The Chilean Army’s Coup D’état in 1973: A Case Study of the Role of Armies in Revolutions

The following is a collection of recommendations for anyone wishing to expand their knowledge of the Chilean Coup d'État.

Bawden, John R. The Pinochet Generation: The Chilean Military in The Twentieth Century. University of Alabama Press, 2016, pp. 1-8; 96-163.

This book is an exploration of the uncanny nature of the Pinochet regime and the impossible task of separating this long withstanding institution from the broader intellectual culture of the armed forces, especially in lieu of the September 1973 coup d’état. The source delves deep into recreating the structure of the Chilean armed forces both prior to the coup against Allende and after, tracking the policies enacted as a reflection of a cultural aspect of this institution. The formation of the officers, the historical contextualization of the army’s role in significant Chilean historical events, and the historical role of the Chilean army as political “check”, are considered in this book as valuable insights to the overall uniqueness of Pinochet’s army. The claim is laid that historically the officer class was highly professional and its soldiers highly organized and trained, not only in matters of military relevance, but also akin to political developments. Hence, the army was a natural check to the political institutions in Chile, legitimized by its history of involvement ins political events. Therefore, the author concludes that while the amount of military dictatorships in Latin America in the 1960s and 1970s was unexpected by many political scientists, the rise of Pinochet’s regime in Chile was predetermined by the natural role of the army in Chilean politics, and his policies influenced by the army culture.

John R. Bawden is an associate professor of History at the University of Montevallo, teaching courses on Latin America, World History, and Historical Methods. Among his areas of research interest are prominently South American militaries, U.S.-Latin America relations, and the Spanish Conquest. Research articles such as “Cutting Off the Dictator: The United States Arms Embargo of the Pinochet Regime, 1974-1988”, “Gazing Abroad, the Chilean Military’s Reading of International Events: Implications for Doctrine, Ideology, and Behavior, 1945-1975”, and more, reflect his acute interest of the interrelationship between the army and the state, and foreign intervention. His insight guarantees an innovative understanding of the army as an independent nucleus from the state, to analyze whether its captaining of a revolution can ever be ideologically revolutionary or always ultimately reactionary.

This source offers valuable insight on the army as an independent nucleus, and therefore informs the overall focus by concretely legitimizing the army’s coup d’état in 1973 in Santiago with evidence of its natural role as historical check of political activity. In the question of whether armies can hold revolutionary ideologies if commanding coup d’états, the book makes no effort to legitimize this claim. Instead, the book offers a completely different perspective on the role of the army. The Chilean army’s uniqueness is scrutinized as an independent, autonomous nucleus that historically had checked the government in order to protect the sovereignty of the Constitution and assure its democratic nature. Therefore, the August 22, 1973 resolution of the Chamber of Deputies to call for the army to check Allende’s government did not grant the institution a new power—it merely reiterated one of its jobs. Therefore, in matter of revolutions, the coup staged by the army was not revolutionary nor reactionary, it aimed at reinforcing the constitutionality of democratic rule. Clearly however, this was not the case, as what followed was a gruesome dictatorship. However, those policies can also be traced back to the structural formation of the army officer class—hence this coup was nothing new nor unexpected for those experts that had studied the Chilean army institution for decades.

Burbach, Roger. The Pinochet Affair: State Terrorism and Global Justice. Zed Books Ltd, 2003, pp.1-42

This book is a case study of how right-wing neo-liberalism, supported by the United States, and left-wing socialism, supported by the Soviet Union, created new socio-political awakenings in Chile between the 1960s and 1970s. The book outlines the repercussion of this tension in Chile, by examining how the youth demographic had become contaminated by the call of revolution, both by right wing and left wing leaders in an attempt to prevent the political institutionalization of either fascism or communism. In Chile, this political zeitgeist was not captured by communist armed revolutionaries, but by Salvador Allende. The use of violence was imminent on both sides, as both political opposites enfranchised a specific paramilitary group; yet, somehow the right wing had prevailed. The nucleus of this book’s discourse observes the trends that precipitated the 1973 state coup, theorizing that the essential problematic of the left was that it was not revolutionary enough, as Allende’s democratic approach to socialist progressive policies resulted void of revolutionary fervor, in a country fermenting with political awakening. Moreover, the book further analyzes the repercussions of these social awakenings and respective political movements in light of the abuse of human rights under Pinochet. Yet, in order to conclude, the book carefully investigates the socio-political strain between left and right ideologies that ultimately led one to attain power through violent means. Furthermore, the author argues that the global class of civilizations between the Soviet Union and the United States precipitated the use of violence as a means for change.

