I arrived in Chile at almost exactly the half-way point of the Popular Unity government. Salvador Allende had been elected President on 4 September 1970, at his fourth attempt at the presidency, heading a coalition of his own Socialist Party, the Radical Party (like Britain’s Labour Party, an affiliate of the Socialist International), the Communist Party and several smaller parties, one of them a splinter from the Christian Democrats.
The mood in the country in March 1972 was still quite euphoric, following substantial and hugely popular achievements such as the nationalisation of Chile’s copper mines and the pursuit of a more radical land reform. People still felt that now, at last, they had a government which belonged to them and would bring real and irreversible improvements for the poor and the dispossessed. In the words of the Inti-Illimani song: ‘Porque esta vez no se trata de cambiar un presidente, será el pueblo quien construya un Chile bien diferente’ —This time it’s not just a change of President. This time it will be the people who will build a really different Chile.
Radicalised culture
Chile was an intensely exciting place to be. Everyone was ‘comprometido’ —committed, involved. There was no room for being in the words of the Victor Jara song, ‘ni chicha, ni limonada’ —a fence-sitter, neither beer nor lemonade. Political debate was constant and ubiquitous among all ages and classes of people of the left, centre and right. Newspapers (most of the principal ones still controlled by the right), magazines, radio and TV discussed every action of the government, every promise made by Allende and his ministers and every move of the opposition with a depth, sophistication and venom almost unimaginable in Britain today.
The changes were not only political, they were profound changes in the national culture. Most of the popular singers, many actors, artists, poets and authors identified closely with Popular Unity and considered themselves engaged in a battle against the imported, implanted values of Hollywood, Disney, Braniff Airlines, the ‘cold-blooded dealers in dreams, magazine magnates grown fat at the expense of youth’ in the excoriating words of Victor Jara’s song ¿Quien mató a Carmencita? There was a vogue for playing chess and in cafés and squares you would see people earnestly bent over chess-boards while conducting vehement political debates.
The national publisher Quimantu (the old ZigZag company, bought by the government in 1971) was printing a vast range of books, produced and sold at low prices, to enable all but the poorest to own books, enjoy reading and have access to literature. In the two years of its existence it produced almost 12 million books, distributing them not only in bookshops, but street news-kiosks, buses, through the trade unions and in some factories.
Dark clouds
But dark clouds were beginning to gather. The CIA had already attempted a coup in 1970, with a botched kidnap attempt ending in the murder of General Schneider, commander-in-chief of the Chilean army. ITT and other US corporations were busily urging more decisive intervention on the State Department. There was a vast increase in funding to opposition groups in Chile and the price of copper, Chile’s crucial export, was being manipulated on the world market. The economy was beginning to falter, and inflation to climb.
In October 1972 the owners of road transport staged a massive lockout (still, mistakenly, called ‘the lorry-drivers strike’), paralysing road transport, attacking or sabotaging the vehicles of any who continued to work and paying a daily wage well in excess of normal earnings to owner-drivers who brought their lorries to the road-side encampments of the strike. The atmosphere of these was similar to those of the refinery blockades in Britain in 2000, but far more serious and violent. Food, oil, petrol and other necessities ran short.
I spent some of my free hours unloading trains in Santiago’s Estación Yungay, alongside teams of volunteers organised by the Chilean Young Communists and other groups.
The lockout subsided, and all attention was turned for the next few months on the mid-term congressional elections due in March 1973. Despite a concerted opposition media campaign to denounce growing food shortages and economic difficulties which were affecting the living standards of many workers, Popular Unity increased its share of the vote to 43.2 per cent.
By now, however, the Christian Democrat party had turned decisively to the right and began to identify more and more closely with the parties of the traditional right. Virulently anti-communist and sometimes anti-semitic messages became more frequent in their newspaper, La Prensa. Together, this right-dominated block held the majority in both Senate and Chamber of Deputies and could block any legislation. Their messages were that Popular Unity meant ‘the way to communism via your stomach’, in other words by hunger; and that socialism meant promoting envy and hatred (of the rich).
