Fifty years on, the wounds left in Chilean society by the coup of 11 September 1973 are still very much open. Justice is a long way from being served, secrets remain untold, and the bodies of many of the victims are yet to be found.
Last Wednesday, the government announced a new national initiative to find the remains of 1,162 Chileans who vanished under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and remain unaccounted for. In most cases, the best their families can hope for are fragments or traces of DNA.
After ousting a democratically elected socialist, Salvador Allende, Pinochet rounded up opponents, social activists and students in Santiago’s national stadium and other makeshift detention centres, where nearly 30,000 were tortured and more than 2,200 were executed.
Allende’s body was pulled out of the bombed wreckage of the presidential palace, La Moneda. He is generally thought to have killed himself rather than be captured by soldiers loyal to Pinochet, the armed forces commander he had appointed a few weeks earlier.
Almost 1,500 others simply disappeared, and since the end of the junta in 1990, only 307 have been identified and their remains returned to their families. Anticipating the reckoning to come, Pinochet had ordered the bodies of the executed to be dug up and dumped at sea, or into the crater of a volcano. Investigators now hope that modern technology might help pinpoint massacre and temporary burial sites that might still yield vestiges of the dead.
Ariel Dorfman had been working as a cultural and press adviser in La Moneda, and was lucky to survive. Most of Allende’s staff were executed in the first days after the coup.
“This was a tragedy for Chile, for Latin America and for the world, because we were trying to open a way to a more just, radical society without violence,” Dorfman, a novelist, playwright and academic, told the Observer.
Trials are under way in a last-gasp effort at accountability before the perpetrators die of old age. On Monday, seven former soldiers aged between 73 and 85 were finally jailed after the criminal chamber of the Chilean supreme court upheld their convictions for the murder of Victor Jara, a celebrated folk singer and Allende supporter who was tortured and then shot 44 times.
Many of the details of the 1973 coup and the ensuing dictatorship remain unknown. Pinochet and the junta were efficient when it came to destroying evidence and the US has been grudging in declassifying its own records, which have emerged in a dribble over the years. Under pressure from Chile’s current president, Gabriel Boric – a 37-year-old former student activist – and from progressive Washington Democrats such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the US has declassified two new documents: presidential intelligence briefings given to Richard Nixon on the day of the coup and three days earlier.
It was hard to understand why they had been withheld for so long. They confirmed what had already been generally established: that the CIA had not directly stage-managed the 11 September coup. The presidential daily brief for 8 September contains reports of a plot by naval officers, but adds: “There is no evidence of a tri-service coup plan.”
“Should hotheads in the navy act in the belief they will automatically receive support from the other services, they could find themselves isolated,” the intelligence briefer told Nixon.
Even on the day of the coup itself, Nixon was told that, although some army units appeared to have joined the effort, “they may still lack an effectively coordinated plan that would capitalise on the widespread civilian opposition”.
Jack Devine, who was serving as a CIA clandestine officer in Chile in 1973, was eating lunch in an Italian restaurant in Santiago on 9 September when he got a message to call home. It was his wife, who told him a coup was coming.
One of Devine’s sources, a businessman and former naval officer, was leaving the country and had been unable to find the CIA man, so had gone to his house and told Mrs Devine to pass on his tipoff: “The military has decided to move. It is going to happen on September 11.”
Devine told the Observer: “That is the first clear sign that a coup was coming, just a couple of days ahead of time. We were caught by surprise. That’s the first evidence that something was coming. And many of the people still didn’t believe it in Washington and the CIA.”
There is no question, however, that the US had helped set the stage for the military takeover. From the time of Allende’s election on 4 September 1970 at the head of the Popular Unity alliance, the White House, led by Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, began plotting to get rid of him.
The CIA planned a putsch the following month, before Allende could even hold his inauguration. US spies found willing officers and supplied them with guns, cash and guarantees of US support for a military government. The plot led to the murder of the commander-in-chief, René Schneider, who had stood by the incoming president, but it fell short of toppling Allende when plotters in the military pulled out.
In a telephone conversation on 23 October, Kissinger told Nixon that there had been “a turn for the worse”.
“The next move should have been a government takeover, but that hasn’t happened,” he said, describing the Chilean military as “a pretty incompetent bunch”.
“They’re out of practice,” Nixon replied.
