'ALLENDE AND THE MYTH MAKERS,' BY DAVID HOLDEN. ENCOUNTER, JANUARY 1974. 'CHILE'S COUP AND AFTER,' BY ROBERT MOSS. ENCOUNTER, MARCH 1974.

• Document Type: CREST
• Collection: General CIA Records
• Document Number (FOIA) /ESDN (CREST): CIA-RDP79-01194A000100710001-7
• Release Decision: RIPPUB
• Original Classification: C
• Document Page Count: 22
• Document Creation Date: November 11, 2016
• Document Release Date: August 5, 1998
• Sequence Number: 1
• Publication Date: May 7, 1974
• Content Type: REPORT

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CONFESSIONS OF A MASTER-SPY (story)
3
Neilson Graham
W. H. AUDEN
7
Golo Mann
ALLENDE & THE MYTH MAKERS
12
David Holden
COLUMN 25
R
CAMBRIDGE IN THE 1950$
28
Harry G. Johnson
FILM
THE AMERICAN AS MOVIE CRITIC
40
Isabel Qiigly
POETRY
-
Vernon Scannell 6, Louis Phillips 11, Fleur Adcock 48, Douglas Dunn 60, Peter Reading 68
NOTES Et TOPICS
HITLER AS BEST-SELLER 50 Karl-Heinz Janssen
RESTORING RABINDRANATH TAGORE 52 Mary M. Lago
ITALY'S `c CULTURAL CRISIS" 57 Francois Bondy
SPECIAL BOOK SECTION: SCIENCE
THE ALEXANDRIAN TRAP 61 Stephen Toulmin
A LITTLE GLOBAL DIFFICULTY 72 John Naughton
THE SOLUBLE IN PAWN TO THE POSSIBLE 77 Roger Williams
REVOLUTION IN THE HEAVENS 82 John Taylor
AUTHORS Er CRITICS
LYTTON STRACHEY & THE FACTS 87 Donald H. Simpson
IN THE MARGIN
ON ALL SIDES OF THE BARRICADES 20 Melvin J. Lasky
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 As rr MAY SEEM to say so when the
bloodshed of the - Chilean coup d'itat is
so so keenly remembered and the generals who
made it are riding unpleasantly high, the fact
remains. that Salvador Allende died a lucky
man. In life he was a failure. Both his policies
and his country were shattered long before the
end. But in death he achieved success beyond his
dreams. Instantly canonised as the Western
world's newest left-wing martyr, he became
overnight the most potent political cult-figure
since his old friend, Cho Guevara.
To some extent, of course, the congregation
had already been prepared for this posthumous
elevation. In the throe years of Allende s admini-
stration the "Chilean experiment" and the
"Qu7ean road to socialism" had become fav-
ourite topics of discussion among left-wing
groups in Europe. where Chile's supposed
resemblance to Italy or France had encouraged
the belief that Europe might, for once, follow in
Latin America's footsteps instead of the other
way about Many aspiring revolutionaries from
Europe and the United States had actually
joined their Latin American :counterparts in
Chile in much the same spirit as -their dropped-
out contemporaries had hitch-hiked to Nepal
hoping for a glimpse of Paradise in action. By
the time of the September coup the military junta
claimed- them were as many as 15,000 foreigners
of all kinds in Chile, actively supporting-some-
times with violent--the "socialist revolution."
DAVID Houz rm has travelled in Chile on several
recent ass meats as Chief Foreign Corret-
pondent for she "Sunday Tunes." Among hit
regular contributions to ENCOUNTER are "South
African Notebook" (August 1970). "Day Trio
to Zanzibar" (September 1972) and "Ethiopia-
Forty Years On" (February 1973). -
These specially interested groups or indivi-
duals obviously provided a ready network for
international propaganda in the aftermath of
Atlende's death. But the shocked and, at times,
almost hysterical reaction to the coup went far
beyond such committed parties to embrace
many of the West's ordinary liberals and social
democrats. For them, as much as for the self-
styled revolutionaries, it seemed, a bright light
of world-wide hope had been extinguished in
Santiago; and from Washington to Rome, via
Paris, Bonn and London, anguished cries of
"Foul!" rent the air.
Chilean armed -forces, could. offer no excuse
(77ee Guardian, 12/9/73); as a "Disaster in
ism and democracy everywhere" (New States-
man, 14/9173); and as "The Death of a Hope"
. comparable, even, to the Russian invasion of
regime in 1968 (The Observer, 16/9/73).
Within 24 hours of the first, bare news of the
coup the General-Secretary of the British Labour
Party, Mr Ron Hayward, was writing officially
to one of Allen de's former colleagues to say that
anger felt by the British Labour movement "as
the aspirations of the working people of Chile-
shared by so many others around the world-
are destroyed at the hands of a few arrogant and
ignorant officers acting at the behest of those
who believe their right to rule is unchallengeable"
(The Times, 1319/73). Mr Len Murray, General-
Secretary of the Trades Union Council,: expressed
vigour. And Mrs Judith Hart, speaking as a
as to suggest that her mind had come close to
. being overthrown with Allendes government.
They ranged from the -declaration that "the
democratic will of the people of Chile" had been
defeated by capitalist "collusion" (The Guardian,
17/9/73) to "for Socialists of this generation
Chile is our Spain" and "fhis.is the most vicious
fascism we- have seen in generations" (The
Guardian, 1919173). -
When the Labour Party Conference met- at
actions had hardened into established orthodoxy.
given a standing ovation when he became the
first non-delegate to address a Party Conference
since two Spanish Republicans were allowed to
utterly condemning the military coup and the
precipitate action of the British Government in
recall of the British Ambassador from Santiago
all aid, loans, and credits; and calling on the
tion of democracy in Chile and to offer financial
(Aflende's) movement (The Times, 5110173). My
Tax OUTCRY nN Bx,rmw was typical--and
A@pLavel; .F o* Re e d d0Q/*8 : CIA
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the reasons for Ibis fierce reaction would repay
study. Probably they induded a happy chauae of
liming. Several of the most fashionable matters
of Western political protest had passed into
history orbecn shadowed, by disillusionment in
the year or two before Allende's downfall, from
Viet Nam and Greece to Black Power and the
Student Movement. .All=de's dramatic end
supplied a new cause just when It was wanted.
Familiar doubia standards were certainly in-
volved. Nobody at the Labour Party Conference,
for example, thought it necessary to ask wby
such a royal welcome should bo offered to "this
representative of a government which -bad in-
cluded one of the very few -Communist parties
outside Eastern Europe to approve the Rnssiaf
invasion of Czechoslovalda. _A Pavlovian res..
ponce to the very idea of "revolution" was also
clearly in evidence--and made an the more eager,
it seemed, by the fact that this particular revolu-
tion had betn
taking pIac a s# such a safe distance
m such sublimely foreign parts. 'Miele was,
perhaps, a characteristic love of worldly failure,
too-for it was difficult to read some of the more
extravagant expressions of grief at Allende's
death without sensing a touch of gratification at
the idea that Good had ortcx more subed to
Evil and so delivered another, martyr into
Heaven before .he could be corrupted by the
practical demands of life on Earth. But most of
all, perhaps, the response seemed to stem from
ignorance and wishful thinking-always the two
most powerful sources of political romanticism-
which left the facts of life in Allende's Chile
either unknown or ignored and the field wide
open, therefore, to the creation of instant myth.
Hence the composite picture, now accepted
throughout a wide spectrum of Western liberal
and left-wing opinion, of Allende as a genuine
social democrat of impeccable constitutional
propriety who met his end at the hands of a
fascist conspiracy on behalf of a minority "ruling
class" aided and abetted by the United States
of America.
To replace this romantic vision with something
approaching reality may already be impossible,
for myths undoubtedly possess a life of their own
immune to rational challenge- To attempt to do
so also may entail some risk of abuse, for it
semis to be -a common assumption nowadays
that anyone who seeks a rational explanation of
a military coup d'elat (unless .it happens to
represent a left-wing interest) is necessarily a
fascist beast.
I sHouu 'MAKE rr PLAnn, therefore, that I am
concerned here with Ailende's Chile and not with
what has taken its place. I hold no brief for
military juntas, nor for the summary executions,
mass imprisonments, censorship or whatever that
the Chilean junta may have inspired or tolerated
during its early months of power. Indeed, because
I happen to know and like Chile as a country and
count a number of Chileans among my friends I
feel some personal sadness at the country's
prrscnt plight. But I feel no surprise nor, I am
afraid, much moral shock. Military men will be
military men, the world over; and in any case
Chile was-left in such a mess by Allende that
some vindictiveness, alas, was only to be expected
when be fell. -
Nor am I concerned with Chilean might hava-
bins. I accept that the country needed genuine
social reform and I believe that it probably could
have beta achieved without violence by a
democratic government that was ready to work
Pragmatically. within the constitution and with a
proper respect for what the economic and
political fabric of Chile would stand.
But that is not the point any more. What I am
concerned about is how the country came to its
present pass. And without wishing to speak ill of
the dead, it seems to me necessary to say outright
for the sake of the living that the Chilean coup
was largely Allende's own fault and that the myths
with which it has been surrounded on the Left are
not merely a falsification of Chilean history bttt
a potential danger to the future of liberal and
social democratic politics in the Wester world
as well. Indeed, what is most disturbing to me
about the fashionable Western reactions to events
in Chile is their revelation of the degree to which
revolutionary romanticism has combined with
left-wing cynicism in recent-years to corrupt our
own,politics. It is certainly "no accident" that,
for example, the British Labour Party which so
uncritically adopts Allende's cause is also the
party which has permitted - its self-avowed
.Marxists and utopian socialists to gain factional
.positions of unprecedented power.- - -
I will leave others to pursue that theme,
however. All I want to do is to try to set some of.
the Chilean record straight--or at any rate,
straighter by looking in some detail at three of
the main myths that now surround the end .of'
Allende and his famous experiment. ; - - .
