Chile’s new president, Gabriel Boric, has stressed the importance of his Yugoslav roots. But well before Boric's rise to prominence, across much of the last century, Yugoslav socialism was a major influence on the Chilean left.
by Agustín Cosovschi
Part 2 - Yugoslav Workers in Latin America
At the root of Yugoslavia’s connections with Latin America is a movement of workers, in the most literal sense. The story begins in the late nineteenth century with the massive emigration of poor peasants and unskilled workers from Southeastern Europe to Latin America, especially the lands of the Southern Cone.
Several thousand Yugoslavs, mostly coming from the territories of present-day Croatia (at that time under Austro-Hungarian rule), settled in Argentina, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, and southern Brazil, in search of a better life. This influx continued in the early twentieth century, intensified by the 1924 US Immigration Act restricting the number allowed to enter the country. As a result, Latin America became the promised land for thousands of Yugoslav migrants, some 150,000 of whom lived on the subcontinent by 1928. Their numbers would continue to grow over the 1930s, as the newly founded Yugoslav state faced internal tensions and an uphill struggle to develop its heavily agrarian, imbalanced, and dependent economy.
World War II brought a historic turning point in Yugoslavia — and so, too, in the scope and composition of its nationals’ presence in Latin America. After the Axis invasion of 1941 and the fall of the Karađorđević monarchy, the region had seen the creation of a German protectorate in Serbia and the fascist “Independent State of Croatia.” But then came the successful partisan war led by Josip Broz Tito’s Communist Party and the formation of a federal, socialist Yugoslavia. This in turn resulted in the departure of widespread masses of anti-communist and ultranationalist political émigrés to Latin America, most of them of Croatian or Slovenian background and often former fascist collaborators.
The influx of several thousand such émigrés post-1945 radically changed the Yugoslav presence in South America. Yet even this varied across countries: while Argentina was a massive receiver of such immigrants, who became politically dominant in the Yugoslav, and especially Croatian, diaspora — making Buenos Aires a hub for fascist Ustaša activities and, indeed, global anti-communism — the Yugoslav community in Chile was more immune to such influence. Perhaps due to its relatively better social position, the fact that most came from the less radicalized and less “Croatianized” region of Dalmatia, or perhaps due to the lesser influence of fascist ideas in Chile compared to Argentina, the Croatian community in this country was less conservative and generally more pro-Yugoslav, as it would remain until 1991.
Yet this is not just a story of migrant workers and fascist collaborators but also one of militants with a strong belief in democratic socialism. In the Cold War years, connections between Chile and Yugoslavia would become deeper than ever, as relations hardened between mutually sympathetic movements.
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