| |
 The political economy of development Dedication About us Castellano Français Home |
|
|
| A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z |
| World indicators on the environment | World Energy Statistics - Time Series | Economic inequality |
|
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 |
|
| 1 The Artful Staging of a "Suicide"
|
| 2
THE MURDER OF ALLENDE Garrido suddenly realized who he was: Salvador Allende. "We shit on the President!" he shouted. There was more machine-gun fire from Garrido's patrol. Allende was riddled with bullets. As he slumped back dead, a second group of civilian defenders broke into the Salon Rojo from a side door. Their gunfire drove back Garrido and his patrol, who fled down the main staircase to the safety of the first floor, which the rebel troops had occupied. Some of the civilians returned to the Salon Rojo to see what could be done. Among them was Dr. Enrique Paris, a psychiatrist and President Allende's personal doctor. He leaned over the body, which showed the points of impact of at least six shots in the abdomen and lower stomach region. After taking Allende's pulse, he signaled that the President was dead. Someone, out of nowhere, appeared with a Chilean flag, and Enrique Paris covered the body with it. The furious battle between the first and second floors continued. Dr. Paris's group left the half-destroyed Salon Rojo, whose roof was now in flames. In groups of four and five people, the defenders con- tinued fighting, most of them unaware that President Allende was dead. Less than an hour later, around quarter to three in the afternoon, the civilian defenders were overcome by troops from the Infantry School, the Tacna Regiment, and the 2nd Armored Regiment. Thirty- two people had survived of the original group of forty-two men and women who had been defending La Moneda for five hours. The entire second floor of the building was now occupied by the invading troops. The commander of the attack on La Moneda, Brigadier General Javier Palacios Ruhman, followed by Captain Garrido and his patrol, marched into the Salon Rojo, leaned over Allende's body, and pulled away the bloody Chilean flag. Turning to Garrido, General Palacios ordered: "We must seal off this room. Don't let anybody else in. No one is to see the President's body. Put me through to headquarters, to General Pinochet in person." " Attention Post One! Attention Post One! Combat Unit Alpha One here. General Palacios requests to speak to General Pinochet." |
| The Artful Staging of a "Suicide"
3 Palacios took the radio microphone and reported in a dry, precise voice: "General Palacios to General Pinochet. Mission accomplished. Moneda taken. President dead." "How is the body?" the Army's commander in chief asked. "Destroyed." "Don't let anyone see it. Wait for instructions." It was then a few minutes before 3 P.M. on September 11, 1973. At 6 A.M. that morning, the high command of the Chilean armed forces had mobilized some 100,000 men and launched an all-out attack against the economic, political, social, and administrative centers in the country. No less than 3,000 leaders of laborers, farmers, office workers, and political parties were murdered on September 11. Be- tween the eleventh and the fifteenth, 5,500 more were to be killed combating the rebel military forces, and some 6,300 persons would be imprisoned and shot or murdered in some other way between the twelfth and the thirtieth of September. In the first eighteen days, there were approximately 15,000 civilian casualties. Of these, slightly less than 6,000 were in Santiago: 800 murdered on the eleventh, 2,900 killed later in combat, and 2,200 shot or murdered after being taken prisoner with or without "summary trial in time of war." These tragic statistics are the result of the second part of the coup plan, Operation Beta One, which the rebel generals had intended principally to affect Santiago. It involved the military occupation of the city's two main industrial concentrations: Los Cerrillos, in the southeast, and Vicuna Mackenna, in the central eastern area. In con- junction with these occupations, commando units composed of mili- tary personnel and civilian fascists were to engage in "pincer opera- tions." Between 6 and 8 A.M. on the eleventh, these units would arrest about 6,000 persons throughout the country. Prisoners were to be taken to military headquarters, subjected to brief, pointed interroga- tions, and executed immediately afterward. The military described this as "cleaning up the motors of Marxism"; these people were leaders of towns, unions, farm worker settlements, political parties, and leftist cultural organizations. The list of their names had been in |
| 4
THE MURDER OF ALLENDE preparation since November 1972. Its compilation was a joint effort of Chilean Army, Navy, and Air Force intelligence. The Chilean military had close affiliations with the intelligence departments of the U.S. Southern Command in the Canal Zone and with members of the Brazilian Embassy in Santiago. The rebel generals believed Beta One could be completed during the afternoon of the eleventh, but the people's resistance in Vicuna Mackenna and Los Cerrillos surprised them, continuing through the night of the eleventh. Around noon on the twelfth, the workers' scanty munitions gave out, and mass murders in the Santiago labor housing sectors, including La Legua and Lo Hermida, finally stopped most of the resistance. It was only then that the generals felt confident about announcing the achievement of the first part of the coup, Operation Alpha One.1* This was the "suicide" of Salvador Allende Gossens. During Alpha One, La Moneda was to be taken in order to capture the President himself. Estimated time for its completion was 120 minutes after the onset of the attack on La Moneda (9 A.M., Septem- her II, 1973). The rebels' intelligence estimates did not envision resis- tance from the handful of civilians inside the palace. They expected Allende to surrender at once when faced with infantry, armored cars, tanks, and the threat of aerial bombardment. After transferring him to 2nd Armored barracks, the rebel generals probably thought that as a result of various humiliations they planned for him Allende would commit suicide if momentarily left without a guard. This would be announced to the country around one o'clock that after- noon. Instead, it took five hours to capture La Moneda and subdue forty- two civilians armed with submachine guns and one bazooka. This small group held off a siege of eight Sherman tanks (each equipped with a 75-mm. cannon and a .50-caliber machine gun), two recoilless
|
| 6
