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The murder of Allende And the end of the Chilean way to socialism Róbinson Rojas Harper and Row, New York, 1975,1976-Fitzhenry&Whiteside Ltd., Toronto, Canada, 1975 |
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| Notes
221 1. The Artful Staging of a "Suicide"
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N O T E S : page 7 spect to Latin-American armies, stated that the pact contributed to the political aims of the United States through its training programs, which brought many foreign military leaders to the U.S., not only to improve the technical ability of the military, but also to expose them to the requirements of reliable military leadership in contemporary society. "On June 3, 1969, Melvin R. Laird, U.S. Secretary of Defense, said to Congress: '. ..I am certain that the Military Aid Pact will do everything in its power to guarantee that every dollar invested in aid granted will be most effectively employed in helping the foreign policy and security of the United States.' "In 1963, Robert McNamara, the then Secretary of Defense, said to Congress: 'Military and economic aid are frequently bound together in support of U.S. objectives, providing the native armed forces with able instructors through the military aid program, with the Agency for International Development contributing the material elements. ..to reduce the vulnerability of the native people to the flattery and threats of Communist agents involved in manufacturing revolutions.' "In 1964, in the House of Representatives, General Robert J. Wood, at the time director of military aid in the Defense Department, stated: , A Security Program for the Alliance for Progress is being carried out ...whose principal objective is a Latin-American military leadership.' " For further information on this subject, see James Petras, "Estados Unidos y el nuevo equilibrio en America Latina," Revista de Estudios Internacionales, Jan.-March 1969, Santiago, Chile, pp. 490-518. 3. These words are an approximate reconstruction of what was said by the American adviser to the conspiracy in September 1973; this is based on what was said in speeches and meetings on Navy ships and in military centers by the conspiring officers from May 1973 on. As was reported during the first ten days of September 1973 in Puro Chile, Ultima Bora, and the magazine Chile Boy, the conspiring officers haranguing mainly sailors and pilots asserted that "the Americans are backing us up," adding further details. These officers included: Colonel Juan Soler Man- fredini, director of the Air Forces Technical School; Colonel Carlos Ottone Mestre, director of the Captain A valos Aviation School; Second Lieutenant Jaime Olavarrieta, from the Sailors (Grumetes) School at Quiriquina Island; Lieutenant Julio Meneses from the Valparaiso Naval Hospital; Commodore Alberto Vazquez, commander of the aeronaval base at El Bolloto; Commodore Martiniano Parra, from the naval base at Talcahuano; Commander Cesar Guevara Fuentes, from the El Bosque Group 7, Air Force, Santiago, and his second-in-command Ivan |
| N O T E s : page 8
223 Doren as well as his assistants Lieutenant Ernesto Gonzalez and Corporal Florencio Galvez. One of the most outspoken officers was Air Force Colonel Ramon Gallegos Alonso, who pointed out that '.the Americans give us technical advice and backing in everything." He related details of meetings from November 1972 on with representives of the U.S. Army to plan Allende's overthrow. Gallegos Alonso was the public relations chief of the Chilean armed forces until August 1973 and former Commander in Chief Cesar Ruiz Danyau's right-hand man in the conspiracy of the second half of that month-along with officers Juan Pablo Rojas, Guillermo Navarro Vicencio, Raul Vargas, and An- tonio Quiros-in Santiago itself. In Antofagasta, in the north of Chile, the squadron commander Juan Cvitanic, public relations chief at the Cerro Moreno base, was another who touted the coup to his friends by describing its " American backing." Another commander in the An- tofagasta group was Patricio Araya Ugalde, who was referred to as "Ruiz Danyau's alter ego." In Los Cerrillos Group 10, there were German Fuchslocher and Carlos Alvarez; and in Quintero Group 2 (near Santiago), Group Commander Pablo Saldias Maripangue. Most of the information about the meetings between the Chilean and the American officers from November 1972 on came from this type of source, when, it seems, the conspirators were absolutely certain that nothing would stop the coup. There were, of course, numerous other sources well informed about what was happening in the core of the conspirators' group, but I cannot name these sources because it would jeopardize the life of many Chileans, both civilian and military, who are still in Chile now. 4. In this parliamentary election, the 44 percent received by the Unidad Popular is really a victory, given the political system of Chile. Never before had any elected Chilean government increased its percentage of the votes after the presidential elections. A case in point is that of Eduardo Frei: elected in 1964 with 56.09 percent of the vote, his party dropped to 42.3 percent in the 1965 parliamentary elections; three years later, in the municipal elections of 1967, his government received 35.58 percent of the vote; this decline culminated in the parliamentary elec- tions of 1969, when the percentage was 21.8 percent. In the pluralistic system of democracy that existed in Chile until September II, 1973, this relative minority was not a sign of illegitimacy but rather a measure of backing or rejection of a constitutional action. By the same token, in the 1958 presidential elections the winning candidate, Jorge Alessandri Rodriguez, received only 31.2 percent of the vote, but he defeated |
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NOTES: pages 11-16 Allende, the runner-up, whose total was 28.5 percent, Frei, with 20.5 percent, and the Radical, Luis Bossay, with 15.4 percent. Nobody ques- tioned the legitimacy of Jorge Alessandri's presidency. With the Unidad Popular government, the opposite was the case. Winning 36 percent of the vote in 1970, it raised this percentage to 44 percent in 1973, a significant expansion of its plurality. However, the conspirators "proved" the illegitimacy of Allende's government using the fact that he '.represented only a minority of 36 percent," a false argument given the context of Chile's political system. 5. What happened in this meeting was related by President Allende him- self to a small group of Unidad Popular journalists in La Moneda on the night of the same day, August 8. Some of these journalists are in prison in Chile, and others have gone underground; one of them, Augusto Olivares Becerra, was killed. 6. The existence of this tape, a summary of its contents, and this version of the meeting were revealed by Allende to a small group of Unidad Popular journalists in order to explain his request that they not report any of these events, as the situation was "extremely critical." The events of the following day were more or less public, including harangues in the courtyards of the air bases involved and the comings and goings of easily identifiable military couriers. However, the agreement with Allende was respected, and the leftist newspapers did not inform the public of the event in detail, but rather in a general and indirect way. Of course the newspapers of the right were also silent. 7. During the 1970 presidential campaign, many journalists accompanied Allende day and night as he traveled all around Chile, and at day's end the question of what the armed forces would do if Allende won was often discussed. From that time on, it was known from Allende's own mouth that he thought he had "at least one friend, General Torres de la Cruz." Allende was later to define Torres as an " Allendista." He even said that it was enough guarantee that Torres was fifth in seniority at that time, preceded only by Schneider, Prats, Pinochet, and Urbina, and followed by Bonilla. After the events of October 1970, Torres was again mentioned by Allende's military advisers as "loyal." During March- April 1973, when the arms searches of the factories began, Unidad Popular officials went to Punta Arenas to talk to Torres (Allende had sent him there to "reinforce" the struggle against the fascists' arms smuggling from Argentina) to find out what was going on inside the Army. Naturally, Torres said that the brutalization and punishment of the workers of both sexes were excesses proper to that type of action. |
| N O T E s : pages 39-56
225 8. The case of Augusto Pinochet in the drama that Chile is living through today is very special. Today, he seems to be an extremely cruel head of a fascist military junta. But until June 1973, the conspiring generals were not at all sure of Pinochet, particularly because he always seemed to agree with his superior, Army Commander in Chief Carlos Prats, in his political line, and because many of the courses of action taken by the General Staff under his direction were carried out under Prats's slogan of "defending the Constitution in case of military insurrection." General Pinochet was the last important link in the coup to close. The principal reason for Generals Leigh, Bonilla, Brady, and Arellano and Admiral Toribio Merino to "invite" him to be chief of the junta was to avoid a rupture in the Army. Perhaps the fact that he was excluded for such a long time from the conspirators' group also kept him outside the plan to assassinate Allende. 9. According to unofficial testimony, there were eight dead and forty-three wounded among the soldiers, in addition to a damaged but not inopera- ble Sherman tank. The official report, however, announced "two dead and seventeen wounded" and made no mention of damaged materiel. 2. Why Was the General Assassinated? 1. The fifth coup attempt was covered in Chapter 1. The first and second military insurrections are treated in Chapter 3; the fourth, fifth, and sixth in Chapter 5. The coup of September II, the seventh and success- ful attempt, is discussed in detail in Chapters 1, 4, 5, and 6. 2. The remaining 4 percent of the work force is taken up by the so-called domestic employees, mainly peasant women who work in the houses of the middle and the upper bourgeoisie. Their salaries are so low that they are not included in the national accounts. (Facts taken from " An- tecedentes sobre el desarrollo chileno 1960-1970," ODEPLAN, 1971, 30-32, pp. 43, 45.) 3. The greater part of the papers that indicated payments had been re- ceived by Gabriel Gonz81ez Videla from the American consortia were published in the Chilean magazine Vistazo in November and December 1962 and July 1964; in my articles "La penetración imperialista en Chile" in Causa ML. Nos. 1-9, and in the series "La historia sucia de los politicos dem6cratas" in Puro Chile March 15-April 7, 1973. A similar case was that of Rodolfo Michels, which was so scandalous that he was expelled from the Radical party in 1964, whe!l the leftists gained control of this political group; they were later to support Allende's candidacy in 1970. Michels was thrown out for "carrying on illegal |
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NOTES: page 57 relations with a foreign company, Anaconda." But the right wing re- gained control of the party, and relations with Anaconda were reestab- lished (see ibid. ). 4. When the copper mines were nationalized in July 1971, Robert Halde- man left Chile. In his offices at the El Teniente mine, documents were found attesting to conversations and agreements involving state prop- erty and votes in the Chilean Parliament, in the form of correspondence between Chileans and Haldeman and his superiors in the Kennecott Company. There were 70,000 pages of documents. Mayor[a, a maga- zine, published copies of 100 of these documents from December 1971 to January 1972; these reproduced the conversations between Frei and Haldeman in 1963, Haldeman's report on Frei, and documents of money paid to journalists, members of Parliament, and politicians to proselytize for American companies and their tax agreement in Chile. Raul Morales Adriazola, a rightist Senator, was called into court for this, but the Appellate Court, although it accepted the genuineness of the documents, declared itself incompetent to judge Morales Adriazola owing to his congressional immunity. The court refused to suspend this ,immunity in order to try him. One of the journalists named as receiving some payment was Carlos Sepulveda, now president of the Professional College of Chile. About Guillermo Correa Fuenzalida, see "La historia yanqui de un Presidente chileno," a series published in Puro Chile, Feb. 17-28, 1973. 5. The story of the $20 million fund for Frei's 1964 presidential campaign was published in the April 6, 1973, issue of the Washington Post. The newspaper quotes a witness as saying, "U.S. government intervention in Chile in 1964 was blatant and almost obscene." The Post also re- ported that "the number of 'special personnel' dispatched at various stages of the campaign to Chile from Washington and other posts was calculated by one key Latin American policy maker at the time as being in the range of lOO." The leftist political parties PS and MAPU after- ward put together "La historia yanqui de un Presidente chileno" in Puro Chile (op. cit.), revealing the relations between Frei and the American consortia; other reports appeared in Causa ML, No.5, 1969, and in the June 8, 1973, issue of Punto Final, "Acta de acusacion contra Eduardo Frei," to bring about action against Frei in the Chilean Congress for providing services to a foreign power during the term of his presidency. The accusation was of course rejected by the reactionary majority in the Senate, but the charges were so well documented that Frei could not enjoin their publication. The denunciations included copies of letters to |
