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General Pinochet came to power in a military coup d'état on September 11, 1973, in which rebels bombed the Presidential Palace with British-made Hawker Hunter fighter jets. During this coup, Allende died. The nature of his death is unclear: His personal doctor said that he committed suicide with a machine gun (generally presumed to be the machine gun given to him by Fidel Castro), and an autopsy labelled his death as suicide, while others insist he was murdered by Pinochet's military forces while defending the palace. [14], [15], [16]
Initially there were four leaders of the junta: besides Pinochet from the Infantry, there were Gustavo Leigh Guzmán of the Air Force, José Toribio Merino Castro of the Navy, and César Mendoza Durán of the Gendarmerie. Coup leaders soon decided against a rotating presidency and named Pinochet permanent head of the junta.
Pinochet moved to solidify his control against any opposition. On September 13, the junta dissolved the Congress. The National Stadium was temporarily converted into an immense prison. Approximately 130,000 individuals were arrested in a three-year period, with the number of "disappeared" reaching into the thousands within the first few months. Most of the people targeted had been supporters of Allende; the September 13 decree also outlawed the parties that had been part of Popular Unity.
In his memoirs, Pinochet affirms that he was the leading plotter of the coup and used his position as Commander of the Army to coordinate a far-reaching scheme that was coordinated with the other branches of the military. In recent years, however, high military officials from the time have said that Pinochet only reluctantly got involved in the coup a few days before it was scheduled to occur.
Once the Junta was in power, Pinochet soon consolidated his control, first retaining sole chairmanship of the Junta (originally agreed to be rotated among all members), and he was proclaimed the President of the Republic.
See main article U.S. intervention in Chile.
While U.S. government hostility to the Allende regime is unquestioned, the U.S. role in the coup itself remains a highly controversial matter. Documents declassified during the Clinton administration show that the United States government and the CIA had sought the overthrow of Allende in 1970, immediately after he took office (" Project FUBELT "; U.S. efforts to prevent Allende taking office in 1970 are discussed in 1970 Chilean presidential election), but claims of their direct involvement in the actual coup are neither proven nor contradicted by publicly available documentary evidence; many potentially relevant documents still remain classified. Regarding Pinochet's rise to power, the CIA undertook a comprehensive analysis of its records and individual memoirs as well as conducting interviews with former agents, and concluded in a report issued in 2000 that the CIA "did not assist Pinochet to assume the Presidency." [17]
The CIA was notified by contacts of the impending Pinochet coup two days in advance, but contends it "played no direct role in" the coup. After Pinochet assumed power, U.S. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger told President Nixon that the U.S. "didn't do it" (referring to the coup itself) but had "created the conditions as great as possible." [18]
Immediately after the Allende government came into office, the U.S. sought to place economic pressure on Chile. U.S. National Security Council documents, later ordered released by U.S. President Bill Clinton [19], include decision memorandum no. 93, dated November 9, 1970, written by Kissinger and addressed to the heads of diplomatic, defense and intelligence departments. This document stated that pressure should be placed on the Allende government to prevent its consolidation and limit its ability to implement policies contrary to U.S. and hemispheric interests, such as Allende's total nationalization of several foreign corporations and the copper industry. Specifically, Nixon directed that no new bilateral economic aid commitments be undertaken with the government of Chile [Kissinger, 1970].
Between 1964 and 1970 (under Frei), over $1 billion in economic assistance flowed in; during the Allende's tenure (1970-73) disbursements were non-existent or negligible [Petras & Morley, 1974]. The reduction in aid combined with the fall in the value of copper from a 1970 high of USD $66 to a low of USD $48 per ton, which undermined Allende's proposed restructuring of the Chilean economy. As the program was dependent on government spending, this caused a decline in the socioeconomic circumstances of Chile's poorest citizens.
U.S. officials ordered measures up to and including support for a potential coup to prevent Allende from taking office, although there are conflicting views as to whether the U.S. later pulled back from this position. That the U.S. planning a potential coup in Chile is evident in a secret cable from Thomas Karamessines, the CIA Deputy Director of Plans, to the Santiago CIA station, dated October 16, 1970, after the election but before Allende's inauguration. "It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup ... it is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG [Unites States Government] and American hand be well hidden" [Karamessines, 1970].
Once it became clear that Allende had won a plurality of the votes in 1970, the CIA proposed two plans. Track I was designed to persuade the Chilean Congress, through outgoing Christian Democratic President Eduardo Frei, to confirm conservative candidate Jorge Alessandri as president. Alessandri would resign shortly after, rendering Frei eligible to run against Allende in new elections. However, Track I was dropped, because Frei, despite being firmly anti-Allende, was also adamantly opposed to going against Chile's longstanding democratic traditions.
