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As Salvador Allende and his supporters forged a democratic path towards socialism, the task of building a more sovereign and egalitarian national economy became one of the Popular Unity (UP) revolution’s first priorities. To that end, Allende’s coalition promoted a massive downward redistribution of income during its first months in office while also extending state control over many of the country’s most essential industries. Chile’s food economy, including its agricultural sector, received special attention during this early period as both purchasing power and domestic production soared. However, when a combination of economic, ecological and political factors caused consumer production to stagnate, acute shortages for a wide range of goods raised questions about the viability of the UP’s plans for a more just consumer economy. The emergence of a powerful opposition movement also raised questions about the government’s reluctance to pursue substantive political changes at the same time that it implemented major economic reforms. By examining the political economy of the UP experiment in the context of Chile’s 2019–20 uprising against inequality and political exclusion, this article reconsiders the consequences of the UP’s inability to link economic transformations with changes in how political power was exercised in mid-century Chile.

This article examines the politics of food during Chile's Popular Unity (UP) revolution (1970-73). Organized around the rise and fall of the Juntas de Abastecimiento y Precios (Price and Supply Committees, JAPs), a state-backed network of collectively managed stores and ad hoc food distribution sites, the article explores how the UP revolution expanded long-standing practices of community-led price monitoring and food distribution to make the promise of economic democracy more concrete for urban, working-class consumers. As the JAPs' power grew, however, such efforts became a political lightning rod, unifying Chile's domestic opposition around the claim that the state's presence in the food economy-rather than its absencecreated scarcity and needlessly politicized domestic life. Ultimately, the article contends that the consumer marketplace was a key arena for competing conceptualizations of democracy and the state in early 1970s Chile, anticipating the centrality of consumption to the neoliberal counterrevolution that the country experienced in the post-UP era. O n the second Wednesday of November 1972, several hundred community members gathered outside a supermarket in the población of Santa Julia, a rapidly urbanizing neighborhood on Santiago's southern periphery. They came to celebrate the achievements of Chile's Popular Unity (UP) revolution (1970-73) after two years. More urgent, however, was the task of protecting the revolution's gains from being undone. A few weeks prior, the anti-UP opposition had coordinated a nationwide closure of private businesses to coincide with a weeks-long truckers' strike. The October bosses' strike, as the event became known, crippled the distribution of consumer goods around the country. Given that it occurred as Chile's spring planting season was beginning, the protest would also decimate the country's domestic food supply well into 1973. In response, UP supporters commandeered stalled delivery trucks and pried open the chained-up entrances of privately owned For their feedback on various versions of this article as well as the larger project of which it is a part, I am grateful to

In this article, the co-editors introduce key themes and contributions of this special issue of Radical Americas, particularly as they pertain to the 50th anniversary of Chile’s Popular Unity revolution (1970–3) and the more recent estallido social (social uprising), which began in Santiago de Chile in October 2019. They underline the historical context for contemporary events, arguing the need to recognise the influence, memory and significance of the past in the present.