| N O T E S : page 57
227 Frei from David Rockefeller and his "economic instructions" (pub- lished earlier in Mayorfa, Ian. 1972). Here are some paragraphs from the texts published in Mayorfa: "Meeting of November 12,1963, between Robert Haldeman, vice-presi- dent of Braden [the Kennecott mine, El Teniente] and Frei at the home of Jose Claro Vial [Gabriel Gonz!ilez Videla's son-in-Iaw], at the request of Frei. Frei said: 'I am certain that if elected President, we will not have problems in reducing the present high taxes, either by agreement, law, or legal contract. ...Here in Chile I feel closer to Braden than to the Anaconda people. ...Mr. Milliken [of Kennecott] is a hard and dry man. I do not doubt his intelligence, but he does not have the human warmth and cordiality that Mr. Roy Glover [world chief of Anaconda] had; I had established a very good friendship with him and he was always grateful to me for voting in favor of the Nuevo Trato law [a 1958 law that scandalized Chile because of its guarantees to the American copper companies].' " (Text found in the El Teniente offices in Santiago after the nationalization, a memorandum of Manuel Illanes, a Chilean journalist and a Kennecott official. ) Another quote: "In August 1968, Hanson's Latin American Newslet- ter, published in the United States, said in a study of the Frei adminis- tration: 'No other government of the extreme right has been so generous with the American companies as the Frei administration, through the agreements he has signed. His exceedingly favorable treatment lacked balance and judgment and was so harmful to Chilean interests that it provoked hilarity in Washington.' " (Hanson's Latin American Newslet- ter, mimeographed issues published by a private company in Washing- ton, D.C., regularly sent to Chilean periodicals in 1967-1969.) 6. The relation between Plan Camelot (for details see Gregorio Selser's Espionaje en America Latina, Buenos Aires, 1966) and Roy Hansen's study was inferred in the sessions of the Chilean Chamber of Deputies from June to December 1965, which convened as a result of the revela- tions about that espionage project published in the newspaper El Siglo in May, June, and July 1965, and by myself and Miroslav Popic on Radio Portales in Santiago on the Sunday news program "La Gran Encuesta" in June and July of the same year. As shown by the state- ments of Juan de Dios Carmona, Frei's Defense Minister at the time of the scandal, to the Chamber of Deputies' Investigatory Commission, the Defense Ministry had known about Hansen's study and had authorized it because it "was not considered to be espionage." Hansen himself wrote that "the data was collected during a series of three trips ( 15 |
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N O T E S : pages 58-60 weeks in total) to Chile between 1964 and 1965. Two hundred Chilean civilians were interviewed; there were intensive interviews with 38 gen- erals, and a questionnaire was distributed among active officers of the Academy of War and the Polytechnic School." He adds that his trips took place between December 1964 and June 1965, and that he had access to the documents in the Chilean Army General Staff library (off limits to Chilean civilians). The introduction of Plan Camelot in Chile was under the charge of Hugo Nuttini, a sociologist who contacted Alvaro and Ximena Bunster to begin a team operation. The Scandinavian sociologist Johan Galtung alerted leftist joumal- ists, and the scandal about Plan Camelot began in May 1965. For details on these events, see my book Golpe de Estado contra Prei?, Ediciones Punto Final, Santiago, 1965. Transcripts of the radio program "La Gran Encuesta" were in the files of the Information and Broadcast of the presidency in Santiago until September 11, 1973. On the involve- ment of American University with Project Camelot, see The Rise and Pall of Project Camelot: Studies in the Relationship Between Social Science and Practical Politics, edited by Irving Louis Horowitz, Cam- bridge, M.I.T. Press, revised edition, 1974, especially pages 23, 24, 25. On Roy Hansen see, also, The Black Book of American ]ntervention by Armando Uribe, Boston, Beacon Press, 1975, pages 26-29. 7. In 1969 some Chilean joumalists gained access to the "classified" copy that existed in Chile, and a summary of its contents was published in the Santiago magazine Causa ML, No.21, Aug. 1971, pp. 20-25. Han- sen's work Was funded by the Ford Foundation and the Rand Corpora- tion. 8. The quotes from the text ofPlan Camelot come from the Spanish edition published in August 1965 by the Oficina de Informaciones de la Camara de Senadores de Chile as a document appended to the investigation that the Chamber of Deputies was conducting into the alleged "espionage." The introduction to Plan Camelot stated that its purpose was to find a "system" which would "make it possible to predict and politically influence significant aspects of social change in the world's developing countries" (p. 2 of Spanish edition). In late June 1965, UPI released a bulletin from Washington reporting the "suspension" of Plan Camelot: "Responsibility for the operation belonged to the Special Operations Research Office (SORO) of the American University in Washington." A Pentagon spokesman stated on July 8 of that year that the project, launched by the Army's information services, was functioning in vari- ous countries: Peru, Colombia, and Chile; that it had already cost some |
| N O T E S : pages 60-68
229 $300,000; and that already "a great number of specialists in social sciences of international reputation had contributed ideas and informa- tion referring to Communist subversive attacks." On July 21, when a group of sociologists at the University of Chile denounced the attitude of Hugo Nuttini, the total funds invested in the project to that time amounted to some $6 million (see Alain Labrousse, El experimento chileno, Ediciones Grijalbo, 1973, p. 150). The quotes from the sociologist Roy Hansen's work on the Chilean high command came from a photographic copy of the mimeographed English version that is kept in the Academy of War's library in Santiago. After September 11, I destroyed the negatives of that photographic copy, while the positive copy in my office at Puro Chile was probably burned when the military bombed and set fire to our building on the day of the coup. In my article "Las Fuerzas Armadas chilenas" ( Causa ML, No.21, Aug. 1971, pp. 11-25), I published an extensive extract from Hansen's investigations. 9. In August 1968, in Causa ML, No.2, in my article "La Penetracion norteamericana en las Fuerzas Armadas chilenas," the first documented denunciations were made of the introduction of anti- Marxist courses in the Bernardo O'Higgins Military School. More were made in Punto Final in 1969 and 1970. The expression "Western and Christian" had been in use since the violent presidential campaign of 1964 as an answer to the "Oriental, atheist world" in defining the struggle of capitalism against Communism. From that time on, "Western and Christian" had come to mean the "non-Socialist" world and had lost the religious connotation of "Christian." Speeches, books, college theses, and the armed forces were using this expression in that sense. The beginning of the military school's upper classmen going to the Canal Zone in 1968 was made public in an allusive speech by Rene Schneider, who by that time was director of the military school. For the general anti-Communist orientation in Chilean military education, see Lieutenant Colonel (Ret.) Alberto Polloni, Las Fuerzas Armadas de Chile en la vida nacional, Editorial Juridica de Chile, Santiago, 1972. 10. The quotes from The Rockefeller Report on the Americas come from a Spanish translation made by the Oficina de Informaciones de la Camara del Senado de Chile in December 1969. 11. For a detailed examination of the conspiratorial meetings of civilian politicians and the military in October 1970, see El Caso Schneider. Operacion A/fa, Section of Special Documents, Editora Nacional Qui- mantu, Santiago, 1972; Eduardo Labarca, Chile al Rojo, Ediciones de |
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N O T E S : pages 70-71 la Universidad Tecnica del Estado, Santiago, April, 1971; Sergio Ramos, Chile: ¿Una economía en transicion?, Casa de las Americas, 1972, pp. 260-286; Puro Chile issues throughout November 1970; and the transcript of the trial attorney's report, published in El Siglo, June 5, 1971. General Schneider's role in the plot was indirectly denounced, because the political conditions at the time did not permit the destruc- tion of his "constitutionalist image," in Causa ML, No.20, Jan.-Feb. 1971, and in issues of El Pueblo, Feb., March, and April 1971 (in these articles, the Pentagon's involvement in the affair was also denounced). Additional documentation of ITT's and the CIA's machinations will be found in Documentos secretos de la 1T1: Ediciones Quimantu, 1972. 12. The most spectacular proof of Frei's participation in the plot was given by retired General Roberto Viaux Marambio. In Conversaciones con Viaux (Santiago, 1972), Florencia Varas, a journalist, published Viaux's confidences made to her while he was in prison. These and the investiga- tions conducted after the scandal provoked by this confession (one of the main charges in the Parliament accusation of Frei in 1973, when he was president of the Senate; see note 5) revealed that Arturo Matte Larrain (of the Matte-Alessandri economic clan) and Guil1ermo Carey Tagle (a lawyer for Kennecott Copper) were the contacts between Frei and the rest of the conspirators, including the Americans. (See .'La historia sucia de los politicos democratas," a series of articles published in Puro Chile, March 7-April 15, 1973.) Viaux explained in detail to Varas how Frei had participated in the conspiracy but asked not to be associated with it publicly. Viaux insisted that Frei's hesitation made the Americans suddenly withdraw their backing from the coup. 13. In hindsight, it is tragic to recall how Allende persisted in his thesis that his government was not socialist but that it was paving the way toward socialism without any prior violence and destruction. On the basis of this thesis, during the three years of his administration he attempted to convince his political enemies that if the Unidad Popular's reforms were not made, social violence would erupt, motivated by the most under- privileged sectors of society. But the curtain of propaganda from the right and the United States painted Al1ende's government as "socialist" and even "Marxist." Allende's speeches and preSs conferences are filled with references to his nonsocialist program and his thesis that his re- forms were the only way to halt the decay of Chile's social system. One quotation will suffice: "In the first place, [we need] clarity, clear understanding, to know where we are going, what goal we should achieve at this stage. I have |
| N O T E S : page 72
