The Pinochet Generation: The Chilean Military in the Twentieth Century

The Pinochet Generation

The Pinochet Generation

The Chilean Military in the Twentieth Century

JOHN R. BAWDEN

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa

The University of Alabama Press

Tuscaloosa, Alabama 35487-0380

uapress.ua.edu

Copyright © 2016 by the University of Alabama Press

All rights reserved.

Inquiries about reproducing material from this work should be addressed to the University of Alabama Press.

Typeface: Garamond

Manufactured in the United States of America

Cover photograph: Regiment of Carabineros on horseback in a public square in Arica around 1926. (Photo courtesy of the Archivo Fotográfico, Biblioteca Nacional de Chile.)

Cover design: Todd Lape/Lape Designs

∞

The paper on which this book is printed meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48–1984.

Cataloging-in-Publication data is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN: 978-0-8173-1928-1

E-ISBN: 978-0-8173-9025-9

Contents

List of Illustrations

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1. Evolution of a Proud Tradition: Chile’s Armed Forces to 1931

2. First Years in Uniform, 1931–1945

3. The Gathering Storm: Postwar Politics and Institutional Frustration, 1945–1970

4. Intellectual and Professional Formation, 1945–1970

5. Salvador Allende and the Armed Forces, 1970–1973

6. Soldiers before Pinochetismo, 1973–1976

7. Defying the World and Restructuring the State, 1977–1981

8. Circling the Wagons: The Survival of the Pinochet Regime, 1982–1986

9. Mission Accomplished: The Transition to Protected Democracy, 1987–1990

Epilogue

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Illustrations

FIGURES

1. Army soldiers swear allegiance to the flag, Granaderos Regiment, 1920

2. Royal Navy Captain Charles Burns directs the first course for general staff officers at the Naval Academy of War in 1911

3. General Carlos Ibáñez del Campo at the start of his first presidency in 1927

4. Air force officers standing in front of an amphibious Sikorsky S-38, somewhere in the southern channels circa 1935

5. Regiment of Carabineros on horseback in a public square in Arica around 1926

6. Augusto Pinochet with a group of cadets at the Military Academy around 1933

7. Peasant father gives an army rifle to his son, a conscript in the infantry school

8. View of Pisagua, an isolated port north of Iquique

9. Salvador Allende with his military commanders during a toast at the country’s annual military parade in Parque Cousiño, Santiago, September 19, 1971

10. Salvador Allende after his address to the nation, May 21, 1971

11. José Toribio Merino Castro, the commander in chief of the navy from 1973 to 1990

12. Seized arms on public display after the coup

13. Let’s go Chileans! End this United Nations farce. All of Chile against the international aggression. Yes to Chile.

14. Augusto Pinochet with his successor, Patricio Aylwin Azócar

MAPS

1. Modern Chile

2. The Tierra del Fuego archipelago

Acknowledgments

I have incurred many personal and intellectual debts writing this book. I wish to acknowledge the early encouragement I received from James Brennan, Juliette Levy, Robert Patch, and David Pion-Berlin during the completion of my graduate studies at the University of California, Riverside. In particular, James Brennan supported the decision I made to write about the armed forces and offered generous guidance as my doctoral advisor.

In Chile, a number of individuals helped me along the way. I wish to thank Cristián Garay Vera, Miguel Navarro Meza, Patricia Arancibia Clavel, Rodrigo Peñaranda Pedemonte, Carlos Tromben Corbalán, and Marco López Ardiles. They answered questions and pointed me to valuable source material.

Alison Bruey and Jim Day commented on chapter drafts, and the book’s two anonymous reviewers offered useful suggestions. William Sater gave feedback on several chapters and has always been willing to share his extensive knowledge of Chilean history with me. Chris McGillion provided invaluable assistance at two important points in the book’s development. I benefited from his advice as I expanded the scope of my doctoral dissertation and when I revised the second half of the manuscript.

