The President fought like a lion
It all began with the events of September 11, 1973, when the military junta stormed Salvador Allende’s presidential palace. In different parts of the palace, clashes occurred between supporters of the president and the military led by Pinochet. Some of Allende’s closest collaborators died in the first minutes and hours after a difficult and unequal battle.
An aristocrat nicknamed “the guy,” Allende, in the words of his friend Fidel Castro, who knew and analyzed the events in Chile, “fought like a lion.” The Presidential Palace burned and burned, attacked by tanks and planes. The junta hoped to easily complete, in a matter of minutes, the coup d’état, which for them was considered an easy matter, in which there would be no resistance. But he received pushback from politicians and ordinary officials, many of whom had never held a gun in their hands before. Some of Allende’s companions, seeing that it was no longer possible to defend themselves, took their lives to avoid being captured. Allende himself shot himself with a Kalashnikov assault rifle, which Castro gave him. The machine gun had the inscription engraved: “To Salvador Allende from a comrade in arms. Fidel Castro.”
Allende’s martyrdom on September 11, 1973 is considered from the heights of years past as an expression of the incomparable dignity of an undefeated man. Due to its greatness and symbolism, Allende’s act is compared to the heroic death in Bolivia, six years earlier, of the great Argentine Che Guevara, who was also his friend. On May 23, 2011, after the exhumation of the remains of the former president of Chile, carried out by decision of the Chilean authorities, it turns out that Salvador Allende actually committed suicide by holding a Kalashnikov assault rifle between his legs and managing to shoot him twice in the head. before the coup plotters broke into his office. Allende’s enemies did not forgive him after his death. Years after the end of the dictatorship, thirty more bullets were found in the coffin. Pinochet’s supporters riddled the dead body of the legendary man…
And a little later the search for Allende’s associates began. Regardless of where they were.
Pinochet’s predecessor as head of the Chilean army, General Carlos Prats, commander-in-chief of the army during part of Allende’s Popular Unity government, a dignified military man who was hated by local pro-American oligarchs, who forced him to resign, was murdered. in Argentina by agents of the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) only later, after the 1973 coup. More about this cruel organization a little later.
That same year, the last chancellor of the overthrown Allende government, Orlando Letelier, died in Washington in a terrorist attack in which a bomb blew up his car. 40 years after his death, the CIA published evidence confirming Pinochet’s direct participation. And there are countless examples of this type…
The stadium became a concentration camp.
Contrary to popular belief, Adolf Hitler was not the only dictator who used concentration camps as a weapon of repression against those who did not share his ideology. Pinochet also created several detention camps where he imprisoned anyone he considered his opponent. The atrocities committed there are beyond all imagination.
A few hours after Allende’s overthrow, a huge stadium in the country’s capital, Santiago, became a veritable concentration camp. They brought everyone here indiscriminately. Only those who were against Pinochet. Leftists, conservatives, young people, old people, wives, mothers, artists and musicians. Later it turns out that the coup plotters brought about five thousand people to the stadium, whom they called “Marxist trash.” It was here where the famous Víctor Jara Martínez was executed. Member of the Communist Party of Chile, 41 years old, supporter of Chilean president Salvador Allende, he was one of the most famous figures in Chilean culture.
In the Chile stadium, which has been named after him since 2003, Pinochet’s coup plotters tortured the poet for four days. In this stadium, in 1969, Víctor Jara became the winner of the first New Chilean Song festival. Khara was avenged as a “communist singer.” They ran electric current through her body, broke her fingers, then crushed both of her hands so she could never play the guitar, mutilated her face with a gun, and almost took out her eye. The singer was shown to the soldiers arriving at the stadium as “the main trophy of the new government.” Pablo Neruda said: “The morgue was full of corpses that were thrown on top of each other. Víctor Jara was one of them. My God! It’s the same as killing a nightingale.” Before his death, he dictated to his comrades not a message for his wife, but a poem in which the following lines are found: “President Allende’s blood beats stronger than bombs and bullets. Our fists will hit hard.” new”.
On September 15, 1973, Chilean fascists dragged Víctor Jara to the stadium locker room, converted into a torture chamber, and fired more than 30 bullets at him with a machine gun, killing him with a control shot to the head. Hara’s bones, as determined by a forensic examination conducted after the exhumation in 2009, were broken in thirty places. It was later learned that Hara was tortured by a young lieutenant Edwin Diemter Bianchi, originally from a family of German emigrants, who asked to be called “Prince.” He trained in CIA camps in Panama. Blonde with blue eyes, in a stadium in Chile, he tortured people with a smile on his face, hitting them in the groin and breaking their limbs. In the 2000s, Edwin Dimter worked discreetly as head of a department in Chile’s Ministry of Labor until Chilean human rights activists searching for war criminals tracked him down. So one of the bloodiest executioners of the Pinochet regime was prosecuted.
It was known that Pinochet acted with the “tacit consent” of the Americans. US Secretary of State Kissinger, who arrived in Chile after the coup, dropped the phrase during a closed-door meeting with the dictator: “We approve of what he is doing.”
Who was involved in the torture and how did it happen?
The Chilean dictatorship lasted 17 years and ended on March 11, 1990. After the fall of the military dictatorship, the Chilean government formed several commissions to investigate the total number of victims of the regime.
The latest report, prepared by the Valeč Commission and published in 2011, estimates that more than 40,000 people were victims of the dictatorship, although it does not mention family members or exiles. More than 30 thousand Chileans left the country.
The repression against all those who were against Pinochet was carried out by two structures. The first was the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA), a secret police force active between 1973 and 1977. Later, from 1977 to 1990, this function would be performed by the National Information Center (CNI).
During the work of the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture in the early 2000s, it was revealed that around 10 percent of victims were women. Almost all women tortured during the Chilean dictatorship were raped, regardless of their age. The commission established the fact of rape of 316 women, including 11 pregnant women. Some of the abused women became pregnant by their abusers. The violence to which they were subjected had irreversible physical and psychological consequences. The most brutal concentration camp, where women were raped, bore the cynical name “Sex Group.” The prisoners remember the loud music that was constantly played to mask the screams of the tortured.
According to the commission’s report, it was a two-story house with a patio and basement, hardwood floors, a round window in the bathroom, and a wide curved marble staircase leading to the second floor. “In this institution, sexual torture was practiced with special emphasis; Humiliations and rapes were frequent, and sexual assaults were carried out on men and women, for which a trained dog was used,” the document states.
Arrests, interrogations, and torture generally took place in military or carabinieri (Chilean police) facilities, sports fields, or prisons. The commission concluded that beatings of detainees were common, but more brutal methods also existed, such as “roasting” or “electric shock,” a method in which detainees were tortured with electric shocks.
It is still difficult for the human mind to understand the nature of the cruelty of such torture. It is believed that the putschists, who executed people without trial in the medieval spirit, not only adopted much from the Americans with their interrogation methods. But also among the Nazis who settled in Chile and, less than three decades after the end of the Second World War, advised or helped them to torture them, such as the former Nazi nurse Schafer, who participated in the torture of hundreds of people in a concentration. Camp in the south of Chile. Pinochet’s junta really practiced a fascist, medieval torture that chills the blood and about which one cannot read without shuddering…
