This film investigates the factory worker's response to the insurrection, as well as Chile's socialist aspirations for the future. The camera captures the optimism in the industrial working class before Pinochet's US-backed coup d'état.

Completed two years after La batalla de Chile: La lucha de un pueblo sin armas - Primera parte: La insurrección de la burguesía (1975) and La batalla de Chile: La lucha de un pueblo sin armas - Segunda parte: El golpe de estado (1976), this film deals with the creation of thousands of local groups of "popular power" by ordinary workers and peasants to distribute food; occupy, guard, and run factories and farms; oppose black-market profiteering; and link together neighborhood social service organizations, first as a defense against strikes and lockouts by factory owners, tradesmen, and professional bodies opposed to the Allende government, and then increasingly as Soviet-type bodies demanding more resolute action by the government against the right.—Fiona Kelleghan <[email protected]>