Grounding Pinochet
03.13.2018
BY
LIAM TURBETT
For more than four years, Pinochet’s air force was paralyzed by 3,000 Scottish workers who refused to service its planes.
If Vietnam was the first “television war,” then September 11, 1973 was arguably the first televised coup. Images of the brutal overthrow of Salvador Allende’s socialist government in Chile were beamed around the world in the days that followed, with few symbols of the CIA-backed assault on democracy proving more resonant than that of low-flying Hawker Hunter jets bombing the presidential palace. The body of Allende would later be pulled from the building, while his supporters were rounded up, tortured, and executed in their thousands.
Among those following the faraway events was Robert Somerville, a member of the Communist Party and a union shop steward at a Rolls Royce plant in the Scottish town of East Kilbride, ten miles south of Glasgow. A few days after the coup, Somerville brought a motion condemning the military junta to a union meeting in his workplace, where it was passed. There was nothing unusual about this in itself, with the coup sending shock waves around the world and rapidly spawning an international solidarity movement.
But there was an important difference about the East Kilbride plant: the factory was, by that time, the only one in the world that serviced the engines of the Hawker Hunter jets that were the mainstay of Chile’s air force. In the coming months the plant’s workers would organize a remarkable boycott that grounded most of Pinochet’s air force for years. For years, the story of their refusal was forgotten — but a new movie by the son of Chilean exiles aims to tell their tale.
Nae Pasaran
When a consignment of engines from Chile appeared in the factory in March 1974, the East Kilbride workers had an opportunity to turn their opposition to Pinochet’s junta into more than just words. After an engine inspector refused to let the consignment through, it quickly came to the attention of the factory’s union committee and within hours, an official boycott was underway. All 3,000 workers at the plant would maintain the “blacking” of the engines for four years. Their stand was widely celebrated by the Chilean solidarity movement, and proved a major cause of consternation for Rolls Royce, the British government, and the Chilean regime. When Hortense Allende, the deposed president’s widow, visited Glasgow in 1975, she praised the boycott as a “beacon of light to those in Chile.”
For the workers, though, it was easy to feel that their actions had little lasting effect, with the engines’ presence becoming part of everyday life at the factory while debates raged in the background. In any case, the engines were spirited away in a mysterious pre-dawn raid one day in August 1978, with the workers and union left feeling powerless. What became of them was never known, with even the license plates of the vehicles used to remove the engines turning out to be fake. Military involvement was suspected.
More:
https://www.jacobinmag.com/2018/03/nae-pasaran-chile-coup-scotland-solidarity