Roger Burbach was the director of research and publication at the Center for the Study of the Americas and a writer for the North American Congress on Latin America. He studied Latin American political crises in the Cold War period and was professor of Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. His was most prominently interested in socialist democracies, especially that of Chile in 1970-1973, and its potential application to the United States’ case. His interest in socialist democracies and in the authors of their collapse renders Burbach incredibly important to understand exactly what brought Allende’s government to a halt internally and the degree of agency that the army had that allowed them to overthrow democracy between August 22 and September 11.

This source offers interesting insight of the premises for revolutionary activity and sentiment. The degree of revolutionary activity seems to have been unavoidable and predetermined by the mounting political and social tensions in Chile by 1973. However, what was unexpected seems to have been the overcoming of right-wing over left-wing ideologies. Nevertheless, contrasting to John Bawden’s The Pinochet Generation: The Chilean Military in the Twentieth Century, it seems that this analysis contra poses the expert understanding of the Chilean army as the institution that historically checked the government. Hence, any revolutionary sentiment that would become possible only through means of violent revolution would be avoided by the army’s intervention, regardless of it success predictability. Moreover, the level of foreign backing by the United States or the Soviet Union is not a justification that suffices to explain the different policies conducted by Pinochet’s regime, as those were extremely unique to the Chilean case.

Ensalaco, Mark. Chile Under Pinochet: Recovering the Truth. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000, pp. 1-68.

The aforementioned book follows an overarching analysis of the Chilean dictatorship under Pinochet from its inception in 1973, specifically the use of repression both in accordance with the nature of the army, and in defining the consolidation of Pinochet’s political power. The book observes the various aspects of revolutionary theory, but focuses primarily on the use of violence and its inevitability. Its innovative theory proposes the 1973 as a revolution rather than a coup d’état. Moreover, it specifically addresses 1973 Chile as an unprecedented case study in revolution, citing its uniqueness in the realm of collapsing democracies of the South American region. While other countries in South and Central America had fallen to authoritarian regimes of bureaucracies, Chile was captained by a single man, Pinochet, who retained complete power over the politicization of the army. Chile is argued as a solitary case in revolutionary history, a claim justified by describing various aspects that created momentum for the army in 1973, and ultimately the inevitability of a right-wing coup d’état. According to the author, the 1973 army coup is to be analyzed as a revolution: he cites the divisions within the leftist parties and the inability to reconcile socialist and communist ideologies, which conclusively brought the communist left closer to the extreme right. The increase politicization of the army’s institution, and its accordance with the popular majority’s discontent, render the 1973 coup against Allende a revolution rather than a reaction. For the author, this symmetry in clearly defining revolutionary versus reactionary rebellions cannot apply to the coup in Chile: the army was not reactionary because it did not contain—in its future policies—atavistic tendencies, as is often associated with reactionary forces. Instead, the central claim proposed in the first chapters is that the coup was the last effort in a revolution that had begun with Allende’s win in 1970.

Mark Ensalaco is a professor of political science at the University of Dayton, and among his interests are the politics of human rights, political violence, and the relations between the United States and Latin America. In lieu of his other works, such as "Pinochet: A Study in Impunity", and "Chile Bajo Pinochet: la Recuperacion de la Verdad" (“Chile Under Pinochet: Recovering the Truth”), Ensalaco is a figure with elevated knowledge of the Chilean question under the dictatorship. His authority on the subject is undoubtable and his theories are innovative, insightful, and uncommon in the discourse of state violence and the army in revolution.

