Revolutionary Left Movement

The Revolutionary Left Movement (, MIR) is a Chilean far-left Marxist-Leninist communist party and former urban guerrilla organization founded on 12 October 1965. At its height in 1973, the MIR numbered about 10,000 members and associates. The group emerged from various student organizations, mainly from University of Concepción, that had originally been active in the youth organization of the Socialist Party. They established a base of support among the trade unions and shantytowns of Concepción, Santiago, and other cities. Andrés Pascal Allende, a nephew of Salvador Allende, president of Chile from 1970 to 1973, was one of its early leaders. Miguel Enríquez was the General Secretary of the party from 1967 until his assassination in 1974 by the DINA. Although it was involved in military actions and assassinations, particularly during the Resistance to the 1973 Chilean coup d'etat, the MIR states they reject assassination as a tactic (see below on the assassination of Edmundo Pérez Zujovic by the VOP). Before the coup The Sino-Soviet ideological dispute, the Soviet Union's repressive interventions in Czechoslovakia and other Warsaw Pact countries, the presence of the Cuban Revolution in Latin America, and the emergent global student movement inspired in the humanist socialism of the Frankfurt School and the New Left (by the time of the early opposition to the Vietnam War) were the main ideological issues that the traditional Chilean left (the Socialist Party and the Communist Party) had to deal with amid their relative political stagnation in the beginning of the 1960s. By the early 60s, amidst a political dominance of the right-wing and center-right wing parties strongly supporting US policies, the traditional left parties' "reformist" doctrine of a non-revolutionary road to socialism began to be questioned by different militant groups within those parties. The questioning for changes and the opposition against such changes resulted in several small groups or factions.