7 : : : Working for the Revolution

Beatriz became heavily involved in her father’s fourth presidential campaign in mid-1970. Earlier that year, Salvador Allende had been nominated as the candidate for the Unidad Popular (UP)—a coalition forged in 1969 comprising six parties, including the Socialist Party (PS), the Communist Party (PCCh), the Movimiento de Acción Popular Unitario (MAPU), and the Radical Party. As with his PS nomination, his selection had been riven with intra-Left divisions. Beatriz, consumed by her work at the university and her involvement in the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (ELN), had been disdainful of party machinations. True, she had been involved in persuading PS radical sectors to support Allende. But, as she had written to Luis, the nomination process had been “slow, traumatic, and not easy”—“a spectacle … of disunity … a very negative image.” She also worried about implications for her father. And she was skeptical of an electoral victory: “I do NOT have faith in this,” she had written at the beginning of the year. “I do NOT see any possibility at all in it.”¹ Beatriz dreaded the return of political campaigning to Guardia Vieja and the rhythm of yet another election. Waiting for her family to return from Algarrobo in January, she relished the calm before a new political storm. Everything was about to “change completely,” she predicted. The house would become a “madhouse”—an “inferno of people, letters, telephone calls, meetings etc.”² At least when his campaign started, she had therefore, for various reasons, not been a key player.

It was Beatriz’s emotional attachment to her father—rather than sudden faith in peaceful democratic change—that altered this. Pivotally, Salvador Allende had a minor heart attack. Potentially devastating in the midst of campaigning, this health scare needed careful management. Beatriz immediately contacted Oscar “Cacho” Soto, a young cardiologist and Eduardo Paredes’s best friend, who recommended anticoagulants and rest (publicly, the candidate was said to be suffering from flu and bronchitis). Oscar had never treated Allende before but was deemed trustworthy and became his private doctor henceforth.³

Beatriz was nevertheless shaken by what had happened. Although Allende recovered quickly, she decided it was her “duty” to “look after him.”⁴ She told her father he had to “delegate work and responsibility to others because [campaign work] was too much for him” and tried “modestly to help him as a doctor, as a daughter, avoiding displeasures, dislikes, playing the role of companion and secretary and replacing him at a few small events.”⁵ On 3 May, for example, Beatriz spoke on his behalf at a not-so-small rally of seven thousand in La Cisterna.⁶ Joining Allende’s campaign team more actively than before, she also accompanied her father to interviews and helped him prepare for a televised presidential debate. This was to be doubly challenging given Allende’s health. Beatriz therefore assembled a team of trusted friends at Guardia Vieja, including Jorge Arrate, a young economist she had known from the Brigada Universitaria Socialista (BUS).⁷ These efforts paid off; the debate went well, helping quash rumors he was seriously ill.⁸

Beatriz’s sudden resolution to take a more active role in supporting her father led to her sacrificing the most important thing to her at the time: visiting Cuba. “It pisses me off, it hurts me,” she wrote to Luis. In mid-1970 it appeared everyone was “packing bags” to go to Cuba, leaving her in “a deep depression … I envy them,” she confessed.⁹ Significantly, however, her father’s heart attack also forced Beatriz to engage more with what was happening around her. In March she had admitted “little Chile is beginning to get interesting.” But little else.¹⁰ Now, mobilized by her love for her father, she began reflecting more on his campaign. As she wrote to Luis at the end of May, “I think the current moment Chile is living through has great political importance, and I concede … the importance of the UP as a process. … Even though it is difficult, I do not exclude the possibility of an electoral triumph. This country has become very polarized, the political level has risen, as has anti-imperialist consciousness and in general. The Unidad Popular is doing well. … I love my father very much and I respect him more every day. … He has made me sign up [for the campaign] and collaborate.”¹¹

What Beatriz found when she joined in mid-1970 was an ideologically charged electoral race, echoing past presidential campaigns but building on them. As in 1964, women and youth groups mobilized, supporters volunteered in disadvantaged neighborhoods, thousands attended rallies and marched in the streets; workers lobbied their colleagues, and young Allendistas painted walls with the UP’s insignia (one propaganda group called itself the Elmo Catalán brigade).¹² At a grassroots level, Beatriz also campaigned in poorer communities, talking to women, in particular, persuading them to vote for the UP.¹³ Electioneering, working at the university, and maintaining her ELN commitments meant she was exhausted. But this had advantages: “There are so many things [happening] that days are flying by,” she wrote to Luis in June. “At night I get back so wrecked that I don’t have much time to think and feel lonely.”¹⁴

In many respects, the Left stood a better chance than in 1958 and 1964. This is not because its percentage of voters had risen drastically. As it turned out, a slightly lower percentage of people voted for the UP in 1970 than had voted for the Frente de Acción Popular (FRAP) in 1964. For all the enthusiasm of those who did campaign, there were some on the left—particularly those radicalized after 1964—who were pessimistic about the UP’s chances. Many miristas who had voted for the FRAP now simply refused to participate in the electoral system they scorned.¹⁵ Those under twenty-one and illiterate Chileans remained disenfranchised, meaning official voter registers did not accurately reflect the much broader mobilization in favor of the UP. However, rather than the electorate being split two ways, with the Right conclusively backing the Christian Democrats against the Left, it was now divided three ways, between the Right, the center, and the Left, giving the latter a greater chance of securing the most votes. Moreover, the Christian Democrat’s candidate, Radomiro Tomic, was a progressive within the Christian Democrat Party (PDC), believing a future alliance with the Left was inevitable. Arguing Frei’s Revolution in Liberty needed accelerating, his followers essentially backed a program for transformation akin to Allende’s. The combination of his supporters and the UP’s thus gave overwhelming weight to proposals for radical change. Against this agenda and the PDC’s record, former president Jorge Alessandri stood for a resurgent right wing, grouped since 1966 under a new party, the Partido Nacional (National Party, PN).

Allende’s position, similar to his previous campaigns, now focused on Frei’s failings, his subservience to “national and foreign capitalism,” and his use of “violent repression.” The UP’s Basic Program declared that the country needed a “people’s government” to “put an end to imperialist domination … and initiate socialist construction.” Supporting the UP meant proclaiming oneself “in favor of the urgent replacement of current society” through nationalizations, a new constitution and People’s Assembly, investment in education and culture, incorporation of the armed forces into development, suffrage from age eighteen irrespective of literacy, and diversification of Chile’s foreign relations. Significantly, the UP promised that change would take place through existing political institutions, while guaranteeing individual and social rights and respecting opponents operating within the law. La vía chilena al socialismo—the Chilean way to socialism—would initiate a new form of socialist transition grounded in “democracy, pluralism, and freedom.”¹⁶ As a means of giving practical meaning to this vision, Allende announced forty measures underpinning a Unidad Popular government. A reference to Chile’s short-lived 1932 Socialist Republic, which had also promulgated forty measures, these included milk programs, house building, free medicine, and the dismantling of Frei’s mobile police units involved in recent repression.¹⁷ It was an ambitious to-do list. Despite the early June cold Santiago weather, thousands heard Allende deliver pledges, marching in four separate columns to Avenida Bulnes accompanied by musical bands and a giant mechanical dinosaur to represent Chile’s right wing with a model Uncle Sam holding its reins.¹⁸

Having proven he was campaign fit, Allende resumed an intensive schedule, touring the country with Beatriz accompanying him when she could. On 8 June, for example, they traveled north of Santiago, visiting poblaciónes and industrial sectors and greeting large crowds. Mirroring rallies in Santiago, different columns marched on town squares, with Beatriz and her father accompanying a youth column and provincial party leaders in La Serena. Beatriz then stood next to her father on stage as he announced the UP’s forty measures to eighteen thousand supporters.¹⁹ Beatriz was pleased to see evidence of Cuba’s influence around the country. Even in desolate areas, consisting of “3 or 4 houses of miners and peasants,” private spaces were adorned with the revolution’s images. “I have found with surprise that when entering these houses you find a portrait of Fidel or Che cut out from a newspaper and stuck on the walls,” she reported; she felt emotionally touched to see Cuba’s “sacrifice and teachings … lighting up places like these.”²⁰ She and her father also had fun campaigning. Visiting poblaciónes, local men flirted with her by calling him “father-in-law.” “I die laughing,” Beatriz wrote to Luis. She also confessed she was surprised by what she witnessed. “I think everything is going well. … Chile is changing.” Contrary to her internationalist ventures, she now also acknowledged she could have a bigger impact in Chile than abroad. And yet, for someone who had long since doubted the prospects for peaceful revolution, mobilization scared her. “I am screwed … after seeing the faith and hope so many people have,” she confessed. “I don’t know what all this means if [hope] comes to nothing. … Something bigger than the campaign has to happen because I have seen people’s cravings for governmental power and … a thousand images pass through my mind. … I don’t know if we are prepared for all the possibilities and alternatives that can come ahead.”²¹

