Santiago, 1 February 1973 – 27 January 1974: A Memoir by Piero De Masi

By Odie Lindsey

Or maybe it was history. An individual is no match for history.
Roberto Bolaño, By Night in Chile

Piero De Masi witnessed South African apartheid while posted to Durban, was in Prague in ’68, as Soviet tanks seized the streets, and in occupation zone East Berlin during the dismantling of the Wall. Long before his career as an Italian diplomat began, De Masi’s childhood was spent in part under Nazi and Italian Fascist occupation; for a time, his family hid out in a cave beneath an Umbrian hill town. He is no stranger to life carved by turmoil.

De Masi’s memoir, Santiago, 1 February 1973 – 27 January 1974, documents his tenure in the Italian Embassy in Chile during the ’73 coup, including the takeover itself, the death of President Allende, and the clampdown by the military dictatorship which followed. Given his senior role as charge d’affairs, the take is unique in that it offers both a street-level view of the unfolding coup (the “golpe”) and an insider’s overview of policy, procedure, and the geopolitics of the US-backed destabilization. He applies equal measure of attention to the fighter jet bombing of the presidential palace, the cartoons that were jammed onto every TV station after the junta hijacked the national media, and the diplomat’s indulgences he was offered, some of them from the black market. (For example, De Masi’s position entitled him to ample “confort,” meaning “comfort,” a.k.a. . . .toilet paper.) At times, formal protocol alone kept him from expressing the sharp difference between his personal politics and the views of other expats—unlike De Masi, some of the more prominent Italians in Santiago were decidedly pro-Pinochet. And of course there is the spectacle of force, and the terror of the Acontecimientos, the “Events” of the coup itself: roundups, raids, curfews, assassinations. When De Masi must travel to Santiago’s notorious National Stadium—a makeshift site of mass incarceration, torture, and execution—he gets caught in the crossfire between soldiers and resisters. Though terribly shaken, he feels some joy in the aftermath, since the “shooting meant that, more than two weeks after the golpe, there was still someone able and willing to resist.”

Most notably, perhaps, the memoir covers his decision to shelter scores of political dissidents within embassy walls, saving them from Pinochet’s notorious Death Squads. (De Masi’s role to this effect was fictionalized in the 1982 film Missing, and he features in Nanni Moretti’s 2017 documentary, Santiago, Italia.) The compound was crammed with up to 250 dissidents at any time, with De Masi arranging for the safe passage of nearly 1000, most of whom found asylum in Italy.

Having known him for nearly thirty years, I was delighted to learn of the reception for the memoir—in Italian national media, at an event with former Italian Prime Minister D’Alema, and as part of the Europe-wide screenings of the Moretti film. De Masi even returned to Santiago for a state reception at the Museo de la Memoria, where he met the children and families of the people he had saved. Also, Santiago brought dimension to my rereading of Bolaño when I returned to it last fall, as millions of Chileans returned to the streets, a legacy of the dysfunction bred by Pinochet’s regime.

Below, you will find an excerpt from the memoir (set on September 11, 1973, the day of the coup), prefaced by a short interview with Piero De Masi that I recently conducted. He supplied his answers via email from Namibia, Africa, where he is sheltering in place according to virus protocol, awaiting a return to Italy.

ODIE LINDSEY: How “fast” was the coup in ’73? At times, it seems it was inevitable, as if Allende was doomed to be challenged from the start. Yet the event itself appears to have moved at lightning speed.

PIERO DE MASI: If not inevitable, the coup was very likely to occur since the beginning of Allende’s government. The right wing, together with the moderate center, were the majority in the country, and though with different motivations, they both opposed the new President—a fairly mild social-democrat—and his coalition, which included among others left-wing extremist factions threatening the political and social balance of the Chilean society.

For a long time, the military had kept their traditional “professional and neutral” position until Parliament’s anti-government majority approved in August 1973 a resolution in which the legitimacy of the Government was questioned. That was the legal pretext for the military to intervene in the political battle that had shaken the country.

What was totally unexpected was the brutality of the coup. Those who were for the military intervention propended for a temporary suspension of [politics as usual], followed by a quick return to the “normal situation,” within the consolidated schemes prevailing in Latin America at that time. Very soon the military showed an attitude far from those expectations, and the new system, based on violence, terror, and fear, stayed in power for fifteen years. 

OL: Given your experience in Prague, and perhaps during WWII, were you conditioned to the circumstance of the coup? To the velocity, and related chaos, and the very notion of occupation? Or were you learning on the spot?

