Chile: the balanced view : a recopilation of articles about the Allende years and after

CHILE'S COUP ANO AFTER(*) By ROBERT MOSS Not long after Allende's death, the police searched the home of his former chief of detectives, Eduardo "Coco" Paredes, who had been killed during the fighting. Among his papers, they found a neat inventory of the contents of 13 crates addressed to the late president that had been flown in from Havana on a Cuban plane. The arrival of those crates, back in March 1972, had excited widespread speculation about possible arms smuggling and much outraged mut1ering about the "comrade president's" immunity from customs. Needled by his critics in the press, Allende finally disclosed that the crates contained mango-flavoured ice-cream-a tribute from the heroic socialist women of Cuba. And there the matter was allowed to rest until "Coco" Paredes's inventory turned up. It showed that, as the reader may have already guessed, the crates had been crammed full with Czech automatic weapons, pistols, grenades and ammunition, which all went into the private arsenals that Allende maintained in his palace, his fortress-líke home in the Avenida Tomás Moro, and hls weekender at El Cañaveral up in the Andean foolhills, where his guards gave instructipn in guerrilla tactics and mass-produced home-made explosives. The truth about the "mango ice-cream" is one detail among the rest that suggest that Allende was no more aman of peace and non-violence than his friend Fidel Castro. Now he is dead and the generals give orders, it is often argued that such details, even If true, are irrelevant. This argument rests on nothing more solid than the claim that, whatever wicked things Allende and his friends were doing, they were not as bad as the "pitiless repression" that followed his overthrow. In the hands of Allende's apologists, this quanfitative compari– son of the two régimes becomes a simple way of evading the charge that the Marxist government, though democratically eleeted; had made itself undemocratic. Allende ínter– fered wíth the press, certainly, but after all-the argument runs- he didn't close down all the papers he didn't like, as the junta has already done.(1) He flouted the wishes of the opposition majority in Congress, eertainly, but he didn't close down the opposition partíes. His supporters may have set up guerrilla bases and stored up arms for an eventual-and violent- "revolution within the revolution", but wasn't that all rather childish and forlorn compared with the smooth efticieney with which the big battalions swung into aetion when the signal was given on last September 11th? In debating the rights and wrongs uf whát has happened in Chile, the important question is not whether the "Iesser evil" is a Marxist government on the way to setting up a dietatorshíp or a military junta that has already done so. It is whether Chile was still a real or viable democracy 011 the eve of the eoup. If, as seems clear to me, it had ceased to be a viable demoeraey -through the breakdown of consensus polities, the routine víolence of both polítical extremes, the government's systematíc violation offhe law and, above al!, an economie crisis of Weimar proportions- who was prímarily responsible? (')Reprinted Irom Encounter. Vol. XLII. March 1974. This article was included as the last chapter 01 the Spanish editiw 01 the author's book on Chi/e's marxist experiment, published by Editora Gabriela Mistral, 1974. (1 )His justílíers olten add Ihal papers likeE/ Mercurio, being voíces oflhe "reaclíonary middle-class," were ripe for Ihe rubbish-heap anyway. The melhods 01 a pro-Marxist paper like Clarín (in which Allende had shares) -conservative leaders were somelimes depicled as naked whores wilh swaslikas around !heir necks- rarely come under Ihe same kind 01 critical analysis. 47