THROUGHOUT THE COLD War, one of Washington’s key concerns was to keep countries in Latin America and the Caribbean from moving into the Soviet camp. Whether a government declared itself to be Communist, like Castro’s Cuba, or was merely a left-wing administration that Washington feared could be infiltrated by Soviet sympathisers, the assumption was that it represented a potential threat. It was a new take on an old mindset, a rewriting of the so-called Monroe Doctrine, according to which the United States would not tolerate outside powers interfering in Central and Latin America, which it claimed as its sphere of influence.
Thus, in 1954, the CIA sponsored a coup in Guatemala to depose a left-wing government. Eleven years later, in 1965, Washington sent US Marines to counter what it feared was a left-wing takeover of the Dominican Republic. It was the reason why there was such alarm in US government circles when Fidel Castro took over Cuba in 1959. It was also why, from the mid-1960s onwards, there was such an American focus on Chile, a major South American power with a long tradition of stability and democracy, where the US had extensive interests in the copper and silver mines.
In Chile’s election of 1964, the CIA spent millions of dollars quietly shoring up the campaign of Eduardo Frei Montalva, the Christian Democrats’ candidate for President, and trying to scare voters away from his Socialist opponent, a former doctor and senator called Salvador Allende, who was heading a coalition of Communists and Socialists. Allende lost, but when the next presidential election came around in September 1970 he stood again, and this time in the first round of voting he came top, although without an outright majority.
The Americans had been distracted by the war in Vietnam and were caught unawares. President Richard Nixon was furious and blamed the CIA and the State Department for neglecting to exert influence on the vote, creating the danger that Chile might ‘go Communist’. He called on his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, and his CIA chief, Richard Helms, to do something. A twin-track plan was devised to try to make sure that the second run-off vote to be decided by the country’s Congress would deny Allende an outright victory.
The hastily concocted mission did not go well. The first part of the plan was to try to persuade Congress to opt for the conservative candidate who had been the runner-up. An onslaught of CIA-inspired propaganda in the local and international media blasted out messages aimed at undermining Allende’s chances.
The second element was a plot to kidnap the commander-in-chief of the Chilean armed forces, as the first step towards staging a military coup. But the abduction plan went wrong, the victim was mortally wounded and the renegade Chilean general who had been hired by the CIA to lead the coup was arrested. With the botched operation a failure, there was no fall-back plan to stop most members of Congress voting for Allende. As a result, on 24 October 1970, he won the second round – the first Marxist leader to come to power in democratic elections, and the first to become a Latin American president.
Once in office, Allende wasted little time in restructuring the economy according to what he called ‘the Chilean path to Socialism’. The copper mines and other large-scale industries were taken out of private ownership and nationalised, as were the banks. Large landed estates were expropriated and converted into farm cooperatives. A government healthcare and education system was established. More rights were granted to workers, and there was greater welfare provision for the low-paid. Diplomatic relations were established with Castro’s Cuba.
In Washington, this was just what President Nixon’s administration had feared, and the Americans set about doing what they could to weaken and destabilise the Allende government. According to Helms’s notes from a meeting with Nixon and Kissinger in September 1970, their aim was to ‘make the economy scream’. Loans from the World Bank failed to materialise, US aid to Chile was withdrawn, and millions of dollars were allocated to opposition groups.
Faced with a shortage of funding, President Allende turned instead to the Soviet Union and its allies for alternative support. The Cuban leader, Fidel Castro, visited Chile and urged Allende to move further to the left. Moscow provided some assistance, but it was disappointingly limited and the Soviet Union failed to deliver on credit loans. Possibly the Kremlin did not want to antagonise Washington and spoil chances of détente, given that Brezhnev and Nixon had just exchanged visits. Possibly Moscow took a hard-headed decision that the unstable Allende government might not survive, so expending capital on supporting it was not a good option.
In time, the strain on the Chilean economy began to take effect, because of both external factors and the strains resulting from Allende’s socialist reforms. Export income for copper fell drastically. The population began to feel the pinch from rising inflation and unemployment. Strikes called by truck drivers, teachers and doctors all contributed to undermining the economy and the country’s stability still further. Some of the unrest was fuelled by covert CIA operations. Right-wing Christian Democrats who dominated the country’s Congress accused Allende of leading the country towards a Cuban-style Communist dictatorship.
