Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (45 page)

Before midday, two hundred soldiers from Chile’s armed forces surrounded the embassy, occupying neighboring buildings and cutting it off completely.
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In these circumstances, Estrada ordered the embassy’s radio plant and its codes to be destroyed in case the building was overrun. Similarly, documents were burned (with candles) so that if and when the Cubans needed to leave Chile, they could use the thirty large crates
these had been stored in to smuggle their weapons out of the country.
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And, later, in the embassy’s backyard, Oña also set fire to Allende’s private papers as promised.
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Meanwhile, Chile’s population listened to the junta’s radio declarations to learn what was happening. U.S. Embassy personnel were also sitting by the radio, waiting for either Allende to resign or La Moneda to be bombed. Having arrived at the embassy diagonally opposite the palace, Davis sent regular reports to Washington detailing news he received from the junta’s broadcasts but little more.
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Meanwhile, at his residence, his wife and daughters were glued to the radio. Suddenly, just before midday, the Hawker Hunter jets everyone had been waiting for passed overhead. As Davis’s wife later described, “It was an eerily beautiful sight as they came in from nowhere. The sun glinted on their wings. There were only two. Still in formation, they swung gracefully through the sky in a great circle, and then they tipped and dove … one bomb each … then, a gentle curve upwards.”
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Of course, those inside the palace faced the grim reality of those “eerily beautiful” jets. Moments before the planes began bombing La Moneda, Allende had forced women to leave the building. The group that remained had then taken whatever cover it could, with a limited number of faulty gas masks. For the next twenty minutes, the palace was hit by at least eight bombs.
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Over the next hour and a half, the resistance within the palace exchanged fire with the military, using two bazookas against the tanks. Pro-government snipers in the public works building next to the presidential palace also fired on the military.
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Yet, together, these efforts were in vain. Just before two o’clock, the military stormed the building and found Allende dead.

Despite preparations over the course of three years to defend the government in the event of a coup, the Chilean Left also crumbled. The PCCh’s newspaper,
El Siglo
, heard of the military’s intervention just in time to order readers to their “combat position!” but many simply did not know where they should go.
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Still uncertain of the nature of the situation they faced, leaders from the PCCh, the PS, and the MIR had finally met at 11:00
A.M.
to decide on a course of action. But they could not agree, and the arms in their possession were limited. Enríquez, unable to access Cuban arms, for example, believed he could assemble four hundred militants by 4:00 p.m. but calculated that only fifty would be ready for combat, which was clearly not enough to withstand the military’s onslaught.
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A key problem for the UP’s parties was that communication broke
down.
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The Cubans explain this breakdown as the responsibility of party leaders and a consequence of the compartmentalization of trained militants. One key PS leader immediately sought asylum in a foreign embassy, for example, and another PCCh leader failed to alert militants to the location of stored armaments.
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At 5:00
P.M.,
Estrada also fiercely rebuked Carlos Altamirano when he called the embassy to enquire where the MIR was fighting so that he could join them. Not only had Altamirano called on an open telephone line, but Estrada believed it was very late to be organizing the armed resistance that he had been recklessly boasting about.
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The Cubans were also too tied up with their own difficulties to be able to offer more assistance. At least two gun battles occurred between the Cuban Embassy and Chilean armed forces on 11 September.
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The fiercest took place at midnight when Oña attempted to leave the embassy to escort Allende’s wife and daughters to the ex-president’s innocuous burial in Viña del Mar. Despite prior arrangements with the military and explicit instructions for him to leave the building specifically for this purpose, troops fired on Oña when he opened the door.
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The Cubans returned fire so fiercely that a Vietnamese diplomat who witnessed the battle later told Timossi that he had never seen professional armed soldiers running backward as fast.
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While bullets flew back and forth above them, Oña and the ambassador lay flat on the ground behind the embassy’s wall. “It was probably a few minutes, but it felt like an eternity,” Oña later remembered. Eventually, the military called a ceasefire, but not before it had suffered a number of (as yet unknown) losses. On the Cuban side, the ambassador and another person were wounded.
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The intensive targeting of Cubans by Chilean military and paramilitary forces is revealing in terms of their priorities and fears. Throughout 11 September, coup leaders threatened to send tanks and jets to bomb the embassy.
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A Cuban merchant vessel,
Playa Larga
, was also heavily attacked by sea and air near the port of Valparaiso, and when the military forces raided factories and neighborhoods, they hunted down all foreigners as a matter of priority.
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But no other embassy faced the same pressure as the Cuban Embassy. The Soviet Embassy, for example, was surrounded briefly a day after the coup but escaped the military’s wrath.
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Moreover, transcripts of Pinochet’s conversations with the coup’s other leaders on 11 September reveal that Allende’s ties with Cuba were influential in determining the general’s mind-set. He personally insisted on inserting a clause into the military’s radio declaration pointing the finger at “foreigners who
have assassinated our people,” and at “foreigners who have intervened here on our territory.”
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And amid organizations for Allende’s burial, he had commented that the body should be “put in a box and loaded onto an airplane, that the burial take place elsewhere, in Cuba.”
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The junta also immediately broke off diplomatic relations with Havana and, seeming afraid of engaging in confrontation, urgently wanted all Cubans in Chile to leave the country.
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Although the Cubans themselves now quite clearly also wanted to leave, they did not trust the military to guarantee their safety, and they wanted to safeguard their interests in Chile. Thus, while Cuban diplomats bombarded foreign embassies worldwide to demand “safe conduct” for their colleagues, frantic negotiations went on in Havana and Santiago to organize their departure.
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What concerned the Cubans was how to safeguard the arms they had stored for the MIR, how to take their own arms with them without them being discovered, and how they could protect Max Marambio, a Mirista and former leader of the GAP with close links to the Cubans who was at the embassy on the day of the coup and whom the military refused to let leave.