This secondary, much more recent scholarly analysis, provides a different perspective of the topic of revolutionary legitimacy for the army. Common analysis places the 1973 coup d’état of the Chilean armed forces as a reactionary rebellion against Allende’s progressive social reforms, citing the oppression and human rights violation that succeeded the coup as evidence of conservative social reaction. Nevertheless, the motivations that drove the army to take over the government have typically been whitewashed as the behavior of a capricious upper economic, social and political class rather than being contextualized. Ensalaco takes into consideration every facet of a “typical” revolution: the role of governmental oppression, the awakening of a monolith’s socio-political conscience, and ideological tensions. Between 1970 and 1973 ideological tensions began to exacerbate between the far right and the far left, both being discontent with Allende’s “democratic” socialist transition, which was viewed by both political oppositions as weak and ineffective. Moreover, in terms of the topic wherein observed, the army seems to have been justified in revolting: such an analysis would ultimately conclude that the army itself was revolutionary. The most prominent detail that points out this assertion are the various labor strikes of the industries that Allende had nationalized. The popular discontent, reflected in the workers’ strike (independent trucker union, copper miners, etc.) show a degree of popular backing for the army’s intervention. The narrative sets Allende’s government as the oppressor and the army as the liberator—legitimized in its claim to liberation by the Chamber of Deputies and by discontent both of the popular working masses and the production-owning upper-class bourgeoisie. Hence, the book answers the topical question of whether or not the army’s coup d’état in Chile on September 11, 1973 can be characterized as a revolution rather than a reaction: seemingly, the army was the executor of a popular demand that happened to be uncommonly anti-Marxist, and that had been growing since the 1970 elections.

Gómez-Barris, Macarena. Where memory dwells: Culture and State Violence in Chile. University of California Press, 2009.

The book is an analysis of a collection of photographic evidence, illustrations, and memoirs produced under Pinochet’s dictatorship, which spanned many decades and survived many political and economic global shifts. The book emphasizes the importance of memory and iconography. The author argues that every revolution has certain icons that represent it: as for the French Revolution it was the Bastille, for the Chilean coup that icon was the Esmeralda, the ship anchored at Valparaíso that served as the first torture detention center on September 11, 1973. Moreover, the importance of memory is infinitely underscored in this source. Memory is a power in its own right that revolutionary causes can harness legitimacy from and also permits revolutions to not go to waste by respecting the sacrifices of those involved. The book lengthily details the tension between the mass exodus of producers of prominent creative outlets, such as artists, filmmakers, novelists, etc. and the role of the underground culture in preserving icons of the 1973 coup d’état and their memory. Essentially, the book provides analytical insight on the experience of September 11, 1973 by those who endured the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in the decades that followed. It follows an underground perspective of those covertly engaging in collecting evidence of the brutal use of violence in Chile to support the claim of human rights activists against the inhumane treatment of individuals under the dictatorship.

Macarena Gómez-Barris is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and American Studies and Ethnicity as the University of Southern California. Her research primarily focuses on political violence and its aftermath, and the role of memory and culture in Latin America, while her interests are mainly cultural memory and indigeneity in the Americas using a colonial and feminist framework. Considering her vast repertoire of academic production in topics of Latin America, political violence, and memory she is a valuable source for the topic in question. Her expertise grants this book authority to shed light on the subjective experience of the coup on a personal level.

This book was not pivotal in the understanding of the army as a machine of ideological revolution. In fact, it did not illuminate the topic of justification and legitimacy of the coup d’état in Santiago in 1973. It did not mention the population as a whole or the interests of civil society and their correlation to the legitimacy of the army to “liberate” Chile of Communism. Nevertheless, it increased an already kaleidoscopic pool of frameworks to understand September 11, 1973. In fact, completely opposed to Ensalaco, the author argues that the coup by the army was unwarranted and illegitimate, justifying this claim by citing the copious amount of violence used to repress Chileans from revolting against the authoritarian regime imposed thereafter. The importance of memory and iconography is their relation to what they describe: for Gómez-Barris, these were channels to recreate the violence and oppression suffered under Pinochet’s regime. The level of violent repression, and the romanticizing in popular culture and in the media of the desaparecidos, are the justification used by the author to argue that the rebellion of the politicized army was only a chauvinist and capricious expression of virility rather than a revolution in touch with the populace. The author cites the fact that memory and icons were central to the art production of post-Pinochet Chile, and underscores the importance of art as a true reflection of the emotional receptivity of a nation.