Ultimately, she was pessimistic about winning and worried what would happen if Allende lost or was blocked from assuming power.²² Although a sizable sector of the PDC was sympathetic to or at least willing to accept the Left, the government’s propensity to use repression against opponents and the Right’s resurgence were threatening. From 1965, rumors existed of a military coup to counter the growing strength of left-wing parties, of strikes, and of Christian Democratic reformism.²³ A frustrated army mutiny in October 1969—the so-called Tacnazo—had then rung alarm bells regarding the restlessness of Chile’s traditionally constitutional military. And regardless of the Organa and the ELN, the Socialist Party clearly had no real policy toward the military.²⁴ Elsewhere, right-wing paramilitary violence mounted. In May, a rural governmental engineer had been murdered in Linares province and landowners were blamed, prompting the first combined national strike by rural workers’ unions.²⁵ Reports of contraband Belgian machine guns arriving from Argentina for extreme right-wing groups fueled fears.²⁶ The Left accused Frei’s government of systemic violence, pointing to San Miguel, Puerto Montt, and carabineros beating students “with impunity.”²⁷ As Allende warned, there seemed to be “a clear intention to create a climate of violence in anticipation of the Unidad Popular’s victory and as a way to create conditions to oppose it.”²⁸

In this context, Beatriz and others close to the president were worried about Allende’s security.²⁹ Campaign staff had previously haphazardly guaranteed his safety. In 1964, for example, two campaign staffers, armed with pistols, had taken turns accompanying the candidate and had employed a third to gather intelligence.³⁰ Yet, by early 1970, Allende’s team concluded such arrangements were unsustainable. In April 1970, the Socialist Party and the Organa—increasingly linked to the Chilean elenos—reached a similar conclusion. Because of his links to the president and the ELN, the PS’s Central Committee thus chose Eduardo Paredes to reinforce security.³¹

Out of sight, Beatriz worked closely with Eduardo, her ELN background and Cuban training making her indispensable. On a basic level, she had already persuaded her father they should take karate lessons for self-defense (she joked she would become “a dangerous woman”).³² More important, she and Félix Huerta, recently returned from hospital in Havana after being accidentally shot and paralyzed, began recruiting others to form an armed escort. Félix’s brother, Enrique, who had recently bought a large U.S.-made taxi, became Allende’s driver.³³ And Beatriz also begged Fernando Gómez, back in Chile after leaving the ELN, to help: “I want to ask you a huge personal favor,” she told him in late June. “I trust you completely and I fear for my father’s life, he walks [around] alone, those that accompany him are party comrades almost his own age, no one looks after him, nor does he accept protection, I am worried, tell me that you will stay and you will be with him, at his side.” With Enrique, Fernando therefore formed the beginning of Allende’s new security detail, soon to be known as the GAP—the president’s Grupo de Amigos Personales (group of personal friends).³⁴

However, Allende did not immediately welcome the prototype GAP. As Fernando recalled, his first day was a “disaster.” Allende was resistant to having armed guards, demanded he drive, and refused to eat with pistoleros in the house, insisting he was not in danger. When Fernando decided establishing an escort would not work and told Beatriz, she, Fernando, and Allende had a tense meeting. According to Gómez, she spoke softly but sternly, threatening her withdrawal from the campaign if Fernando left. And Allende relented.³⁵ Even so, this episode is revealing for what it tells us about the tensions between Beatriz’s militarized perspective of threats and his optimism regarding peaceful democratic change. It is unsurprising that her main contribution to his campaign drew on her ELN experience and was grounded in her belief confrontation lay on the horizon. For all his sympathy toward his daughter and the far Left, Allende was simultaneously uncomfortable. But the formation of the GAP in the context of mounting fears of right-wing violence marked a convergence of two revolutionary groups trained in different worlds: Cuba’s guerrilla training camps and Chile’s Congress.

In subsequent weeks, the GAP was fortified. By the election, its members had eight pistols and four safe houses. Three other elenos also joined, organizing logistics for campaign tours.³⁶ That elenos played such a prominent role is partly thanks to Beatriz, who facilitated collaboration. Elenos had previously focused abroad because they, in line with the Cubans, had not believed Chile was suited to immediate armed revolution. They had therefore insisted on defensive preparation for future confrontation, concentrating their energies on Bolivia. But military organization now went beyond the ELN. Indeed, precisely at this moment, members of the BUS and the Organa had embarked on establishing a guerrilla training camp near Chaihuín, in southern Chile, preparing preemptively for what they saw as inevitable conflict. It was a disaster, with one student killed when the military found the camp. It also created a scandal in the country, playing into right-wing threats of a violent revolutionary future should Allende be elected.³⁷ There is no evidence to suggest he or Beatriz was directly involved, although Beatriz knew some who took part and would serve as an interlocutor between them and her father at various points during the campaign. But the episode underpinned an uneasy relationship—and vulnerability—between the UP’s stated democratic ambitions, these military tendencies, whether they would be coopted into Chile’s socialist future, and how they could be explained to opponents.

For now, Allende relied on a small group of volunteers for his safety and his daughter to help bridge the divide between the UP and the far Left, including the MIR. Predicting he would win or lose by twenty thousand votes at a meeting Beatriz convened with Félix and other young socialists just before election day, he asked what forces the Left had to defend itself if needed. As Félix remembered, they had “people who had experience, training” but mostly “good intentions and speeches … very little.”³⁸ Beatriz was among those who feared the worst. On election day, she, Eduardo, and Patricia Espejo, her colleague from Campus Oriente, thus decided there should be loyal militants stationed at the Hospital Salvador, to treat the injured in the event of violence.³⁹ Hernán Coloma, who had been at Chaihuín, similarly assumed a secret position with other militants on the city’s outskirts, in preparation for a potential coup.⁴⁰ Preoccupied with the prospect of a violent backlash, the revolutionary Left—Beatriz included—thus missed much of the campaign’s celebratory atmosphere. But, in fearing the worst, they were not entirely wrong.

Victory and Fear

Allende’s narrow victory on 4 September 1970 was greeted with shock and euphoria. As Beatriz recalled, her father was so overwhelmed he couldn’t speak.⁴¹ Having composed himself, he called Alejandro Rojas, Communist leader of the Federación de Estudiantes de la Universidad de Chile (FECH), to ask if he could use the students’ building on Santiago’s principal avenue to address supporters. It seemed fitting given young peoples’ role in pushing for change.⁴² Hearing the news on the radio, Hernán and other members of the Organa couldn’t resist celebrating. Rather than stay on guard like “imbeciles,” he recalled, they joined a group of miners at the last minute, advancing down Providencia.⁴³

Beatriz and Patricia also headed downtown.⁴⁴ As Gilda Gnecco, Beatriz’s former supervisor, remembered, crowds carried marchers along, their feet hardly touching the ground.⁴⁵ “It is hard to define what we felt,” Beatriz would tell a Cuban journalist. “Thousands and thousands of images, different emotions, came to mind. It was a struggle of years, a dream that we saw coming and that we suddenly could not believe to be true. I remembered the man from the pampa, the man from the saltpeter, copper, and coalmines. Chilean women and children … Chilean youth, who in recent times had suffered a lot of repression. One had the feeling that all the doors were opening and, at the same time, this sense of responsibility came down on us. It was a feeling between euphoria and anguish: everything together.”⁴⁶

