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

were given political indoctrination and military training, under the supervision of Cuban, North Korean, and'Czech instructors. Some factories were turned over to arms production. In the Madeco plant. which makes refrigerators, workers on night-shift soldered together a couple of dozen "people's tanks" (ordinary fork-lift trucks shielded by armour-plating and with heavy machine-guns mounted on top) underthe guidance of a Brazilían polítical exíle named Sergio de Moraes. This was no! an isolated example. The finance for such goings-on was either borrowed from the capital of the state-run companies themselves (the government publishing house was a notorious donor) or taken from the secret budgets of various ministries. The foreign ministry alone disposed of more than $1 m a month in clandestine funds. Apprentice guerrillas looking for a job were given sinecures by state agencies likethe municipal works corporation (Cormu) whose staff increased from 200 to 12,000 under Allende-although there was no notable increase in municipal works. And among the more·than 13,000 political exiles who flooded into Allende's Chile, there were plenty of veteran terrorists to lend their expertise. The Tupamaros toured the slum suburbs in propaganda teams, and built up .'. rural base in the n ,rth of Chile under the leadership of Raúl Bidegain Greissing, one of Ihe few key organis"rs to escape the Montevideo police. If all this was taking place, why did armed resistance to the coup crumble so fast? There are two probable explanations. The first is that the threat to mobilise the workers' brigades had never been more than a bluff. The government had been able to call out its supporters in big demonstrations, although (to everyone but the Guardian correspondent) it seemed that its drawing power had been badly eroded by the time of the raUy on 4 September, a week before the coup. The Guardian estimated the crowd that day at 1,250,000, while the Wall Street Journal correspondent who was also present observed that the square where the rally took place could not have held many more than 20,000, and reported how one group of particularly noisy supporters was being led round and round the block to give the general impression of greater numbers. If the workers were no longer prepared to turn out to hear speeches, would they be ready to face the tanks? It seems that, with some exceptions (pockets of resistance such as the Sumar factory), they were no!. The second factor was that the leaders of the Left-wing parties appear to have taken the rational decision to go underground as soon as it became clear that the armed forces had not split-as the Communists had believed they would. They were not unprep;:tred for this move., Safe houses had already been chosen, and many of the Socialist and miristas leaders were able to make quick getaways. Others simply ducked into the nearest friendly embassy. It might be tempting to conclude from this that the Guerrilla Left in Chile was pas sérieuÁ. But the resistance of the sniper and the saboteur continues, and is met by equally ugly forms of military repression. Whether the campaign of urban terrorism that may now be beginning will develop into a real threat to the new régime will depend on the cohesion of the armed forces, on their capacity to hold on to their initial civilian suppo;1, and on the calibre of the guerrillas themselves. The opening attempts at armed resistance to the junta outside Santiago were pathetically amateurish. One clash took place at Neltume, a small town on the outskirts ofthe Panguipulli timber reserves. On the day after the coup, a certain José Gregorio Liendo, famous in the outside world under his nom-de-guerre "Comandante Pepe",(7) turned up at the head of about 50 men and attacked the local Carabineros post. Although the police were outnumbered by ten to one, they managed to hold out until three more carabineros from a neighbouring village came to their rescue. Pepe's guerrillas were driven off ¡nto the hi.lIs, where Pepe himself (together with his wife Yolanda and three of his supporters) was captured on 19 September as he headed towards the Carririne pass into Argentina. One of tlle Air Force officers who (7)Alastair Horne. "Commandante Pepe," ENCOUNTER, July 1971. 53