Junta de Gobierno De Las Fuerzas Armadas Y Carabineros de Chile. Bando No5. Archivo Chile: 11 Sept. 1973

This political pamphlet argues primarily for the liberation of Chile from Allende’s “Marxist” reforms that have, according to the military Junta, trumped the civil rights of Chileans, citing the unconstitutionality of the President’s socialist reforms. Moreover, it argues for a complete overhaul of corruption, anarchism, democracy, economy, and any progressive reforms that have been beneficial for some but not others. The document argues for the army’s moral duty to reinforce stricter social values that Chile is founded on, and seeing the moral void left by the Bolshevik government, the army sacrifices itself to the task of upholding the sacredness of Chilean moral values. Moreover, this political document clearly questions the legitimacy of the democratically elected government under Allende, and positions the army in place of governance, finding its legitimacy in its convicting the immorality of the government, and promising to bring justice to the country. The scope of this manifesto was to popularize an unpopular sentiment of discontent that was only inherent to the sentiments of the army, and somehow create the hero complex of the army that saves the people from its own elected representatives—hence, from its own decisions.

The Junta de Gobierno De Las Fuerzas Armadas Y Carabineros de Chile essentially translates to a military conjunction of different army apparatuses—the navy, the army, the air forces, and the national state police. This pamphlet is a political manifesto of a kind of neo-fascist ideology, proposed the day of the coup in Chile, by the members that would then set up the military dictatorship, headed by Pinochet. The Junta wrote this manifesto and then enacted its fourteen points, upholding this document, and the several others produced during the dictatorship, as an alternative constitution that gave the military junta power, justification, and legitimacy.

This work is incredibly pivotal to understanding the role of the army in a revolutionary struggle. In common understanding of revolutionary trajectory, the typical behavior of the army is to side with the government and protect it from the popular rebellion. In some cases, armies become themselves revolutionary because they side with the rebellion against the oppression of the government, as seen in the Russian Revolution. This document provides the different clauses, against which the army argued, were being reinforced by Allende. Hence, it is also interesting to observe the justification the army found to revolt and observe how the army then took this justification as legitimacy to revolt. The manifesto mentions the injustices of the government against its people and refuses to acknowledge its legitimacy, promising to free Chileans from it. Yet, the democratic regime in place was elected by the Chileans themselves, which then lift the veil of underlying hypocrisy of the army’s justification to revolt. By being external to the popular needs, it promised a liberation from a government that the people they were going to save, voted for. Hence the hypocrisy: using the tool of liberation rhetoric in a context that did not need—economically, socially, and politically—to be liberated, as Chileans had consciously voted for their democratically elected government. Conclusively, this document seems to shed light on the power hunger of the army rather than a movement of the people.

Muñoz León, Fernando. “Competing Narratives about Sacrifice: Three Readings of the 11 September 1973 Coup in Chile and their Conflicting Constitutional Projections.” Political Theology: Taylor & Francis Group, vol. 17, n. 6, 2006, pp. 507-524

This academic research article argues the three fundamentally diverse narratives that describe September 11, 1973 in Chile: the sacrificial narrative of Allende’s resistance, full of socialist undertones, the sacrificial narrative of the military Junta, liberating the country from the grip of Marxism, and finally the ambivalent narrative of the democratic center. The article exposes firstly September 11 of 1973 as the point of convergence of different politics that had created tension in Chile since 1970. Moreover, it frames the narrative of the coup as a heroism complex. The article notes the shift in the paradigms of political rhetoric from one that auspicates the concretization of one ideology, to one of heroic complex. On the one hand, Allende’s rhetoric frames the narration of the coup in terms of personal sacrifice for the good of the workers. On the other hand, the army’s rhetoric is one that exhorts the people to commit to a sacrifice in order to liberate the country from the grips of Marxism. The central theme of the article is to denote the narrative of the two contesting sides in order to determine their appeal to civil society.