231 said very honestly: The government of which I am the head is not a socialist government. The Unidad Popular program is not a socialist , program. But our government and our program are the beginning of the building of socialism." (Speech of May 1, 1972, made before thousands of laborers; quoted in Salvador Al1ende's collected speeches, La revolu- cion chilena, Ediciones Eudeba, Buenos Aires, 1973.) The reader will find more such quotes from Allende's speeches in Chapter 5. Regarding the state's "capitalist" nature in its economic reforms, see Sergio Ramos, Chile, Una econom[a en transicion?, cited above; Pedro Vuscovic (Allende's Minister of the Economy), "Dos aftos de politica econ6mica," published in Ute magazine, Vols. 11 and 12, Jan.-Feb. 1973. A version of Allende's conversation with the gen- erals was given by Luis Hernandez Parker on the radio program "Tribuna Politica," broadcast by Santiago's Radio Portales, Oct. 20, 1970. With regard to the terrorist activities, Valenzuela, Schilling, Rod- riguez, Huerta, and Viaux confessed organizing them. This was re- ported in Ultima Hora, Clarin, El Siglo, Puro Chile, Le Nacion, etc., in November and December 1970, and afterward. An official summary of these confessions appeard in The Schneider Case: Operation Alpha, Editorial Nacional Quimantu, Santiago de Chile, 1972, Series of Special Documents. 14. A version of the talk General Schneider gave in the Academy was known on the night of October 15 in the core of Senator Allende's campaign committee, and it provoked a series of articles on the subject of "The Armed Forces' Constitutionality" in Ultima Hora. El Siglo, and Puro Chile, Oct. 17-19, 1970. These articles cited concepts put forth by Schneider to demonstrate that Allende would be elected in the Ple- nary Congress, because the armed forces were not afraid of the Unidad Popular program. For their part, Kennecott lawyer Guillermo Carey Tagle and Air Force General Joaquin Garcia, both involved in the plot (see Eduardo Labarca, Chile al Raja. cited above), commented on Schneider's talk at a meeting of friends (at the home of Senator Raul Morales Adriazola, another conspirator; see note 4) on the night of October 18. Colonel Thomas H. J ones, chief of the Army section of the U.S. military mission, was rumored to have influenced the Schneider talk that smashed their plot's hopes of victory. Jones had come to Chile around mid-1968 and was Schneider's constant companion in program- ing the Bernardo O'Higgins Military School curriculum. PEC, a magazine of the extreme right, denounced in an issue in the last week of |
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N O T E S : pages 73-76 October 1970 the "American military" as the cause of Allende's elevation to the presidency. Later reports showed that Colonel Jones and Colonel Paul M. Wimert, military attache to the U.S. Embassy, were closely attached to Schneider in those weeks and held many meetings with other officers of the Army and Air Force, chiefly to explain the lack of opportunity to prevent Allende from becoming President. In July 1971, in separate actions only three days apart, Colonels Jones and Wimert were removed from the U.S. Embassy. This followed an unprecedented series of visits between January 14 and May 25, 1971, from an admiral and a rear admiral of the U.S. Navy and a U.S. Air Force general to the Chilean high command, each one spending an average of four days there. Meanwhile, between December 1970 and May 1971, Allende held fourteen meetings with the Chilean high com- mand, which he told radio and newspaper reporters were "concerned with the future of those national institutions." (For details of these events, see Causa ML, No.21, August 1971, my article "Que piensan las Fuerzas Armadas?" the first part of which is translated in Dale Johnson's book The Chilean Road to Socialism, New York, Double- day Anchor, 1973; in Alain Labrousse's Reformisme ou revolution, Paris, 1972; and in Labrousse's El experimento chileno, Grijalbo, 1973. 15. Admiral Porta Angulo resigned his post because the four admirals who had spoken to Allende did so without his authorization as commander in chief of the Navy. That is, they failed to respect the "military hier- archy," which in Chile, particularly in the Navy, has almost the charac- ter of a religious myth. Porta Angulo felt that his "hierarchy" had been abrogated, and so he quit. 16. Quoted from the documents provided by columnist Jack Anderson to the Senate Commission investigating ITT in 1972. From NACLA 's (North American Congress on Latin America) Latin America & Empire Report, Vol. 6, No.4, April 1972, pp. 8-10. 17. Ibid., p. 13. 18. Ibid., p. 14. 19. Ibid., p. 15. This report was dictated by phone from San Juan. 20. Ibid., p. 17. 21. Ibid., p. 19. 22. In November 1970, in his first instructions to the directors of Unidad Popular newspapers and news media, President A1Iende said that "Gen- eral Schneider's tragic murder is of such political sensitiveness that our responsibility as revolutionaries is to refer to it in the way most conve- |
| N O T E S : pages 82-103
233 nient to the interests of the political process that we are directing." He went on to declare that the duty of responsible journalists was to confine themselves to the official reports released by the military attorney in charge of the case in referring to anything that had to do with the military personnel allegedly involved. Later, more detailed instructions issued by the President's spokesmen added that the event should be treated as a "personal and isolated adventure" on the part of some generals. Allende had insisted to responsible Unidad Popular journalists that they had to take care to keep the armed forces from collapsing in order to maintain his government's security on that "flank," as he put it. In point of fact, it was an extremely perilous moment, since the Santiago and Concepción garrisons were involved, along with the com- manders in chief of the Navy, Air Force, and military police. A notable presence was that of Colonel Washington Carrasco, serving as General Eduardo Arriagada Lasa's chief of staff in the Army Third Division. Carrasco was promoted to Arriagada's position when the latter was fired during the Allende administration; he was to become one of the principal members of the conspiring generals' group, leading the mili- tary insurrection of September II, 1973. Later, in December 1971, the Santiago daily La Tribuna mentioned the Prats-Allende agreement in unsigned articles on pages 2 and 3. 23. Que Pasa, Nov. 2, 1973, p. 7. 24. The Rockefeller Report on the Americas, New York Times Edition, Quadrangle Books, 1969, pp. 66, 70.
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NOTES: page 103 portation, warehousing, and communications, 6.3 percent; commerce and services, 36.5 percent. The same accounts showed that 50 percent of the work force was laborers and 1.4 percent employers. This gives an idea of why the combative strength of the workers in Chile was so great and was able to push such movements as the Unidad Popular forward. Its fighting capacity was tragically set in motion in 1907 when the saltpeter works went on strike, to be suppressed by the government through the Army's slaughter of 3,000 workers in the Santa Maria de Iquique schoolhouse. The 1.4 percent of the work force comprising the employers and bondholders was organized into guilds in the Sociedad de Fomento Fabril, the Sociedad Nacional de Agricultura, and the Confederacion de la Producción y el Comercio, through which they had always controlled the Chilean government. The degree of concentration of economic power in this 1.4 percent is revealed by the following facts, from the same source: 17 percent of the stock companies possessed 78 percent of the total assets of the stock companies. In those dominant companies, the ten biggest shareholders owned more than 90 percent of the stocks in almost 60 percent of those companies. It was there that the eleven oligarchic clans mentioned were concentrated, consisting of no more than 1,000 adults, for whom 1,500,000 laborers worked. This oligarchy was closely related to major American capital. The facts show this: machinery and equipment, 50 percent American con- trol; iron, steel, and metal products, 60 percent; rubber products, 45 percent; automotive assembly, 100 percent; radio and television, nearly 100 percent; office equipment, nearly 100 percent; copper fabricating, 100 percent; tobacco, 100 percent; advertising, 90 percent. To this data should be added the power of Anaconda, Kennecott, and In, in copper and telephones (Dale Johnson, ed., The Chilean Road to Socialism, New York, Doubleday Anchor, 1973, p. 13). Combining this situation with the state's foreign debt and private Chilean companies having North American organization, the outlay for technology, and the dependency of the country's armed forces on the U.S. Army should give an idea of what is meant by calling Chile "a capitalistic country dependent on imperialism." After 1907, the organization of workers and peasants began actions to obtain legal recognition, which was achieved only in 1953, when the Central Unica de Trabajadores was formed. In 1972 the Central Unica had a million members, that is, 33 percent of the work force. The agricultural workers' unions began to gather strength after the 1967 |
| NOTES: pages 11O-l14
235 peasant unionizing law, forming various "confederations" which by 1972 represented more than 100,000 agricultural workers. Such political parties as the Communists and Socialists depended on the strength of the urban and rural workers' organizations to be able to participate in the country's political life, finally obtaining the presidency in 1970. It was against this rapidly rising force that the Chilean generals mobilized their troops on September 11, 1973. The Chilean unions, in addition to serving the workers as a weapon to obtain wage increases, better working conditions, and fringe benefits, traditionally took an active part in politics, being the vanguard in the struggle. against the domination of the American multinationals and paralyzing the country whenever political crises threatened to bring in fascism and its derivatives. The owners' guilds (for example, the Socie- dad de Fomento Fabril) traditionally took the opposite position. Lying somewhere between these adversaries were some 1,400,000 employees and self-employed workers, whose inconsistent political posi- tion tended to oppose that of the workers. These formed the middle stratum in the city and country, and traditionally they served as a kind of buffer zone to the 1.4 percent of exployers and bondholders. Some 400,000 of these people were government employees during the Allende administration. It was this middle stratum that the fascist military movement depended on for the success of the September 11 coup. 2. Pedro Vuscovic's words are taken from his article "Dos años de Política Económica del Gobierno Popular ," Revista de la Universidad Técnica del Estado, special issues 11-12, 1972-1973, Santiago, pp. 53-67. 3. In the first week of July 1973, National party Deputy Domingo Godoy Matte (of the extreme right wing), gesticulating menacingly with his right hand toward the seats of the leftist Deputies, cried out: "The Marxists had better not be so happy! Djakarta is coming!" From the first days of 1973, the words "Djakarta is coming!" scrawled in black paint had been appearing allover the walls of Santiago. Shortly afterward, leftist politicians and progressive journalists began to receive anony- mous letters that said simply: "Mr. So-and-so: Djakarta is coming: Number X." For example, Jose Gomez Lopez, director of Puro Chile (presently a prisoner of the military, since his arrest on September 15, 1975), received anonymous letter number 31; Puro Chile's assistant director, Eugenio Lira Massi (in exile in France, where he died in June 1975), number 28; I received number 37. In August 1973 the scenario of Plan Djakarta began to be revealed when attacks commenced against the homes of these people. The selective terrorizing of leaders and |
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NOTES: pages 115-121 journalists of the left was carried out by groups of ex-Cadet and Rolando Matus Commandos, advised by two Americans. The investigation of Plan Djakarta was halted by the September II coup. The selection of the name Djakarta for the plan of killing was obvious: it referred to the September 1965 coup in Indonesia, in which approximately 300,000 Indonesian leftists were massacred by the Army, overthrowing presi- dent Sukarno. A leading member of Plan Djakarta was Brigadier Gen- eral Hernan Hiriart Laval (sent into retirement in early 1973 for con- spiring with the latifundistas and giving orders to kill two peasants in Valdivia Province). Hiriart is currently ambassador of the military junta in Peking. (Reports on Plan Djakarta appeared in Puro Chile and Ultima Nora during July and August 1973.) 4. This case is a typical one that demonstrates the contradictions, deceits, and stratagems in the inner circle of the high command. Justiniano denounced Canales because he jeopardized any serious plan for a coup with his frivolity. Prats had to accept his generals' opinion to maintain the precarious cohesion of the Army, in the hopes of proceeding with his thesis of forming an armed forces-Allende government to save the critical situation and avoid a military coup commanded by the "hard- liners." After September 11, 1973, General Canales was appointed am- bassador to Lebanon. 5. From Punto Final, No.190, Aug. 14, 1973, p. 7.