Throughout the summer of 1973, political tensions mounted and the country became increasingly polarised. In June, the colonel of a tank regiment surrounded the presidential palace (known as La Moneda) in another failed coup attempt, this time sponsored by right-wing paramilitaries. At the end of July, workers in the country’s copper mines went on strike. In August, Allende faced a series of constitutional challenges, including a charge by some Congress members that he was seeking ‘absolute power’ with the ‘goal of establishing a totalitarian system’ and was heading for a confrontation with the armed forces.
Then, on 22 August 1973, the commander-in-chief of the army, who had been loyal to Allende and resistant to any idea of the army assuming control to restore order, submitted his resignation after concluding that he had lost the support of the Chilean military. The next day, his place was taken by his deputy-in-command, General Augusto Pinochet – a man whom Allende mistakenly judged was someone he could count on. Less than a month later, on the morning of 11 September, General Pinochet and his top commanders set in motion a military coup against the Allende government.
The coup was well-organised. Within hours, most television and radio stations in the capital had been seized or disabled, telephone services were cut, and the combined branches of the armed forces were able to declare that they now controlled most of the country. President Allende retreated to the presidential palace with his bodyguards and refused to accept defeat in return for safe passage out of the country, despite a threat from the coup leaders that they would bomb the palace. In an emotional final speech from inside the palace, he warned the people of Chile that a coup d’état was under way and declared that he would rather die than agree to surrender.
General Pinochet ordered armoured and infantry troops protected by helicopter gunships to open fire on the presidential palace. Then he gave orders for the Chilean Air Force to start bombing. It took several hours for the junta’s soldiers to fight their way in because of resistance from Allende’s defenders. First reports suggested that Allende was killed amid the fighting, but a later autopsy concluded that he had taken his own life, shooting himself with an AK-47 rifle.
The military junta moved fast to suspend the constitution, impose strict censorship, declare a curfew, halt political activities and dissolve Congress. Chile was now in the hands of a military dictatorship, with General Pinochet at the helm, along with two other generals and an admiral, representing between them the three branches of the armed forces and the military police.
Once its grip on the country had been secured, the junta set about ruthlessly rounding up and eliminating the opposition. Allende’s cabinet was arrested and his widow and family fled to Mexico. Many of those detained in the wake of the coup were held in the country’s National Stadium. Over the next few years, tens of thousands of Allende supporters were tortured. Some were executed and others simply disappeared without trace so that their families never knew what had happened to them.
On the economic front, the socialist policies of Allende were sharply reversed. Factories, land and banks were returned to private ownership, and Chile was transformed into a liberal free-market economy on an American model.
The United States could now rest assured that Chile’s socialist government had not ended up in the Soviet orbit, but the outcome came at a cost, not least to the United States’ own reputation. Pinochet’s military coup brought to an end nearly 50 years of democratic government in Chile. The brutal crackdown against the opposition was widely denounced as a flagrant violation of human rights.
There was sufficient public unease about the CIA’s possible role in the coup and its aftermath for the US Senate to launch hearings in 1975, overseen by the Church Committee. It looked into the range of CIA covert activities in Chile to ascertain whether it had a hand in the overthrow and death of Allende. The Church Committee’s final conclusion was that there was no hard evidence of direct US covert involvement in the coup of 1973, but that nonetheless it had given the impression it was not against it.
Subsequently the CIA admitted its covert role in trying to stage the earlier failed coup to prevent Salvador Allende from becoming President in 1970 and its support for the opposition once he was elected, but insisted that it did not try to instigate the Pinochet coup of 1973. It claimed that it was not involved in bombing La Moneda Palace and had only learned of it just before it took place.
Whatever the full extent of CIA involvement in Allende’s downfall, the US government and the CIA did actively support Pinochet’s military junta afterwards, and the damage in the court of public opinion was done. The military coup in Chile in 1973 and the litany of human rights abuses and violence attached to it are often cited by critics as an example of why the United States cannot claim the moral upper hand during the Cold War.