Violence of the wealthy
The now united opposition decided that if democratic votes would not provide the results it required, it would resort to violence and call on the military to intervene. Government buildings and institutions were targeted by arsonists, and sabotage of the electricity network brought frequent black-outs. I watched gangs of young middle-class men in Providencia, one of the wealthier avenues of Santiago, halting trolley-buses and setting fire to them.
On June 29 the No.2 Tank Regiment headed by Colonel Souper and backed by the leadership of the fascist group Patria y Libertad, staged an attempted coup. Tanks surrounded La Moneda, the presidential palace in the centre of Santiago. But the rest of the armed forces failed to move in support and the coup failed. I spent that day with my friend Wolfgang, a film-maker at the State Technical University, peering round street corners and trying to film the action as it developed.
We could not tell at the time if this was a dress rehearsal or a false start by a group of hot-heads. Our relief at its failure was short-lived: it was immediately clear that worse lay ahead. At my work-place, the Forestry Institute, we began to take turns to mount guard at night to protect the buildings against sabotage. The institute’s distinctive Aro jeeps had been ambushed on roads in the conservative south of Chile and the drivers beaten up.
In the poor neighbourhood where I lived, close to the centre of Santiago, we had set up a JAP, a food supply committee, which aimed to suppress the black market, discourage hoarding and ensure that basic necessities such as rice, sugar, cooking oil and some meat, were distributed to local residents at official prices. We had enrolled 1,200 families in an 8-block area, and the weekly general meetings were attended by 400 or more. We worked with the owners of the small corner grocery stores common in that area. But they had no love for us.
Military rebellion
The country was slipping into a de facto state of civil war. Allende attempted to stabilise the situation by including military officers in his cabinet, but his loyal army chief, General Prats, was forced to resign when a group of wives of other senior generals staged a demonstration outside his house, accusing him of cowardice. His replacement was General Augusto Pinochet, at that time still believed to be loyal to the constitution.
By early September 1973, we fully expected a crescendo of right-wing violence, a military rebellion, further coup attempts. Popular Unity supporters marched in a vast demonstration on 4 September, taking hours to pass in front of the Moneda Palace, where a desperately tired and grim-faced Allende stood to salute his supporters.
But nothing had prepared us for the swiftness, the precision and the totality of the coup that began in Valparaiso on the night of 10 September and had gained complete control of the government, all major cities, airports, radio stations, phones, transmitters and communications by 3pm on the 11 September.
In the Instituto Forestal, we met in the canteen. Most people left to go home, collect children from school, ensure the safety of their families. Some perhaps had orders from their parties to go to particular points of the city, to defend, to await orders, possibly to take up arms. A group of us stayed on to guard the buildings until the military curfew made it impossible for us to leave. The radio broadcast only military music and bandos, military communiqués, read in a clipped, cruel, mechanical voice, declaring an indefinite 24-hour curfew, reading a list of names of those who must hand themselves in immediately to the Ministry of Defence, and justifying the ‘military pronouncement’.
Torture and killings
At first we believed that there would be resistance, that the armed forces would divide, even that General Prats was marching from the south at the head of regiments loyal to the constitution. But none of this occurred. Pockets of resistance in industrial areas of the cities were swiftly and brutally eliminated. Some military officers were arrested, others fled the country, but there was no significant rebellion. The parties of Popular Unity and the MIR hunkered down for underground resistance but, having worked publicly and openly for so long, most of their existing leaders were instantly identifiable and were soon arrested or killed.
Together with other non-Chileans, I hid that night in the outhouse of a colleague who lived near the Instituto. Returning next morning we found the institute empty, with signs of doors having been forced and some bullet marks. A military patrol had come during the night and arrested the director and those who had remained on guard. We went through the buildings, office by office, removing all lists of names, trade union membership, party posters and badges, everything that we supposed m