The excesses of the junta are so systematic
that they approach genocide.
                     LEOPOLDO TORRES, president of the Intemational                                        Movement of Catholic Jurists, in Madrid,  quoted in  L'Express, in late 1973

 Shortly after midnight, September 10, the Chilean people were savagely attacked by regiments from the Army, Navy, and Air Force  bases, from the military police barracks, and from the homes of fascist group leaders, where civilian operatives, called "independent units" by the rebel high command, headed the military patrols in the murder or arrest of Chilean labor leaders.
    In less than twenty hours this blitzkrieg would leave a broad wake of destruction, death, torture, and shame. The untrammeled brutality
 was brought about by the military high command, who represented themselves to the nation as fulfilling "the normal duty that the Fatherland requires of us. "
   At l0 P.M. on September 10, the few drunken stragglers in the Valparaíso dockside bars witnessed something quite peculiar: the war fleet, which had weighed anchor ten hours earlier for the ostensible purpose of joining four U.S. warships on Operation Unitas in their annual war maneuvers, had returned to port; the fleet was landing its troops, and the troops were dispersing throughout the city!
   Contingents of Navy infantry, under the personal command of Rear Admiral Sergio Huidobro, occupied the Cerro Baron Station fuel depot, the Municipal Building, Arturo Prat Square, the railroad station, and other strategic sites. Military police troops were coming out to join them.

  At First District headquarters, the commander in chief of the Navy, Admiral Raúl Montero Cornejo, was personally arrested by Vice-Admiral José Toribio Merino, deprived of his rank, and left in
the custody of a commodore armed with a submachine gun. Merino assumed command in the presence of the admirals led by Patricio Carvajal Prado. After the insurrectional ceremony, Carvajal traveled swiftly to Santiago to take charge of his "combat" post at the Defense Ministry , a few yards from La Moneda.
   At the same time, an officer in the Valparaíso military police, having no idea of what was happening, informed the Santiago Highway Control that "the Navy is mounting a huge arms search ... they're in all parts of the city." After that, silence. The telephone lines out of Valparaíso were cut off from the capital.1
   Thus the Navy carried out the final plan of action agreed upon with General Augusto Pinochet on September 7: the fleet had left port on Monday the tenth and then two hours before midnight had returned to Chile. It had split into two groups: half the fleet remained in Valparaíso, with tentative support from two U.S. Navy destroyers which had sailed to a position just outside Chile's territorial waters, 200 miles away. The other half was sailing at full speed to the port of Talcahuano. And there two more U.S. Navy ships would position themselves.
   The military occupation of Valparaíso, using Navy infantry as a vanguard, took place during the last two hours of September 10 so efficiently that no one in the rest of the country was aware of it until well into the early morning of September 11.
    But the credit for this cannot go entirely to the Chilean high command. The plans for the military takeover had been discussed, adjusted, and corrected with members of the U .S. military mission in Chile and with the U.S. Army's Southern Command in the Panama Canal Zone during June, July, and August.2 This gigantic military operation did in fact have one weakness: the lack of a centralized system for radio communications to connect the armed forces scattered throughout twenty-five provinces, on sea, on land, and in the air .

The Southem Command of the American Army, through its air base in the Argentine province of Mendoza, solved the problem. They sent a specia1ly equipped aircraft to serve as a "relay station" and "centralizer" for military radio messages. This help was provided so openly that Argentine reporters exposed the maneuver three days after the coup. The Buenos Aires daily paper El Mundo revealed part of the "transmissions support" operation that the Pentagon was conducting:
  The airplane of type WB57S and the reserve pilots M. B. Lemmons and D. C. Baird, commanded by Majors V. Dueñas and T. Shull ofthe U.S. Air Force, coordinated all operations of the rebel armed forces before and during the coup.
  This aircraft, especially equipped with the most up-to-date communica- tions instruments, operated on the day of the coup as a flying radio station. The flight perimeter included the area enclosed by Mendoza, Argentina [between the 32nd and 33rd parallels south], and the Chilean cities of La Serena [30th parallel south] and Puerto Montt [between the 41st and 42nd parallels south]. This indicated a "triangular flight pattern" of 250 miles from Mendoza to La Serena, 770 miles from La Serena to Puerto Montt, and some 620 miles from Puerto Montt back to Mendoza. This covered nineteen provinces of Chile.
  The U.S. Air Force plane began to operate in this zone on September 7. That day it flew two missions; on the tenth it flew others. From the eleventh (the date of the coup) to the thirteenth it was assigned as constant support to the rebels' communications system.
  The legal cover for the missions coordinating rebel communications was " Mission Airstream." The task accomplished by the U.S. plane was to connect the Chilean Navy stations with sections of their Army and Air Force.3                                                                                                    
          OPERATION PINCERS                                                              
Not all the credit for the destruction unleashed on Chile can go to the Pentagon's generals or the Southem Command of the U.S. Army in the Panama Canal Zone. A good part of the insurrection's objectives (including the junta's intentions of regressing to dependency on the United States 4) had germinated in the minds of the highest-ranking conspirators. One was Vice-Admiral José Toribio Merino Castro,

self-promoted admiral and commander in chief of the Navy as of the night of September 10, and destined to become, a few hours later, one of  "the four" members of the military junta.
Admiral Merino was fifty-seven years old, a 1936 graduate of the Naval School. Like the other senior officers of Latin America "destined" to be chiefs of their services, he had had a "long apprenticeship" in the U.S. military system.5 During World War II he served on the U.S. Navy warship Raleigh, patrolling the Panama Canal Zone and Guadalcanal. Between 1956 and 1957 he was a naval attaché in London. Afterward he joined the General Staff and became a professor of geopolitics and logistics.
Merino was the first of the rebel senior officers who "rose up" against the idea of having a coalition of leftist parties govern Chile. By 1971, he was frequently heard, at the Playa Ancha (Valparaíso) Naval Academy, saying that "it is a mistake on the part of the Americans to let Allende govern." On the night of September l0, Merino was a proud man: he was carrying out the plan to "exterminate the Marxist ideology" for which he had fought so hard from 1972 onward. The first person wholeheartedly to support this plan had been Air Force General Gustavo Leigh Guzmán. Then Division General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte joined him, and after him came military police General César Mendoza Durán.
When some Navy officers expressed their horror at the dreadful massacres devastating the country in the wake of the coup, Merino's reply ran through the fleet like a cold chill: "We are the nation's surgeons. When a patient has cancer in his leg, it is eradicated and the patient is saved. We are eradicating Marxism. ...We are conducting a surgical operation. ...Our work is humanitarian."6
In June 1973, even before Augusto Pinochet was "invited" to become "leader" of the military uprising, the plans for the armed occupation of the country were complete as far as war strategy went. What had not been decided upon was how to "politically" maintain the military occupation over a period of years. Of course, there was general agreement to close down the National Congress, militarize