At the University of Montevallo in Alabama I have enjoyed the support of historians in the Department of Behavioral and Social Sciences: Robert Barone, Jim Day, Wilson Fallin, Clark Hultquist, and Ruth Truss. They provided a collegial setting in which to grow as a scholar, and I cannot imagine having had better colleagues. The interlibrary loan staff at the school’s Carmichael Library acquired countless rare books on my behalf. Several university grants allowed me to conduct research at archives and libraries in the United States and Chile.

I also wish to acknowledge Dan Waterman from the University of Alabama Press. He moved the book through external review in a timely manner and provided assistance at every stage of the process.

My parents, Mary and Richard Bawden, my brother, David, and my sister, Elizabeth, have cheered me on over the years; their love and support has meant a great deal to me. Finally, I dedicate this book to my wife, Tara Swancoat Bawden. She understood the need I had for long periods of quiet study away from home during a time when careers and small children made our lives exciting and happy but always time constrained. I am fortunate to have such a partner and friend.

All translations from Spanish to English in this book are my own unless otherwise indicated. I am responsible for any errors or mistakes contained in the text.

Introduction

Chilean soldiers transformed their country twice in the twentieth century. In the first half they enlarged the role of the state and helped precipitate radical changes leading to the 1925 constitution. In the second half they implemented a decentralized free-market political economy and fathered the 1980 constitution. Officers imposed their vision of the future. According to one perspective, military governments accomplished what civilian politicians had proved incapable of doing: they modernized the state in each half century. What is true for the entire period is that observers frequently misjudged, misunderstood, or caricatured the country’s professional soldiers.

This book aims to correct the paucity of historical knowledge about the officers who overthrew Salvador Allende in 1973. The image of Augusto Pinochet wearing dark sunglasses, with his arms crossed, and surrounded by equally stern-looking officers typifies one perception of a sinister, impenetrable military establishment. Who were these uniformed men? How did the army mold Pinochet in the years before he became an icon of tyranny and anticommunist repression? A central argument of this book is that the peculiar nature of the Pinochet regime (1973–1990)—its policies, repressiveness, longevity, and revolutionary politico-economic project—cannot be separated from the broader intellectual and institutional culture of the armed forces.

Frederick Nunn made an astute comment about what could be expected of Chile’s military government in the mid-1970s. He wrote, The primary thing to be remembered about the junta is that each of its members has over thirty years of military career behind him. . . . It is hard to believe that this background will not be the primary influence in their thinking and action. Too, it should be remembered that these men are essentially products of pre–World War II initial training and intellectual formation.¹ The same thing could be said for the leaders of other South American military regimes after 1964. Understanding professional soldiers in the years before they assumed control of the state demands knowledge of their experiences, collective memory, and external influences.

The Pinochet generation may refer to Chilean officers who reached maturity under the shadow of dictatorship—hijos de la Guerra Fría (children of the Cold War), as one officer put it—but the principal focus of this book is the generation of Chilean officers, born between 1915 and 1925, that entered military academies in the 1930s and 1940s, completed advanced training in the 1950s and 1960s, and went on to hold positions of senior leadership in the 1970s. Admirals José Toribio Merino and Patricio Carvajal, for instance, entered the Naval Academy in 1931 at ages fifteen and sixteen, whereas army commanders Carlos Prats and Augusto Pinochet, both born in 1915, entered the Military Academy in 1931 and 1933. Air force generals Gustavo Leigh and Fernando Matthei began their military careers in the early 1940s and reached the top of their institution in the 1970s. For all these men the convulsive domestic and international context from 1930 to 1950 constituted an important backdrop to their early careers.

Carlos Prats lived through a particularly fierce antimilitary backlash after the sudden collapse of General Carlos Ibáñez del Campo’s government in 1931. During that tense period civilians attacked uniformed soldiers in the streets. For Prats these bitter memories illustrated the cost of military involvement in politics. That year a massive naval mutiny forever marked Merino, Carvajal, and Ismael Huerta, then navy cadets. As grown men they resolved to prevent a similar breakdown of order and discipline in their beloved institution. In 1948 Pinochet and Matthei each received assignments to carry out missions of internal repression once President Gabriel González Videla had outlawed the Communist Party and ordered the arrest and detention of communist militants. Such experiences contributed to a bipolar conception of the world, divided into friends and enemies. These men lived, as Eric Hobsbawm put it, during the short twentieth century, a temporal unit marked by inflexible ideologies, sweeping political change, and massive violence that began with the outbreak of World War I and concluded with the unexpected collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991.²

