Garcés was an advisor and friend of Salvador Allende. The President, on September 11, 1973, at 11:15 a.m., ordered him to leave La Moneda, thereby saving his life. He was the architect of a plurinational team of ten lawyers, in a trial against Augusto Pinochet in Spain, England and France. Pinochet was detained in London between October 1998 and March 2000. In 2005, Garcés managed to get Riggs Bank to compensate the former dictator’s victims for money laundering in excess of $8 million. Now that the 50th anniversary commemoration has passed, he evaluates the divisions that remain in Chile.
-The commemoration of the 50th anniversary of the military coup is over and the positions still seem irreconcilable, how is it understood? Where are the keys to a response?
-I believe that the answer is found in the political and media microclimate that has persisted in Chile after the dictatorship, which has maintained the hegemony of the media that supported the coup, the dictatorship and then impunity. These media supports have not been affected or altered in their hegemony during the political transition from 1990 to today. An example of this is that the main journalistic medium in the country, before 1973, which was Clarion, with greater assets, remains today confiscated and occupied by the Armed Forces. Information pluralism is very limited. Thus, the distance from the internal reality of Chile is cooked with the perception of what happened in the coup d’état 50 years ago. That explains what was behind the internal perception and the vision from abroad.
-In the midst of controversy over the 50 years of the military coup, detractors of President Salvador Allende claim that his purpose was to radically change the Chilean system – they call it destroying it – 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 was going to submit to a referendum starting on September 11, 1973. It is a text that has been published thanks to the material that Mr. Eduardo Novoa rescued. Monreal, president of the State Defense Council, upon 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 absolutely no foundation or basis in reality.
-Salvador Allende’s last words avoid mentioning the Popular Unity, why?
-I don’t see it that way. President Allende, in 1973, culminated a long career that began in the 1930s, seeking the unity of popular forces – with the idea of overcoming the defects of the capitalist system – in a socialist orientation. Throughout that long career, Allende supported his program and project in different parties with various political leaders. In that last message of September 11, he recalls, in my opinion, everything about his political career and the project for which he fought. He ran for the Presidency three times in successive elections and for which he finally gave his life. In that sense, the subject of the discourse are the citizens, the workers that he describes in his speech.
-In his book Sovereign and intervened and in multiple investigationss It is shown that it is impossible to analyze the coup of September 11, 1973 without the intervention of the United States, but it gives the impression that amnesia prevails in many people today.
-Fifty years later, thanks to the decisions of the United States Congress and the Democratic presidents of the 90s and the last decade, it is absolutely demonstrated, with official documents of the United States Government itself, that since the 1958s and in Particularly since 1964, the North American Government has sought to prevent the candidacy personalized by Salvador Allende from reaching the Government. When he won the 1970 elections, it is also proven that President Richard Nixon’s decision was dated: September 1, 1970. At the request of the owner of The Mercurywho asks for a coup d’état to prevent President Allende from taking office, and as of November 15, 1970, that is, the day after Salvador Allende is installed in La Moneda as President, the decision of the Nixon Government is do everything in their power to prevent the Government from being consolidated.
Thinking about the influence that this Government could have in Western Europe and particularly in Italy, the memorandum of November 5, 1970 literally says that the success in consolidating the Government of Salvador Allende would alter the balances of the entire world and the position of United States within that world. What, a small country of barely 11 million inhabitants, so far from the coasts of Europe and Asia, could threaten? The meaning described in the memorandum was a geopolitical conception, that is, the possibility that within the capitalist system hegemonized by the United States, in a democratic and participatory manner by the entire people, a way of organizing the economy, production and the distribution of the country’s resources in a different way than the capitalist system works. All through a democratic means, with greater freedom and participation.
The process was being watched closely from Western Europe, particularly Italy and France. François Mitterrand traveled to Santiago to talk with President Allende and study how the Chilean process was developing.
All of this worried the Nixon Government and is what sustained the geopolitical vision of destroying the process that was developing in Chile. It took three years and they finally achieved it, because the correlation of forces was so different and unequal.