THE MURDER OF ALLENDE twenty years. In 1952, Gabriel Gonzlilez Videla, the President of Chile and head of the Radical party, signed a Mutual Aid Pact with the United States. Since that time, the Chilean military had been trained and financed by the U.S. armed services.2 On September 10, 1973, these Chilean troops and their officers were mobilized to attack the constitutionally elected Chilean government. Their combined strength consisted of: Army: Just over 30,000 men, organized in six divisions, one of which is cavalry. There are six cavalry regiments, two armored regi- ments, and two of mobile artillery geared for use in mountainous territory. Ten of the sixteen infantry regiments are motorized. There are five artillery regiments. Out of the total number of regiments, eight are stationed in Santiago, the capital. Training is permanently advised by the U.S. military missions, whose teaching duties range from the Academy of War (for officers in the General Staff) to the Junior Officers' Training School in Santiago. Here all the teaching plans, discussion groups, and courses in "general culture" in the Army regiments (and Air Force, Navy, and military police units) are pre- pared with the advice of U.S. experts. Air Force: Just under 9,000 men. It includes bombardier, air attack, antiaircraft, combat helicopter, and ground support units. It depends on the U .S. Air Force to such an extent that its commander in chief prior to the present one (Gustavo Leigh Guzmlin, a member of the military junta), Cesar Ruiz Danyau, was known to his aides as "the Yankee," because he was in constant contact with the U.S. Air Force mission in Chile. Navy: Slightly over 15,000 men. In addition to a combat fleet, the Navy has Marines, naval aviation, and naval engineer units. Its offi- cers are the heirs of British Navy tradition, and its commanders consider themselves the military aristocracy of Chile. In planning the military coup against Allende, they proposed the massive Operation Pincers plan to assassinate popular leaders. Military Police: Slightly more than 30,000 men. Its organization is militarized, possessing automatic weapons and a company of antiriot |
| 8
THE MURDER OF ALLENDE Command in the Canal Zone, as well as various elements within the Department of Defense in Washington, were carefully apprized of these plans. Two stages were envisioned: first, a "softening" of public opinion, through activities of the Christian Democratic and National parties, and of controversial fascist groups such as Fatherland and Liberty, ex-Cadet Commandos and Rolando Matus Commandos, and employers' guilds such as the Society for Industrial Development (Sociedad de Fomento Fabril, grouping the industrial oligarchy), the National Agriculture Society (grouping the agricultural oligarchy), and the National Confederation of Production and Commerce (grouping the industrial, commercial, and financial oligarchy); second, "attacking the prey," when the prey (the Allende government) was already cornered and breathless and without much popular support. This scheme included a "wait-and-see" period to evaluate the out- come of the March 4, 1973, elections for the seats of 150 Deputies in the Lower House of the Chilean Parliament and 25 Senate seats (out of a total of 50) in the Upper House. At that time, the fate of Salvador AIlende, once he had been ousted, had not been determined. Until June 1973, the prevailing idea had been to send Allende into exile. In addition, a minority of the generals, especially those in the Army, believed that they could convince Allende to head a "national unification " civilian-military government, excluding the leftist political parties from official participation. This they referred to as a "soft coup." But in the March 1973 elections, Allende's Unidad Popular ticket carried almost 44 percent4 of the vote. Pressure from laborers', peasants', and office workers' unions began to create the climate for the formation of grass-roots power structures that just might find a way to supplant the economic, political, and social power of the North American multinationals and the national oligopolists. The attitude of the most reactionary generals, as well as that of the Pentagon Latin-American desk, hardened. They began to pressure those generals who still clung to the idea of a "national unification" civilian- military government headed by Allende. On the other hand, Allende |
| The Artful Staging of a "Suicide"
9 himself, impelled by the growing revolutionary tide of his grass-roots constituency, made it clear to Generals Frats and Pinochet that he would not lend himself to heading a thinly veiled military dictator- ship. In July 1973 the high command of the Chilean Navy upset the balance of military opinion with one daring, macabre stroke. A team of professional assassins, led by a member of Navy intelligence, mur- dered Allende's naval aide, Commodore Arturo Araya Peters, in his own home on the night of July 26, 1973. They accomplished this in concert with the ex-Cadet Commandos.* The assassination had been plotted with the rebel group in the military police, who controlled military police intelligence. The members of the Navy high command taking part in the con- spiracy believed two objectives had been accomplished by this assassination: 1. It prevented Araya Peters, a personal friend of Allende and a member of the "constitutionalist" faction in the armed forces, from being promoted to rear admiral. This would have made him a member of the General Staff of the Chilean armed forces. According to mili- tary regulations, in September 1973, when Araya Peters finished his two-year assignment as naval aide to the President, he would be returned to active duty and, also by regulation, would be promoted to the second-highest rank within his section of the armed forces. This would give President Allende an important man in the heart of the Navy General Staff-that is, in the heart of the conspiracy to over- throw the constitutional government, where he just might discover it prematurely. In July 1973 the rebel generals had not yet set a date for the coup. Their consensus was that around the end of 1973 or the
|
| 10
THE MURDER OF ALLENDE beginning of 1974 would be the most propitious time, since by then they expected the economic situation to be intolerable, exacerbated by a national work stoppage that was scheduled to begin in August. 2. With the complicity of military police intelligence, the rebel admirals hoped to hatch a plot to blame the Socialist party for the naval aide's death, thus inducing the rest of the senior officers of the armed forces and military police to react favorably to the idea of the conspiracy. The Socialists were the principal party in the govern- ment's Unidad Popular coalition (Salvador Allende belonged to it), and his bodyguard, the GAP (Grupo de Amigos Personales, or Group of Personal Friends), was drawn from it. The commando assassins hired by members of Navy intelligence did a very clean job. Several days after the murder, military police investigators arrested an "alleged assassin." He was an employee of the lowest rank in a branch of the Production Development Corpora- tion (Corporacion de Fomento de la Produccion), who (surprise, surprise), after being beaten in the first basement of the Defense Ministry under the vigilant eyes of naval prosecutor Aldo Montagna, had confessed that he was a "Socialist" and had agreed to be one of the assassins "by contract with one of the GAPs." He now "repented doing it," for which reason "he had surrendered himself," drunk, to the night guard of the Santiago Intendencia, the location of the First Prefecture of Military Police, which was under the direct command of General Cesar Mendoza Durán, afterward a member of the junta. * In the second week of August, the tidy little plot began to fall apart. A group of detectives from the Homicide Squad of the Chilean civilian police, whose director, Alfredo Joignant, was a member of the Chilean Socialist party, began to gather up the threads leading to the identity of the commando assassins. President Allende received a police report on the case, in which two facts were established: 1. The man arrested as the "alleged assassin" had been forced to
|
| The Artful Staging of a
"Suicide"
