Fact, Fiction, and Agitprop

I flew from Santiago to Rome on August 15. The night before I left an army officer told me that Marxist activists had hidden away eighteen thousand military uniforms smuggled in from Cuba; that left-wing students were shedding their craggy Che Guevara locks for soldierly crewcuts; that the stores of illicit arms the army had been uncovering here and there were just a small portion of the whole; that, in sum, the army expected a bloody coup from the Left in which as many as thirty thousand Chileans might die. It was only under extreme pressure from the navy, he said, that Carlos Rodríguez, Cuba’s prime minister, and Manuel Pineiro, Cuba’s secret service chief, had been forced to leave the country. The military suspected that they were in Chile to prepare for the coming insurrection.

The Western press back then, in late August/early September, was having its doubts about Señor Allende’s Chilean way. “It seems a mighty peculiar road to socialism—or to anywhere else for that matter,” wrote David Holdin of the London Sunday Times on September 5. “The tragic prospect is that while the harassed and embattled president may succeed in averting a military coup, he may soon be powerless to govern or stave off overt civil war,” said Time Magazine at about the same time. Le Monde admitted that Allende’s Popular Unity had been a failure. Yet one week later, after Allende’s fall, the press, from Marxist to socialist to independent, was at one in its shock and horror at what the generals had wrought.

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Nena Ossa

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I flew from Santiago to Rome on August 15. The night before I left an army officer told me that Marxist activists had hidden away eighteen thousand military uniforms smuggled in from Cuba; that left-wing students were shedding their craggy Che Guevara locks for soldierly crewcuts; that the stores of illicit arms the army had been uncovering here and there were just a small portion of the whole; that, in sum, the army expected a bloody coup from the Left in which as many as thirty thousand Chileans might die. It was only under extreme pressure from the navy, he said, that Carlos Rodríguez, Cuba’s prime minister, and Manuel Pineiro, Cuba’s secret service chief, had been forced to leave the country. The military suspected that they were in Chile to prepare for the coming insurrection.

The Western press back then, in late August/early September, was having its doubts about Señor Allende’s Chilean way. “It seems a mighty peculiar road to socialism—or to anywhere else for that matter,” wrote David Holdin of the London Sunday Times on September 5. “The tragic prospect is that while the harassed and embattled president may succeed in averting a military coup, he may soon be powerless to govern or stave off overt civil war,” said Time Magazine at about the same time. Le Monde admitted that Allende’s Popular Unity had been a failure. Yet one week later, after Allende’s fall, the press, from Marxist to socialist to independent, was at one in its shock and horror at what the generals had wrought.