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| N O T E s : page 121
237 internal pressure not to punish the generals most deeply involved. In sum, he tried throughout to be loyal to his generals and at the same time to Allende in a play that would put him in a position to be considered a presidential candidate in 1976. His indecisive character is well ex- pressed by this testimony Joan Garces gave to Le Monde, Oct. 5, 1974, p. 3, after Prats was killed in Buenos Aires: "Last July, Prats said to me: 'I want to tell you something I never told President Allende. In May 1968 certain Christian Democratic ministers in Frei's government wanted to provoke a coup d'etat.' He did not believe it to be compatible with his position and duties to reveal something of that political charac- ter to the late President." Prats's murder on September 30, 1974, oc- curred at a time when the CIA 's participation in the destabilizing of Chile's Unidad Popular government to pave the way for a coup was being denounced in the United States; this suggests that Prats knew many details of the conspiracy which he did not tell Allende and did not dare to reveal after September 1973, when he was in Argentina in exile. Apparently, his game of being "loyal" to two antagonistic sides at the same time caused his death. 2. It is very possible that this title, "October in Chile," given to the Pentagon report was a figment of the coup generals' imagination when they mentioned it to some civil politicians in late 1972 and late 1973. Fragmentary knowledge of this text was leaked out through conversa- tions of General Oscar Bonilla with such civilian conspirators as Eduardo Frei and Juan de Dios Carmona, leaders of the right wing of the Christian Democrat party. Later, after the September 1973 coup, my information about this report was more detailed, coming through channels that I cannot reveal at this time. In the same way, I found out that "October in Chile" had two parts, or two sections: the Pentagon's opinion on the necessity of a coup, of preparing a coup against Allende, which was first made known only to the senior officers who met in November 1972 with the Pentagon envoys; and second, the "routine" report shared with the entire General Staff regarding the armies of countries adjoining Chile (Per'.1 and Bolivia). These "routine" intelli- gence reports from the Pentagon to the Chilean armed forces were not published on a regular basis; their normal number is one or two per year, and they belong inside the framework of "exchange of intelligence" as envisioned by the Mutual Aid Pact. The second section was the one known to Prats at that time. 3. The Pentagon's meddling in the Chilean oligarchy's efforts to overthrow Allende was exposed in a series of articles by Julio Zapata Bernales in |
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N O T E S : pages 122-125 in Puro Chile's Sunday supplement, Dec. 1972 and Jan. 1973, under the titles " Anatomia de un golpe de estado," "Como la gran burguesia quiere derrocar a Allende," "El Fascismo como tecnica del golpe de estado," "Estados Unidos detras de Frei y Jarpa," and "La Sociedad de Fomento Fabril y el imperialismo: Golpe." These articles revealed the general orientation of the instructions to isolate Prats, leave the politi- cians in the background, create the "trade guild power" base of fascism, and induce the senior officers to form a conspiratorial bloc. Punto Final, March-April 1973, took up again these denunciations of the Pentagon plans. After July 20, 1973, when General Washington Carrasco traveled from Concepcion to Santiago to talk to Air Force Group 7-that is, to its commander Cesar Guevara Fuentes and fifteen other officers-about a scheme to "attack Santiago by air from La Serena, Quintero, and Concepcion" (this referred to attacking the industrial sectors and work- ing-class living areas), more information came out about the Pentagon's meddling (see Chile Hoy, Aug.-Sept. 1973). 4. The Bolivian chief of state, General Hugo Banzer, had, from the time he took power after the 1971 coup, repeatedly uttered the slogan "We will regain our coastline," as he led campaigns to strengthen the Bolivian Army to recover "our historic territory." He was referring to the 66,000 square kilometers that form part of the present Chilean province of Antofagasta, which Chile snatched from Bolivia after win- ning the war of 1879 against Bolivia and Peru. (Chile took from Peru the present province of Tarapaca, 55,000 square kilometers in area.) Both provinces contain Chile's richest copper and saltpeter resources. Banzer's campaign to "regain the coastline" at times acquired the char- acter of real war hysteria, naturally for his own internal political pur- poses. 5. The size of that "campaign fund" may be inferred from the following facts, revealed later: The New York Times, Sept. 8, 1974, p. 26, reported: "The CIA director also said that after Dr. Allende's election, $5 million was authorized by the 40 Committee for more 'destabilization' efforts in 1971, 1972, and 1973. An additional $1.5 million was provided to aid anti-Allende candidates in municipal elections last year. Some of these funds, Mr. Colby testified, were provided to an unidentified influential anti-AUende newspaper in Santiago." The unidentified newspaper was El Mercurio, property of the Edwards economic group, whose chief, Agustin Edwards, was living in New York, as vice-president of Pepsi Cola. Puro Chile and Ultima Hora in Santiago February 26, 27, 28, 1973, denounced ITT, Anaconda, |
| N O T E S : pages 126-132
239 Kennecott, Dow Chemical, Grace, Chase Manhattan Bank, and First National City Bank for contributing to the "campaign fund" through the Edwards clan. For their part, the Chilean magnates also opened up their pocketbooks: the Feb. 19-26, 1975, issue of the Chilean magazine Ercilla interviewed Orlando Slienz, president of the Sociedad de Fomento Fabril (SOFOFA, Society for Industrial Development) at that time. He stated: "I never saw the CIA. It was so easy to collect money during the UP that there was no need to use hot money. .." (p. 14). Time magazine (Sept. 30, 1974, p. 21) reported: "Approximately half the CIA funds were funneled to the opposition press, notably the na- tion's leading daily El Mercurio. ...Additional CIA funds went to opposition politicians, private businesses and trade unions." The Time article also said: " 'You buy votes in Boston, you buy votes in Santiago,' commented a former CIA agent assigned to the mission. But not enough votes were bought; Allende had a substantial following." 6. It may seem absurd to affirm that the civilian fascist groups were trying to infiltrate the armed forces, but the situation was that fascism at that moment was operating on two parallel levels: the civilian and the mili- tary. The civilian fascist groups were used as political tools by the oligarchs who supported Frei's election as "emergency President" after a military coup, to try to convince the high command to mount a coup "for Eduardo Frei." But events were to show that "military fascism" won the game and retained power on all levels. 7. According to the text later included in his Third Message to Congress, on May 21, 1973. 8. In October 1972, regarding the strategy to be used to destroy the own- ers' conspiracy, the great crisis between the leaders of the Communist and Socialist parties broke open, as did that between Carlos Altamirano and Salvador Allende, the top leaders of the Socialists. Allende felt that Altamirano was falling over the precipice of the extreme left, as he would tell anyone who would listen to him. This was reflected in violent personal attacks on Altamirano in Puro Chile during November- December 1972 by the journalists and editors sympathetic to AIlende and the Socialist party leadership. In January 1973, in relation to an argument about the supply and price control juntas (people's organiza- tions to control food distribution and speculation) with Treasury Minis- ter Fernando Flores, the President, in the presence of journalists in La Moneda, shouted that the Unidad Popular parties bored him, that they were "a bag full of cats" (a Chilean expression for very intense, serious disputes), and that they did not know how to lead the people. For |
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NOTES: pages 137-139 months, ever since the December 1971 crisis created by the Empty Pots March staged by the right, Allende had said the same things semipub- licly. These were used by right-wing newspapers, which even ran front- page stories on the subject (e.g., "Allende Fed Up with the UP," in La Tribuna. first week of Sept., 1972). It may have been owing to this situation that General Prats stated to his military colleagues that AIlende was almost ready to unite with the armed forces in his govern- ment. However, later events show that the President never had that intention, although his private and public declarations might seem to lead to the opposite conclusion. About this leadership crisis and frag- mentation at the top of the Unidad Popular, see, for more information, Chapter 5. 9. From April 1973, the newspapers El Siglo, Ultima Hora. and Puro Chile, and the magazines Punto Final. Chile Hoy, De Frente, and El Rebelde were constantly denouncing the conspiratorial activities of Juan de Dios Carmona, Patricio Phillips, Eduardo Frei, Pedro Ibaftez, and Generals Oscar Bonilla and Cesar Ruiz Danyau, not to mention Vice-Admiral Merino. This situation climaxed in August 1973, when Allende accepted Ruiz Danyau's resignation and decided to retire Oscar Bonilla and five other generals, as well as Vice-Admiral Merino, in the second half of September. The coup, however, came first. See Joan Garces's U.N. document, already cited, and details of this affair in Chapter 5.
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| N O T E S : pages 140-141
241 On November 16, 1971, an additional budget of 390,972,000 escudos (some $32 million) was accepted from the Treasury Ministry for a five-year Unidad Popular project to provide housing for the armed forces (some 7 ,000 houses for officers and junior officers were projected). The January 15, 1972, edition of La Nación, a daily, reported a speech by General Oscar Bonilla, the Army director of personnel, when 56 new houses were presented to the officers: "We are only beginning. Our determination to go forward is plain and unbending. ...The institution has planned this initiative and will fight for it, knowing that it is defend- ing something vital to each one of its members." In salaries, the period 1970-1972 also represented a great jump ahead. According to figures from the 1972 Senate Commission on the Treasury and the National Planning Office, the following comparisons could be made: In 1964 the Army commander in chief earned six times the national average for a worker's salary; in 1972, eighteen times the national average. At the lowest end of the senior officers' wage scale, a colonel in 1964 earned almost four times more than the average worker; in 1972, thirteen times more. 2. For more details on these plans created in the Pentagon, see Causa ML, No.8, May 1969, in which is printed the complete text of the Manual FM 31-15 as it is used by the cadets of the Bernardo O'Higgins Military School in its postgraduate courses at Fort Gulick in the Panama Canal Zone. This publication caused "violent polemics" in Chile (Alain La- brousse, L 'Experience Chilienne, Paris, 1972, p. 152; Spanish edition, El experimento chileno, Grijalbo, 1973, pp. 152-153): "But even before General Schneider's new regulation went into effect [this refers to post- graduate attendance at Fort Gulick by the Bernardo O'Higgins Military School cadets], between 1950 and 1965, there were already 2,064 Chi- lean military men who had been trained in the U.S. and 549 who were trained outside the U.S., that is, in the antiguerrilla schools of the Latin American countries." See also Chapter 1, note 2, on what the Mutual Aid Pact means to the U.S., and Causa ML, No.2, Sept.-Oct. 1968. More documentation on the same subject will be found in Alain Joxe, Las fuerzas armadas en el sistema politico de Chile, Editorial Universi- taria, Santiago, Chile, 1972; and Robinson Rojas in Causa ML, No.21, July-Aug. 1971, pp. 20-25. 3. A denunciation of these "six points" was published in the official news- paper of the Santiago industrial cordons, Tarea Urgente, in June 1973. It had a circulation of 45,000, primarily workers, and was staffed by MIR people and a group of Socialist party members. The newspaper |
