Answers: Chile's September 11 Attack

50 years after the Pinochet coup

It’s now 50 years after the other major September 11 attack, the military coup in Chile in 1973. Democratically-elected Marxist president Salvador Allende took his own life as fighter jets bombed the presidential palace. General Augusto Pinochet seized power and stayed in office until 1990, unleashing a campaign of repression against political opponents while moving Chile away from nationalisation to a market-oriented economy. Pinochet’s policies and their consequences continue to reverberate in Chile today and the country remains deeply divided over his legacy.

Pinochet’s supporters say he ushered in economic growth. More on the theme here and here. Others say the argument is overstated and point out that Chile’s per capita income growth rate moved up to a ‘stunning 4 per cent per year’ in the two decades after the restoration of democracy in 1990. In 2010 Chile became the first South American country to be admitted into the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), home to some of the world’s wealthiest industrialised democracies.

High economic growth has been accompanied by rising inequality, leading to mass protests in 2019. Conservative president Sebastian Pinera agreed to create a constitutional assembly to replace the market-oriented Pinochet-era constitution of 1980. Independent leftist candidates won a big chunk of seats in the assembly. The protests also paved the way for former student protest leader Gabriel Boric becoming Chile’s youngest elected president.

But the assembly’s progressive draft constitution backed by President Boric was resoundingly rejected in a referendum. Voters were turned off by its length and many found it too radical. A particularly contentious aspect was the draft’s description of Chile as a ‘plurinational’ country that includes autonomous Indigenous nations and communities. More here, here, here and here. Subsequent elections to the assembly this May saw a far-right party emerge on top.

Chile’s government under Gabriel Boric is the closest in ideology with Salvador Allende since the 1973 coup. But he is also facing a polarised country. The right-wing opposition refused to endorse his defence of democracy on the 50th anniversary of the coup, as conservatives gain support amid inflation, low growth and a crime wave.

Answers

1) Her father was an air force general who was imprisoned after the coup and died after months of torture. A medical student at the time, she was jailed and tortured. She moved to Australia and then East Germany where she resumed her medical studies. Trained as a paediatrician, she returned to her country and its politics. Following the transition to democracy, she became the first woman to become Defence Minister in her continent. Who?

Michelle Bachelet, two-time President of Chile. The torture survivor was later the United Nations human rights chief.

2) This Nobel laureate and friend of Salvador Allende died 12 days after the coup. While cancer was reported to be the cause of this literary figure’s death, investigations over the past decade have raised questions. Who?

Pablo Neruda. Questions have been raised about the official version that he died of cancer in recent years. More here and here. A new report suggests Neruda may have been poisoned. More here, here and here.

Recent critical examinations of Neruda’s life and work have taken a toll on his reputation, especially amid the global #MeToo movement against sexual violence. Chile's Congress had to drop plans to rename Santiago’s main international airport after Neruda.

3) Another Nobel laureate. She was featured on the country's highest denomination currency note by the Pinochet government, who packaged her as a symbol of conservative morality and the ‘mother of the nation’, though her work was more complex. This poet was the first from Latin America to be awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Who? (She took her pseudonym from an angel and the name of a wind that blows over the south of France)

Gabriela Mistral. She died in 1957, long before Pinochet seized power. In recent years, her reputation has undergone a revival in Chile, while Neruda’s stock has dimmed. More here.

While a schoolboy, Pablo Neruda was encouraged by Gabriela Mistral, who was then a school principal. She introduced him to Russian classics (Tolstoy, Dostoevsky and Chekhov). Both worked as diplomats and both were posted in Spain during the 1930s.

You can read about Pablo Neruda’s efforts as a diplomat to bring hundreds fleeing the Spanish Civil War to Chile in my earlier quiz on Refugees and Migrants in Fiction.

4) A third Nobel laureate. The Pinochet government hired a bunch of economists trained by him who embarked on a growth-focused privatisation strategy. He met Pinochet in Santiago in 1975 and pressed for a ‘shock treatment’ in macroeconomic terms. The government soon implemented austerity measures and opened up the economy. Who?

Milton Friedman. More here. More on the protests against him in the U.S. that followed his 1975 Chile visit here. The economists trained by Friedman who were hired to implement privatisation in Chile were known as the ‘Chicago boys’. More here, here and here.

5) This country refused to send its football team to play a World Cup qualifier in Chile in November 1973 because the venue, Santiago’s Estadio Nacional had been used as a prison camp after the coup. Thousands were tortured and dozens murdered there. The country was disqualified by FIFA while Chile made it to the 1974 World Cup. Name the country. (With the rival absent, the Chilean players turned out on the field, passed the ball among themselves and finally shot the ball into an unguarded net)

Soviet Union. You can watch a sample of the ‘match’ with just one team below.