In fact, Allende’s narrow victory over Alessandri—by less than forty thousand votes—was far from secure. Alessandri refused to concede, and according to Chile’s constitution, Congress had the final say where no overall majority existed. Moreover, the congressional vote on 24 October gave the opposition six weeks to mobilize and block the president-elect. As Beatriz remembered, her father anticipated conspiratorial action, warning “comrades … to be alert and organized.”⁴⁷ Meeting with young Socialists at Guardia Vieja the day after the election, he warned they had to reinforce security, that there would possibly be “attacks” against him. With Beatriz by his side, Allende predicted that the UP would gain ground in municipal elections in April 1971 while the Right recovered, but he acknowledged that the longer-term future was harder to foresee. “Hold on Catalina, we are going to gallop,” he told these young Socialists, employing a colloquial phrase to denote a roller coaster ride on the horizon.⁴⁸ That Beatriz’s friend and close ELN collaborator Celsa Parrau accompanied Inti Peredo’s wife and children to Cuba from Chile for safety is indicative of the threat those closest to her predicted.⁴⁹

Beatriz also traveled to Havana in mid-September on her father’s behalf. Allende had asked his mistress, Miria Contreras de Ropert, known as Paya, a key member of his campaign team, to accompany Beatriz. And they got on remarkably well.⁵⁰ In Cuba Beatriz confided to a Chilean living there that she had never had any faith in elections but now understood her father had been “right” and was committed to being at his side.⁵¹ Barely two weeks after his election, Beatriz was pivotal in mediating a new Cuban role in Chile. Had she not been involved, Allende’s relationship with the island’s leaders would probably have ensured the Cuban-Chilean relationship was strengthened anyway. But given Beatriz’s role as her father’s personal envoy and her close contact with Piñeiro’s intelligence team through her work for the ELN and her relationship with Luis, ties were immediate and intimate. Over the course of four nights of meetings, Beatriz briefed Fidel on the situation in Chile and requested his help in reinforcing her father’s bodyguard.⁵²

For his part, Castro transmitted advice via Beatriz reflecting lessons learned from Cuba’s experience and a shift in Cuba’s foreign policy since 1968. After years of revolutionary losses in Latin America, the Cubans were opting for pragmatism and consolidation. In contrast to the Cuban revolutionary zeal Beatriz had admired in the 1960s, Castro thus advised Allende to be cautious: to prevent experts and technicians from leaving Chile, avoid acting “too revolutionary” so as not to provoke opponents, sell copper on the dollar market, and maintain good relations with the military.⁵³ As Juan Carretero, a senior member of Piñeiro’s team, remembered, Beatriz became a “bridge of great value” between her father and Cuba’s leaders.⁵⁴ Returning to Santiago, utilizing her communications training and a new Radio “Zenith” the Cubans provided, she also managed coded communications from Cuba to Chile. To protect Allende, the radio was installed in Paya’s home rather than Guardia Vieja, and Beatriz used her ELN code name, Marcela, for security.⁵⁵

Fidel Castro and Beatriz, Havana, no date. Archivo Fundación Salvador Allende.

On a personal note, Beatriz’s relationship with Luis also now took a leap forward. Assuming Luis, as the person responsible for dealing with the country since 1963, would go to Chile, Beatriz married him on 16 September. As Luis remembered, the decision was automatic and mutual: “We reached the conclusion it was the right time.” Even more so than her first marriage, it was a simple event, involving signing a marriage certificate.⁵⁶ Whether Beatriz knew Luis was simultaneously in a relationship he had continued during their long-distance affair is unclear. Her love letters suggest otherwise, but given her relaxed attitude toward her father’s affairs and friendship with Paya, it may be that she knew and accepted this situation, waiting for the opportunity for them to be together. Either way, given the opportunity to formalize their relationship, Luis did not hesitate in leaving his Cuban girlfriend.⁵⁷

As predicted, Luis also followed Beatriz to Chile, arriving in Santiago shortly after her on 26 September. During Beatriz’s stay in Havana, one of her key discussions with Castro had centered on Cuba’s ability to train and arm the GAP. Castro had subsequently sent Beatriz and Paya home with a Carl Gustaf portable antitank recoilless rifle each, which they managed to take into Chile undetected via Madrid.⁵⁸ He had also agreed to send three Cubans to Chile representing different branches of Cuba’s intelligence and security apparatus—Tropas Especiales (Special Forces), Interior Ministry, and Piñiero’s Departmento General de Liberación Nacional (General Department of National Liberation)—to assess the situation. And, as one of these three Cubans, Luis entered the country covertly as part of a delegation of veterinary scientists attending a Pan-American congress. He also managed to smuggle ten additional pistols into the country for the GAP. Beatriz was in Concepción with her father when he arrived, so Luis handed the pistols directly to Paya. He then moved into a safe house for the next month.⁵⁹

Beatriz and Luis were nevertheless soon able to see each other regularly. In addition to meeting in the Cubans’ safe house, Carmen Castillo lent them hers so they could spend time alone. With her Radio Zenith, Beatriz was meanwhile able to transmit messages from Havana to the Cubans and help coordinate their movements. The Cubans had to be very careful of being identified by their accents and generally went out only after dark. A group of trusted Chileans, including Paya and Eduardo’s wife, Eva, looked after them. They were cooked for and driven around the city, cautiously coordinating meetings with left-wing parties and with Allende’s nascent bodyguard.⁶⁰

In the months that followed, in fact, the Cubans became the GAP’s “professors.”⁶¹ Allende’s security had already been strengthened immediately after his victory. Six new recruits had joined from the ELN and Organa. At her instigation, Beatriz had also organized a meeting on 5 September between the president and Miguel Enríquez to ask for his collaboration. Ten miristas had subsequently joined its ranks. A former member of Chile’s armed forces, Mario Melo, expelled from military service for left-wing views and linked to the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR), was also brought in to help. Not only was this a way for miristas to use the skills honed in military training and urban guerrilla actions, but it was also a way for Allende to incorporate them and neutralize their potential opposition.⁶² One of those who joined, Max Marambio, had close links to Havana and became one of the guard’s leaders. The GAP also began to draw on foreign (East German and Mexican) and local left-wing parties’ intelligence.⁶³ Preparations were made for more Cuban arms transfers after November 1970. Members of the island’s intelligence services and Tropas Especiales—including members of Castro’s bodyguard—would arrive in future months to offer training. And the GAP’s recruits traveled to Cuba for additional instruction, usually lasting two weeks. Organizationally, from its rudimentary origins, the GAP eventually consisted of four branches: garrison (to protect the president’s residences and La Moneda); bodyguard; operations (intelligence); and services (logistics, arms, medical supplies).⁶⁴

All the while, Beatriz presided over the political dynamics of GAP as well as managing relations between her father and the Cubans.⁶⁵ And she and her collaborators were astute in predicting some sort of backlash against Allende’s victory. True, there is no evidence to suggest plans to assassinate the president-elect existed within the armed forces. But plotting began apace across Chilean society, and Allende faced sporadic attacks (some armed) in subsequent years.⁶⁶ In the United States, meanwhile, the Nixon administration initiated a series of covert actions to block Allende’s confirmation as president. These operated along two “tracks,” which increasingly focused on an “in-house” coup: military intervention to force new elections. When General René Schneider, Chile’s constitutionally minded commander in chief of the army, refused to countenance any move against Allende, Nixon’s ultrasecret Track II gave the CIA permission to remove him, sending arms and at least $50,000 to help. Yet, in pursuing these desperate strategies, U.S. officials responded to, and worked with, Chileans. There was no shortage of anti-Allende collaborators. Among them, Frei and Augustín Edwards, a right-wing businessman and El Mercurio’s owner, appealed directly to U.S. officials, while Track II dealt with retired military officials and right-wing paramilitaries.⁶⁷

Ultimately, Schneider was assassinated in a botched kidnapping operation on 22 October 1970 that was supposed to have triggered a military coup. Although the group responsible was not in direct contact with the CIA by this point, U.S. officials had provided a green light and encouragement. But in doing so, they paradoxically confirmed Allende’s inauguration. With the shock of Schneider’s assassination reverberating around the country and an agreement between the UP and the PDC on constitutional guarantees secured, Congress confirmed Allende’s victory on 24 October by 153 to 42 votes.