PDM: I mainly learned on the spot. What was happening around me isn’t usually part of the training one gets to become a diplomat. And yet the atmosphere of Santiago in those first months of military rule, the fear one could perceive in the population, the total silence in those curfews starting at 10 p.m. every night, reminded me of a special period of my childhood in Rome when, after the armistice between Italy and the Allies on September 8, 1943, the Nazis occupied central and northern Italy. Same silence in the streets, same fear, same brutality from an army holding a total power of life and death on the entire population. Those were my feelings.

Obviously my tasks were different now in Santiago, and I needed to “invent” at every moment my own rules of action as I had no texts to consult, nor had I instructions from my government, which was itself probably unable to “invent” something to instruct me about.

OL: Moving from the coup to the current pandemic: Are there any parallels between our current battle with the novel coronavirus and the historic events you have witnessed? Can you offer any prognosis about the legacy of this particular upheaval?

PDM: I sincerely wish this event might leave a positive legacy to the world. From my forced exile in this remote part of Africa, I read every day what politicians, historians, philosophers, poets, and other beautiful minds write about the changes this human catastrophe might bring to our way of living, to the organization of the economy and the social relations—and all that.

Yes, let us hope this will happen. But let me be a little skeptical about it. Let the virus fade out as it came and you will see everything go back where it was before: that [life as we know it] was not an occasional settlement, but rather the final outcome of centuries of fights, inventions, struggles, and victories of the whole humankind. There is no room for utopia, I’m afraid. I hope I’m wrong, anyway.

OL: You spent much of your career posted away from Italy, and I know you are presently away from home (and with return travel suspended). How is your relationship to home, especially now?

PDM: From where I am now, I try to follow closely the events that are occurring in Italy. It is a tragedy, so sudden and unexpected that it is extremely difficult to seize its actual dimension. Fortunately my close relatives and my friends are all well, at least for the moment. Personally, I feel somehow guilty for not being there to share my country’s destiny. This reminds me of some people who said at the end of WWII, “I don’t know, I was in Switzerland . . .”

However, I only wish to go home soon and see there what it will take to go back to a normal life.

Originally published in Italy, Spain, and Chile, the following chapter of Santiago, 1 February 1973 – 27 January 1974 is from a working English translation (courtesy of Robert Elliot, and Sharrilyn Whiting De Masi).

Chapter X

I was up by six. The appointment with Matteucci was for eight o’clock, but I’ve always liked to take my time in the morning: coffee, bathroom, dressing, breakfast—all things I like to do slowly.
I was already in my tennis clothes when the phone rang. Roberto Toscano’s voice assailed me, without any preliminaries: Aren’t you listening to the radio? It’s the coup!
I turned the radio on; there was great confusion on all the stations—the crackle of gunfire, attempts to explain what was going on. All this commotion, though, meant that this time it was more serious than the Tancazo of the twenty-ninth of June. Now it was the bulk of the armed forces that was moving.
I rang Roberto back, and we decided to go to the Embassy to follow developments from there.
It was early in the morning on a late winter’s day; the streets were a blue-gray colour, the few vehicles on the road speeding away hysterically and the pedestrians walking quickly. My heart raced as I drove; I was in a rush to get to the Embassy, if for no other reason than to live that moment—evidently a crucial one—with the others.
I arrived. Roberto was there. He’d come with Matteucci in the car—using public transport that morning was out of the question. Damiano Spinola was there, and the others all arrived one or two at a time.
I had the Philips transoceanic radio I had bought in Strasbourg in the office and we started listening to the various stations. Little by little the general picture took shape: the navy had rebelled in Valparaiso before dawn; the army had sprung into action in Santiago and besieged the Moneda Palace, where Allende and his followers were barricaded, returning fire. The armed forces’ action was coordinated, involving not only the army and the navy but also the air force and the Carabineros. The four chiefs had formed a military junta and were operating jointly. That was all we knew. What was happening in the rest of the city and in the other towns wasn’t clear.
We looked at each other in dismay; what everybody had dreaded so much was actually happening. I wrote a very short telegram to the Ministry, to let Rome see that we were on the alert, but when the teleprinter operator designated the zone and pressed the send button, the strip of yellow punched paper stopped after a couple of clicks, and we knew that communications to the outside had been cut off.
As time went on, many of the left-wing radio stations went silent, one after the other—a sign that they had been attacked and shut down. Only a couple of them remained active, and on these stations, at about nine o’clock, Allende spoke. As always, despite everything that was happening, the Canción Nacional[1] was played all the way through and seemed never-ending. We listened to his words, calm and without rhetoric, as if, from his besieged palace, he was talking about what was by now something from a history book. “Trabajadores de Chile, estas son mis últimas palabras”[2], he said. I could feel a lump in my throat—we knew it really was the end.
After all the confusion, shouting, and shooting, the reduced number of radio stations gradually started to be inundated with military proclamations. By now the golpe had succeeded and the situation needed to be brought under control. Among the many barked-out orders, there was one telling the population to stay indoors, announcing an indefinite curfew during which it would be forbidden to go out of the house.
We decided to send all the staff away, close the Embassy, and go home ourselves. Roberto suggested I go to their house, seeing as I would have been by myself at home for the entire duration of that toque de queda indefinido[3].