-Did President Allende calibrate the opposition’s destabilizing purposes to the right extent? Or did he believe, naively, that Chilean democrats would never endorse a military coup?
Naivety is not a vision that corresponds to that of President Allende, who, even before his election in 1970, had assumed that he would find himself in very difficult situations and with obstruction of the sectors and interests that were affected by its government program. The progress of the conspiracy and the coup attempts over the three years was punctually followed by the Government, which tried to stop them with the legal means at its disposal. At the same time, we must keep in mind that the strategy of the North American Government was to create a crisis situation that would push the Government (of Allende) to a temptation that it never had: resort to forceful measures, with the certainty that, if the Government followed the path of repressing the seditious movement, that would lead to the opposition’s response with North American support for forceful measures.
That was the underlying design of the North American strategy, to such an extent that, in Henry Kissinger’s memoirs, the first volume he published in 1974, months after the coup, he says that President Allende was preparing a self-coup. That is to say, it is the desire on the part of the North Americans for the President to resort to forceful measures, because if he had entered that terrain, which he never proposed, the overwhelming counterforce would not only have overthrown the Allende Government, but would have would have delegitimized it for the future.
The battle of La Moneda, the President’s resistance on September 11, is a political battle, of a moral nature. It is not military, because there is no confrontation between armed forces. That, the last political battle, Allende won. For this reason, 50 years later, the world and particularly Chileans, remember to commemorate the tragedy to which the country was subjected by the main hegemonic power.
-While the Government was trying to carry out agrarian reform, small radicalized sectors of Chile insisted on carrying out what we could call the small revolution. Intervening cinemas, small businesses, which, fundamentally, deepened the growing hatred.
-Indeed, in every revolutionary process and in every democratic process there are always sectors and nuclei that disagree with the main line. This also occurred in Chile. But the Government’s position was very clear. In the unborn draft of the Constitution there is an article that provides and provides that small and medium-sized property in industry, agriculture, and commerce are not susceptible to nationalization. This demonstrates that the Government was very clear about the areas of state ownership of the strategic sectors of the economy. But, at the same time, that small and medium-sized industry, small and medium-sized property had to be governed by the rules of the market.
-For years it was believed that there was national consensus on some issues, such as the rejection of the dictatorship and the condemnation of the violation of human rights, but that was questioned in the last commemoration.
-This problem can be seen from the perspective of the Armed Forces. In my analysis, the transition from the dictatorial to the two-party system in Chile follows the model of Spain, which, from Francoism to the current monarchical regime, has as its budget the destruction of the Spanish Republican Army between 1936 and 1939. The defeat of the Republican Army in Spain It is the support of the dictatorship of General Franco and that of the current monarchy in Spain. The same phenomenon occurs in Chile. On September 11, the republican component of the Chilean Army is destroyed. The Republican Army dies on September 11.
I explain it. Never in the history of the Chilean Armed Forces had the Commander in Chief of the Navy been arrested and dismissed due to a conspiracy by his subordinates (Raúl Montero Cornejo). Never in the history of Chile had the general director of the Carabineros and the six highest-ranking generals been dismissed by a general without command of troops and evidently supported by the Carabineros for that internal coup (General César Mendoza was the sixth in seniority in the institution ). Never in the history of Chile, since the founding of the Republic, had the head of the Army revolted against the head of the State.
The control mechanisms of Chilean democracy over the Armed Forces disappear. What are these control mechanisms? No one could be a commander, ship captain or colonel with command capacity without prior agreement of the Senate and, in turn, no one could be a general or admiral without a decision from the head of State, the President of the Republic, in positions of strict trust. of this, and could be removed if they lost his trust. That was destroyed in 1973; 50 years later it has not been recovered. Consequently, Chile has a hierarchical, structured army, but its republican vein was destroyed in ’73 and it continues like this without the representative institutions of popular sovereignty having control of the appointments of the commanders that I just described.
By José Zepeda Varas