11 sign a declaration he had not even read. The text of the confession was known to a legislator of the extreme right (Gustavo Alessandri) and had been read by him in part over the National Agriculture Society's radio station (the property of some large landholders) two hours before the "alleged assassin" had been arrested. 2. The identification of the actual members of the assassination team-seven persons-had revealed at least two with connections to a senior naval officer. A concurrent investigation of the military police intelligence captain who had persuaded the "alleged assassin" to sign the confession revealed that he had met, two weeks prior to July 26, with another senior naval officer. With this evidence, part of which he made public (omitting the "senior officers in the armed forces"), the President met on the morn- ing of August 8, 1973, with the commander in chief of the Army, Division General Carlos Prats Gonzlilez; the commander in chief of the Air Force, Air General Cesar Ruiz Danyau; the commander in chief of the Navy, Admiral Raul Montero; and the director general of the military police, General Jose Sepulveda Galindo.5 The political situation was extremely serious. On July 27 a new nationwide strike of truck owners began: it was directed by Leon Vilarin, a man directly connected to the coup plot through Eduardo Frei and Onofre Jarpa (see Chapter 5). On August 7 discussions had terminated between Allende and the national directorate of the Dem- ocratic Christian party (controlled by the group of Eduardo Frei, whose liaison with the military opponents of Allende was General Oscar Bonilla, the present junta's ex-Minister of Defense). These DCP / Allende discussions had been requested by the Archbishop of Santiago, Raul Cardinal Silva Henriquez, for the general purpose of "reaching a political pact of nonaggression to stop the civil war that would be unleashed by a ~ilitary attempt at a coup d'etat." Naturally, Frei was not interested in having these discussions succeed. The same day on which the discussions began, July 30, General Oscar Bonilla met with Eduardo Frei and Senator Juan de Dios Carmona (Defense Minister during the Frei regime) and reportedly |
| 12
T H E M U R D E R O F A L L E N D E urged them to sabotage attempts at political conciliation and to make their fundamental goal "an agreement from Parliament to declare Allende's government illegal." The morning of August 8 was full of political storm clouds. On the one hand, an industrial stoppage intended to wreck the Chilean economy had begun. On the other hand, the workers' organizations were pressuring Allende to let them "solve the industrial stoppage with our own hands." Allende's information about the military conspiracy appears to have been fragmentary, most of it contrived by Army and military police counterintelligence. They had painted their own picture of the conspiracy's extent, and accordingly Allende believed that it was restricted to "a small nucleus" in the Navy, headed by the commander in chief of the First Naval District (Valparaiso, Chile's main port, an hour and a half from the capital by freeway) and Vice-Admiral Jose Toribio Merino (later a member of the military junta), plus another isolated "little nucleus" in the Air Force, which had "the sympathy" of General Cesar Ruiz Danyau. Allende believed that he could solve the huge political crisis he was faced with by a sudden turnabout against the civilian as well as the military conspirators. His plan was to incorporate all the branches of the armed forces and military police into his Cabinet of Ministers in order to take the steam out of the workers' organizations' attempts to undermine the oligopolists. He would take a strong public stand backed by the four commanders in chief. On the morning of August 8, Allende read the four military leaders the civilian police report on the assassination of his naval aide, com- modore Arturo Araya Peters. He then explained that "if the people discover the truth about this, half a million people will die in Chile," that the workers and peasants "would assault the Navy and military police barracks to crush the conspirators and Araya Peters's murder- ers." He described the police report as a time bomb, and suggested that it would be preferable to solve the problem of the Navy and military police "conspiracy" in a "confidential, institutional way." |
| The Artful Staging of a
"Suicide"
13 Allende added that the civilian police report had a second part, which he chose not to reveal for the time being, in which "the connection between Araya Peters's assassins and foreign military forces" was proved. Thus, Allende went on, it would be best for "the military institu- tions of Chile to show their loyalty to and support of constitutionality and the law" by joining a Cabinet of "national unity," "to appease the passions," to find a solution to the work stoppage now as it was beginning, not when it became serious "like the one in October 1972." This would give the Executive Office time to promulgate several laws that the Christian Democrats and the National parties were asking for on behalf of the Society for Industrial Development and the National Agriculture Society. The commanders in chief accepted. The Navy chief was named Treasury Minister; the Air Force chief became Minister of Public Works; the Army chief, Defense Minister; and the head of military police, Minister of Housing. On the morning of August 13, Salvador Allende dramatically announced to the country the composition of his new Cabinet, characterizing it as one aimed at "national security" and "the last chance to avoid a confrontation between Chileans." What Allende had done, in fact, was virtually to write the first part of his own death sentence. The consensus among the conspirators in the high command was that Allende was "dangerously close to the truth" and that given time to pursue the investigation, he might uncover the complete Pentagon-Navy-Air Force-Army-military po- lice connection, of which he could make considerable political use in exile. According to sources within the military hierarchy, it was Vice- Admiral Jose Toribio Merino who first voiced the opinion in the ensuing days that Allende must be killed or made to commit suicide, that there was no other choice. Still, the final decision to murder Allende was not reached until Tuesday night, August 21, at a meeting which the subchief of the Army, General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, did not attend. Pinochet probably never knew that Allende was to be assassinated, and most |
| 14