  unions and factories in the Area of Social Property, as well as the administrative apparatus, and dissolve the workers' Central Única and all political parties, beginning with those of the Unidad Popular. But was that enough?
    For Merino and his fellow ideologues, it was not. For him, the problem with Communism was its people, not its organizations. He therefore proposed a plan which he arrogantly christened the "three- thirds" plan: "in the first hours" kill 3,000 middle-level leaders of all the Unidad Popular's organizations, "from radicals to MIRistas,"** arrest, try, and give long prison sentences to 3,000 leaders well known to the public; "exile" 3,000 more politicians, professionals, and "intellectuals," from "Christian Democrats leftward." That, said Merino,  would guarantee "social peace" for a decade.
    Merino had been talking about the "three-thirds" since March of 1973 in Valparaíso naval circles. When this talk reached the ears of some leftists (myself among them) that same year, the comment was, "The poor man is insane, he's an old-fashioned Nazi, he doesn't realize he's in Chile." Months later, it would be clear that he was no old-fashioned Nazi, but an up-to-date one. The difference was that his ideological center spoke English, not German.
   Merino Castro's ideas were opposed only by a group of "reformist" Army generals, who believed that the sort of action he proposed would result in "hatred against the military, which would provoke guerrilla warfare all the time we are in power." But when the events of March, April, May, and June revealed the strength of the people's desire for national liberation, the balance tipped in favor of the "three- thirds" philosophy. The conspiring generals and admirals decided that the Chilean people were infected with revolution, that it was like leprosy. And, as in the Middle Ages, the lepers had to be burned to cleanse the infected area.
  From late June on, the plotters began to finalize their lists of "ex-
 (** Members of MIR. Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, one of the truly revolutionary and very radical political parties (with MAPU in the Unidad Popular). )

tremists," "political leaders," "Marxist journalists," "agents of international Communism," and any and all persons participating with any vigor in neighborhood, communal, union, or national organizations. These lists had been in existence since October-November 1972 in the hands of the SIM and Navy and Air Force intelligence. In addition, the Pentagon had been asked to get the CIA to give the Chilean Army its lists of Chileans linked to socialist countries. These names were sorted into two groups: (1) persons not publicly known, or relatively obscure, but who were important in all kinds of leftist organizations; and (2) well-known people in important positions, including high-ranking officials in the Allende administration.
   The first group was dubbed "the motors of Marxism" by Merino; the second, "the leaders of Marxism." By early August, the lists were almost complete, and Toribio Merino's "three-thirds" plan was taking on apocalyptic dimensions.
   "The motors ofMarxism" consisted of some 20,000 Chileans, from university students to old people who had retired but were still very active in community life. These people were to be arrested and executed in the first hours or days of the military coup. Thus, by August 1973, Merino's 3,000 had become 20,000.
   The names on the second list, "the leaders of Marxism," were no surprise to Merino and his associates. Their number did not exceed 3,000. These, it was agreed, had to be arrested, tried summarily, and sentenced to long imprisonment. The rebel high command thought this was a good idea because "if we list such well-known leaders as casualties, the whole world is going to accuse us of being dictators." On the other hand, if they exterminated the obscure people who were the real movers among the laborers, peasants, and office workers, "nobody will ask us about them."
    When the Navy infantry began to occupy Valparaíso on the night of the tenth as the first phase of Chile's occupation by air, land, and sea, the generals and admirals had specific goals to accomplish in their blitzkrieg:

brutal that even the Archbishop of Santiago, Raúl Cardinal Silva Henríquez, at great personal risk, made this public statement: "It is our belief that peace will not be brought to Chile on the foundation of destroying a large number of Chileans" (in the Chilean magazine Ercilla. No. 2,002, December 12-18, 1973; this magazine belongs to Frei's group in the Christian Democrats).7
  Nevertheless, in spite of these meticulous preparations for murdering 20,000 Chileans, the surprise of the attack, and the unpreparedness of the people's organizations to successfully resist a slaughter of such magnitude, the results of the first twenty-four hours of the operation to exterminate the "motors of Marxism" were a relative failure.
  The estimated figures, which I obtained myself and through friends who risked their lives to inform me during the days immediately after the coup, show that on September 11 the attackers assassinated only a little over 3,000 of the list of 20,000, falling far short of their goal of killing 6,000 the first day.
  A tentative breakdown, province by province, of these results judged "unsatisfactory" by the rebel general staff, follows:
   Tarapacá Province: 80 middle-level leaders assassinated out of an ideal total of 400. The region was invaded by troops under the com- mand of General Carlos Forestier Haensgen and Colonel Odlanier Mena Salinas.
   Antofagasta Province: Around 80 assassinations; the victims, part of a total of about 400, were hunted down in their own homes. The occupation forces were commanded by Brigadier General Joaquín Lagos Osorio and Colonel Eugenio Rivera Desgroux.
   Atacama Province: Out of approximately 1,000 people on the list, they were able to kill only some 100.
   Coquimbo Province: 100 assassinations out of 200. Atacama and Coquimbo provinces were assigned to Lieutenant Colonels Oscar Haag Blaschke and Ariosto Lapostol Orrego.
   Aconcagua Province: 100 out of 500. Colonel Héctor Orozco Sepúl- veda commanded.

