The Condor Years (9 page)
Authors: John Dinges
There is no way to exaggerate the atmosphere of terror that the military imposed on Chile after September 11, 1973. Pinochet made no attempt to hide the brutality of his counterrevolution. Although he faced virtually no armed resistance, MIR having decided to forego activating its military force in favor of hunkering down for a longer fight, Pinochet’s troops occupied the cities with guns blazing. For days, it was common to see bodies along roadsides or floating in the Mapocho River, which traverses Santiago. City morgue workers filled all available refrigeration units and began to stack bodies in corridors, allowing families to walk through to identify relatives.
Automatic rifle fire could be heard every night for months during the dusk-to-dawn curfew. Fortified police and army barricades, manned by troops armed with machine guns, were set up in streets throughout the capital. Commandeered city buses filled with soldiers careened through neighborhoods, stopping to raid individual houses, often after neighbors called in accusations that suspicious foreigners or “bearded subversives” were living there. (Police, alerted by neighbors’ denunciations, twice raided the author’s house in the middle-class neighborhood of Ñuñoa, near central Santiago, where he was living in a rented house with three Chileans, an American, a Canadian, and a Colombian. One of the Chileans, a graduate student in economics from a working-class family, was arrested when he returned to his school to pick up books. Soldiers released him after midnight, putting him on the street five miles from home during curfew when street patrols had permission to shoot to kill. He crept house to house for hours, finally scaling the fence at our house and banging on the door just before dawn.)
Tens of thousands were rounded up in the first weeks and packed into stadiums and then into hastily constructed concentration camps. In a tactic repeated many times, troops surrounded and raided entire settlements (
poblaciones
) of poor and working-class people considered strongholds of pro-Allende sentiment. By December, the concentration camp population reached 18,000 prisoners.
As terrible as it was, the executions, dumped bodies, concentration camps, and mass arrests were just the visible part of the repression. A good part of the atmosphere of terror came from uncertainty about military actions that were hidden. There was a general awareness that people were dying, but nobody knew how many. Many of those arrested never showed up in the concentration camps; neither did their bodies appear in the morgues or rivers.
Over the years, bodies were found in unmarked plots in cemeteries, at the bottom of abandoned mines and wells. Several hundred bodies were located, but they did not add up to the thousands of names on the lists of the disappeared.
Pinochet’s toughest enemies, however, had escaped the country to build resistance abroad. Those who stayed in Chile were creating underground networks to strike back at the military. Stopping those in hiding would require new intelligence capability and systematic operations throughout the country. Defeating subversion abroad was even more difficult. It would be a sustained,
international struggle. Pinochet began to develop the long-term international apparatus almost immediately after September 11. According to a CIA report dated October 3, one of his first steps was to reach out to like-minded friends: “The armed forces apparently believe the left is regrouping for sabotage and guerrilla activity. Several friendly governments have been asked to provide counterinsurgency materiel and training.”
Brazil and the United States were first in line to help Chile reconfigure its military for the new tasks.
There is a continuing dispute about specific actions by U.S. agents to promote and support the 1973 coup. The record of newly declassified documents is expansive but still incomplete. The most recent official report about the CIA role, the so-called Hinchey Report, released in 2000, reaches a carefully hedged but still disconcerting conclusion:
Although the CIA did not instigate the coup that ended Allende’s government on 11 September 1973, it was aware of coup plotting by the military, had ongoing intelligence collection relationships with some plotters, and—because CIA did not discourage the takeover and had sought to instigate a coup in 1970—probably appeared to condone it.
The official CIA position draws a fine line between instigation (which it denies) and support (which it does not rule out before the coup, and which it acknowledges after the coup). The documentary record on the latter remains fragmentary and inconclusive.
Short of a credible investigation, the documents released so far will be subject to the not unreasonable assumption that they have been carefully redacted to hide the truth of U.S. involvement. That said, the contemporary documents should be analyzed first in terms of their explicit content, and not simply dismissed as lies where they contradict suspicions about U.S. actions.