After the failure of the 1970 coup, Devine said, “Nixon sent out specific instructions to the CIA that there be no more coup plotting.” The US administration focused instead on undermining the Allende government, which had been elected by a slender margin and was facing substantial internal opposition. Washington coordinated with its allies in Latin America to block Chile’s access to international finance, persuaded US companies to leave Chile, manipulated the global price of copper, Chile’s principal export, and helped foment strikes within the country.
The Nixon administration was also quick to throw its support behind the junta. When shocked US diplomats sent reports of the slaughter that had followed the coup, Kissinger told his aides: “I think we should understand our policy – that however unpleasant they act, this government is better for us than Allende was.”
Pinochet found another powerful friend on the world stage when Margaret Thatcher was elected in Britain in 1979. She restored Chile’s export credits and dropped an arms embargo on the regime, selling it jet fighters and training its troops.
A succession of Tory ministers visited Chile, admiring the high economic growth rate and the wholehearted adoption of the absolutist monetary policy extolled by Milton Friedman at the University of Chicago. A group of Chilean economists who had studied there, known as the Chicago Boys, took top positions in Pinochet’s government, and the country became a test case for the policies of privatisation, deregulation and tight control of the money supply. Complicating social factors, such as trade unions and popular resistance, had been taken out of the picture.
“The Chilean coup was a triumph of the anti-communist movement in the United States and Latin America. You can’t get around the fact that it led to the defeat of democratic and progressive governments all over the region,” said John Dinges, who lived through the violent early years of the Pinochet era as one of the few US journalists to remain in the country after the coup.
“There was a youth-oriented revolutionary movement, which was sometimes quite extreme, advocating armed struggle, and that was also physically eliminated. So the violence was successful,” Dinges, the author of two books on the Pinochet regime, said. “More than 80% of the population of Latin America was under rightwing military dictatorships by the end of 1976.”
The Pinochet regime coordinated with fellow military-run governments in Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia and Brazil to eliminate leftwingers and social activists in Operation Condor, a concerted slaughter across the region. It had US support, in the form of technical support, training and military aid, through the Ford, Carter and Reagan administrations, all in the name of fighting communism.
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The coup’s lasting legacy around the world has been defined mostly by the international backlash to its shocking cruelty. It galvanised the human rights movement in Europe and the US. In Washington, the US’s involvement shocked politicians such as Senator Frank Church, who oversaw the first congressional hearings on the CIA’s covert activities which ultimately led to constraints on its future operations.
The martyrdom of Allende and his experiment in democratic socialism inspired a generation of leftwing political activists around the world.
The record of the Allende government is complicated. The Popular Unity alliance never commanded a parliamentary majority and was deeply split. Rapid nationalisation and blanket pay rises for workers brought with them mismanagement of state enterprises and hyperinflation. But because it was violently cut short, many different myths grew up around what might have been.
“It became like a Chilean mirror. People read into Chile what they wanted to see,” said Tanya Harmer, associate professor in Latin American international history at the London School of Economics.
“Across the world, the diverse groups on the left learned the lessons they wanted to learn from the coup. Social democrats viewed it as constitutional democracy overthrown, so it was about the rule of law. The more radical left read it as evidence that you could never have a revolution without an armed struggle.”
Dorfman argues the Allende government and its destruction changed the course of progressive politics. “There were lessons to be learned and they have endured: the need for vast coalitions to effect that structural change, and the way in which Chile’s suffering created a consciousness about human rights violations,” said Dorfman, who has written an assessment of the Allende legacy in the New York Review of Books, and a novel about Allende’s death, The Suicide Museum.
Inside Chile, the coup’s legacy is still being fought over. A recent Mori poll found only 42% of Chileans thought it had destroyed democracy, compared with 36% who said it had saved the country from Marxism.
Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive in Washington, who has led the pressure on the US government to declassify its documents on the coup, warned that denialism about the atrocities of the Pinochet era was strengthening, along with the rise of the far right.
“It is a Rosetta Stone for the discussion over the threat of authoritarianism versus the sanctity of democracy,” said Kornbluh, who is the author of a book based on the documents declassified so far, The Pinochet File. “And Chile is having that debate about its past because it’s dealing with this threat right now – and a number of other countries including the US, and countries in Europe, are facing the same issue.
“The coup in Chile was really the repression of a lot of hopes and dreams around the world, and I think that dynamic still resonates and is still relevant today.”