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N O T E S : pages 141-146 had been able to acquire this information through "patriotic military police officers." The paper felt that the "six points" revealed Manuel Torres de la Cruz as a conspirator. Nevertheless, the events of June 29, 1973 (military mutiny), obscured this spectacular denunciation with the storm of news on the uprising, and it was not revived until August- September 1973, in the dailies Puro Chile and Las Noticias de Ultima Nora. In these same publications, the military source of the gun control law was denounced; it had come about through Juan de Dios Carmona's connection with General Oscar Bonilla. Emphasis was placed on the antipopular character of this legislation. See Aurora de Chile, Aug. 1973 (a Socialist party newspaper with a circulation of 35,000). 4. These gun search statistics come from the dailies Ultima Nora and Clar[n and the magazine Punto Final at the end of August and early September 1973. The fascist organizations' attacks and acts of sabotage were reported by the agency Prensa Latina, in news wires published in the 4ma, Peru, daily El Expreso, Sept. 13-30, 1973. 5. In March 1973, this event was denounced indirectly (without naming Rear Admiral Ismael Huerta Celis) by Eugenio Lira Massi, a journalist whose "La columna impertinente" appeared three times a week in Puro Chile, and by Fernando Rivas Sanchez, in the same daily. Both colum- nists presented the anecdote as proof that there were "senior officers in the Army and Navy" involved in the conspiracy to overthrow the constitutional government, and that these senior officers were protecting saboteurs and dynamiters belonging to the right-wing terrorist groups. 6. The Central Unica de Trabajadores was a national organization of laborers' and office workers' unions founded in 1953; it became the most powerful tool of Chilean union organization. In 1973 the laborers' and office workers' unions were joined by the peasants'. The Central Unica had a centralized national organization in Santiago and regional organi- zations at the provincial level. Its directors were elected by direct ballot. In 1973 it comprised almost one-third of the country's work force, that is, almost half the laborers, office workers, and farm workers. Traditionally it was directed by representatives of the Communist and Socialist parties, and in the last years (1970-1973) the Christian Democrats had a greater participation than before. It was active on two planes: in organizing the workers' struggle for higher salaries and in serving as a support to the leftist parties in their political campaigns. 7. Generals Herman Brady Roche, Mario Sepulveda Squella, and Wash- ington Carrasco, in addition to Colonels Augusto Lutz (after the military coup promoted to brigadier general and named secretary general |
| N O T E S : page 146
243 to the military junta, rising from the position of chief of the SIM, which he held until December 1973) and Sergio Julio Polloni perez (in Decem- ber 1973 promoted to chief of the SIM, from the position of commander of Army Telecommunications) formed the central team of the SIM during the three years of the Unidad Popular government. From its office in the Defense Ministry (9th floor, office No.85), the SIM group was in charge of coordinating work with U.S. Army intelligence advis- ers (according to a January 1973 issue of Tarea Urgente), headed until June 1971 by Colonel Thomas H. Jones, chief of the U.S. military mission in Chile. (When Colonel Jones left Chile on July 21, 1971, he was decorated with the Chilean Star of Military Merit, pinned on him by General Carlos Prats Gonzalez in the farewell ceremony.) All of these men, along with Colonel Manuel Contreras Sepulveda, comman- der of the Tejas Verdes Regiment (stationed at the Santiago port ofSan Antonio), and the commander of the Paratrooper and Special Forces School, Lieutenant Colonel Dante Marchesse, are graduates of the United States Armed Forces School, specializing in intelligence, at the Southern Command of the U.S. Armed Forces in the Panama Canal Zone. SIM chiefs who made frequent trips to the Southern Command were Generals Brady and Carrasco and Colonels Lutz and Polloni, using the air bridge that existed between the U.S. Command and the various intelligence corps of Latin America (Chile's air bridge is set up like this: Los Cerrillos Air Base, Santiago; Cerro Moreno Air Base, Antofagasta; Albrook Airfield, Canal Zone). To give the reader an idea of what this direct line between the Pentagon's Southern Command and the Chilean generals means, I quote a brief account by Fran<;ois Schlosser, which appeared in Le Nouvel Observateur, No.467 , Oct. 28, 1973: .'The Panamanians call it the Wall of Shame. It is the wire-and-bars barrier that separates the world of Latin America from the 'Canal Zone,' under U.S. jurisdiction. Behind the chicken wire, the American way of life reigns. Enormous buildings house the services of an organism that today makes Latin America quail: the Southern Command. Its latest triumph: Chile. ...The Southern Command is at the same time an information center, a many-disciplined 'military university,' and a base of operations. In the antiguerrilla school, thousands of Latin American senior and junior officers are trained for war against subversives. These officers receive complete technical training in the different military schools scattered throughout the Canal Zone: Communications School, General Staff School, Aviation School, etc. Underground constructions, places excavated in the rocks, house the nerve center of a |
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N OT ES : page 146 communications system that covers the entire continent. ...Here, the U.S. authorities maintain direct contact, by telephone or teletype, with their correspondents installed in all the South American capitals, where their role is more important than that of the 'official' American ambas- sador. An air network reinforces the communications network. To travel to Rio, Santiago, etc., the Southern Command civilian agents and its military 'students' make use of its own aircraft, its own airports. ...The center's creation goes back to the early sixties. It represents a strategic option put into effect by Washington. After the Alliance for Proiress's failure against 'Castrista' subversion, the U.S. decided to play its military ace. ...In the Panama Canal Zone military schools, a myth was born: that of the 'solidarity' of the Latin American soldiers. This psy~hological ploy produced excellent results. Its theme was: 'We have the same concerns, we are patriots, we want reforms, and we have a common enemy, Communism.' For the Catholic officers from the South American armies, generally members of the middle class, these simplistic formulas were enough to cement an elementary political conscience. Thirty-five thousand of them received training from the Southern Command. These officers made up the staffs that took power in Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, etc." The New York Times, Oct. 23, 1973, carried an article signed by Drew Middleton that published other details about the purpose of the Southern Command as an element of control for the U.S. Army over the majority of Latin American generals. "Scattered across South America and the Caribbean are more than 170 graduates of the United States Army School of the Americas who are heads of governments, commanding generals, chiefs of staff, and directors of intelligence- ...'We keep in touch with our graduates and they keep in touch with us,' said Col. William W. Nairn, the commandant. The school offers 38 separate courses, all of them conducted in Spanish. Last year about 1,750 officers, cadets, and enlisted men from 17 countries attended courses." "The school's four instructional departments deal with com- mand, combat operations, technical operations and support opera- tions." Generals Brady, Carrasco, and Sepulveda are typical of these gradu- ates. The oldest of them, Brady, had the following career: in 1943, he was chief of the military district that included Chuquicamata (a copper mine controlled by Anaconda); in 1946 he was graduated from the Southern Command; from 1947 to 1953 he was the military delegate to the Production Development Corporation; in 1959 he traveled to Fort |
| N O T E S : pages 147-149
245 Benning, Georgia, for a military course; after that, he was made com- mander of the 6th Armored Division in the north of Chile; he became chief of staff of the 2nd Division, then commander of the 2nd Division. Afterward, in 1974, he was appointed head of the Joint Chiefs of Staff of National Defense, and in March 1975, Defense Minister, replacing General Oscar Bonilla, who died on March 3 in a helicopter crash 300 kilometers south of Santiago. General Carrasco, having the same U.S. military diplomas, was appointed chief of the Chilean military mission in Washington in January 1974, and later, in December of the same year, commander of the Army's Fifth Division, replacing General Lutz, who died suddenly on November 28, 1974. 8. Carrasco was replaced in the Third Division by Agustin Toro Dlivila, who was hastily promoted to brigadier general in October 1973, when he was still military attache in the Chilean Embassy in Mexico City. Toro, whose career is obscure, was a close personal friend of Augusto Pinochet. In July 1974, Agustin Toro Dlivila was appointed the junta's Minister of Mines and was replaced in the Third Division by Brigadier General Nilo Floody Buxton. While Carrasco was chief of the military mission in Washington, the U.S. sold $68 million worth of arms to the junta. On October 25, 1974, General Pinochet's aide Colonel Enrique Morel Donoso was promoted to brigadier general and sent to Washington to replace Carrasco. When Carrasco was commander in chief of the Third Division in Concepcion, Senator Bulnes Sanfuentes, who represented Concepcion Province, made frequent trips there, making no attempt to conceal his long visits to Carrasco at his headquarters (the implications of these visits were denounced in Punto Final, El Rebelde, and Puro Chile from August to September 1973). 9. "The Chilean military has had a long and close relationship with the United States, and the Pentagon regards the 90,000 Chilean soldiers, sailors, airmen and carabineros (the national police force) as among the best armed forces on the continent. Between 1950 and 1970, Chile received more military aid ($175.8 million) than any other Latin American country except Brazil. This amounted to about 10 percent of Chile's total defense budget in the same period. The largest amounts of aid were supplied prior to the elections of 1964 and 1970 to placate discontent in the military that might otherwise have been exploited by the strong Leftist parties. This high level has been maintained throughout the last three years which, including projected grants for 1974, total $45.5 mil- |
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NOT ES : page 149 lion- This is double the corresponding total for the previous four years. At a time when economic aid has shrunk to less than $4 million, this signifies a liberalization of military aid to Chile. "The U.S. Air Force has a particularly close relationship with their Chilean counterparts, built up by the U.S. Air Force Mission in san- tiago over the last 20 years. More than 70 percent of the Chilean Air Force'planes and helicopters are manufactured by the United States. At the present time, the Chilean military is awaiting a shipment of 20 ex-U.S. Navy A-4B Skyhawk fighter jets, previously used in Vietnam, which are sitting on an airstrip at the Davis-Monthan AFB in Arizona. The State Department saw no problem in selling these jets to a Marxist government. In fact, last Spring the United States offered to give credit to Chile and four other Latin American countries to purchase F-5E Freedom Fighter jets. The offer is particularly significant in that Presi- dent Nixon had to sign a special statement waiving the restrictions placed on selling sophisticated weaponry to underdeveloped countries. This can only be done if the President determines that such financing is important to 'U.S. national security,' which he obviously did in this case. "This proposed sale (Chile has not yet bought the jets) was greeted with disbelief by Congressman Wayne Hays (D-Ohio) in recent hearings on foreign assistance, who wondered what Chile would do with these aircraft. The events of recent weeks seem to have answered that ques- tion. "During the Senate hearings on foreign assistance, Senator Inouye (D-Hawaii) also questioned the logic of granting military credits to a country which had expropriated U.S. interests. (The possibility of a cutback in these military credits due to the UP's 'intransigence' on the issue of compensation, must have worried the Chilean military.) Admi- ral Raymond Peet justified this policy toward Chile before the Senate committee. He explained that the United States prefers that under- developed countries 'buy American' rather than have them look else- where for military equipment (Chile was considering the purchase of jets from the Soviet Union and France). Furthermore, according to Peet, 'one of the big advantages that accrues to the United States from such a foreign sales program is the considerable influence we derive from providing the support for these aircraft.' Providing the F-5E jets or the Skyhawks, would preserve a certain pro-American orientation in the Chilean military at a time of strain between the governments of the two countries. |
| N O T E S : page 149