Fernando Muñoz León is a law professor at the Universidad Austral de Chile, with a doctorate from Yale Law School. Among his most noteworthy works are: “Competing Narratives about Sacrifice: Three Readings of the September 11, 1973 Coup in Chile and their Conflicting Constitutional Projections”, “Not Only ‘Who Decides’: The Rhetoric of Conflicts over Judicial Appointments”, and more. Considering that Muñoz León is indeed Chilean and has done research on an incredibly broad spectrum of fields concerning the Chilean coup, this author is an exceptional resource for the topic at question. Not only is his education stellar, but the connections between fields that he develops shed an insightful light on such focused topics as the role of the army in a revolution.

This work enlightens the quest to determine whether the army’s coup in Chile in 1973 could be deemed as a revolution or if by definition the army’s legitimacy to rebel only comes in forms of reactionary waves. Part of this topic is looking into the justification for revolt: revolutions occur because of a divergence in basic human sentiments, a push or need for change. Hence, the justification for one type of revolution over another is central to understand whether the army is revolutionary of itself or not. In Chile, the army had gained such a level of autonomy that its rebellion was external and out of touch with the people of Chile’s sentiments. As it progressed from state to non-state apparatus, the army’s claim was essentially the liberation of “the people” from the grips of Marxism. In this source, it is clear that the rhetoric used by the Junta shaped the public understanding of this coup—a coup that the army would deem revolutionary. Nevertheless, Muñoz León also argues for a tension between the sacrificial narrative that the army framed their violent take of power, and the illegitimacy of that claim with the Chileans. In other words, the army had lost sovereign legitimacy by becoming completely autonomous from the central government and thus became seen as a foreign invading force by the people rather than a force sworn to protect the nation from injustice and outside invasion. The army’s revolt did not come as a reflection of the people it had sworn to protect, nor was it just a vehicle that reinforced a popular contestation of Allende’s rule. The army’s rhetoric of sacrifice that encompassed its “national liberation” aim, emulated the activity of foreign invasion, due to its disalignment with popular sentiment.

Piñera, José. “How Salvador Allende Destroyed Democracy in Chile.” Society, Sept/Oct. Vol. 42, Issue 6, 2005, pp. 20-25.

In the above cited scholarly article, the issue of Chile’s crippling democratic system is examined by case studying Salvador Allende’s unconstitutional presidency between 1970 and 1973. The article takes into consideration multiple aspects that contextualize both democracy in Latin America and the increasing ideological tensions of the Cold War period. The author centers his case study around the Chamber of Deputies’ resolution on August 22, 1973 to both depose the democratically elected President Allende and call for the intervention of the armed forces to protect the Constitution. This date is pivotal to the events that precipitated the coup d’état on September 11, as it is a real turning point of democracy, according to Piñera. The argument is made not only for the unconstitutionality of Allende, citing his abuse of constitutional loopholes to enact socialist reforms, but also for his masked attempt behind a façade of democracy to attempt a communist coup himself, hence the need for the army’s intervention to counter Allende’s momentum. The article heavily criticizes Allende’s attempt to subvert democracy by imposing unpopular socialist reforms. In effect, the author justifies this claim by underscoring the importance of the Chamber of Deputies in Allende’s win against the two other presidential contenders. Allende’s win was only slightly higher than his runner-up, Jorge Alessandri, which made the decision to elect President up to the Chamber of Deputies. Conclusively, the author defends military intervention in September of 1973 by expressing its inevitability in an attempt to counter an impeding socialist revolution in Chile.

José Piñera has been Chile’s secretary of labor and social security, overseeing much of the privatization of its pension system. As a politician, he has fought for privatization of social security, an echo of Reagan politics. As a professor and economist, however, he has written many accounts for the protection of democracy wherever possible, the most notorious of which is “How Salvador Allende Destroyed Democracy in Chile” in 2005. Therefore, while one may take into account a degree of bias of the author’s perspective, his propensity to chastise Allende’s government does not undermine his authority on the subject of political systems, especially on the balance between democratic and authoritarian regimes.