1. The American
Intervention Myth
T xis POUND its most virulent expression in
the equation of Allende's downfall with that
of Dubcek. Yet in the absence of any American
armed assault to compare with the Soviet invasion
of Czechoslovakia-jet alone the fact that
whereas Dubcek's Parliament supported him
against the Russians, a majority of Allende's
Congress invited him to resign--there were only
stereotype suppositions to sustain it. In .general, the American intervention myth
seemed to derive from that. characteristic Latin
American and left-wing scapegoat complex which
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 CPYRGHT
insists that the Yanquis are responsible for every-
thing (except, of course, anything good). Gar-
nished with historical fact (Guatemala, the Bay of
Pigs, etc.) this is frequently transmuted in Latin
American affairs into a plausible anti-American
smear; and the state of Washington politics in
1973 was, of course, guaranteed to give such a
smear extra credence this time. The New States
'man offered a fine example. "The likelihood is
that the trail will lead back to the Pentagon", it
assured its readers, "if a proper investigation can
ever be mounted. But in default of this it does
seem possible to say that Nixonisn and its allies
were already too heavily implicated in :he
subversion of Allende for them to be exonerated
now" (14/9/73). The charge is 'almost ectoplas-
mically vague yet simultaneously all-embracing.
But what does it actually rest on?
First, presumably, the celebrated memorandum
of ITT which suggested ways of preventing
Allende from assuming the Presidency in 1970
and of toppling his regime it he did so. There is,
of course, no doubt of this memorandum's
authenticity, nor of its appalling folly; and with
such organisations admittedly. Pushing their
:,consp"1ratorixi notions at the heart of American
politics it .is not surprising that suspicions of
yanqui skulduggery were aroused. But there is a
major snag for anyone who sees the memorandum
as evidence of actual dirty work: simply, that all
inquiries so far indicate that its recommendations
were never adopted. They were studied by the
CIA, where one department produced a con-
tingency plan based upon them. But neither the
memorandum nor the plan seems to have received
assent at any higher level; and even the kind of
public exposure to which the ^aiorkings of the
White House, the CIA and most;other things is
Washington have been treated caring the Water-
gate crisis (including the allegations of Nixon's
personal involvement with ITT), I am hard-
pressed to believe that if such assent had been
giver' it could have been kept gtue.tuntil now.' .
credit is laid at Washington's door as a major
weapon in a cold war against Allende from the
start At first glance this has more substance to it.
The U.S. certainly suspended further commercial
credits of its own to Chile after Allende had
nationalised the American-owned copper mines
on terms amounting to confiscation. As the major
power in the World Bank and the IMF the U.S.
also argued there against further aid for Chile;
and to the extent that it was successful it must have
added to Allende's financial difficulties. But it
was not able to prevent other Western countries
(e.g. Holland and Sweden) from continuing to
offer credit; it never persuaded Britain to close
down its small aid programme; it did not exclude
the re-scheduling of most of Chile's foreign debt
repayments in 1972, and it had not prevented the
discussion (incomplete at the time of the coup)
of a similar re-scheduling for 1973. In short, the
U.S. influence may have limited Western aid and
credit but it was far from being able to condemn
Allende's Chile to economic purdah. In any case,
Chile was not one of the under-developed world's
hard cases, totally dependent on external aid and
credits for its survival. The wealth of its copper
mines alone ensured that in normal times it was-
not more than marginally "aid-worthy", and
with sensible economic management'it ought to
have been able to withstand a good deal of
external pressure. Unfortunately, nobody with
even a nodding acquaintance with economics
could have classified the management of then
Allende government as anything but disastrous.
To a great extent it placed itself beyond the pale
for any but the most trusting-or'dedicated ---- f
creditors. But even if that had not been so, and if
the blame for Chile's economic difficulties could
have been laid fairly and squarely at Washington's
door, Allende would surely have had small cause
for complaint. It was, after all, his administration
which announced its -immediate deterniination to
"expropriate imperialist capital.'. . realise a policy -
of self-financing.-.. and review, denounce and
repudiate, as the case may be, treaties or agree-
ments limiting our sovereignty, specifically the
reciprocal assistance treaties, the mutual aid
pacts, and others, between Chile and the United
States" (The People's Unity-Basic Programme
of Government, 1970). - -
It was also his administration which promised
to "repudiate the agreements between us and the
International Monetary Fund" (The People's
Government Rrst 40 Steps, 1970). These bold
intentions were never folly realised, it is true;
but they were expressed as official policy before
the United States or any other "imperialist"
power had actually done anything to embarrass
Allende's government. In other words, it was
Allende who decided to pick the quarrel. It seems
naive, to say the least, to complain that his
chosen opponents took defensive measures. What
else were they expected to do?
Secondly, in support of the glean inter-
vention theory, it is pointed outs that the U.S.
maintained its contacts with the Chilean armed
forces and continued to supply ;them with arms
when other ? American aid to Chile was sus-
pended, Therefore, so the implic tion goes, the
Pentagon was deliberately keeping open the
option of inspiring a military coup against an
unwelcome government. But this is obviously. -a
two-edged ardent. For one thing, an army
that is still getting its toys to'play with is usually
rather more than less likely to endure the follies
of its ruling politicians gladly. And for another,
what would have been said if the Americans had
actually suspended arms shipments to forces
whose commanders were serving in Allende's
cabinet? The outcry about "Yanqul imperialism"
and "Pentagon politics" may easily be imagined.
'Th rdly, the strangulation of foreign. aid and
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THOSE WHO DO COMPLAIN of American
action, nevertheless, might be better em-
ployed in asking why Allende got so little support
from most of the governments which professed to
be his friends. Except for Cuba, which offered en-
thusiastic (but not always practical) advice to
Allende, as well as supplying arms and training
for his militant Left, the world's established Marx-
ist governments were consistently cool to the
"Chilean experiment." The farthest the Soviet
Union would go to show its approval ?was,to
open a 12-year credit in roubles for Chilean
imports of Russian industrial goods and to agree
to take a limited amount of Chilean copper for
a year or two in repayment. But the hard currency
loans that Chile really needed to plug the gaps
that quickly opened between Allende's economic
promises and performance were never forth-
coming from any Marxist source. Nor was that
surprising. In the nature of things, Marxist
countries rarely have hard currency to spare and
they were unlikely to devote what little they might
have to bailing out a rfgime which seemed intent,
upon over-reaching itself in every direction. .
Conceivably, Allende would have done better
for himself and his country if he had simply
abandoned the "free" world market altogether
and taken Chile at once into the controlled trade
bloc of the Communist world in the hope of
getting total Soviet support. But that would have
meant imposing a complletely _centralised economy
and strict political control inside Chile-in short,
abandoning the romantic pretence of ."con-
stitutional revolution" for the more customary
revolution by decree. To his credit, perhaps,
-Allende was unwilling (or unable) to do that;
but even if he ham h_ might not have worked.
To support.C astro's -Cuba is believed to have
cost Moscow the equivalent of about $1 million
a day for many years. To support a similar rbgime
in Chile would probably have cost even more.
There was never the slightest sign that Mr
rev, or anyone else in the Kremlin, was
ready to accept such a burden. .
To sum up, then, it seems to me that the idea
of an.American conspiracy to overthrow Allende
is both unproven and unnecessary to explain his
downfall. I am not saying, of course, that
Washington was not relieved to see him go;
although I think some American officials would
have preferred to see him stumble on for sometime
longer in the hope that growing disillusionment
would infect even his stoutest supporters and
accordingly diminish the chances of his being
made a martyr when nemesis finally overtook
him. But in general the American attitude seems
to have been a predictably cautious one: _
Thou shalt not kill, but need'st not strive
O cioi y to keep aliive....
A realistic Chilean government embarked on its'
"road to socialism" would surely have bargained i,
for that much, and'(on a truly Marxist analysis
.such as Allende professed) it should have expected
much more-that America would move in for the
laD as soon as possible. Yet while adopting a
deliberately provocative stance, Allende took no
steps to protect himself against possible American
reprisals, declined to compromise for the sake
of other Western help, and failed to.provide
grounds even for his supposed Marxist friends
to help him.
It was magnificent, perhaps, but it was not
politics. At the very least, Allende must be
convicted here of a lack of realism that would
probably have been fatal to any statesman any-
where. -
2. The Ruling Class.
Conspiracy Myth
T RE PICTURE of Allende being overthrown
by what has been variously described as a
"revolt of the privileged," a series of "bosses'
strikes" or a "conspiracy of the traditional ruling
class" contains so many misconceptions that it is
hard to know where to begin to sort them out.
One idea, however, seems basic to them all:
that Allende and his Popular Unity coalition
were - somehow the uniquely legitimate repre-
sentatives o "the People's Will." That such an
odd belief should have gained any currency
whatever outside purely propagandist circles is a
mark of the confusion that surrounds the
Chilean experience in the minds of many non-
Chileans. To judge from published comments,
such as those referring to the "defeat of the
democratic will", some of Allende's sympathisers
abroad seem even to believe that he not merely
enjoyed a massive popular majority. of the vote
but was also the first President of his country to
do so.
Yet the facts are beyond dispute. Chile was
and had been for many years a ' functioning
,democracy with a constitution which vested
executive power in the President arid legislative
power in Congress. Both in theory and in practice,
no doubt, there were serious weaknesses--es
revealed, for instance, in the inability of previous
governments to press -through social reforms as
swiftly as many Cleans would have wished.
But by common consent the system was the best
and most stable in Latin America and it had
enabled Allende himself to contest the Presidency
unsuccessfully three times before h,6 finally won
it at his fourth attempt. in 1970. There was no
doubt of . the legitimacy of that victory. But,
unfortunately for those who saw itt as a unique
expression of "the people's will", it was gained
only through a narrow plurality in which Allende
obtained just over 36?%, of the poll! ibis nearest
rival, only a couple of percentage paints behind,
was the candidate of the conservative National
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CPYRGHT
Party, whose members in Congress opposed
Allende from the start. Another 23went to the
third candidate, a radical reformist from the
Christian Democrat party, many i of whose
members in Congress at first gave Allende the
benefit of the doubt, hoping he v'duld modify
his avowed Marxism iii practice to a'kind of
reformism compatible with their own ideas and
the existing constitution. - 1 \ 1 .
In the mid-term Congressional) elections of
March 1973, the Popular Unity coalition raised
its share of the vote to 44% (although this time
the "legitimacy" was suspect owing ';to opposition
allegations of subsantial electora4 !fraud). But
the opposition parties retained a large majority
.in Congress where, by that time,' most of the
Christian Democrats bad joined the Nationalists
in outright antagonism to the President. On these
facts it seems plain that, so far from representing.