Military institutions imbue soldiers with a strong sense of history and national tradition, and Chile’s victories over Peru and Bolivia in the nineteenth century established an enduring concept, that of the undefeated armed forces: siempre victoriosas, jamás vencidas (always victorious, never defeated). This idea gave substance to the belief that the Pinochet regime had to defeat its enemies and make an honorable, victorious exit from power.

The military’s constitutionalism and reverence for hierarchy proved historically consequential at several different junctures. The army, navy, and air force agreed to launch a coup only after they perceived that the elected president had severely broken the law and the prevailing crisis appeared to lack a legal resolution. During the dictatorship, concern for rule following did not disappear even as an ethos of internal war justified extralegal behavior. Early on, instinctual respect for the chain of command muted interservice and intraservice rivalries and helped Pinochet consolidate his control of the army and the government.

Silence mattered, too. The Pinochet generation proved remarkably tight-lipped about internal matters. Few officers ever broke the taboo on speaking with foreigners. Old soldiers took secrets to the grave, and various episodes from the dictatorship remain enshrouded in mystery. In many instances, aspects of military culture predating 1930—Prussian discipline, reticence, and institutional memory—determined essential outcomes.

Military culture is an amalgam of values, customs, traditions, and their philosophical underpinnings that, over time, has created a shared institutional ethos. From military culture springs a common framework for those in uniform and common expectations regarding standards of behavior.³ Chile’s unusual geography and potential encirclement by rival states to the north and the east has led to an institutional focus on the possibility of fighting a multifront war in which Chilean soldiers would have to exhibit superior training, efficiency, and motivation to prevail over enemy nations.

The armed forces’ institutional memory provided a crucial framework through which soldiers understood events and formulated responses. From 1972 to 1973 institutional leaders resolved to prevent a repetition of the 1891 civil war, when the army mostly sided with Chile’s president, José Manuel Balmaceda, and the navy allied itself with the country’s congressional rebels. That violent division of la familia militar (the military family) lingered in military consciousness. In 1983 the junta wanted to avoid two things that had accompanied General Carlos Ibáñez del Campo’s abrupt departure from power in 1931: instability and civilian backlash. Members of the junta disagreed on aspects of the political transition, but they regarded any form of unconditional surrender to the regime’s enemies as unacceptable. For instance, it could result in changes to the 1980 constitution or in the imprisonment of institutional leaders. Thus they saw their fates collectively bound.

Certain personal and ideological factors warrant attention. The Roman Catholic backgrounds of Pinochet and Merino—the junta’s two most important members—strengthened their guiding sense of mission and purpose. By all accounts, both commanders believed they had been chosen to save the fatherland from Marxism. Pinochet once explained to a journalist, Just like Saint Peter, I believe God elected us to fulfill missions and prepared the path for us to do what He commanded.⁴

This religious outlook coexisted with other attributes, such as shrewdness, ambition, mistrust, and, above all, a strong instinct for self-preservation. Indeed, Pinochet demonstrated a remarkable ability to outfox political enemies and turn apparent losses into personal victories. Through it all, he remained an infantry officer. His preparation at the Army Academy of War forever marked his outlook and actions as head of state. Similarly, those who knew José Merino concur that he was a sailor first, deeply attached to the Chilean Navy, its history, and its traditions. Each man felt a historic responsibility to act as the faithful custodian of his institution’s honor and prestige.

After World War II Latin America entered a political and military alliance with the United States. Washington provided military hardware to its allies, and thousands of Chilean soldiers trained in the United States. Despite the Pentagon’s hemispheric influence, US doctrines did not enter an institutional vacuum. Chilean soldiers had a point of view rooted in their own traditions, history, and place in the world as a developing state. US military influence never overwhelmed the national traditions or the local concerns of professional soldiers who had advanced training facilities, anticommunist sentiments, and native intellectual traditions long before the era of US hegemony. Moreover, militaries in Brazil, Chile, and Argentina compare poorly with those in Guatemala, El Salvador, and Nicaragua, both in terms of professional development and the ability of the United States to influence them.