Meanwhile, Schneider’s assassination had a profound effect on left-wing strategic planning. On one level, it removed Allende’s doubts about an armed escort. The next day, he instructed the GAP to be doubled to defend his mandate and Chile’s revolutionary process.⁶⁸ Wanting as much information as possible about the Schneider case, Allende asked Frei to allow Eduardo Paredes to shadow the director general of investigations, a position the latter assumed after Allende’s inauguration.⁶⁹ Preoccupied, Fidel also dispatched Juan Carretero to Chile clandestinely with instructions to help ensure Allende assumed office.⁷⁰ On another level, Schneider’s assassination reinforced the revolutionary Left’s ideas about the inevitability of confrontation. As the MIR reasoned, conflict between imperialism, its local allies, and popular forces had “merely been delayed” by Allende’s election but would henceforth “be more legitimate and … take on a more massive dimension.”⁷¹ Ricardo Núñez, a member of the PS Central Committee, already inclined toward seeing armed struggle as unavoidable, similarly reflected that Schneider’s murder provided corroboration of this fact. The bourgeoisie would not give up their privileges, concluded radical PS members, who therefore had to be ready to defend Chile’s revolutionary process. Yet there was little agreement on how to do this. The Communist Party, inclined to working through Chile’s political institutions and consolidating the UP’s electoral victory, was wary of antagonizing enemies through military preparation.⁷² And, in many respects, Allende and many of the people he would choose as advisers and ministers—particularly when it came to foreign policy—also held this position.⁷³

On the eve of Allende’s inauguration, his closest confidants and the UP coalition were thus divided. While these differences would matter less in the honeymoon period following his assumption of power, they became serious under pressure. For now, Allende, with Beatriz’s help vis-à-vis the far Left, and his own long-time contacts in Chile’s diplomatic and political world, managed to straddle divisions between factions, incorporating different groups into his administration and using their distinctive strengths to bolster chances of forging a revolutionary path. But long-term unification of forces and advancement along a coherent path to socialism would not be easy.

La Moneda

Following Allende’s inauguration, Beatriz left her job to work full time at La Moneda, her commitment to revolutionary change and loyalty to her father surpassing seven years of medical training and a career in public health.⁷⁴ Having helped coordinate her father’s armed escort and serving as liaison with Cuba, she was now formally named as one of his private secretaries. Although Osvaldo Puccio stayed on as Allende’s long-term secretary, with his own staff down the hall, a “private secretariat” was established next to the president’s office.⁷⁵ This was a gendered and personalized office, occupied by women tied to Beatriz or her father. And characteristically for many contemporary archetypal female roles, it was offstage. But it was also highly influential. Beatriz helped assemble an administration, determined access to the president, and delegated jobs to trusted contacts. “She knew how to command,” a friend explained.⁷⁶

Paya officially ran the private secretariat. Although not previously politically active beyond her role during Allende’s campaign, a close friend remembered “she radicalized at high speed,” because of both her relationship with Allende and her sons’ militancy for the MIR. She also had secretarial and management experience and was adept at handling accounts.⁷⁷ Paya therefore controlled the president’s diary and finances, being responsible for buying the GAP’s twenty-five cars with presidential funds, signing off on salaries, and paying expenses. And, as such, she was known as “the GAP’s mother.”⁷⁸ Alongside Beatriz, one of the GAP’s members recalled, Paya was also the person Allende trusted most.⁷⁹ Beatriz meanwhile dealt with political relations between her father and Chilean left-wing parties (including the MIR), Cuba, and, as we shall see below, Latin American revolutionary movements. As Isabel Jaramillo, a young journalist with links to Cuba and secretarial training, who joined the secretariat in early 1971, explained, Beatriz dealt with “sensitive” cases. It was not a traditional secretarial role; she often arrived late or was away from her desk, but the access she had to her father and the bridge she offered to the revolutionary Left was vitally important as her father sought to walk a fine line between different left-wing sectors.⁸⁰ In addition to Isabel, Beatriz asked her Campus Oriente colleague, Patricia Espejo, to join the secretariat. Both were committed revolutionaries, although they relinquished formal militancy for political parties to serve Allende directly.⁸¹ They were also romantically attached to the far Left, with Patricia married to mirista Eugenio Leyton and Isabel soon to be in a relationship with William Whitelaw, a leader in Uruguay’s Tupamaros, whom she met when he arrived at La Moneda for a meeting with Beatriz in early 1971. Patricia helped manage the president’s diary and his contacts, while Isabel worked for Beatriz on matters relating to Cuba, Latin American revolutionary movements, and analysis of the international and domestic press. However, these roles could change with exigencies of the moment.⁸²

Beatriz and Salvador Allende, Santiago, no date. Archivo Fundación Salvador Allende.

All accounts suggest La Moneda was a particularly convivial place to work for Allende’s team. As Frida Modak, Allende’s press secretary who worked in an office adjacent to Beatriz, remembered, there was a special atmosphere, underpinned by friendships established over years.⁸³ Although the president ate in a formal dining room, such younger staff as Beatriz, Frida, members of the GAP, and invited friends congregated in a small kitchen down the hall.⁸⁴ Allende treated La Moneda staff well. His sense of humor and practical jokes allowed them to deal with the stress of government.⁸⁵ As Beatriz would describe, the president was “so generous, so cordial, so apparently calm. … He had this capacity to always see the positive side of things.”⁸⁶ Every evening around eight o’clock, the president would also invite staff into his office for a whisky to discuss the day’s events. And although Beatriz preferred a glass of water, she was always there. As his daughter, she was able to speak frankly, to question and challenge him.⁸⁷ Allende’s routine was nevertheless demanding. He was a “work machine,” Beatriz explained, “he leaves us all behind. … Sometimes they ask him why he works so hard, and he responds that the responsibility [of government] is of such magnitude, he cannot rest a single minute.”⁸⁸ Beatriz shared this sense of duty: “her commitment was total,” friends remembered.⁸⁹

The process of moving into La Moneda and setting up a government was nevertheless tricky. The outgoing Frei administration stripped everything from government offices, desks, telephones, and pens included. Allende’s private secretaries therefore equipped them from scratch.⁹⁰ More problematic, Beatriz was among those closest to Allende who feared the CIA had installed bugs in La Moneda. The first two days of Allende’s presidency were thus spent scanning the building for surveillance devices. And, in this respect, the Cubans were important.⁹¹ As one of the GAP’s members remembered, they reviewed the whole building. Cuban systems and technology were not particularly advanced, but microphones were removed on several occasions during Allende’s administration. Beatriz and Luis were key to these arrangements. Yet, similar to his initial response to armed protection, Allende was not convinced such measures were needed. Scanning for microphones therefore took place after he left La Moneda at night.⁹²

Beyond liaising with the Cubans and helping to set up the GAP and Allende’s secretariat, Beatriz was also instrumental in helping her father assemble other collaborators. Working with Félix Huerta again, she helped coordinate two advisory groups. The first, the Centro de Estudios Nacionales de Opinión Pública (Center for the National Studies of Public Opinion, CENOP), became what Allende called his “intellectual GAP.” It was initially proposed by Claudio Jimeno, a sociologist with a doctorate from the United Kingdom who had worked with Eduardo at the Hospital San Borja’s Centre for Preventative Medicine. Its goal was to use “modern methods of sociological intelligence”—including opinion polls, surveys, and media analysis—to assist the president. Comprising representatives from the Communist and Socialist Parties’ political commissions and Félix, whose bedroom was often where they met, CENOP produced short reports read by Allende every morning. The group’s members were disdainful of the president’s older collaborators, viewing them as “outdated.” CENOP’s reports were also read by Carlos Prats, Chile’s new constitutionalist commander in chief of the army; the Cubans; the Soviets; Allende’s political adviser, Joan Garcés; and his speechwriter, Augusto Olivares.⁹³

