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Chapter 1. Transferring Power
- University of California Press
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13 O N E Transferring Power I Around midnight on October 5, 1988, the commanders of Chile’s air force, navy, and national police entered La Moneda. They had received a summons from General Pinochet, who had just lost a one-man presidential plebiscite, in which Chileans had been asked to approve an eightyear extension of his regime. But there had been no official announcement , and the partial returns broadcast on Chile’s controlled television channels suggested that Pinochet was winning. The three military commanders did not believe these reports. Outside La Moneda, the streets of the Chilean capital were subdued and tense. Two buses belonging to the paramilitary police, the carabineros , were parked outside the palace and near the defense ministry one UC_Spooner-CS4-PC-ToPress.indd 13 3/4/2011 11:50:53 AM 14 A n U n e a s y T r a n s i t i o n block away. Another carabinero bus was stationed near the headquarters of the Comando del No, a multipartisan coalition that had campaigned for a vote against Pinochet. Tear gas trucks had been positioned at major intersections, but there were few pedestrians, let alone demonstrators, anywhere to be seen.1 Leaders of the Comando del No had urged their supporters to vote, then to go home and stay indoors the rest of the day. The junta had serious misgivings about Pinochet as a presidential candidate, believing that a conservative civilian might have a better chance of winning. In the months leading up to the vote, Pinochet had traveled extensively up and down Chile’s narrow territory, ostensibly on government business but actually to campaign for his own reelection, even before the junta had officially nominated him. His secret police, the Central Nacional de Informaciones (CNI), had even organized a political party, the Avanzada Nacional. The group attracted few adherents other than those with ties to the military, but they appeared wherever Pinochet did, cheering, waving Chilean flags, and holding up banners. And the country’s state-controlled television stations were careful to avoid images filmed from a distance that might expose the limited extent of Avanzada Nacional’s membership. During one such tour Pinochet claimed to have narrowly avoided an assassination plot when explosives were discovered at an airport where he was scheduled to land. He had canceled the visit the previous day, claiming he had a premonition that something was amiss, and the episode appeared to have been staged to boost his popularity.2 At times during his campaign Pinochet appeared in civilian dress, but he had no intention of ever giving up his role as head of the Chilean army. According to air force commander General Fernando Matthei, the junta members had insisted that if Pinochet was going to prolong his presidency for another eight years, he should do so as a civilian and retire from his post as army commander. It was their role to nominate the regime’s candidate on August 30, 1988, and they informed Pinochet they would only do so if he agreed to this condition. The dictator seemed to agree, saying he would announce his departure from the army in a speech on September 11, the anniversary of the coup that brought the regime to power. But Pinochet’s speech that day contained no such announcement. [44.200.145.114] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 18:39 GMT) T r a n s f e r r i n g P o w e r 15 “That old gangster, he didn’t say a word about this,” Matthei said.3 And relations between Pinochet and the other service commanders cooled considerably in the weeks leading up to the vote, which Pinochet believed he would win. The Chilean economy had recovered from the severe slump it had suffered during the early 1980s, when low copper prices and high foreign debt gave way to mass protests against the regime. The country’s gross internal product was growing by 7.3 percent that year, up from 6.6 percent the previous year, and most economic indicators seemed to augur well for Chile.4 Pollsters, however, were detecting a different mood. One conservative research group, the Centro de Estudios Públicos, had taken a poll in June of that year and found that only 14 percent of those surveyed described their economic situation as good, with 56 percent reporting it was average and 30 percent describing it as bad or very bad. A quarter...