"the People's WE I". Allende never actually re-
presented more than a substantial minority
interest. Only if "the People" are identified as
being those who voted for Allende; wbjle the rest
-the majority-are relegated to the status of
-'non-people". can any other interpretation be
-sustained. But that, of course, is just what
is implied by the myth of the "fining class
conspiracy.". ,
IF THERE WAS a "ruling class" in Cie it was that
of the politiciins and the surrounding establish-
ment drawn mostly from the narrow upper end of
Cue's prosperous middle class. Allende himself
and many of his ministers and leading supporters
were as much part of that group as were their
political opponents But,ironicaliy, itwas a group
that often sufieredless than others from Allende's
socialism because its members on both sides
generally possessed enough cash or property to
exploit the black market at home or slip into
agreeable exile if things got too rough-in any
case, to. survive (like Allende himself until leis
death) in very reasonable comfort. But the j>eople
who did most to overthrow Allende were rarely
of this group at all. With the possible exception
of some naval officers, the armed forces were
very much apart from the establishment of any
political colour; and even after Allende brought
the service commanders into his government they
remained aloof from, and remarkably little
known by, those relatively small circles in Santiago
which were accustomed to set the country's
political tone.
Indeed, as events since the coup d'etat have
shown, Chile's military men-like their counter-
parts elscwbcrer-were probably as contemptuous
of the politicians (and as ignorant of politics) as
the politicians went of them. They had stayed
outside politics for nearly 40 years, and if Allende
himself bad not dragged them into the whirlpool
they might have been content to remain that way., But their position was made intolerable by the
President's own decisions. On the one hand they -
were encouraged to turn a blind eye to the steady
growth of illegal, para-military forces under the
command of the President's fr iends or others who
were more extreme in their revolutionary com-
mitment. On the other hand they were required
to serve in his cabinet to maintain "law and
order" and arasstan the cotmtry of the President's
constitutional propriety. On top of that they
wee threatened by attempts from within the
President's own circle to subvert their authority
within their own forces, as ' in the naval - cxxn
spiracy uncovered in July 1973, and the public
call for a naval insurrection by Allende's friend
and fellow-Ieadcr of the Socialist Party, Senator
Carlos Altamino, made only three days before
the coup.
A surer way can hardly be imagined of pro-
yoking mutiny among responsible officers, and
it is only surprising, in retrospect, that it did not
happen sooner-as in most Latin American
countries it surely would have done. To ascribe
the mutiny thereafter to the machinations of
"the riling class" is to understand nothing,
dither of military men in general or of C1i1e's mill-
tary in particular.
Smw.ARLY, THE so-certain "bosses' stn'es" which
preceded the military coup Were, in fact, nothing
of the kind. The lorry-men who _paralysed half,
or more, of Chile's transport by their month-long
strike in September-October 1972, and their even
longer strike in July-September 1973, were mostly
owner-drivers who would have fitted fairly readily
into the Teamsters' Union in the United States.
They displayed the fierce economic and social pro-
tectionism typical of what in Europe or North
America would be called the lower middle class,
and they saw themselves threatened by galloping
inflation and by what they believed to be the
Government's intention to destroy their way of
life through state control or ownership of their
services. Along with the small shopkeepers who
supported them---not forgetting the queue-weary
housewives whose famous "Saucepan March" in
Santiago was the most dramatic early sign of
revolt--whey might be classed as the Poujadisres
of Chile. But by no stretch of the imagination
could they be described as representatives of a
"boss" or -'ruling" class, or even as being
especially -Privileged" in a social or economic
sense. Moreover, they owed li ttle, if any, allegiance
to the traditional political groupings of Chilean
politics, although they obviously welcomed any
support they could get from them. On the
contrary. they tended to cut across the traditional.
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spectrum and look to new leaders, whether of
right or left. This, their principal spokesman,
Senor Leon Vilarin, was actually a member of
Allende's Socialist Party while others of the
leadership cxa~e from the Nationalist Part ranks
or fiiomm no party at aIL- '
The members of the various professional
associations, Me doctors, dentists, lawyers and
airline pilots, which joined the second transport
strike, were likewise not "bosses" although they
were certainly, in Chilean terms, rather more
"privileged." Their protest was probably more
ideological than that of the lorry-men and the
shopkeepers--it was usually their wives, for
example, who objected most forcibly to tho
Government's politically-inspired changes in the
school curriculum but it was also provoked by
sheer exasperation and fear at the growing
threat to their professional status posed by the
Government's combination of administrative
inefficiency and dubious social priorities. For
example, Chiles economic collapse and inflation
not only threatened many doctors financially
but seriously frustrated their work. Some early
reports from Santiago after the coup made the
point that hospitals were appealing urgently
for bandages and drugs to treat the wounded,
as if that indicated that the number of casualties
must be overwhelmingly high. But bandages,
drugs, and other medical supplies had been only
sporadically obtainable in Chile for many months
beforehand. The daily round of the pharmacies
in search of the simplest medicines had become a -
regular feature of Santiago life; and foreign
embassies had been driven to stock-pile their own
supplies, imported through the diplomatic bag,
for the treatment of the most normal ailments
among their-staffs. It was partly-in the hope of
ending that situation that many otherwise
conscientious-doctors finally joined the movement
to get Allende out -
T, wt SHOULD IT BE FORGOTTEN that some of the
11j most damaging strikes of all were those of
Chiie's most influential blue-collar workers-the
copper-miners. The last lorry-men's strike was
immediately preceded by a two months' strike for
higher wages by miners at El Teniente, the coun-
try's biggest mine. Because copper accounts for
three-quarters of Chile's foreign earnings, that
strike probably cost the country far more in real
terms than the transport str&-e, whose costs to a
great extent could be absorbed internally. Indeed,
as one West European diplomat remarked to me
in Santiago, the money lost in those two months
at El Teniente.would have more than repaid
Chile's entire debt to his government-a 'debt
which Allende at that moment was trying to re-
schedule for the second consecutive year.
It is true that the copper-miners were the elite
.of Chile's blue-collar class and, no doubt,
wanted to keep it that way. To that extent,
perhaps, they may be deemed "privileged"-
like, say, coal miners or motor car workers in
Britain; although I doubt if that is what members
of the Bri tish Labour Party, or the New Statesman,
can have had in mind in embracing the "privi-
leged" thesis. But a more importantireason for the
miners' restiveness, I believe, is that although
they were the most vital of all Chile's manual
workers they suffered far more than most of
their erstwhile comrades from *he country's
'shattering economic decline under' Allende. Un-
like farm and factory workers, they could not
supplement their official wages by selling the
fruits of their labour on the black market Tha
.-fam worker who could take home a sack of
potatoes, a few chickens, or cvea a side of beef,
could make a good living on the; black market
even if his official wages remained stationary
while inflation roared ahead. The factory worker
who was entitled to buy a proportion of his
factory's output at official fixed prices could
(and did) sell that at six or ten timers what he had
paid as soon as be left the factpry gate. But
miners could hardly find ready buyers for a stolen
truck-load of copper ore.'
Thus the copper-miners were thrust, in effect,
into the same position as the lorry-men, the shop-
keepers, and virtually all or. Chile's 'salaried
professional men and women: *4Y were left
more or less defenceless against the most vicious
inflation the country had ever experienced,
jI.
SonzE AroLoGI,Srs for Allende bayed maintained
that the degree of inflation was exaggerated or,
at any rate, little worse than was! customaryin
Chile and elsewhere in Latin America. The truth
is that it was far beyond anything no=ally
endured in that continent. As little as nine
months after Allende came to pbwer, when I
first visited Chile, the escudo had ~aiready fallen
from 20 to 40 against the US. dollar on the free?
or black, market. Eighteen months later, on my
,second visit, the Government.'s own figures put
the rate of inflation at 130% in a year, the money
issue was going up by 10% a month and the
escudo had fallen to about 350 to the black U.S.
dollar. By August 1973. the official inflation rate
was 323% and rising fast, and the escudo was
worth only 2,000 to the dollar-an effective
devaluation in less than three years of 10,000%!
- Nor is it enough to attribute these catastrophic
rates to such adventitious or malicious factors
as-and again I refer to published arguments--
falling world copper prices, the normal difficulties .
of maintaining industrial and farm output in a
time of radical political change? or deliberate
American intervention. -
On the list of these three I have already said
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enough, I hope, to show that it was far from
decisive and that it was, anyway, largely self-
invited. As to falling copper prices, the fact is
that after a fall in the first year of Allende's
Government," pries recovered until by the time
of his overthrow they were 80% above the level
at the time of his election. Had they not risen
so steeply be would almost certainly have fallen
sooner and probably would not have secured his
relative, short-lived success in the mid-term
elections of March 1973. The difficulties of main-
taining output in a Time of change, however, were
real-unfortunately, far more so than Allende
.ever seemed to realise.
To take just two examples: copper and milk.
Expropriation ' of the copper mines from their
.American owners would, no doubt, have led in
itself to the withdrawal of American technicians
as well as of American management with some
-consequent risk of losing production temporarily,
at least. But this might have been overcome by
the promotion of trained Chilean managers and
technicians, of whom there was no shortage.
Alas, for Chile's national income, Allende not
merely nationalised but deliberately politicised
the mines as well. Jobs-for the party boys were
handed out in thousands while trained Chileans
emigrated so that, after three years of Popular
Unity Government, mining manpower and costs
had risen by more than a third while mining
,output was down by about the Same amount:
'S take nulk as the second crimple because it
was specifically mentioned in Popular Unity
election manifestos, which guaranteed "every
Chilean child h3if-a-quartof mf dar'1y" Here
again the ' gmernment's, Proggrammc of land
reform, intended to break the pow= of Chile's
remaining landlords and aopen the way to co-.
operative or state farming, might have been
expected to result in some shortfall in dairy pro-
duction. for a year or two while the teething
problems were sorted out. In fact, however, milk
production dropped as If someone bad simply
punched a hole in the bottom of every chum in
-the land. At one large cooperative dairy in
Te muco, one of the main milk: producing areas of
Cie, the average daily winter intake of hulk
was about 50-6D,000 gallons in 1970. By 1973 it
was down to 7,040. Nor was this surprising.
