Latin Americans Remember the 1973 Coup in Chile against Salvador Allende on its 40th Anniversary
!!!
While people in the United States remembered the September 11, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York City and the Pentagon in Washington, D.C., Latin Americans pondered “the other 9/11.” Salvador Allende, who came to power in Chile in 1970 as the first elected socialist president in Latin America, fell victim to a coup by the Chilean military on September 11, 1973. Rather than step down, Allende committed suicide in the presidential palace as it was attacked, seemingly bringing to an end the so-called “Chilean way” to socialism. His elected government was replaced by the military dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet. In Chile today there is clearly no consensus about the meaning of the events. Many Pinochet supporters still interpret the coup as a necessary, even heroic, feat that saved Chile from socialist “domination.” They are utterly unrepentant. Yet other Chileans remembered that “dark day in the country’s history” with television specials, plays, recitals, and protests, such as the event in central Santiago in which a thousand participants lay down in a “corpse line” to symbolize those who disappeared during the dictatorship. Michelle Bachelet, former socialist president and favorite for re-election, was a twenty-something medical student at the time. After the arrest and execution of her father (Air Force General Alberto Bachelet) who remained loyal to the Allende government, she and her mother were arrested and tortured.
In Chile
El Mercurio and La Tercera of Santiago reported that on the eve of the anniversary, Chilean President Sebastian Piñera told interviewers that, while military intervention was a dark moment in Chilean history, he thought that President Salvador Allende and his Popular Unity regime shared responsibility for “the breakdown of democracy.” Referring to the management of Allende, the rightwing Piñera said that “even though his government was democratically elected, “in my opinion he did not respect basic democratic principles…he had no respect for the law.” Piñera insisted that Allende’s goal was to “transform Chile into a model of Marxist socialism like Cuba.” So, “at the end of the day…the only solution was a military coup.” It was “not sudden, it was not a surprise,” he added. Finally, Piñera dismissed Allende’s growing popularity as a “romantic” effect given the fact that he killed himself rather than surrender.
Likewise in Qué Pasa Magazine Gen. ( R ) Guillermo Garín, one of Pinochet’s most trusted subordinates and now the vice president of the Fundación Pinochet, insisted that “I have no reason to apologize.” He asserted that the Chilean military “prevented a civil war.” They made possible the prosperity that Chile now enjoys. They acted “with a sense of patriotism” and “struggled to take the country forward.” He also claimed, in spite of massive evidence to the contrary, that the military regime “did not violate human rights.” Rather, “in the midst of this struggle individual people committed aberrations.” They dealt with the “issue of security” in an “independent” manner. After all, they “had to fight against an enemy” that “threatened Chileans.”
Yet in Página/12 of Buenos Aires Chilean writer, intellectual, and political activist Ariel Dorfman remembered it differently. He is alive forty years later to tell the story of the coup thanks to the generosity of his friend Claudio Jimeno. “I remember it now as then, when I left him without knowing that it was a final farewell, not knowing that soon he would be dead and I would survive, that they would kill him instead of picking on me.” Like millions of other Chileans Dorfman and Jimeno were fervent supporters of Allende who claimed (in a time when guerrilla war was the predominant mode of popular mobilization on the Latin American left) that it was possible to have a revolution without resorting to violence. And “after decades of repression and fear, of sorrow and combat,” the dictatorship ended and democracy was restored, but it was also “severely restricted.” The “sinister Pinochet constitution, approved in a fraudulent referendum in 1980, remains to this day the supreme law of the republic, hindering many essential reforms that the country needs.” What is more, Chile became an economic “laboratory” for “a savage neoliberal experiment in which unbridled greed, extreme resource denationalization, and the suppression of workers’ rights were imposed on a helpless people.” Yet on the other hand, Chile also showed how a people can, through non-violence and an arduous campaign of civil disobedience, conquer fear and end a dictatorship. The encouraging resistance movements in favor of democracy that have sprouted on every continent in recent years prove that the future does not have to be ruthless, that the Chilean September 11 did not mark the end of the search for freedom and social justice.
And in the Buenos Aires Herald Michelle Bachelet reminded the world that “I am here as a survivor.” The former Chilean president and current front-runner in the November election headed a ceremony at the former detention centre Villa Grimaldi as part of the country’s remembrance of the coup. Bachelet, who was imprisoned and tortured at Villa Grimaldi, said “we hope to build a country that is able to move forward in a fair, equal and peaceful way and that is only possible if we advance in truth, justice, reparations and commitment.”
Finally, in La Tercera of Santiago Senator Ximena Rincón wrote that perhaps the best tribute to the pain of September 11th is the commitment to promoting and deepening democracy. Some of the political actors from this period have chosen to ask forgiveness “by act or omission,” while other have tried to explain away their actions “in those sad years.” Yet while many claim that there were errors “on all sides,” it is a fact that “nothing justifies the democratic breakdown brought on by the military coup.” And just as important, “the Constitution of 80 was conceived and approved” under threat of force. So the “essential question” is: are Chile’s institutional structures capable of “integrating all the political perspectives of people who feel alienated by Chile’s current version of democracy.” This is the “special challenge” for her generation, the children of 73 who grew up under a regime that “negated democracy, denied participation, and rejected differences.” They learned to reconstruct democratic values in an honest and principled political struggle. They learned to make alliances and friendships and to generate civic engagement. These experiences are the engine that drives the fight to get institutions to proactively promote democratic values.