Eventually, Havana entrusted Sweden’s ambassador, Harald Edelstam, with Cuban interests. When this left-wing Swedish aristocrat, with experience of covert operations during World War II, arrived at the embassy, Estrada led him down to the cellar where the Cubans had stored the arms they wanted to distribute to the MIR. And although Edelstam was reportedly shocked at their quantity, Estrada remembers that his attitude was “magnificent.” He immediately agreed to protect Marambio, safeguard the arms, and help distribute them as soon as possible. For the time being, though, he covered the cellar’s trap door with a sofa and vowed to sleep on it.
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Meanwhile, on 12 September, the Cubans collected documents and money from Cuba’s commercial office, rescued those that had not been able to get to the embassy from their safe houses, and packed their empty diplomatic crates with Cuban arms.
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Cubans later recalled it was pure luck that a Soviet plane was at Pudahuel airport to fly them out of Chile.
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It was also only because Soviet personnel were neither vulnerable nor being asked to leave that they agreed to donate their plane when asked by the Cubans to do so. The only other country the junta immediately broke relations with was North Korea, on the grounds that it, like Cuba, had “actively intervened in internal national politics.”
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However, despite the discovery of North Korean arms at Tomás Moro, which served as the pretext, Pyongyang’s leaders knew nothing
about the weapons (the Cubans had brought North Korean weapons into the country because the USSR and Eastern Europeans had put restrictions on Cubans transferring their weapons to Chile).
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Cuba’s three-year mission in Chile thus came to a disastrous end far more abruptly than the Cubans themselves had anticipated. Their improvised escape and the extensive embassy preparations for withstanding a prolonged struggle reveal that the Cubans had never expected to abandon the country like this. Although Marambio and Edelstam, together with Argentine Montoneros clandestinely in Chile, delivered approximately three hundred arms to the MIR in the weeks after the coup, these did not offer any significant relief for the desperate situation Chile’s left wing faced.
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As the CIA noted, the junta planned “severe repression” to “stamp out all vestiges of communism in Chile for good.”
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Of course, the junta’s fear that the Cubans could lead mass resistance, nurtured over the course of three years of psychological campaigns to play up Cuban involvement in Chile, was exaggerated. Even with prior knowledge and unity, it is far from certain whether a few hundred (or even a few thousand) partially trained Chilean militants could have resisted Chile’s armed forces. The Chilean Left was hopelessly divided and was unprepared to face the military onslaught that followed, having been severely weakened by the arms raids in the weeks leading up to the coup. There also does not appear to have been a joint Cuban-Chilean plan to defend the government. Rather, there was a general expectation that the Cubans would assist if the time came.
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And although their embassy remained a central point of reference to the various sectors of the Chilean Left, in the context of fragmented left-wing planning the Cubans had become dislocated and unable to direct any decisive countermeasures for a coup. Ultimately, Havana’s role depended on Allende to take decisive action to unite these forces and request the Cubans’ help. But this request never came. “The only option was to try to arm the popular forces,” Castro later told Honecker; “Naturally it would have been dangerous, but it was more dangerous to do nothing…. For the enemy was mobilized, the fascists were mobilized, and the masses were nowhere to be seen because the government had not mobilized them.”
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One week after the Chilean coup, Cuba’s representative at the United Nations, Ricardo Alarcón, labeled Nixon the “intellectual author” of the
military’s intervention.
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From Berlin to Tanzania, Paris to Rome, and Montreal to Honduras, other fingers also pointed at the United States as the architect of Allende’s downfall.
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Chile’s new regime certainly looked like Nixon’s most-favored ally in Latin America, Brazil’s dictatorship. But as one external observer noted two years later, “the level of oppression” was a “major difference”: “Chile’s military junta has not only utilized the experience of Brazil but leapfrogged the early experimental stages of the Brazilian process.”
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Washington played a role in encouraging the new Chilean dictatorship to speedily learn the lessons from Brazil. Indeed, U.S. contingency planners had been examining ways of persuading a hypothetical military regime to seek close relations with Brasilia even before the Chilean coup took place. And now that it had, policy makers in Washington—among them the previously reticent Davis and members of the State Department—paid considerable attention to ensuring that a potential military regime succeeded.

The day after the coup, the State Department instructed Davis to discreetly convey Washington’s “desire to cooperate” and to “assist” the junta.
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As Kissinger privately argued, “however unpleasant,” the new government was “better for us than Allende.”
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Over a month before the coup took place, intelligence analysts had also unsurprisingly predicted that Allende’s “demise” would be a “psychological setback to the cause of doctrinaire socialism in the hemisphere” and that his successors would “be favorably disposed toward the U.S.” and to foreign investment.
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Pinochet also quite clearly wanted to “strengthen … friendly ties” and contacted the U.S. Embassy in Santiago on 12 September as a means of doing so.
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Although he had apparently not communicated his plans to Washington before, he now notably played up Allende’s alleged pressure on the army to purchase Soviet equipment as a lever to extract adequate assistance.
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Indeed, looking back on the days before the coup when he was minister of defense, Letelier recalled that he had asked Pinochet to look into the prospect of purchasing arms from the USSR and that the latter had expressed opposition to the idea of Soviet arms and training programs in Chile.
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This attitude appears to have impressed U.S. officials in the immediate aftermath of the coup. On 14 September, intelligence sources noted somewhat belatedly that he was “decisive” and “prudent … the priority concerns are to restore order and economic normalcy. Political reform apparently will wait.”
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The DIA also later described him as “very businesslike. Very honest, hard working, dedicated.” And Davis went as far as to call him “gracious and eloquent.”
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