Apart from the fact that legal land reform 'had
been accompanied by' widespread and un-
checked illegal land seizures so that too many
farms were in the hands of people utterly without
experience, the prices established for milk-as
for most other farm products-were simply
economic-nonsense. Presumably in. the hope of
getting half-a-quart of milk for every child on the
cheap, the government decreed that a gallon of
milk would fetch less than half the price of one
egg. Inevitably, nobody was interested in pro-
ducing milk and cows were.slaughtered, wholesale
for beef-legally or illegally--or driven over the
forced to scour the world for dried milk imports
that, thanks to his policy in the copper
be no longer had foreign currency to pay for.
SUCH Fou r.s were repeated everywhere as the
romantic gestures of self-styled revolution we
preferred to facing the facts of life. While oven
production in both agriculture and industry fell
,disastrously, Allende simultaneously attempted
redistribute the national wealth by giving Chd s
poorer classes more money to spend. They w
his constituency and they were properly grate I,
for many of them certainly had never had much
before. But you can't redistribute what you have
already thrown away; and as output vanished,
so domestic queues grew longer, foreign - deb
piled up, and the budget deficit expanded like a
hydrogen balloon. A year before the final collapse
I asked one of Allende's chief economic ad%isers.
what they were going to do to control a situation
that was already looking critical. He replied,
with commendable candour, that he really didnht
know. "I know," he said, "What we ought to
we should impose an austerity r6gime tomorrow,
freeze wages, and ration essential supplies. Put
how can we? We would destroy our own politicl
base.
Precisely. In the end, rather than do that t r .
plunged on down the primrose path of promises
and illusions and practically destroyed the
country. The "ruling class conspiracy" W
:the gloss that they and their supporters put up n
the reality of their own miscalculations.
3. The Myth of tre
Constitutional Revolutionat_
H WE COME to the crux of Allen 's
!F policies and character about which, fin,
-sIl the other - arguments revolve. Was he, a
genuine constitutionalist? Was he a true revolu-
ti onary? Was he--could he ever have been bot 7 :
Allende: hi-mself, of course, admitted }
doubts. Repeatedly, he ins'csted that he wasp a
revolutionary and a Marxist, and that he intended
to establish at least the preconditions for wliat
he told Regis Debray would be "total, scien c
Marxist socialism." Equally repeatedly, be p
claimed his faith that he could achieve this d
by constitutional means, through the ballot ox
and all it implied. That was, after all, to be he
distinctive "Chilean road to socialism" of w ch
so many people outside Chile cherished such
high hopes.
But no hindsight is required to see that -l$th
theory and practice were riddled with contCa-
dictions. Revolutions are bom of, or generate
sectional conflict-a fact of political life t tat
Allende acknowledged every time he spoke of
"overthrowing" what he called the "bourgeois"
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state. But a democratic constitution rests upon
consensus--a basic acceptance of the fact that
the State represents more than a merely sectional
interest. The second permits reform, but the first
denies it; and there is no way of reconciling the
two.
All Allende's practical difficulties followed
from this simple distinction. Taken seriously, his
constitutionalism meant that his programme
could only succeed if a majority would actually
vote for it. But, elected as he was with only just
over a third of the popular vote and with a large
majority of Congress against him, Allende had
neither a democratic nor an administratively
effective mandate for his revolution. Indeed, in a
parliamentary rather than a presidential demo-
cracy, he would probably never have been able to
begin.
If he was to succeed within his six-year term of
office even in opening the door to revolution, let
alone establishing it as accomplished fact, he
had to transform his minority into a majority.
But how to do it? For, if words meant anything,
Allende's had to mean that he intended to replace
the existing, reformable constitution of Chile
with another that would be, of its Marxist
nature, irreversible. In other words, a system that
was admittedly democratic was to be used to
build another that would be of ectively dictatorial.
This was asking the majority to hang itself from
its own gallows; and, not surprisingly, it declined.
ALLENDE's ATTEMPTS to overcome this basic
illogicality in his position were precisely what
ensured his ultimate downfall Refusing to
abandon either his revolutionary rhetoric or his
professed constitutionalism he was forced to rely
more and more upon political illusionism. His
sleight-of-hand was often remarkable, as he
sought to outwit the opposition majority in
Congress by exploiting the letter of the constitu-
tion, using every legal loophole to force upon them
measures they did not want But in the process,
inevitably, he destroyed the constitution's spirit,
so that his opponents became as ruthless as he
was. At the start he won considerable opposition
support in Congress for needed changes like the
nationalisation of the copper mines, land reform,
and the state's takeover of banks and major
industries-evidence that the democratic con-
sensus could and would work within the existing
constitution. But, at the end, not a single member
of the opposition majority would cast a vote in
his support. They voted unanimously to condemn
his "habitual Illegalities" and were even joined
by the Supreme Court in accusing him of dis-_
regarding the rule of law He had cut away the
middle ground of Chilean politics, wrecked the
democratic consensus, and begotten the reality
of counter-revolution, through his own addiction
to revolutionary slogans. -
. Equally inevitable was the economic break-
down, which' came from. Allende's attempts to
enlarge his popular base outside the _political
institutions. Here his plan was two-fold: to buy
political support among "the People" through
massive wage increases and other benefits and at
the same time to squeeze the middle class . into
submission, or even flight from the country,
through wholesale nationalisation of their inter-
ests and the appointment of his own men to all
significant civil-service jobs. The two simply
cancelled each other out; for while the first part
of the plan raised vast new expectations and
demands, the second diminished the country's
capacity to meet them. The whirling spiral of
inflation followed as a necessary result of
Allende's political confusions.
THESE BASIC CONTRADICTIONS were Compounded
by the fragmented nature of Allende's support.
His Popular U n i t y coalition a far from united.
Its majority element was Allende's own Socialist
Party-a body that bore little Iesemblance
beyond its name to most of the democratic
socialist parties of Europe which so enthusias-
tically espoused its cause. It was, in fact, a
revolutionary Marxist party that began as a
splinter of the more bureaucratic and Stalinist
Chilean Communist party in the 1930s, and in
recent years had acquired a fiery "New Left"
wing as well. Several of its leaders, like Senator
Altamirano, and many of its rank and file, con-
stantly urged Allende to "speed up the revolution"
without much regard for constitutional niceties.
The smallest element of the coalition was the
Christian radicals of various persuasions, some
of whom hoped to offer a bridge to the centre
of Chilean politics by cooperating with the left
wing of the Christian Democrats, but none of
whom ever attained positions of real influence.
The coalition's sheet anchor was the Communist
Party which, as business and administration
slipped into chaos, became increasingly im-
portant as a source of discipline and strategic
thinking.
T WOULD HAVE BEEN hard enough to drive
I this troika anyway without either overstepping
the constitutional limits of government or anta-
gonising one or other of its elements and thereby
jeopardising the only "democratic" base the
revolution had. But Allende had also to contend
with the still more militant left outside the coali-
tion, led by the Movement of the Revolutionary
Left (MIR), which insisted on revolution now,
and by violence if necessary-as, in MIR's view,
it was.
Here Allende's professed constitutionalism was
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revealed rs, at -best ~oquivocaL He ' y
rejected MIR's violence* 'Yet. he never permitted
the Army to root out their para-military groups.
When they stigmatised bus land refon n pro-
gramme as "inadequate" and seized hundreds of
farms at gun-point he rebuked than in occasional
speeches but did nothing to reverse their actions.'
When they hi-jacked lorry -loads of valuable
manufactures, to rase funds by selling them on
the black market, he rarely tried to redress the
crime. The Left-said this was because the AMR
truly represented "the People" against whom
Allende dared not act. But the truth, I fear, was
more squalid. For one thing, the MR had close
friends in the Socialist Party and in Allende's
own entourage whom the President did not want.
to offend. For another, as long as their activities
did not actually split the Popular Unity coalition,
it, as often convenient to see them pushing along
the revolution by unconstitutional means while
Allende denounced them in his role as a
constitutionalist.
It was not as if Allende was unable to deal
with the MIR when he had to. For example,
when a Mirista force blockaded the Philips
television=factory in Santiago in 1973 after an
unsuccessful attempt to hi-jack a lorry-load of
TV sets, they were allowed by the Government
to remain unmolested for ten days, although a
police post was just across the road. Yet when
diplomatic representations were made by the I,
Dutch charge d'cfaires with the hint that his
country's financial aid might have to be recon-
sidered if this harassment of a Dutch enterprise
continued, the Mrista.$ were hustled away
without a shot in 24 hours.
A snM..AR EQtmocAmox was evident in Allende's
adoption of a personal armed- bodyguard-the
first in memory to accompany a Chilean President.
It is true that the extreme Right in Chile was
quick to threaten violence as a response to
Allende's proclaimed revolution, and Allende
himself always maintained that he needed pro-
tection. But right-wing para-military groups were
never as big or as highly organised as those on
the Left; and, in any case, the proper reaction ofa
constitutionally-minded President would surely
have been to call upon his state security forces to
protect him.
Instead, Allende formed a personal unit,
known as "the Group of Friends of the -Pre-
sident." Trained, armed, and partly manned-by
Cubans, it was led by known revolutionaries,
sympathetic to the MI-R, including Allende's
son-in-law. The existence of such a group at the
very centre of the State was not merely a pro-
vocation to the established security forces and an
affront to Chilean tradition, it was also an implied
.rejection of the principle of const;tutional rule.
Dotrars Anotrr the real depth of ,Allende's on.
stitutionalism were raised also by his nal
history and his language, both of which suggested
a romantic attachment to violence. He -
after all, a founder and first president o the
Latin American Solidarity Organisation, created
in Havana in the 1960s and dedicated to the
encouragement of armed insurrection throughout
the continent. He promised to "paint Santiago
with blood" in 1970 if Congress declined to
ratify his election as President, and be repeat
tried to intimidate the opposition, inside and
outside Congress, with the threat of civil gar.
These were not the actions or the sentiments of a
man dedicated to constitutional change, except
as a matter of expediency.
On the'other hand, it was hard-to see Allende as a genuine revolutionary. He never loo ed
A bon vi arid but _well-Boomed, a spa py_
dresser, with a twinkling eye for the ladies d a
good deal of personal charm,, his strop est
political card was his skill in tactical iranoeu e.
But as a strategist, a thinker, a man with a eat
message, he was unconvincing. Towards the d,
as be appeared with increasing frgquency on the
presidential balcony in Santiago to ad ' ess
chanting crowds of his supporters with revilu-
tiona y platitudes, he seemed to ;!me to lose! all
contact with reality, to have becomean acto4 in
love with his revolutionary part': rather th a
serious leader who knew where lie was goin
IN RsrxosrEcr, I am inclined to thinlt this as
always the truth of the matter] with. Ali de.