Throughout the Region
Mercopress of Montevideo recognized that the figure of Pinochet still divides Chile. This was clear when Chile’s conservative government and center-left opposition held separate events to mark the 40th anniversary of the bloody coup that ushered in 17 years of harsh military rule under the late Gen. Augusto Pinochet. The official observance was led by President Sebastian Piñera, a billionaire businessman who built his fortune during the Pinochet era. The opposition government’s ceremony held their own. Both Piñera and Bachelet condemned the human rights abuses of the Pinochet regime, which killed more than 3,000 people, jailed and tortured around 38,000 others, and forced tens of thousands into exile. But while Piñera accused the Socialist president ousted by the coup, Salvador Allende, of undermining the rule of law, Bachelet said responsibility for the damage done by Pinochet’s rule lies exclusively with the perpetrators of the coup.
La Jornada of Mexico City remarked on the degree of cultural activity connected to the anniversary. They noted the “protest in which thousands of people lay on the ground for several blocks from Avenida Alameda de Santiago to the Plaza Italia.” Called “Querer no ver,” the event was designed by a group of artists who sought to make visible the systematic human rights violations committed by the dictatorship. Summoned through social networks, mostly young participants lined face up and lay still for 11 minutes. There were also “dozens of plays, films, books, and photo exhibitions” that sought to show the horror of the 17 years of the Pinochet dictatorship and the censorship of the “long years of cultural darkness.”
O Globo of Rio de Janeiro reported disorders in Santiago on September 11. At least 13 people were arrested at dawn after rioting in several neighborhoods of the capital, complete with burning barricades, shootings, and buses damaged. In the morning, seven high schools were occupied by students in a demonstration in memory of the victims. Sebastián Piñera, the first conservative elected president since the country’s democratization and years of socialist governments called for national reconciliation, yet Sen. Isabel Allende stressed that the way to forgiveness was through the truth about what happened during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Allende’s daughter said that there are families today that still cannot bury their disappeared loved ones. El Telégrafo of Guayaquil also noted the riots in the suburbs of Santiago, former bastions of opposition to the dictatorship, where protesters erected barricades and clashed with police, leaving at least 68 detainees and five vehicles burned. They remarked that such protests are traditional at this date, when the residents of Santiago’s poorer neighborhoods are given license to express their discontent, but there is also usually some looting of shops, in a mixture of political protest and crime.
Sergio Carrasco, who worked for the Associated Press bureau in Santiago, remembered events for the Buenos Aires Herald. In particular he remembered the justification for the coup: “in the face of a grievous economic, social and moral crisis,” they proclaimed, the Armed Forces were “united to initiate the historic and responsible mission of liberating the people from the Marxist yoke.” The air force commander, General Gustavo Leigh, justified the violent takeover, saying: “It is necessary to eradicate the Marxist cancer from its roots.” In El Nacional of Caracas Vladimir Villegas recalled how the Stadium of Santiago was converted into a concentration camp where Chilean men and women were taken and murdered. The Chilean socialist experiment faced powerful internal and external enemies. And while many mistakes may have made the Popular Unity government, nothing justified the emergence of a bloody dictatorship that shamelessly imitated the procedures of the German Nazis. In Página/12 of Buenos Aires Mercedes López San Miguel reminded readers that according to official figures, the number of people missing or killed in Chile between 1973 and 1990 exceeded 3000, while another 40,000 people survived political imprisonment and torture. The Amnesty Law Decree, adopted in 1978, exempts military and police from criminal liability for human rights violations committed between September 11, 1973 and March 10, 1978. While some judgments have avoided application of the standard that still exists, it is inconsistent with Chile’s international obligations on human rights.
Folha de São Paulo’s columnist Vladimir Safatle asserted that Salvador Allende led a government that sought to overcome economic inequality while deepening mechanisms of direct democracy, trying to find “an innovative path between bureaucratic societies of Eastern Europe and capitalist countries.” This “Chilean way” of socialism, in fact, “embodied the deepest fear of countries like the Cold-War U.S.” They feared a successful model “capable of bringing socialist redistribution of wealth practices to a multiparty democracy.” Allende, therefore, fell victim to a “strategy of sabotage” aimed at creating economic and political instability, sanctioned and encouraged by Henry Kissinger, then U.S. Secretary of State of U.S. Juan Jesús Aznarez in El Espectador of Bogotá also spoke of the U.S. role in Chile. He pointed out that this is “not the first time the United States had promoted the overthrow of Latin American presidents.” He listed the examples of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954, Juan Bosch in the Dominican Republic in 1963, and João Goulart in Brazil in 1964.
Finally, Hector Dada Hirezi explored the impact of the 1973 coup on El Salvador in El Faro Magazine of San Salvador. One of the founding members of the Christian Democrats, Hirezi remembered that the rise of Salvador Allende and “socialism in democracy” showed the way to other Latin American nations. The Salvadoran Christian Democratic Party could look to its “Chilean sister party” as the model to follow. The dream of a democracy with social justice seemed to be manifesting itself as a material reality. While in El Salvador the armed forces, the oligarchy, and the United States were clear obstacles, the dream, it was hoped, might be realizable, even if with difficulty. The victory of Salvador Allende seemed to say that a nation could “build socialism without resorting to armed revolution,” though the “birth of leftist armed groups in our country was almost simultaneous with Allende’s assumption of the presidency,” and the “electoral path to change” remained an “impossibility” for decades. Young people in El Salvador, so energized by the promise of Allende’s government, came to believe after the coup that the only route to social justice was through armed struggle.