In winter of 1973 I joined a small group that meet at Edinburgh University to discuss the coup and steps we might take. We were a motley crew, an elderly Edinburgh academic, a working class Scottish PhD student studying Maoism, a German Chilean student who had suddenly found himself in exile and heading the Scottish branch of the Chilean MAPU, a young Scottish woman Communist Party member, another young woman from the Home Counties who was moved by human rights abuses and myself recently graduated from Cambridge and keen to save the world. During the next year we mounted an exhibition at the Edinburgh Festival, received refugees sent up from London, visited Rosyth dockyard to meet striking engineering workers and attended a national conference in Birmingham.
In the autumn I moved to London to work but gave up the job at the end of the year to work full time at the Chile Committee for Human Rights from January 1974 to 1979. CCHR was set up with the idea of maximizing support for Chile by appealing to those committed to human rights aspects of the events rather than those committed to the political goals of the Allende government, though there was of course substantial overlap between the two. There were two of us in the office, myself and Wendy Tyndale who more or less created the project, recruiting a list of sponsors including Archbishop Ramsay, Harold Pinter, Peggy Ashcroft, Stanley Clinton-David MP, Lord Avebury, Russell Johnston MP, Eric Heffer MP. We developed a network of members round the country, some individuals, some trade union branches, some church groups, some specific CCHR groups and some Chile Solidarity groups. We supported members with a newsletter on developments in Chile, organized meetings to discuss the situation. We shamelessly copied Amnesty in asking groups to adopt political prisoners and to write pressing for their release. In 1975 the Chilean government passed Decree Law 504 which allowed prisoners to exchange their sentence for exile and this increased the numbers arriving. We were not directly responsible for reception of refugees but invited them to talk to us about their experiences which were recorded and sent to the UN Commission for Human Rights in Geneva. Financially we lived on small grants from charities such as Christian Aid, Cafod and Oxfam supplemented by fund raising through concerts and a flag day. We ran out of money at one point but it didn’t occur to us to stop working and I remember going to the Camden employment centre to sign on with my briefcase on my way to work.
Wendy visited Chile and produced a booklet “Chile Under the Military Regime” and we later produced another booklet “Women in Chile”. As well as campaigns for individual prisoners we encouraged people to lobby the government to increase provision for refugees and, more controversially, to refuse the military government the right to extend loans on national debt through what was known as the Club of Paris. The Labour Government that took power in 1975 headed by Harold Wilson was very sympathetic to the Chilean cause and Judith Hart at ODA approved a scheme to offer scholarships to Chilean refugees as part of the work to train professionals and academics for the future development of the country. David Owen at the Foreign Office and Michael Meacher at the Dept of Trade were lobbied with delegations made up of trade unionists. We went to the Chilean Embassy with Trevor Huddleston and Mgr. We campaigned for the many thousands of disappeared detainees with an emphasis on William Beausire, an anglo Chilean citizen who was detained in Argentina in 1975 and never found. We raised the profile of Colonia Dignidad, a German institution in the south of Chile thought to have acted as a centre for torture and detention following the coup. We organised publicity for Sheila Cassidy when she was released from detention in Chile in 1975 and a speaking tour for Pastor Helmut Frenz who was expelled from Chile following activities to promote the ecumenical human rights movement.
In 1979 I went to work for WUS where there was a team of about 10 people managing the Chile scholarship programme. My role was to prepare financial reports and assist with the annual negotiations with ODA about budget requirements. Additionally I was involved in activities of the students. Chilean exiles had established a number of working groups on topics such as Economics and Health to meet together with a view to preparing for an eventual return to Chile. In the 1980s we began support for returnees and were able to support people financially for the first six months with a small stipend. This was arranged through contacts in Chile. Following the coup many of those expelled from the University established small research centres, supported by foreign funding as a way of keeping alive an independent intellectual life. Applicants for return were asked to come forward with a proposal for research that they wanted to carry out and to contact an institute to work with. It was a good programme that allowed people to return to active engagement with the society. From 1983 I spent two or three months in Chile each year in connection with the administration of this programme until 1991. Following the plebiscite in 1988 when the people voted to end the military regime, the movement back to democracy became stronger and faster until the 1990 return of a democratically elected government.