247 "The Chilean Navy has also continued to receive military credits and to carry out joint maneuvers with the U.S. Navy. In fact, on the day of the coup, U.S. ships were en route to Valparaiso to conduct routine maneuvers, but turned back after a brief meeting with a Chilean vessel. "Providing hardware is only one tactic the United States uses to influence the Chilean military. In the past 20 years, over 4000 Chilean officers have been trained in the United States and U.S. schools in the Panama Canal Zone. General Pinochet, the head of the military junta, served as military attache to the Chilean embassy in Washington D.C. and went to the U .S. Southern Command in the Canal Zone several times. Pinochet is known to be a hard-liner and in 1971 he warned, 'I hope the army will not have to come out, because if it does, it will be to kill.' In addition, according to Newsweek magazine of Sept. 24, 1973, the other members of the Chilean junta, Gustavo Leigh of the Air Force, Admiral Toribio Merino of the Navy and General Cesar Mendoza Frank of the Carabineros, have all spent some time in the United States. And in 1971, a high-Ievel military mission from the United States visited with Chilean military leaders. [See above, Chapter 2, note 14.] "The Carabineros have also received U.S. aid through the Office of Public Safety of the Agency for International Development. The pro- gram funneled nearly $2.5 million to the Chilean police forces since 1961, but was ended in 1971 by the UP government. In 1970, according to a Washington Post article of October I, 1970, the OPS advisor sta- tioned in Chile, Joseph Vasile, was expelled for his involvement in a right-wing terrorist plot to discredit President Allende. Vasile was then transferred to Vietnam where he worked with the pacification program. The Carabineros are playing an important role in the junta and will most likely come increasingly under the influence of the military. As in other countries throughout the world, the Chilean police have emerged as a strong paramilitary force engaging in counterinsurgency activities for the new regime." Extract from "Chile: The Story Behind the Coup," NACLA's Latin America and Empire Report, Vol. VII, No.8, October 1973, pp. 8-9. For more on this see Senate Hearings before the Committee on Appropriations concerning Foreign Assistance and Related Programs Appropriations, FY 1974, and Hearings before the House Committee on Foreign Affairs on the Mutual Development and Cooperation Act of 1973. More information on U.S. military aid to Chile and its influence on the Chilean military will be found in Alain Labrousse, El experimento chileno, Grijalbo, 1973, pp. 150-154. |
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NOTES: pages 151-154 10. The battle for economic power between the Unidad Popular on the one hand and the Chilean oligopolies and American multinationals on the other was a battle between the state's capitalistic economic power, managed by the Unidad Popular, and private capitalistic economic power, managed by the national and foreign oligopolies. In this struggle, the Unidad Popular was hampered from operating freely by the entire capitalistic legal structure of the state system that it governed, and it therefore was doomed to lose the game against the national and foreign oligopolies. 11. As indicated above, Chapter 4, note 2, the existence and reconstruction of the Pentagon's .'October Report" was deduced by some leftist groups through the speeches, harangues, and semipublic meetings of middle-level officers with their troops. But, of course, there was also additional, and very exact, information from some officers sympathetic to the aims of Chilean democracy, whose names I cannot cite because they are still in Chile. This Pentagon report had represented a radical change from the earlier attitude of "wait and see," maintained until October 1972, and it reflected the thinking of an important sector of U .S. multinational consortia whose influence carries much weight in Washington. This sector, led by the Rockefellers, was opposed to the hard-line attitude advocating immediate destruction of the Allende government, urged by groups like ITT, Anaconda, and Kennecott. This duality of opinion explains what was happening during 1970, 1971, and 1972 in Chile, when the armed forces, manipulated by the Pentagon, kept on the fringes of the developing political situation. For a detailed study of the duality of opinion among the groups of U.S. consortia and their attitude to Chile and the Allende government, see Dale Johnson's The Chilean Road to Socialism, New York; Doubleday Anchor, 1973, section 2 of Part I, "U.S. Policy in the Making: Chile, to Accommodate or Crush," and Section 3 of Part I, "The Coincidence of Internal and External Counterrevolutionary Forces." See also Robinson Rojas, El Im- perialismo Yanqui en Chile, Ediciones ML, Santiago, 1971, pp. 102- 110, Addenda I and II. An illustration of the causes of "wait and see" may be given by these paragraphs extracted from the NACLA account of the Council on Foreign Relations of the United States' sessions: at the December 14, 1970, meeting, Jerome I. Levinson of the IDB (Inter- American Development Bank) says: "Experimentation with different political systems in Latin America is inevitable. The process of change in Latin American societies will provoke variations in the status quo of U.S. property in the hemisphere. But U.S. interests are not incompatible |
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249 with the social development of Latin America. We can reach compromises with change, as has happened in Mexico." Covey T. Oliver, of the State Department, said: "Chile should be given all the opportunities to achieve success with its new government. Just as Cuba cannot be considered a failure because of the effects of American policy after Castro rose to power, Chile must be given a chance." And Walter Sedwitz, of the OAS, said at the same session: "If the government fails, there will be a radicalization in Chile and a security problem for the U.S." Naturally, this attitude changed when a popular revolutionary movement began to develop that was not controllable by the leftist political parties and, by the same token, was outside the reach of being controlled by the classic bourgeois democratic game that was so solid in Chile. 12. Allende's .'incapacity" to get out of the crisis was due to the alliance among the Christian Democrats, the National party, and the Radical Democrats. This alliance blocked in Parliament any legislation to tax the oligarchy, which would reduce the budget deficit and control the runaway speculation in which the great industrial and commercial mag- nates were indulging, or to make certain economic activities a crime, which would stop the scandalous way in which the industrialists, mer- chants, and latifundistas were sabotaging the national economy. In the Parliament elected in 1969 (before AIlende took office) the party distri- bution was as follows: Unidad Popular parties: 80 Deputies and Sena- tors; Christian Democrats: 75 Deputies and Senators; National party and Radical Democrats: 45 Deputies and Senators. Thus, the opposition majority was 120 to 80, which permitted foiling government legislative initiatives and allowed "constitutional challenges" to the Cabinet Ministers: in Allende's 33 months of government, he had to change the composition of his Cabinet 22 times on account of these maneuvers. This was a long way away from October 24, 1970, when the Parliament had voted: 153 Senators and Deputies for Allende as President; 35 for Alessandri, and 7 abstentions. This kind of deadlock between the Parliament and the President continued even after March 1973, when the government's Senators and Deputies increased to 84 and the oppositions' dropped to 111. It was because of this that on July 18, 1973, the Socialist party's secretary general, Carlos Altamirano, said: "The political forces of Chile find themselves temporarily at an impasse. In the face of this impasse, our strategy is oriented to breaking it up and using this break to promote a strong process of mobilization of the masses ...and to radicalize the revolutionary process." This strategy was firmly rejected by Salvador |
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N O T E S : pages 159-160 Allende and the majority of the Chilean Communist party's Central Committee, who were always playing on the thesis of "don't radicalize" and "consolidate what we have won." This brought Allende and the Chilean Communist party to the idea of holding conversations with the Christian Democrats, which the Socialist party and the MAPU refused to do. The MAPU magazine, De Frente, No. 12, June 29, 1973, de- nounced "the bourgeoisie, led by Frei and Jarpa," for attacking "by double entry, meaning to overthrow the government or oblige it to compromise. ...They are putting seditious generals into the cockpit. ...They are warming the climate for the moment of the fascist insurrec- tion. ...What the Christian Democrats hope is that the Unidad Popular will commit hara-kiri by freezing the process of change and repressing those who are demanding to move ahead, and thus cut themselves off from their most genuine social base. ...In case the government holds firm, the Christian Democrats are counting on their allies, who they know are preparing another way out" [the fascist insurrection]. For its part, Chile Hoy, another Socialist magazine, explained in the same month that the dialogue with the Christian Democrats was only a pretext on the part of the conspiring generals to "exploit the unaccept- able demands that had been made to strengthen their final assault against the revolutionary process." And that was indeed the case: when Allende announced his political concession for September II, give or take a day, the generals settled on that date for the coup, precisely to prevent Allende from conceding. 13. The laws in force at that time in Chile with respect to television were so ambiguous that the government could not order the pirate station to close because it would violate articles in the Political Constitution re- garding freedom of the press. But at the same time, since the pirate station did not have a legal permit to operate, the government could obstruct its broadcast while the situation was being discussed in the courts. 14. In May 1973 the civilian police, at that time commanded by the militant 4 Socialist Alfredo Joignant, managed to arrest Rafael Undurraga Cruzat, T one of the members of the commando team, and through his confessions the CIA 's connections with this incident became known. Puro Chile and Ultima Hora published the facts at that time, but the law courts sabotaged the civilian police investigation by refusing to provide search warrants for the homes of the people implicated and forcing the civil authorities to suspend the investigation for the time being. 15. For a detailed study of the IPES, see my book Estados Unidos en Brasil, Ediciones Prensa Latinoamericana, Santiago, 1965. |
| N O T E s : pages 160-168
251 16. A denunciation about this was made by Fernando Rivas Sanchez in Puro Chile during January and February 1973, and by Marlise Simmons in the Washington Post during January 1974, page B-3. 17. This summary of Rodriguez Grez's interview with Viaux in the Santiago Penitentiary was published in July 1973 in a mimeographed report by the MIR. 18. On August 25, 1973, after a spectacular hunt, the Santiago civilian police arrested the second national chief of Fatherland and Liberty, the industrialist Roberto Thieme, who, in order to be able to operate more succcessfully in the underground smuggling arms from Mendoza, Argentina, for his group, had passed himself off as "dead in an airplane crash" in January 1973. Roberto Thierne's confession provided the Socialist party (the civilian police chief was a Socialist) with proof that Manuel Fuentes Wedling was the "contact" between the CIA and the fascist organization, that Fuentes and the CIA had prepared the incident against Prats, and also that the CIA had approved the June 29 coup plan. Roberto Thierne's confessions uncovered such a huge net of "con- tacts" between the CIA and Chilean politicians that the police had to continue the investigation in strict secrecy. The investigation was ter- minated, of course, on September 11, 1973. 19. For the surgical approach to cleaning up the Chileans' minds, see p. 193 and p. 258, note 6. On March 11, 1974, the military junta published a "Declaration of Principles of the Government of Chile," in which they stated that "it is of the utmost importance to change the mind of the Chileans," and that for this they "will exercise with energy the principle of authority, dealing drastically with every breach of discipline or act of anarchy" (AP news wire, dated Santiago, Chile, March 11, 1974, carried in La Estrella de Panama, March 13, 1974). On June 18, 1974, La Estrella de Panama published on the first page of its second edition an AP news wire from Santiago under the headline "Education to Be Reorganized with Anti-Marxist Focus" which began: "About 600,000 professors and schoolteachers yesterday began a two-day national conference to study an education reorganization with an anti-Marxist focus." It added that the military junta's document had one stipulation for this reorganization: that "the educational system will not permit the participation of professors who promote the teaching of national or foreign doctrines such as Marxism." Professors had to personally indicate to the military authorities whether they were in agreement with this document. In Chile a "state of war" exists, it said, "martial law" is in effect, and "civil rights are suspended." 20. The generals' request was doubly cynical because on March 6, 1973, the |
