Editor's note: On December 13, Chile held elections, with four candidates for President: billionaire center-right candidate Sebastian Pinera, (44 percent), Eduardo Frei (30 percent), from the center-left Concertacion, which has governed in Chile since the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship, Marco Enriquez Ominami, (19 percent), an independent who has attracted a large vote due to his criticism from the left of the failures of the Concertacion, and Jorge Arrate (six percent), the candidate of “Juntos Podemos,” a coalition that included the Communist Party.

Since no candidate received more than 50 percent of the vote, there will be a runoff election on January 17.

As notable was the historic election of three Communists to the Congress, for the first time since 1973. The three are Guillermo Teillier, the Party’s president, Lautaro Carmona, its general secretary, and Hugo Gutierrez.

In this interview, we asked Mr. Teillier about his own victory as well as how he sees the presidential contest.

The website of the Communist Party is Chile is wwww.pcchile. org.

The interview was conducted by Elena Mora, a featured writer for the People's World and a contributor to Political Affairs.

Elena Mora: How did you do it? What was different in this election, where you, the three Communist candidates, were able to win?

Guillermo Teillier: Well, what was different was that up to now, we relied on our own forces, or on a very small alliance of forces, allowing us to get something like five, or seven, or even eight percent of the vote. We could never get candidates elected because the “binomial” (two-party) electoral system did not allow it. Parties or coalitions that get less than 35 percent of the vote were not able to get candidates elected. Even though in some districts we got up to 28 percent of the vote, we were not able to be elected.

In this instance, we made a joint electoral pact with the “Concertación” governing coalition and that allowed us to be elected. Actually, in three districts it allowed us to win a majority on a ticket called “Concertación and ‘Together we can achieve more democracy’” This allowed us to get three Deputies elected.

EM: So you were joint candidates of the Concertación and of “Junto podemos?”

GT: Yes, our coalition was called “Junto podemos” [Together we can], and we had Jorge Arrate as our presidential candidate. In this situation we formed a pact between both coalitions and we formed a joint ticket, which was called “Concertación y Junto Podemos por Más Democracia” [Concertación and Together we can achieve more democracy]. The purpose was to be able to break into the political process, having three Deputies elected. The previous situation only ended up with our exclusion from the parliamentary process during these last twenty years of transition to democracy.

However, we need to change the “binomial” electoral system into a proportional system. Our proposals go further than that: changing the Constitution, totally changing the institutions that were established by Pinochet which have changed very little during these twenty years.

EM: Yes indeed—as you know, this “binominal” system [of two dominant parties] is, as you know, a problem here in the United States as well. But what were the most important questions for the Chilean people? What was your electoral program?

GT: Well, it’s the same electoral program that we put forth with Jorge Arrate. We drew up this program with popular meetings, with organizations and labor unions, where we discussed a left program. And these bases, these grassroots meetings of thousands or tens of thousands, we could say, culminated in a nationwide assembly of more than 2,500 grassroots delegates from all over the country. These are the ones who gave final approval to the program and decided on who would be the candidates of the Left.

This program draws upon the people’s feelings, and seeks institutional changes such as changing the Constitution, changing the electoral system, and returning to the State the powers that were taken away by the Pinochet dictatorship. We want a pluri-national state, recognizing the rights of the indigenous peoples. We also seek to restore the rights of the workers. In the last 20 years not a single right, of all those that were stolen by the dictatorship, has been restored to the workers.

These are institutional changes. But there are also other changes that we are seeking, related to the economy. For example, we propose to keep Chilean copper Chilean and resist privatization, because 70 percent of the copper is being mined by foreign companies. We need to either re-nationalize the copper industry, or at very least ensure that the majority of the profits stay in Chile, because these businesses have taken out 70 billion dollars in profits during the last five years, while paying only three million dollars in taxes.

There’s also the matter of the nationalization of water resources. Water in Chile is in the hands of private companies, but we propose that this ought to be public property, for public use, and that the State is the rightful owner of the water resources.

And speaking of human rights, we want the repeal of the Amnesty law [protecting those who committed crimes during the Pinochet dictatorship], because there is a risk of amnestying those who are guilty of crimes against humanity. One thing is sure: if Piñera, the candidate of the Right, would win, this would happen.

There are also the issues of education and health care, both of which affect all the population. State support needs to be strengthened, because what has happened in Chile is that both these systems have been privatized.

And there’s a program that has to do with the industrialization of the country, with state intervention. Article 9 of the Constitution prohibits the state from intervening in the private manufacturing sector. But this goes against Chile’s traditions, because the state has traditionally helped Chilean industries. But what happened is that since the dictatorship these have been turned over to transnational corporations or to domestic monopolies. But these have made no contribution to the industries. And the State is prohibited from establishing manufacturing industries.

We say that the State ought to provide the biggest impulse for industrialization, this without in any way putting down private enterprise, above all small and medium sized businesses.

But we need to address the problem of the enormous levels of unemployment that exist in Chile. Ten or eleven percent of the workers in Chile are unemployed, which means 800,000 workers who are jobless at this moment.

This is the basic part of the program. There are many other themes that are important, including the environment, protection for the people in relation to the abuses of the financial system. The system is heavily loaded down with debt, but nobody controls the financial system. So, we propose different types of controls on the financial system.

