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World indicators on the environment | World Energy Statistics - Time Series | Economic inequality |
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The murder of Allende And the end of the Chilean way to socialism Róbinson Rojas Harper and Row, New York, 1975,1976-Fitzhenry&Whiteside Ltd., Toronto, Canada, 1975 |
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THE MURDER OF ALLENDE 1. Hunt down and kil1 20,000 people whose names were on lists previously distributed to al1 commands in the twenty-five provinces. The goal for the first hours of the coup was 6,000 of these people. This search-and-destroy mission was named Operation Pincers. 2. Arrest and confine 3,000 other persons in previously designated concentration camps. 3. Occupy militarily and maintain all administrative, economic, and political centers in the country. 4. Prepare for a combat period of five to seven days, with projected casualties of 50,000 people, of which the armed forces should sustain a portion "no greater" than 2,000 men in order to guarantee the operation's success. (On these points, the military leaders were to contradict each other in public statements after the massacre. For example, General Gustavo Leigh, in the Santiago daily La Tercera on September 17, 1973, stated; "We are taking this course of action because 100,000 dead in three days is preferable to 1,000,000 in three years, as happened in Spain." And General Augusto Pinochet, in a national network TV interview in October 1973, said: "The resistance crumbled rapidly. We expected, we were prepared for them to resist for five days -that didn't happen; there could have been 50,000 dead.") In any case, it is important to realize the fol1owing: the four basic goals of the blitzkrieg on September 11 show that the rebel soldiers were acting very confidently -they knew that they would be catching by surprise a total1y unsuspecting and unarmed or poorly armed populace. The people's resistance would be the resistance of desperation in the face of certain death. For this reason, they were calculating one dead soldier to every twenty-four dead civilians. (This is worth remembering if one has in mind the alleged Plan Zeta, in which the civilian left was going to wipe out all 100,000 soldiers in the Chilean armed forces. This nonexistent plan was given as an excuse for the September coup by the generals and admirals.) In the months following September 10, the situation became so |
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201 wife [engineer Eugenio Ruiz Tagle, who belonged to the MAPU, a workers' and peasants' party]. All those shot had been sentenced a few days earlier to jail terms ranging from two months to forty years. But the junta chose to have them dead. ... While the military junta celebrated the passing of two months since the government overthrow, a long convoy of cage trucks, generally used for cattle, transported 900 political prisoners to the saltpeter works at Chacabuco, recently converted into a concentration camp, where the prisoners will have to tolerate the rigors of a desert climate. The saltpeter works had been converted two years ago into a national monument by President Allende." Another cable, dated September 28, 1973, from Agence France Presse in Montreal, reported: "Three Canadian priests expelled from Chile on their arrival today denounced the campaign of "murders by the thousands" and "widespread denunciations" that fol1owed the military coup of September 11. Father Jean Latulippe, who worked with a popular initiative organization, said that according to unquestionable testimony, when "the occupants of a military truck on September 13 frisked a twenty-year-old pedestrian and discovered a knife on him, an officer pulled out his revolver and shot him on the spot. They threw the body into the truck and told the witness to disappear. It's clear that the soldiers had the freedom to kill anybody they chose," the priest added. ..But the repression against popular leaders was perfectly organized." There were other cases, such as those attested by Chilean Congress- man Eduardo Contreras, in Ñuble Province: Military Police in Ninhue deposited a dying young teacher, Carlos Sepúlveda Palaviccino, in front of his house. For two hours they prevented his wife from going to him. When he finally died, the military police left and allowed his wife, now his widow, to go to him. But the end of 1973 did not bring the end of torment for the Chilean people. Even in April 1974, nearly seven months after the coup, the situation remained just as ghastly. On April 1 the Associated Press sent this news wire from Santiago: "Catholic, Lutheran, and Jewish religious leaders in Chile presented an appeal to the courts on behalf of 131 persons about whom, they say, nothing is known since their arrest by the forces of order in the last months. The |
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203 bodies were half decayed. When the peasants notified the military police post at the city gates, they were told curtly: "you saw nothing. If you say anything, we will arrest you and cut your throats, just like those corpses." Those bodies were the leftovers from the "extermination" operation in Ñuble Province, resembling the "leftovers" in any other province in Chile after September 11, debris left by bayonets, machine guns, and torture devices of the Chilean Air Force, Navy, and Army. Shortly before this incident at the Las Tejuelas bridge, the Arauco Fishing Association, which produces canned seafood in the port of Talcahuano, had to halt work for several days. The fish they were receiving were full of bits of human flesh from bodies the Chilean Navy had tossed into the ocean after they came out of the naval base's torture chambers. One journalist, still in Chile, whose name I must withhold, told me how corpses of people who had been tortured and later shot appeared in the Mapocho River, which runs through Santiago: "During the first weeks of October I had to cross Bulnes bridge to get over the Mapocho very early every morning. The first time I could not believe my eyes. It couldn't be true. From a distance I could see lots of people gathered along the bridge's railing and the riverbanks. They were looking at the half-floating corpses, four men's bodies. I still remember, one was wearing a red shirt. Farther off, there was a fifth body which had been dragged ashore. This scene went on every day, and not just at this bridge. You could see them at Pedro de Valdivia bridge too. Dozens of women would station themselves at the bridges every day, in hopes of seeing the body of a husband or son who had disappeared after being picked up by the soldiers. One day I saw nine corpses, all with bare chests, hands tied behind their backs. The bodies were perforated by bullet holes. And with them was the body of a girl, apparently fifteen or sixteen years old." Children were not spared. On September 18 a military patrol went to pick up José Soto, a maker of wrought iron furniture, in his sixties, president of the supply and price control junta in his district, Quinta Normal. Soto wasn't home. His fourteen-year old son was alone in the house. The military patrol seized the boy. Afterward they threw the |