The new approach to Cold War history emphasizes diverse archival sources and new conceptual frameworks to reinterpret events and place historical subjects into broad, international contexts.⁵ The Pinochet Generation fits into this approach. I situate Chilean military actors in their own society and vis-à-vis outside forces. Chapters 3 and 4 in particular demonstrate how the Chilean armed forces belonged to a transnational community of military professionals that shared ideas and influenced one another.

Another aim of this book is to examine twentieth-century episodes in Chile from the perspective of its military protagonists. I chart the process from 1970 to 1973 by which a consensus formed that it was necessary to overthrow President Salvador Allende and assume control of the state. Many of the armed forces’ concerns during this contentious period have been poorly understood. For example, political and economic instability had regional security implications. The Pinochet generation worried that Peru’s nationalist government might take advantage of a civil war or a chaotic internal situation to reclaim territories lost during the nineteenth century. This issue greatly preoccupied soldiers, if not civilians.

Chile was an international pariah for the duration of the dictatorship as a result of systematic human rights abuses and persistent negative press. The US Congress applied a total arms embargo on Santiago in 1976, and the UN General Assembly issued multiple resolutions condemning the Chilean government. At the end of 1978 an aggressive military government in Buenos Aires appeared poised to occupy disputed islands in the Beagle Channel. To a significant extent, all these outside pressures pulled the armed forces together and fostered cohesion; they therefore strengthened the Pinochet regime.

Historiographical Considerations

In the 1950s scholars underscored the solidly middle-class origin of Latin America’s officer corps. John J. Johnson pointed out practical reasons that young men joined the armed forces, such as status, corporate benefits, and a pension. He observed that many young officers came from provincial towns but as lieutenants and captains they could aspire to marry the daughters of wealthy families in the capital. Similarly, high-ranking officers could expect to attend elite parties and have access to national leaders.⁶ Social scientists also drew attention to the disproportionate number of officers with immigrant backgrounds. Indeed, German, English, Italian, French, English, Syrian, and Yugoslavian surnames peppered Chile’s military registries in the twentieth century, and by 1986 two German-speaking Lutherans sat on the country’s junta: Fernando Matthei (air force) and Rudolfo Stange (police). Immigrant families encouraged their sons to consider the military profession as one avenue to status in the new society.

According to modernization theory, the changing social and demographic profile of South American officers meant that these soldiers would no longer defend the status quo or protect elite interests. Rather, militaries in the most developed countries—Argentina, Brazil, and Chile—would support the implementation of progressive reforms alongside middle-class politicians who wanted to rectify economic backwardness and promote industrial development. Some scholars predicted that military involvement in politics would diminish as professional development proceeded.⁷ Others were less optimistic. Edwin Lieuwen thought that Latin America’s armed forces might become even more interventionist after World War II. He worried that US security assistance was elevating the power, confidence, and militarism of militaries in the region as well as their internal demands for tanks, warships, and airplanes.⁸

Scholars did not expect the wave of highly repressive anticommunist military dictatorships in Brazil (1964), Argentina (1966), Chile (1973), and Uruguay (1973). In fact, by 1980 two-thirds of Latin Americans lived under military rule rather than liberal democracy. Some observers wondered if Iberian culture explained the phenomenon. Yet there were simply too many counterexamples for such a blanket generalization. Military coups occurred on a regular basis in Africa and Asia throughout the 1960s and 1970s, which undermined any notion that Hispanic culture was an essential cause of military intervention. Meanwhile, civilians enjoyed firm control of the armed forces in Mexico, Latin America’s second-largest country.

