Chapter 1The Port City

Foreword

I have spent my working life on the other side of this story. For twenty years, for The Atlantic and for El País, I wrote about the people who stood in front of the machinery: the singers whose songs were banned, the students who organized and vanished, the mothers who carried photographs of their children to the gates of government buildings and stood there until someone wrote it down. I filed from Santiago, from Buenos Aires, from Caracas. My beat was the victims. So when I told people I was writing a book about Augusto Pinochet, more than one of them asked me, with real concern, why I would give years of my life to the man instead of to the people he destroyed.

The honest answer is that I had been writing about him all along.

Every story I ever filed from the Southern Cone had Pinochet in it somewhere, the way a photograph of a flood has the water in it. He was the condition my subjects lived inside. The musicians I profiled had learned to sing around him. The exiles I interviewed dated their lives from him: before the coup, after the coup. I had written the perimeter of the man for two decades without ever walking into the center, and I began to suspect that this was a kind of evasion — that a journalist who spends his career on the wounded owes, eventually, an accounting of the instrument. Not sympathy. Not balance, in the degraded sense that word has acquired. An accounting.

I expected to find an author. I mean that in the plain sense: I expected that at the center of seventeen years of systematic terror I would find a mind that had conceived it, a will that had designed it, a man commensurate with the thing. That is not what the record shows. I worked from the public record — the truth commission testimony, the court files that accumulated across three decades, the declassified cables, the published memoirs of survivors and of accomplices, the general's own dry textbook on geopolitics — and what the record shows is a mediocrity. A middling student who was rejected by the military academy twice and simply kept applying. An officer whose superiors considered him harmless. A man who, so far as anyone recorded, never expressed an original thought in his life. The terror was original. The man was not. Reconciling those two facts took me longer than any other part of this book.

What I found instead of an author was a system: a military trained for generations to regard civilians as inferior and intervention as duty; a torture apparatus that operated with the calm of a licensed profession; an economic project that used the silence terror produced as its laboratory conditions. Pinochet did not invent this system. He rose through it, waited inside it, and then sat at the top of it, and his one genuine talent — a stubborn, grinding refusal to let go of anything he had ever been given — kept him there for seventeen years. The stadium detentions of the book's title were among the first things the system did with its new freedom, and the stadiums are where I kept returning, because the people herded onto that grass were the people I had spent my career writing about. This book is where those stories converge with the man they converge on.

Why does he deserve a book? He does not. That is the wrong verb. He requires one. He died in a hospital bed, old, attended, never convicted of any crime, and the constitution his regime drafted still governs the country I was born to cover. The share of Chileans willing to call the coup justified has been rising, not falling. A man whose legacy were finished would be a subject for historians. Pinochet is not finished. He is an open argument conducted in the present tense, and the side that remembers is not guaranteed to win it.

I came to this book from the side of the victims, and I have not changed sides. But I no longer believe you can honor the names on the memorial walls while declining to understand the man whose signature put them there. This book is that attempt: to walk from the port city where he was born to the stadiums, and to keep walking past them, into everything the stadiums made possible.

— Mateo Salazar, Santiago

Chapter 1 · The Port City

Valparaíso, 1915

The city clings to the hills above the Pacific like something that refuses to let go. Valparaíso in 1915 was Chile's window to the world: a port city of funiculars and warehouses, of British shipping firms and German beer halls, of sailors and customs agents and middle-class families who lived in the narrow houses stacked along the cerros, the hills that rise steeply behind the harbor. The city had been wealthy once, before the Panama Canal redirected trade routes and left it stranded on the wrong side of the continent. By 1915 it was a city living on the memory of commerce, its grand Victorian buildings beginning their long decay, its port still busy but no longer essential.

Into this city, on November 25, 1915, Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte was born.

His father, also named Augusto, was a customs official, a mid-level functionary in the port bureaucracy, a man of modest means and modest ambitions who spent his career processing the cargo that passed through Valparaíso's docks. His mother, Avelina Ugarte Martínez, came from a family with slightly more social standing but no more money. The Pinochets were not poor. They were not rich. They occupied that stratum of Chilean society, the clase media, the middle class, that defined itself less by what it possessed than by what it was not. They were not laborers. They were not landowners. They were respectable.