While the Soviet takeovers and crackdowns to cement Communist rule in Eastern Europe may have been more extensive and shocking, the fate of Allende’s government in Chile underscored the stark fact that, when it came to a fear of Communists in its own backyard, the US government was also prepared to foment unrest and engage in subversive activities to make sure its own sphere of influence remained intact.
Osvaldo Puccio was a 20-year-old student at the time of the coup. His father was President Salvador Allende’s private secretary.
We had two cats in our house: one was called Agrarian Reform and the other Proletarian Revolution. That shows how ideological the country was. A large contingent of my generation thought that Allende was not revolutionary enough, that he was a reformer. At that time being reformist was an insult. Nowadays being a reformist is almost a word of encouragement. Allende was seen by the youth community as a very moderate person. Besides, they said that he was an old man, wearing a suit and tie, a parliamentarian. He wasn’t Che Guevara! He wasn’t a revolutionary.
In September 1973 Jack Devine was a clandestine CIA officer based in Santiago.
After the [1970] coup failed, there was a directive that the CIA would cease and desist from coup plotting. You certainly were expected to develop sources that could report on the military, report on what was going on in the country. And there was authorisation to support the opposition, in other words the political parties, the media, who were under tremendous pressure to be able to resist the encroachment of what was perceived to be a leftist and potentially Communist government. In my particular case, my brief consisted of paying close attention to the political parties and being supportive and at the same time working with the media to resist the Allende leftward movement.
The context of Chile was the view that the Russians and the Cubans were going to use Allende as a pathway to creating another Cuba. I think Kissinger referred to it as a ‘Red sandwich’. I don’t believe Allende was a Soviet agent, but you had the Communist Party in his coalition. So, it wasn’t just Allende, it was a question of the external forces, so that eventually the Communists would come to power and that we would have a Red Cuba and a Red Chile. Now, that was the view not just of Nixon, but I think it was broadly shared in the power structures in Washington at the time, and certainly Dr Kissinger was of that view as well.
Steven Volk was a graduate student at Columbia University when he arrived in Chile in July 1972.
I knew there was really only one place I wanted to be at that time, which was Chile. This was a world historical experiment, the first time that a socialist government was democratically elected, and so I selected a topic that would take me to Chile.
As well as his academic research, Steven Volk worked on a progressive print news bulletin called FIN (Fuente de Información Norteamericana).
We decided at the end of 1972, why don’t we get an office? And so using personal names, not with the name of the organisation, we rented an office, which we shared with a lawyer, about two blocks from the Chilean Congress. And when we arrived, two very strange things: there waiting for us on our doorstep was the complete works of Enver Hoxha of Albania – and we had no idea how he knew we were there! And we moved into the office and there was a phone installed and almost as soon as we were in the office we picked up the phone to make a call out and before dialling or anything somebody on the other end said, ‘US Embassy, can I help you?’ So, we were already connected to the US Embassy in Santiago at the time. It was very clear to us that the embassy had its eye on us.
I lived in a building close to the centre of town. Kitty-corner to my apartment was a construction site. One day in October of 1972, I saw all of the workers gathered in front of this construction site. I stopped and said, ‘What’s going on?’ And they said that somebody had come by and offered the workers at this site a full month’s pay if they would stop working. And this was at the moment of the 1972 economic boycott that the opposition to Allende called on. And I said where was the money coming from, you know, who’s going to pay you for not working for a month? They told me the CIA. Now, I had no way of knowing whether that was true or not. As it turns out, it was true. But it was clear that they were being paid money to join the boycott against Allende. I said, ‘What are you going to do?’ and they said, ‘We’re going to continue to work. This is our job. We’re going to get paid for working and that’s what we should do.’
There’s a short story by García Márquez called ‘Chronicle of a Death Foretold’, the story of a crime that’s going to be carried out, everyone knows it’s going to be carried out. Everyone acts as if in a Greek tragedy so that finally it comes about, even though most people want to avoid it. I think this story is key to understanding Chile’s situation in the last months before the coup.