As to workers’ pension systems, we propose the return of a pension system under which the State as well as bosses and workers contribute to retirement funds, instead of only the workers contributing. At present, pension funds are being administered by three or four big transnationals, and in general, on retiring a worker gets one quarter or one fifth of his or her former salary, while these big pension administrators make fortunes every year. What is more, they invest workers’ contributions outside of the country, and due to the current crisis, they have lost more than 25 billion dollars in foreign stock markets. Nobody’s going to return this amount to the workers.

So, all this forms part of our program. This is how we are with the people, and it is basically why the people voted for us.

EM: Yes, all these themes are very similar to ours. But how did people react to the fact that Communists won seats in Congress?

GT: Well, for me, the best satisfaction that one can experience is to see the immense happiness that pervaded the country, from north to south. The parties, the celebrations, the happiness in the streets, everything was incredible. Thousands of people came out in different places in the country. It was happiness overflowing. In reality, we didn’t even think it was that much that we had accomplished. Emotions went way beyond just Communists or supporters of our electoral ticket. It was the ordinary people who were rejoicing, feeling that our victory was their own.

EM: Newspapers here were saying that young people did not vote in large numbers. How do you see this?

GT: Well, here, young people have a great lack of confidence in the political system, especially because of the persistence of Pinochet-era institutions, and there are 3 million eligible voters who have not registered. For this reason, young people between 18 and 25 years old only represent seven or eight percent of registered voters. In Chile, voter registration has stayed at about 8 million during recent elections, without much change, and young people are not registering to vote. This is understandable, because politics has involved lots of corruption at very high levels, election promises are never fulfilled.

So it’s not that young people are not interested in politics. It’s just that they don’t want to participate in this process, which they say is pointless. However, on this occasion, among the young people who did vote, we got the greatest majority. This may imply that a change is coming in young people’s thought-patterns, with a certain degree of hope in what we are proposing.

In Chile a system of automatic voter registration was recently approved, which means that everyone is automatically registered to vote if they qualify. Voting is voluntary. This is certainly going to affect future elections, and we will see if there will be increased consciousness or not. We will see how this affects the youth vote, as well as rest of the electorate. Given that voting is still voluntary, we will see if they will continue to vote at current levels, or whether they will continue to stay away from the polls or cast blank ballots. We shall see what happens.

EM: Did they change the law for THIS election, this about voter registration?

GT: No, the law was changed, but it did not come into effect in time for this most recent election. It will come into effect for the next election. This change in the law also has another consequence: Granting absentee voting to Chileans who are outside of the country. This will affect between 800.000 and 1,000,000 Chileans. The Right was fiercely opposed to granting the vote to Chileans outside of the country.

We fought for the right to vote for Chileans outside the country. We argued that if all Chileans were to be automatically registered to vote, Chileans in other countries would have to have the right to vote as well. The State would have to make arrangements for them to be able to vote. And this will continue to be a controversy, because the Right is still opposed to allowing Chileans living outside the country the right to vote.

EM: And the problem of the Right… How do you address this? For example, looking from the outside, it seemed to us to be a risk that the Right would win the next election. How do you see the road ahead and the danger of the Right in the next election? When is it? In January?

GT: January 17 is the runoff election. The panorama is contradictory; on the one hand we have the advance of the Left and the themes that the leftist coalition is proposing, and the candidacy of Marco Enríquez-Ominami, who was another presidential candidate who got 20 percent of the vote with a progressive, center-left platform with a few more progressive standpoints.

But why contradictory? Because there is the risk that the Right will win. In the first round of voting they got 44 percent of the votes. It’s true that 56 percent of Chileans did not vote for the Right, and don’t want a rightist government. But at the same time, they don’t want things to keep on exactly as they are now. They want change. So, what we have done is, we don’t want the Right to win, and we have not given them any openings. We know the implications that this has domestically and internationally, that in Chile there has been a rightist candidacy, supported by the most reactionary sectors.

Piñera is an intimate friend of US imperialism. He [Piñera] has been in Colombia, and is in favor of U.S. military bases in Colombia. So what we told leaders of the Eduardo Frei campaign is that they had to get closer to the people’s progressive and leftist feelings. So, he made a twelve-point proposal, adopting a big part of our platform. This is directed to that 26 percent of the electorate who did not vote for the Right but who did not want “business as usual.”

This is opening the way. We, as “Juntos podemos” and also as the Communist Party, have announced that we will vote for Eduardo Frei, and that we’re going to campaign based on those twelve points. Our role will be to demand the fulfillment of those twelve points.

That’s where we’re at up to this point. There are very few days left before the elections, and our purpose is to increase the Left’s possibilities of winning. We’re not going to participate in that government, but we are willing to come to a convergence around broad goals, not only political goals but also social goals, for some of the points that interest us, such as changes to the Constitution, workers’ rights, and other things that are in Eduardo Frei’s 12 points.

EM: Well, thanks a lot, comrade, and best of luck. We are all very interested in what is happening there in Chile with the election of Communist candidates, and also the struggle against the Right. Right now, Latin America is a very interesting place for the world progressive movement. We’re very happy about what has happened, and we wish you good luck in the January elections. Thanks for your time.