The Toscanos’ house was in a middle-class residential district, on a long, straight street of bungalow-type houses with gardens, all more or less the same.
We found Francesca in a very anxious state about everything that had been happening. The people from the other houses had come out into the street and were talking excitedly about the events; you could see they were pleased – “se acabó la pesadilla!”[4], someone said.
The radio channels kept on reporting what was happening. The military had given Allende an ultimatum to surrender and come out of the Moneda, or else the palace would be bombed. But there was no news of the president’s reaction.
Then, towards eleven, we heard the sound of aeroplanes and went out into the garden just in time to see two fighter jets circling quite high overhead. Then they dived, one after the other, towards the city center, and we couldn’t see them anymore. Less than a second later, we heard two very loud explosions and then, nothing. It was clear that the promise to bomb the Presidential Palace had been kept.
We went back into the house, we and the other people in the neighbourhood; perhaps they weren’t so exultant now, having seen the methods that the country’s new rulers were beginning to use.
The TV gave the country orders. Countless images of military men in battle gear filled the screens, grimacing menacingly with their helmets right down over their eyebrows, screaming out again and again what in those few hours had become the gospel of the coup. Bando No. 1: All things were forbidden. Anybody who disobeyed was threatened with death, everything was abolished, and, naturally, the new order was established. There was no footage of the fighting, and nothing was said about the fate of Allende. The perpetrators of the coup put the entire country in a state of shock, terrorizing people. Every now and again, there was a break, as if to let those sinister announcers get their breath back, in which there were cartoons: Speedy González, Watchdog, Coyote and Roadrunner, Pussy Cat—the best of entertainment for simple minds. Implicit was a statement on how public opinion was to be managed: the giving of orders and the deactivation of the brain.
Thus we spent the afternoon indoors, watching TV and talking about that bizarre sequence of events, still incredulous. To add to our state of bewilderment there was the news, given almost as an afterthought amid the whirlwind of fragmented announcements, of Allende’s death. Nobody bothered to say exactly how the president had died. Probably those military minds hadn’t decided yet whether it suited them better to say that Allende had taken his own life or been killed by them.
We made a few phone calls to the leading figures in the Italian community to ask whether there were any victims or wounded among our fellow nationals. They told us they were all well. They didn’t tell us they were celebrating, but it wasn’t difficult to guess that they were, knowing them. That evening we stayed glued to my short-wave radio, which, thankfully, we had brought with us from the Embassy. We realized that the Chilean coup had become the event of the day; everybody was talking about it. Naturally, there was nothing we didn’t know already. An outburst from Radio Moscow indicated there were seven hundred thousand dead, which, despite the gravity of the situation, made us smile because the number seemed preposterously high.
Meanwhile, international telegraph and telephone communications were still cut off, and so we were unable to talk to anyone in Italy. Nor was there any news about a possible end to the curfew, in force continuously since eleven in the morning.
That evening we ate and drank lots of wine, given the understandable need to boost our morale, or perhaps to dull our senses and then sleep on it.
They put a camp bed in the living room for me to sleep on, in a pair of Roberto’s pajamas that were obviously much too tight.
And so ended the eleventh of September.

[1] National anthem
[2] Workers of Chile, these are my last words
[3] Curfew without an indication of its end
[4] The nightmare came to an end!

Odie Lindsey is the author of the forthcoming novel, Some Go Home (July 2020), and the story collection, We Come to Our Senses, both from W. W. Norton. He is Writer-in-Residence at the Center for Medicine, Health, and Society at Vanderbilt University. More at oalindsey.com.

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