After the last election in March 1973, the radical right wing, which was already very large, realised that there was no democratic way to unseat Allende. So, they concentrated on the conspiracy. At same time, the government was getting more and more radical and the moderates within government were being marginalised.
Late in August and September [1973] you had strikes and demonstrations and you could feel the instability and the fact that the government was losing its power base. But I think the important note – and I have direct first-hand knowledge of this – [was that] the CIA did not find out about the coup plot until 72 hours before the coup, and that report came from an asset that I had. The message was very brief, and it’s contained in a declassified cable that I drafted, and it reads something like: ‘On September 11th the military will move against the President. It will start in Valparaiso and it’ll be announced on Radio Agricultura at …’ They said 7am and it turned out it was 8am or so. I sent the cable and then later that night I met another source who basically repeated the same thing. So, I was feeling comfortable that the reporting was accurate. A third report, which was very detailed, came from an active duty military officer, but I think he was authorised by the command: go tell the Americans what’s going to happen so they’re not surprised, but tell them so late that it doesn’t change anything. And that’s precisely what happened. So, Washington found that the 9th September cable was the first notice.
The assumption was you would have a bloodless coup and that there would be an election.
On the night of September 10, I finished at the university late at night. I went to the Moneda Palace to meet my father and then go to the house together. My father was Allende’s private secretary. He was in charge of the presidential cabinet. When I saw my father, he told me that the police had reported the illegal entry into Chile of the head of an extreme right-wing terrorist group, responsible for organising the attempted coup in June.
We went to the house and had dinner. Very early in the morning, about 5.30am, we received a phone call from a very good friend of the family, who was married to an air force officer. I answered the call and she said, ‘Tell your dad that the thing is on.’ I went to my father’s room to tell him what our friend had said, and at that moment we received another call, this time from the house of President Allende, asking my father to go immediately to the Moneda.
That day I had a law exam in college, and I put on my most elegant clothes because I thought that after going to the Moneda, I would go to college to take the exam. Regardless of my illusions, it shows that the crisis was a state of normality at that time. I thought it was not so extraordinary, a coup having begun, that the university would cancel the exam.
We received very contradictory news. Then conversations began with the military command. Pinochet sends a message through my father asking the President to go to the Ministry of Defence. And Allende answers him also through my father, telling Pinochet not to be a coward, that the President of Chile only receives people in the Moneda and the one who must move is him.
Around 10.30am, Allende got all the people who were in the Moneda together and gave a little speech. It was extraordinary, offering a moral justification to those people who wanted to leave the palace. He also thanked those people who stayed, without any obligation or pressure on people to stay. The President asked me to leave, and I told him that I wanted to stay. Then he hugged me and said, ‘Well, I won’t ask again, because the President of Chile cannot oblige any man to be where he doesn’t want to be.’ So I stayed.
In retrospect, I see Allende now as a very distant man, who had an attitude that projected an immense inner peace. I have no doubt that he knew what the consequences would be for him. He knew it. He acted as if he already knew this was his last day and he was going to die. He was calm and aware of what was going to happen.
I was living about eight blocks from the Moneda. I would usually get up at about six-thirty, seven in the morning and go off to work at the library by about nine o’clock. [On the day of the coup] I went to my front windows which faced out on the Alamada, which was the main street that runs through the heart of downtown Santiago, and saw that the traffic was running the wrong way, that the cars were all headed out of the city as opposed to into the city. So, I immediately turned on the radio and there was nothing there, and I flipped around and finally found a station and it reported that there was a coup going on at the time, that the navy had revolted in Valparaiso and that the army had rebelled against Allende. At that moment, it became clear also that the government stations were going off the air and as I listened in on one of them I could literally hear the doors being battered down, shouting, gunfire and then the station went off the air.
I listened to the military reports saying that Allende was given a certain amount of time to give up the presidency and that he would be flown out of the country. And I was listening to what turned out to be Allende’s last speech on the radio in which – I can’t really explain, I still get emotional thinking about it, hearing him talk about the hope that he had had for the Chilean people and for this process, the betrayal he felt over these officers that he had appointed and that he would remain as President of Chile, he was elected to do his job and he wasn’t about to leave.