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NOTES: pages 176-181 acting commander in chief of the Army, Division General Augusto Pinochet, head of all the armed forces in the country, which "guaran- teed a democratic, clean election without incidents and with absolute impartiality," made a statement using that exact phrase. The same thing was done by the director of the Electoral Register, Andres Rillon, a Christian Democrat, thirty days later, after the College of Examiners (composed in the main of Christian Democrats and National party members) checked the votes one by one. Rillon said that it had been "one of the cleanest elections in the history of Chile." His words ap peared in all the national newspapers at the time. 21. The torturers were the chief of Navy intelligence, Captain Gajardo; Navy Infantry Captain Koller; Navy intelligence Captain Acufla; Lieutenants Jaeger, Letelier, Luna, Alarcon, Tapia, and Maldonado; and a Navy Infantry second lieutenant, Boetsch. The tortures took place in Fort Borgoflo at Talcahuano and at the Valparaiso Naval Academy (denounced in Ultima nora, Puro Chile, Clar[n, Punto Final, and Chile noy, Aug.-Sept. 1973). 22. One paragraph of Prats's letter said: "In realizing, during these last days, that those who wished to denigrate me had managed to disrupt the judgment of a segment of Army officers, I deemed it a duty of a soldier of solid principles not to allow myself to become a factor of fragmentation in institutional discipline and in the State of Right [civil rights], nor serve as a pretext for those who are seeking the downfall of the constitutional government" (from Chile noy, No.64). 23. After this incident and the coup of September 11, there has been no word about Generals Pickering and Sepulveda. Nevertheless, since they were very closely connected to the conspiracy and had the confidence of the rest of the coup's generals, it is likely that they are now leading anonymous civilian lives. 24. The second paragraph of the news item revealed the extent of the duplicity of Merino's maneuver in accusing Carlos Altamirano, Gar- reton, and Enriquez of "subversion" in the Navy, to give the "Red coup" pretext. It happens that now Merino was not requesting censure of these legislators on the basis of "subversion" (obviously, because he could not present any proof to the Senate or the Chamber of Deputies), but rather on the basis of "the backing both legislators gave to the sailors," which apparently was his interpretation of their having publicly and repeatedly defended the sailors who had been falsely accused of subversion. The truth was that at this point in the military conspiracy, its leaders did not even take care to maintain the intellectual decorum |
| N O T E S : pages 185-191
253 of making their statements, accusations, and sentences coherent. 25. The coincidences between the movements of the rebel Chilean generals and the U.S. diplomatic and military missions in Santiago are worth noting. On the morning of September 7, the generals agreed to overthrow Allende on the 11 th, four days later: "U .S. Ambassador to Chile Nathaniel Davis traveled to the United States on Friday, Sept. 7, 1973 (four days before the coup), met with Kissinger on the 8th, and returned to Chile on the 9th" (NACLA's Latin America and Empire Report, Vol. VII, No.8, Oct. 1973, p. 10). Davis was the director of the Peace Corps in Chile in 1962, and in 1968 was sent to Guatemala, where he directed a "pacification program" resembling the ones carried out in Vietnam. "In 1971 this program had left 20,000 people dead" (ibid.). Jack Anderson, in the Washington Post, Dec. 10, 1972, quoted a cable sent by Davis to Nixon from Santiago "long before the political crisis erupted, which said: 'Perhaps what is significant now is growing convic- tion in opposition parties, private sector and others that opposition is possible. ...[Allende's] objectives are increasingly seen as incompatible and as going beyond what can be accepted. If opposition interests are to be protected, confrontation may not be avoidable.' "
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NOTES: page 192 given by the Southern Command to the Chilean armed forces for their insurrection and subsequent domination of the whole country will be found in various publications. "The Chilean soldiers receive daily four rations of food, canned and sealed in the U.S. ...More than 200 soldiers from the latest graduating class of Chile's Military School recently arrived in Fort Gulick (Canal Zone) to undergo intensive training in urban guerrilla warfare." (Boletín del Comité de Solidaridad de Panamá con Chile. Jan. 1974, p. 6). "From the Canal Zone, specifically from Howard Air Base, planes leave for the air base at Antofagasta in the north of Chile. Two types of' American solidarity' come here. On the one hand, ITT, which in- stigated and financed the coup, has made an agreement with the junta to send large quantities of necessary products for the Chilean Army, Navy, and Air Force. The American products are flown from Cali- fornia to Howard Air Base in the Zone. From there they leave for Antofagasta. On the other hand, since October II, 1973, U.S. Air Force Circular No.17 .277, emanating from the Pentagon, is in effect, whereby all kinds of logistic support are allocated for the junta. From the Post Exchange at Corozal in the Canal Zone, according to the exit permits for products from that military post, there are large consign- ments shipped to Chile: ammunition (bullets for M-I rifles, 45-caliber bullets for automatics, tear gas, etc.), as well as pharmaceutical products and plasma. Especially noteworthy are the large amounts of drugs and, particularly, a kind of food given to soldiers just before they enter combat" (ibid.. p. 5). 3. El Mundo added that the plane's identifying number was USAF 63103289. Crawdaddy magazine, May 1974, p. 40, said: "A reporter from the Boston Phoenix, a weekly newspaper, checked with the Penta- gon last month and an Air Force spokesman confirmed that a plane with that license number and crew had indeed left Argentina on the day of the coup. The spokesman, however, insisted that the plane was on a 'weather mission,' and that it did not penetrate Chile's air space. "Meanwhile, Tim Butz, a former U.S. Air Force reconnaissance expert who now works for the Committee for Action/Research on the Intelligence Community, has examined a series of aerial photographs of the bombed Presidential palace. Butz reports that the photos show that the surrounding area was virtually untouched while the Allende palace was totally demolished, and alleges that that type of precision could only have been accomplished by the use of the advanced American weapons, 'smart bombs and rockets.' " |
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255 (In fact, only the façade of the Palacio de la Moneda was demolished; the rest of it caught fire.) 4. Preliminary proof of the junta's intentions of regressing to dependency on the U.S. is provided by this news: Buenos Aires, Sept. 12, 1973 (Prensa Latina): "Juan Domingo Peron today condemned the fascist coup in Chile. ...Asked if there could have been u.s. intervention in this coup, Peron answered: 'I could not prove it, but I believe so, I deeply believe there was. As I have experience in these processes, how am I not going to know! Only yesterday, the rumors were that they were going to have a party in the State Department' " (published in El Expreso, Lima, Sept. 13). Washington, Sept. 12, 1973 (EFE). "An independent organization today asked the Senate to investigate the possible participation of the CIA in the coup d'etat that yesterday overthrew President Allende in Chile. The Committee for an Open Society, whose offices are in Washington, asked Senator William Fulbright, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, to conduct an investigation to decide whether there was any direct U.S. intervention in the events in Chile. 'We believe that the U.S. government was deeply involved in the overthrow of Allende's government,' said its director, William Higgs" (pub- lished in El Expreso, Lima, Sept. 13). "In round numbers, up to September 11, 1973, 170 businesses were requisitioned, 155 had interveners, and a significant percentage of the stocks of 90 others [of these monopolies] was bought, which gives a total of 415 businesses" (statement of General Sergio Nullo, vice-president of the Production Development Corporation, CORFO, made to the Chilean magazine Que Pasa, Nov. 2, 1973, p. 8). "On January 23, 1975, the CORFO announced officially that 220 companies had already been returned, 59 had been sold to private persons, 26 were ready to be returned, and at a later time, another 80 would be put up for sale" (La Opinion, Buenos Aires, Jan. 24, 1975). Santiago, Chile, Nov. 15, 1973 (Agence France Presse): "About 50 U.S. companies which were nationalized by the overthrown Allende government will be returned to their former foreign owners, military junta sources confirmed today" (published in El Dfa, Buenos Aires). "In New York, Business Week magazine estimated yesterday, November 14, that 50 North American businesses nationalized by Allende would be returned to their former owners. ...The magazine adds that it is 'unlikely' that ITT will regain control of the Chilean Telephone Company, but it emphasizes that in exchange, 'it will have |
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NOT ES : page 192 a much greater possibility of receiving better compensation' " (El Día, Buenos Aires, Nov. 16, 1973). "During the past week, experts from the missions of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Inter-American Committee for the Alliance for Progress, and OAS observers arrived in Chile. ...They are working at the Banco Central de Chile [in conjunction with General Eduardo Cano], from where they get in touch with all the organizations that interest them" (reported in the Chilean magazine Ercilla, Nov. 14-20, 1973). " A mission to acquire oxygen, led by Chancellor Admiral Ismael Huerta, was sent to the U.S. and Canada, and its purpose was accom- plished. They made contact with international agencies, with the gov- ernment, and with private North American corporations, with whom there is much business pending" ( ibid., p. 23). In Washington, on November 5, 1973, UPI reported that Chile prom- ised to repair alleged injustices in the expropriations of the North American copper companies, and announced that compensation would be negotiated. The new Chilean Ambassador to the U.S., General Wal- ter Heitman, declared that it was unfair to deny compensation unilater- ally to the expropriated enterprises, under the pretext that they had not paid taxes in previous years. The Buenos Aires daily El D£a, quoting the Bank of America's report on the Chilean coup, Dec. 14, 1973: "The report says that 'the national banks will, in the future, as was the case before being nationalized by the overthrown government, act independently and directly in their foreign operations, but under the supervision of the Banco Central and the Superintendent of Banks.' " Washington, Dec. 22, 1973 (Prensa Latina): "Chile agreed with the U.S. to pay $124 million as the first installment of its foreign debt and to grant 'fair compensation to U.S. interests.' The decision was made known in a joint communique from the State Department and Chile's National Treasury. The U.S. government's document says that 'the new military junta of Chile has promised to pay the compensations corre- sponding to American enterprises and assures a climate propitious to investments' " (El Expreso, Lima, Dec. 23, p. 15). New York, Ian. 4, 1974 (Reuter Latin): "Dow Chemical today an- nounced the signing of a contract with the Chilean government to reassume administration of two companies. ...Fernando Leniz, Minis- ter of the Economy, said that the government has a plan ready to return the banks federalized during the regime of the late President Salvador Allende to their former owners. " |
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257 El Mercurio, Santiago, Jan. 19, 1974: "Robert Haldeman, a top ex- ecutive in Braden Copper, which owned the El Teniente mine until 1971, has arrived in Chile." He met with Eduardo Simian, a junta adviser. " After his Santiago talks, Haldeman began a tour of the large copper mines, in particular Chuquicamata." New York Times, Jan. 28, 1974 (datelined Santiago, Jan. 23): "The austere economic program that the junta has put into effect to overcome the economic chaos inherited from the three-year Marxist Government has earned the praise of conservative economists and has reaped a number of modest successes, including loans from abroad and sharp production increases. "However, virtually all Chileans have been hit hard by a sharp de- crease in their purchasing power as prices have been allowed to reach realistic market values without corresponding increases in wages. "The economic burden has proved devastating for the poorest Chi- leans, who in four months have faced such increases as 250 per cent for bread, 600 per cent for cooking oil, 1 ,400 per cent for sugar and 800 per cent for chicken. "In the shantytowns where a fourth of greater Santiago's 3.5 million people live, concern over repression and civil liberties now places a distant second to concern over food prices." In Washington, on January 29, 1974, the AP reported that according to the RUNDT Economic Intelligence Service the businessmen felt greatly relieved by the change of government, and that feeling was affirmed when the properties that President Allende had confiscated were returned. Washington, Feb. 8, 1974 (EFE): "The Chilean government today paid more than $1.5 million to the U.S. in compensation for the nation- alization of copper companies and paper manufacturers that had Ameri- can interests." Mendoza, Argentina, March 28, 1974 (Prensa Latina): "Regarding the payment of compensation [to Anaconda and Kennecott], the junta's economic adviser, Raul saez, announced that the amount would be 'between 300 and 600 million dollars.' " Miami Herald, Apri114, 1974, datelined Santiago, April 13: "Gen- eral Motors has formally agreed to return to Chile after having sus- pended operations under the Allende regime." Santiago, Chile (a plant by the Chilean Embassy in Panama, in La Estrella de Panamá, May 30, 1974): "They have now passed 'the phase of standardizing some 3,000 agricultural properties which had been illegally expropriated by the former Marxist regime' " (this meant re- |
