The cover photograph shows a pivotal moment in Chile’s history: the day General Augusto Pinochet became army commander. He and Salvador Allende, Latin America’s first democratically elected Marxist president, seem to be on friendly terms. But then, there are also multiple news photographs of Pinochet chatting cordially with Fidel Castro (!) during the Cuban leader’s 27-day visit to Chile in 1971. And Allende trusts the future dictator, who as commander of the Santiago garrison was responsible for enforcing the states of emergency Allende imposed on at least three occasions during his presidency.
It is barely three weeks before the 1973 coup, and Pinochet’s predecessor, General Carlos Prats has just resigned from his post after a mob of anti-government protesters gathered outside his residence. He had valiantly tried to keep the army out of politics, but the previous year Allende had formed a “cabinet of social peace” with Prats and two other officers ordered to head three ministries. There were eight cabinet reshuffles during Allende’s three years in office.
In Prelude to a Dictatorship, I wanted to revisit events during the Allende years. I am grateful to those Chileans who witnessed this period and who shared their recollections with me.
Here’s one of the lesser-known stories from one of the most tragic days in 20th century Latin American history, courtesy of Chile’s investigative journalism site, CIPER:
The Chilean air force’s Hawker Hunter planes are preparing to firebomb the presidential palace, as Salvador Allende stubbornly refuses to leave the premises. Most of the country’s radio and television stations had ceased their broadcasts and were restricted to transmitting military bulletins. But one station, located a few blocks from the palace, was still broadcasting: Radio Magallanes.
Allende, sensing that the end was near, telephoned the station and asked to go on air immediately. There was barely time to set up the recording and the radio station employees must have been terrified that at any moment soldiers would arrive and shut them down. A few bars of the Chilean national anthem were played, and then Allende gave his final address to the nation. His voice was deep and remarkably calm.
He said his words were not spoken in bitterness, but disappointment. He criticized the new commanders of the navy and carabineros for their treachery–but curiously did not mention General Augusto Pinochet, who had become Chile’s army commander just three weeks earlier. He may have thought Pinochet was loyal and perhaps detained in some military installation. Allende said workers should defend themselves but not sacrifice themselves. Sooner than they think, he said, “great avenues will open again where free men will march toward a better society.”
“Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers! These are my last words. I am convinced my sacrifice shall not be in vain. I am convinced that, at least, it shall serve as a moral judgment on felony, cowardice and treason that lay waste to our land.” Radio Magallanes went off the air about 10:20 that morning but the employees made at least ten copies of the recording and managed to smuggle them to safe storage sites.
Among this blogger’s beloved friends in Santiago is a couple I’ve known since the 1980s. Without revealing too many personal details, I will say that he is very respected in his profession, speaks three languages, attends international conferences where he presents his work and is sought after and consulted by foreign companies seeking his expertise. He and his wife live in a comfortable house, though certainly not a mansion, in a relatively affluent part of the city.
And yet, whenever he answers the door and it is someone he does not know, the visitor invariably asks to see the homeowner. My friend is of indigenous descent and strangers cannot believe that someone of his coloring could possibly own a house in the area. So he often toys with the visitors, saying oh no, Don ___ is not here, I am the gardener.
His wife teaches at a private girls’ school in the area, and she described to me how the pupils are brought there not by their parents, but by their families’ housekeepers and nannies. So she nudged the school into offering some short courses for these women, usually classes in practical subjects like sewing and first aid, which they could attend after dropping off their charges. A number of families did not react well to this initiative, though many “allowed” their employees to take part.
In a small seaside village, a nervous young postman hovers before one of the most famous men in Chile, poet Pablo Neruda. He is using the poet’s work to court a young woman, and it is a story of how poetry can enrich everyday existence. Antonio Skarmeta’s 1985 novel, Burning Patience, was translated into 30 languages and became a stage play and a film, Il Postino, which was nominated for an Academy Award.
Skarmeta, who passed away on October 15, was a writer of film scripts, short stories and novels, including The Days of the Rainbow, set during the 1988 plebiscite which defeated dictator Augusto Pinochet’s bid to prolong his rule another eight years.
Natascha is a fearless travel writer, who in 1989 made a solo expedition along the Amazon from its headwaters in the Peruvian Andes to Brazil’s Atlantic coast. She cut her hair very short, dressed as a man and used a donkey to carry her camping gear and provisions. sometimes travelling through areas where Peru’s Shining Path had been active. Our paths first crossed at a Society of Authors reception in London, where she showed me her account of that journey, An Amazon and a Donkey, and peppered me with questions about Chile. A few years later she moved with her family to the country, settling in Limache, a town 100 kilometers northwest of Santiago. This book is a remarkable combination of memoir, travel, history and politics providing a broad overview of the country.