   Va/paraíso Province: 250 out of 2,000. Rear Admiral Adolfo Wal- baum Wieber commanded.
   Santiago Province: "Only" 800 members of civilian leftist organiza- tions, out of a list of 6,500. Brigadier General Herman Brady Roche was in charge of the invading troops.
   O'Higgins Province: 80 out of 600. Lieutenant Colonel Cristian Ackerknecht commanded.
   Co/chagua Province: 100 out of 500. Colonel Hernán Brantes Mar- tínez commanded.
   Curicó Province: 50 out of 300. Lieutenant Colonel Sergio Angelotti Cádiz commanded.
   Ta/ca Province: 80 out of 400. Lieutenant Colonel Efraín Jaña Girón commanded.
   Linares Province: 20 out of 100. Colonel Gabriel Del Río Espinosa commanded.
   Mau/e Province: 20 out of 100. Lieutenant Colonel Rubén Castillo Whyte commanded.
   Ñub/e Province: The list had more than 500 names. At midnight on September 11, the Santiago intelligence center was notified that they could "report only 98 casualties." Colonel Juan Toro Dávila com- manded.
   Concepción and Arauco provinces were under the joint command of Brigadier General Washington Carrasco Femández and Rear Admiral Jorge Paredes Wetzer (the latter was chief of the Navy forces at Talcahuano and Tomé). In Concepción, of 2,000 civilians sought, only about 250 were killed. In Arauco Province, 100 were killed out of an ideal total of 500.
   Bío-Bío Province: 120 out of 800. Colonel Alfredo Rehren Pulido commanded.
   Mal!eco Province: 80 out of 400. Lieutenant Colonels Elías Bacigalupo Soracco and Alejandro Morel Donoso commanded.
   Cautín Province: 150 out of 600. Colonel Hemán Ramírez Ramírez and Lieutenant Colonel Pablo Iturriaga Marchesse commanded.
   Va/divia Province: 40 out of 200. Brigadier General Héctor Bravo Muñoz commanded.

   Osorno Province: 140 out of 600. Lieutenant Colonel Lizardo Simón Abarca Maggi commanded.
  Llanquihue and Chiloé provinces: 115 out of 400. The troops were commanded by Air Force Colonel Sergio Leigh Guzmán, the brother of Gustavo Leigh Guzmán, a member of the junta. Sergio Leigh Guzmán was promoted to the rank of general a few days after the coup.
  Aisén Province: 10 out of 200. Colonel Humberto Gordon Rubio commanded.
  Magallanes Province: "Only" 100 out of 500. Division General Manuel Torres de la Cruz was the troops' commanding officer.
  The rebel generals and admirals determined to deal with the rest of the Marxist cancer by mass arrests and the installation of torture and concentration camps reminiscent of the Nazi era.
  In the first eighteen days after September 11, there were nearly 20,000 civilian prisoners in Santiago alone. For the whole country the figure reached 75,000.
  From September 12 to 30, among these tens of thousands of prison- ers, the rebel generals and admirals could find only 6,300 more of the people on the lists. They were executed inside the concentration camps.
  On another front, during the first five days after the military operation, some workers' groups' desperate and unorganized defense against the war machine resulted in 5,500 civilian casualties "killed in battle," as opposed to about 500 military casualties. This figure included those officers and soldiers who opposed the fascists on the morning of September 11 and afterward. Approximately 100 officers and soldiers had been shot by their own comrades-in-arms.
  This makes 15,000 civilian victims in the first eighteen days after the coup: 740 casualties a day, 30 victims an hour, a murder every two minutes.8
  After this initial torrent of death, the killings grew less frequent. The people reorganized, and this gave the commando assassins a harder time.
  During October, November, and December 1973 the rebel officers

killed an average of 30 to 40 people a week, using such subtle methods as the "law of flight." An article in the November 15 issue of the Mexico daily Excelsior, written by their Buenos Aires correspondent, Giangiacomo Foa, sketches a picture of those months:
  "In Chile, the law of flight goes on. Every day, every night, the military junta ruling Chile, in the name of the sacred human rights, liberty, democ- racy, and religion, executes dozens of Chileans whose only crime consists in having supported the Socialist government of the late President Allende. The peace Pinochet is seeking to implant is the peace of the dead.'. These are the words of Carmen Hertz, a woman lawyer. Her husband, Carlos Berger, who was manager of the Chuquicamata copper mine [and also a reporter for El Siglo. a Chilean daily ], has just been executed in the Calama jail, along with 26 copper mine workers. The Chilean military junta continues to be implacable with its prisoners of ..war."
  "'I was with him until 4:30 P.M. We talked for a long time. He was calm, thinking he had only twenty more days to finish out the sentence that the council of war had handed down a few days before. I never dreamed he would be shot ninety minutes later..' Carmen Hertz's story is not very different from those of hundreds of victims who have watched their homes, families, and lives being destroyed, as Pinochet's government vents its repressive fury on their loved ones. The national odors of Chile have become gunpowder and blood. The law of flight is the macabre daily fare: "When I asked about my husband, they answered curtly that he had been killed trying to escape, along with twenty-five other prisoners. I thought I would go crazy when they confirmed the news; I still couldn.t believe it. I was told that all the prisoners in the Calama jail were dragged out of their cells by surprise and taken to a place called Topater, a target practice area for the soldiers stationed there on the Bolivian border. Afterward I was able to get my husband's death certificate from the Calama coroner. It gives the cause of death as "destruction of the thorax and cardiac region by bullet impact.. "
  Executed with Berger that afternoon were David Miranda, the former national director of the Federation of Mines, and two reporters from Radio El Loa; the rest of the victims were workers. But the Calama execution is only one more in a bloody series of unspeakable events.
  In the La Serena jail, fifteen citizens were killed. Among them were the director of the Music Conservatory, Jorge Peña, and a pediatrician, Jorge Jordán. On the outskirts of Antofagasta, on October 19, another twenty-two Chileans were shot, among them a cousin of former President Eduardo Frei's

