LANDMARK EVENTS
The LANDMARK EVENTS page provides detailed accounts of specific episodes in the 1973 to 1998 period, which were significant and characterized distinct periods of Chile's recent history.
Each of these events is highlighted in the chronology, providing another means of entry to the page.
Military Coup: September 11, 1973
Lonquen: The Disappeared Do Exist
May 1983: First National Protest
May 1991: The National Truth and Reconciliation Commission Report
March 1998: Pinochet, from General to Senator
SEPTEMBER 11, 1973 - THE MILITARY COUP
The Military Moves In
On September 11, 1973, the four branches of the Armed Forces, led by Army Commander-in-Chief General Augusto Pinochet, violently overthrew the constitutionally elected government of President Salvador Allende, marking the beginning of 17 years of military rule in Chile. With the stated mission of "redirecting the country along the path of liberty and law" the military regime immediately embarked on a "witch hunt," arresting and imprisoning hundreds of supporters of Allende's Popular Unity government and members of other leftist political parties, as well as individuals perceived to be affiliated with these.
The coup and its unexpectedly bloody aftermath, put an abrupt end to a relatively long period of constitutional rule in Chile and set the stage for a de facto authoritarian regime that would be sustained through force until 1990. From 1973 until 1990, and particularly in the earliest years of the military regime, human rights violations were widespread and systematic. These included arbitrary arrests, raids on private households, imprisonment, extra-judicial executions, torture, relegation and exile.
A Government Under Siege
"Getting up and shaking off the dust that had fallen on him, Allende asked if anyone was hurt. In the group that accompanied him, everyone was unharmed, even though the bombardment had annihilated the GAP (Allende's personal bodyguards) positioned in different parts of the presidential building. The worst thing about the twenty rockets dropped by the Hawkers was not so much the explosion itself, but the fire and the expansive wave that followed the explosion, advancing through the corridors, shattering windows and ripping doors off their hinges."
La Moneda, the seat of the Chilean government, was under siege. At 11:52 a.m. the Air Force began its bombardment of the presidential palace and the Army its tank attack. For the next twenty minutes, Hawker planes launched 20 projectiles into the heart of the government building, reducing it to a burning pile of rubble.
President Salvador Allende and a handful of his closest advisors and personal bodyguards had hurried to La Moneda earlier that morning to assess reports of an ominous movement of troops in Valparaiso. (read testimony)
It was not the first time rumors had flown of a plot to overthrow the democratically elected socialist government but this seemed the most serious rebellion yet. Originally believed to be an uprising of minority factions within the Army and Navy, it became clear as the morning progressed that Allende no longer had a single ally among the leaders of all branches of the Armed Forces.
The Coup was Inevitable.
In the moments before the commanding generals of the coup gave the order to initiate an air strike against La Moneda, they repeatedly demanded Allende’s resignation, offering him and his family safe passage out of the country. Allende refused to surrender, and instead busied himself organizing the armed resistance from within La Moneda, evacuating as many people as possible from the building and sending his top aides to negotiate with the military leaders.
Shortly before he died, Allende went on the only radio airwave still open, Radio Magallanes, to give a defiant last address (link) to the nation, in which he pledged his own life in defense of his right to govern.
Throughout September 11 and the following day, the military established absolute control over all Chilean territory.
Unexpected Brutality
"The military tricked us all, because we believed that (the coup) meant the restoration of democracy and that turned out to be false. But we could not believe that it was false... We were all tricked, because we believed it was for freedom and democracy."
(Cardinal Silva Henriquez as cited in: Chile. La Memoria Prohibida)
"The Chilean Armed Forces have long been attributed with a "traditional apolitical attitude." But that presumed "loyalty to the Constitution" always had its limits and disappeared every time it became necessary to protect the privileges of the dominant class. Also, the Chilean Army has always proven to be a brutal instrument for class domination."
(Chile: Libro Negro, 1974)
"Above all, we are conscious and happy to be able to live with the assurance that we will not be murdered in cold blood and without reason, that our children will again study without anyone putting a yoke on their minds, that our wives will not be beaten, insulted or massacred. And, ultimately, happy to be able to contribute all that each of us is capable of contributing so that our country continues being free and sovereign, just like before the damnation of the Marxist experiment and the ignominious vice of a corrupt and treasonous government fell upon us."
(Libro Blanco de la Ingenieria Chilena, Colegio de Ingenieros)
There are, inevitably, widely diverging views as to how it came about that Chile’s traditionally apolitical Armed Forces would undertake a military strike against its own government. Political analyses aside, there is one undeniable fact about the Chilean coup of 1973 - nobody imagined that the military regime would be so bloody nor so long-lasting.