Basically, he was a political romantic, dealing, in
sensations rather than sense. He enjoyed his b ur
upon the stage but-he never praperly assessed
,.the forces he was dealing with; either for! or
against him. He raised. exapectations on his ka
side without commanding the means to satisfy
them, and he encouraged opposition on the
other side by his use of a revolutionary rhetoric
whose threats he also could not fulfil.
At best ,he was muddle-headed; and time may
show that he was. deliberately deceitful. Certainly
be managed to deceive a lot of pirople, inclu g
himself. But in the end reality taut its own, d
lessons. That you can't be a democrat muf a
revolutionary-at least, not in a society the is
already admittedly democratic. That you can't
be anti-American and expect the Americans I to
help you. That you can't pose $s the peop#e's
leader and kick most people in the teeth.
you can't conscript soldiers into politics
expect them to remain apolitic aL That you
have inflation roaring out of sigh f~ and main
base for social welfare. That, an I short, the
world is not Qoud-cuckoo-lani3 Down h
you just can't have your cake and eat it.
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It is sad that such elementary' lessons should
have to be taught yet again at such tragic cost in
Chile. But it is alarming that so: many people
elsewhere should evidently fail to,-grasp that they
are the lessons.
1 Addicts of the ITT conspiracy theory might like
to work out, incidentally. why ITT in Chile was never
taken over by Allende, even after the notorious
memorandum became public property.. Was it,
perhaps, because its operations then were mostly
losing money and Allende did not want to share its
financial embarrassments? Or was it that lie knew the
company had given him an effective political stick to
beat his opponents with and be did not v6w.t to throw
it away by licking the company out? Either way,
TI-Ps apparent immunity from reprisal did not
suggest that he took its challexgt very seriously.
'Although even that was not unthinkable towards
the end, such was the chaos the economy had fallen
into. The last time I left Chile, a week or so before the
coup, I drove over the Andes to Argentina and at the
Chilean customs post at the summit of the pass I
found officials taking a large American car to pieces
and laying upon the snow-covered ground around it
one ton of copper ingots that had been hidden in
various nooks and crannies of the chassis. It would
have been worth around U.S. $2,000 in cash in
out fora mX ~4 by othen, nttho in Chilean
ab
mark-~ of
' Indeed, as I discovered for myself on a visit to
southern Chile nine months after Allende's elections,
local police forces there were under specific instruct
tions not to attempt to restore the farms to their legal
owners. See also Robert Moss's report in Eracotrh-ree,
"Allende's Chile", August 1973, and Alistair Horse's
"Commandants Pepe", July 197L
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E counter.
Edited by MELVIN J. LASKY and ANTHONY THWAITE
MANAGING EDITOR: Margot Walmsley. ASSISTANT EDITOR: Bryan Healing.
GENERAL MANAGER: Anthony Robinson. ADVERTISEMENT MANAGER: John Hall.
ADVtsoRY BOARD: Maurice Cranston, D. ,J Enright, Anthony Hartley, Leo Labedz, _
Goronwy Rees, Edward Shils, John Weightman.
Published monthly by Encounter Ltd. at 59 St Martin's Lane London WC2N 4JS
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THE LAST THROW (story) 3 V. S. Pritchett
FOREIGN AID, FOREVER? 15 P. T. Bauer
THE T-GROUP 30 J. P. Ward
COLUMN 42 R
POETRY
Michael Longley 29, Alan Ross 29, Alan Brownjohn 41, Gavin Ewart 44,
Tadeusz Rdzewicz 80, Elizabeth Jennings 90
NOTES Fr TOPICS
BETWEEN MAO & MOHAMMED 45 Peter Schmid
!3; HE PROPAGANDIST'S PROPAGANDA 47 George Martelli
THE QUEST FOR CUNDUM 52 Gordon Lee
BOOKS & WRITERS
MONSTROUS GROWTHS 56 Geoffr y Strickland
IS RICHARDSON ALIVE? 61 Laurence Lerner
JESUS OR CHRIST 64 Chaim Raphael
MING MAYHEM 67 Tao Tao Sanders
POINTS OF THE COMPASS
CHILE'S COUP & AFTER 72 Robert Moss
EAST & WEST
GERMAN MONEY & BOLSHEVIK HONOUR 81 Joel Carmichael
DOCUMENTS
Anyone for Objectivity? (Sidney Hook) 94
LETTERS 91
AUTHORS 96
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POINTS OF THE
COMPASS
Letter from Santiago
Chile's Coup
& After
CPYRGPY Robert Moss
N OT LONG AFTER
Allende's death,
the police searched
the home of his
former chief of
detectives, Eduardo
"Coco" Paredes, who
had been killed during
the fighting. Among
his papers, they found
a neat inventory of
the contents of 13
crates addressed to
the late president that
had been flown in
from Havana on a
Cuban plane. The
arrival of those crates,
back in March 1972,
had excited widespread speculation about possible
arms smuggling and much outraged muttering
about the "comrade president's" immunity from
customs. Needled by his critics in the press,
Allende finally disclosed that the crates contained
mango-flavoured ice-cream-a tribute from the
heroic socialist women of Cuba. And there the
matter was allowed to rest until "Coco" Paredes's
inventory turned up. It showed that, as the reader
may have already guessed, the crates had been
crammed full with Czech automatic weapons,
pistols, grenades and ammunition, which all went
into the private arsenals that Allende maintained
in his palace, his fortress-like home in the Avenida
Tomas Moro, and his weekender at El Canaveral
' His justifiers often add that papers like El Mercu-
rio, being voices of the "reactionary middle-class,"
were ripe for the rubbish-heap anyway. The methods
of a pro-Marxist paper like Ciarin (in which Allende
had shares)--conservative leaders were sometimes
depicted as naked whores with swastikas around their
necks-rarely come under the same kind of critical
analysis.
CPYRGHT
up in the Andean foothills, where his guards gave
instruction in guerrilla tactics and mass-produced
home-made explosives.
The truth about the "mango ice-cream" is one
detail among the rest that suggest that Allende
was no more a man of peace and non-violence
than his friend Fidel Castro. Now he is dead and
the generals give orders, it is often argued that
such details, even if true, are irrelevant. This
argument rests on nothing more solid than the
claim that, whatever wicked things Allende and
his friends were doing, they were not as bad as the
"pitiless repression" that followed his overthrow.
In the hands of Allende's apologists, this quanti-
tative comparison of the two regimes becomes a
simple way of evading the charge that the Marxist
government, though democratically elected, had
OYU Press, %xim", but aft at-ft wmitem
runs-he didn't close down all the papers he
didn't like, as the junta has already done.' He
flouted the wishes of the opposition majority in
Congress, certainly, but he didn't close down the
opposition parties. His supporters may have set
up guerrilla bases and stored up arms for an
IT is a curious foible of contemporary journalism
-the ideologised reporters are content to know
only their own special political contacts, their
'pals", and can't bear to gather all the facts from
all possible sources. When, for example, Mr
Richard Gott-Penguin's editor of their "Latin
American Library" of paperbacks and The
Guardians regular correspondent--arrived in
Santiago a few days after the September coup,
he confessed that there was "nobody left" he
knew from whom he could gather a scrap of
information. Nobody at all? In other times this
would have been an embarrassing, and damaging,
confession for foreign correspondents who
usually knew how to talk to Hitler as well as to
Ossietsky, to Mussolini as well as Matteotti, who
cultivated contacts in all walks of life in order to
collect information for a reasonably accurate,
comprehensive, and objective story of onrushing
events.
ROBERT Moss continues the reconstruction of
the recent tragedy in Chile which we began with
David Holden's article on "Allende & the Myth
Makers" in the January ENCOUNTER. Moss con-
tributed an earlier "Letter" on Allende's Chile
to the August 1972 ENCOUNTER; his book on
Allende's Marxist Experiment" was published
last year by David & Charles. He is now working
on a biography of General Giap and on a study of
"The Age of the Terrorist" to follow his "Urban
Guerrillas" (Temple Smith, 1972). Mr Moss is a
special correspondent of The Economist"
(London).
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eventual-and violent-"revolution within the
revolution," but wasn't that all rather childish
and forlorn compared with the smooth efficiency
with which the big battalions swung into action
when the signal was given on last September 11th?
In debating the rights and wrongs of what has
happened in Chile, the important question is not
whether the "lesser evil" is a Marxist government
on the way to setting up a dictatorship or a
military junta that has already done so. It is
whether Chile was still a real or viable democracy
on the eve of the coup. If, as seems clear to me, it
had ceased to be a viable democracy-through
the breakdown of consensus politics, the routine
violence of both political extremes, the govern-
ment's- systematic violation of the law and, above
all, an economic crisis of Weimar proportions-
who was primarily responsible?
SUPPOSE THAT a leader of the Labour left became
prime minister of Britain and started off by
releasing members of the Angry Brigade and the
IRA who are currently in jail and formed a private
bodyguard out of them to defend No 10 Downing
Street. Suppose that he then embarked on a pro-
gramme of confiscation of private property that
affected not just a handful of property specula-
tors, but every small farmer and industrialist in
the country and was sped along by the activities
of armed squatters seizing houses and farms at
gunpoint. Suppose that inflation at an annual rate
of three hundred and fifty (350) % was then used
as a means of wiping out the savings and the
salaries of the middle class, and that (finally) the
government's supporters, having turned Man-
chester and Birmingham into armed camps with
-the aid of Palestinian terrorists and KGB
instructors, incited mutiny within the armed
forces. Few people, on either the right or the
left, would argue that Britain had remained a
viable democracy.
The obvious riposte is that the scenario is in-
conceivable in Britain (which, one prays, it is)
and that the substitution is therefore untenable.
The point is that if a government in Britain acted
in the same way as Allende's did, few people
would describe it as democratic, andeven fewer
if-as would be impossible under the British
parliamentary system-it ignored parliament
even in the face of a majority ruling that itbad
"systematically violated the constitution .112 Those
in favour of such a government would have to
define their terms rather more carefully than those
who persist in calling the Allende regime a
"democratic" or even a "people's" government.