The CIA had also drawn up a second plan, Track II, in case Track I failed. The agency would find generals willing to prevent Allende from assuming the presidency and provide them with support for a coup. Presumably, a military junta could then schedule new elections, but Nixon simply did not want Allende in power; he was not concerned about specific details.
The agency came into contact with General Roberto Viaux, who was planning a coup with loyal military officers. An important part of Viaux's plan was to kidnap General Rene Schneider, Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean Army, who was a strict constitutionalist and opposed to the idea of a coup from a historically apolitical military. The CIA maintained contact with Viaux, but eventually decided against supporting his plot, instead looking for other generals willing to take part in a coup. About the Viaux situation, Kissinger said to Nixon on October 15, 1970, "This looks hopeless. I turned it off. Nothing would be worse than an abortive coup."
However, on October 22, Viaux went ahead with his plan, which was badly botched. Gen. Schneider drew a handgun to protect himself from his attackers, who in turn drew their guns and shot him in four vital areas; he was pronounced dead in Santiago's military hospital. The event provoked national outrage. As far as American involvement, the Church Committee , which investigated U.S. involvement in Chile during this period, determined that the weapons used in the debacle "were, in all probability, not those supplied by the CIA to the conspirators."
There is no evidence that the U.S. directly backed Pinochet's successful coup in 1973, but the Nixon administration was undoubtedly pleased with the outcome; Nixon had spoken with disappointment about the failed coup earlier that year. Had Allende managed to complete his 6-year term, the CIA would likely have simply provided funds and propaganda support to a non-Marxist opponent, as it had done in 1964 and 1970.
The U.S. did provide material support to the military regime after the coup, although criticizing them in public. A document released by the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) in 2000 titled "CIA Activities in Chile" revealed that the CIA actively supported the military junta after the overthrow of Allende and that it made many of Pinochet's officers into paid contacts of the CIA or U.S. military, even though some were known to be involved in human rights abuses [20]. The CIA's publicly announced policies on paid informants have since been modified to exclude those involved in such abuses, but at the time they were evaluated on a case-by-case basis and measured with the value of the information they provided.
The documents produced by various U.S. agencies were provided by the US State Department in October 1999. The collection of 1,100 documents dealt with the years leading up to the military coup. One of these documents establishes that U.S. military aid was raised dramatically between the coming to power of Allende in 1970, when it amounted to USD $800,000 annually, to $10.9 million in 1972. The U.S. government supported Pinochet's government after he came to power.
The CIA also had provided funding and propaganda support to political opponents of Allende in the 1964 and 1970 Chilean presidential elections, as well as during the Allende administration.
On September 10, 2001, a suit was filed by the family of constitutionalist General René Schneider , once head of the Chilean general staff, accusing former US Secretary of State Henry Kissinger of arranging Schneider's 1970 murder because he would have opposed a military coup [21]. However, CIA documents indicate that while the CIA had discussed potential plans for his kidnapping, his killing, which was committed by a rebel military group with CIA contacts, was never intended. Furthermore, Nixon and Kissinger had decided a week before the killing that General Viaux, who was the chief plotter in the Schneider incident, was not a good bet for the coup.
The U.S. government under Richard Nixon never hid its dislike of the Allende regime, so they could hardly have been expected to render Allende active support. Whether the United States' economic policy towards Chile caused the economic crisis or merely aggravated what was already an intractable situation for Allende is unclear. It is realistic to remark that these policies did adversely affect Allende's chances of alleviating the crisis.
The coup, regardless of the degree of U.S. involvement, achieved the U.S. government objective of eradicating the threat of socialism in Chile and brought about a regime sympathetic to their own interests. In her evaluation of United States foreign policy around the time of the coup in Chile, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, later U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, highlighted her country's lack of overt aggressiveness in the developing world while events were transpiring in Chile. "In the last decade especially we have practiced remarkable forbearance everywhere." [Kirkpatrick, 1979] While this is the case for overt U.S. policy, severely constrained by the movement that had grown up in opposition to the Vietnam War, nonetheless, as discussed above, at the very least United States policy regarding aid helped lead to Allende's downfall and the U.S. at some times actively supported coup planning, although possibly not that of the coup that actually occurred.
In a 2003 interview on the U.S. Black Entertainment Television network, U.S. Secretary of State Colin Powell was asked about why the United States saw itself as the "moral superior" in the Iraq conflict, citing the Chilean coup as an example of U.S. intervention that went against the wishes of the local population. Powell responded: "With respect to your earlier comments about Chile in the 1970s and what happened with Mr. Allende, it is not a part of American history that we're proud of." Chilean newspapers hailed the news as the first time the U.S. government had conceded a role in the affair.
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