The Red Sonnet

In the first twenty years of her life, Parra witnessed a torrent of events that were to have a devastating effect on Chilean history. Following the massacre of San Gregorio (in 1921), the Communist Party, which Parra was part of for a short time in 1946, was formed. The government of Arturo Alessandri Palma, a conservative with reformist pretensions, was overthrown by the armed forces, reinstated and then expelled again within less than a year, to be replaced with a military dictatorship headed by Coronel Carlos Ibáñez del Campo. Ibáñez would also be overthrown, in turn, by another major reversal on the part of the Chilean Navy under the reactionary direction of its officers. He would have time, however, to hand the nation's copper over to the North Americans, the Telecoms Company to the ITT Corporation and to unleash a violent repression of trade unions that triggered masses of barbaric killings, imprisonments and riots. From her family home Violeta would experience first-hand, as we all did, the style of a right-wing government concealed by the military cloak.

In 1929 the saltpetre crisis hit. It plunged the country into chaos, exacerbating social polarisation and throwing a hungry mass of workers, their wives and children on to the streets of Chile. This precipitated two things: the fall of Ibáñez and the ‘squad revolution’, a naval mutiny that resulted in the imprisonment of all the officers. The mutiny brought fifteen thousand armed men and twenty-three naval units under its control and sought to repeat the experience of the battleship Potemkin in Chile. The shake-up in the consciousness of the country was alarming: the movement failed, however, because the pusillanimity of the existing proletarian political parties left it without support, but it was enough to stir new undercurrents in the depths of society. Significantly, the Chilean government asked the North Americans for direct armed intervention to neutralise the crisis and the power vacuum. Another of the consequences of the political upheaval was the founding of the Socialist Party shortly after the military coup of Marmaduke Grove and his short ‘Socialist Republic’ of twelve days. Arturo Alessandri Palma (known as ‘the Lion’) then returned to government and, therefore, the repression of the trade union movement continued.