Free The Condor Years by John Dinges Page B

continent—the largest in Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina—translated Che’s call to arms into new tactics adapted to city streets as well as mountain paths.
    General Pinochet’s military takeover in Chile was a crushing blow for those on the side of revolution, but the ultimate outcome was not yet decided. In fact, for the most radical revolutionary groups, Pinochet’s coup had an ironic silver lining. By destroying Allende’s “ via pacifica ,” the peaceful road to Socialism, Pinochet had legitimized its opposite. Pinochet had proved the revolutionariesright. The violence of the overthrow served to confirm what they had been saying all along: that true revolution would triumph not by the gradualism of elections and social reforms but by the force of arms.
    There was a further irony in Pinochet’s victory. His soldiers swept up tens of thousands of factory workers, peasants, and party members whose radicalism consisted in their vote and public activism in support of Allende’s democratic revolution. But the repression barely touched—at first—the revolutionary leaders advocating armed struggle. They had already gone safely underground before the coup.
    Those groups prepared to fight on in Chile. With long-standing organizational bases in Argentina, Uruguay, and Bolivia, like-minded groups took the Pinochet coup as their mandate to internationalize the South American armed revolution for the first time.
    Chile’s group was the Movement of the Revolutionary Left ( Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria ), known as MIR. Its leaders had come out of the student movements of the 1960s and had established an important base of support in a few unions and in the shantytown communities surrounding Santiago. They considered themselves a vanguard and advocated a Leninist model of party-led Socialist revolution—meaning that after the revolution, a country would be run by a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” President Allende’s nephew, Andrés Pascal Allende, was a top MIR leader, and one of the most vociferous in criticizing his uncle’s government as timid and reformist.
    MIR never carried out armed actions while Allende was president. Nevertheless, in the months preceding the September 1973 coup, they embarked on an aggressive military strategy: its main element was an attempt to organize resistance to coup plotting inside the Chilean armed forces. MIR had also stockpiled arsenals of light weapons and conducted military training in the hills outside Santiago. MIR central committee chief Miguel Enríquez had publicly called on soldiers to defy orders: “Non-commissioned officers, rank and file and policemen should disobey the orders given by officers involved in a coup, and in that case [of a coup in progress] all forms of struggle will be legitimate,” he said in July.
    It was not a traditional guerrilla strategy to defeat the armed forces butrather to burrow from within. Commented Andrés Pascal: “We called the military part of the organization the ‘central force,’ but it was almost like a school. We had some weapons, sure, but it was more like propaganda. The principal military work was inside the armed forces; that is, it was political work directed at the armed forces, to try to recruit, to win people over inside the armed forces to oppose a coup.”
    MIR’s contacts inside the military provided good intelligence about the coming coup. MIR leaders prepared a contingency plan: friendly troops would allow them to break into military arsenals and distribute weapons to loyalist troops as a preemptive strike against the officers’ plotting.
    From the point of view of Chile’s military establishment, no more hostile and dangerous action could be imagined than MIR’s attempt to split the military from within. No political group had ever attempted to infiltrate the military. For the officers corps, on both sides of the coup plotting, such a split meant civil war and the specter of military killing