In that light, there is a fascinating exchange of cables between the Santiago station chief and his boss at CIA headquarters, the chief of the Western Hemisphere Division. The subject is the prospect of a coup against Allende’s government. Allende has finished his first year in office, and the CIA officials are discussing how they should influence the Chilean military. The context is the failed CIA attempt to instigate a coup a year earlier.
November 12, 1971, Santiago chief of station to CIA Headquarters:
We recognize that the [redacted] program’s end objective, a military solution to the Chilean problem, must be sought within very carefully drawn guidelines. . . .
There should be a high probability for success before we weigh in in favor of a coup. . . .
We therefore restrict our discussions of the mechanics of a coup to recruited sources and are discreet in our discussion with the other military officers. . . .
Taking into consideration all the caveats and limitations noted above, we conceive our [redacted] mission as one in which we work consciously and deliberately in the direction of a coup.
To this point in the exchange, it is clear that the CIA station chief, who has been identified as Ray Warren, believes that his goal is to cause a coup, and that the discussion is about “how.” The next cable in the sequence is even more explicit, and it contradicts the station chief’s understanding of his job.
December 1, 1971, CIA headquarters to Santiago station chief:
We hope that the following comments will explain and define the limitations on [redacted] operations as well as provide practical and acceptable guidelines for the future. . . .
Since we do not have [redacted] approval to become involved in any coup planning, we cannot accept your conclusion in [your cable] that the [redacted] mission is to “work consciously and deliberately in the direction of a coup.” Nor can we authorize you to “talk frankly about the mechanics of a coup” with key commanders, because the implications of that amount to the same.
On the other hand, the monitoring and reporting of activities, events and attitudes of the Chilean armed forces and their leaders has become increasingly important. . . . There is of course a rather fine dividing line here between merely “listening” and “talking frankly about the mechanics of a coup” which in the long run must be left to the discretion and good judgment of the individual case officer.
The essential fact . . . is that we do not have any authority to state, or even to imply, that [redacted] favors a coup as a solution to the Chilean dilemma.
In sum, stay with history as it unfolds, don’t make it.
The coup occurred twenty-two months later, ample time for the on-again, off-again U.S. coup policy to switch back in the other direction. But it must be said that the available documents do not suggest that such a switch in fact happened. In the absence of further evidence, the Hinchey Report’s conclusion stands, namely, that the United States worked to undermine the Allende’s democratically elected government and ardently desired its overthrow, but had no direct role in the military coup itself.
Our concern here is to examine the alliances that grew up around Pinochet’s blow to the Latin American left and how the United States influenced the Pinochet regime after it took power, particularly in supporting, training, and gathering intelligence from the security agencies most responsible for Operation Condor assassinations and other systematic human rights violations.
The Hinchey Report, despite its generally hedging tone, points to intense activity by U.S. agencies to help Pinochet’s regime prepare for the coming security challenge.
CIA actively supported the military Junta after the overthrow of Allende. . . . Many of Pinochet’s officers were involved in systematic and widespread human rights abuses following Allende’s ouster. Some of these were contacts or agents of the CIA or US military. The IC [Intelligence Community] followed then-current guidance for reporting such abuses and admonished its Chilean agents against such behavior.
Liaison with Chilean Security Services. The CIA had liaison relationships in Chile with the primary purpose of security assistance in gathering intelligence
on external targets.
The CIA offered these services assistance in internal organization and
training to combat subversion and terrorism from abroad
, not in combating internal opponents of the government. [Emphasis added.]