Many of the liberals who mourn Allende as a
progressive reformer would probably man the
barricades against a leader who did the same
things in Britain. But then Chile, like Czecho-
slovakia, is a far-away country about which we
know precious little and one can always appeal
to the mistaken belief that it is just another tin-pot
Latin American area where the rich trample on
the poor and where an honest man must take the
side of the revolutionaries.
MY PURPOSE HERE is not to justify what has
happened since the coup-which must raise
serious doubts about the future of democracy in
Chile, even if the wilder rumour-mongering is
discounted-but to show why in some sense the
coup became inevitable.
The Chilean coup bore some resemblance to the
military takeover in Indonesia in 1965. In both
cases, the armed forces had been ready to take
orders from a radical left-wing government until
it rounded upon them. The Indonesian Commun-
ists, who had found a pliant tool in President
Sukarno, narrowly failed to eliminate their
potential opponents in the high command on the
night of 30 September 1965, when six key generals
were murdered. There is now evidence to suggest
that the leaders of the far left in Chile were plan-
ning to deal with suspect generals in a similar
way, and that the September coup may have
pre-empted an autogolpe-a self-made coup.
THREE THINGS SHOULD be made clear at once.
First, the coup was made in Chile. If anyone
was "meddling" in Santiago politics, it was the
Communist side. The 1,400-odd Russians in
Chile were not exclusively concerned with im-
porting tractors. The Cubans did not confine
themselves to supplying guns and instructors to
the Guerrilla Left. They may have played a more
critical role than was previously suspected in the
counsels of the Allende government. Allende's
Cuban son-in-law, Luis Fernandez de Oila, who
had formerly been the desk-officer behind Che
Guevara's Bolivian expedition, took over his
wife's office inside the presidential palace, where
he was presumably well-placed to examine
important cables and correspondence travelling
in and out. -
Second, the coup did not happen in a political
vacuum. In a country as politically-minded as
Chile, it would not have been possible without
the backing of the major opposition parties,
whose leaders now, ironically, find themselves in
a state of unemployment. The Christian Demo-
crats, who faced the 1970 election with a pro-
gramme very similar to Allende's, moved over to
qualified support for the military takeover-
which may have shown that their death-wish was
not as highly developed as Allende had hoped.
Allende's most lasting achievement, clearly, was
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to destroy public confidence in a constitutional
system that had served Chile better and longer
than similar versions have served most West
European countries.
Third, the generals might never have moved if
they had not had the gage flung at them, first by
the Guerrilla Left, and then by Allende himself.
The story of how the different factions in the high
command finally coalesced to destroy Allende is
not generally known, and is therefore worth
looking into in some detail.
The Making of "Operation
Seaweed"
N OW THAT THE MILITARY have been sucked
into Chilean politics, it may not be all that
easy to get them out. But that is also part of
Allende's legacy. He took the calculated decision
to co-opt the generals into his government. It was
a way of keeping them out of trouble and of
damping down the opposition-since senators
would be slower to speak out (and union leaders
more reluctant to strike) against the men in the
peaked caps. In the end, of course, Allende only
succeeded in giving the generals a sense of their
own power-and an appetite for more-without
securing their loyalty.
He was fortunate, after the murder of General
Schneider in October 1970, to find a powerful
ally in the new commander-in-chief, General
Carlos Prats Gonzalez. Prats was hardly a man of
the Left, though he shared with many of his fellow
army-officers a profound distrust of the tradi-
tional Right. But he developed a close personal
friendship both with Allende and with two of the
key men in the Chilean Communist Party,
Senator Volodia Teitelboim and Luis Figueroa,
the trade union leader. His commitment to the
regime deepened as his personal ambition grew;
there may well be substance in the rumours that
the Communists promised to back him in the
presidential elections in 1976.
With Prats' support, Allende managed to
persuade the armed forces to help him out of his
first major crisis, brought on by the wave of
opposition strikes in October 1972. Thus Allende
was able to form the first of a series of three joint
cabinets that presented the world with the novel
' See my account in Chile's Marxist Experiment
(David & Charles, 1973).
4 The armed forces had been made more aware of
the dimensions of Chile's economic crises by the
confidential monthly reports prepared by a group of
some 30 young economists (some were from the
Christian Democrat and National Parties, but most
were independents) who had been meeting since
January. Their work established the framework for
the junta's economic programme.
spectacle of professional soldiers taking their
seats beside Communist and Socialist left-wingers.
The first time round, the formula worked exactly
as the Communists had said it would. Astonished,
and partly reassured, by the new coalition govern-
ment, the strikers returned to work, and Allende's
most strident critics fell temporarily silent.
But Prats became an increasingly lonely man.
Not all of his senior colleagues relished their role
as the underwriters for a government responsible
for the worst economic crisis in Chile's modem
history, and most of them were angered by
Allende's refusal to take action against the para-
military groups that were organising on the Far
Left. Prats showed disturbing signs of personal
instability: he quarrelled violently with opposi-
tion senators and then, on 27 June, there was his
extraordinary skirmish with a middle-class matron
called Alejandrina Cox. Mrs Cox noticed him in
a passing car, and stuck her tongue out at him.
Prats, in fury, ordered his driver to give chase,
pursued her for a dozen blocks, fired two bullets
at her car to make her stop and then rushed to
her window, put his revolver to her head, and
addressed her in the following terms: "Apologise,
you shit, or I'll kill you (Pide perddn mierda, o to
mato)." The government afterwards tried to make
out, clumsily, that this was all part of some
"assassination attempt."
.Prats offered his resignation, which was re-
fused. Providentially for him (or perhaps not so
providentially, since it seems that government
agents provocateurs may have been involved') the
comic-opera exploits of Colonel Roberto Souper,
who attacked the presidential palace with a few
tanks two days later, gave him the chance to
present himself as the national saviour. But he
had lost all credibility with his colleagues. Prats
realised that his career was over on 22 August,
when Congress ruled that the government had
been acting unconstitutionally that day. The
women of Santiago, who appear to have played a
crucial role at every major turning-point in Chile
over the past three years, demonstrated outside
his home. The riot police who came to disperse
them with tear-gas apparently failed to realise
that most of the 300 women present were officers'
wives, and that four of them were the wives of
serving generals! (There are few countries in the
world where you can fire tear-gas into the face of
a general's wife and get away with it.) General
Prats resigned the following day. He, more than
any man, had been the main prop of the Allende
government since the October strikes. With the
appointment of General Augusto Pinochet as his
successor, the way was open for direct military
intervention.4
But THE NAvy, not the Army, was the driving
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force behind the coup. Its officers, drawn from
the middle class and proud of their long relation-
ship with the Royal Navy-visible by their
"English" uniforms and their fondness for pink
gin-were always regarded as the most conserva-
tive section of the armed forces. Allende's
attempts to woo the military with decorations,
wage increases, and bland flattery made little
impression on them. Although Admiral Rat51
Montero, the Navy's commander, was a cautious
constitutionalist, he was unpopular with many of
his subordinates, who felt that it was his duty to
take a firmer stand with Allende-especially after
the discovery of left-wing plans for a mutiny.
Early in July, some young naval officers at
Talcahuano detected the first signs of what.was
afoot. Although the Navy is a professional force,
left-wing elements had managed to set up
"political cells" among young petty officers and
ratings. Plans had been drawn up to seize control
of the cruiser Latorre and the destroyer Blanco
Encalada and then use them to bombard naval
shore installations at Valparaiso. The mutiny was
to take place at night; the officers of the watch
were to be eliminated, and lists were drawn up of
other officers who were to be attacked in their
homes. If the mutiny was successful, the ring-
leaders were going to claim that they had headed
off a Right-wing coup and appeal to Allende to
close down Congress and seize total power.
On 7 August, after more than 400 sailors had
been arrested and interrogated, the Navy deman-
ded that the parliamentary immunity of two
leaders of Allende's coalition-Carlos Altamirano
of the Socialist Party and Oscar Garret6n of the
Movement of United Popular Action (Mapu)-
should be lifted so that they could be put on trial
for their part in the conspiracy. The Navy also
called for the arrest of Miguel Enriquez, the chief-
tain of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left
(Mir). It is now established that all three had met
with the ring-leaders of the mutiny. Whether
Allende himself was also involved is less clear.
I talked shortly after the coup with one officer
from the cruiser Prat who claimed that the key
organiser on board his ship, a petty officer called
Maldonado, had told him that he bad taken part
in a secret meeting with Allende in the high-rise
apartments known as the Torres de Tajamar in
Santiago. That may well be the kind of thing that
a frightened man says under pressure to please his
interrogators; but whether or not Allende was
personally involved in the plot, it is clear that his
government was.
It was with this knowledge that a group of
Valparaiso navy planners put the final touches to
a secret plan for military intervention. Its code-
name was "Plan Cochayuya," derived from the
name of a kind of seaweed found along the Chil-
ean coast. The series of incidents that finally
brought it into effect will appeal to those who
favour the "Cleopatra's nose" conception of
history. In fact, what appeared on the surface to
be a petty squabble over promotion-over
whether or not Admiral Montero would resign
to make way for Merino as his successor-
merely served to ignite the powder-barrel
that Allende had been perching on uncomfortably
for many months. While the admirals quarrelled
with the president, truck-drivers crippled the
country's land communications, Right-wing
saboteurs from Patria y Libertad blew up railway-
lines, and the extreme Left, through its workers'
committees and para-military brigades, worked
feverishly to gain the upper hand in the con-
frontation that now seemed inevitable.
AGAINST THIS BACKGROUND, Allende
tried to gain time. He tried to allay the
increasing militancy of the Christian Democrats
by airy promises of changing his policy, of taking
them into the cabinet, and even of facing the
country with a referendum. He tried to placate
the armed forces by allowing them to conduct
arms searches in the heartlands of the Guerrilla
Left-the Santiago poblaciones and the rural
bases in the south-while at the same time trying
to elbow out conservative officers like the Air
Force commander, General Cesar Ruiz, who lost
his job in mid-August. He even tried to use the
old formula of a joint Military-Marxist cabinet
that had bought him time back in 1972. He
formed a new cabinet with the service comman-
ders on 9 August, and when that fell apart after
Prats' resignation, he managed to cobble together
yet another one.
