Vol. 24 No. 13 · 11 July 2002
pages 3-7 | 4093 words
11 September 1973
Christopher Hitchens
- Pinochet in Piccadilly: Britain and Chile’s Hidden History by Andy Beckett
Faber, 280 pp, £15.99, May 2002, ISBN 0 571 20241 1
I have a more or less fixed memory of the end of the ‘Sixties’. In the autumn of 1970 I went to join a strike picket at the General Motors plant in Fremont, California. Handy for Berkeley and Oakland, the factory was one of the salients of a national labour shutdown that was scheduled to begin at 12 o’clock at night. In the ranks of supporters were hardened veterans of the battle against the Vietnam War, especially of the famous blockades of the military recruiting centres in the Bay Area. Sympathisers of the not yet discredited Black Panther Party were in evidence, as were those who had been beaten and tear-gassed alongside César Chávez in his fight to unionise the near-serfs of the Salinas Valley agribusiness empire. All the strands of ‘the movement’ were still in some kind of alignment. Just before the deadline, the company cops tried to smuggle some scab trucks through the gates, and the resulting bonfire of overturned vehicles gave a lovely light. In the next edition of the People’s World, the splash headline was a very Sixties one: ‘Fremont – In The Midnight Hour’. It competed for space with another, smaller headline, which announced the victory of Salvador Allende’s ‘Popular Unity’ coalition in Chile.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
This article is also available for purchase from the London Review Bookshop. Contact us for rights and issues enquiries.
- print this article
Letters
Vol. 24 No. 15 · 8 August 2002
From Theresa Heine
It was not the Prussians who trained the Chilean Army, as Christopher Hitchens claims in his review of Andy Beckett's Pinochet in Piccadilly (LRB, 11 July), but the Germans: after 1871, the Prussian Army became part of the Imperial German Army. Incidentally, until Pinochet's coup the Chilean Army had an unequalled record in Latin America of not interfering in politics. It required the dismissal of General Prats, its Commander-in-Chief, who opposed the planned coup (and was later assassinated in exile), to put the Army firmly under Pinochet's control. Admiral Toribio Merino, on the other hand, of the British-trained Navy, was a key figure in Pinochet's coup and a senior liaison officer with its US backers.
Theresa Heine
London NW5
Vol. 24 No. 16 · 22 August 2002
From Andy Beckett
Theresa Heine (Letters, 8 August) makes a fair point about the rarely mentioned political diversity of the Chilean Army in her response to Christopher Hitchens's review of my book, Pinochet in Piccadilly. Besides the pro-democratic General Carlos Prats, whose dismissal she correctly cites as an important prelude to Pinochet's coup in 1973, René Schneider, another Chilean general who believed that soldiers should obey elected politicians, was assassinated by local right-wingers in 1970. However, I am not sure that the Chilean Army tradition of non-interference in politics was quite as strong as Heine suggests. There was a well-established liberal and constitutional side to Army thinking, but there were also successful military coups in Chile in 1924, 1927 and 1932. The second of these brought General Carlos Ibáñez, 'the Chilean Mussolini', to power for four years. Chile reverted to elected civilian governments between 1932 and 1973, but whenever these threatened right-wing interests some Army officers would become restive. In 1969, for example, there was an Army revolt on the streets of Santiago against the mildly social democratic President Eduardo Frei, and throughout the Presidency of his more radical successor, Salvador Allende, there were escalating instances of insubordination and intimidation by Army officers, despite Schneider and Prats's efforts to keep their soldiers out of politics. All this makes Pinochet's coup look less like an American-financed aberration and more like the awakening of an old Chilean Army instinct.
Andy Beckett
London N5
