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Chapter 1 The Victors and the Vanquished We come here to pray for the future of Chile. We ask the Lord that there be neither victors nor vanquished among us. - Cardinal Raul Silva Henriquez September 11, 1973 President Salvador Allende began to receive disturbing reports of troop movements in and around Santiago late on the night of September 10. His advisors placed calls to senior military officers for explanations, but their answers were evasive or deceptive. Chile was plunged in the midst of a profound political crisis, and the breakdown of its vaunted democracy seemed inevitable and imminent.' These rumors could be the first reports of an impending coup d' etat. But the main elements of the Chilean navy had left the port of Valparaiso on the evening of September 10 to rendezvous with a U.S. task force for maneuvers, leading Allende to believe that the threat of a coup had departed temporarily with the fleet. Nonetheless, the embattled president told confidants that he would announce a date for a national plebiscite at noon the next day. He gave a very different speech instead. Once out to sea, naval officers opened secret orders instructing them to return to port, isolate Valparaiso, and set in motion a previously drawn up national security plan. The military was indeed mounting a coup to depose Salvador Allende's Popular Unity government. Allende's presidency, now in its third year, had been tense and conflictive from the onset. But over the past year attitudes had hardened and events had spun out of control. In October 1972 the independent truckers' association went on strike to forestall a possible takeover of the transportation industry by the socialist president. The paro paralyzed an already ailing economy and led to confrontations between government opponents and supporters. The independent truckers ended the action only when Allende invited the senior military commanders into his cabinet, initiating a process 2 Chapter 1 by which the armed forces were drawn into a worsening political conflict, and themselves became politicized. Allende's leftist coalition had fared well in mid-term congressional elections held in March 1973, but the results revealed a sharply polarized country . In April bus owners went on strike and were soon followed by copper miners. In late May the Supreme Court openly charged Allende with "illicitly interfering with the proper exercise of judicial power," a situation that implied the "preemptory or imminent rupture of the country's legality."2 At the end of June, a Santiago tank regiment mutinied. This so-called tancazo failed to spark a general uprising, but it was a prelude to the September coup. The armed forces commander-in-chief, General Carlos Prats, personally confronted the rebels and convinced them to stand down, but Prats's tenure as commander of the armed forces would be curtailed as a result. In July a cascading series of events led even the most optimistic observers to believe that a coup was inevitable. On July 2 the General Comptroller's Office ruled against the president in his bid to implement only those portions he approved in an important piece of legislation . In that same week, both houses of the Chilean Congress passed a joint resolution reiterating the Supreme Court's allegations about the government's illegal conduct. On July 25 the independent truckers declared another strike and this time vowed to immobilize the transportation industry until Allende resigned. The following night Allende's naval aide-de-camp was assassinated. The extreme right Fatherland and Liberty paramilitary organization accused the extremist Movement of the Revolutionary Left of the murder, and vice versa. Chile was lurching toward a disaster. If there was a possibility of avoiding a breach of Chile's democratic traditions , it depended on negotiations between Allende's coalition government and the leadership of Chile's center-right Christian Democratic party. The Roman Catholic prelate, Cardinal Raul Silva Henriquez, issued the call for negotiations in the third week of July. The cardinal had his differences with Allende, especially over the socialist president's initiatives in public education , but he could foresee the coming tragedy and attempted to avert it. In the years to come Cardinal Silva would come to personify the movement against the repression that was the hallmark of the military regime that ousted Allende. The negotiations between Allende and the Christian Democrats, then led by Patricio Aylwin, began on July 30. By mid-August they were suspended without an agreement that might have solved the mounting crisis." In...

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