Romantic Revolutionary

...Indeed...

...Chile's democratically elected President spoke often and eloquently of his chances for survival...

...The charge that U.S...

...Other military officers, outraged by the government's decision to supply arms and insurrectional instructions to the mir, were formulating contingency plans for a coup...

...rather, it is that he respects truth, knows how to write an accurate report, and is a patriot who wanted the Chilean President to succeed in checkmating Right- or Left-wing attempts to impose dictatorship...

...Subsequently, after going into exile, Senora Allende endorsed a tape in which Luis Gonzales, a 17-year-old carabinero, claimed to have seen her husband killed by troops...

...He was an extraordinary leader and a profoundly impressive human being...

...At 11:52 a.m...

...No observer of the tragedy is better qualified than Nathaniel Davis to give us the definitive account of what happened...

...Because Allende could never quite reconcile these two roles or act decisively in either of them, he fell, and the free Chile so many had known and loved vanished as well...

...La Moneda was hit by rockets...

...ships had left Peru and were heading south for long-scheduled joint maneuvers with the Chilean fleet when word of the coup reached them...

...At the same time, says Davis, this romantic yearning for revolutionary heroism dreamed "marvellous, soaring dreams...

...The carabinero generals, who had pledged to support the President, came aboard when Carlos Altamirano, the Socialist Party chief, called for additional illegal action...

...I am reasonably confident that it was not U.S...

...The claim that American naval forces stood by off Valparaiso to support the revolting Chilean fleet is easiest to disprove: U.S...

...Insteadof joining thearmed proletarians in the industrial belt, who were left without a popular figurehead, Allende rushed to La Moneda...

...What sort of man was he...

...The expedient worked briefly because the Minister of Defense, General Carlos Prats, liked the President and managed to settle with the truckers...

...TheMiRistas built homemade tanks...

...By vacillating," says Davis, "the President harvested the disadvantages of both trust and mistrust, and ultimately the whole military institution would move against him, essentially undivided...

...We made no effort to depose Chile's President, Davis demonstrates, nor did we help others depose him...

...Outgoing American Ambassador Edward Korry had repeated to Nixon the warning he had given then National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger on several occasions: Any attempt to support a military coup would backfire...

...Allende, who was not there, responded by displaying his characteristic uncertainty...

...naval engineering technician in Valparaiso, Arthur Creter, had told him of "doing a job" for the Chilean Navy at the behest of the CIA...

...The reason for this is not his having been the U.S...

...they simply used the confusion to double the number of factories they were illegally occupying, from 282 to 526...

...policy during my time in Chile to 'destabilize' Allende and bring him down...

...A tank unit, the Second Armored Regiment, based in Santiago, had entered into a plot with the Right-wing organization Fatherland and Liberty to kidnap the President...

...If anything can, this book should finally defuse the debate surrounding the last two years of Salvador Allende...

...Davis has spent five years disposing of litigation brought by Horman's family and other accusers, and he is now pressing a suit against the defamers...

...Allende's widow, and his mistress, who was with him to the end, at first confirmed the well-documented suicide...

...With Pinochet still sitting on the fence, the Navy and Air Force commanders, Admiral Jose Merino and General Gustavo Leigh, prepared the coup...

...A Trot-skyite in his youth, "hemaintained family ties to the Left wing of the Socialist Party and even to the Left-extremist Mmistas [members of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left] who opposed his UP government...

...He condoned the violation of Chile's liberties, laws and Constitution...

...The admission, however, has not prevented those who want to make the dead President into a martyr from continuing to promote the fabrication...

...Evidence supporting Washington's complicity in the coup is equally suspect, if harder to refute because it is impossible to disprove a non-act...

...Then there is the story of Charles Hor-man, a young American filmmaker the Chileans picked up and killed in a sweep following the coup...

...covert action...

...It turned out that Creter's "job" involved repairing naval fire extinguishers and that he could not speak Spanish, making it highly unlikely he would have been picked as a master spy...

...The CIA station in Santiago," says Davis, "favoredU.S...

...pilots bombed La Moneda with American rockets was made by a Communist deputy that an Italian journalist questioned in a Santiago hideout several weeks after the ouster...

...It was too late: Fifteen minutes earlier Conception, Chile's second city, had capitulated without a shot...

...Prats had assured the President that he and the other high-ranking military men were loyal...

...Shortly before 2 in the afternoon Allende shot himself, and a few minutes later his remaining defenders either escaped the palace or were killed...

...The great truckers' strike of October 1972 further damaged Allende's prestige—and the economy—making it necessary for him to take friendly military men into his Cabinet...

...Jorge Alesandri, the aging and inept boss of the conservative National Party, lost out to Allende by 39,000 out of 3 million votes cast...