But the tightrope that Allende was trying to
walk was being cut away at both ends. As
Allende's friend Regis Debray later acknow-
ledged, the Left and the Right were engaged in a
race against time. If the junta is to be believed,
the Socialist Left and the Mir were now preparing
their "Z plan"-a plan for the assassination of
senior officers and civilian opposition leaders that
was to have been executed on 18 September. It
seems that they timed it a week too late.
ON WEDNESDAY, 29 August, Admiral Merino and-
Admiral Sergio Huidobro, the chief of the Chilean
marines, went up to Santiago to see their com-
mander. They told Admiral Montero that he had
lost the confidence of the Navy: he should resign,
and the armed forces should withdraw from the
cabinet. Montero insisted on consulting the
president. So the three admirals drove around to
the Avenida Tomas Moro shortly after midnight,
where they found Allende "slightly drunk."
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According to one account,' he raged at Merino:
"I know what you are doing. Well, go aheadl
What you discovered at Valparaiso is only one
tenth of what the Communists and the miristas
are doing." And later, shaking his fist, "I have
declared war on the Navy." He had thrown down
the gauntlet. He is even said to have boasted that
his house in Tomas Moro was an "impregnable
fortress." To which Huidobro replied: "You
should leave matters of security to the experts."
It was as if Allende had strayed into that state of
ate described by the Greek tragedians, in which
it becomes impossible to decipher reality from
illusion.
The following Friday, back in Valparaiso, 500
naval officers waited in a conference room for an
hour-and-a-half while the admirals talked in the
nearby town of Salinas. Admiral Montero found
that even his oldest friends were now convinced
he should resign. Overcome by emotion, he
agreed; and his decision was duly reported to the
captains and commanders. But when he returned
to Santiago, Allende insisted that he should stay
on "a few weeks longer." The following morning,
the admirals were summoned to Santiago for a
surprise meeting in the Defence Ministry. They
expected to be told that Montero's resignation
was confirmed. Instead, they were asked by
Orlando Letelier, the Defence Minister, to stand
up one by one and state their reasons for wanting
him to go. Allende had calculated that their
reluctance to embarrass a fellow-officer in public
would make them hold their tongues. He was
wrong. Starting with Merino, the admirals stood
up in turn and attacked Montero for failing to
secure the arrest of those responsible for the
Valparaiso plot and for failing to press for
military withdrawal from a cabinet that was
"destroying the country."
AFTER nits snow OF ADAMANcy, Allende adopted
a different tack. He received Merino and Huido-
bro privately in his palace on Monday, 3 Sep-
tember, and asked them to give him "five or seven
days more" to sort out his problems. At the end
of that interval, he promised, he would appoint
Merino as the new Navy commander and name
an entirely civilian cabinet. Merino went back to
the squadron at Valparaiso happy enough with
this arrangement. But he found that his fellow-
officers were not willing to trust Allende's word.
It was agreed that if Allende still refused to take
immediate action the following Friday (the date
set for Merino's next appointment with the
president) the signal would be given to launch
' Allende, is of course, not alive to testify as to the
accuracy of these quotations; my account is based on
eye-witness reports gathered in Santiago.
"Operation Seaweed." The chief of the joint chiefs
of staff, Admiral Patricio Carvajal, had been
working for some months to get closer collabora-
tion between the three services and the Cara-
bineros, but it was still unclear whether the Navy
would have to go it alone.
Merino duly kept his appointment on Friday
the 7th, and found that Allende was still unready
to sack Montero. He did not argue this time. He
went back to Valparaiso and gave the signal to
launch Plan Cochayuya. The original date for the
coup was Monday the 10th, but General Pinochet
asked for a 24-hour delay to prepare the Army.
The timing was settled when Admiral Huidobro
drove up to the capital on Sunday with a small
square of lined notepaper concealed in his sock.
The message from Merino read: "D-Day is
Tuesday. The hour is 0600. (signed) Jose Toribio."
General Gustavo Leigh, the new Air Force
commander, and General Augusta Pinochet
examined it in Pinochet's house, and then wrote
the word Conforme ("I agree") on the back of the
paper and signed their names. If they had any
remaining doubts about the justification for what
they were planning, these had been diminished by
the violent speech delivered by Senator Alta-
mirano the previous day, which amounted to
incitement to the naval ratings to rebel against
their officers.
T T ~'WO MAJOR PROBLEMS remained: to enlist the
I support of the para-military Carabineros,
whose leaders were mainlypro-Allende men, and to
mobilise the troops without alerting the Govern-
ment to the true nature of the plot. The first
problem was solved when the Carabinero General
Jovani cast in his lot with the conspirators.
General Cesar Mendoza (No 7 in the strict order
of seniority) followed suit. Their adhesion meant
that, on the morning of the coup, Allende found
himself abandoned by his police guard at the
palace, who turned their armoured cars (tan-
quetas) inwards to point at him.
Security was also fairly well kept. The fleet put
out to sea on Monday, supposedly to join in
manoeuvres (Operation Unitas) with the Ameri-
cans, and when it sailed back to harbour around
dawn on Tuesday, it seems that Allende thought
that he only had to contend with an isolated naval
rising. Suspicious that something was afoot, he
had telephoned to General Herman Brady (the
Santiago garrison commander) around midnight,
to enquire whether everything was all right. Brady,
who had been close to Allende in the past, assured
him that the Army was ready to deal with any
contingency, although he had already received his
marching orders from Pinochet. It is almost
certain that Allende would not have driven to his
palace on Tuesday morning had he realised that
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he was not dealing merely with a handful of
dissident admirals, but with the united strength
of his armed forces. He drove to his death.'
The Guerrilla Bluff
N A HEATED DISCUSSION with the generals
I over the resignation of Admiral Ismael Huerta
from the cabinet in January 1973, Allende
declared that, if they ever turned against him, he
would not commit suicide or seek exile in Cuba.
"I will take refuge in the Cordon de Cerrillos," he
warned, "and you will never get me out."
The Cordon de Cerrillos is one of those indus-
trial suburbs that point like knife-blades towards
the centre of Santiago. These suburbs-and the
squatters' camps, or campamentos-dotted
around the outskirts of the city were viewed by
the revolutionary Left as the bases for an eventual
October-style insurrection.
Within the state-run indus-
tries, workers were given poli-
tical indoctrination and mili-
tary training, under the
supervision of Cuban, North
Korean, and Czech instruc-
tors. Some factories were '1;4
turned over to arms produc-
tion. In the Madeco plant,
which makes refrigerators,
workers on night-shift sol-
dered together a couple of
dozen "people's tanks" (ord-
inary fork-lift trucks shielded
by armour-plating and with
heavy machine-guns mounted
on top) under the guidance of
a Brazilian political exile
named Sergio de Moraes.
This was not an isolated example. The finance
for such goings-on was either borrowed from the
capital of the state-run companies themselves (the
government publishing house was a notorious
donor) or taken from the secret budgets of various
ministries. The foreign ministry alone disposed of
more than $lm a month in clandestine funds.
Apprentice guerrillas looking for a job were given
sinecures by state agencies like the municipal
works corporation (Cormu) whose staff increased
from 200 to 12,000 under Allende-although
there was no notable increase in municipal works.
And among the more than 13,000 political exiles
' The testimony of his own doctor and the photo-
graphs of his body make it clear that he committed
suicide with the automatic weapon sent to him as a
gift by Fidel Castro. He had been firing it from a
window earlier that morning.
who flooded into en e s Chile, ere
plenty of veteran terrorists to lend their expertise.
The Tupamaros toured the slum suburbs in
propaganda teams, and built up a rural base in
the north of Chile under the leadership of Raul
Bidegain Greissing, one of the few key organisers
to escape the Montevideo police.
If all this was taking place, why did armed
resistance to the coup crumble so fast? There are
two probable explanations. The first is that the
threat to mobilise the workers' brigades had never
been more than a bluff. The government had been
able to call out its supporters in big demonstra-
tions, although (to everyone but the Guardian
correspondent) it seemed that its drawing power
had been badly eroded by the time of the rally on
4 September, a week before the coup. The
Guardian estimated the crowd that day at
1,250,000, while the Wall Street Journal corres-
pondent who was also present observed that the
was being led round and
round the block to give the
general impression of greater
numbers.
If the workers were no
longer prepared to turn out
to hear speeches, would they
be ready to face the tanks?
It seems that, with some
exceptions (pockets of resist-
ance such as the Sumar fac-
tory), they were not.
The second factor was
that the leaders of the
Left-wing parties appear to
have taken the rational decision to go under-
ground as soon as it became clear that the armed
forces had not split-as the Communists had
believed they would. They were not unprepared
for this move. Safe houses had already been
chosen, and many of the Socialist and mirista
leaders were able to make quick getaways.
Others simply ducked into the nearest friendly
embassy.
It might be tempting to conclude from this that
the Guerrilla Left in Chile was pas serieux. But
the resistance of the sniper and the saboteur con-
tinues, and is met by equally ugly forms of
military repression. Whether the campaign of
urban terrorism that may now be beginning will
develop into a real threat to the new regime will
depend on the cohesion of the armed forces, on
their capacity to hold on to their initial civilian
support, and on the calibre of the guerrillas them-
square where the rally took
place could not have held
many more than 20,000, and
reported how one group of
particularly noisy supporters
VA
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selves. The opening attempts at armed resistance
to the junta outside Santiago were pathetically
amateurish.
One clash took place at Neltume, a small town
on the outskirts of the Panguipulli timber
reserves. On the day after the coup, a certain Jose
Gregorio Liendo, famous in the outside world
under his nom-de-guerre "Comandante Pepe,"7
turned up at the head of about 50 men and
attacked the local Carabinero post. Although the
police were outnumbered by ten to one, they
managed to hold out until three more Carabineros
from a neighbouring village came to their rescue.
Pepe's guerrillas were driven off into the hills,
where Pepe himself (together with his wife
Yolanda and three of his supporters) was cap-
tured on 19 September as he headed towards the
Carririne pass into Argentina. One of the Air
Force officers who took part in the hunt for Pepe
told me that he gave himself up to an advance
patrol without firing a single shot. "He said that
he did not want to risk his wife's life. But it
seems to me that he was not a serious guerrilla.
What was she doing up there in the first place?"
