Volodia Teitelboim: Politician exiled under Pinochet (Independent)

[struggle4progress]

Saturday, 2 February 2008

... As a journalist he collaborated in the founding of El Siglo, the party's daily newspaper. He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies for Valparaiso in 1961 and 1965 and then won two successive terms as senator for Santiago in the upper house. With his receding chin and flat cap, he was a familiar figure to Chileans. He was later to say that his aim was to ensure that "human beings would not be merchandise, but should participate as collective architects of a society of justice and solidarity".

Teitelboim was a major figure in the six-party Popular Unity coalition headed by President Salvador Allende of the Socialist Party which governed from 1970. As such, Teitelboim was in the thick not just of Allende's reform programme but also of the internecine fighting among the parties which so sapped its effectiveness.

The military putsch of September 1973 found him in Moscow, in transit between Rome and Santiago at the end of an official mission to explain government strategy to Europeans. Radio Moscow immediately seized the opportunity to put him on air. Under the protection of Sergei Lapin, the Soviet minister for radio and television, his principal political work thereafter consisted in his twice-weekly broadcast Escucha, Chile ("Listen, Chile") on Radio Moscow, which brought news to a country whose inhabitants were subjected to terror and censorship and which was to run for 17 years.

One of his earliest programmes carried every detail of the burial of Pablo Neruda, the poet who had been a Communist since 1945 and who in 1971 became Chile's second winner of a Nobel Prize for Literature. It told how the coffin of Neruda, who had died of prostate cancer within a few days of the coup, was carried out of a house which had been comprehensively wrecked and its books, papers and photographs burned by Pinochet's soldiery ...

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/volodia-teitelboim-politician-exiled-under-pinochet-777225.html