THE MURDER OF ALLENDE likely found out only on the afternoon of September 11, when the President's death was already a fait accompli and the spectacle of the suicide was being arranged. As of August 20, apparently only Vice-Admiral Jose Toribio Merino, then head of the First Naval District, General Cesar Mendoza Durlin, of the military police, and General Gustavo Leigh Guzmán, commander in chief of the Air Force, were agreed that Allende's suicide was essential to the success of their coup. Their final decision must have been made in response to a major blunder committed by General Cesar Ruiz Danyau. Driven by per- sonal ambition and believing that "the situation was ripe," Danyau arranged the air garrisoning of Santiago from two bases, one for ground support and the other for chase and bombardment, in preparation for a planned "military pronouncement" on Monday, August 20, which, he believed, would draw the rest of the armed forces to his side. To trigger the coup, he resigned his new appointment as Minister of Public Works on Friday, August 17. This meant that Allende would have to ask for his resignation as commander in chief of the Air Force. According to Ruiz Danyau's plan, the Air Force would then rise up and cause Allende's downfall. This would be followed by the nomination of himself, Ruiz Danyau, as head of a military junta. Allende, partly aware of Ruiz Danyau's ploy, delayed accepting his resignation until the next day. He called a meeting in the Palacio de La Moneda of the Navy chief, Admiral Raul Montero; the Army chief, Carlos Prats; and the second-ranking general of the Air Force, Gustavo Leigh Guzmán (the latter, unknown to Allende, was one of the heads of the conspiracy). Allende played them a tape recording of a conversation between a retired Air Force colonel and two or three other people.6 The colonel could be heard saying that "the group" had already begun to "operate various units" to convince the senior officers of the three branches of the armed forces "to abandon Allende" and "join the crusade against Marxism." The tape continued that "the Americans are aware of our activities and approve of them," and said once, "My general Ruiz Danyau is with us to the death." At that point Allende pointed out to Leigh Guzmán that "this plot" |
| The Artful Staging of a
"Suicide"
15 was "treason to our country," since generals "of the republic of Chile" were actively conspiring with a foreign power. Then he ordered Leigh Guzmán to take over command of the Air Force, to approve the forced retirement of Ruiz Danyau, and to persuade those air units that might support Ruiz not to. Leigh Guzmán accepted Allende's orders after the President threatened to "let Chile know about this infamy." The next day, Sunday, August 19, without consulting Ruiz Dan- yau, Leigh Guzman informed Vice-Admiral Toribio Merino, Cesar Mendoza of the military police, and Augusto Pinochet of the Army of what had transpired and told them that Ruiz Danyau had to be dumped. They agreed. On Monday the officers of the air bases at El Bosque and Los Cerrillos in Santiago mobilized their men and requested support from the Navy Yard in Valparaiso, the Tacna and Buin regiments, the Junior Officers' School, and the 2nd Armored Regiment, quartered in Santiago. At least Ruiz Danyau had chosen the day well: Allende traveled by helicopter to Chillan (some 500 kilometers south of San- tiago) to take part in a ceremony commemorating the birth date of General Bernardo O'Higgins, the Father of the Country. Neverthe- less, the rest of the conspiring generals, heeding Leigh Guzman's advice, had decided to abort the "untimely coup" and let the ax fall on the neck of their erstwhile accomplice. From the Defense Ministry, the Joint Chiefs of Staff took steps to persuade the Air Force officers to demobilize. By noon, everyone was agreed that they had to "wait," and that, in the meantime, General Ruiz Danyau would go into retirement. Leigh Guzman would become commander in chief of the Air Force, and another Air Force general, Hector Magliochetti, would be named Minister of Public Works. (Magliochetti is presently assistant to General Pinochet.) This series of events appeared to be a resounding political victory for Allende. Joan Garces, a Spanish citizen and Allende's economic adviser, testified to the General Assembly of the U.N. on October 9, 1973: "That night, on his return to Santiago, President Allende was informed that General Pinochet, sub-commander in chief, had been |
| 16
THE MURDER OF ALLENDE asked to join the coup, but, in his own words, he answered: I am a general respectful of the Constitution and I will be loyal to the government to the end.' " It is worth noting that until the morning of September 11, when General Pinochet was at Peñalolén in the Andean foothills of San- tiago, directing the military invasion of the city and the attack on La Moneda, Salvador Allende considered him a "loyal general" and would call him up to ask, "What's going on, Augusto?" But Allende's "political victory" was a Pyrrhic one, achieved at the cost of letting his enemies know that he had solid information about the conspiracy. Allende had written the second and final part of his own death sentence. The leaders of the conspiracy were then aware that he knew far too much. Allende in exile, having documents within reach and arousing the sympathy of most of the governments and peoples of the world, would be a more than formidable enemy. From Tuesday, August 21, Leigh, Mendoza, and Merino began to sketch out the final details of their plan. They were advised by a team of men from SIM (Servicio de Inteligencia Militar), the Army, Navy intelligence, and U.S. Army intelligence. To complement the "basic ideas" of the plan, information about Allende's personality waS hast- ily gathered from those military officers who were said to know him best. They depended chiefly on the opinion of Brigadier General Manuel Torres de la Cruz, commander of the 5th Army Division in the extreme south of the country, and fourth-ranking in seniority among the Army's generals. Torres de la Cruz was the leader of the extreme fascist faction in the Army and since October 1972 had been the prime mover behind the conspiracy against the government. Yet he was considered by Salvador Allende and his "military matters adviser," Senator Alberto Jerez, of the Christian Left, to be "the only Allendist general in the Army" and a "loyal friend."7 General Torres de la Cruz's reports caricatured Allende as an "individual who drinks to excess, who is easily swayed, vain, cow- ardly, the easy prey of discouragement in difficult moments" (this assessment was based on attacks against Allende which appeared in the Santiago right-wing newspapers). |
| The Artful Staging of a "Suicide "
17 Taking into consideration the views of General Torres de la Cruz, as well as those of military police General Jose Sepulveda Galindo and Allende's Army aide, the conspirators, also advised by the U.S. Army intelligence group in the Chilean Defense Ministry, calculated that once Allende was trapped on the day of the coup, either in his private residence on Tomas Moro Street in the eastern part of the capital, or in the Palacio de La Moneda, there were but two probabilities. Some of my informants had access, briefly, to documents which set forth what these probabilities were. According to the transcript they made: Probability One: The objective, intimidated by the deployment of armored cars and infantry, and under the threat of aerial bombardment, will commit suicide before the battle begins. This is highly probable, keeping in mind that the objective has on innumerable occasions, even in front of senior Army officers, expressed his admiration for Jose Manuel Balmaceda, a president who committed suicide in 1891 after his troops were defeated by insurgent armed forces. Probability Two: The objective, realizing his defenselessness and knowing perfectly well that the civilians are incapable of defending themselves against a joint attack of the country's entire armed forces, will surrender. This may happen before or after an aerial bombardment intended to "soften" but not demolish his residence or the palace. If Probability One takes effect, the military press will assume charge of announcing it immediately and will at the same time begin Press Phase Two involving the disaccreditation of the suicide's character, focusing on an image of a drunkard, libertine, and hedonist (contact will be made with a group encharged to fabricate evidence). If Probability Two occurs, the objective will be segregated at once from accompanying civilian or military personnel. He will be conveyed under guard to the Military School. Once isolated, he will be taken under maximum security to 2nd Armored HQ. There he will be treated in a degrading manner by selected military personnel of low rank. They will subject him to humiliations (disrobed, in ridiculous poses; objective will be forced to commit humiliating acts, which will be openly photographed) based on information we have about him. Their traumatic effect should result in suicide. Preparations should include allowing objective to see material previously gathered to discredit him publicly. If this inducement is successful, the military press should immediately begin Operation Public Knowledge on the terms cited above. If objective resists the team's efforts to create a traumatic effect, and if positive results are not achieved 60 to 90 minutes after the surrender, objective |