This distinction mattered in Chile in 1915 more than it would have mattered in most countries. Chilean society was stratified with a rigidity that outsiders found remarkable and insiders found natural. At the top sat the great landowning families, the latifundistas, who controlled the Central Valley's agricultural wealth and, through it, the country's politics. Below them, a thin professional class of lawyers, doctors, and military officers. Below that, the merchants and functionaries of the port cities. Below that, the miners of the Atacama Desert, the farmworkers of the haciendas, the urban poor of Santiago's conventillos. Movement between these layers was not impossible, but it was rare, and it was slow, and it required either extraordinary talent or extraordinary patience.

The military was one of the few institutions that offered a path upward, not to the very top of Chilean society, which remained the preserve of the landed families, but to a position of respect and stability that a customs official's son could not otherwise expect. This fact would matter enormously.

But first, the childhood.

Augusto Pinochet grew up in a household that was Catholic, conservative, and conventional. His father drank. This is mentioned in some accounts and omitted in others, as though the detail were either too ordinary to note or too inconvenient to include. The drinking was not catastrophic. Augusto senior held his job, maintained his household, kept the family fed. But it created an atmosphere that the son would later describe, in his characteristically self-serving way, as one in which discipline was lacking and needed to be supplied from within.

The boy was not brilliant. He was not gifted. He was not, by any account, remarkable. He was a middling student who attended the local schools with the other children of Valparaíso's middle class. He was physically small. He would remain short throughout his life, with a round face and soft features that gave him, even in uniform, the look of a man playing dress-up. He had no particular athletic talent, no obvious intellectual curiosity, no distinguishing characteristic that anyone would later point to and say: there, you could see it even then.

What he had was persistence. A stubborn, grinding, unyielding persistence that his later admirers would call determination and his later critics would call something else entirely. When he was rejected by the military academy, the Escuela Militar in Santiago, on his first application, he applied again. When he was rejected a second time, he applied a third time. He was finally admitted in 1933, at age seventeen, not because anyone had recognized latent brilliance but because he would not stop applying.

This persistence, this refusal to accept rejection, this willingness to keep pushing against a closed door until it opened, would define his entire career. It was not the persistence of a visionary. It was the persistence of a man who wanted something and could not imagine not getting it. There is a difference between the two, and it matters.

The Chile He Was Born Into

To understand what Pinochet would eventually do to Chile, it is necessary to understand what Chile was.

In 1915, Chile was a democracy, one of the oldest and most stable in Latin America, a point of considerable national pride. It had a constitution, a functioning legislature, regular elections, a free press, and a tradition of civilian control of the military that was, by the standards of the region, extraordinary. The Chilean military had intervened in politics only twice since independence: in 1891, when a civil war between the president and the congress was settled by force, and in a brief period of political instability in the 1920s that had not yet occurred when Pinochet was born. The norm was civilian rule. The expectation was that it would continue.

But Chilean democracy in 1915 was a democracy for some. The great landowners controlled the countryside through a patronage system that made their workers dependent on them for housing, food, and employment. Elections in rural areas were managed affairs: the hacendado told his workers how to vote, and they voted accordingly, because the alternative was homelessness and hunger. Women could not vote. Literacy requirements excluded much of the population. The system was democratic in form but oligarchic in substance, and it functioned, as such systems do, by keeping the people who might have demanded change from having any mechanism to demand it.

This arrangement produced a country that was, on the surface, stable and prosperous. Chile's nitrate mines in the Atacama Desert had generated enormous wealth in the late nineteenth century, wealth that funded the construction of Santiago's grand public buildings, the expansion of the railroad system, and the comfortable lives of the families who controlled the mines. When synthetic nitrate was developed during World War I, that wealth evaporated. The Chilean economy, dependent on a single commodity, contracted sharply. The workers who had mined the nitrate, and who had already begun organizing into unions and political movements, found themselves unemployed, angry, and increasingly radicalized.

The response of the Chilean state to this radicalization was violence. In 1907, eight years before Pinochet's birth, the Chilean military had massacred striking nitrate workers and their families at the Santa María School in Iquique. The number killed is still debated; estimates range from several hundred to several thousand. The massacre was not an aberration. It was a policy. When the workers of the north organized, the military was sent to disorganize them. When they struck, the military was sent to shoot them. This was the Chilean military's actual relationship to Chilean democracy in the early twentieth century: it served as the enforcement arm of the oligarchy, and when the oligarchy's interests were threatened, it killed.

