The Death of Salvador Allende

Abstract

It was toward the end of 1969 that three generals from the Pentagon dined with five Chilean military officers in a house in the suburbs of Washington. The host was then-Lt. Col. Gerardo Lopez Angulo, assistant air attaché of the Chilean Military Mission to the United States, and the Chilean guests were his colleagues from the other branches of service. The dinner was in honor of the new director of the Chilean Air Force Academy, Gen. Carlos Toro Mazote, who had arrived the day before on a study mission. The eight officers dined on fruit salad, roast veal, and peas, and drank the warmhearted wines of their distant homeland to the south where birds glittered on the beaches while Washington wallowed in snow, and they talked mostly in English about the only thing that seemed to interest Chileans in those days: the approaching presidential elections of the following September. Over dessert, one of the Pentagon generals asked what the Chilean army would do if the candidate of the left, someone like Salvador Allende, were elected. Gen. Toro Mazote replied: “We’ll take Moneda Palace in half an hour, even if we have to burn it down.”