6) Last month, a Chilean court confirmed jail terms for seven retired soldiers for the 1973 murder of a popular folk singer who was tortured and killed in Estadio Chile. Thousands of Allende supporters were initially detained in this stadium before being shifted to Estadio Nacional. Estadio Chile is now named after the communist activist whose body was found days after the coup, riddled with 44 bullets. Who?

Victor Jara. More here, here, here, here and here.

7) What action taken by Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón in October 1998 ended up being a diplomatic quagmire for the UK?

Baltasar Garzon issued an arrest warrant charging Pinochet with human rights crimes during his 17-year-long dictatorship. Pinochet was arrested in the UK, where he was recovering after surgery. Pinochet was allowed to leave for Chile after a year and a half on grounds of ill health.

While Pinochet was freed, his case was a turning point in using the principle of ‘universal jurisdiction’, which allows ‘states or international organisations to prosecute individuals regardless of the place where the crimes were committed and the nationality of the perpetrators and victims’. More here and here.

The precedent set in the Pinochet case culminated in the conviction of the former dictator known as ‘Africa’s Pinochet, Chad’s Hissene Habre in Senegal in 2016. It was the first time courts of one country prosecuted the former leader of another for human rights crimes. More in my earlier quiz on Chad.

8) What was Operation Condor, officially launched at a meeting in Chile’s capital Santiago on November, 25, 1975?

The targeting of leftist political opponents by eight US-backed military dictatorships in South America.

9) This sector that was dominated by American companies was nationalised by the Allende government in 1971. Pinochet kept the sector under state control and his government set up the company Codelco in 1976. Chile is the world's largest producer of this metal. What?

Copper. More here and here.

10) Uproar in the U.S. over the coup led to the passage of the Kennedy Amendment in 1976 (it was championed by Senator Edward Kennedy). What was the amendment all about?

Halting U.S. weapons sales to Chile. More here. George Washington University’s National Security Archives in its Chile Documentation Project extensively details the extent of U.S. meddling in Chile. Seymour Hersh wrote for the New York Times in 1974 about ‘CIA Said to Have Asked Funds for Chile Rightists’. The Church Committee was set up by the U.S. Senate to investigate abuses by the CIA, including toppling foreign governments.

Just months after the Kennedy Amendment became law, the top Chilean dissident in the U.S., Orlando Letelier and his colleague Ronni Moffitt were killed in a car bomb attack orchestrated by the Pinochet government, a short distance away from the White House. Letelier had been Chile’s ambassador to the U.S. and then defence minister under Salvador Allende. More here, here, here, here, here and here.

Two weeks after Letelier was assassinated on September 21, 1976, the second presidential debate saw challenger Jimmy Carter attack incumbent Gerald Ford over his administration’s support to Pinochet’s military dictatorship. Carter went on to become the first U.S. president to place human rights at the centre of his foreign policy though the results were mixed. Carter cut back ties with Chile in 1979 after its refusal to extradite three former secret police officers in connection with Letelier’s murder. But Edward Kennedy, now Carter’s rival in the Democratic primaries, condemned the response as insufficient. Kennedy remained a vocal voice against Pinochet while as the 1980s wore on the Reagan administration turned against the dictator. Chileans voted against another term for Pinochet in a referendum in 1988 paving the way for democratic elections in 1990.

11) Born in Argentina and raised in the United States, he moved to Chile at the age of 12 and went on to become media and cultural adviser to Allende’s chief of staff. He was forced to flee after the coup and made his mark as a novelist and playwright. His latest novel The Suicide Museum released this month is about a billionaire Holocaust survivor, who hires a writer to uncover the truth of Salvador Allende’s death. Who?

Ariel Dorfman. More here and here.

12) While the first months of the Pinochet dictatorship saw Chilean football players turning out to play in what was a prison camp (Question 5), the final months saw a notorious win-at-all-costs action by goalkeeper Roberto Rojas. A World Cup qualifier against Brazil in 1989 led to FIFA imposing a life ban on Rojas from playing football. Evidence for the decision emerged from pictures taken by Argentinian photographer Ricardo Alfieri. What did the goalkeeper do?

Roberto Rojas concealed a blade inside his glove and deliberately injured himself when a flare was thrown into the ground. He pretended he was hit by the flare. More here, here and here. The game was ruled in Brazil’s favour and Chile was banned from the qualifiers for the 1994 World Cup.

Earlier an unruly clash in Chile was drawn 1-1. The New York Times reported that the Brazilian coach was ‘manhandled by a huge contingent of steel-helmeted police’.

Postscript

I came across additional interesting material on Chile, Salvador Allende and the coup after publishing the quiz.

One is Project Cybersyn, a plan for a hypermodern information system under socialism envisioned by the Allende government. More here, here and here.

The other is Chile’s version of Oskar Schindler. Roberto Kozak saved thousands of people from General Pinochet’s secret police. More here and here.