Two Allende Supporters, Two Nights in Jail and a Gun

Related The Radical Walls of Santiago

Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman recently penned a piece in The Guardian about a night in February 1973 when he was arrested with some friends while painting a pro-Allende mural on a city wall. This was the final months of socialist Salvador Allende’s presidency, and crucial congressional elections were only a month away. The right-wing opposition, aided by the CIA, was hoping to win the two-thirds majority needed to impeach and remove Allende. The campaigns on both sides deployed squads of young supporters to cover Santiago in wall paintings and posters.

Dorfman (“Death and the Maiden,” among many other works) was prompted to recount his night in jail by the half-century anniversary of the bloody military coup that overthrew Allende and imposed the 17-year iron dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Fearing the worst as he was being handcuffed, Dorfman ended up being surprised by the treatment he and his comrades were given:

The sergeant gently informed us that we were under arrest, charged with vandalism and disturbing the peace. He seemed oddly paternal, as he and his men ushered us into the back of the van that would transport our group to the nearby police station. There, once again with the utmost courtesy, we were locked in a large cell already brimming with other pro-Allende supporters who had been caught that night.

Some of our fellow prisoners had been in this situation before and were not surprised that, instead of being beaten to a pulp, we were being treated in this considerate manner. It had been like that since Allende had won the presidency in 1970. The days when the national police force had maimed and killed activists were over.

And so, instead of nursing wounds, we spent the night discussing our young, nonviolent revolution until we were released in the morning with only an admonishment: We must not continue to deface public and private property.

Nothing in Dorfman’s experience changes the record of Chile’s military police — known as The Carabineros — inflicting brutal violence on leftist protesters. Dorfman recounts how he had to run for cover in 1965 when the police moved in to violently break up a demonstration against the U.S. invasion of the Dominican Republic. That history of police abuse continues to the present. When massive demonstrations shook Chile in 2019, Carabineros viciously attacked protestors with tear gas, water cannons, batons, rubber bullets and — most notably — pellets aimed at head level that injured the eyes or blinded some 200 civilians.

The Chilean police treated Dorfman and his fellow leftists with perfect courtesy that night in 1973 because they were under orders from Allende’s leftist government to curtail unnecessary violence and excessive use of force.

Six months after Dorfman’s night in jail, the police station he was detained in, as with every other police station in Chile, became a center of terror and torture as Pinochet consolidated his dictatorship. It’s a reality that Dorfman acknowledged from exile after he fled Chile to save his life.  

A few months after Dorfman’s detention, in May of 1973, I was working as the English translator for President Allende’s speeches and writings when I, too, was arrested by the same Chilean Carabineros. 

Earlier that day, a pro-fascist commando group blew up Chile’s main oil pipeline and Allende declared a state of emergency and stepped up security measures.  I had gone out that evening with a girlfriend and another couple and had an excellent dinner at an upscale restaurant.

As we were heading home in a taxi, we saw a Carabinero checkpoint a couple cars ahead of us.  “Not to worry,” said the taxi driver. “They are only looking for guns. No problem.”

Problem was, I had a gun in my suit jacket.

Some months before I had bought a couple of cheap Argentine .22 revolvers for a grand total of $6 each. And when I went out late at night I sometimes pocketed one for self protection. Like the night in question.

Problem was, I had a gun in my suit jacket.

As our car approached the checkpoint, my female companion suggested I give her the gun, which she could put in her panties as it was doubtful she would be patted down.  Of course, she was right, but I was afraid. I figured if the cops found a gun that was hidden, it would be twice as bad.

I was patted down (the women were not) and gently arrested — no cuffs — and put into a paddy wagon to be watched over by an older cop. “What a pity,” he said. “You know there is a mandatory two-year prison sentence for carrying a gun.” That was true and I was not very pleased to remember that. While I had legally registered the gun, I did not have a carry permit. 

I was taken to a small police station downtown, about six blocks from my apartment.  It was a quiet, sleepy place at this late hour toward midnight.

I was not cuffed. I was not put in a cell, but asked to sit on a bench. I mulled over the possibility of telling the sergeant that I was Allende’s translator but decided not to. Relations between the armed forces and police and the government had become quite strained and I wasn’t sure how that info would cut.

Instead, I told the sergeant the basic truth. The gun was registered. I carried it only for self defense. And I was not a criminal.

“Oh, I know for sure you are not a criminal,” the soft-spoken thirtysomething sergeant answered, holding up my revolver and sniffing the barrel. “No criminal would buy a piece of shit like this.  You’re lucky you never fired it as it would have blown off your hand.”

He then rolled his chair back a bit and opened up his top desk drawer where he had a stash of about a dozen of the same model revolver. “How much did you pay for it,” he asked with a smile.

“Six bucks.”

“Ha! You got fucked,” he said.  “$4 is the right price. $5 tops.”

He then proceeded to tell me that he was new in Santiago, that he was recently transferred from the south but that he was enjoying the big city and the interesting people he was meeting. People like me!

We chatted for about 10 minutes and then without saying anything, he picked up an eraser and struck my name and ID number from the station watch log. Then he offered me a phone to call someone to pick me up. I am telling you the truth when I say he seemed a tad forlorn as he was clearly enjoying the conversation with me and probably wanted more company.

As I was leaving, he gave me his card with his home address in the south on the back. “I go back home next month,” he said. “If you ever come through, look me up and we’ll do a barbecue.”

I have no need to apologize for my strong bias against Chilean police. I have plenty of receipts. They acted like uncaged animals during the dictatorship and, on several occasions, I bathed in their tear gas and water soaked with CS gas and fended off foot cops wildly swinging batons.  In the early days of the dictatorship, I saw a group of Chilean police sodomize a young protester with a baton in plain daylight.

Nor have the Chilean police been reformed or restructured since the dictatorship ended 30 years ago. In 2019, when Chile was struck by a “social explosion” that brought millions to protest in the street, the Carabineros responded with vicious violence.  Santiago was shrouded for days with tear gas. Demonstrators were met with small tanks, blasts from mobile water cannons, platoons of baton-swinging cops and volleys of rubber bullets and — worse of all — pellet fires at head level that blinded or injured the eyes of some 200 civilians.

When I was in Chile in January and saw so many riot-equipped Carabineros deployed in buses and transports around the city, I swelled with the usual disgust.  And, yet, in my darkest moments regarding police — be it in Chile or here at home — I, too, remember that peculiar, rather wonderful encounter I had the night I was arrested and then released.  I tell myself that quietly, unbeknownst to us, there must be many other police like the sergeant who dealt with me, police who are maybe looking for an opportunity to act more humanely, if permitted to do so.