The aforementioned article greatly enlightens the question of whether the coup was inevitable and whether it can be considered a revolution rather than a reaction. It is a valuable source that analytically questions the grounds prior to the coup, asserting that democratic collapse in Chile was inevitable both because of internal crises and as a reflection of the pressure from the United States and Russia. Hence, it justifies the claim for military intervention, yet it does not resolve the question of military dictatorship that followed. Moreover, if the claim is that democracy was so essential for Chile, then it would logically follow that succeeding the military intervention to depose Allende, there would be another democratic regime. Yet, since this was clearly not the case, it questions democracy’s inherence to Chilean politics. However, the question of democratic failure is essential to understand whether or not the Chilean coup’s main actor—the army—was revolutionary in its own right. The disintegration of democracy occurs on two levels: the government’s majority’s dissatisfaction with the elected leader, and popular dissatisfaction with his socialist reforms, leading to nationwide worker strikes. Typically, revolutions tend to be moved by egalitarian, left-wing ideologies; however, it is clear by analyzing Piñera’s document that the coup was supported by the people and the government and therefore qualify, if not partially, as a revolution to upset a president with authoritarian tendencies. If the Chilean case had been moved by left-wing ideologies, the interpretation of it would most certainly be in consonance with revolution.

Policzer, Pablo. The Rise and Fall of Repression in Chile. University of Notre Dame Press, 2009.

The organization of violence, through means of coercion, is explored in this book, which follows the developments that explain the degree of the army’s autonomy in Chile, ultimately permitting it to overthrow the democratic elected socialist government under Allende. More specifically, it delves into the army’s exposure of the political environment that conditioned the army to grow from a semi-autonomous organ of the state to a completely autonomous guerrilla-like concentrated force, to ultimately being re-assimilated into the state as the definition of the state itself. The scope of this source is to expose the covert utility of the army both for a dictatorial and democratic regime. Generally, the use of coercive force is analyzed through the case study of the Chilean coup of 1973. This is conducted by observing the way in which the Chamber of Deputies under the elected socialist President Allende granted a degree of independence to the army, which were tasked with checking the presumed unconstitutionality of the President’s executive decisions. Hence, the source’s scope is to shed light on the use of state organs, such as the Parliament, to organize legitimate and coordinated violence against its democratic opposition through means of the army, an organ that by definition holds the legitimate use of violence in a democracy.

Pablo Policzer is an associate professor of the department of political science at the University of Calgary in Canada, specialized in comparative politics, he focuses on Latin America and the use of violence and its evolution in political conflict. He has done research on the role of state and non-state armed groups in authoritarian and democratic regimes. This level of specialization and attention to niches in political science grants Policzer expertise in the field of the use of organized violence through state regulated organs, such as the army.

This work extensively illuminates the bibliography topic, which aims to frame the question of the degree of justification and legitimacy that the army had for staging a coup d’état in Chile in 1973, thus analyzing whether an army’s autonomous rebellion can ever be synonymous of a revolution or if its extent is always reactionary. Policzer’s central claim is that organized violence is vital and even central to governance. Therefore, it is assumed that in democratic states the most overt form of organized violence is the army in its various declinations. Any army is to a regime (democratic and authoritarian) an exercise of the state’s monopoly of legitimized violence. The core of an army is that is functions on its rigorous organization, and its legitimization of using violence. Within civil society, it is the only form of legitimate power, hence why revolutionaries are often called non-state autonomous actors. The army, on the other hand, is a state actor. Nevertheless, 1973 Chile saw the army go from state actor to non-state autonomous actor in not even two months: August and September. The Chamber of Deputies solicited the army to check the unconstitutional behavior of Allende, thus allowing the army not only autonomy but independence from the government. This level of independence and autonomy created a rebellion that was unprovoked by civil society but came as a top-down procedure. Therefore, according also to Policzer, the revolution was undesired by the civil mass, but by the army, which thus dictated the scope of the revolution and its interests. Ultimately, he lays the claim that since the revolution was unwanted by the electoral majority that had overwhelmingly voted for center and socialist parties in the presidential elections, the army’s coup was undeniably reactionary and necessarily violent by definition of being the absolute concentration of legitimate violence of the state.