The second group Beatriz helped assemble was more informal and changeable, comprising young Socialist militants and invited representatives of other left-wing parties, such as the MIR. Aside from Beatriz, this group consisted of Félix and Eduardo, JS leaders like Carlos Lorca, and those, as we shall see below, in charge of the PS’s evolving military apparatus, such as Rolando Calderón, Arnoldo Camú, and Félix’s former medical school classmate Ricardo Pincheira. This group had been meeting since before the election, but Beatriz now assembled it regularly. As Félix remembered, Allende was “thoughtful … he listened a lot and he liked to listen to young people” and different perspectives.⁹⁴ For young militants with no parliamentary experience or formal political roles, to have such links to the president was striking and cannot be understood without grasping Beatriz’s role and personal ties. Beyond formal party structures, it gave them direct access to the president, whom its members hoped to influence, and it gave Allende insight into Chile’s complex left-wing scene. Although the president had other advisers—for example, old friends like the diplomat Ramon Huidobro and the Inter-American Development Bank functionary Felipe Herrera, the lawyer Hernán Santa Cruz, or Víctor Pey—and despite his interaction with party and congressional leaders, this group was also a way of incorporating a younger generation of revolutionary leaders into his administration. As Beatriz would later reflect, Allende “always maintained a dialogue with youth organizations, which he gave special importance to. … He saw in young people freshness, generosity, healthy motivations.”⁹⁵ Meeting in private, intimate spaces, in an informal atmosphere of trust, they also felt they could convey opinions that might not otherwise have been voiced.

Beatriz was always present at such meetings. Although not a named CENOP analyst, she helped devise strategies for gauging public opinion, such as monitoring cinema audiences’ responses to newsreels.⁹⁶ She did not take notes but, in Félix words, she had an “impressive memory” and could relay three-hour meetings verbatim. If Allende wanted to convene an encounter, it was also Beatriz he asked to organize it. She visited Félix almost daily, arriving late in the evening and throwing stones at his window. She chain-smoked Cuban cigarettes with him, drank a coffee, and debated politics. She liked bouncing ideas off him because they tended to disagree. Despite having been in the ELN, he was generally closer to the PCCh’s positions, whereas she was more aligned with the MIR’s; Beatriz had a good impression of Miguel Enríquez and he did not, Félix remembered, believing Miguel invented and exaggerated certain things, like the MIR’s forces. However, he shared Beatriz’s profound loyalty to Allende.⁹⁷

Elsewhere, Beatriz used her position to secure jobs for friends and ensure her father had trustworthy collaborators. Arturo Jirón, her former teacher, was invited to join Allende’s medical team and, in 1972, would, somewhat unconventionally for a young surgeon, be appointed minister of health thanks to her recommendation.⁹⁸ She also suggested her father appoint her former boss, the pediatric and public health specialist Manuel Ipinza, to the position of vice president of Chile’s National Board of Kindergartens.⁹⁹ Elsewhere, Beatriz did not completely forget her medical training and vocation for public health initiatives in poor districts. As minister, Jirón recalled she would help him deal with the politics of health care. She would also join him to have lunch with pobladores outside Santiago “to get to know their problems.” “That was her way of working,” he remembered, “always close to where problems were.”¹⁰⁰ Her medical contacts also allowed her to resolve health crises. When a right-wing smear campaign suggested young volunteers working in poblaciónes were contracting sexually transmitted diseases from one another, for example, Beatriz rang up a former course mate to ask him to investigate (he found the allegations to be false).¹⁰¹

Revolutionary Solidarity

When it came to international relations, Allende had a diplomatic team that proceeded somewhat cautiously. Chile’s new foreign minister, Clodomiro Almeyda, was one of those who supported this position and recalled Allende resisted the far Left’s “primitive battle instinct” toward the United States. Chile remained within the Organization of American States and reached out to Argentina’s military government to neutralize its threat. Overall, in fact, the UP advocated “healthy realism.”¹⁰² This was contrary to Beatriz’s inclination, which was far more belligerent. Indeed, against Castro’s advice and a general acceptance of the need to operate cautiously in other areas, she is known to have criticized her father for not explicitly and publicly denouncing the United States more. She also favored a punitive approach to private U.S. copper companies—denying them any compensation when nationalized.¹⁰³

Although he resisted Beatriz’s influence when it came to the United States and formal diplomacy, Allende nevertheless relied on her as a parallel and unofficial foreign minister when it came to Cuba and revolutionary movements.¹⁰⁴ As Beatriz had written to Luis months before Allende’s election, along with establishing relations with Vietnam and North Korea, reestablishing diplomatic relations with Havana was one of the “first measures” he wanted to adopt as president. And, as a conduit of information for her father, she relayed his wishes that the Cubans prepare for this.¹⁰⁵ The topic had also come up when Beatriz visited Cuba in mid-September. Then, via Beatriz, Castro had reportedly advised Allende to wait—“six months, a year, or two”—so as not to antagonize enemies.¹⁰⁶ But, for the president—as for his daughter, who had been an activist for Cuba since her teenage years—relations with Cuba were a long-standing unconditional commitment. Allende sealed the deal privately at his inaugural reception, taking advantage of the Cuban delegation’s presence in Santiago. A week later, on 12 November, he announced the resumption of relations, ending Cuba’s diplomatic isolation in Latin America, with the exception of Mexico, since 1964.¹⁰⁷

For Beatriz, the reestablishment of relations was both a private and a political cause for celebration. Luis was immediately named chargé d’affaires, and although, as someone who rose up through the police force and intelligence, he had no diplomatic training, he embraced the position. It is possible Allende, requested by Beatriz, had asked that his new son-in-law and longtime Cuban contact take up this post. But it was also a logical decision, given Luis’s years of service as Piñeiro’s Chile specialist.¹⁰⁸ In the months that followed, eight or nine intelligence officers, including Juan Carretero, would handle relations with Chile’s political parties, and Luis would join this team, focusing primarily on relations with the president. Mario García Incháusteguí, a friend of Castro’s and former Cuban diplomat at the UN, would take over as ambassador, and Irina Trapote, Beatriz’s friend from the Federación de Mujeres Cubanas, assumed work for the embassy’s new cultural attaché, Lisandro Otero.¹⁰⁹ In the space of a year, Beatriz’s life—as with others on the far left—therefore dramatically changed. In December 1970, Allende would declare an amnesty for thirty miristas, as well as thirteen other far Left militants.¹¹⁰ And having been depressed by the ELN’s fortunes, her longing for Luis, and her distance from Cuba at the end of 1969, Beatriz now found herself in a position of power, working directly with the Cubans she had so often dreamed of seeing. Through her relationship with Luis, Cuba’s revolutionary regime also had a direct channel to the presidency.

The resumption of Chilean-Cuban diplomatic relations recalibrated the inter-American Cold War power balance. Alongside nationalist military regimes in Peru and Bolivia that had come to power over the previous two years, anti-imperialist forces appeared to be gaining ground. To be sure, these were relative gains. Right-wing dictatorships still ruled Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina. But in Washington, Nixon and Kissinger were worried enough to refocus attention on the region, reaching out to military allies to bolster counterinsurgency operations and isolate Chile.¹¹¹ For those targeted by such forces, Chile offered a pressure valve and escape—as democratic countries throughout the region had before—but more so now that a left-wing government was in charge. Already, hundreds of Brazilians, among them intellectuals and guerrilla groups, had arrived in Chile during the Frei administration fleeing repressive practices. By 1973, 1,200 Brazilian exiles were living in Chile, including 70 Brazilians released in a hostage exchange. Other groups, including far Left revolutionaries, began seeking refuge in Chile. Within the first few weeks of the Allende presidency, Chile offered asylum to 17 Bolivians, 9 Uruguayans, and 12 Mexicans.¹¹²