“Subversion and terrorism from abroad” was precisely what Pinochet’s advisers envisioned as their most serious long-term threat. The operational brain center for planning the new intelligence apparatus was the
Academia de Guerra
, the War Academy, a French colonial–style building along Santiago’s Alameda, at the corner of García Reyes Street. It had housed the school for advanced officers training since 1886. In 1973, it had been a meeting place for the coup plotters, and continued after the coup as a kind of think tank for the officers advocating the most hard-line methods in the struggle they considered to be a
world war against Communism. The officer Pinochet put in charge was Lieutenant Colonel Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, a tough leader who was popular with his troops and had a reputation for being a devout Catholic and something of an intellectual. He had already come to the attention of U.S. intelligence officials in Chile as one of the best and the brightest. Contreras gave the new apparatus the name Directorate of National Intelligence (Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional), to distinguish it from the existing military intelligence organizations within each branch of the armed forces. It became universally known as DINA.
The September 11 coup also spurred the toughest revolutionary groups into action.
Thousands of Allende supporters who escaped arrest fled the country, many by walking over the Andes separating Chile and Argentina, others making their way through the northern Atacama Desert to Peru. Argentina was in what was to be a relatively brief period of civilian rule. The military, which had ruled since overthrowing Juan Domingo Perón in 1956, had allowed elections earlier in 1973, which were won by a Perón surrogate, Héctor Cámpora. Perón returned from his long exile in Spain and unceremoniously pushed Cámpora aside. Perón, seventy-eight years old and in failing health, won new elections in a landslide and took power just a month after the coup in Chile.
Hated by the most conservative sectors of the military, Perón balanced extreme right-wing and left-wing factions within his own Justicialista Movement. Peron’s crafty power maneuvers had included overt encouragement of armed action by leftist allies he referred to with affection as
los muchachos—
“the boys.” He had made clear his sympathy for Allende, and he had reopened diplomatic relations with Cuba, breaking the U.S.-sponsored embargo. With Perón’s populist restoration, Argentina became a haven for political refugees and revolutionary organizations. As military dictators closed down politics in one country after another, Bolivians, Uruguayans, Paraguayans, Brazilians, and now Chileans all flocked to take advantage of the heady freedom in Argentina.
The radical revolutionaries now making Argentina their home base had spent the early 1970s under the protection of Allende’s Chile. Most of the top leaders made their escape from Chile in the weeks prior to the coup. The most
committed veterans were Uruguay’s Tupamaros and Bolivia’s National Liberation Army (
Ejército de Liberación Nacional
—ELN). The Bolivian group had inherited the mantle of revolution from Che Guevara himself, who had fought in a
guerra de guerrillas
in the mountains of Bolivia, until he was captured and executed in 1967 (by counterinsurgency troops accompanied by CIA trainers). Thousands of Tupamaros were imprisoned in Uruguay, but hundreds more had escaped and were preparing a counteroffensive from outside the country.
In Argentina, they were welcomed by the most formidable group of all, the Argentine People’s Revolutionary Army (
Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo—
ERP) and its above-ground political organization, the Revolutionary Workers Party (
Partido Revolucionario de los Trabajadores
—PRT). Mario Roberto Santucho, an accountant, had led the group from its origins in Argentina’s bickering Trotskyist factions to a disciplined, ideologically united party. Having grown up as a clandestine organization under military rule, ERP was not reluctant to translate its violent rhetoric into military actions. Its members had carried out a series of kidnappings and assaults that had led to its banning in 1972. With some 5,000 militants deployed in cells throughout Argentina’s cities, the PRT/ERP was rich and well organized, and itching for the revolution to start.
The ERP leaders saw the coup in Chile as confirming their conviction that Latin America was embarked on an irreversible road to revolution. “We were in one of our best moments in the political bureau,” said Luis Mattini, one of the few top ERP leaders still alive to describe the events of the 1970s. “The mass movement was at its peak. We decided to deploy all necessary effort to help Chile—such as mass demonstrations of solidarity in Argentina, but above all military preparation and material support for MIR. . . . We firmly concluded that the coup was not a setback but rather the removal of an obstacle. We thought the Chileans would rise up in arms, and given the degree of politicization and socialist conviction they had we thought they would be unstoppable.”