petition was made by Monsignor Fernando Ariztía Ruiz, auxiliary bishop of the Catholic Archdiocese of Santiago; Helmuth Frenz, Evangelical Lutheran bishop; and Ángel Kreitman, the leading rabbi of Chile, as well as other leaders.
  "The document was presented last Friday as a habeas corpus in the name of a "Committee of Cooperation for Peace" to the Santiago Court of Appeals.
  "It states that its purpose is to "safeguard the physical and moral integrity of many persons who today find themselves deprived of freedom and secluded in places that are kept secret from their relatives and friends and who are therefore inaccessible to a just and sufficient public defense."
  The writ of habeas corpus was presented by the religious leaders on behalf of 131 presumed victims, none of whom are public figures. The document says: "The human drama that so many mothers, wives, children, relatives, and friends are living through has moved the Committee of Cooperation for Peace in Chile to present, on behalf of arrested persons who have not yet been located, the present habeas corpus. "
  It adds that "we have been moved, as clergymen, by the anguish of so many people, for the most part innocent, poor, and humble, deprived of all social relief, obscure people with no influential friends. The case of each of these people on behalf of whom we are asking aid today has been carefully studied and submitted for approval not only by relatives or friends of the plaintiffs but also by a body of lawyers and social workers."
   All of the above is but a pale reflection of what the generals and admirals have done. Execution has transformed itself from a punishment into a relief for the hundreds of thousands of Chilean men, women, old people, and even children who are brutally tortured every day.                  
          THE TORTURES                                                                          
In early November 1973, some peasants traveling over the Las Tejuelas bridge, which crosses the Ñuble River about a mile and a half from Chillán, noted that, as usual, the water level was beginning to drop with the end of the rainy season. Along with this phenomenon, they noticed another one, new and horrifying: the appearance of dozens of headless cadavers with their arms tied behind their backs. Some of the

 boy's bullet-riddled body on Soto's doorstep -"so the sonofabitch won't be a faggot and will tum himself in," the soldiers shouted to his neighbors. (José Soto and his family are now out of Chile, so I am able to tell his story.)
   During September and part of October, in the Santiago communities around the industrial areas, the soldiers would leave bodies in the streets. When their relatives came to pick them up, they were arrested. The bodies generally had fingemails pulled out, or legs broken, or testicles smashed. Several had their eyes burnt out, apparently with
cigarette butts.
   In January 1974, Chilean Air Force troops deposited the body of a seventeen-year-old boy, an MIR party member, in a town south of Santiago. Part of the boy's abdomen had been subjected to vivisection. Both his legs were broken, and also his left arm. His entire body was covered with holes made by cigarette burns. He had also been cas- trated. The coroner later cited as cause of death "acute anemia."
  Other common forms of torture practiced by the Army's SIM and military police intel1igence officers were to extinguish cigarettes in the victim's anus and to apply electric current to the ears, anus, and testicles. For their part, the officers of Navy infantry appeared to have developed other tastes: seven members of the Valparaíso harbor patrol turned up dead, their legs broken and their testicles smashed.
  Persons kept prisoner in September on the freighter Lebu, anchored in the Valparaíso harbor, have described to me how the boat was turned into a jail for torture. The second hold housed two hundred prisoners. In one corner was an oil barrel cut in half, used by the prisoners to defecate and urinate in. In one wooden cell there were twenty-five prisoners. They all slept on the floor. At night, when the prisoners had at last managed to go to sleep, the Navy infantrymen would come and walk back and forth on top of them. The Lebu would set sail at night until it was out of sight of land, and then the prisoners would be shot and thrown into the ocean, after their chests were cut open with bayonets, "so the motherfuckers won't float." Fishermen from Horcones, Quinteros, and other inlets in the area found

bodies or parts of bodies when drawing in their nets.
  When, early on the morning of September 11, 7,000 Army infantry, 2,000 Air Force infantry, and 4,000 military police under the command of Brigadier General Sergio Arellano Stark launched a general attack on the workers of Santiago, armed forces police had already set up seventeen concentration camps in the city, equipped with torture devices and ready for use. These were: the Air Force's installations at Los Cerros de Chena (San Bernardo), the Chile Stadium, Corridor 5 of the Santiago Jail, a courtyard in the Santiago Penitentiary, Los Cerrillos Air Base, the basements of the Defense Ministry, the eastern enclosure of the Bernardo O'Higgins Military School, the Buin Regiment barracks, the 2nd Armored Regiment barracks, the Navy weather station in Quinta Normal Park, the National Stadium, the Tacna Regiment barracks, the Infantry School, El Bosque Air Base, the Paratrooper and Special Forces School, and Nataniel Stadium.
  On the morning of September 11, before the order had been issued to bomb the Government Palace, General Pinochet was concerned (at his command Post Number One, in Peñalolén) to know whether these seventeen concentration camps were ready to begin functioning. He contacted Post Five, Vice-Admiral Patricio Carvajal's command post. According to this recording of his transmissions:
  "Post Five to Post One, over ..."
  "Post Five, Post One here. We have to know whether Chile and Nataniel stadiums are ready for prisoners. We want to know who is manning them. And if they're not working yet, when do you expect them to be ready?"
   There in those concentration camps, an entire encyclopedia of human brutality was being written. This is the testimony of a prisoner in the National Stadium, Luciano Duque, a worker in the state railroad's printing office:
  "They buried a rifle point in the scar I have from a hernia operation on my left side. But they didn't hit me very much. I saw Alberto Corvalán, the son of Luis Corvalán, the Communist party's secretary general, in the National Stadium. They had him isolated and you weren't allowed to talk to him. We

 were something like four hundred prisoners, and they made us line up be- tween two lines of soldiers who had us covered front and rear with their guns. There was young Corvalán, with a blanket over his head. Six soldiers were insulting him, to get him angry and make him talk, I realized. Corvalán wouldn 't open up. When the insults exasperated him, he would answer like a man, and then, between the six of them, they kicked and beat him and struck him with their rifie butts unmercifully, as if they really enjoyed it. Then Corvalán screamed for them to stop hitting him. This happened two or three times, and all of us prisoners were desperate because we couldn't do anything and it was clear that if we shouted they would machine-gun the lot of us. Finally Corvalán's screaming stopped. He didn't move anymore. The soldiers ordered some of the prisoners in the line to help move him. I don't know where they took him."                   
                 THE WOMEN                                                                       
       The military torture teams, graduates of the Americas School in the Canal Zone, have revealed a degree of human bestiality with Chilean women that puts them way ahead of their American trainers.9
          A woman professor at the East Santiago campus of the University of Chile, married, with two children, was detained for forty days in the National Stadium. She wrote me this about the "female prisoners of war":
          "They were obliged to remain all day long face down with their hands on their necks and their legs spread. ...There were lines of them kneeling or standing against the walls, and at the slightest movement they were struck or kicked -and, in several cases I saw, shot. In rooms fifteen by eighteen feet there were a hundred women. Food came only once a day, at 4 or 5 P.M. There were mainly two groups of women: workers and university professors. Girls and women were harassed, obliged to disrobe, manhandled, and insulted as a preamble to the interrogations. The academics among us had been taken out of our classrooms at gunpoint. One group of schoolteachers had a typically sad experience: at the investigatory commission one of them had her hair cropped off ...then at Los Cerros de Chena, the eyes were always blindfolded. To go to the bathroom, they had to be accompanied by guards who took the opportunity to manhandle and beat them. They were interrogated naked. Electric current was applied to the mouth, hands, nipples, vagina. Water was