...Reviewed by Selden Rodman Author, "Tongues of Fallen Angels," "South America of the Poets" Like the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 andHitler's 1923 beer ceUaiputsch, the overthrow and death of Salvador Allende on September 11,1973, was a dramatic event that has had ongoing consequences for us all...

...But as the Church Committee on Intelligence Operations revealed, "therationaleofU.S...

...As he told Allende he would, he then went into the street toting a submachine gun and prevailed on the tanks to surrender...

...Understandably the brass, seeing that Al-lende did not appear to trust Prats fully, abandoned him...

...Ordered to reverse course, the American vessels immediately turned north, docking a few days later in Panama, where the Chilean liaison officers disembarked...

...Meanwhile, Allende telephoned the Leftist paramilitary forces ringing the city lo come lo the defense of his regime...

...Efforts to stop Allende by International Telephone & Telegraph and the copper companies, whose Chilean interests Frei had already crippled, came to nothing...

...financial support to the truckers in 1973 and I opposed it...

...No one (least of all Ambassador Davis) denies that President Nixon was eager to see President Allende fail, that the expropriated copper and telephone companies did their best to harass his regime economically, that the CIA provided limited funding for anti-Allende activities in the 1970 election, or that afterward it gave minimal financial support to help the Christian Democratic Party in its struggle to survive...

...Davis devotes two long, carefully reasoned chapters to the controversial suicide and the even more controversial attempt by Allende's foreign supporters to pin his death and the coup itself on U.S...

...Allende's troubles started when rampaging inflation touched off the December 1, 1971, March of the Empty Pots by discontented housewives and forced him to fire Pedro Vuskovic, his Leninist economics minister...

...Ed-uardo Frei of the dominant Christian Democratic Party, who had governed Chile equitably for seven years, was ineligible to seek the Presidency again under the rules of the Constitution...

...The story begins with Allende's triumph at the head of the Popular Unity (UP) coalition—by a 36.3 per cent plurality, nol an outright majority—in the free election of September 4, 1970...

...But tanks were already moving in to seize it, and only the carabineros in the palace remained loyal...

...ambassador in Santiago from 1971 -73...

...Christian Democrats, alarmed by the President's ambivalence toward "bourgeois" democracy, began to oppose him...

...Castro came to Chile and allegedly criticized Allende behind his back for proceeding too slowly...

...He broadcast his last appeal for support at 9:30 in the morning...

...Resistance elsewhere collapsed and the military took over...

...President Richard M. Nixon was known to hope Allende would be defeated, and to that end the Central Intelligence Agency spent $425,000 on covert propaganda against him and the UP, but this small-scale spoiling operation probably gained more sympathy for Allende than for his opponent...

...On the other, he was also a Marxist and the leader of a radical social revolution that might have to foil military and capitalistic conspiracies by extending extralegal power to the working class and arming it clandestinely...

...They did not...

...If he was 'rented,' the rent was high, and the leases were short if observed at all.' Allende did set out to achieve socialism by democratic means, Davis believes, but he had what Chileans call "a flexible wrist...

...Had Allende gone to his supporters the outcome might have been different...

...There is no evidence for this insulting accusation—insulting to the Chileans, who were thus presumed to be incapable of flying their own planes and dropping their own bombs...

...Both the March of the Empty Pots and the truckers' strike were spontaneous reactions to Allende's policies...

...Allende took office...

...Korry once testified before Congress that Allende had been financed "for many, many years by Communist foreign bankrolled," and that he had accepted bribes from our multinational corporations, including $500,000 forked over by a mining company...

...News of the conspiracy leaked out and its leader was arrested, but tanks moved into the center of the capital, released him and circled La Moneda, the presidential palace, firing wildly...

...Pinochet acquiesced once it had become clear the Navy was prepared to act alone, for if it failed, the Armed Forces would be divided...

...That tendency "to be all things to all men" lent a "touch of friv-olousness" to his undertakings and was perhaps Allende's "greatest political weakness over the long term...

...covertpol-icy...

...Nevertheless, in 1982 this tale became the basis of Costa-Gavras' thriller Missing, a movie that goes on to assert the U.S Embassy "fingered" Horman...

...Allegedly he was murdered because a retired U.S...

...The so-called tancazo of June 29, 1973, hardened their attitudes...

...At 6 a.m . on August 11, Admiral Merino took charge of the fleet and seized Valparaiso...

...On the one hand, he saw himself as a protector of the "Chilean Way," embodying Latin America's oldest and most pluralistic democracy...

...was to sustain opposition forces but not to foment strikes, nor to promote disruptive physical action against the UP government, nor to encourage coup plotting...

...Until a few days before the overthrow, though, none of these officers—who included General Augusto Pinochet, the Army commander—had definitely decided to take action...

...No one should conclude," Davis nonetheless adds sensibly, "that Allende was 'bought' in terms of his politics or his convictions...

...The tape is such a catalogue of palpable errors that Gonzales, when confronted with them, admitted Allende had killed himself...