José Nun’s influential interpretation held that Latin American military coups represented middle-class interests and fears. From this perspective, Chilean soldiers had dislodged the oligarchy in 1924 to make changes favoring the middle strata. Likewise, the military coup in 1973 expressed both upper- and middle-class fears about economic chaos and working-class militancy. Scholars operating from either a Marxian or modernization theory framework assumed the primacy of social class for behavior.⁹

In the 1980s, Guillermo O’Donnell’s sociological approach to Latin America’s militaries predominated. O’Donnell held that South American soldiers represented the interests of global capitalism backed up by the Pentagon; their role in the world system was to discipline labor movements, destroy left-wing politics, and empower technocrats who would facilitate the flow of transnational capital to Latin America. This interpretation could not explain everything about the behavior of individual military governments or their relationship to international capitalism, but the idea that Washington created a hemispheric army of foot soldiers committed to US strategic interests and trained to repress left-wing movements has endured.¹⁰

Historians generally eschew mechanical approaches that discount the distinctiveness of each nation’s armed forces. Moreover, they have tended to characterize Latin America’s military institutions as increasingly autonomous in relation to the social system and progressively closed to influences from civil society.¹¹ Nevertheless, historical monographs on South American soldiers are relatively rare. Since 1990 English-speaking historians of twentieth-century Chile have studied workers, peasants, women, indigenous people, and middle-class reformers, exploring a range of themes such as gender, memory, nationalism, and popular resistance to dictatorship.¹² In this body of scholarship, the Chilean military has been an important political actor but hardly the subject of cultural interest or historical analysis. Much of what has been written about the Chilean military comes from political scientists.

Professional historians, it should be noted, do not enjoy unfettered access to army, navy, and air force institutional archives. Moreover, the military’s recent use of political violence against ideological foes has made soldiers unsympathetic subjects of study for some. The comparative lack of historical production may also have to do with earlier views of the armed forces as appendages of the United States or as institutions defending elite interests at home rather than semiautonomous institutions worth studying in their own right.

After the return of democracy to Chile in 1990 a few English-language books presented military perspectives based on oral testimony.¹³ Mary Helen Spooner’s Soldiers in a Narrow Land, for instance, relied on interviews with active and retired officers to present a much more nuanced portrait of the dictatorship and its military protagonists, departing from earlier structural and sociological approaches. At the same time, her book focused on the military’s internal politics and its major personalities, not antecedents informing regime behavior or historically grounded analyses of Chile’s officer corps.

In 1999 the US government began to release more than forty thousand declassified documents related to Chile, including intelligence estimates, government reports, and diplomatic exchanges. This remarkable archive offers insight into the thinking of US policy makers during the Cold War and is responsible for a boom in scholarship on the history of US covert involvement in Chile and US-Chile diplomatic relations from 1964 to 1990. One tendency among authors using these materials is to cast the United States as capable of bringing down governments and controlling military actors.¹⁴ The notion is predicated on the fact that President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger ordered the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to undermine Salvador Allende’s government, which is taken as definitive proof that Washington caused the demise of Chilean democracy in 1973.

Newer studies by Tanya Harmer and Kristian Gustafson recognize the archive’s limitations. Namely, US documents present US perspectives and analyses, not a multisided vantage point. Furthermore, US diplomats and intelligence officers frequently lacked a clear picture of what was happening in the country or sufficient information to make informed judgments.¹⁵ Washington was not an all-powerful, omniscient force in the hemisphere able to decisively influence Chile’s internal affairs at each juncture.

Political scientists have provided some of the most important perspectives on Chile’s military since 1970. Carlos Huneeus’s The Pinochet Regime is widely regarded as the most comprehensive examination of the military government: its ideology, internal functioning, evolution, bases of legitimacy, and relationship to sectors in civilian society. Another political scientist, Robert Barros, acquired copies of the junta’s legislative sessions and showed that the junta, by virtue of its legislative power, limited Pinochet’s executive authority. Predictably, the air force and the navy defended their institutional privileges and placed important constraints on Pinochet’s ability to remain in power after 1988.¹⁶

Chile’s rich historiography does include works that place the armed forces in an overarching historical perspective. Verónica Valdivia’s El golpe después del golpe historicized the conflict between Augusto Pinochet and Gustavo Leigh, the air force commander in chief. After the 1973 coup Leigh championed a set of ideas—state-brokered social justice and state-led development—with firm roots in the first half of the twentieth century, whereas Pinochet and his technocrats rejected those ideas in favor of markets, privatization, and repression. Valdivia’s book charts the continuity of a military consensus about political economy dating back to the 1930s and its eventual displacement by a wholly different political and economic model. In the absence of open military archives, Valdivia relied on interviews, testimonial literature, and professional publications.¹⁷ The Pinochet Generation employs a similar method.