| The Artful Staging of a
"Suicide"
19 Around 2:40 P.M. instructions from Pinochet were transmitted in Morse code from Peñalolén to Post 5 inside the Defense Ministry ( 150 yards away from the besieged Palacio de La Moneda), ordering Post 5 to transmit the news, as if it were secret information, among the various command posts of the military insurrection. Post 5 carried out the order at 2:45 P.M., using the unscrambled radio-telephone system. A leftist ham operator monitoring the military's messages was able to record the transmittal: ..Attention! This is Post Five, Patricio's post (Vice-Admiral Pa- tricio Carvajal Prado]. This is to inform you that Infantry School personnel are now inside La Moneda. The following will be transmit- ted in English, in case we are being monitored: They say President Allende committed suicide. Do you read me?" To use English to keep a message secret was ridiculous, because English is taught from grade school in Chile. However, as Vice- Admiral Carvajal knew, for the purposes of the North American correspondents listening on their monitors in Santiago and in Men- doza, Argentina, it wasn't at all ridiculous. It facilitated what the rebel generals wanted most: to have the news teletype machines all over the world saturating the foreign public with "Allende's suicide. " But this was the easy part of the script. The hard part began barely fifteen minutes later when Pinochet ordered the palace area cordoned off. They must have debated for half an hour about a possible means of suicide. Finally it was agreed that the head would be destroyed with bullets from a submachine gun resting under the chin. The body would be dressed again to prevent witnesses from seeing the other wounds. The body had to be moved to another, more appropriate location, since the Salon Rojo was half destroyed. They chose the Salon Independencia, the President's private place to rest and receive visitors. There, SIM men, under the command of General Javier Palacios Ruhman, divested Allende's body of the bloodied turtleneck sweater he had been wearing throughout the siege. They also removed his blue trousers, which were perforated and had blood stains around |
| 20
THE MURDER OF ALLENDE the abdomen. They dressed him in dark gray pants, scavenged from one of the cadavers inside La Moneda, and Allende's own gray turtle-neck, the stains on which they covered by putting him into his gray tweed jacket and fastening the bottom button (the President had removed the jacket during the battle and left it on his work table). Then the SIM men seated him on the red velvet sofa against the wall that faces Morande Street, propped him against the back of the sofa, placed in his hands the machine gun he had been using almost an hour and a half earlier, and pressed the trigger just once. Allende's head split in two; part of his brain, blood, and pieces of hair flew upward and stuck to a tapestry more than three yards above on the wall behind the sofa. The scene was now set. Because the body was already stiff from rigor mortis, it had not been easy to arrange on the sofa; the SIM men had to use force to straighten the President's legs, leaving them wide apart to stabilize the body. The arms were left hanging slightly apart from the torso. It was 3:30 P.M., more than three hours after the fire at La Moneda had been started by the exploding rockets from the Hawker Hunter jets. The 5th Brigade's firemen (whose fire engines had been standing ready since 12:20 P.M., when the aerial bombardment ended and flames appeared over the Government Palace) finally received permis- sion to fight the fire. The fire station is less than 300 yards from the Palacio de La Moneda, on Nataniel Street, on the ground floor of the building occupied by the offices of the American news agency UPI. Jaime Egaoa, captain of the fire brigade, said afterward: ..A mo- ment we'll never forget was when the fire engine left the station; the doors opened and the soldiers posted themselves in various places. When we came out, the soldiers shot in different directions all at once to cover our advance." When they got to La Moneda, the firemen saw that the conflagra- tion had spread all over the Morande Street area, to the second and third floors and the whole north fa~ade of the Ministry of the Interior (on the right, entering by the main door on Moneda Street), and the Presidential Palace (on the left). It would take them until ten o'clock that night to put out the flames. |
| The Artful Staging of a .'Suicide"
21 The order for the firemen to intervene had come from the Defense Ministry , after General Palacios had given notice that everything was ready in the President's private sitting room. But, pressed by the fire which threatened to reach the room where they were preparing the deception, General Palacios was too hasty in giving the Defense Ministry the all-clear signal. At least two firemen entered the Salon Independencia and were shoved out at machine gun point. But they got in far enough to see one of the soldiers putting a gun on the knees of the corpse seated on the sofa, while another was placing President Allende's combat helmet and gas mask beside him. After this, all the firemen were notified that they couldn't enter that room because "President Allende shot himself and nothing can be moved." As they fought the fire, the 5th Brigade firemen were warned that they were under "military jurisdiction" and were not to "tell anyone what you have seen inside this area." When the Infantry School soldiers entered the second floor of La Moneda for the second time, after the civilian opposition had crum- bled, they behaved with uncontrolled brutality, slapping and kicking their captives, striking them with the butts of their guns, forcing them to lie face down on the floor with their hands on the back of their necks, and running on top of them with heavy combat boots in order to pass through the corridors. Among the captives, the SIM men managed to find a witness. This man was Dr. Patricio Guijon Klein, who since November 1972 had been a surgeon on the medical team of seven attending the Chief Executive. He was not a member of a Unidad Popular party; he had agreed to be Allende's doctor merely because it was a step up professionally. That afternoon he had been trapped in the palace with the rest of the medical team. His fate was to be the witness of a suicide. By 10 P.M. the President's body was already in the Military Hospi- tal to be put in a coffin and to be viewed by a team of doctors from the Army, Air Force, Navy, and military police, who would then copy out on a death certificate what had been established hours earlier by the detectives of the Homicide Squad. The detectives had been sum- moned at 4 P.M. by General Ernesto Baeza Michelsen, commander of |
