In 1970, Castro had warned Allende against provoking Washington. It was too late for that now. As right-wing terror and coup-plotting built up around the Chilean president, Castro advised him to start taking a harder line. He said Allende gave too much freedom to the opposition, and was too unwilling to use violence to advance his revolution. He warned that a confrontation between “socialism and fascism” loomed on the horizon and if Chile’s left didn’t take his advice, they would not survive it.52 But Allende’s Unidad Popular government remained committed to democratic socialism.
In July, right-wing terrorists killed another military official, Arturo Araya, Allende’s aide-de-camp, as he stood on the balcony of his home.53
By August, Carlos Prats had realized there was too much pressure on him. Powerful elements in the military wanted a coup. So did much of the elite, as evidenced by the groups of military wives protesting outside his home.54
And it seemed the right-wing terrorists running wild would rather kill General Prats than let Allende finish his term. All three of those groups had the backing of the most powerful government in history. But Prats wasn’t going to give them their coup. On August 23, he handed in his resignation, and got ready to take off for Buenos Aires.
He was replaced by Augusto Pinochet, an unremarkable, laconic general who had been loyal to Prats and had shown no particular inclination toward a coup just a few weeks earlier. After the failed June Tanquetazo, Pinochet had told a meeting of coup plotters that he did not want to “talk about politics, because that is against the constitution.”
On September 9, Carlos Altamirano, the leader of the Socialist Party, gave a speech at the National Stadium in Santiago. He read a letter delivered to the government by the group of constitucionalista sailors, like Pedro Blaset and Guillermo Castillo, attempting to warn them about plots for a coup in August.
“For us it was vital to avoid that great massacre that they planned to commit against the people between August 8 and 10,” he read from the letter. “Our bosses explained to us that for this or that reason the Marxist government should be overthrown, and the people should be washed of its Marxist leaders. For them, every left-wing leader would get, without a doubt, the Jakarta Plan.”55 By then, it would have been clear to most left-wing Chileans what “the Jakarta Plan” meant. By then, it was also clear to almost everyone that a coup was imminent. Altamirano’s speech was more of an homage to the sailors’ bravery than a news flash.
Two days later, on September 11, Salvador Allende knew what was coming. He barricaded himself in La Moneda Presidential Palace, and gave a final radio address to his supporters.
Surely, this will be my last opportunity to speak to you. The Air Force is now already bombing the antennas.…
I will pay with my life for my loyalty to the people. And I tell you all that I am certain that the seed we have planted in the conscience in thousands and thousands of Chileans cannot held back forever.…
Viva Chile! Viva el pueblo! Viva los trabajadores! [Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers!]
These are my last words, and I am sure my sacrifice will not be in vain.
He took his machine gun (Fidel Castro had given him one as a gift), slung it over his shoulder, and put on an Army helmet. As the Chilean Air Force bombarded the presidential palace and strafed poor communities they thought might want to defend the president, Allende shot himself in the head.56
That night, the new military junta made it exceedingly clear which ideology had propelled their violent rise to power. In a televised addressed to the nation, General Jorge Gustavo Leigh, one of its four members, said, “After three years of supporting the Marxist cancer… we consider ourselves obligated, in the sacred interest of our country, to accept the sad and painful mission we have undertaken.… [We] are ready to fight against Marxism, and willing to eradicate it to the very end.”57
The murder and disappearances started right away.
Fanatical anticommunism, once more, was the founding ideology for a new, murderous regime in the Global South. Internationally, the junta would be a close ally of the United States. But locally, they didn’t want to emulate the US. They wanted to emulate Brazil.58 The junta began establishing a dictatorship and justifying their own existence.
On September 22, Tribuna, the Chilean National Party paper, published a curious interview with General Ernesto Baeza Michelsen. He posed for a photo with a postcard identical to the one that Carmen Hertz and Carlos Berger received at their home. “Djakarta is coming,” it read. In this case, however, the general claimed that it was actually the left that was sending upstanding conservative officers the threatening message. According to this story—now backed with the full weight of a US-supported military dictatorship—the Marxists had planned to kill all twenty-seven high-ranking officers on September 22, and only the right-wing coup had stopped the murderous left-wing coup from taking place. A few days later, General Jorge Gustavo Leigh, one of the original members of the military junta, told the same story. He said to the newspaper La Segunda: “This campaign was destined to totally destroy the Armed Forces… a Jakarta that would permit a final collapse. Once this last bastion had fallen, they were going to impose terror on our country.”59
As this was published on September 22, it was the junta that was terrorizing the nation. Famously, they rounded up thousands of suspected enemies of the regime at the Estadio Nacional for questioning, torture, and execution. Less well known is that Brazilian military advisers were there, helping the Chileans to destroy the young men and women they both considered enemies.60 More than a thousand were immediately executed, their bodies hidden in mass graves.61 But Carmen Hertz and Carlos Berger weren’t among them. They were in the north of the country, where Carlos had been working as a communications officer at the Chuquicamata copper mine, desperately trying to play defense for Allende’s nationalization of the copper industry.