Army, navy, and air force journals constitute an important set of sources for this study because of their regular publication and widespread internal consumption.¹⁸ As the chief outlet for officers to write and reflect on a wide array of issues related to their profession, defense journals reveal political orientations, core values, beliefs, and assumptions shared by officers in all three branches. Articles about history, international relations, contemporary wars, national development, and the spread of military regimes after 1964 reveal the way officers were embedded in various national and international contexts.

Journals also shaped the boundaries of acceptable military thought and defined the parameters of an important discursive field. The published content reflected what Chilean officers studied at their respective war academies and what they brought home from training missions in the United States and Britain or as observers of conflicts in faraway places such as Pakistan and Israel. To encourage quality contributions, general staffs awarded yearly cash prizes to the authors of articles deemed outstanding. The army’s official history observes that academic achievement advanced an officer’s career and won him the respect of his peers.¹⁹

Defense journals have obvious limitations because general staffs published what they saw fit and filtered content. Journals do not expressly reveal interservice and intraservice conflict, although those dynamics can be inferred. What they do reveal are ideas, values, and concerns acceptable to dissemination within a professional community. The regularity of publication throughout the twentieth century makes them valuable sources. In addition to using defense journals, newspapers, government reports, and the junta’s legislative minutes, I draw heavily from testimonial literature. Memoirs and book-length interviews have greatly added to our understanding of the period’s major events and personalities. Moreover, many of these important historical sources remain underutilized.

The book is divided into nine chronological chapters. Chapter 1 outlines the historical evolution of Chile’s armed forces until 1930. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 examine the professional formation and experiences of men who reached the top of their institutions by 1970. Chapter 5 describes the internal process that culminated in the military overthrow of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973. Chapters 6 through 9 connect the major political outcomes during the Pinochet regime (1973–1990) to key personalities, shared experiences, and antecedents in military culture. Above all, this book never loses sight of the broader institutional and intellectual cultures shared by officers in the Chilean armed forces.

1

Evolution of a Proud Tradition

Chile’s Armed Forces to 1931

When Pedro de Valdivia left Peru in 1540 to conquer the forbidding lands south of the Incan empire, his expedition promised hardship. Five years earlier Diego de Almagro had set out with five hundred Spanish soldiers and several thousand Indian allies to conquer the country he and his men called Chilli, but from beginning to end Almagro’s campaign was a disaster. Thousands died of exposure crossing the Andes, and once the expedition reached Chile’s temperate heartland it became apparent that the country had few prospects for profitable conquest—too little gold and hostile Indians. Returning to Peru, Almagro told everyone the land was poor and miserable.¹

Undaunted by Almagro’s warnings, Valdivia marched into Chile’s central valley and defeated a Native army on the site where he built the settlement known as Santiago de la Nueva Extremadura. In a letter to Holy Roman Emperor Charles V, Valdivia wrote that this land is such that there is none better in the world for living in and settling, this I say because it is very flat, very healthy and very pleasant.² The Mediterranean climate may have been agreeable, but the conquest of Chile was not. Native warriors, whom the Spanish called Araucanians, burned Santiago to the ground in 1541 and destroyed the ship Valdivia’s men were building to establish contact with Peru. For the next two years the colony’s settlers lived a frightened existence, nervously guarding their crops and livestock from indigenous warriors.

Valdivia managed to consolidate Santiago’s defenses, but once the conquistador crossed the Bío Bío River three hundred miles south of the capital his soldiers met even hardier resistance. Native peoples learned to neutralize European advantages by attacking the bearded invaders at night or in the rain and by pushing Spaniards off their horses with lances. A celebrated warrior named Lautaro had carefully studied Spanish culture and technology during six years of captivity before he escaped his masters; he then perfected the tactic of separating men into dispersed squads that successively pushed forward and fell back in order to exhaust the Spanish cavalry and diminish its maneuverability.

