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CHILE, OCTOBER 1972: TAKE OVER THE FACTORY


(Photograph of Armindo Cardoso, 1973. / Workers of the company Cobre Cerrillos located at Avenida Melipilla No. 6307, march with a sign that says: "Cordón Cerrillos" and another "Cobre Cerrillos Intervenida Presente")

CHILE, OCTOBER 1972: TAKE OVER THE FACTORY

In reaction to the "1972 employers strike", many of the country's manufacturing industries were taken over by its workers. These actions sought to reverse the lockout promoted by businessmen and leaders of the truckers' union who, in opposition to the government of the Popular Unity of Salvador Allende, coordinated a national stoppage of their activities in early October 1972, seeking to destabilize the distribution chains of food and the operation of factories within cities, increasing the atmosphere of political crisis that in those days polarized the country's population. Many factory workers did not stop their daily activities. On the contrary, they undertook a coordinated mobilization to overcome the lockout, taking their workplaces and rethinking the development of manufacturing production from their own organization.

Although the "take over the factory" by the workers already registered a brief trajectory within the workers' mobilization in Chile, the coordinated action of a group of these staged a singular territory of collaboration, which redefined the very political sense of the manufacturing space. This experience, of approximately 355 days, upset the appearance of the factory and urban space from a manufacturing production logic to one of transformation of society as a whole, adding to the multiple expressions of popular participation (and leadership) that manifested within the government of the Popular Unity and especially since the employer strike of October 1972 (Leiva, S., 2004).


Although the phenomenon of workers 'mobilization against "employers' strike" found expressions in many cities of the country, the city of Santiago was the epicenter of the factory takeovers and their political and territorial characterization, an image represented from its own urban configuration, known colloquially as the "Cordones Industriales".

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