Carlos was arrested on September 12 but quickly released; when he was arrested again, on September 14, he stayed in. Carmen, the young lawyer, tried to arrange for his early release. She was sure he would get out; the question was how soon. Since she knew his fate was in the balance, she didn’t contact the Communist Party or any other higher-ups in Santiago. She stayed close to him, visiting as much as she could, negotiating with the local officials. His sentence was technically sixty-one days—and Carmen hoped to commute that down to time served.
On October 19, she visited the jail at about five in the afternoon. Carlos was distraught, nervous; something was wrong.
“They took away a group of prisoners. It was some kind of command, a different group. I didn’t recognize anyone from the regiment,” said Carlos. “They took them away violently, with hoods over their heads.”
Later that night, Carmen got an anonymous call. They had taken him away, the voice said. She called the warden. “Yes, they took him, but don’t worry, it’s just interrogation and they’ll be right back.” He didn’t come back. They executed all of them. Jakarta had arrived.
In their own way, Pinochet’s forces eventually confirmed this to her. The next night, they parked a jeep on the road and waited for her to approach. They didn’t get out of the car. As she approached, she could see that it was a military priest and someone else, someone in a uniform. That man said, “Carlos Berger and the other prisoners were being driven to the city of Antofagasta, they rebelled on the way, attempted to escape, and were subsequently killed. Hasta luego.” The motor was still running; the driver shifted the car into gear and rolled away. Carmen didn’t cry. She screamed. “Murderers! Murderers! Sons of bitches, you will see! You will pay for this! Murderers, wretched cowards!”
Officials in Washington watched as developing countries across the world reacted with shock and horror to the rise of Pinochet. An October State Department intelligence report noted that a moderate Cameroonian newspaper called Allende’s downfall “a slap in the face of the Third World.”62
Juraj Domic, the Croatian exil
e who introduced the “Jakarta” metaphor into Chilean politics, was given a job in Pinochet’s foreign ministry.
Before the coup, plotters in Washington were worried the Chileans didn’t have what it took to fight socialism. But the Chileans soon surpassed their Brazilian patrons in zeal. The military command was willing to tolerate thousands of deaths, just as Pedro Blaset and the other constitucionalista sailors had overheard. In the end, Pinochet and his men killed around three thousand people, mostly in the early days of his dictatorship. They were proud of their efficiency. Manuel Contreras, a close collaborator with the CIA who created Pinochet’s deadly DINA secret police, knew that the point of state terror was not just wanton destruction of enemies, but to make resistance impossible and solidify the dominant political and economic structures.
Terrorism had to be unleashed on the population before one man, Augusto Pinochet, agreed to take on the role Washington thought Chile’s military was supposed to play. Washington favored Pinochet’s government from the very start. Henry Kissinger had a very simple policy regarding South America’s new dictator: “Defend, defend, defend.”63
However, just as with Brazil’s military dictatorship, the consequences of Pinochet’s violence were far from limited by the borders of his own narrow country. Almost immediately after taking power, he sought to influence events abroad, both by fighting “communism” throughout the hemisphere and by executing civilians around the world.
The international terror began close to home. On September 29, 1974, Pinochet’s secret police murdered Carlos Prats, his former boss, and his wife at their home in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Prats had been preparing his memoirs. After murdering him, Pinochet put out a statement saying his death “justifies the security measures the government has adopted.”64
A few months after Prats was killed, the Brazilian military let slip the existence of its own Operação Jacarta.
In August 1975, Luciano Martins Costa was a journalism student in São Paulo. He and other students were able to interview a general named Ednardo D’Avila Mello, who had a reputation for brutality. Military officers had investigated the young journalists before the interview, of course, and they brought in right-wing students to the interview itself, to pack the room as a sort of intimidation tactic. As these things always went, D’Avila Mello delivered pleasant half-truths about the regime while giving it an air of transparency. The problem was, the general became incensed with one of the students’ questions. He became enraged at what he saw as her insubordinate attitude. He lost it.
“You’re all indoctrinated!” he screamed. “And it’s because of this indoctrination that we’re going to put into effect Operation Jakarta, and neutralize two thousand communists right here in São Paulo.” He began to list the names of targets.
Luciano scribbled down, furiously, “Neutralizar 2mil comunistas em São Paulo…”
The general had gone off script. This was a dictatorship, however, and he had an easy way to make sure it stayed off the record.
“If you publish a single line of what I just said, it will be 2,001!”
The students kept quiet, for quite some time.65
Three months later, Pinochet’s regime held a meeting with representatives from Brazil and their like-minded, US-backed anticommunist neighbors. There were a lot of them, now. Representatives from Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay, and Uruguay met with Manuel Contréras, collaborator with the CIA and founder of Chile’s secret police, in the grand hall of Chile’s War Academy. It was an upbeat meeting. They needed to work together, they had decided. It wasn’t enough just to kill communists and subversives in their own countries. They set up a program to collaborate to exterminate their enemies around the world. They established a central data bank in order to trade intelligence. The computers for that system would soon be provided by the United States. The first day ended with a gala dinner, with attractive Chilean women supplied by the secret police.66
They named their new alliance after Chile’s national bird, the majestic scavenger. In November 1975, they launched Operation Condor.
