Hugh O'Shaughnessy recalls a time 30 years ago when the chaotic Chilean democracy of Salvador Allende was overthrown by a military dictator who was to rule the country for 17 years
From my hotel room across the square I watched fascinated that fateful September 30 years ago as the Moneda presidential palace flamed up under the rockets fired by the Chilean air force. Over subsequent days it subsided into a glowing heap of ashes in the centre of Santiago.
On the evening of Tuesday, September 11th itself, we hotel guests congregated around the television in the hall behind steel shutters and watched Gen Augusto Pinochet, menacingly kitted out in dark glasses, tell his fellow countrymen that the junta was now in charge, politics were henceforth forbidden and there was a curfew on.
I had been in coups in the region before and was getting to recognise the sort of officers whom the Latin Americans call gorilas. President Salvador Allende, whom I had first met at a friendly dinner party in the Chilean capital seven years before and who never failed to receive me on my visits to the city, was dead.
At the same time there was cheer in the emphatic declarations of a leading conservative politician who assured me some days later in the Alameda Bernardo O'Higgins - named after the national hero whose father, the viceroy, was from Sligo - that the military were absolutely bursting to return power to responsible civilians like himself.
That view could not have been more wrong. Pinochet was to be president for another 17 years and effective controller of the country for several years thereafter.
With the benefit of hindsight it is easy to conclude that the overthrow of Allende, who had been elected to office and been president since 1970, was ineluctable.
This respectable bon vivant, radical medical doctor and freemason with his carefully clipped moustache, had antagonised the United States in the middle of the Cold War.
He had to be made to pay for such a crime, no matter that his Chile maintained better political rights and human rights and a freer press than in many countries of the so-called free world of anti-communist states such as Guatemala and Indonesia.
His government was a chaotic coalition of socialists, communists, Christians and social democrats who seemed keener on doing each other down sooner than advance on the road to socialism - if, per impossibile, they could agree on what socialism meant.
Some in the Popular Unity government saw a chance of controlling Chile's chronic inflation, others wanted to promote hyperinflation so as to comprehensively ruin the middle classes. Allende's overthrow, it began to be said 30 years ago, was set in the stars. (Thirty years too late, Luis Corvalán, the secretary general of the Communist Party in Allende's time, last week published a book in which he owned up to his share of sectarianism.)
But such a view overlooks important facts. The first is that the results of the elections held in 1973 showed that the Popular Unity coalition had maintained its electoral support and was more popular than in the presidential elections despite some shortages caused by hostile US measures.
In addition Chile was a republic where the armed forces prided themselves on their respect for the law. The president could also count on popular support abroad. And the economy, based as always on the massive export trade in copper, was literally copper-bottomed.
As in many similar situations, the lawful government suffered a run of ill-luck. Notable was the fortuitous triumph within the ranks of the armed services of those officers who had accepted the US view expounded since the days of president Harry Truman in late 1940s.
That view was that in the time of struggle between the communist forces of evil and the virtuous free world led by Washington, the duty of a Latin American soldier was to support US national interests and not those of his own government.
It was no accident that the US had supported the assassination in 1969 of Gen René Schneider, a leading "constitutionalist" who rejected the US discourse, and that Pinochet's coup followed within days of the resignation of Gen Carlos Prats, another "constitutionalist" from command of the armed forces in August 1973. (Unsurprisingly and with US approval, Pinochet had Prats and his wife blown up in Buenos Aires in 1974.)
Over those years the general proved himself to be the foxiest Chilean politician of the 20th century, outwitting the civilians and the church, running an international hit squad, maintaining good relations simultaneously with communist China and Gen Franco, enriching himself and his family by drug-dealing and plundering the state and even defying, when he chose to, his allies in Washington.
He was certainly foxy. But he was not intelligent. Had he been intelligent he would not have been responsible for the comprehensive disgrace of Latin American military dictatorships which had for long been tolerated with distant amusement by many.
At the time the Argentine military who seized power in 1976 were aghast at his conduct. In the Casa Rosada in Buenos Aires Gen Jorge Videla, himself a worse monster than Pinochet, explained to a group of us journalists how he and his colleagues would protect what they saw as Western Christian civilisation with more subtlety, without recourse to Pinochet's bombast.
They wouldn't, for instance, torture people such as the surgeon daughter of a senior Royal Air Force officer as openly as Pinochet's men had done. For years the Argentine military were successful, until the bibulous Gen Galtieri ruined things by invading the Falkland Islands.
Foxily feigning illness during his captivity in Virginia Water, Pinochet was allowed to fly away free by the Blair government.
It was not intelligent of him then to alight from his aircraft in Santiago and wave his crutch in the air in triumph. Nor could he take his seat in the senate and continue pretending he was too infirm to stand trial.
He became such a political leper than he tainted all those who had to do with him, from Margaret Thatcher to Rupert Murdoch. Today he has even become an embarrassment to Chilean conservatives.
Since Pinochet, Latin American military dictators are no longer looked on as jokes.