Róbinson Rojas Sandford: "The Murder of Allende and the end of the Chilean way to socialism
Harper & Row, 1975

1.- Note from the publishers
2.- A Necessary Explanation
3.- Notes on the doctrine of NATIONAL SECURITY 

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1.- NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHERS:
"Ever since 1973 coup in Chile there has been considerable speculation
about what really happened and about the involvement of the U.S.
government and U.S. business interests. Now, this explosive account by
a Chilean journalist who lived through it all reveals the military,
industrial, and commercial conspiracy, abetted by North American
interests, to bring down the Allende government.
"Beginning on the day of the coup with Allende's murder and the 
military's artful staging of his "suicide", the book goes on to reveal
the background of intrigue and counter-intrigue; the participation
of the CIA, the Pentagon, and U.S. business interests, as well as that
of the Brazilian government; the sinister roles of the Chilean armed
forces, police forces, and political parties; the events throughout
Chile on the day of the coup as the massive military apparatus got 
under way; and the reign of terror and torture unleashed on the
civilian population. This is a fast-moving, well-paced narrative, 
with a "State of Siege" quality to it. It will be an important and
controversial book which neither Allendistas nor the conspirators
and their respectable fronts will like. It shows the latter as a gang
of premeditated murderers and the former, including Allende, as
honorable but very foolish men, who, until the very last moments,
believed that the military was made up of loyal soldiers, faithful to
the Constitution they were sworn to uphold. The author is an excellent
reporter and has carefully woven together the strands of seemingly
unrelated events into a coherent, compelling, and well-documented
story of who did what to whom, when."

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2.- (excerpts from "A Necessary Explanation")
"This book is an accusation. As such, it is written in the manner of 
an extensive police report. It recounts the story of an assassination:
the assassination of one particular man, of thousands of other men and
women, and of the ideas of those men and women. Here is the story
behind the assassination of Dr. Salvador Allende Gossens, the
constitutional President of Chile. The main actors in this drama are 
his murderers: their habits, their ideologies, their meetings, their
plans, their conspiracies.
"This is not a book that analyzes what happened. It is a book that 
tells what happened and how it happened. And because I am writing
as a journalist, a Chilean, a leftists, and a personal participant in
the events in Chile from 1970 to 1973, the reader will also find an
Allende very different from the image created by the funeral eulogies,
the statues, the posters, the worl-wide homages. Here is an Allende
stripped of the mask of perfection, of "everything he did, he did 
well", that so many people have been at such pains to present. Here
the heroic picture of Allende changes to one of a vacillating,
contradictory man attempting to defend "the Chilean way to socialism"
but making the political mistakes that opened the door to the forces
of fascist repression in Chile, aided and abetted by U.S. interests,
both commercial and governmental.
"This is not to say that Salvador Allende was not a hero. No one 
doubts that. No Chilean is unaware that Allende went down fighting,
without any hope of survival unless he surrendered. And he did not
surrender. Heroes die like that, and that is how he died. And that
is how many thousands of his fellow Chileans also died, hopelessly
defending a democracy crushed by the tanks, armored cars, fighter
planes, and machine guns of the rebel soldiers. Allende once said:
"Let them know this, let them hear this very clearly, let it make
a deep impression on them: I will defend this Chilean revolution and
I will defend the Popular government. This people have given me this
mandate; I have no alternative. Only by riddling me with bullets will
they be able to end our will to accomplish the people's programa".
So they riddled him with bullets. A few hours before his death, as
the rebel attack was under way, he broadcast a speech to his
countrymen: "Thus the first page of this story has been written. My
people and the people of the Americas will write the rest."
This is the Allende you will find in this book. And you will read
how the common people, the victims of the coup, were denied the
opportunity to organize for their own protection. In sum, while
this book is a denunciation of Allende's assassins, the generals and
admirals in Santiago, Chile, and in Washington, it is also a
denunciation of the tragic and vacillating conduct of those who
called themselves leaders of the people, but left their people
defenseless against the fascist-imperialist attack...
...The Chilean people paid for this mistake with more than 15,000
dead, more than 30,000 prisoners, more than 100,000 brutally 
tortured, more than 200,000 dismissed for political reasons, and
more than 30,000 students expelled from the university by the
military...The Chilean military unleashed their reign of terror
against the Chilean people in order to protect the interests of
the great North American consortia (Anaconda, Kennecott, ITT, et al),
as well as the strategic interests of the military-industrial 
complex in Washington...R.R."


