Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (44 page)

In these circumstances, Allende feared the worst but was seemingly calm.
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Nine days before the coup he told family members that he was prepared to die if need be.
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A few days later, in conversation with a group of his closest loyal collaborators and speech writers that included his daughter Beatriz and her close friend and political ally, Felix Huerta, the president explained that he had lived a good, long life and that at sixty-five years old he was not worried about what happened to him. Although Allende worried that those younger than him would be left behind and would have to overcome the worst, Huerta vividly remembers that on this occasion the president described what he would do in the event of a coup:
he would kill himself using the AK-47 that Fidel Castro had given him.
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Around this time, Allende also invited a Chilean historian to La Moneda to discuss the story of Chile’s left-wing reformist president José Manuel Balmaceda, who had committed suicide in 1891 when his progressive reforms had failed.
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Moreover, he gave cases of his private papers to his son-in-law, Luis Fernández Oña, so that he could send them back to Cuba for safekeeping or burn them in the event of a coup.
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And, meanwhile, the president personally advised his doctors to make sure their families had contingency plans and passports prepared.
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Then, on 8 September 1973, Allende’s closest friends, including Estrada and Oña, gathered at El Cañaveral above Santiago to celebrate Beatriz’s thirtieth birthday. But it was not much of a celebration. On this evening, Allende played a game of chess with Prensa Latina journalist Jorge Timossi, who recalled the president remarking that the situation was “ugly” and that he was “running out of pawns.”
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Unbeknownst to Allende and the Cubans, on the day they assembled at El Cañaveral, Pinochet agreed not to oppose a coup. When the CIA received news on this day that military intervention was imminent, its station warned there was still a chance that Allende could maneuver his way out of the “most serious threat” he had faced. Yet it also surmised that Allende’s “time could run out” if he did not know exactly what he faced and when, which crucially he did not.
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On 9 September, Pinochet and Chile’s commander in chief of the air force, Captain Gustavo Leigh, signed a note that Admiral Merino, by now commander in chief of the navy following Admiral Montero’s resignation, sent them. By doing so, they agreed to unite their forces in staging a coup on the eleventh. “This is our last opportunity,” Merino wrote, indicating to Pinochet specifically that if the latter did not rally all Santiago’s forces to this cause from the first instance, they would “not live to see the future.”
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The next day, Monday, 10 September, the U.S. Embassy—having been told that the coup would now actually take place the next day—stood by, cautiously ready to help. Having returned to Santiago from Washington the day before, Davis sent news back to the United States that he had advised the Chilean navy that the embassy was “flexible and ready [to] satisfy any requirement” with regard to prescheduled U.S.-Chilean naval exercises due to take place the next day. “At this moment,” Davis wrote, “our best posture is to continue about our business…. U.S. initiative would be difficult to explain and probably misinterpreted.”
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All day on Monday, 10 September, plotters within Chile’s armed forces
successfully deflected government enquiries about troop movements.
¹¹¹
On the basis of rumors Moscow had picked up in Western capitals about a coup, Corvalán made a number of phone calls. But he reassured the Soviet Embassy this was a “false alarm.”
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Meanwhile, although the Cubans were frustrated by the PCCh’s belief in the constitutionalism and loyalty of the majority of Chile’s armed forces, they had no information a coup would be launched on the eleventh. The stumbling block between expecting a coup and knowing it would happen was Pinochet. Like U.S. analysts, the Cubans and their Chilean allies had never suspected he would be one of the coup leaders.
¹¹³
Indeed, both PS and PCCh leaders had agreed he should succeed Prats and the Left trusted him.

As night fell over Santiago on 10 September, American Embassy staff were expectantly waiting to see what would happen next. That evening, an as yet unidentified “key officer … planning to overthrow President Allende” finally asked a U.S. official if Washington “would come to the aid of the Chilean military if the situation became difficult,” but the official refused an on-the-spot commitment.
¹¹⁴
Meanwhile, across town, Allende and the Cubans were all unaware what was going on. When news of troop movements headed toward Santiago from Los Andes military base reached Allende and his closest advisers gathered at Tomás Moro at around 9:00
P.M.,
they made a number of calls to the very military leaders who were waiting in the wings to intervene and were assured nothing was abnormal. “We would not have slept for months if we had had to attend every rumor,” Allende said, and having been placated with the story that troops were only mobilizing in case of disturbances at Altamirano and Garretón’s naval conspiracy trial the next day, he went to bed at 2:30
A.M.
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An hour before Allende retired to bed, Washington’s defense attaché in Santiago had reported back home that a coup would “
apparently
” be launched in the morning but he speculated that Allende might survive it.
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The question was how? The power potentially ranged against him was vast. Chile’s combined armed forces numbered 87,000 in 1973.
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And while counting on at least some of the military to remain loyal to the government, the contingency plans the Left had drawn up depended on forewarning so that advancing troops could be cut off before they reached La Moneda. By dismissing news of troop movements, Allende therefore missed an opportunity to preempt the somewhat nervous plotters. The
Cubans’ logistical room for maneuver was also restricted given that their embassy was in a strategically vulnerable cul-de-sac and could easily be cut off. As the Cubans similarly had little forewarning of the coup, they also had no easy way of distributing the arms they had been stockpiling for the MIR. However, these setbacks did not alter Allende’s plans to go to La Moneda in the event of an attack on his government. To the contrary, having been alerted to the coup at around 6:00
A.M.,
he went straight to the presidential palace to defend his presidential mandate and refused to leave the building alive. If what happened was not completely unexpected, the way it happened—the ferocity with which it took place—nevertheless shocked Allende’s government and the world beyond.