This history is essential because Pinochet would later present his 1973 coup as an unprecedented response to an unprecedented crisis, as though the Chilean military had never before intervened in politics, as though the decision to overthrow a democratic government was made reluctantly and only when all other options had been exhausted. In fact, the Chilean military had a long history of violence against Chilean citizens. What was unprecedented about September 11, 1973, was not the military's willingness to use force against the civilian population. What was unprecedented was the scale.

The Escuela Militar

The institution that shaped Augusto Pinochet more than any other was the Escuela Militar, the Chilean military academy in Santiago, which he entered in 1933 and from which he graduated in 1936.

The Chilean military in the 1930s was, in an odd and consequential way, a Prussian institution. In the late nineteenth century, the Chilean government had hired a German military mission to reorganize the army along Prussian lines. The Germans had come, and they had done their work thoroughly. They had introduced Prussian drill, Prussian uniforms, Prussian tactics, and, most importantly, Prussian ideas about the military's relationship to the state. The Chilean army goose-stepped. It wore spiked helmets. It organized its officer corps along German lines, with a general staff system modeled on the Prussian Generalstab. And it absorbed, with varying degrees of understanding, the Prussian concept of the military as a caste apart: a group of men who were not merely servants of the state but its highest expression.

This concept, the military as a superior institution, staffed by superior men, answerable ultimately to a higher duty than mere civilian politics, was taught at the Escuela Militar not as ideology but as fact. The cadets were trained to believe that they were different from civilians. Better than civilians. More disciplined, more patriotic, more willing to sacrifice. And they were trained to believe that when civilian institutions failed, when politicians proved corrupt, when democracy proved messy, when the country lost its way, it was the military's duty to intervene.

Pinochet absorbed these lessons completely. He was a diligent student, not a brilliant one, but a thorough one. He took careful notes. He studied the texts. He memorized what he was told to memorize. He did not question. He did not challenge. He did not, as far as anyone has recorded, ever express an original thought about military strategy, political theory, or anything else during his years at the academy. He was the perfect product of a system designed to produce obedient, technically competent, ideologically reliable officers.

He graduated in 1936 with the rank of alférez, second lieutenant, and was assigned to the infantry. His class ranking was middling. No instructor singled him out for praise or censure. He was, in every measurable way, average.

And yet he had acquired something at the Escuela Militar that would prove more important than any academic distinction: a worldview. The military was the nation's backbone. Civilians were weak and unreliable. Democracy was useful when it produced acceptable results and dispensable when it did not. Communism was an existential threat. Order was the highest political value. These beliefs, absorbed at eighteen, reinforced at every subsequent stage of his career, would remain unchanged for the rest of his life. Pinochet did not evolve. He did not grow. He did not reconsider. He believed at eighty what he had believed at eighteen, and he acted accordingly.

A Young Officer in a Turbulent Country

Pinochet's early military career, from his graduation in 1936 to the early 1950s, was spent in the garrison towns of Chile's south and north, far from the political centers of Santiago and Valparaíso. He served in Concepción, in the coal-mining region of the south. He served in Iquique, in the nitrate-mining region of the north. He served in the remote garrison of Pisagua, on the edge of the Atacama Desert, where the Chilean government had once interned political prisoners and would do so again.

These were years of routine. Morning drills. Afternoon paperwork. Evening mess. The life of a junior officer in a peacetime army is not dramatic, and Pinochet's was no exception. He trained his soldiers. He maintained his equipment. He filed his reports. He was promoted at the expected intervals, to teniente, to capitán, without distinction and without delay.

He married Lucía Hiriart Rodríguez in January 1943 in Santiago. She was the daughter of Osvaldo Hiriart Corvalán, a Radical Party politician then serving in the Chilean Senate, who would be appointed Minister of the Interior by President Juan Antonio Ríos later that same year. This was a significant marriage for a customs official's son, a step up the social hierarchy that the military alone had not provided. Lucía brought social connections that Pinochet lacked, and she brought an ambition that matched and perhaps exceeded his own. She was, by all accounts, a formidable woman: sharp, status-conscious, and deeply invested in her husband's career in ways that went beyond wifely support. Their partnership would endure for more than six decades, and Lucía would become, during the years of the dictatorship, a figure of considerable power and considerable controversy in her own right.