From the Spanish perspective, these Native warriors were savage indios, the worst of all kinds: sin rey, sin fe, y sin ley (without king, without religion, and without law). Lacking any concept of monarchy, Araucanians formed a loose confederation of extended family units without a central state, which meant that Valdivia could not simply defeat an absolute monarch and place himself atop a set of preexisting imperial structures, as Hernán Cortés and Francisco Pizarro had done in Mexico and Peru, respectively. No matter how many chiefs the Spanish captured, resistance continued from the Native people who are today called Mapuches.³

Valdivia’s campaign proceeded with manifest brutality. He routed an indigenous army in 1550 and ordered his soldiers to slice off the nose and one hand of each of two hundred captives before releasing them with this message: Tell your war chiefs to make peace and submit. Native warriors avenged the deed. In 1553 Lautaro destroyed Valdivia’s army at the Battle of Tucapel and took the conquistador prisoner. One Spanish chronicle relates that the victorious Indians amputated, roasted, and consumed Valdivia’s limbs in view of the (still alive) conquistador.⁴

The Spaniards retained control of the central valley, but in 1594 a Native army captured and killed another Spanish governor, Martín García Óñez de Loyola, and after 1598 the Araucanians destroyed every European settlement south of Concepción, the southernmost extent of Spanish dominion. In this remote imperial fringe, the king’s soldiers had few prospects to become wealthy encomenderos (individuals granted the right to extract tribute from conquered people) but had every prospect to die grisly deaths at the hands of fierce Indians. Recognizing that conquest was at least temporarily impossible, the Spanish military governor, Alonso de Ribera, convinced Spain’s King Phillip III to send a permanent garrison to maintain a frontier with Indians who had proved themselves the equals of any European soldier. At the height of Spain’s global power, the Crown was forced to recognize the sovereignty of Native peoples south of the Bío Bío River. The Mapuches, for their part, agreed to warn the Spanish authorities of pirates off their coastal waters. Only with the advent of industrial technology—the telegraph, railroad, and repeating rifles—did Santiago finally acquire dominion over Araucanía in the late nineteenth century.⁵

This chapter examines the historical evolution of Chile’s armed forces with a focus on events and traditions that influenced behavior and outlook in the twentieth century. The Mapuches’ epic defense of their homeland, which prompted the creation of a standing army in colonial Chile, is a major source of pride and identity in the army. Nineteenth-century triumphs over Spain and over Chile’s neighbors Peru and Bolivia, especially during the War of the Pacific (1879–1884), endowed both the Chilean Army and the Chilean Navy with confidence.

At the same time, these wars created enduring suspicions among the countries involved and ensured Santiago’s perpetual anxiety about the potential for strategic encirclement by rival nations. In the late nineteenth century a process of professionalization under British and German guidance altered the army’s and navy’s structures, composition, and basic attitudes. Important academic traditions developed. In the twentieth century the Pinochet generation could still speak with aging veterans of the War of the Pacific or with officers who had suffered the trauma of the country’s 1891 civil war. Above all, the revolutionary movement of General Carlos Ibáñez del Campo and his subsequent dictatorship (1927–1931) affected military thought and behavior throughout the twentieth century.

The Colonial Crucible

Difficult environmental circumstances shaped colonial Chile. Indian raids, violent earthquakes, and coastal piracy made life insecure for the country’s inhabitants. Each year a payment of silver, known as El Real Situado, arrived from Peru to finance military operations in the south, but geographic isolation meant the country’s inhabitants were usually on their own during periods of crisis. Spoken Spanish evolved in curious ways. The colony was poor, remote, and costly for the Spanish empire to defend.⁶