Just before 6:00
A.M.,
Ulises Estrada received a telephone call informing him that the Chilean navy had begun seizing the port of Valparaiso. He immediately left for the embassy, where he set off a chain of phone calls around Santiago conveying the code word,
lapis [lazuli]
, after the precious blue Chilean stone. This meant that a military coup was under way and Cubans were to leave their houses immediately. There was not even enough time for Cuba’s commercial attaché to collect sensitive documents or money from his office.
¹¹⁸
Estrada also alerted Carlos Altamirano and the Communist deputy chief of police investigations, Samuel Riquelme. And according to Estrada’s recollection, both had some trouble grasping the magnitude of what was happening. In addition, Estrada spoke briefly to Miguel Enríquez, to inform him that the Cuban Embassy would not immediately be able to distribute the weapons it had been stockpiling for the MIR since mid-1972.
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By 7:30
A.M.,
just over one hundred Cubans had therefore arrived at their embassy. The building was sealed off, arms were distributed, and most embassy personnel assumed assigned defensive positions. In fact, by this date the embassy was a fortress awaiting siege. It was treated as Cuban territory, and hence, as its ambassador later recalled, it was to be defended “until the last man.”
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Although from the outside it looked like an unassuming adobe house dwarfed by taller buildings, inside staff had amassed food supplies, the building’s swimming pool had been concreted over to conceal a tank of water, and in a recently dug cellar the Cubans had stored basic medical supplies to treat the wounded and quicklime to hide the smell of any decomposing dead. In all, they calculated they had provisions to last a month.
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As the embassy’s staff prepared to withstand a foreseeable attack, a group of Cubans (as yet, its size is unknown)
also organized arms and transport to leave for Chile’s presidential palace, where they planned to fight beside Allende.
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Meanwhile, across town, the president had arrived unscathed at La Moneda at 7:30
A.M.,
carrying the gun that Fidel Castro had given him. Twenty-three members of the GAP accompanied him, and between them, they carried a collection of arms, including AK-47 assault rifles, an indeterminable number of submachine guns, and two or three bazookas.
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Having gradually gathered that all three branches of the armed forces were acting together and that he could not count on the Carabineros to defend him, Allende issued a radio broadcast at 8:45
A.M.
explaining that the situation was “critical.” To those who were listening, he proclaimed he had “no alternative” but to defend the Chilean revolutionary process and fulfill his mandate; that he would take no “step backward.”
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Inside the presidential palace, documents were simultaneously burned as a matter of almost obsessive priority, arms were distributed, and defensive positions were assumed.
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Over the next hour and a half, a strange mix of the GAP, the president’s closest advisers, government ministers, doctors, and journalists assembled, and just before 9:00
A.M.,
his daughter Beatriz arrived after driving her car determinedly through one of the first army blockades erected around La Moneda.
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Having entered the building, she was asked by her father to call the Cuban Embassy and instruct the Cubans not to go to La Moneda. In Allende’s mind, this was to be a Chilean conflict, and aware that the world was watching, he did not want a battle between the Cubans and Chile’s armed forces at the presidential palace.
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Around this time, Miguel Enríquez also called Allende and offered to join him, but the president responded that the MIR should fight in the streets as it had been pledging to do.
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And even if the MIR or a group of Cubans had set out at this point, it is uncertain whether they would have reached La Moneda without suffering substantial losses. One truck containing members of the GAP and arsenal never arrived.
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Then, when the MIR offered to go to the palace and take Allende to lead a resistance from the outskirts of the city later that morning, Beatriz explained that Allende would never leave the palace.
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Indeed, after the junta broadcast an ultimatum to Allende at 9:30
A.M.
saying that if he did not leave by 11:00
A.M.,
the palace would be bombed, the president stood firm.
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Reflecting on the tension that had built up in Chile before this day, Beatriz recalled that her father “felt a certain sense of relief that this moment had arrived.” He felt “freed from the uncomfortable
situation” of being “president of a popular government” while “the armed forces used the so-called Arms Control Law to oppress workers.”
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Although Allende was clear about his own position, what he expected the workers to do was less obvious. In his last radio message, broadcast at 9:10
A.M.,
Allende had seemingly improvised an elegant farewell to the Chilean people conveying a vague message of restraint and resistance. “The people must be alert and vigilant,” he instructed. “You must not let yourselves be provoked, not let yourselves be massacred, but you must also defend your conquests. You must defend the right to construct through your own effort a dignified and better life…. These are my last words and I am certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain, I am certain that, at the least, it will be a moral lesson that will punish felony, cowardice and treason.”
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Inside La Moneda, Allende then donned a metal helmet and took personal charge of distributing weapons and ammunition. Those who accompanied him knew that they faced a battle that they were unlikely to win, but only as the morning progressed did they fully understand the extent of the situation they faced. At 9:15
A.M.,
there was an exchange of gunfire between soldiers stationed outside the palace and those inside, which grew fiercer when tanks arrived and began firing on La Moneda at 10:00
A.M.
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Around the same time, back at the Cuban Embassy—which kept abreast of developments via telephone contact with the palace and Prensa Latina offices opposite La Moneda—two unarmed members of the MIR, one of whom was the president’s nephew, Andrés Pascal Allende, managed to reach the embassy. Upon arriving, they demanded to be given at least some of the MIR’s arms. However, Estrada refused, believing this would have been “irresponsible.” Between 10:00 and 11:00
A.M.,
approximately fifty members of Patria y Libertad had closed off the embassy’s cul-de-sac with burning oil drums.
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And, as such, Estrada’s decision was based on his fear that the enemy would immediately seize arms given to these two Miristas. Only because others did not hold this view did the two members of the MIR leave the embassy with two donated pistols to defend themselves and somehow (it is not clear how) manage to survive.
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