| 22
THE MURDER OF ALLENDE the military troops who had invaded the center of Santiago beginning at 6 A.M. that day. This was one of several serious mistakes made in the confusion of the afternoon. From the central command post at Peñalolén, General Pinochet had issued an order through General Oscar Bonilla. According to a tape recording made by a ham radio operator, this was the order: "General Bonilla here. General Bonilla to Vice-Admiral Carvajal. Orders from Pinochet. General Bonilla on behalf of the commander in chief: Imperative that as soon as humanly possible the chief physicians of the Army, Navy, Air Force, and military police medical corps, including the Santiago coroner, certify the cause of Mr. Allende's death. ..so that the politicians will not later blame the military for his death. ...I repeat, as soon as humanly possible. ...Do you read me?" "I read you. Chief physicians of Army, Navy, Air Force, and also military police, plus Santiago coroner, to certify cause of death of Mr. Allende ...so that. .." "Yes. ...Chief physicians of each institution including military police. ...Over and out." The military leaders' teamwork was highly uncoordinated that afternoon. Brigadier General Ernesto Baeza Michelsen made contact much earlier with Brigadier General Sergio Arellano Stark, his immediate superior, and leader of the troops occupying the whole of Santiago Province. Baeza seemed to have concluded, logically, that after the military blitzkrieg in which thousands of civilians had been shot and killed throughout the country, the military's word was not going to be worth much in Chilean public opinion. For this reason he must have decided that certification of the suicide ought to come from the civilian police. To that end he called the Homicide Squad to La Moneda, disobeying Pinochet's orders to have the military doctors present. The Homicide Squad team proceeded to: I. Draw up and execute a deposition about the "scene of the inci- dent," just as they found it when they entered the Salon Indepen- dencia in La Moneda around 4 P.M. |
| The Artful Staging of a
"Suicide"
23 2. Examine the suicide-type wound in Allende's head, and nothing more. 3. Waive circumstantial investigation at the scene of the incident. The Homicide Squad team, led by Inspector Pedro Espinoza Vald6s, whose political ideas were openly unsympathetic to the over- thrown government, began their "job" at 4:20 P.M. and finished it at 6:10 P.M. An hour after this, General Pinochet, through General Oscar Bonilla, continued to insist on the presence of the military physicians and, furious, asked why the "certificate of suicide" still had not reached central headquarters of the occupation troops in the capital. A ham radio operator tuned in on and recorded this conversation over the military radio-telephone system, between General Bonilla and Air Force General Nicanor Diaz Estrada, who was in command of Post 3, the coordination unit inside the Ministry of National Defense: "Nicanor, listen. We need to know if the chief health officers and the city coroner have identified the body and made the deposition yet. This is very important. They should not take him to the morgue to do an autopsy because it's a nest of extremists and they may try to steal the body. .." "Roger. We gave the order for a secret transfer to the Military Hospital. The coroners have been summoned to the Military Hospital. I gave orders for the deposition to be brought here to General Staff, but they haven't brought it yet. ..it's been an hour and a half. ..but we still don't have any news. .." "Okay, Nicanor. Tell Herman Brady to vouch for the absolute security of the Military Hospital. This is important. ..over to you, Nicanor ..." "I took care of that." "Thanks, Nicanor." It is clear that the leaders of the troops invading Santiago were very concerned to keep the assassinated President's body well out of sight of all personnel outside their institutions. Their concern was so zealous that the next day they would not let his widow, Hortensia Bussi, have a last look at her husband. The following account was given to the Mexican journalist Manuel |
| 24
THE MURDER OF ALLENDE Mejido, correspondent of the newspaper Excelsior, by Allende's widow on September 13 in the Mexican Embassy: "The next day [Wednesday, September 12] they told me over the telephone that Salvador was in the Military Hospital and that he was wounded. I went there, and although I openly identified myself, the soldiers wouldn't let me in. Afterward I spoke to a general who greeted me with these words: 'Madam, I was the friend of Salvador Allende. Let me offer you my deepest condo- lences.' Only then did I learn that he was dead. "This general, whose name I don't know, promised me a Jeep and an officer to escort me to the Group Seven Airfield of the Chilean Air Force, where he said I had to go. But then another general came out, I didn't know him either, and told me to go there in my own car, because there weren't any vehicles or officers available. "I decided to make the trip in the small car belonging to my nephew, Eduardo Grove Allende. At the airfield they told me that Salvador's body was on an Air Force plane. Before boarding it I spoke by telephone with my daughter Isabel, but she couldn't come with me because she didn't have a safe-conduct. "I boarded the plane. Imagine the scene I saw: a coffin in the center, covered with a military blanket, and on either side my other nephew, Patricio López, and Salvador's sister, Laura Allende. With me were the Presidential Army aide Roberto Sanchez and Eduardo Grove. We flew toward Viña del Mar. The airplane landed at the Quintero Air Base. The flight was smooth, there were no problems. Then they took Salvador off. "I asked to see him, to touch him, but they wouldn't let me. ..they said the box was soldered shut. In two cars following the hearse we went to the Santa Inés Cemetery. The people watched us curiously. They didn't know what it was all about, or whose body was in the hearse. There were many soldiers and military police, as if they expected a crowd. We five who went with Salvador walked in silence to the family crypt, where a month ago we buried Inés Allende, Salvador's sister who died of cancer. "Once again I insisted on seeing my husband. They wouldn't let me, but they removed the outer lid, and all I saw was a cloth covering the coffin. I didn't know whether it was the head or feet. I wanted to cry. The officers kept me from seeing him. They repeated that the coffin was soldered shut. Then I said in a loud voice to the officer escorting me: 'Salvador Allende cannot be buried in such an anonymous way. I want you at least to know the name of the man you are burying. ' I grabbed some flowers from nearby and threw them into the grave and said: 'Here lies Salvador Allende, who is the President |
| 26