poured over their bodies to intensify the pain. The language used with them was completely degenerate; they were forced to repeat, over and over: "I am a cunt, I am a cunt. ..." A hospital technician was taken to the Quinta Normal naval enclosure. She was kept there for three days without sleep, and subjected to electric tortures every few hours. She also had electricity applied to her vagina. Afterward they brought her to the National Stadium. She was taken for interrogation there too, blindfolded as others were. This time she apparently was taken to the cycle track, where by then the torture chamber had been installed. Besides electric shocks, this time she was forced to take something in her hand. They had given her an injection, which she guessed was Sodium Pentothal, and it had made her dizzy, but she was still conscious. At once she realized the object was a penis which, on contact with her hand, became erect. They thrust it into her mouth, where it ejaculated."10
  I have other memoranda from women prisoners who were able to write to me afterward. Essentially they tell the same story, although they add that some officials would intimate that there were "hard methods of interrogation" to "soften," "extract information," and "morally intimidate."
  Some novelties appear in those memoranda: "They stretched the women out on tables and dripped candle wax on their stomachs." "There were rapes, either in groups or individually. 'Move, you Marxist whore,' they would tell the victims. 'If you don't respond you're going to have to suck cock, even for General Pinochet, you shitty whore.' " "Some officers started by sticking their fingers in my vagina, hoping to excite me. ..."
  There are plenty of examples; the newspapers of the world are filled with them. The cemeteries of Chile are filled with mutilated corpses. I would like to quote, as a kind of summary of the art of torture the military uses in my country, the testimony published by Daniel Samper Pizano, a reliable columnist, in the Bogota daily El Tiempo, on March 26 and 27, 1974, on the editorial page. The witness was a university student in Valparaíso.
  "I was arrested in mid-October right on the university campus where I attended classes. The rector appointed by the military would allow the naval intelligence thugs on campus, and I have the impression that the rector

himself was informing against leftist students. They took us with the rest of the prisoners to the Navy Academy of War. This is a four-story steel building located on a promontory over the sea, at Cerro Playa Ancha. When we got there, we were blindfolded and made to climb up to the fourth floor on the iron staircase. The falls and their shoves were the beginning of the torture. As we went up, we heard terrible screams. We thought they were recordings to frighten us, but later we realized they were real cries from people being tortured. They stuck us in a room and forced us to remain standing, with our hands on our necks and without talking. Anyone who moved or talked was thrown on the floor and beaten with rifle butts and kicked. We spent a whole afternoon there waiting for them to call us for interrogation. They caught us talking and punished us brutally, but that was how I found out that in that room there were already people from Customs who were being tortured. One of them was a professor of literature at the University of Chile. There was also a Catholic priest, and another, a man named Juan, well known in the workers' districts of Valparaíso, who later died during a torture session. They gave us reasonably good food, but nobody could eat because of the ghastly screams in the area and the fear we felt. The guards would say sadistically: ..you better take advantage of it, it's your last meal." Nobody slept the whole time I was in the building because the screams were really nerve-racking. They were unbelievable howls of pain, and they never stopped, day or night.
   "The first day they took away a lot of people who had arrived before us: the Customs people, the literature professor, and the Catholic priest. They never came back. Later I caught a guard remarking to his companion: ..The priest fell apart on them right away; they're going to make it look like suicide.".
   "I was interrogated the second day for more than three hours. They un- dressed me and beat me, using their fists and boots all over my body. There seemed to be a lot of them. Then they applied electricity to my testicles. When they tumed off the current, they began to hit me again with their hands and feet. They concentrated on my stomach. This was because when the torture began I felt a karate chop and instinctively hardened my muscles. The torturer shouted at me: "So you're trained, eh? Now you're going to get it." During the entire interrogation they kept me blindfolded and my wrists handcuffed. The muscular contractions caused by the electricity made the handcuffs tighter each time, and the flesh of my wrists was cut down to the bone. By that point I didn't feel pain anymore. I only realized that I was being burned by the electricity. After the interrogation, in which they hoped to find out whether there were weapons in the university, they led me to another room where they took off the blindfold so I could walk, but I kept falling down. They made me crawl to another room where there were tortured

 people lying on the floor. I knew one of them, a university professor, by sight; one whole side of his body was black with bruises; they had punctured his eardrum, which made him howl with pain. The rest of them were all as badly beaten up as I was, or worse. Many had broken ribs and couldn't even breathe. None could walk; their legs were fractured, both from the blows and from the muscular contractions produced by the electricity. There were a lot of women as badly beaten up as the men were. They had also been brutally raped; they had intemal ruptures and were bleeding profusely. One kept moaning. The torturers had inserted a sharp object in her vagina, and it had cut through the peritoneum. Some of the people there said they had recognized the interrogators: they were Navy infantrymen trained at the American bases in Panama.
   "The third day they sent me over to the Lebu, which had been turned into a jail. I was put in Hold 3, where there were already 160 people. Going down, I smel1ed a nauseating stench of excrement. There was no toi1et, and we had to relieve ourselves in cans right there in the hold. There were laborers, office workers, physicians, 1awyers, students, professors. Among them, I remember , were Patricio Muñoz, president of the University of Chi1e Student Federation in Valparaíso; Sergio Fischer, a prominent cardiologist; Nelson Osorio, a professor of literature; Félix Laborde, a chemica1 engineer; Carlos Pabst, a physicist, and many others whom I cannot name. I lived with them for sixty-five days. The food was disgusting. They served us poroto beans with grubs, that is, with worms. For a whi1e they tried to be a little more humane and the commandant of the place, a naval officer named Osorio, let us go up on deck, but so they wouldn't be able to see us from the city, we were forced to stay seated without moving in the sun. Our heels and thighs were bumed by the heat of the deckboards. Then Osorio rea1ized that we were being photographed from an Italian boat, I think it was the Verdi, and after that he forbade going up on deck.
   "We were made to get up at 6 A.M. and do exercises naked. Offenses   - smokjng, talking, not sayjng "sir" when we were jnterrogated- were punished by blows with rifle butts and having to stand rigidly upright with our hands on our necks without moving for as long as twenty-four hours. The slightest movement was rewarded with rifle blows. Every morning and evening we were forced to sing the national anthem as the flag was struck or lowered. We were forbidden to sing the verse that goes "O la tumba serás de los libres, o el asilo contra la opresión" [Either you (Chile) will be the tomb of free men, or the asylum against oppression], because it seems that at the beginning the prisoners would sing those verses louder and the sailors took it as an innuendo against them.
  One day we were very surprised because they made us clean up. They gave