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3.- on the doctrine of NATIONAL SECURITY
pp. 57-61
....At about this time, Roy Hansen,a sociologist at the University
of California, was preparing a scholarly study (PhD) on the subject 
of the Chilean Armed forces high command. Roy Hansen arrived in 
Chile in late 1964 and made contact with Alvaro Bunster at the 
University of Chile (the latter would also be drafted for Plan Camelot;
curiously, he was later appointed ambassador to Great Britain during 
Allende's administration). Through Bunster's sister Ximena he obtained 
the status of investigative sociologist...(Hansen) got in touch with 
the secretary general of the Chilean Army's Academy of War, Colonel 
Rene Schneider Chereau. Colonel Schneider gave Hansen unlimited access 
to the Academy of War's library and study plans, and arranged personal
interviews with the corps of generals... Hanson discovered that the
Chilean Army had a superstructure suited to a far larger corps than
the one they managed ( one general to every 1,000 men, that is, 32
generals to approximately 32,000 men, and one colonel to every 200
men. When he also discovered that the "decisive force" in the 
country's military system was the Army, he concentrated his 
investigation on it. The result of Hansen's work, which the Chilean
Army labeled "secret", was entitled MILITARY CULTURE AND
ORGANIZATIONAL DECLINE: A STUDY OF THE CHILEAN ARMY. A copy of his
study was shelved in the "classified" section of the Chilean Army's
Academy of War library, another went to the University of California
sociology library, and the rest went to the Pentagon.(7)
   In 1964, in Roy Hansen's view, the Chilean armed forces command 
elite were clearly in danger of disintegration as a result of their
total lack of participation in the country's important decisions.
In spite of the fact that the opinion of the Chilean armed forces'
command had been decisive in the country's political development,
for the last forty years they had been used merely as a "terrorizing
specter". At the same time, they were given an undignified third-
order role in the system of government and, what is more, were placed
in sixth or seventh rank economically. Hansen said that since the 
1924 military coup (by the Santiago garrison to force the oligarchic
majority in Parliament to pass reform laws for the workers' salaries 
and health and retirement benefits, to prevent a "Bolshevist
insurrection" of the masses), the Chilean military elite had not found
it necessary to intervene directly in politics, and this had had the
effect of relegating them to the attic in successive civil 
administrations.
Hansen "foresaw" that the high commands, to protect themselves from
further decline, would have a marked tendency in the near future to
take an active part in politics and in national decisions made by
the controlling circles.
Investigating what the generals thought about the rest of the society
they lived in, Hansen reached these conclusions: The generals had a
profound contempt for civilians, whom they considered useless, 
corrupt, and ignorant. Some of them believed that the Parlamentarians,
the civil politicians, and many officials high in the state's
hierarchy "had no idea what Chile is, how it must be defended from
external aggressions and internal subversion". It was also the 
generals' opinion that "the Fatherland" could be defended only by the
armed forces, because civil politicians were incompetent.They felt 
that civilians held the military in contempt but would turn to it
whenever they were unable to control the "subversion of the masses".
Hansen's statistics on the political opinions of the high command
were the following: 10 percent were right-wing, 80 percent were
centrist, and 10 percent were left-wing. But he added the explanation
that for the Chilean high commands, "leftist" meant Frei's Christian
Democratic program of agrarian and banking reform and new contracts
with the North American companies. For the generals, the coalition of
political parties that had supported Salvador Allende was the 
"extreme left" and none of them supported it.
In the first half of 1965, when the Pentagon wanted to put into 
practice a part of its long-term plan to prepare the Chilean armed
forces as reserve forces for maintaining the structure of Chilean
middle-class society in the case of a disaster with the civil 
politicians, there were serious problems. This part was Plan Camelot,
whose intention was to study, classify, and weigh all "the elements
of social, political, and economic pressure against the established
system" to achieve "a system to control those pressures". When it 
began to be applied, the militants in the leftist parties at the
University of Chile denounced it. The scandal was so bad that even
the Christian Democrats, for appearances' sake, supported an 
investigation in Parliament. The leftists in Parliament, plus a
segment of the Christian Democrats, described Plan Camelot as a
"foreign power's plan of espionage against Chile", and Washington
itself was forced to issue a statement in June 1965 that "we have
suggested to the corresponding authorities that the application of 
Plan Camelot in Chile and Colombia be suspended".[8]
But the work in the Chilean armed forces was not suspended. The
U.S. military mission (whose offices are inside the Ministry of 
Defense in Santiago, off limits for Chilean civilians) began 
"advising" the Academy of War curriculum and recommended that all
upper-class men at the Bernardo O'Higgins Military School (which
trains officers for the Army) and the Captain Avalos Aviation 
School (which trains officers for the Air Force) ought to spend
a forty-day instruction period at the U.S. Army's Southern Command
in the Panama Canal Zone.
This "recommendation" from the Pentagon to the Chilean high command
was put into operation in 1968 by the then director of the Bernardo
O'Higgins Military School, already the Pentagon's "trusted man" in
the Army, Brigadier General Rene Schneider Chereau, who had been so
helpful to Roy Hansen.
At the same time, Schneider, a professor in the Academy of War, was
active in introducing new courses on economics, politics, government
administration, foreign commerce, the politics of industrialization,
the history of the Chilean political parties, agrarian and urban 
reform, banking policies, and so on. That is to say, an entire 
curriculum in "public administration" was intended as an important
part in the instruction of the Chilean Army's future generals.In the