THE MURDER OF ALLENDE with the following words: 'For Salvador, from his comrade-in-arms Fidel. ' " That is to say, it was a large-caliber firearm with tremendous fire power. Any police reporter (and I was one for a long time for La Tercera, a Santiago newspaper) has plenty of experience of suicide deaths by firearms as well as of suicides seated on a chair or other piece of furniture without any armrests. This allows us to reconstruct the events beginning with the Homicide Squad's assertion that Allende committed suicide by resting an AK-type machine gun on his knees, sitting on a fairly wide sofa, that is, a sofa without any lateral support. Because of the height of the sofa seat (we reporters were well acquainted with the sofa in question), and also to steady the machine gun's stock with his knees when he sat down to commit suicide, Allende would have had to put his weight on the points of his toes. This would have resulted in a tensing of all the muscles in the legs, and his torso leaning forward, arms very flexed, head resting on the machine gun's barrel point. It would have been what one might call an "uncomfortable" position of "unstable equilibrium" frontward. By pressing the trigger in this position and shooting off half his head with two bullets, the "suicide" would have experienced a terrific jolt in his body, separating the knees, and the machine gun would have dropped to the floor, while the body would have leaned forward and to the right, falling to the floor next to the sofa. None of this happened. Allende's case seemed to have been very "special." His body became rigid immediately after the shots, the spread legs were already rigid, to keep from falling off the sofa, and best of all (so that there would be no doubt): the machine gun re- mained in the alleged suicide's lap. (This detail is contained in the actual legal deposition made by the Homicide Squad, and in the statements made by General Javier Palacios Ruhman on September 22 in Bogotá to the Spanish news agency EFE: "I approached the body. The President was sitting in the middle of the red-upholstered sofa with the machine gun in his hands, |
| The Artful Staging of a
"Suicide"
27 his helmet and gas mask to one side, his glasses on the floor. The face was swollen and the skull was split in two, like a watermelon." Please observe how General Palacios, in his desire to give more details, reveals the inconsistencies: the body was "seated" in the "middle" of the sofa, the head was destroyed "like a watermelon" by a machine gun-and yet death and rigor mortis came instantly, causing him to remain seated with the gun in his hand, after the tremendous impact of two bullets of the caliber of a Soviet AK model!) The most serious discrepancy of all was a difference of two hours between the actual death of President Allende and the time of death given in the Homicide Squad's deposition. This error is contained in the final lines of the police report, accord- ing to the version published in the Santiago daily El Mercurio on September 21. It says: "Time of death, at 18:10 when the examination was completed, was estimated at six hours previous"-12:10, two hours before Allende actually died. Of course, the police under Inspector Espinoza's command cannot be blamed. When they arrived at La Moneda, there was fighting all over the city and it was still not clear which side was going to win. So although the police must have realized that there was something highly irregular about Allende's suicide, they acted professionally and merely put in writing, in the deposition, the entire scene, exactly as they found it. The police experts, in acting as they did, thus left "a door open" for their own role should the military be defeated later by the civilian forces. But it isn't only the Homicide Squad deposition that reveals incon- sistencies. Let us begin with the most important, the statement of Brigadier General Javier Palacios Ruhman, chief of the armored and infantry troops that attacked the Palacio de La Moneda. On September 22, in Bogotá, Colombia, General Palacios was inter- viewed by journalist Arturo Abella on the TV news program "Seven O'Clock." The transcript of his remarks follows: |
| 28
THE MURDER OF ALLENDE "When we surrounded the Palacio de La Moneda in pincer formation, aircraft had destroyed a large part of the building. We went in without gas masks and were received by gunfire from the members of Allende's personal guard, who were shouting 'Marxism does not surrender'. We were almost blinded by the smoke, but we overcame the opposition. When I went up to the second floor looking for the President, his working offices were empty and in disorder...I continued walking through the area that was not destroyed. I came to the anteroom before the large dining hall in the palace. I opened the door, and there Allende was, sitting on a sofa." "You recognized him at first glance?" "No. It didn't seem to me to be Allende. Beside him, or in a corner, there was a doctor named Yojon or Gijon. He was shaking and could hardly speak. He said, 'It's the President. It's the President.' The President was sitting in the middle of the red-upholstered sofa, with the machine-gun in his hands, his helmet and gas mask to one side, his glasses on the floor. The face was swollen and the skull was split in two, like a watermelon. The hand were black with powder. There was almost no blood. I ordered my men not to touch anything until the coroners arrived to examine the body. Coroners came from all three branches of the Chilean armed forces. They verified that it was suicide. Photographs were taken which are now in the government's possession and will be presented on request." "They say that there were wounds in various parts of the body?" "Not one. Not a single one. The coroner's report shows this. There was also a bottle of whiskey in the room. I asked the coroners to determine if there was any evidence of alcohol in the body of the President. Allende had had absolutely nothing to drink." Note that these declarations by General Palacios were made on September 22 while he was in Bogotá as head of the Chilean military sports delegation to the Fifth South American Festival of Cadets. Palacios had no knowledge of the "perfecting" going on in Chile with the story of Allende's suicide under the supervision of General Ernesto Baeza Michelsen. Palacios, after 4 P.M. of that day, didn't speak again to Baeza or anyone else involved in the "suicide" operation. He simply returned to headquarters, which had been transferred to the Bernardo O'Higgins Military School, and spent the days before he left for Bogotá doing his part in the "cleanup of downtown Santiago". |
| The Artful Staging of a "Suicide"
29 Thus, when he made his very detailed statements in Bogota about the incident, he was unknowingly contradicting General Baeza's "offi- cial version." Palacios's version reveals that his troops fought defenders who had no intention of surrendering. If that was so, then why had Allende committed suicide? Forty-eight hours earlier, on Thursday, September 20, back in Santiago General Ernesto Baeza Michelsen, now director general of investigations of the civilian police, released the "official report" on the material, which completely contradicted General Palacios's state- ments two days later. I. General Baeza said that Palacios's troops entered La Moneda after it surrendered. Why the insistence on a surrender? Only if AIIende surrendered would there be any justification for the suicide. As has been established, the defenders in the Palacio de La Moneda never expressed any desire to surrender, but all morning long the rebel officers were repeatedly announcing Allende's "surrender" on the radio stations in their control, and they had even issued an official communique to that effect just after 1 P.M. on the eleventh. To lend "seriousness" to the surrender thesis, on September 20 Baeza read to reporters the "deposition" of Dr. Patricio Guijón Klein (who was freed unconditionally in December 1973 by the military authorities): The President said "give yourselves up," that "Payita [the President's private secretary, Miriam Rupert] should go out first, I'll go out last." We began to get organized. Somebody provided a broom, and I took off my white doctor's coat, which we were wearing to identify ourselves. As we were going down to the Morande Street door to give ourselves up, I remembered that I had left my gas mask behind and went back to look for it. And just as I went to look for it, I passed in front of the door to the next room. Just in front of me, to the right, sitting on a sofa, I saw President Allende at the precise moment when he shot himself with a gun placed between his legs. I could see his body shake and his head explode upward in smithereens. I couldn't determine whether it was one or two shots because the intensive fire going on outside prevented my distinguishing the shots made by his gun. |
