-The commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the military coup is over and the positions still seem irreconcilable. What is that supposed to mean? Where are the keys to an answer?
-I believe that the answer lies in the political and media microclimate that persisted in Chile after the dictatorship, maintaining the hegemony of the media that supported the coup, the dictatorship and then impunity. These media carriers have not had their hegemony affected or changed during the political transition from 1990 to the present. An example of this is that before 1973 it was the most important journalistic medium in the country Clarion, with greater assets, is still confiscated and occupied by the armed forces to this day. Information pluralism is very limited. In this way, the distance from Chile’s internal reality is boiled down with the perception of what happened in the coup 50 years ago. This explains what was behind the internal perception and the vision from abroad.
– Amid controversy over the 50 years of military coups, critics of President Salvador Allende claim that his goal was to radically change the Chilean system – they call it its destruction – what socialism did Allende want?
-The answer to your question was formulated by President Allende himself in his draft of the new constitution, which he intended to submit to a referendum from September 11, 1973. It is a text published thanks to the material provided by Mr. Eduardo Novoa saved. Monreal, President of the State Defense Council, after his return from exile. There the power structure and the pillars of participatory democracy that the president had planned for the future of Chile are clearly defined. So any comparison with the systems of Eastern Europe or with Cuba has no basis or basis in reality.
-Salvador Allende avoids mentioning popular unity in his last words, why?
-I disagree. In 1973, President Allende reached the culmination of a long career that began in the 1930s and in which he sought the unity of the popular forces – with the idea of overcoming the shortcomings of the capitalist system – in a socialist orientation. During this long career, Allende supported his program and project in various parties with various political leaders. In this last message from September 11th, I think he remembers everything about his political career and the project for which he fought. He ran for president three times in consecutive elections and finally ran gave his life. In this sense, the subject of the discourse are the citizens, the workers, whom he describes in his speech.
-In his book Confident and intervenes and in several studiesS It is shown that it is impossible to analyze the coup of September 11, 1973 without the intervention of the United States, but the impression is that amnesia prevails in many people today.
-Fifty years later, thanks to the decisions of the US Congress and the Democratic presidents of the 90s and the last decade, with official documents from the US government itself, it is absolutely proven that this has been the case since the 1958s and especially since 1964 by the North American government tried to prevent the candidacy personalized by Salvador Allende from reaching the government. When he won the 1970 election, President Richard Nixon’s decision was verifiably dated September 1, 1970. At the request of the owner of The Mercurywho calls for a coup to prevent the inauguration of President Allende, and from November 15, 1970, that is, the day after the inauguration of Salvador Allende in La Moneda as president, the Nixon administration’s decision is to do whatever it takes in their power to prevent the consolidation of the government.
If one thinks about the influence that this government could have in Western Europe and especially in Italy, the memorandum of November 5, 1970 states verbatim that the success in consolidating the government of Salvador Allende would affect the balance of the entire world and the position of the United States would change within this world. What could threaten a small country of almost 11 million people, so far from the shores of Europe and Asia? The meaning described in the memorandum was a geopolitical conception, i.e. using the country’s resources in a different way than the way the capitalist system works. All in a democratic way, with greater freedom and participation.
The process was closely watched from Western Europe, particularly Italy and France. François Mitterrand traveled to Santiago to speak with President Allende and learn about the development of the Chilean process.
All of this worried the Nixon administration and supported the geopolitical vision of destroying the process unfolding in Chile. It took three years and they finally succeeded because the balance of power was so different and unequal.
-Has President Allende calibrated the destabilizing intentions of the opposition to the right extent? Or did he naively believe that Chilean democrats would never support a military coup?
Naivety is not a vision that corresponds to the vision of President Allende, who, even before his election in 1970, assumed that he would find himself in very difficult situations and with hindrances to the sectors and interests affected by his government program. The government closely followed the progress of the conspiracy and coup attempts over the three years and tried to stop them using the legal means at its disposal. At the same time, we must remember that the strategy of the North American government was to create a crisis situation that would lead the government (of Allende) to a temptation that it never had: to resort to violent measures, with the certainty that this would be the case If the government were to take the path of suppressing the seditious movement, it would result in the opposition responding with North American support for violent measures.
This was the basic idea of North American strategy, so much so that Henry Kissinger says in his memoirs, the first volume he published in 1974, months after the coup, that President Allende was preparing a self-coup. That is, it is the desire of North Americans that the President resort to violent measures, because if he had entered this terrain, which he never proposed, the overwhelming counterforce would not only have brought down the Allende government, but would have it in the future delegitimized.
The Battle of La Moneda, the presidential resistance on September 11th, is a political battle of a moral nature. It is not military as there is no confrontation between armed forces. This was the last political battle that Allende won. For this reason, 50 years later, the world and especially Chileans remember to commemorate the tragedy that the country faced at the hands of the main hegemonic power.
-While the government tried to implement agrarian reform, small radicalized parts of Chile insisted on carrying out what we might call the small revolution. Cinemas and small businesses intervened, which fundamentally exacerbated the growing hatred.
– In fact, in every revolutionary process and in every democratic process there are always sectors and cores that do not agree with the main line. This also happened in Chile. But the government’s position was very clear. In the unborn draft Constitution there is an article that provides and provides that small and medium-sized real estate in industry, agriculture and commerce are not vulnerable to nationalization. This shows that the government has been very clear about the areas of state ownership in the strategic sectors of the economy. But at the same time, small and medium-sized industries, small and medium-sized real estate had to be subject to the rules of the market.
– For years it was believed that there was a national consensus on some issues, such as rejecting dictatorship and condemning human rights violations, but this was called into question at the last commemoration.
-This problem can be viewed from the perspective of the armed forces. According to my analysis, the transition from dictatorial to two-party system in Chile follows the model of Spain, whose budget from Francoism to the current monarchical regime aims at the destruction of the Spanish Republican Army between 1936 and 1939. Defeat of the Republican Army in Spain It is the support of the dictatorship of General Franco and the current monarchy in Spain. The same phenomenon occurs in Chile. On September 11th, the Republican part of the Chilean army was destroyed. The Republican Army dies on September 11th.
I’ll explain. Never in the history of the Chilean Armed Forces has the Commander-in-Chief of the Navy been arrested and fired due to a conspiracy by his subordinates (Raúl Montero Cornejo). Never in Chile’s history have the Director General of the Carabineros and the six highest-ranking generals been fired by a general without command of troops and apparently supported by the Carabineros for this internal coup (General César Mendoza was the sixth in seniority). Furnishings). Never in the history of Chile, since the founding of the republic, has there been an uprising by the army chief against the head of state.
The Chilean democracy’s control mechanisms over the armed forces are disappearing. What are these control mechanisms? No one could be a commander, a ship’s captain or a colonel with command authority without the prior approval of the Senate and, conversely, no one could be a general or an admiral without a decision from the Head of State, the President of the Republic of this strict confidence and could be removed if they lost his confidence. That was destroyed in 1973; 50 years later it has not been restored. Consequently, Chile has a hierarchically structured army, but its republican streak was destroyed in 1973, and it continues to exist as such, without the representative institutions of popular sovereignty having control over the appointment of commanders that I have just described.