The conventional view among Latin Americanists is that the Chilean Armed Forces had been institutionally loyal and supportive of civilian supremacy at least since the 1891 civil war, which pitted different factions of the Armed Forces against one another and resulted in the overthrow of President Jose Manuel Balmaceda. The military rarely intervened in the political arena after that and when it did so, its interference was minimal.
This was the military that most Chileans knew, or thought they did. And it was the same military that so many Chileans, some of whom supported the coup initially, quickly lost trust in as the new regime’s horrors unfolded before them. The leadership of the Christian Democratic party, for example, publicly supported the military coup at first, only to do an about-face several months later when the regime's dismal human rights record could not be ignored.
Opposing Views
World-record inflation rates (238% in mid-1973), long queues for food, strikes, a rampant black market, corruption and a growing split between left-wing and right-wing political groups were the norm in the months leading up to the coup and, rightly or wrongly, many Chileans called for a drastic change. Not foreseeing the consequences of military intervention, some groups saw the events of September 11 as a chance to rescue a country on the verge of economic collapse and civil war, an argument that would later characterize the texts of the military junta's first legal decrees.
Those who explicitly opposed the coup from the beginning were principally the left political parties, both those that comprised the Unidad Popular and others, as well as a small group of dissident Christian Democrats. Rather than blaming the coup on the breakdown of traditional political consensus and seeing it as the answer to economic and social "chaos," some of these opponents saw September 11 as the "last card" played by conservative forces to defeat Latin America's only successful socialist revolution in democracy. They argue that Chilean conservatives allied with US interests were unsuccessful in defeating Allende through elections, economic sabotage or CIA covert aid, so they resorted to the only remaining option - military intervention.
THE OVENS OF LONQUÉN
A Painful Discovery
"Yellowing splinters of skull with some traces of head hair; some loose, black, hairs; torn clothing which can be recognized as being from a pair of jeans, a man’s sweater..."
(A description by the assistant director of the Hoy magazine, Abraham Santibañez, of the human remains found in the limestone ovens in Lonquen, November 30, 1978.)
Those were some of the remains of the 15 men arrested on the 7th of October 1973, in the rural community of Isla de Maipo, and whose whereabouts were unknown until the end of 1978, when the ovens of Lonquen were discovered.
The discovery, which shook public opinion, became a painful landmark in the history of the disappeared in Chile - a story that began in 1973 with the military coup - for it confirmed the suspicion held by many relatives of the disappeared that their loved ones were indeed dead. The regime could no longer continue claiming - as Sergio Diez, the Chilean delegate before the United Nations General Assembly did on November 7, 1975 - that "many of the supposedly disappeared do not legally exist."
It was in the Isla de Maipo police headquarters that the 15 men, aged between 17 and 51, were last seen alive. Sergio Maureira Lillo and his four sons, Rodolfo Antonio, Sergio Miguel, Segundo Armando and Jose Manuel; Oscar Hernandez Flores and his brothers Carlos and Nelson; Enrique Astudillo Alvarez and his two sons Omar and Ramon; and four young men: Miguel Brant, Ivan Ordoñez, Jose Herrera and Manuel Navarro, all disappeared after being arrested by Isla de Maipo Carabineros police under orders of police chief Lautaro Castro Mendoza.
Their relatives, whose intense search for their loved ones led invariably to nothing, learned of the men’s fate only five years later, when their remains were discovered in the abandoned limestone ovens of Lonquen.
THE FIRST NATIONAL PROTEST - MAY 1983
The Opposition Grows Bolder
The first national protest, held May 11, 1983, was the result of a long process of growing resistance against the regime. Beginning in 1978, former members of Congress - organized since 1974 in the "Circulo de Ex Parlamentarios" and the broad-based political coalition National Development Project (Proden) began to meet, in a series of late-night meetings held with extreme caution, to map out a plan to defeat the regime.
In March 1983, the political coalition Democratic Alliance (Alianza Democratica) was created with the signing of the Democratic Manifesto (Manifesto Democratico), which set Pinochet's departure as the cornerstone for a national agreement. At the same time, unions had slowly begun to re-emerge, particularly in the copper mines, the mainstay of Chile's economy.
In 1982, every sector of Chilean society - from the large industrialist to the public housing dweller - was affected by economic collapse. Inflation was running over 20 percent, unemployment at 24 percent nationwide and as high as 40 percent in some regions of the country, and the peso drastically devalued. The year 1983 found Junta members negotiating with 40 insolvent banks to shore up the country.