| 30
THE MURDER OF ALLENDE At once I ran to him to see if I could be of any assistance, but when I got close I could see there was nothing to be done. The damage was too extensive, and certainly caused instant death. I was completely disconcerted by this situation and realized there was nothing else to do. Since I had lost contact with our group, there was no one else in the room, and I couldn't think of anything to do but sit down beside him and wait for whatever happened. If Dr. Guijón and the rest were going down the Morande Street stairs, and if he had taken off his "identifying" white medical coat (usually a life preserver in such situations), why did he go back for his gas mask? Wouldn't his life have been better protected by staying with the surrendering group and not by separating himself from it? And last, if he realized that Allende had killed himself in a room a few steps away from the Morande Street stairs, why didn't he cover these few steps at full speed and shout, "The President has killed himself'? Dr. Guijón's activities seem strangely unnatural, given the circum- stances in which he found himself. 2. General Palacios says he found Dr. Guijón "beside him, or in a corner." Palacios says that Guijón "was shaking and could hardly speak." But General Baeza said something else. "Dr. Guijón was next to the body of the President, and when General Palacios entered, he iden- tified himself as Mr. Allende's personal physician and gave an account of what had happened." And to give rise to new difficulties, Baeza quotes the following from Dr. Guijon's deposition: "I was sitting right next to the President" when "the general" entered. And as it happens, "the general" (Palacios) on September 22 in Bogota can't remember whether Guijon was "beside him or in a corner." 3. For the police to assert that a man can commit suicide sitting down in an unstable position with a machine gun held between his knees, and remain seated when dead-wait, with the ma<:hine gun in his lap-is grotesque. This is precisely what the Homicide Squad report says. How could this mistake be rectified? Guijon said that he had pushed the suicide machine gun away from himself to avoid |
| The Artful Staging of a "Suicide"
31 having the soldiers think he was a combatant and that afterward General Palacios, in an "excess of zeal" "not to move anything at the scene of the suicide," had ordered him to put it on Allende's lap, and that the civilian police, in "describing" the scene, had done only that, "describe" what they saw. The weapon was resting on the body's lap because General Palacios had ordered Guijón to put it there. On Thursday, September 20, Baeza read this part of Dr. Guijón's deposition, and he repeated it to reporters in interviews granted the following December. This is Guijón 's statement: " At a given moment I removed the weapon because I was sitting right next to the Presi- dent, and there wasn't very much space between the body and myself, and the weapon was too close to me. Then I thought that if in a given moment soldiers came in they might think I meant to defend myself. So I decided to remove the weapon and place it at the other end of the sofa. Later I showed this to the general who came in [Palacios], who made me put the weapon back in its place. " Now, that is a very good statement, but as it happens, General Palacios forty-eight hours later in Bogota was saying something quite different: "I approached the body. The President was sitting in the middle of the red-upholstered sofa with the machine gun in his hands, his helmet and gas mask to one side, his glasses on the floor. The face was swollen and the skull was split in two, like a watermelon." 4. To complete this canvas, General Palacios related on September 22 in Bogota: "I ordered my men not to touch anything. ...Coroners came from all three branches of the Chilean armed forces. They verified that it was suicide. Photographs were taken. ..." Palacios did in fact order his troops "not to touch anything," but that was in the burning Salon Rojo of La Moneda. The transfer of Allende's cadaver to the Salon Independencia was accomplished after 3 P.M. not by Palacios's men but by members of the SIM team sent by General Baeza. Palacios received instructions from General Pino- chet at Peiialolen headquarters to let the chief health officers of the three service branches and the military police into the room, but these officers did not go to La Moneda. Palacios, of course, did not know |
| 32
THE MURDER OF ALLENDE this, because after about 4 P.M. he was out of touch with the scheme. Thus General Baeza's account contradicts General Palacios: "When President AlIende's death became evident, the high command summoned detectives and experts from the Homicide Squad to La Moneda, keeping Dr. Patricio Guijon Klein at the scene of the inci- dent. He appeared to be a suspicious member of the GAP and possibly had assassinated the Chief Executive. " These policemen were the ones who took "seventy photographs" of the scene of the incident. In conclusion, Palacios says that "coroners came from all three branches of the Chilean armed forces. " General Baeza says no, that they were "technicians from the Homicide Squad. " Palacios says that the "soldiers" took the photographs at the scene of the incident. General Baeza says no, they were taken by the Homicide Squad technicians, as it actually happened. And to add a lyrical appendix to this bundle of contradictions, here are the words of the coroner's report on AlIende's body, produced to eliminate all doubt about the "suicide": " Analysis of the skin on the hands and chin showed the presence of gunpowder, caused by the use of a firearm." This, in a simple suicide, is often conclusive proof. But what does it prove in Salvador AlIende's case? He had been fighting for four and a half hours, using this weapon. 5. On September 22, General Palacios emphasized that " AlIende had had absolutely nothing to drink." It is to be assumed that Palacios made this assertion after having spoken with some of the doctors who performed the autopsy on AlIende's body. However, the final autopsy report says that " AlIende's body showed a 90% level of alcohol poisoning." Why was this done? Was it necessary to have a "drunken President" for AlIende's suicide to be good? Did it serve the junta's project of smearing AlIende's reputation? On his return to Chile, General Palacios was met with the news that his troops had taken a "Government Palace that had surrendered." He modified his Bogota statements and in the first week of October 1973 read them to Christian Democrat and right-wing journalists (the |
| & |