Story of a Death Foretold by Oscar Guardiola-Rivera

Story of a Death Foretold by Oscar Guardiola-Rivera

Author:Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
Published: 2013-08-28T16:00:00+00:00


They were never really council meetings. Instead, Allende would give us a pep talk. He would tell us that national security was in peril because of the CIA and other reactionary elements within Chile, who were behind the transport strikes. I could tell he was lying . . . and he lied extraordinarily well, as did his ministers. Nothing could be believed. Allende certainly could lie diabolically well.37

Admiral Carvajal deserves more credit than historians of the Chile coup allow him. Because of his initiative, the so-called Committee of Fifteen was instituted on 30 June 1973. Unlike the Cofradía Náutica, the Committee of Fifteen did not act behind a veil of secrecy. General Carlos Prats agreed to its formation, taking on board Carvajal’s initiative and the advice of his two colleagues in Allende’s Cabinet, Admiral Raúe Montero and General César Ruiz Danyau, enlisted by Allende to help to stabilise the country. Five high-ranking members of each branch of the armed forces would make up the Committee. Their task would be ‘to establish where the situation is going, and find some common ground’.38 Now the minority group of conspiring generals and admirals, who had been meeting in secret, could express their views in the open, and from a position of command.

Carvajal made his proposal after the failure of an attempted coup on 29 June 1973. It had been crushed by the loyalists within the armed forces, Prats and others, but revealed the existence of an internal split in the military, as well as its darker side. On 29 June Lieutenant Colonel Roberto Souper attacked La Moneda presidential palace with the tanks of his Second Armoured Regiment. Prats and, eventually, garrison chief Augusto Pinochet put an end to the conspiracy. Accompanied by Lieutenant Colonel Hernández Pedreros and other officers, General Prats got one tank driver after another to surrender. Towards the end, one of the tank drivers, Lieutenant Mario Garay, pointed his sub-machine gun at General Prats and told him he refused to give up. Major Osvaldo Zavala, Prats’s most trusted soldier, reacted quickly: he pulled out his gun and pointed it at Garay’s head. Garay gave up. Around midday, Colonel Souper took refuge back at his headquarters with the remaining three tanks. Seventeen soldiers and five civilians died that morning, including an Argentinian journalist named Leonardo Henricksen who captured the moment when a soldier turned towards his camera and shot him down. The cameraman filmed his own death.

According to Patricio Guzmán, who included the entire shot in his documentary The Battle of Chile, he also revealed the darker face of the Chilean army.39 In the afternoon, five leading members of the right-wing paramilitary group Fatherland and Freedom sought refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy. They assumed full responsibility as the alleged instigators of the military’s revolt. Souper had been recruited by the group earlier on, but was not the only one in the military with strong ties to the group, which also had links among the Gremialistas and members of the National Party close to ex-President Alessandri.



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