same way, intensive studies of Marxism were begun through courses on
Marx, Lenin, and Mao Tse-tung [9].
From 1968, Professor Schneider, after long work sessions with the
members of the U.S. military mission in Santiago, began to develop
"the modern theory of national security", which consisted of 
maintaining that the real meaning of the phrase "the armed forces are
the guarantors of national security" had a double character: security
with respect to external enemies, and security with respect to 
internal enemies, and that in "the present conditions of Chile" the
"internal" enemies of national security are much more dangerous, real,
and latent than the "external" enemies. And who are those "internal"
enemies? According to Pentagon theory as transmitted through General
Rene Schneider, they are all those who, taking advantage of popular
discontent resulting from social injustices and abuses by the 
possessors of wealth, are trying to remove Chile from the "Christian
Western world" in which it was born and is destined to continue 
living. Among these "internal" enemies, naturally, those "who 
advocate Marxist socialism" hold the place of honor.
Similar courses and theories were being developed at the same time in
the Navy, Air Force, and military police, all under the aegis of the
"North American intelligence advisers" and all through senior officers
like Brigadier General Rene Schneider Chereau.
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[7] In 1969 some Chilean journalists gained access to the "classified"
    copy that existed in Chile.  
[8] The quotes from the text of Plan Camelot come from the Spanish 
    edition published in August 1965 by the Oficina de Informaciones
    de la Camara de Senadores de Chile...The introduction to Plan
    Camelot stated that its purpose was to find a "system" which would
    "make it possible to predict and politically influence significant
     aspects of social change in the world's developing countries"...
    "Responsability for the operation belonged to the Special 
    Operations Research Office (SORO) of the American University in 
    Washington, DC"..."A Pentagon spokesman stated on July 8 that the
    project, launched by the Army's information services, was 
    functioning in various countries: Peru, Colombia and Chile...a 
    great number of specialists in social sciences of international
    reputation had contributed ideas and information referring to
    Communist subversive attacks" (UPI).
    The quotes from the sociologist Roy Hansen's work came from a
    photographic copy of the mimeographed English version that is
    kept in the Academy of War's library in Santiago. After Sept. 11,
    1973, I destroyed the negatives of that photographic copy, while
    the positive copy in my office at the journal PURO CHILE was
    probably burned when the military mombed and set fire to our
    building on the day of the coup. In my article "Las Fuerzas 
    Armadas Chilenas (Causa ML, No. 21, Aug.1971, pp. 11-25), I
    published an extensive extract from Hansen's investigations.
[9] See Causa ML, No. 2, August 1968, my article "La Penetracion
    Norteamericana en las Fuerzas Armadas chilenas".  
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pp. 77-81
"Suddenly, to an outside observer, the Pentagon's apparently innocuous 
1964 undertaking to introduce courses in economics, politics, 
industrial development, agrarian reform, and so on in training the
Chilean armed forces was amply justified. A colonial country's armed
forces had been prepared to cope with a possible crisis in 
colonization brought about by the failure of the civilian 
organizations dependent on the oligopolies, or by excessive pressure
from the labourers, peasants, and office workers to disrupt the 
system.This very set of circumstances was gestating in early 1971...
In 1970... a paper entitled "Las Fuerzas Armadas en el Tercer Mundo"
(The Armed Forces in the Third World),was published in MEMORIAL DEL
EJERCITO DE CHILE, No.356 (Chilean Army Briefs)... the article's main
concepts were as follows:
1.- In the Third World the military has a strong tendency to 
    participate in politics.
2.- The Third World's armed forces are the only social organization
    that is cohesive, capable, and efficient enough to cope with the
    socio-economic problems of underdeveloped countries (this is, of 
    course, the same thesis put forth by Nelson Rockefeller in his
    1969 Report on the Americas)
3.- "Communism" is a real enemy, but on "innumerable occasions" the
    small groups of "oligarchs"that dominate a society have used the
    "specter of Communism" to pressure the military to intervene in
    politics, overthrow governments, and thus enable the oligarchs to
    recover their position as exploiters.
4.- The chief cause of political unrest in Latin America is poverty.
    Poverty is produced by an unjust distribution of wealth. If 
    wealth comes to be equitably distributed, "there will be no
    subversion in Latin America".
5.- The United States has an obligation to prevent subversion in Latin
    America by aiding us with development programs.
6.- The correct way to confront the threat of Communism is by 
    achieving agrarian, banking, and industrial reforms that are just
    to both "the laborer and the industrialist".
7.- Only the armed forces have shown themselves capableof effecting
    change in Third World societies without creating "social chaos".
8.- In Latin America, the armed forces are the only cohesive 
    organization that can keep these countries within "the Western
    bloc of nations".
9.- The problem of economic development in each country has ceased to
    be one belonging solely to the politicians or certain civilian
    groups. It is basically a problem of "national sovereignty", which
    fundamentally relates to the country's armed forces. A weak 
    country has a weak military apparatus. An economically strong 
    country has strong armed forces. Thus, when politicians prove
    incompetent to develop a country's economy, the military is
    obligated to intervene to prevent the national sovereignty from
    being endangered.
10.- "The Constitution and the laws" are not "unalterable social
    entities" but rather legislative guidelines that can change, 
    adapt, or "destroy themselves", according to what is convenient
    for a nation's security and its internal and external sovereignty.

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