us mess kits, and lowered mattresses into the hold for all of us. That day a delegation came from the International Red Cross. As soon as the Red Cross left they took away our mattresses and we never saw them again. In rare cases the Navy was interested in hiding the very serious tortures inflicted on people the international organizations asked after, or whose death might cause a scandal abroad. These people were taken to the Naval Hospital, where some of them committed suicide. This happened, as I know for certain, with a girl who had been repeatedly raped. When she committed suicide, all the fourth- floor personnel were summoned to the hospital to find out who had allowed the suicide to happen.
  "When the news came that the Lebu had been sold for scrap, they released me under the supervision of the military police district commissariat. I had to present myself there every day for checking. Once they had the new concentration camp ready [the torture camp in Colliguay Alto, Valparaíso, where the ships' prisoners were transferred in December], they rearrested the people who had been freed. Before they sent me home under guard, they tried to leave me psychologically conditioned and they took me to the Academy of War for a new torture session. I was there four days. I realized their methods had gotten much crueler and more refined. They beat me more often and they used more electricity. I nearly lost my mind. not so much because of my own suffering but because of that of people weaker than myself. I saw young university women who were unspeakably tortured; one of them, who was pregnant, had been repeatedly struck on the stomach and was showing symptoms of aborting. Men over sixty had been burned aIl over their bodies with cigarettes and electricity. Men and women had their fingernails puIled out with pliers. Afterward, they took me to the Navy Infantry's Silva Palma barracks. After two days. they inexplicably set me free, demanding that I present myself once a day for checking and not teIl what I had seen. I never found out why I was arrested, since I didn't know about any weapons at the university. I wasn't an extremist, and I didn't belong to any leftist party. I had only participated in the volunteer youth work programs, as had aIl the other university students. I had exceIlent grades. and my professors thought highly of me. My parents asked the rector to intercede on my behalf, and perhaps that's why they let me go. The fascists are so arbitrary that I'll never know why."
   Other information about the present Chilean torture system has revealed that beginning in February 1974. the Peñalolén Military Camp in Santiago's Andean foothills. which had served as general

headquarters for the rebel generals and admirals, was turned into a "pilot torture camp" for political prisoners. For three or more months, Brazilian police and army advisers were training Chilean Army, Navy, Air Force, and military police officers in the difficult art of torturing "prisoners of war." 11
   This Brazilian "technical" aid is not surprising, since according to the rebel generals' own statements published in Santiago a week after the coup, they had sent Chilean Army and Navy officials to Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay, to "brief" those governments on the uprising to take place on September 11. The day after the coup, the Brazilians, Bolivians, and Paraguayans began to send intelligence experts from their respective armies to "collaborate" in identifying, capturing, and torturing Brazilians, Bolivians, Paraguayans, and Uruguayans who had sought po1itical asylum in Chile during the previous years.
  One example is the case of a Brazilian sociologist and university professor, Theotonio Dos Santos, who had taken refuge in Chile seven years earlier, and after September 11 took asylum in the Panamanian Embassy. Refused a safe-conduct out of the country, he had to stay there for five months. In Washington, when a delegation from Hostos Community College of the City University of New York asked at the Chilean Embassy why a safe-conduct was not being granted to Dos Santos, the Chilean Embassy's press attaché, Carmen Puelma, asserted: "An investigation is under way because the Brazilians have 'suggested things' about his background. ..and also because he was the editor of Chile Hoy {Chile Today), a political magazine" (New York Times, November 24, 1973, page 24).
  The Brazilian "advisers" were the ones who introduced the technique of softening morale by the "simulated" firing squad: taking prisoners to the execution wall, putting them through the execution ceremony in a group, but shooting only one out of every four or five people in the row. This technique was frequently used during the first two months after September 11. It is now being used in the various concentration camps, such as Chacabuco, in Antofagasta; Pisagua, near Iquique; Juan Fernández Island, 360 miles out of Valparaíso;

Quiriquina Island, outside of  Talcahuano; Dawson Island, in the Beagle Channel; Colliquay Alto, in Valparaíso; and the Peñalolén Camp in Santiago.                                                                                                  
          CORRUPTION                                                                            
The military occupation of Chile has developed a new kind of corruption in the ranks of the Air Force, Navy, Army, and military police. Here is a schematic summary of this new life style of Chile's present bosses:             
Corruption in the Military Police                                                           
   1. Teams of three or four officials, dressed in civilian clothes and carrying nonregulation weapons, go out during curfew hours to search homes and steal valuables. First, they extract information from domestic servants or civilian fascists about the neighborhood, and then they attack. They call this fona (a slang word meaning something like a legal hold-up). Military policemen Daniel Vargas and Carlos Cáceres of the 13th Commissariat are two of the many soldiers who belong to these teams.
  2. When the military policemen are on guard duty, for example at embassies, they hold a blank notebook in their hands, stop cars for alleged traffic violations, and accept bribes of money or valuables. They call this "moonlighting."
   3. They collect money from the families of people who have taken asylum in embassies to get permission to talk to them, for a minute or two, through the iron grilles in front of the house. The rates in December 1973 ran from 2,000 escudos to 15,000 escudos, depending on how rich the relative looked.
  4. They try to force former Unidad Popular officials who have not been arrested to pay for "protection." In January 1974 the rates ran from 10,000 to 15,000 escudos a month.
   5. They take liberties with the wives of prisoners. This happens at the level of ranking officers, who insinuate to the wives that if they