Pepe gave his first press interview, to an enter-
prising young Chilean journalist, back in April
1971. He quickly gained a reputation as "Child's
Che Guevara"-a title that seems rather absurd
in retrospect. He talked to the press about the
need for a "continental revolution" designed to
create a "union of socialist republics" in Latin
America. But Pepe's chief virtue was that, unlike
the Mir's "guerrilla theosophists," as a Com-
munist critic once called them, he had some claim
to present himself as a kind of "working-class
revolutionary." He was the son of a peasant
farmer from Magallanes who managed to buy
himself a small farm after he won a lottery prize.
He studied forestry at the University of Valdivia,
but he abandoned his studies after six months in
order to join the grindingly poor timber-workers
on the big estates up around Panguipulli. Helped
by the local left-wing governor (who helped him
to escape from the police on one occasion) he
organised a series of violent land-seizures.
I WAS PROBABLY THE LAST FoRIIGNER to see
Comandante Pepe alive. I managed to visit him in
the prison in the drizzly southern city of Valdivia
where he was held after his capture. I found a
man in his early thirties, short, with a lean, sharp
face, several days' growth of beard, and bright
but barely focused eyes like polished marbles. He
seemed physically well although (like Che
Guevara) he was an asthmatic and is said to have
been treated for lung complaints in Cuba and
' Alastair Home, "Commandante Pepe," ENcouN-
TER, July 1971.
Hungary. He was also very cool and self-
possessed, although bitter about his public image.
"The world press and Chilean television have
done me irreparable harm," he told me. "They
gave me the title of Comandante, which I never
wanted. They attributed acts to me that I never
committed."
Pepe's wife Yolanda, whom I visited in the
neighbouring municipal jail (the most modern
building in Valdivia) where she was being held
separately, shared his views about the media.
When I asked her whether she felt that the press
had made a myth (un mito) out of Pepe, she
thought that I had used the word humito, which
means a little puff of smoke. "Yes," she replied,
"every day the press was making smoke around
my husband." When I asked her whether she felt
that Pepe came to see himself as a second Che
Guevara-as his admirers made him out to be-
she said that "That question is very seditious for
my husband. I can't answer it, but I can tell you
that I also put it to him."
Yolanda begged that Pepe's fife should be
spared, for the sake of their infant son who was
staying with her father in the Nueva la Habana
poblaci6n in Santiago. Pepe himself appeared
conscious of what lay in store for him: "I am not
worried for myself. I will be united with the march
of history." He was judged by a military court and
sentenced to death for his guerrilla activities. The
sentence was carried out at 8.40 p.m. on 3
October.
There was a sad Bonnie-and-Clyde atmosphere
about the whole thing. One could not think of
Pepe as a serious guerrilla, still less as a terrorist
red in tooth and claw. But more serious conten-
ders will follow.
The New Order
WHAT ROAD WILL Chile follow now? It will
be a double tragedy if the alternative to the
"Marxist experiment" proves to be nothing better
than a blinkered, savagely repressive military
dictatorship. The way that the generals have set
out to fulfil their self-elected mission to "eradicate
the Marxist cancer" makes one think of what
Francois Mauriac, in sorrow, said about the
revenge inflicted on the men of Vichy by his
comrades from the French Resistance: "The idea
of decapitating a head still capable of thought is
unwarrantable.... "
In fairness, it has to be said that the generals are
being reviled as much for imaginary crimes as for
real ones. There has been a widespread suspension
of the critical faculty in the face of improbable
body-counts: the figure of 20,000 or 30,000 killed
that was bandied around in the House of Com-
mons during a recent debate, for example, or the
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Points of the Compass
much-quoted Newsweek claim that the Santiago
morgue had processed more than 2,700 bodies in
the fortnight after the September coup-a figure
that later turned out to be the official tally for all
bodies processed since 1 January.
No reliable estimate of the casualties since the
coup is as yet available. In the order of quantities,
the Chilean coup was bloody by comparison with
the Greek coup in 1967, bloodless by comparison
with the aftermath of the military takeover in
Indonesia in 1965. It has almost certainly cost
fewer lives than the brief civil war that followed
the overthrow and suicide of an earlier Chilean
president, Balmaceda, in 1891-when more than
10,000 people (out of a population only a fifth the
present size) were killed. But such comparisons
are probably not what matters. Chile's new rulers
face the familiar temptation of the victors in any
internal war: to claim their revenge, and to claim
in self-justification that it was the other side that
"started it." The continuing violence suggests
that they, or their subordinates, have not been
able to resist that temptation.
I N A COUNTRY as deeply polarised as Chile has
become, it will not be an easy task to persuade
those who formerly supported the Allende govern-
ment (and this means at least 40 ?% of the elector-
ate) to accept the new order of things. This is why
no senior officer is talking of restoring the
constitutional process in less than a year. General
Augusto Pinochet told me that he felt that the
country was only at the beginning of the "healing
process." He argued that the military must be
allowed time to " epoliticise" the Chileans, who
were once descril~d by Eduardo Frei as a nation
"sick with ideo)ogy." General Leigh compares
the state of CJ'file to that of "a drain that has
become clogged up with mud and debris," and it
has to be "cleared away before the water can
flow again."
Saez was only one of the civilian experts called by
the junta to advise on how to straighten out the
economy in the days following the coup. Orlando
Saenz, the combative young president of the in-
dustrialists' association, SoFOFA, was given an impor-
tant role as economic adviser to the foreign ministry.
Roberto Kelly, a retired naval -officer and successful
private businessman, was made minister-director of
the state planning agency, ODEPLAN, and a team of able
young economists who had worked on a draft pro-
gramme for economic reconstruction over themonths
before the coup quickly found jobs in the administra-
tion. A month after the coup, General Rolando
Gonzalez, an indecisive army officer who was origin-
ally handed the economics portfolio, was replaced by
Fernando Leniz, the former president of El Mercurio,
the major independent newspaper that had played a
decisive role in the opposition to Allende. As these
appointments suggest, the junta soon grasped the
need to place the economy under the control of
qualified men.
It is not really surprising that the political
leaders of the Centre and the Right are ready to
accept the need for a 1-2 year period of military
rule, with the exception of a group of left-wing
Christian Democrats associated with Bernardo
Leighton and Radomiro Tomic. For one thing,
it is clear that the labour of economic reconstruc-
tion will involve unpopular austerity measures,
and the party leaders would prefer to see the
armed forces take responsibility for them. That
way they do not lose votes. There is also the
probability that the extreme Left is preparing a
terrorist campaign. Again, the political party
leaders would prefer to see the high command
take responsibility for dealing with that.
But at the same time, the political leaders who
took a stand against Allende expect to be given a
place in the new system. One of the early mistakes
of the junta was to fill most vacant positions-in
the civil service as well as the cabinet-with
retired or serving officers. This reflected both the
traditional isolation of the armed forces from
society in general and the conviction that it was
necessary for the junta to transcend party alle-
giances in order to present a "national image."
The influence of key civilian advisers, like Raul
Saez, who was initially seen by the junta as a kind
of economic supremo, was connected with their
personal entree to the armed forces as well as with
their personal capacities. 8
But outside the economic sector, the armed
forces established a virtual monopoly of the new
administration-filling ambassadorships and even
university rectorships as well as cabinet jobs. The
junta overreached itself badly by placing military
men as rectors in most of the universities a fort-
night after the coup. By doing this, they risked
losing the support of the anti-Marxist student
groups who had played a leading part in the
movement against Allende; and the way that
Eduardo Boeninger, the brave and outspoken
Christian Democratic rector of the University of
Chile, was driven to resign was scarcely likely to
reassure his fellow-Christian-Democrats-nor,
indeed, those who believed that, by backing the
coup, they were helping to preserve the possi-
bility of a pluralistic society in Chile. Whatever
the personal qualities of a man like General Cesar
Ruiz Danyau, the retired Air Force chief who
was appointed to replace Boeninger, he simply
did not possess the intellect or the vision usually
required in a university rector. The appearance of
retired generals on the campuses is more alarming
for Chilean society than isolated incidents like the
burning of Marxist literature in Santiago.
OBVIOUSLY A GREAT DEAL WILL DEFEND On Whe-
ther the junta can rebuild the economy. On the
day of Allende's death, foreign reserves were
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Points of the Compass
down to $31m; the foreign debt had mounted to restore the former system now that the left-wing
some $4 billion; and inflation was running at an parties that represented some 40% of the elec-
annual rate of 350%. The junta's attempt to torate have been outlawed. There are a certain
restore realistic prices and exchange rates will number of "corporatists," both within the high
mean some temporary hardship; but it is possibly command and among the team of jurists who
the only way of restoring incentives for local have been working on a draft constitution, who
manufacturers and foreign investors. Similarly, are fundamentally out of sympathy with the
the reorganisation of state-run firms will mean an democratic system in any case. They are probably
end to the featherbedding of political favourites
and, therefore, more unemployment; but it is also
one of the ways to curb the deficits of the public
corporations which were one of the prime sources
of inflation.
The junta will have to contend with an attempt
to isolate it, both internally and externally. It is
ironic that many of those who attacked the
Americans for limiting credit lines to the Allende
government are now calling for an economic
blockade of the "fascists" who have replaced him.
Such a campaign may fail, but if it succeeds it
might help to make the regime still more repres-
sive. If the generals cannot sort out the economy,
they will be compelled to fall back on force as the
means of keeping themselves in power.
W HAT KIND OF POLITICAL SYSTEM will
eventually emerge from the Chilean imbro-
glio is still obscure. It will obviously be hard to
? Edmund Burke, "Letter to a Member of the
National Assembly in answer to some Objections to
his Book on Foreign Affairs" (1791).
in a minority, but it is an influential one.
The problem is that the system broke down
under the stresses imposed on it by Allende and
his fellow-Marxists, and cannot be reconstructed
overnight. To say that Allende was primarily
responsible for destroying Chile's democratic
system is not an attempt to cover up the violence
and blunders of his successors, but to show where
the tragedy began. Those who compare the
fashionable mythology that has been woven
around Allende with his actions may be reminded
of Burke's words about the revolutionaries in
France in a different epoch: "They are the same
men and the same designs that they were from the
first, though varied in their appearance. It was the
very same animal that at first crawled about in
the shape of a caterpillar, that you now see rise
into the air and expand his wings into the
sun.... "s Allende and his friends cannot be
absolved by what has happened since the coup.
The men now painted as martyrs for democracy
are the same men that smuggled in machine-guns,
camouflaged as mango ice-cream, and meant to
use them.
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