I was right next to him, physically next to him, when he made his last speech. At that moment, I did not realise the significance of the speech. I heard it again after everything happened and I returned from having been in prison. It was then that I realised its meaning: it had been a speech to make an assessment and to say goodbye. It was spontaneous, he didn’t have any paper – a completely improvised speech. And if you listen to it you know it’s the speech of a man who’s going to die.
A battle had already started. The carabineros [national police force] distributed arms to each one of those who were in the palace. Also, they distributed helmets and some masks because gas was being fired at us. As soon as the first group of people left, they started firing on the palace. There was an exchange of shots.
I was on the second floor of the palace and President Allende told me: ‘Young comrade’ – that’s what he called me since I was a little boy – ‘go check the posts to find out how many of the carabineros we have left.’ And I walked unconsciously from the office to a wide corridor where the busts of the Chilean former Presidents were and somebody shouted to me, ‘Get down, they’re firing!’ When you’re in a situation like that you don’t think about being brave, you think that the bullets are aimed at everyone but you.
There were many shots fired before they started bombing. The pipes had been broken and water flowed through the palace. The floor was half flooded. There was a conversation between my father and the military about when they were going to start the bombardment. First the bombing was set at 11am, and then finally it was announced for 12pm.
We tried to protect ourselves. We had to sit on the floor, but the floor was flooded. I was thinking, ‘I’m going to mess up my good trousers that I wore to take the exam at university.’ President Allende had given me a watch a few days before. It must have been the most modern watch available at the time. It had a button on it and, when you pressed it, it lit up to show you the time – in 1973! A digital watch! And when the first bomb dropped I immediately looked at the watch to see if the military was on time. The clock ticked 12.00. The first of the bombs hit us at 12.00 on the dot.
There we see up in the sky these two jets and they’re coming in. They circle around behind the building where I am and then you see them coming down the other way and heading on what would look like a bombing run towards the centre of the city. Then I could see the jets pull up on the other side. And nothing happens. We think, ‘Absolutely, they can’t do this, the idea of bombing your own White House is just incredible.’ So, we feel a moment of elation and then there the jets are again behind us and they circle once more and they go down on a bombing run and they come up on the other side and this time there’s a huge black cloud of smoke and it’s clear that they had bombed the Moneda. At that moment, everything sort of snapped into focus, that this is not what we had talked about as a golpe blando, which is a sort of mild coup in which Allende would be escorted out of the country. This was a way of saying, ‘Everything that you thought is not true any more. We are now in charge, this is our country and we will stop at nothing to stay in power.’ From that moment, it just became absolutely clear that there was nothing ahead of Chile except dark days.
After the bombing, there was a new dialogue with the military and they agreed that a delegation would go out to negotiate. This delegation consisted of a minister, the deputy interior minister, my father and myself. We had gone to negotiate but they arrested us immediately, and the talks didn’t last five minutes.
We were imprisoned in the basement of the Ministry of Defence when they brought in a group of comrades who had been with us in La Moneda, including Carlos Jorquera, a journalist who was Allende’s press chief. And he told us only with the movement of his lips: ‘The Doctor is dead.’ The people closest to Allende called him ‘the Doctor’. That’s how we found out.
I had a very bad night because I was tortured, and the next day it was the same. Then they took me to the National Stadium – some very difficult days. They burned my body with cigarettes. I had a beard like all the leftist students at that time, and they got a soldier to take off my beard and made me eat it. A fellow next to me was literally kicked to death. I felt very scared, because you feel a lot of impotence. It was totally arbitrary. Well, that’s how dictatorships work. Dictatorships that are not arbitrary serve little purpose. Fear is produced by arbitrariness, not by order. Then they took me to the Military School, where I met with my father. After that, they took us all to Dawson Island, which is an island at the south of the Strait of Magellan, located in the south part of the country which goes down to the Pole.
