The Chilean Congress, however, overwhelmingly ratified Allende as president, and the Socialist leader moved quickly to implement his program, known as “La vía Chilena al socialismo” (“the Chilean Way to Socialism”). This included nationalization of large industries, the implementation of government-run healthcare and educational systems, land redistribution, literacy campaigns, and free milk programs for children. Allende reestablished diplomatic relations with Cuba in defiance of Washington and was close to Cuban leader Fidel Castro, who spent a month in Allende’s Chile.
Throughout Allende’s short-lived presidency, the Nixon administration—with the cooperation of large U.S. corporations and powerful media outlets in Santiago—aggressively fomented unrest within Chile and isolated it economically. In a cable to Washington, U.S. Ambassador Edward Korrey reported telling Chilean authorities: “Not a nut or bolt will be allowed to reach Chile under Allende. We shall do all within our power to condemn Chile and the Chilean to utmost deprivation and poverty.”7 Nixon, meanwhile, issued a directive saying the United States should “Make the [Chilean] economy scream.”8 By 1973, U.S.-influenced hyperinflation and strikes had gripped the country, while Washington supported a media campaign inside Chile aimed at blaming and ultimately bringing down the Allende government.9
On the morning of September 11, 1973, General Pinochet—Commander in Chief of the Army—coordinated a massive military operation that surrounded the presidential palace, La Moneda. In a radio recording of Pinochet instructing his troops during the coup, the General is heard saying, “Kill the bitch and you eliminate the litter.”10 Shortly after 9:00 a.m.—with gunfire and bombs in the background—Allende addressed the nation on one of the few radio stations still operating. “Having a historic choice to make, I shall sacrifice my life to be loyal to my people,” Allende said. “I can assure you that I am certain that the seeds planted by us in the noble consciences of thousands and thousands of Chileans will never be prevented from growing.”11 Within hours, Salvador Allende was dead—allegedly having committed suicide—and one of the darkest eras in the country’s history had begun. “The [U.S. government] wishes to make clear its desire to cooperate with the military Junta and to assist in any appropriate way,” said a classified cable from the White House Situation Room dated two days after the coup. “We welcome General Pinochet’s expression of Junta desire for strengthening ties between Chile and U.S.”12
With the support of Washington, the junta quickly dissolved Congress and Pinochet was declared president. Thousands of Allende supporters and suspected “communist sympathizers” were hunted down by the junta’s forces. Thousands were brought to Estadio Nacional de Chile between September and November 1973; hundreds were executed, thousands tortured.13 The number of Chileans killed in the early days of the Pinochet regime will never be known, but the CIA station in Santiago reported that by September 20, “4,000 deaths have resulted so far from the [coup] and subsequent clean-up operations.” Four days later, the CIA estimated the number at 2,000 to 10,000.14 According to a secret briefing paper prepared in October 1973 for Secretary of State Henry Kissinger titled “Chilean Executions,” the Junta had massacred some 1,500 civilians, summarily executing between 320 and 360 of them.15 “During a ruthless seventeen-year dictatorship, the Chilean military would be responsible for the murder, disappearance and death by torture of some 3,197 citizens—with thousands more subjected to savage abuses such as torture, arbitrary incarceration, forced exile, and other forms of state-sponsored terror,” wrote investigative researcher Peter Kornbluh in his groundbreaking book The Pinochet File. “Within weeks of the coup, Pinochet created a secret police force empowered to eliminate any and all enemies of his regime.”16 So brazen was the junta—and so confident in its backing by the United States—that it murdered U.S. citizens in Chile and targeted Chilean dissidents, such as Allende’s foreign minister, Orlando Letelier, in Washington, D.C. Letelier and his U.S. research assistant, Ronni Karpen Moffitt, were killed in a 1976 car bombing fourteen blocks from the White House.17
Despite the overwhelming evidence of the brutality of the Chilean junta, Jose Miguel Pizarro, Blackwater’s Chilean recruiter, remained a staunch defender of Pinochet and the coup. “It’s exactly the same war on terror” that the Bush administration has waged, Pizarro argued. “I believe there was a major effort of the Chilean Army, the Chilean Navy, and the Chilean Air Force, to make sure that a lot of people got arrested in order to clear them up immediately, but very few people remained in actual custody after the first three or four weeks of the military putsch.” Mass executions, Pizarro said, simply did not happen. He did not deny that there was a “military government” in Chile, but he asserted, “to claim that the amount, the scale of the corruption or the human right abuses, to claim that there was an actual, real military dictatorship, is a flat-out lie.”
Pizarro grew up proud in Pinochet’s Chile with dreams of serving in the Chilean Army: “I got a picture of myself when I was seven with a plastic rifle in my hands so—it’s funny—I have never wanted to be anything else besides an Army officer.” Despite the well-documented atrocities committed under the Pinochet regime in Chile, Pizarro said, “Funny because I spent those seventeen years of military government living in Santiago. I never saw troops shooting, arresting, killing, doing anything wrong in any way, in any shape, or in any form.” He said allegations of Pinochet overseeing “human rights abuses at an institutional level” are “a flat-out lie.” Instead, Pizarro painted a picture of Pinochet as a man who restored democracy to Chile, stamped out communism, and cracked down on Cubans from Fidel Castro’s government who had filed into Chile as “advisers” after the election of Allende. As for allegations of mass torture, Pizarro said that, too, did not happen, adding that the Chilean definition of torture is liberal. When asked if he personally knew anyone who was tortured, he recalled a story told by a family friend whose father was taken in 1973 when they were in the midst of a barbeque, “and then the military stormed in, and they took my daddy prisoner. They keep him for forty-eight hours, and then they kicked him out on a highway.” Pizarro said the official government documentation determined 2,871 people were killed under the dictatorship, adding, “After three years in Iraq, you have less than 3,000 casualties.” Absolutely, he acknowledged, “there were human rights abuses” in Chile, but he asserted they were committed by “secret police, by little tiny groups of corrupted officials.” There were human rights abuses “by Chilean standards,” he said. “By Colombian standards, we were having, I mean, I don’t know, a picnic.”