The World: General Pinochet: Bloody Democracy

“Democracy carries within its breast the seed of its own destruction. There is a saying that ‘democracy has to be bathed occasionally in blood so that it can continue to be democracy.’ Fortunately this is not our case. There have been only a few drops.”

So said General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, the stern, ruddy-faced leader of Chile’s military junta, in an hour-long interview last week with TIME Correspondent Charles Eisendrath, which took place in Pinochet’s Defense Ministry office overlooking the gutted Moneda Palace. Pinochet was vague about the junta’s timetable for a restoration of civilian government. “We will keep the status quo for a certain time, and then grant more liberty. But we don’t want politics. The only party now is the Chilean party, and its members are all Chileans.

“The political parties have only been recessed. The government has no partisan politics because if we were to have parties right away, we would again fall into contamination. But our doors will remain open to politicians who have recognized abilities. The only condition is that these men do not mix their work with politics.”

Pinochet indicated that there might be restoration of U.S. corporations’ ownership of mines and factories taken over by Allende’s leftist government. An economic team, the general revealed, is studying “all possibilities,” including turning back nationalized firms to their former owners. “We will try to offer the greatest margin of liberty,” he promised, in determining just who gets what.

The junta leader heatedly denied charges raised in some quarters that the U.S. might have been involved in the coup. “We received help from nobody,” he snarled. “Put that all in capital letters. We did this ourselves, the true Chileans and the armed forces, with no help from the inside or the outside. “The movement was executed with the complete union of all the armed forces and carabineros. Each branch did its own planning, although only two or three people in each knew of it. This was necessary because they were in extreme danger of being denounced. The Marxist system kept the commanders under daily surveillance—our hours of arrival at our offices, for instance, and our activities. Telephones were tapped.

That is why we restricted knowledge [of the coup to a few] people.”

Why did the coup take place? “We did this,” Pinochet answered, “because the President had exceeded the constitutional limits of his office. He had made fools out of the judiciary and the legislative branch. On the one hand he told us [the military] that he did not want a civil war. Yet day after day our intelligence service reported the presence of arms even in his own house. While he said to us that he was the victim of civil war, we had documentation that he was preparing for one.”

When the fighting for Moneda Palace began, Pinochet went on, the junta asked Allende to surrender four separate times. “But the only thing he wanted was to gain time, possibly in the hope that our unity might break. We guaranteed his safe conduct out of the country. We even put off the air force attack for an hour to allow Señor Allende to consider his options.”

The presidential palace was attacked, Pinochet said, “because Allende was protected by a guard who had heavy weapons, even bazookas.” What about the prospect of a “reaction” to his junta from the dead President’s numerous and apparently well-armed supporters? Said the general, calmly but firmly: “We have taken the necessary precautions.”