The regime's opponents decided that the time was right to go public.
The first national protest, organized primarily by the Confederation of Copper Workers (CTC) with backing from political opposition groups, took the government and even protest organizers by surprise because of its magnitude and diversity. To ensure the broadest appeal possible, the convocation had made no specific demands, declaring only: "The time has come to stand up and say: enough."
May 11, 1983 started out much like any other day, perhaps with less traffic on the streets of Santiago. Many parents kept their children home, while workers engaged in slowdowns or suspended work altogether. By mid-day, sporadic protests erupted at university campuses and outside the courthouse downtown.
But at precisely 8:00 p.m., the city began to shake with the clanging of pots and pans, not only in low-income neighborhoods on the outskirts of the city but in upper middle class sectors as well. Hundreds of cars, especially in the wealthier parts of town, created massive traffic jams, with horns blasting. With a blaze of barricades, caravans of cars, and small marches, protesters re-took the city for the first time in nearly ten years.
MAY 1991 - NATIONAL TRUTH AND RECONCILIATION COMMISSION REPORT
The Whole Truth
The creation of the National Truth and Reconciliation Commission on April 25, 1990, one of Patricio Aylwin's first acts as President, marked an uneasy political boundary between the first democratic transitional government and the authoritarian regime that had ruled Chile for the previous 17 years.
The Justice Ministry's decree -"to clarify the whole truth on the most serious violations of human rights" - created the eight-member Commission headed by attorney Raul Rettig, and immediately sparked apprehension within the Armed Forces and their supporters.
 "We want the whole truth," insisted Sergio Onofre Jarpa, president of the rightist Renovacion Nacional (RN) party and former Interior Minister in the early 1980s. Members of other rightist parties likewise expressed doubts about the Commission's capacity to retain "historical objectivity."
A moment of tension arose in the Commission's first month of life when Army Maj. Gen. Jorge Ballerino, on express orders from his Commander-in-Chief Augusto Pinochet, called on Rettig. Ballerino conveyed the Army's concern that the Commission's work might fall prey to political interests wishing to discredit the Armed Forces and the Army in particular. The Army was also warned that the Commission might overstep its legal mandate by taking on work that properly pertains to the courts.
The new government perceived the Army's challenge to the Commission as indirectly questioning presidential authority itself. Aylwin called the commander-in-chief to La Moneda to answer to this unacceptable intrusion into the civilian-political realm. Pinochet pledged his willingness to cooperate and the government publicly reiterated that the Commission had no judicial powers whatsoever and would turn over names of human rights offenders directly to the courts.
Victims' relatives and other human rights advocates also had their doubts. For them, the Commission's working definition of "the most serious human rights violations," comprised only of those violations that resulted in death, was too narrow in scope. Yet the Commission's inclusion of deaths and presumed deaths as a consequence of other human rights violations such as illegal executions, disappearances of persons, and torture reassured most of these skeptics as well.
MARCH 1998: PINOCHET, FROM GENERAL TO SENATOR
Clashing Visions
On March 11, 1998, the National Congress in Valparaiso became the setting for another clash between the antagonistic visions which constitute modern day Chile. For the first time in the country’s history, a former military dictator was sworn in not only as senator, but as lifetime senator, senador vitalicio . Pinochet claimed his permanent seat in the same democratic institution he closed down years before, alongside supporters and well-wishers, but also alongside some of the very political leaders whose exile and persecution he ordered in the past.
The 1980 Constitution enacted by the military regime of former Army head Augusto Pinochet affords a lifetime senate position to any past president who has served a mandate of at least six years. On March 11, 1998, the only candidate eligible for the post was Pinochet. Former President Patricio Aylwin had served only a four-year mandate, in line with the agreements reached between the regime and some democratic sectors during the final years of the dictatorship. The last democratically-elected president before Aylwin, Salvador Allende, died in the presidential palace of La Moneda on September 11, 1973, before the end of his mandate, amidst the bombing and shooting which paved the way for the military regime.
In the weeks preceding the new legislative period beginning March 11, 1998, different groups of Concertacion legislators had mounted legal challenges to the lifetime Senate seat, but to no avail. They argued, among other things, that General Pinochet had never been elected president. In the end, the general's opponents were powerless: the Concertacion coalition, which accepted the Senate seat in 1990 as a condition of the transition to democracy, stuck to the bargain.
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