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NOTES: page 192 a much greater possibility of receiving better compensation' " (El Día, Buenos Aires, Nov. 16, 1973). "During the past week, experts from the missions of the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Inter-American Committee for the Alliance for Progress, and OAS observers arrived in Chile. ...They are working at the Banco Central de Chile [in conjunction with General Eduardo Cano], from where they get in touch with all the organizations that interest them" (reported in the Chilean magazine Ercilla. Nov. 14-20, 1973). "A mission to acquire oxygen, led by Chancellor Admiral Ismael Huerta, was sent to the U.S. and Canada, and its purpose was accom- plished. They made contact with international agencies, with the gov- ernment, and with private North American corporations, with whom there is much business pending" ( ibid.. p. 23). In Washington, on November 5, 1973, UPI reported that Chile promised to repair alleged injustices in the expropriations of the North American copper companies, and announced that compensation would be negotiated. The new Chilean Ambassador to the U.S., General Wal- ter Heitman, declared that it was unfair to deny compensation unilater- ally to the expropriated enterprises, under the pretext that they had not paid taxes in previous years. The Buenos Aires daily El Día. quoting the Bank of America's report on the Chilean coup, Dec. 14, 1973: "The report says that 'the national banks will, in the future, as was the case before being nationalized by the overthrown government, act independently and directly in their foreign operations, but under the supervision of the Banco Central and the Superintendent of Banks.' " Washington, Dec. 22, 1973 (Prensa Latina): "Chile agreed with the U.S. to pay $124 million as the first installment of its foreign debt and to grant 'fair compensation to U.S. interests.' The decision was made known in a joint communiqué from the State Department and Chile's National Treasury. The U.S. government's document says that 'the new military junta of Chile has promised to pay the compensations corresponding to American enterprises and assures a climate propitious to investments' " (El Expreso, Lima, Dec. 23, p. 15). New York, Jan. 4, 1974 (Reuter Latin): "Dow Chemical today an- nounced the signing of a contract with the Chilean government to reassume administration of two companies. ...Fernando Leniz, Minister of the Economy, said that the government has a plan ready to return the banks federalized during the regime of the late President Salvador AIlende to their former owners." |
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NOTES: page 193 turning nearly 50 percent of the land expropriated in agrarian reforms carried out by the Frei and Allende administrations). In Santiago, Chile, on June 13, 1974, the AP reported that on the previous day the government had put up for sale 107 companies that were expropriated during the three-year administration of President Salvador Allende. The CORFO published a list of a total of 150 firms to be returned to the private sector. The list contained seven companies that once operated on American capital, two on British, and one on Italian. Nine months earlier, the military junta had returned about ninety companies to their former proprietors. A CORFO spokesman said that the state would sell all companies presently under its control, with the exception of public or strategic services (La Estrella de Panamá, June 14, 1974). 5. As examples, let us look at the Army commanders in chief: General Luis Miqueles Caridi, commander in chief in 1967: courses at Fort Belvoir and Fort Monmouth in 1941 and 1942; in 1952, military mission at the Chilean Embassy in Washington. General Sergio Castillo Aran- guiz, commander in chief in 1968: Fort Knox in 1969. General René Schneider Chereau, commander in chief in 1969-1970: Fort Benning in 1953. General Carlos Prats González, commander in chief in 1970- 1973: Fort Leavenworth in 1954. General Augusto Pinochet, comman- der in chief from 1973: Fort Leavenworth, 1955; Southern Command, 1956; military mission in Washington, 1956. See also p. 221, note 2, and p. 242, note 7. 6. The first official reference that the Chileans had to the rebel generals' surgical idea (earlier, the leftist dailies had reported on this primitive notion, especially in August and September) was on the night of Septem- ber 11, 1973, when General Gustavo Leigh explained over nationwide TV that the coup was intended "to extirpate the Marxist cancer in Chile." On September 19, El Mercurio reported that General Augusto Pinochet had declared that "when we have extirpated the malignant tumor of Marxism" "the country will have all its liberties restored, since it is for these that we have fought." There are some phrases approaching this idea which will probably pass into history, such as General Pinochet's statement quoted in the Caracas weekly Punto en Domingo, Sept. 30,1973: "Democracy carries in its core the seed of its own destruction. Democracy every so often has to bathe itself in blood for it to go on being democracy." For his part, General Sergio Arellano Stark, head of the Santiago garrison, interviewed on "A Esta Hora se Improvisa," Channel 13 TV, Sept. 23, 1973, at 11 p .M., said: "There |
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