Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (43 page)

Yet the Cubans could not alter Allende’s determination to confront military intervention from the presidential palace as the democratically elected leader of his country. And, in the end, as Ulises Estrada recalled, “it was his country” and the Cubans “had to respect him.”
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When Allende showed the Cuban plans to Prats, then still commander in chief, and General José Maria Sepulveda, head of Chile’s Carabineros, Estrada was nevertheless angry.
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In his view, this clearly undermined Allende’s defense and risked leaks to plotters. To date, it is not known whether Pinochet saw the plans when he succeeded Prats or what exactly they proposed. However, it is clear that the GAP began stockpiling weapons (including bazookas) at La Moneda and Tomás Moro with Cuban help in the months before the coup and that this was by no means a closely guarded secret.
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Certainly, looking back, Estrada believes that this visible preparation contributed to the unexpected power and brutality of the military’s coup. In his opinion, military plotters knew that the means and the will existed to resist any attack and that is why those who launched the coup used such ruthless force.
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When Allende had shown these plans to Prats and Sepulveda, the Cubans also bemoaned Allende’s indiscretion because it further compromised Cuba’s position in Chile. The antigovernment press was already stoking fears that Havana was preparing the government to launch a preemptive coup to seize dictatorial power. In the early hours of 27 July, when
Allende’s naval aide, Captain Arturo Araya, was shot dead on his own balcony, the press instantly—and wrongly—pointed the finger at Oña and members of the GAP.
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Havana’s alleged smuggling of arms in boats of sugar that arrived after April 1973, Piñeiro and Rodríguez’s trip, and the Cubans’ supposed complicity in the escalation of violence in the country all helped fuel this propaganda and the increasing attacks against them. At least seven bombs targeted Cuban Embassy personnel, their business connections, and, on one occasion, a school for Cuban children in Santiago in the months before the coup.
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Cuba’s trade mission was a favorite target, and Havana’s commercial attaché remembers that every night women surrounded his house beating saucepans.
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Meanwhile, psychological warfare was employed. “Remember Jakarta,” read one message posted to the Cuban Embassy and painted on walls throughout Chile, evoking the memory of the annihilation of more than 500,000 Indonesian Communist Party members in 1965.
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In this context, embassy personnel, including Cuba’s cultural attaché, had received advanced arms training, carried pistols, changed houses at night to avoid vulnerability, and were assigned members of Cuba’s elite Tropas Especiales to guard them.
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And in late August, in preparation for the departure of one of the embassy’s most senior political counselors, Juan Carretero, who was returning to Cuba to take up a new post within the DGLN, Castro sent Estrada to Santiago permanently to take over his post and manage preparations to withstand a coup.
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Meanwhile, although the opposition exaggerated the extent of Cuban involvement in Chile, Havana certainly facilitated Chilean left-wing military preparations. According to Chilean testimonies compiled almost thirty years later, the Socialist Party’s military apparatus had received three arms deliveries “from the island” by September 1973, of which exactly half was given to the GAP. These deliveries comprised two hundred AK-47 assault rifles, four P-30 submachine guns, eight Uzi submachine guns, six Soviet RPG-7 anti-tank rocket propelled grenade weapons (each with nine rocket launchers), thirty-six P-38 automatic pistols, thirty-six Colt pistols, and two recoilless guns.
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However, Estrada maintains that the number of weapons Cuba gave the Chilean Left overall was significantly higher. According to him, the Cubans had delivered a combined total of three thousand arms to the MIR (before May 1972), the PCCh and PS, and, to a far lesser extent, MAPU. He also remembered that they gave armed training to “hundreds” of Miristas and a total of nearly two thousand Chileans, in both Chile and Cuba.
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Even if these larger figures are more accurate, Castro later privately lamented that the Chileans took “far fewer” weapons than Havana had “wanted to give them.” As well as his own personal efforts to persuade Corvalán to accept an array of weapons during his trip to Chile back in 1971, he later explained to East Germany’s leader, Erich Honecker, that weeks before the coup the Cubans had stockpiled “enough weapons for a battalion” in the Cuban Embassy, comprising “automatic weapons, antitank weapons,” but that when it asked the PCCh to collect them, “they never did.”
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Smaller collections of arms were also hidden around the city in locations specified by maps in key leaders’ possession, meaning that the Left’s ability to resist the coup was precariously reliant on these individuals. Finally, the Cubans also had weapons stored at the embassy and in a safe house nearby it for the MIR. But there was no clear strategy for distributing them in the event of a coup.
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Defying Cuban advice to unite behind Allende, the far Left also vociferously advocated confrontation with the opposition and fueled right-wing fears of subversion.
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In August 1973 the collective group of far left Chilean, Uruguayan, Argentine, and Bolivian revolutionaries formed almost a year earlier under the MIR’s leadership established a formal alliance aimed at launching armed revolution throughout the Southern Cone, the Junta Coordinadora Revolucionaria (Revolutionary Coordinating Junta, or JCR).
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Estrada also recalled that by this stage all Chile’s left-wing parties appeared to be “conspiring with the same General” within the Chilean armed forces.
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Then, in early August, the Chilean navy announced that it had uncovered a left-wing conspiracy within its ranks involving the PS’s Carlos Altamirano, the MIR’s Miguel Enríquez, and MAPU’s Oscar Garretón. The three leaders were subsequently put on trial, but they were unrepentant, insisting that it was the military itself that should stand in the dock. The MIR also claimed naval officers arrested on charges of subversion were being tortured (they probably were). Meanwhile, the Cubans’ growing disillusion with the far Left led them to reportedly believe that it was merely “gambling” and “playing at revolution without any realism.” As the East German Embassy in Santiago reported back to Berlin, “even the Cuban comrades” were “troubled by the adventurism and imprudence” of the Socialist Party and, in an “exhausting and long discussion” with its members, had pleaded with them to take a more “reasonable and responsible position.”
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Devastatingly, provocative action by the far Left and the military’s effective infiltration of left-wing parties made leftist preparations for armed