will sleep with them, it might be possible to intervene on their imprisoned husbands' behalf. This happens every day, and there are thousands of cases in Santiago alone.
  6. They manhandle the women servants in houses near their guard posts and force them to have sexual relations in their own houses under the threat: "If you don't submit, we'll arrest you for being a Marxist."                
Corruption in the Armed Forces                                                            
   1. Some officers select the best-looking women prisoners to rape personally, as "part of their interrogation." Like the military police, they put psychological pressure on the wives of prisoners to let themselves be raped in exchange for "improvements" for their imprisoned husbands. Officers in administrative positions demand the same favors from female workers and secretaries under the threat of "firing them as Marxist sympathizers."
   2. During searches, they manhandle women. It has become customary to have the women disrobe, "in case they are concealing weapons," and remain so while searches are carried out. They drink any liquor in the house. In downtown Santiago, a woman living alone experienced five searches of her apartment in a month, and each time she was raped by the patrol's officer.
   3. Searches are carried out in two stages. On the first visit they look for the "fugitive." On the second they remove electrical equipment, household appliances, paintings, antiques, and so on. Books are destroyed.
   4. They employ threatening language with women whose houses have been searched several times. I know of at least three cases of threats of "If you don't give us dol1ars, all of us wil1 rape you."
   As time has passed and the military has taken over all positions of responsibility in public administration, the corruption has acquired more refined forms, and so a large percentage of the money circulated in the country, the valuables, and the women have become part of the military's war booty.

  Lest we think that because of his late joining of the conspiracy, General Augusto Pinochet was not of the same stripe as his troops, here is the order he transmitted from Peñalolén on the moming of September 11, recorded by a ham radio operator:
  "Post One here, General Pinochet speaking. Prepare a bulletin: state that for each member of the armed forces murdered, five Marxist prisoners in the hands of military authorities will be shot immediately ..."
  "Repeat the last part, please."
  "I repeat:..five Marxist prisoners in the hands of the military authorities will be shot immediately. ...Prepare a bulletin to that effect."
  "I read you."
   Here is another of Pinochet's conversations, also recorded by a ham radio operator:
  "I would appreciate a report-"
  "This is a report on Operation Population Reduction, La Legua, at 10: 14. Three hundred military police, three Army companies [300 men], and five companies from El Bosque [300 men] have encircled the town. Once the target is isolated, the softening operation will begin, using tank infiltration, air support from helicopters, and fighter planes if necessary ...The essentia1 requirement is to isolate the target. For this, direct cooperation from the military police is necessary."
   "Yes, but coordination with military police ...this also has to do with Army ...who is in charge of the operation?" [General Pinochet is asking the question.]
   "In the Second Division they decided we should do it because we're responsible for the zone. The tank commander, Colonel Calderón, is in charge. The Army is coordinating. We have to deliver the target to the tanks ..."
   "Listen, I want you to explain to me just exactly what the term reduction means. Does it say reduction of the population? What exactly does reduction mean?" [Still Pinochet questioning.]
   "It means exactly that, if the need arises. If the population surrenders, the reduction is over, General. Until yesterday there were insurgent groups creating problems, but it seems they're on the defensive now ...So reduction means making entry. Here is a basic point that is very
important. Anybody caught bearing arms is to be arrested, and if he resists, he is to be eliminated. Is that how you understand it?"

  "Yes, General. The tanks soften ..."
  "Good, that's clear."
   General Pinochet was very clear; nearly a thousand soldiers equipped with tanks, artilleried helicopters, fighter jets-against a population living in houses of corrugated tin, cardboard, and newspapers. No more than 12,000 inhabitants, including children, women, and old people. But this was the method begun on September 11. That morning Pinochet's soldiers killed more than 200 men, women, and children in the La Legua settlement in Santiago.
   Here is another communication recorded by a ham radio operator:
  "Post One to Post Three, Post One to Post Three. General Pinochet to General Leigh. Carry out the air attack on the State Bank and the Ministry of Public Works, as soon as possible. Attack the roofs of these buildings. Do this as soon as possible. Tell me when you are going to do it, and coordinate action with land forces."
  "Post Three to Post Two, General Leigh speaking. Carry out air attacks as soon as possible."
  "Understood. One moment, please. Post Two reporting to General Pinochet. Artilleried helicopter will open fire on the roofs of the State Bank and the Ministry of Public Works in fifteen to twenty minutes."
  "Understood. The air attack is to be directed only at the roofs of the buildings ..."
  There were about twenty civilians in the State Bank and the Ministry of Public Works, lightly armed at best. Against them and La Moneda nearby, Pinochet tumed an army of five hundred men, tanks, armored cars, cannon, and air support. Meanwhile, at Río Blanco in the Andes, at the Alta Montaña School, General Pinochet's wife was spending the day skiing with their sixteen-year-old son and fourteen- year-old daughter. At seven in the evening, she phoned her husband and he told her, "Everything is quiet."   President Allende had already been assassinated, La Moneda had been destroyed, and a carpet of thousands of dead civilians assured the "quiet" of Chile, from north to south, east to west.
  But desperation works miracles. Groups of laborers, office workers,

students, and women came out of their homes that day to resist the military invasion of their country .The radio communications went on.
   "Correct, Post Five. 1000 Las Acacias Avenue. They're handing out arms there. There's a crowd of people being given arms."
   "Understood, Post Two."
   "Go ahead, Post Two."
   "P1ease report on measures being taken with respect to the situation at Station 6 in Santa Rosa. Our ground forces there are being shot at by a large number of armed persons ..."
   "Post Three to Post One, please report."
   "Post Five, Post Three here. The general needs a report."
   "Post Five here, for Post Three. What you asked about Santa Rosa Station 6: The command reports that tanks have been sent there with reinforcements from the Infantry School."
  "Understood. "
  "Post Five to Post One. Give me the troop commander. This is a report. There is a clandestine radio transmitting at 29 megacycles. Two, nine, 29 megacycles."
  "Understood."
  "Inform Post Three that we are waiting for help to arrive."
  "Listen, Nicanor, Beta One El Bosque thinks we have to announce the curfew again today, because there are a lot of people gathering in the streets. ...Beta One thinks it should be repeated every ten or fifteen minutes."
  "Okay, we'll repeat the announcement."
  "General Benavides here. The Military Police Training Center in Macu1 is under attack. I've asked for air support. There's sniping going on in Los Jazmines. There's only one officer and two enlisted men in that town ..."
  "We urgently need information about leftist intimidation at Villa Las Acacias in Maipú-that's behind Villa Schneider. Do you read me?"
  "I don't read you."
  "I repeat. Leftist forces are intimidating inhabitants of Vil1a Las Acacias in Maipú. Now do you read me?"
  "Affirmative."