Once the government had been suppressed, they put a curfew in. It was lifted for a few hours and a number of people returned home. The curfew continued for weeks. You were allowed on to the streets, but after five or six o’clock (I don’t remember the exact hour) there was no movement on the streets. We did have people reporting eventually about what was taking place in the stadium and that was pretty gruesome. So, you still didn’t have a sense of how many people were wrapped up. You knew there was violence, people were killed, but there probably wasn’t a good reading of it for several days.
I didn’t have a telephone in my flat and I had no idea where anyone was or what’s going on. By Saturday, the curfew was only an evening curfew, so we started to get in touch with each other again. And it’s over the next few days that we learn for the first time, this is about September 18th or 19th, that one of our colleagues, Charlie Horman, has been disappeared from his house. His wife and a colleague who was with Charlie come to visit me in my apartment and basically detail to me the story that would later be broad cast in the Costa-Gavras film Missing, about what he had heard in the Viña del Mar, the port city, about his return to Santiago in a military car and what had happened after that time. So at that point, that was the first time, about ten days after the coup, in which a North American had been missing. We had no idea where he was, and in fact the Horman family would not find out until the middle of October that he had been killed and buried in an unmarked grave in the wall of the Santiago cemetery.
My second colleague Frank Teruggi had been arrested with his roommate David Hathaway when soldiers had come to their house. It later appeared that they had been denounced by neighbours. So they were taken down to the National Stadium. I went to the morgue, which was a horrifying sight, with hundreds of bodies stacked along the floor in double rows, with rows above and below, and unfortunately that’s where I found Frank’s body.
When I saw him, the clothes were taken off the bodies and they were lying there, and Frank’s throat had been slashed. There was a cut from the chin-level down to the right and he had two bullet holes in his chest. When the official autopsy report would come out of the government, the arguments the Chilean military was making was that he had been released from the National Stadium, was out after curfew and had been shot 17 times by a passing patrol. I’m a young college student, this was a very traumatic time, but you can’t mistake 17 bullet holes for a slashed throat and 2 bullet holes. By the time his body was returned to the US, there was no ability to make another autopsy, so that’s how it stood. It was quite clear that these were all victims of military violence, and you would see bodies on the street. I saw a number of them as I walked around. I joined with the other crowds as we stood on a bridge over the Mapocho river and bodies would be floating by on it.
In terms of my own safety, I figured my best approach would be to become very public to the US Press Corp that was down at the time. I would meet with them fairly regularly and say, ‘Look, today I’m going to go here, and tomorrow I’m going to go there.’ And so at least they would know if I wasn’t around. My own apartment was searched two different times by the military, as part of a larger sweep of the building. There’s a fairly famous photograph taken by David Burnett of soldiers burning books on the streets in Santiago. Quite literally those were my books that they took out of my apartment.
I think Washington was initially pleased to see the coalition and the Communists and Socialists had failed in their efforts, and I think there was satisfaction with it. As the reality set in, I think the Pinochet government had increasingly difficult relations with the US. I can tell you from the intelligence side from the earliest days there was cautioning that we would not be providing help if there were any human rights violations in anything we were working on. The human rights issue was joined fairly early in the aftermath.
We were imprisoned on Dawson Island for a full year. After that, they took us to Santiago. On the island, we’d been separated into four groups, according to each branch of the armed forces. I was in the police group, so when we were taken to the city they left me at one of their facilities. In that place, I spent 73 days in a solitary cell. I was eventually expelled thanks to the mediation of the CIME, which was the United Nations agency to coordinate migration. I ended up living in Romania and then East Germany. I returned to Chile in 1984.
Remember the basic premise here, which is the CIA was not orchestrating that military attack. I believe in the CIA; I thought it performed a unique mission in the Cold War. It stopped us from getting into fighting wars. The Russians actually believed that this was a pathway forward and we blocked them. We made an effort to block them there and it failed, whether it was the military that took the initiative or not. It was the last time that the Russians tried through the ballot box, certainly in Latin America, but I believe worldwide, to try and bring about change. So that was a contribution and I think it was the last hurrah for the Cubans as well. They had pretty well spent their energies after that. So, the combination of all the things we did in Latin America I believe stemmed the tide of the Communists. It’s so long ago that most people have forgotten just how real the Cold War was.