The day of his inauguration, thanks to Beatriz’s prior intervention and involvement, Allende had also welcomed eight Teoponte survivors into Chile, including the ELN’s leader, Chato Peredo, in a negotiated settlement with Bolivia’s nationalist president, Juan José Torres.¹¹³ Beatriz and other Chilean elenos had subsequently met Chato in early 1971 and decoupled themselves from the ELN’s command structure. They did not feel Teoponte’s failings had been sufficiently addressed and now saw Chile, not Bolivia, as the place where imperialism could be best challenged.¹¹⁴ This focus on Chile was “understandable,” Chato recalled; after a meeting with Allende organized by Beatriz, he also agreed that ELN operations in Chile would be strictly clandestine so as not to compromise the new Chilean president’s democratic mandate. Beatriz’s involvement with the group also diminished significantly; she did not want to undermine her father, and Chato supposed anything relayed to her would get back to the president.¹¹⁵ Even so, she did not give up the association entirely. She was friends with the German-Bolivian member of the ELN, Monika Ertl (or “Imilla”), for example, who spent time in Chile in early 1971 before leaving for Hamburg. There, on 1 April, Monika walked into Bolivian colonel Roberto Quintanilla Pereira’s office and killed him. Conceived as “popular justice,” given Quintanilla’s order to amputate Che Guevara’s hands and his role in Inti’s murder, the ELN hailed the operation as a victory.¹¹⁶

When it came to Latin American revolutionary exiles arriving in Chile, Beatriz meanwhile used her father’s position—and her own within his team—to offer solidarity. As a member of the Uruguayan revolutionary movement, the Movimiento de Liberación Nacional–Tupamaro (MLN-T), who arrived legally and openly in Santiago in December 1970 remembered, Beatriz and a group of her associates found them places to stay with sympathetic PS militants, as well as arranging food, clothes, medicines, and documentation.¹¹⁷ It was the same work she and other Chilean elenos had undertaken for Bolivia, and it was also a way of returning the Tupamaros’s internationalist solidarity for the ELN.¹¹⁸ The relationship between La Moneda and the Tupamaros in Chile was “wonderful,” Patricia remembered.¹¹⁹ Beatriz coordinated this support, providing the “political link from La Moneda,” working predominantly with other women like Patricia and Isabel in the Secretariat; her ELN comrade, Celsa Parrau; and from December 1970 onward, her childhood friend, Carmen Castillo, whom she hired to work with them on matters relating to Latin American revolutionary groups.¹²⁰ Money for this work came from “everywhere,” Celsa remembered: from the Cubans, from La Moneda, from individuals involved. Luckily, the Tupamaros did not ask for much; they “lived humbly.”¹²¹

In return for the solidarity they received, the Tupamaros in Chile—numbering around twenty by the end of 1970, but set to rise steeply over the next two years—offered to support the UP. Their collaboration with Allende’s government was complicated by the president’s request, as with the ELN, to avoid open involvement in domestic politics—and association with the MIR in particular—so as not to provoke criticism of foreign intervention. In early 1971, the leadership of the MLN-T thus temporarily suspended nine militants in Chile who wanted to support the new government (it seemed “absurd” not to cooperate with Chile’s revolutionary process, one of them explained).¹²² Months later, these same Tupamaros were asked to help the president’s security team by sharing their expertise. Responding to Enrique Huerta’s request, for example, three went to work in a garage set up by the GAP in the Independencia district of Santiago which prepared cars, equipping them with bigger tires, radio systems, and hidden trunks, allowing them to carry arms. Although Enrique was their contact, Beatriz was aware of, if not overseeing, arrangements and would attend meetings regularly.¹²³ As a result of her relationship with William Whitelaw, one of these nine MLN-T militants, Isabel also helped coordinate security relations from the Private Secretariat.¹²⁴

The close relationships between the Tupamaros and Allende also meant they worked with Chile’s president when the British government asked him to help negotiate the release of Britain’s ambassador in Montevideo, Geoffrey Jackson. Having kidnapped Jackson in January 1971, the Tupamaros wanted a ransom. Over more than a month, in highly secret meetings managed by the president’s private secretaries, Allende reportedly and privately offered the Tupamaros $20,000 to release him. When this was refused, he sent an emissary to Montevideo to ask them for direct talks with the British and assigned Carmen—hired by Beatriz—to facilitate secret meetings between British diplomats and Tupamaro leaders.¹²⁵ Unsurprisingly, given what we know about existing links, with Beatriz as the Uruguayan revolutionaries’ primary interlocutor in La Moneda, the British were suspicious of Allende’s position. He “wants the best of both worlds,” the British ambassador reported, noting “suspicious aspects” of his dealings with the presidency. “The contact I saw in the dark room at the President’s house did not talk with a Uruguayan accent. It is possible that the whole thing was a put-up job; that the contacts are extremely close and that Allende really plays it as the Tupamaros wish,” he surmised. “He may think that if we and the Tupamaros can reach agreement so much the better for him; but that if we cannot, both sides will, with luck, consider that he has done the best for them.”¹²⁶

Ultimately, Allende played his hand well, and although Jackson was released via another channel in Montevideo, the Foreign Office was grateful.¹²⁷ As the ambassador surmised, the president’s approach to Latin American revolutionary movements helped compensate for an otherwise relatively conservative foreign policy agenda when it came to far Left critics. And Beatriz was grateful of the opportunity to put her internationalist solidarity into action. But it would be a mistake to regard Allende’s actions as merely cynical calculations given his prior support for guerrilla insurgencies abroad, not to mention his co-option of the MIR and elenos into his inner circle. As Beatriz would explain, “He showed practical solidarity toward a great number of Latin America liberation movements, … even with compañeros who chose certain roads in Chile … [that he] did not agree with. He always had a gesture of solidarity. … He observed critically, but at the same time taking some lessons from what was, for example, the Tupamaro movement’s struggle.”¹²⁸

The refuge that Allende’s Chile offered to revolutionaries was important in establishing the country as a fulcrum for revolution in the region, even if it espoused an alternative model for socialist transformation. As if to confirm its status at the forefront of revolutionary change, as well as a seemingly new chapter in Latin America’s revolutionary struggle, Régis Debray, author of Revolution in the Revolution? and a prominent intellectual collaborator with Cuba and Che Guevara, arrived in Chile in early 1971. In Santiago, Beatriz asked Carmen to look after him.¹²⁹ Beatriz, Luis, Juan Carretero and Max Marambio also accompanied him on a day trip to Valparaíso, where they stood smiling for an official commemorative tourist portrait. And yet, as with other aspects of Chile’s democratic revolutionary process, the warm welcome someone who had so prominently espoused violent revolutionary change received in Chile was awkward. Sitting down with Allende, Debray asked how exactly the president defined “revolution.” To him, he challenged, it was about “replacing power of one class with another. Revolution is destruction of the bourgeois state’s apparatus and its replacement by another, and none of that has happened here.” Was it possible to have a “revolution without arms,” Debray demanded. Allende’s response was yes. He underlined the specificity of Chile’s circumstances, its long history of left-wing organization and party structures, and opportunities the constitution offered to “open the way” to change. He also stressed the number of transformations his government had already instituted. Ultimately, he believed the UP’s legalism would protect his government (even when it came to U.S. intervention, Allende stated his electoral triumph had tied Washington’s hands), and he advocated a large-scale consciousness-raising program to boost support for revolutionary changes. But he admitted the path ahead would be difficult, that the government had already faced serious provocations—including Schneider’s assassination—and reactionary conspiracies. The future depended on whether his opponents would opt for direct confrontation, and he accepted that the Left had to be vigilant and prepared, if necessary, to oppose reactionary violence with revolutionary violence (he did not specify how). Pushed on differences between left-wing sectors, Allende also acknowledged only tactics separated them: “The end goal is the same,” he insisted.¹³⁰ To a large extent, this was true. His solidarity with Latin American revolutionary movements, with Cuba, and with Chilean far Left groups showed he did not reject them but sought to integrate and ally with them in pursuit of a common objective. The GAP and the president’s advisory groups also show he was already exploring defensive military options for protecting his presidency. Indeed, after six months, his administration—uniting to forge a common path ahead, drawing on different strengths from Chile’s kaleidoscopic Left, and resisting opposition attacks—still looked relatively promising.