      "No press publication of any kind will be permitted. If any comes out, the place of publication will be destroyed."
      "Yes."
      "I repeat the first part: From the military junta of government to com- manders of garrisons and independent units: beginning immediately, arrest any political or union leader or private person who does not obey orders and observe the curfew. These persons will be tried, and if caught with arms and/or explosives, they will be sentenced by courts martial."
      "Understood."
      One of Allende's colleagues, who was working with him on the night of September 10 when the President was preparing his submission to the demands of the civilian opposition, told of Allende's astonishing ignorance about the real role his generals were playing. This is the report sent out by Spanish news agency EFE on September 18:
      "During the course of the work session, President Allende was informed by telephone of troop transport trucks coming from San Felipe (100 kilometers from the capital) in the direction of Santiago. The Defense Minister [Orlando Letelier] telephoned General Herman Brady, head of the Santiago garrison and commander of the Army's Second Division. The latter indicated to Letelier that he knew nothing about it, but would find out and phone back in fifteen or twenty minutes.
      "At 00:30 hours on Tuesday the eleventh, the minister called Brady again and the general told him that he had contacted San Felipe and that "everything was in order" there.
      " Shortly before 07 :00 hours, President Allende was awakened with the news that the officers of some ships had mutinied, specifically the cruiser Admiral Latorre and the submarine Simpson.
       "At 07:00 hours, Allende telephoned the commanders in chief. None of them answered. [By that time, they were all at the rebel headquarters in Peñalolén, except for Admiral Montero, who had been deposed and put under arrest by Merino.]
       "At 07:10 President Allende spoke by telephone with General Brady and ordered him to assess the situation and, if he was not going to assess the situation, to tell him so directly.
      " At 07:30 President Allende arrived at the Palacio de La Moneda. At 07:45 he telephoned Luis Figueroa (a Communist), the president of thc Central Ünica, the workers' organization. At 07:55 he recorded his first message to the country, which was broadcast by Radio Corporación (Socialist). At 08:00

he telephoned Rolando Calderón (a Socialist), secretary general of the Central Única. He had kept on trying to reach the commanders in chief, without success. He intimated that he feared they might be compromised. He said General Orlando Urbina (inspector general of the Army) and Admiral Montero were not at home either.
  "At 08:20 the President's Air Force aide, Commander Roberto Sánchez, phoned just as Dr. Allende was recording his second radio speech. Commander Sánchez said that he was at Air Force Group Seven (in Santiago), where he had gone to find out what was happening, and that General Gabriel Van Schowen (chief of the Air Force General Staff) had told him that he had an aircraft ready for President Allende. The answer to this message was: 'Tell General Van Schowen that the President of Chile is not going to flee in an airplane, and that he knows how to fulfill his duty as a soldier.'.
  At 08:30 the people in La Moneda heard the first proclamation from the military junta."
   At 7:40 that moming, a woman alone, Allende's wife, began to live her nightmare along with the rest of the Chileans.
  "Tuesday at 7:40 a telephone call woke me. It was Salvador, who said: "I'm calling you from La Moneda. The situation has become serious. The Navy has rebelled. I'm going to stay here. You stay at Tomás Moro." He practically forbade me to go out of the house. I clung to the radio. I heard his last mess¡ige to the people of Chile. By noon, the phone at La Moneda wasn't answering. Around 11 :30 a reconnoitering helicopter appeared over the house. At that time I still didn't know that the military police had deserted us. That was when the air bombardment began. The planes would come and fire their rockets and come back again. Between each attack, an insane burst of gunfire was set off. The house was turned into a mass of smoke, smelling of gunpowder and destruction. I made my last calls to La Moneda from the floor , sometimes kneeling, sometines lying down. That's when Carlos Tello, my chauffeur, came to get me. He had been able to bring the car into the courtyard in back of the house. We went out through the nuns' school behind our house. I decided to go to Felipe Herrera's, and fortunately no one followed us. I stayed there all day. I couldn't go out because martial law had been declared and a curfew announced. I stayed there, not knowing anything about my husband or my children."
When the Chilean Air Force began to bomb the Tomás Moro Street residence to "reduce" Salvador Allende's wife, the first plane made a

very serious mistake. Instead of striking the Allende house, the first four rockets hit the Chilean Air Force Hospital, twenty blocks north of the target. "The windows' glare confused me," the pilot confessed to his companions later in the day. The rockets struck a wing of the hospital: one landed in the basement laundry, the second on the third floor, the third on the terrace, and the fourth in the garden. The only casualty was a nurse who broke both legs.
   That evening General Leigh announced to the nation on television: "The Marxists are vicious. They did not hesitate to attack a hospital, the Air Force Hospital in Las Condes," and he went on to declare that now the sun would shine for Chileans, because they would be governed by honest people, because "we military men never lie."
   The Tomás Moro house, the residence of the presidents of Chile, suffered the first effects of the rule of these honest people. After it was bombed, it was left open to be looted by crowds of the upper class, who avenged themselves on Allende by stealing his belongings.
   General Leigh was not the only soldier who "never lied." There was General Pinochet, who stated by telephone to the Franco-Luxembourg radio RTL: "Pablo Neruda is not dead and is free. We do not kill anybody. If Neruda dies, it will be a natural death."
   Pablo Neruda, desperately ill with cancer of the prostate and in need of daily medical attention, had been isolated in his house on Isla Negra for five days (September 11-15) by a cordon of soldiers and military police. They let no one, not even people bringing medicine, into or out of the poet's house. No one has been able to determine whether the rebel generals had actually decided to kill Neruda with a "natural death." But Neruda's death was the result of those five days without medical attention. Finally, dying, he was transferred to the Santa Maria Clinic in Santiago. But while Neruda was still at Isla Negra, the troops sacked his house, smashing the poet's belongings, burning his books, stealing his money. Neruda's house in Santiago, at the foot of San Cristóbal Hill, was also sacked, or rather "searched," which is the same thing in the mouths of the generals who do not lie. Neruda's books were burned, and his possession