They had five children: Inés Lucía, born December 14, 1943, followed over the next thirteen years by Augusto Osvaldo, María Verónica, Marco Antonio, and Jacqueline Marie. The family moved from garrison to garrison, as military families do, following Pinochet's postings through the small cities and remote outposts of Chile's long geography. It was a conventional military life: orderly, hierarchical, contained. The children grew up in officers' quarters, attended military schools, learned the protocols of military society. There is nothing in those years, in the accounts that have been assembled from family members and contemporaries, that suggests what was coming.

But something was happening in Chile during these years that would eventually make everything else possible. The country's politics were shifting leftward. The Communist Party, founded in 1922 when Luis Emilio Recabarren's Partido Obrero Socialista voted to join the Communist International, had grown into a significant political force: well-organized, disciplined, with strong roots in the mining communities of the north and the industrial workers of Santiago. The Socialist Party, founded in 1933 as a Marxist party independent of the Soviet-aligned Communist International, had produced leaders of national stature. Labor unions were organizing across the country's mines, factories, and farms. And in 1938, a coalition of leftist and centrist parties, the Frente Popular, had won the presidency with Pedro Aguirre Cerda, beginning a sequence of center-left governments that would gradually expand the franchise, strengthen labor protections, and challenge the political dominance of the landowning class.

For a young officer educated in the Prussian tradition, taught to see communism as an existential threat and civilian politics as a necessary annoyance, this leftward drift was disturbing. Pinochet did not write about it. He did not speak about it publicly. But the Chilean military was watching, and it was worried, and the worry was deepening with each election.

In 1948, the government of Gabriel González Videla, a Radical Party president who had been elected with Communist support and who had appointed Communists to his cabinet, turned against his former allies under U.S. pressure and passed the Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy, which outlawed the Communist Party, stripped Communist officials of their positions, and authorized the detention of party members. Pinochet, then a captain, was assigned to oversee the detention camp at Pisagua, the port town on the northern Pacific coast where the government had established an internment facility for political prisoners.

This was his first direct involvement in political repression. The assignment was routine. He was not the only officer involved, and the detention camp at Pisagua, while harsh, was not the systematic killing operation that would come later. Conditions at Pisagua were poor: inadequate food, cold Pacific winds, isolation in a remote location accessible only by sea. The prisoners included Communist Party officials, union leaders, and intellectuals. The repression also reached the poet Pablo Neruda, then a Communist senator, who went into hiding from a warrant that the government had issued for his arrest and would later describe the Pisagua detention camp in poems that gave international visibility to the repression.

The assignment established a precedent. The military could be used against Chilean citizens for political reasons. An officer could be ordered to guard political prisoners, and he could do so without moral crisis, without questioning the legitimacy of the detention, without concern for the politics of the men he was holding.

Pinochet did so. He performed the assignment competently. He reported to his superiors. He moved on to his next posting.

Twenty-five years later, Pisagua would be used again, this time as a concentration camp for prisoners of the 1973 coup. The prisoners would not just be detained. They would be shot, and their bodies buried in unmarked graves in the desert. The mass graves at Pisagua were discovered in 1990, when the Chilean democratic government authorized excavations. Nineteen bodies were found in a single grave: prisoners executed in the weeks after the coup.

The Geopolitician

In the early 1950s, Pinochet was assigned to teach at the Escuela Militar, the same institution where he had been trained. He was also enrolled in the Academia de Guerra, the war college where senior officers received advanced training in strategy and military science. The Academia de Guerra was where Chilean officers were shaped into the strategic thinkers that the institution required at the general officer level: not merely competent tacticians but men who could think in terms of national interest, regional power, and the long-term security requirements of the Chilean state.

It was here that Pinochet developed his interest in geopolitics, the study of how geography shapes political and military power. He read the German geopoliticians: Friedrich Ratzel, the nineteenth-century geographer who had introduced the concept of Lebensraum, or living space, as a determinant of national power; Karl Haushofer, the Weimar-era general who had developed Ratzel's ideas into a comprehensive theory of geographic determinism and whose influence on Nazi strategic thinking had made his work controversial in the postwar West but not in the armies of Latin America, where geopolitical thinking remained respectable and professionally useful.