Family Life

If Allende’s first six months in government was a honeymoon period, it was also one for Beatriz and Luis. With his position in Chile public, but with neither yet earning a formal salary, Luis had moved into Guardia Vieja. But they soon found a small house to rent on Calle Martín Alonso Pinzón. It was somewhere they could finally build a life, and Allende, who had always given them his blessing, bought them a washing machine and television.¹³¹ By coincidence, their new house was also ten blocks from the new presidential residence, Tomás Moro, so when Allende moved in February 1971, they were able to visit easily.¹³² Beatriz and Luis meanwhile bought two dogs—a sheep dog and a collie—from the same family that bred the dogs Beatriz had grown up with.¹³³ Testimony to their sympathy for armed revolution and to the revolutionary Left’s romanticized obsession with weapons, she and Luis named the dogs after rifles used in guerrilla combat: “FAL” and “AK.” The couple’s social life also revolved around politics. Colleagues came to their house to eat, or they were invited to other people’s houses. With work absorbing their time, reading books and going to the cinema or plays was rare, although Beatriz’s love of folkloric music continued. Generally, though, they arrived home late from work and, exhausted, went straight to bed.¹³⁴ In this respect, they were not alone. Unidad Popular supporters expended enormous energy for their government. As Carmen remembered, days “prolonged for a long time after sunset.”¹³⁵ Left-wing health care professionals volunteered to serve on medical trains touring Chile.¹³⁶ Volunteers spent holidays working on infrastructure projects.¹³⁷ Women ran political campaigns to explain government programs, offering “popular education” in mothers’ centers.¹³⁸ Militants did not feel they could waste time socializing for the sake of socializing; social lives were political.¹³⁹

Meanwhile, the Allendes’ family circumstances were as complicated as ever. Although Beatriz was multitasking for her father, Isabel and Carmen Paz were conspicuously absent from Allende’s inner circle. Isabel worked at the National Library, and as had been the case in Frei’s administration, Hortensia—as First Lady—was in charge of running the Coordinadora de Centros de Madres (Coordinator of Mothers’ Centres). But with an office on the other side of La Moneda, she was rarely seen in the president’s wing.¹⁴⁰ Indeed, neither Beatriz’s sisters nor her mother were similarly enmeshed in the fabric of the presidency. And, for her part, Beatriz was increasingly distant from them. Her relationship with her mother, in particular, was dreadful. Beatriz despaired of Hortensia’s tastes and concerns—her precious ivory collection, for example.¹⁴¹ Her mother had also initially been disapproving of Beatriz’s relationship with Luis when he moved to Santiago. As Luis remembered, things were tense, and though nothing was ever said openly, he understood Beatriz’s mother worried about the effect her relationship with a Cuban could have on Allende’s standing.¹⁴² That Beatriz worked closely with Paya cannot have helped. But Beatriz was also openly contemptuous of her mother. When, on occasion, Allende would invite his presidential staffers for dinner at Tomás Moro after work, Hortensia sometimes joined them. When Hortensia gave her political opinions, these nevertheless caused offense. Her views, generally more in line with those of Christian Democrats, were “a burden” for Allende, Patricia remembered, but Beatriz considered them “worse” and would leave the room.¹⁴³

Beatriz and Luis, Havana, 1972. Biblioteca Virtual Salvador Allende Gossens.

While her sisters kept a distance, Beatriz’s relationship with Paya blossomed.¹⁴⁴ Twenty years younger than her father and therefore closer in age to Beatriz, the two embraced their joint role in looking after the president, in handling the day-to-day running of La Moneda, and in sympathy for the MIR. Moreover, Allende’s happiness with Paya was important to Beatriz, standing in stark contrast to the increasingly bitter and frequent arguments he had with his wife.¹⁴⁵

To escape Hortensia, who tended to go to Cerro Castillo, the presidential residence in Viña del Mar, accompanied by her two other daughters and their children, Allende—accompanied by Beatriz and Luis—spent virtually every weekend at Paya’s country house.¹⁴⁶ Just outside Santiago, at the foothills of the Andes, “El Cañaveral,” as it was known, was a tranquil, spacious house with a pool and enough room to host intimate friends. Leaving late on Friday after work, Allende, Paya, Beatriz, and Luis—and invited guests—would not return to the city until Sunday evening. Salvador and Paya had separate bedrooms, and they were careful not to show any physical affection in front of Beatriz but were obviously intimate. Paya always made sure she had Beatriz’s favorite foods (sea urchins, for example), and she enjoyed cooking for her guests, of which there were many: Allende’s private secretaries and their partners, his press secretary, Augusto Olivares, his young Socialist advisers, Cuban embassy personnel, doctors, and members of the GAP. And those who spent weekends at Cañaveral recalled it as idyllic. It was a safe space where the president could relax among trusted confidants, where he could swim, play chess, enjoy food and wine, and watch cowboy films, his favorite entertainment.¹⁴⁷

Interestingly, Chile’s other left-wing political parties were rarely invited to El Cañaveral. Luis Corvalán, secretary-general of the Communist Party, worried about being excluded: “In El Cañaveral, many things are decided and the Communists do not have anyone there,” he complained privately.¹⁴⁸ The Socialist Party’s secretary-general from January 1971, Carlos Altamirano, visited often but was not invited when his relationship with Allende soured later on. Friends in government who had known the Allendes for decades—particularly those who knew Hortensia—either were not invited or chose to stay away, declining complicity in Salvador’s relationship with Paya.¹⁴⁹ The situation was thus a case where personal and intimate relations affected national politics and foreign relations. Like CENOP meetings in Félix’s bedroom, Cañaveral also tells us something about Allende’s chosen inner circle. While he had close advisers at various different levels of government and the UP functioned as a collective of political parties, his administration is impossible to understand purely by examining the ministers he appointed or institutional party histories. Groups on the margins of formal government were just as, if not more, significant. Certainly, it was at Cañaveral that Allende had the opportunity to talk through the previous week and the challenges that lay ahead with his closest confidants.

By mid-1971, however, the honeymoon period he had enjoyed was coming to an end. The UP’s parties had done better than hoped in the country’s April municipal elections, securing 49.7 percent of the vote, despite covert U.S. funding for opponents. As Beatriz later conceded, there had been “great nervousness” about the government’s “first exam.”¹⁵⁰ In July, Congress also voted unanimously for the nationalization of copper, the flagship policy of Allende’s political career and the signature achievement of his administration. When her father announced compensation would be subtracted from “excess profits” companies had reaped—later determined more than the compensation itself—Beatriz congratulated her father, gifting him a painting by Cuban artist René Portocarrero that he had admired in her house.¹⁵¹ The UP was also able to count on an enthusiastic following among grassroots supporters who felt their quality of life had improved thanks to rising wages, increased public spending, and state-led programs in education and public health. The UP built ninety thousand houses in 1971, almost double the number built in 1969 and four times 1970’s figure.¹⁵² As Beatriz reflected in mid-1971, Chileans supported the government because “they know there is no repression, that there is a profound agrarian reform, that natural resources are being transferred into state hands. They even know about the most simple and quotidian facts, so vital for Chilean families such as … [receiving] half a liter of milk daily.”¹⁵³

Yet, by mid-1971, challenges loomed, exacerbated by intra-Left disagreements over the pace and priority of socialist transformation. At a basic level, divisions obstructed government projects. Assigning a representative from every coalition party to run such projects collectively meant “not one head, but many,” a state employee remembered.¹⁵⁴ While Allende called workers to launch a “battle for production” in May 1971, championed by the Communist Party, the more radical wing of the UP argued that this campaign diverted attention from seizing control of the means of production. As with Frei’s administration, rising expectations also put pressure on the government. In the second half of 1971, the government would confront the first of many strikes in state-owned enterprises by workers demanding more money.¹⁵⁵ Elsewhere, land seizures increased. In Santiago, pobladores constructed new communities, the most prominent being Nuevo La Habana, established just after Allende’s inauguration in November 1970, with the MIR’s active involvement.¹⁵⁶ The UP’s parties were generally sympathetic, having supported similar moves for over a decade, but as Allende explained, his government now wanted to avoid “anarchic” solutions to housing problems.¹⁵⁷ Freely admitting she had helped twelve tomas in six years of Frei’s administration, Laura Allende now told Eva, the high-society woman’s magazine, that rural land seizures were “understandable” but “not justifiable because they affect production.” She called on Chileans to “have confidence the Government can resolve their problems.”¹⁵⁸

Although the UP accelerated land reform, taking over almost as many farms in eight months as the PDC had done in six years, occupations nevertheless continued, and the demand for faster revolutionary change grew.¹⁵⁹ While the MIR and left-wing sectors of the PS supported such moves, the government was increasingly in the uncomfortable position of having to assert control and manage revolutionary impulses. In May 1971, for example, the government used police for the first time to deal with an illegal occupation. At the end of May, in his first message to Congress, Allende then outlined his ideas on the construction of socialism without destroying the bourgeois state, angering those on the far left who insisted that the two were incompatible.¹⁶⁰ Beatriz did not hide her displeasure in private, berating her father when she disagreed with him but ultimately remaining loyal. And although he listened, he did not necessarily follow her advice.¹⁶¹ Indeed, divisions on the left, between the government and grassroots supporters as well as between parties, caused growing problems. While the president asked his daughter to assemble advisory groups of different viewpoints, resolving these differences was more difficult.