From the introduction:
“Few things are more thrilling than climbing the coastal mountain in my valley to see both the Andes and the Pacific Ocean at the same time, or to set eyes on the mighty River Baker churning through southern Patagonia. European conquerors did not value the views nature has to offer, but it was and remains the country’s greatest treasure.“
On a train from Paris to Barcelona two young women from radically different background meet. Constanza is a Chilean exile, who as a university student in Santiago witnessed security agents enter a classroom and drag away two of her classmates, who were never seen again. Jacinta is a Catalan from a wealthy family. They become friends, and through Jacinta’s contacts Constanza finds work in an art gallery and meets her future husband. She has a daughter whom she names Jacinta. But Chile, still controlled by the Pinochet dictatorship, tugs at her heart and Constanza makes an ill-fated decision to spend some time there, leaving both Jacintas behind. She never returns.
“Las Dos Jacintas” is one of eleven stories in Fracturados , https://www.editorialforja.cl/producto/fracturados-11-cuentos-de-odette-magnet/ a collection of short fiction exploring the experience and lingering effects of political repression. Magnet is an expert in this area, having covered human rights for the weekly magazine Hoy—one of the very few Chilean publications willing to do so during the dictatorship. And as a student at the Universidad Catolica, she sometimes crossed paths with operatives from Pinochet’s security agency, the DINA.
“I was very well aware—like many of my friends or classmates—that we had quite a few DINA agents among us (pretending to be students),” she said. “A toxic atmosphere; suspicion and fear were in the air.”
Magnet’s older sister and her husband fled to Argentina after the coup, but were taken away by security agents at their apartment in Buenos Aires and never seen again. While working as a reporter at Hoy she sometimes received threatening phone calls, including one silent caller with the sound of typewriters keys clicking in the background. She also learned that security agents had been posted outside her daughter’s school.
The Pinochet regime ended in 1990, but scars still remain and literature dealing with this period is still emerging. “I know I am not alone: with the end of the dictatorship, many of us began to hunt for words, our own, which had been gagged for so long.”
Full disclosure here: Magnet is a good friend of this blogger and she provided invaluable help when I was researching my second book.
This month marks the 50th anniversary of the bloody military coup which overthrew the government of Salvador Allende, and here’s one of the lesser-known incidents from that period.
On September 10, 1973, an army official drove the wife of Chile’s future dictator and her two youngest children east from Santiago up into the Andes mountains. Their destination was the Chilean army’s mountaineering school, where they would be overnight guests. The facility’s director was Colonel Gustavo Cantuarias, who considered to be a “constitutionalist,” i.e., an officer wanting to keep the armed forces out of politics and not supporting a coup.
Why would General Augusto Pinochet send his family there on the eve of the coup? It is a matter of record that he only signed on to the coup the day before, after being confronted by the commanders of the navy and air force. He was not convinced the coup would be a success, and he did not inform several army generals and colonels of the plan. The army mountaineering school’s proximity to the Argentine border meant that he and his family could flee the country with relative ease.
On the morning of September 11, 1973, Pinochet took his time before arriving at his command post. According to his memoir, El Dia Decisivo, he stopped on the way at the home of his eldest daughter to see his grandchildren. The coup happened, with Hawker Hunter jets attacking the presidential palace and President Salvador Allende committing suicide rather than surrendering.
Two days later Pinochet sent a helicopter to the army mountaineering school to collect his family, but their host, Colonel Cantuarias, was arrested and taken to the Military Academy in Santiago. He died there on October 3—the official account was that he had shot himself. But the Truth Commission, formed in 1990 to investigate human rights abuses during the Pinochet dictatorship, studied his case and “believes that this was the suicide of a person who was being subjected to so much pressure by government agents that such a decision offered an avenue of escape.”
Cantuarias was not the only Chilean army official to die in dubious conditions after the coup. Two senior army generals who, unlike the cynical and opportunistic Pinochet, were very much involved in the plotting to overthrow Allende would also die in highly suspicious circumstances. Their cases will be the subject of a future blog post.
Chile’s young president, Gabriel Boric, is on the cover of Time Magazine, with a flattering profile of this “new kind of leftist leader.”