Cuban-Chilean strategy meeting in Havana, 1973. Left to right: Arnoldo Camú (PS), Fidel Castro, Ulises Estrada, Manuel Piñeiro, Beatriz Allende, Luis Fernández Oña, and Carlos Altamirano (PS). Also present, his hand barely visible to Castro’s left, was Rolando Calderon (PS). Courtesy of Luis Fernández Oña private collection.

confrontation transparent. Even before the Tanquetazo, U.S. intelligence sources reported the PCCh had drawn up new plans for increasing its military capabilities. “The intention is to create, as soon as possible, a network of paramilitary units throughout Chile,” the CIA concluded, noting that arms were being distributed between public buildings “for their defense, or for attack purposes when necessary.” It also knew the party was coordinating its preparations for self-defense with other UP paramilitary groups and that it had received Cuban training.
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Later, in early August, the CIA reported PS militants were on “alert 2 status,” one step before an “emergency.” According to U.S. sources, this meant they were instructed to remove “all files from PS offices at all levels” and each militant was given a two-digit alias that only cell leaders could identify. Those with military training were then instructed to choose sympathetic people close by for possible training and incorporation into “neighborhood defense forces.” In the event of an emergency, cell leaders would “contact the militants by telephone or messenger with further instructions.”
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This information was largely correct; over a month before September, all left-wing centers of potential resistance—factories, schools, and neighborhood groups—jumped
between alert statuses ranked from 1 to 3 while the majority of the parties’ members awaited further instructions.
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On the far Right, preparations for an impending showdown were also visible. The Chilean government’s intelligence sources reported that Patria y Libertad was receiving training from members of the armed forces and that meetings between PDC senators and military leaders were occurring in air force hangars. In August alone, right-wing paramilitaries launched 316 attacks, and members of the armed forces began assuming greater control in Santiago, Valparaiso, and Punta Arenas.
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In particular, the military ruthlessly invoked an “Arms Control Law” that had been passed in October 1972 against the Left so that by the end of August, violent raids took place every day, hardly touching right-wing arsenals.
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Chile’s armed forces also patrolled the streets in Santiago and began registering workers and residents in slums across the country.
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And, as they did, the tenor of the far Left’s proclamations sharpened. Two days before it took place, Carlos Altamirano declared that revolutionaries had to “strike back.” Referring to Allende and the PCCh’s recent last-ditch efforts to reach an agreement with the PDC, he insisted that insurrection could not be fought “through dialogues.” Instead he exaggeratedly proclaimed the Left had “a combative force which nothing and nobody can contain.”
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In reality, the Left’s combative force was of course far weaker than Altamirano suggested. Indeed, the Chilean situation was so tense, and the government’s position so vulnerable, that members of Allende’s bodyguard, the GAP, stopped carrying weapons just in case they were confiscated by the military under the Arms Control Law. According to the GAP’s survivors, the group had sixty-eight members by this stage (spread out among Allende’s escort and personnel at his home in Santiago, Tomás Moro, and his weekend retreat, El Cañaveral). However, this group believed it would have to shoulder the majority of the burden of any resistance to a coup.
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Members of the GAP later testified that the PS also believed it could count on 45 men with armed training, 90 to 100 “special operatives,” and between 15 and 20 intelligence agents.
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But this was a relatively tiny force that would not be able to contain a coup and, in this situation, the GAP became openly critical of Allende for having failed to mobilize the population and prepare decisively for an attack. To be sure, the president had an anti-insurrection plan drawn up by the armed forces, “Plan Hercules,” that would bring a thousand Carabineros to Santiago to restore order. But this did not count on revolutionary forces.
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Rather, the idea was that the armed forces would divide in two in the event of a coup and that a sizable section would remain
loyal to the government as it had done during the Tanquetazo. With faith in this idea, the president gathered all members of the GAP together on 26 August and promised that he would not compromise the people’s mandate he had been given.
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Given the critical situation in Chile, Allende also canceled his much-anticipated trip to the Non-Aligned Movement Conference in Algiers and the possibility of visiting five additional African nations (Zambia, Tanzania, the Republic of Congo, Zaire, and Guinea) a few days after he met with the GAP.
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Earlier, as noted, he had expressed enthusiasm about attending and his hope of combating Third World dependency. “We think that the Non-Aligned countries represent economic and political potentials of great significance,” he had written to President Boumedienne of Algeria.
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But Allende now informed him that Chile’s situation was “serious” and that imperialism was helping those who attacked his government, making it impossible for him to attend.
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The position within the armed forces was certainly now serious. Having assumed the position of defense minister in the tenth (and last) of Allende’s cabinet reshuffles on 28 August, Orlando Letelier found himself faced with intransigent opposition within the navy when he tried to prevent its commander in chief, Admiral Montero, from stepping aside in favor of Admiral Merino. At a meeting of the Naval Council on 1 September 1973, Letelier expressed his “surprise” when explicit fears of Marxism, infiltration in the armed forces, and the breakdown of cohesion within the navy were put to him. The armed forces were meant to be “professional and apolitical,” he insisted, adding that while it was hard to remain on the margin of politics, the alternative meant rejecting the military’s professional obligations. But the former ambassador failed to persuade Merino. As the latter stated categorically, parties aligned to the government had infiltrated the navy, and the institution did not want to be Marxist.
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