A Trip to the Movies
Benny arrived in Chile in 1975. He had been transferred from his job in Bangkok, after more than a decade there, to work as a UN economist. Back in Kansas, he had gotten a taste of North America; but this was his first time living in Latin America, and of course, he was excited. He arrived with his wife and children, who did their best to learn the language.
They learned very quickly what life was like under Pinochet. One evening, Benny decided to take a stroll through central Santiago and catch a movie. On the way, a couple Carabineros, members of the Chilean police, stopped him on the street. They needed to know who he was and where he was going.
It was suspicious that he was even walking. There was a curfew in Santiago, and it was approaching. But it was also his race that fueled their suspicion. Just as being Chinese had led the US-backed military to harass his community, and Suharto’s dictatorship forced him to officially change his name to “Benny Widyono” while working in Bangkok, his face inspired suspicion in Chile, too.
By this point in his life, Benny spoke enough Spanish to understand what the cop said next.
“Quiere que lo lleve?” Do you want me to take you away? The subtext was clear as day to Benny. Do you want me to take you in, to be tortured, and maybe never come out? Do you realize you can be disappeared tonight?
Benny tried to be as polite with the cop as possible. It worked—the guy was just trying to intimidate him a bit, which also worked—and Benny was able to walk away. But over his first few weeks in Chile, he realized that not even his plush UN office was a refuge from the chaos of this violent dictatorship. Or rather, the chaos arrived there because it was a refuge. As Benny and his colleagues worked, young Chileans would run to the UN compound, fleeing the regime, and jump over the walls. Inside, they couldn’t be arrested by the secret police, as the UN facilities, nestled onto the south bank of the Mapocho River, had a little bit of autonomy from the regime. These young men and women were mostly members of the left-wing MIR party, which had heeded the warning of the 1965 massacre in Indonesia and subscribed to the doctrine of armed revolution. Benny watched as the kids kept coming, and coming, and set up a mini encampment inside, sleeping on mattresses on the floor and looking for a way out of the country. They probably didn’t know that Operation Condor could hunt them down, anywhere on earth, even if they did get out.
Pinochet hated Benny’s office. For him, the whole UN was basically a hive of communists. But even worse, Benny worked at the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (CEPAL). This was a bastion of what Pinochet and his global allies considered unacceptably leftist economic thought. CEPAL was the epicenter of development economics and dependency theory; Chile’s new dictator, on the other hand, had elevated a group of well-connected Chilean economists who had studied at the University of Chicago, and favored a radical turn toward free-market economics. This group, which came to be known as the “Chicago Boys,” were far more zealous than even Benny’s old acquaintances in the “Berkeley Mafia” back in Indonesia. Their ascendance was not planned—the Pinochet government’s raison d’être was anticommunism, not market fundamentalism—but under these economists, Chile became the world’s first test case for “neoliberal” economics, and Benny’s CEPAL offered advice that was no longer welcome.67
But still, Benny was soon invited to fancy events in barrio alto, the eastern neighborhoods up toward the hills, where the elite lived. When you stand in downtown Santiago and look east, it’s almost always breathtaking. You can usually see snow capping the peaks of the Andes, towering above you, while down below you stroll through warm air thick with the smell of tropical spices.
It was when Benny went up the hill a bit into the posh neighborhoods that he first saw them: “Yakarta viene,” “Djakarta se acerca,” or just “Jakarta.”
It was a surprise. He had to ask around to figure out exactly what the graffiti meant, w
here all the slogans came from. He found out, and that was even more of a shock. The capital of his own country had come to mean not cosmopolitanism, not Third World solidarity and global justice, but rather reactionary violence. “Jakarta” meant brutal elimination of people organizing for a better world. And now he was in another country, also backed by the US, whose governing forces celebrated that history rather than condemning it.
The paint was everywhere. But it was slowly fading.
The coup, only two years old now, had been rewritten into a new history by the victors. That was a process he knew very well. There was another similarity with Indonesia that Benny noticed right away. Allende, like Sukarno, was a talker. Pinochet, like Suharto, never really said much. Sometimes, Chilean TV would transmit video of a recent Pinochet speech but dub over his voice to fix what he had actually said. Even the present could be rewritten.68
Benny had to get used to seeing “Jakarta” plastered all around, but it never sat well with him. And one day, all these emotions came pouring out. The Indonesian ambassador to Argentina came to give a lecture to Chilean students alongside Benny, who was often the closest thing his country had to an ambassador in Santiago. This meant working with Suharto’s government, but like most Indonesians, Benny had resigned himself to that reality.
After the lecture, students pressed the ambassador on how and why the Chilean government looked to Jakarta for an example of glorious, anticommunist terror. What was the meaning of all that graffiti? The ambassador was furious.
“That’s simply the name of our capital! How dare you imply it’s synonymous with massacre?” Benny was angry too.
But were the students actually wrong? He had to face this. He knew the whole city of Jakarta in its dirty, beautiful complexity. But outside the country—here in Chile—all that arrived was the story of mass murder. A mass murder that absolutely happened, that Pinochet had somehow replicated here. The graffiti wasn’t slander. It was reality.
The Jakarta Method Page 25