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N O T E S : page 193 turning nearly 50 percent of the land expropriated in agrarian reforms carried out by the Frei and Allende administrations). In Santiago, Chile, on June 13, 1974, the AP reported that on the previous day the government had put up for sale 107 companies that were expropriated during the three-year administration of President Salvador Allende. The CORFO published a list of a total of 150 firms to be returned to the private sector. The list contained seven companies that once operated on American capital, two on British, and one on Italian. Nine months earlier, the military junta had returned about ninety companies to their former proprietors. A CORFO spokesman said that the state would sell all companies presently under its control, with the exception of public or strategic services (La Estrella de Panama, June 14, 1974). 5. As examples, let us look at the Army commanders in chief: General Luis Miqueles Caridi, commander in chief in 1967: courses at Fort Belvoir and Fort Monmouth in 1941 and 1942; in 1952, military mission at the Chilean Embassy in Washington. General Sergio Castillo Aranguiz, commander in chief in 1968: Fort Knox in 1969. General Rene Schneider Chereau, commander in chief in 1969-1970: Fort Benning in 1953. General Carlos Prats Gonzlilez, commander in chief in 1970- 1973: Fort Leavenworth in 1954. General Augusto Pinochet, comman- der in chief from 1973: Fort Leavenworth, 1955; Southern Command, 1956; military mission in Washington, 1956. See also p. 221, note 2, and p. 242, note 7. 6. The first official reference that the Chileans had to the rebel generals' surgical idea (earlier, the leftist dailies had reported on this primitive notion, especially in August and September) was on the night of Septem- ber II, 1973, when General Gustavo Leigh explained over nationwide TV that the coup was intended "to extirpate the Marxist cancer in Chile." On September 19, El Mercurio reported that General Augusto Pinochet had declared that "when we have extirpated the malignant tumor of Marxism. ..the country will have all its liberties restored, since it is for these that we have fought." There are some phrases approaching this idea which will probably pass into history, such as General Pinochet's statement quoted in the Caracas weekly Punto en Domingo, Sept. 30, 1973: "Democracy carries in its core the seed of its own destruction. Democracy every so often has to bathe itself in blood for it to go on being democracy." For his part, General Sergio Arellano Stark, head of the Santiago garrison, interviewed on " A Esta Hora se Improvisa," Channel 13 TV, Sept. 23, 1973, at 11 P.M., said: "There |
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259 really haven't been that many casualties. ...If there had truly been 700,000 dead, we wouldn't have any security problems at all." These ideas have their civilian antecedents, such as a statement by Patricio Phillips, the National party Senator, who on the same TV program, Feb. 1973, had said: "We have to keep it clearly in mind that the best Marxist is a dead Marxist." See also p. 235, note 3, for "Plan Djakarta." 7 .Beginning in Apri11974, a violent conflict developed between the gener- als and the Catholic Church, because Raul Cardinal Silva Henriquez began to publicly protest the murders, arbitrary arrests, and tortures, as well as the misery the Chilean people were being condemned to. On April 14 the Cardinal said in a sermon delivered in Santiago Cathedral: "We have said it to our people, to our authorities, that we cannot offend against the principles of respect for humanity. Human rights are sacred, and no man can violate them. For this reason, today we cry out in the pain of a father who watches his family being torn apart, the quarrels between his sons, the death of some of them, the imprisonment and the pain of others. ...We have said that violence generates nothing but more violence and that this is not the way." On April 24 the majority of the Chilean bishops published a dramatic document deploring "the denunciations, false rumors, the increased unemployment, firings for arbitrary or ideological reasons"; the fact that "the unsalaried are being made to bear an excessive share of sacrifice"; the "lack of effective judiciary guarantees for personal security"; "arrests for arbitrary rea- sons or prolonged imprisonment"; "interrogations with physical and psychological pressure." "There are rights which touch upon the human being's dignity, and these are absolute and inviolable." This provoked a very irate reaction from the junta, and General Gustavo Leigh, speaking for the junta, said: "The bishops are the tools of international Marxism" (El Mercurio, Santiago, April 30, 1974). 8. When the military coup was unleashed on September II, there were two political groups reasonably prepared to withstand the attack: the MIR (Revolutionary Left Movement) and the PCR (Revolutionary Commu- nist party), who had had a clandestine information network since the beginning of the Unidad Popular government (even the membership of the overwhelming majority of their active members was secret). These two information networks, plus the remnants of the Socialist and Com- munist parties, allowed me to make a very rough reconstruction of the September battles' casualties. In early 1974 the French representative to the International Congress in Strasbourg released very similar figures, which were: 15,000 dead; 30,000 political prisoners; 200,000 workers |
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N O T E S : pages 206-207 expelled from their work centers for having belonged to the Unidad Popular or sympathized with it; and 25,000 students expelled from the universities. On December 5, 1973, Martin Reynolds of UPI, in an annual news report published in Lima's El Comercio, said: "On October 5, it is revealed that according to the CIA 's calculations, some 3,000 persons died in the process of consolidating the military coup in Chile. " He added that 250 members of Fatherland and Liberty had been trained by military men in Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil, who had received prior training in the Panama Canal Zone. For their part, the Chilean military was more conservative: on October 4, 1973, they reported that the casualties had been 476 civilians and 17 soldiers. But in March 1974, Ercilla magazine published a different statement, from General Pinochet: "We have had 1,600 dead, of which 200 were on our side" (taken from a version of that interview published in the March 1974 edition of Le Monde Diplomatique). 9. Among the torturers, the following men have been identified: Special Forces Captain Bender Hoffer (in Chillán); Colonel Manuel Contreras Sepulveda (Tejas Verdes Regiment, in San Antonio); Army Lieutenant Medina, in Rancagua Jail; Colonel Horacio Oteiza; General Orlando Gutierrez; Captain Nelson Arturo Duffey (who has a platinum plaque in the back of his skull, owing to the explosion of a North American training plane at Los Condores-Iquique Base); Captain Victor Matic; Captains Florencio Duble and Alvaro Gutierrez; Lieutenant Jose Garcia Huidobro; Captain Alberto Bastendorf; War Auditor Christian Rodriguez; Squad Commander Jaime Lavin Parina; Group Commanders Gonzalo Perez Canto and Erick Barrientos Cartagena; Squad Commander Engineer Edgardo Ceballos (all of the above from Santiago Air Bases 7 and 10); and military police Colonel Daniel Ivaceta, in Santiago. 10. There are hundreds of testimonies about these horrifying tortures. One of them was presented to the International Commission in Helsinki, which was in operation beginning March 21, 1974. The denunciation was written in the form of an affidavit letter sent to Chile to the military . Here are excerpts: "We know, Mr. Daniel Ivaceta, how you interrogated and tortured Ana Alicia Flores, a Chilean woman, age twenty-five, physical education teacher in Santiago, wife of Manuel Matamoros, a bank manager during the government of President Allende." The affidavit states that the tortures were intended to find out where Matamoros was. There were blows, insults, and "you waited a few seconds and when you did not receive an answer, you ripped off an article of her clothing. ..you |
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261 beat her head and breasts; you grabbed her hair in your hands and yanked her head back and struck her face." It goes on to say that they left her alone for a time, and then they took her, in her blouse and stockings, down two flights of stairs in the military police's Zañartu barracks in Santiago. .'There you, Mr. Daniel Ivaceta, were waiting with five officers. They were older men, with white hair, approximately the same age as yourself. Before beginning the interrogation, you and your henchmen obliged her to undress completely, and then you ordered her to walk stark naked back and forth in front of you, repulsive old men. Afterward you forced her to run and dance. Naturally Ana Alicia Flores could not dance. Then you forced her to rollover on the floor; afterward you threw her on the table in front of you, and you, Mr. Ivaceta, began to disrobe first. ...The unfortunate woman found the strength to jump off the table and run to a corner of the room, where she shouted everything she thought about you into your filthy, sweaty faces. When she fainted, you threw her on the table and three of you raped her." The affidavit states that she fainted again and they locked her up until the following day, when she was interrogated again. .'You again beat her up in a group and raped her, and she lost consciousness again." But Alicia Flores didn't talk (she didn't know where her husband was, in any case). "The next day you threw her out of the Commissariat, realizing you weren't going to get anywhere with her. You put her in a car, half naked and covered with blood, and drove her several blocks away from the Commissariat-and left her in the street. strangers helped her home" (from Unidad Internacional, April 4, 1974, p. 8). 11. This situation was denounced on March 23, 1974, before the International Commission in Helsinki, with documentation that was accepted as valid by the president of the Organizing Committee, Finland's Minister of Public Instruction, Ulf Sundqvist, and the members of the Committee. These advisers have produced highly sophisticated tortures of a psychological nature, such as the ones perpetrated on Clodomiro Almeyda, Allende's Minister of Foreign Relations, who was kept blindfolded for fifteen days, day and night, in the Air Academy of War in Santiago, according to his statements to the director of Mexico City's Excelsior (May 18, 1974, p. 16A). The same newspaper printed a detailed report on the tortures carried out by these "technical experts," denounced by Catholic bishops, Protestant leaders, and Jewish rabbis in Chile (AP news wire, datelined Mexico City, May 17). 12. In September 1973 a Chicago priests' group, Pro Justice and Peace, |
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NOTES: page 220 wrote a report entitled "Chile: Zero Hour," in which they stated: "The U.S. policy in Chile was not 'Let's leave them alone' but rather 'Let's aim for the jugular vein, let's cut off their food and water, let's force them to die economically, and afterward let's watch them fall.' While they stopped all economic aid, the U.S. continued sending military aid to the country, and as it happens, Nixon's military aid to Chile in 1974 was the largest they ever received. Nixon is as innocent in Chile as he was in the last election. Chile is Watergate with a passport" (taken from Panama's Diálogo Social, No.50, Oct. 9, 1973, p. 25). The figure of $40 per death is based on the escudo/dollar rate of exchange for the period. In October 1973 the military junta raised this rate 1,000 percent-that is, from 25 escudos to the dollar on September II, 1973, to 280 escudos in October. At the same time, it fixed the rate of exchange for brokers at 850 escudos to the dollar. It is this figure that I used for my calculations. The $40 spent by the Chilean generals had impressive results, according to information gleaned from AP, UPI, EFE, and Agence France Presse news wires: October 24, 1973: The U.S. Department of Agriculture issues a $24 million credit to Chile to buy grain. It had been requested by the generals on September 26, and it is the largest credit in the history of Chile for this purpose. During Ailende's three-year administration, only $3.2 million were received for this purpose; between 1962 and 1965, $6.5 million. November 8, 1973: $20 million for rural electrification from the International Development Bank. November 9, 1973: $24 million for manufactured goods, granted by Manufacturers Hanover Trust, and $20 million for the Banco Central; eight U.S. and two Canadian banks offer the junta $150 million in credits. James Green, president of the New York Bankers' Association, in signing the agreement, says, "We are lending a hand to the new Chilean government, in psychological help and in good faith." November 14, 1973: $28 million credit to buy feed corn, granted by the U.S. Department of Agriculture, breaking another Chilean record (naturally, payable over a three-year period and at 9.5 percent and 10.5 percent annual interest). December 12, 1973: $80 million from the International Monetary Fund, on standby, breaking another Chilean record. January 18, 1974: Inter-American Development Bank grants the junta $128 million in credit. In the last fourteen years, prior to Septem- ber II, 1973, Chile had received a total of $314.1 million from IDB. |
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263 That is, in four months, the generals received, in cash or credit, $454 million from the U.S. government and international organizations it controls: quite a return for their investment of $40 for every dead Chilean. But this was not all. On February 9, 1974 (AP news wire from Washington), the Inter-American Committee of the Alliance for Progress recommended that a credit of $785 million ought to be extended to the generals. |