At a strategic level, they also affected how the Left dealt with mounting opposition. The Communist Party’s leaders, like Allende, favored tactical alliances, shying away from any use or talk of armed struggle, fearing provocation and believing state institutions could bring about change. Socialists, predicting they would need to resist counterrevolutionary violence at some stage—and that it was necessary to prepare militarily—came together at the party’s congress in La Serena in January 1971. In this respect, the fusion of the ELN, the Organa, and Juventud Socialista militants, along with their combined election to more than half of the Central Committee’s seats, was important. Carlos Altamirano—sympathetic to this line of thinking—was elected secretary-general. Recognizing that the Unidad Popular was in government but did not yet have power to embark on a transition toward socialism or the ability to defend the government, the PS created a new defensive organization superseding the Organa, known as the “Frente Interno,” consisting of a military apparatus and intelligence structure. The GAP would become part of this organization. And Rolando Calderón would be decisive in establishing it. This went beyond Beatriz’s responsibility as her father’s private secretary and initial coordinator of the GAP, but it was significant that at least two of those in charge of the Internal Front’s organizations were longtime friends: Ariel Ulloa, a former member of the Sierra Maestra BUS nucleus from Concepción, would be in charge of the so-called Organization within the Internal Front, and her close ELN collaborator Arnoldo Camú would head its military apparatus. Beatriz also knew those heading the Frente Interno, Exequiel Ponce and Ricardo Pincheira, who was now in charge of its intelligence unit, from the ELN (she had encouraged Luis to get to know the latter when he visited Cuba in May 1970).¹⁶² From early 1971 onward, this new structure began preparing for a potential coup.¹⁶³ And although Allende had remained silent about the Internal Front at La Serena, Beatriz—fully supportive and connected with the party’s new structures—was key to helping him convene regularly with its leaders, whom he, at least in part, increasingly depended on for intelligence and physical protection.¹⁶⁴

Even so, the question of defense was—and would remain—difficult. Chile’s Cold War struggles in the early 1970s differed from the majority of those in Latin America. It pitted a left-wing government already in power against those trying to turn back a state-led revolutionary project rather than left-wing insurgents against a U.S.-backed regime. Unlike the cases of Cuba and Nicaragua after 1959 and 1979, respectively, the UP did not have its own military force capable of withstanding attacks from opponents or sufficient trust in the state’s preexisting intelligence and security apparatus. The combination of Cuban arms and training, the PS’s Internal Front, the MIR’s experience in urban guerrilla operations and grassroots mobilization, and the Communist Party’s own highly secret, defensive military apparatus did not provide the basis of a coherent defensive strategy. To the contrary, even at their peak, these uncoordinated defensive measures at a party or presidential level were no match for the combined weight of Chile’s professional armed forces backed by a united civilian opposition and the U.S. government. As Debray succinctly summarized in early 1971, Chile faced an “unstable equilibrium,” but “power came from the barrel of a gun, and the popular government does not have its own armed apparatus.”¹⁶⁵

Meanwhile, the UP’s commitment to peaceful democratic change meant opponents remained resilient and powerful. If anything, the shock of Allende’s victory and the UP’s success in municipal elections led to a right-wing resurgence and reassertion of power by Chile’s old establishment. Now, however, a sector of the traditional Right, aided by powerful sponsors abroad, readjusted its tactics and increasingly embraced violence, sabotage, and destabilization. The PDC’s position also moved decisively against the UP in early June 1971 after Edmundo Pérez Zujovic, Frei’s former minister of the interior, was assassinated by the Vanguardia Organizada del Pueblo (Organized Vanguard of the People, VOP), a small extremist left-wing organization formed in 1968–69 by individuals who had been expelled as “provocateurs” from the Juventudes Comunistas de Chile (Communist Youth, JJCC) and the MIR.¹⁶⁶ Targeted for his responsibility for the Puerto Montt massacre, Zujovic’s murder was the kind of disaster Allende had been desperate to avoid. In early 1971, in fact, following armed raids and robberies, he and his closest associates—Beatriz included—had asked Tupamaros based in Chile to persuade VOP’s members to lay down arms, but to no avail. Allende’s team saw the VOP as an “extremely serious problem,” one of those close to negotiators remembered, but the VOP’s leaders were “fanatical and intransigent” (many suspected but never proved CIA collusion).¹⁶⁷ That Eduardo Paredes led police operations against the VOP’s leaders, resulting in three of them and three policemen being killed, did not lessen charges.¹⁶⁸

The episode exacerbated fears the UP was merely a cover for imminent violent revolution and blocked incipient negotiation between the UP and left-leaning sectors of the PDC. It also tipped the correlation of forces in Chile toward the government’s opponents. Immediately after Zujovic’s murder, the UP narrowly lost to Christian Democrats in ideologically charged elections for the position of rector of the University of Chile and a congressional seat in Valparaíso. In both cases, the right-wing PN backed the PDC candidate, uniting opposition to Allende in a pattern that would characterize Chile’s political balance henceforth.¹⁶⁹ While two-thirds of Chile’s electorate had voted for far-reaching change in 1970 by backing Tomic or Allende, the scales now tilted away from the UP as the PDC moved right. More ominously, Socialist Party sources reported that representatives of the PDC, PN, and armed forces began meeting up with each other after Zujovic’s death.¹⁷⁰ As Beatriz told a journalist in mid-1971, “There is permanent political opposition that deforms facts and is fundamentally expressed through newspapers. … [Opponents] also try to obstruct all government measures. They carry out sabotage against production. In industry [they initiate] inflation. … Landowners … kill cattle or send it to Argentina. They hinder all government plans. … Sometimes, [critics] reproach us with issues that in six months cannot be changed, that are part of the inheritance we received from the capitalist system. … A huge lack of housing and a whole series of problems that cannot be solved in the time that the Unidad Popular has been in power.”¹⁷¹

When she gave this interview, Beatriz was in Cuba ostensibly delivering a copy of Salvador Allende’s first message to Congress. But, with Luis accompanying her, they were able to take a few days off to visit Varadero. Beatriz had also arranged for Patricia, who traveled with them, to stay on to receive defensive military training. It was “hard,” Patricia recalled; she wore army fatigues and learned how to use weapons. In retrospect, knowing how ineffective such training would be, she remembered it was also “absurd … like a dream.” And knowing Allende would disapprove, Patricia simply said she was going on holiday.¹⁷² As well as being revealing for what Beatriz (and Patricia) kept from Allende, this training is indicative of the Cubans’ willingness to help Beatriz in security matters without consulting him. And yet, for the most part, the Cubans’ role in Chile during the UP was requested, welcomed and sanctioned by the president, who used Beatriz as his interlocutor.¹⁷³

Now, in Cuba, as her father’s confidant, Beatriz also had the opportunity to talk with Fidel Castro about the UP’s performance. By mid-1971, the Cuban leader regarded Beatriz as a trusted and personal acquaintance. Although this was partly because she was Allende’s daughter, those who witnessed the relationship firsthand testified that Castro came to admire Beatriz as a revolutionary in her own right. When she was in Varadero with Luis, Castro stopped by to visit her and took her fishing. On one of at least four trips to Cuba during her father’s presidency, he also taught her to fire a bazooka. And he would listen carefully to her assessment of Chile’s situation. The prognosis she delivered by mid-1971 came as little surprise. As Luis remembered, Beatriz mostly focused on the UP’s growing challenges.¹⁷⁴