In order to minimise their own responsibility for the 1973 coup d’état, the right wing says (in the words of Marcela Cubillos) “as long as the left does not admit its responsibility for the collapse of democracy that preceded the coup d’état, no statement makes any sense or is of any use”.
The first thing to clarify is that democracy collapsed at the time of the coup, not before! Chile was a democratic country: the Congress worked, the institutions worked. The government made many mistakes, yes. There were violent groups on the right and on the left, yes, but democracy had not collapsed.
Fifty years after 11 September 1973, the right is demanding that the left acknowledge responsibility for the coup, distorting a history that begins with the right’s assassination of General Schneider, continues with the right’s complicity with the CIA, with Nixon’s order to “make the economy squeak”, and is inserted into a Latin America in the context of the Cold War.
Over the years, the left has acknowledged the mistakes made during Popular Unity. And the historical facts tell us of a republican President Allende, who in an appeasing attitude, whose intention was precisely not to destabilise democracy, was prepared to call a plebiscite on Tuesday 11 September, in order to prevent the military coup that the right wing had been organising for some time with the help of the Washington government and the CIA.
The questions to be asked today are different:
Has the right wing recognised its responsibility in the preparation of the coup, the criminal acts of Patria y Libertad, the conversations of right-wing figures with the Nixon government, the food hoarding that produced queues and shortages and ended the day after the coup, the truckers’ strike that paralysed the country and was financed with money from the right wing and other money from the United States?
Has the right wing recognised the criminal act of bombing the Moneda palace where the president of Chile died while the right wing celebrated by uncorking bottles of champagne? Has the right wing requested forgiveness for the 17 years in which opponents were tortured, shot, their throats slit and made to disappear while the same Congress was closed from where today they hold the left responsible for the military coup? Did the right wing of the Pinochet government disembark when that government ordered the assassination of Orlando Letelier in Washington and the shooting of Bernardo Leighton and his wife Anita Fresno in Rome, leaving her in a wheelchair and him badly wounded?
Let us agree that the Popular Unity was a government in which many mistakes were made, let us agree that people like Carlos Altamirano did enormous damage by inflaming the tempers of the Navy, of opponents of the government and even of the government itself, let us agree that the maxim of “advance without compromise” of the young people of the MIR only exasperated the detractors of Popular Unity, Let us agree that the illegal seizures of factories and land contributed to the intoxication of social coexistence, let us agree that the arrogance with which part of the Unidad Popular created all kinds of hatred and suspicions by pretending to make radical changes, without agreements with the opposition. And let us also agree that the opposition itself did nothing more than cut off any change proposed by the government, however positive it might be for the country.
Let’s agree that it was not a good government and neither was it a good opposition. What was installed there was hatred, revanchism and polarisation.
But none of that justifies the criminal act that was the military coup, planned long before the situation became polarised and by forces, some of them completely alien to the internal Chilean situation. And of course, none of that justifies the long dictatorship that followed, where all public freedoms were violated, more than three thousand people were made to disappear, ten thousand families were sent into exile, opponents of the regime were tortured, burned alive, and others had their throats slit. And after the dictator lost the plebiscite, which would have left him in power for another eight years, a transition to democracy began, agreed with the military, which seated Pinochet as a senator for life in the reopened Congress.
For too long the “untouchability” of the military was established. And taking advantage of this untouchability, the military never said where the bodies of the disappeared detainees were, nor what they did with them before directing them into the sea, into the lakes or before dynamiting them in the deserts or hiding them in lime ovens and caves. And so impunity was established.
What has happened to all Chileans, left and right, has been a horrible tragedy. The justice that should have come many years ago has either taken too long or has simply not arrived. Some members of the military are being held in a luxury prison. General Pinochet died peacefully in his bed without doing a single day in prison and without acknowledging that, under the pretext of a war against Marxism-Leninism, he installed a military dictatorship where even military men who dared to defend democratic values, such as his friend General Carlos Prats, were assassinated.
The only thing that is clear on this sad anniversary is that these two sides will not be reconciled as long as there is no consensus that, whatever the political errors of a government, a coup d’état like that of 11 September 1973 will always be a criminal act, which will lead to the death of those who defend democracy, will produce a profound rupture in society and will leave the soul of the country as wounded as the soul of Chile is today.
I believe that the only point of unity that remains is pain.
Elizabeth Subercaseaux, Chilean journalist and author