Now let’s travel back in time to September of 1970, with the Cold War raging. Here’s Time’s cover story on Salvador Allende and the “Marxist threat in the Americas.”
What a difference 52 years makes.
Full disclosure here: this blogger did her master’s thesis on Time and Newsweek coverage of the Allende government. Time was very critical; Newsweek less so. A few years later I became a Time stringer in Venezuela and after that, a Newsweek stringer in Chile.
The Condor Trials: Transnational Repression and Human Rights in South America, by Francesca Lessa. Yale University Press.
During my last visit to Santiago I had lunch with a woman who worked at the Chilean Foreign ministry’s trade department. It was a warm spring day and we ate at an outdoor café near some of the city’s historic buildings. The setting was pleasant, but the conversation was grim as she told me something of her family’s history.
In the aftermath of Chile’s brutal 1973 military coup, they fled to Buenos Aires. But the Argentine capital was no safe haven. In early 1975 security forces arrested her father and interrogated him about his two sons. A year and a half later one son was arrested, along with his Argentine wife and sister-in-law, never to be seen again. The family moved to a different house while continuing to search for them, only to endure more terror: my lunch companion and another sister-in-law were arrested and taken to a secret detention site where they were held for eight hours and brutally interrogated by both Chilean and Argentine officers, who warned them to leave the country immediately or face the same fate as her missing brother.
Her family’s story is one of many discussed in Francesca Lessa’s new book on the long, long struggle for justice in South America’s human rights trials. The title refers to Operation Condor, a brutal campaign of cross-border arrests, murders and forced disappearances by military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay and Bolivia spearheaded by the Pinochet regime’s security forces. Some of the best-known cases were the car bomb assassinations of former Chilean army commander Carlos Prats and his wife in Buenos Aires in 1975 and of former Chilean defense minister Orlando Letelier and his colleague Ronni Moffitt in Washington in 1976. And yet, these cross-border campaigns of terror and repression did not begin with Operation Condor. In the 1960s Brazil’s military government began monitoring and harassing Brazilians living in neighboring countries, actions which escalated as more South American governments came under military rule.
Lessa is a lecturer in Latin American studies at Oxford University, who studied human rights investigations and trials while based in Montevideo, conducting field research from 2014-2017 and analyzing over 3,000 documents from six different countries. In addition, she attended seventy-four hearings in Argentina’s Condor trials. Remnants of the old repressive apparatus endured—in February 2017 she and a group of other human rights researchers, activists, lawyers, public prosecutors and government officials received death threats from a Uruguayan group calling itself the “Comando General Pedro Barneix.” In an e mail Lessa told me she then left Montevideo for Argentina, but the Uruguayans in the group remained in the country, where the government “never provided any protection and very limited support.” The Comando Barneix briefly resurfaced during Uruguay’s elections in late 2019, when it sent out threatening messages to Uruguayan voters in an attempt to sway the vote in favor of the right-wing candidate (who ended up winning). Authorities eventually made one arrest, and investigations are continuing.
It’s been over three decades since the Pinochet dictatorship ended in Chile and by now, you’d think most of its surviving killers and torturers would be behind bars. Quite a few are, and Chile even has a special jail to hold such prisoners.
But every now and then someone manages to elude justice. Consider the case of former army colonel Walter Klug, charged with the forced disappearance and killing of a university student and of more than 20 employees at two hydroelectric plants in southern Chile shortly after the 1973 military coup. In 2015 he was sentenced to a 10-year prison term for the first crime, but Klug, who holds dual Chilean and German citizenship, managed to leave the country on his German passport. He took up residency in Germany but two years ago travelled to Parma, Italy with his wife, an engineer who was attending a conference. Italian police arrested Klug at his hotel and later extradited him to Chile.
Here’s where it gets murky. Klug’s legal team successfully appealed his conviction in the case of the missing university student, though why this didn’t happen back in 2015 is unclear. The case of the missing hydroelectric plant workers was still moving through the courts, and. presumably Klug was not supposed to leave Chile while this was going on. Nevertheless, Klug fled the country again, using his German passport and earlier this week a Chilean human rights group reported that he was in Argentina, awaiting a flight to Germany—which has no extradition treaty with Chile.
Stay tuned.
Update: On Saturday, June 12, Argentine police arrested Klug outside his hotel in Buenos Aires and at last report he was due to appear before a judge to begin the process of extraditing him back to Chile.