The army’s institutional history describes the colonial period as a dynamic struggle for space between freedom-loving Mapuche patriots and Spanish conquistadors, which led to a unique mestizaje (mixture of indigenous and European people). Not only did two races blend together, but also the Chilean soldier, heir to the formidable military capabilities of the Araucanian warrior and Spanish soldier, was born. It is, therefore, not a stretch to say that the Army of Chile had its origins during the Spanish Conquest rather than independence.⁷ This interpretation also puts warfare at the heart of colonial development, suggesting that the southern frontier, and by extension the entire country, was a nexus of practically uninterrupted conflict from the conquest until 1810. In reality, a stable aristocratic society emerged rather quickly in the central valley, marked by very rooted social hierarchies. Similarly, the Araucanian frontier was not always embroiled in violent skirmishes. Rather, intervals of calm allowed Indians and colonists to engage in mutually beneficial commercial and cultural exchange.⁸

Sergio Vergara’s social history of the Chilean Army shows that it recruited soldiers from humble yet diverse social groups, whereas the vast majority of officers serving in the frontier zone came from society’s middle strata. On the cusp of independence 90 percent of the king’s soldiers defending the southern frontier were Chileans. A few of the officers belonged to regionally prominent families, and social connections to Santiago’s landowning elites existed only through occasional ties of marriage. Chile’s officers thus came from respectable but modest families. Such research bolsters the army’s view of itself as an institution of the people, not of elites. Vergara also concludes that the relatively large number of soldiers in Chile and their social importance contributed to a recognized aspect of the nation’s character: respect for hierarchy and official titles.⁹

The existence of a permanent frontier guarded by a standing army had one very important consequence. In the central valley, Native peoples and Europeans blended, relatively quickly, into a Hispanic, culturally homogeneous society. This development, observes Mario Góngora, distinguished Chile from Peru and Mexico, where large indigenous cultures prefigured the viceroyalties and the republics.¹⁰ Góngora points out that Peru’s and Mexico’s Indians tended to remain clustered in autonomous villages, where they paid taxes to the Spanish king and received occasional visits from itinerant priests but on the whole spoke Native languages and lived in isolation from European society. In contrast, Chile’s Indians were either independent or subjugated and assimilated. Góngora also draws attention to the fact that every generation of Chileans experienced a wartime victory after independence from Spain in 1817: the war with the Peru-Bolivian Confederation (1836–1839), a second war with Spain (1864–1866), and the War of the Pacific (1879–1884). These victories, Góngora argues, did not merely increase the state’s territory, they also endowed political and military elites, if not illiterate peasants, with a sense of national superiority.

The past possessed relevance for civil-military relations in the late twentieth century. Gregory Weeks writes of a widespread consensus in the military that the army either predates or coincides with Chilean independence; in other words, the army is so closely tied to the creation of the nation that the two can hardly be distinguished. . . . By asserting that its roots are sunk so deep in the national soil, the army has claimed a permanent and prominent position in national politics and so views itself not as a spectator but as an actor on the historical stage.¹¹ When Augusto Pinochet received the title Captain General of the Republic he relished the comparison to Chile’s early military governors, called captain generals, who enjoyed broad powers to found cities, distribute land, and organize the economy. The title also compared Pinochet to Bernardo O’Higgins, Chile’s great patriot who held the same title after independence from Spain. Pinochet, as is well known, viewed his sixteen-year dictatorship as entirely consistent with the role played by past military governors.¹²

Bernardo O’Higgins and the Portalian Paradigm

Two personalities dominate the nation’s achievement of independence from Spain and first steps as a fledgling republic: Bernardo O’Higgins and Diego Portales. Military journals devoted enormous attention to these two personalities: O’Higgins as the man who secured Chile’s independence from Spain, and Portales as the éminence grise who founded a stable political order that distinguished Chile from other Spanish American republics. In the military imagination, both statesmen guided their ungrateful compatriots through moments of peril.

The armed forces celebrate O’Higgins as a master strategist who foresaw the role that sea power would play in halting Spanish attempts to reimpose colonialism.¹³ To train army officers he established the Military Academy in 1817 and the Naval Academy one year later. In October 1818 the embryonic Chilean Navy captured a Spanish frigate, which forced the Spanish viceroy to assume a more defensive posture. He could not risk more royal ships falling into patriot hands.¹⁴ O’Higgins also wisely hired foreign officers,