He read the Chilean geopoliticians who had adapted these ideas to South America's geography: the long, narrow strip of land between the Andes and the Pacific, bordered by historically hostile neighbors. Chile had fought wars against Peru and Bolivia in the War of the Pacific (1879–1884), acquiring the Atacama Desert territories that contained the nitrate and copper deposits on which Chile's economy had been built. The territorial disputes with Argentina over Patagonia and channels in the far south had never been fully resolved. The geopolitical tradition taught that geography was destiny: that Chile's elongated shape made it uniquely vulnerable and uniquely strategic, and that the defense of its territory required a military that understood the connection between geographic position and national power.

He wrote a book. In 1968, he published Geopolítica, a textbook on geopolitical theory: a work of synthesis, analysis, and application, written out of his teaching at the Academia de Guerra. It would later be examined by scholars for evidence of the intellectual framework that led to the coup. What they found was less illuminating than they had hoped. The book was competent and derivative, a synthesis of existing geopolitical theory applied to Chile's situation, written in the dry, methodical prose of a career officer summarizing his reading. It contained no original ideas. It revealed no hidden depths. It was the work of a man who had studied a subject thoroughly and understood it adequately, and it told you almost nothing about what he would do when given power.

But the fact that he wrote it mattered. In the Chilean military of the 1950s and 1960s, an officer who published an academic work, even a derivative one, was an officer who took himself seriously, an officer who aspired to be more than a garrison commander. The book positioned Pinochet as a military intellectual, a man of ideas, even if the ideas were borrowed. It helped his career.

And it revealed something about how Pinochet thought about nations. In the geopolitical framework he absorbed, nations were organisms. They had vital interests determined by geography. They competed with other organisms for resources and territory. The survival of the nation was the supreme political value, and everything else, democracy, human rights, individual liberty, was subordinate to it. This was not an unusual framework for a military officer of his generation. But most military officers of his generation did not get the chance to act on it.

The Slow Rise

Pinochet's promotion through the ranks of the Chilean Army was steady and unremarkable. He was promoted to major in 1953. To lieutenant colonel in 1960. To colonel in 1966. To brigadier general in 1968. To division general in 1971.

At each stage, he was considered a safe choice: reliable, competent, not brilliant but not troublesome. He was not associated with any of the political factions within the military. He was not known to be plotting anything. He was not known to have strong opinions about anything. He was, in the assessment of his superiors and his peers, a professional soldier who did his job and kept his mouth shut.

His postings during this period included command of the 7th Infantry Regiment "Esmeralda" in Antofagasta and a term as deputy director of the Academia de Guerra. He spent time at the Escuela Militar as an instructor in military history and geography. He served with the Chilean military mission that helped organize Ecuador's War Academy in Quito, from 1956 to 1959, his first international assignment, which gave him exposure to the continental military network that would later prove significant in organizing Operation Condor. Chilean senior officers of his generation regularly attended courses at American military institutions during the Cold War era, and the American connection, the shared doctrine, the shared training, the shared anti-communist ideology, was not incidental to the coup. It was essential to it.

This reputation, for political neutrality, for institutional loyalty, for being essentially harmless, became the most important asset of his career. It was the reason Salvador Allende would appoint him Commander-in-Chief of the Army in August 1973. It was the reason Allende's advisors would not object. It was the reason the left would not see him coming.

Whether the reputation was deserved is a question that divides historians. Some argue that Pinochet was genuinely apolitical throughout his career, that the coup was a late-life conversion, a response to a crisis rather than the expression of a lifelong ambition. Others argue that Pinochet was simply more cautious than his colleagues, that he shared their antipathy to the left but was too shrewd to express it openly, too patient to act before the moment was right.

The evidence supports the second interpretation. Pinochet had overseen the detention of Communists at Pisagua in 1948. He had absorbed the Prussian military ideology that viewed civilian democracy with suspicion. He had spent decades in an institution that defined itself in opposition to the left. He was not apolitical. He was invisible. And in the military politics of Chile in the 1960s and early 1970s, invisibility was a strategy.

The distinction between genuine political neutrality and strategic invisibility is the distinction between a man who was swept up in events and a man who was waiting for them. It is the distinction that matters most in understanding what happened on September 11, 1973.

But before that day, there was a decade of politics to navigate. And before the coup, there was the man the coup was directed against.

His name was Salvador Allende.