Pinochet was so toxic in 1980 that not even Ferdinand Marcos would have him over for a play date. 

The military state was strangely similar to a bad monarchy. Positivism was a way around divine right, because the divine right of military dictators was not believable. It was ironic, though, because Masonic, free-thinking positivists who declared martial law for the common good had intended to do away with kings and queens and courtly butt-licking. But there it was, like a bad penny. They also had the CIA to back them up.

Freemasons thought their declarations were somehow scientific. There were no statistics, no lab reports and no peer reviews, but they said scientific with emphasis on all the syllables: SCI-EN-TIF-ic. The way Pinochet said communist: CO-MU-NIST-ta. That made it sound true. And Freemasons were pragmatic. Real reasons were a waste of time. It was all about power, comrade. And power was about ruthlessness. About having no moral compass and a clear idea of what you wanted.

On the other side of the Cordillera, Juan Perón had been a Freemason. He had a beautiful wife who was his greatest asset. She was a master of making things seem true, and making you want them by making you want her. Eva Perón even spoke in complete sentences. Buenos Aires was the Oxford of the Southern Cone. There were people who could read. And, because she was an actress, she always got the rhythm just right, (AR-GEN-TI-na). And, people believed her because she was beautiful.

Juan Domingo’s second wife had a nice chat with Pope Pius XII in 1947. And, with General Franco. On her Rainbow Tour of Europe. Power was all about putting on a good show. The boys in Europe were like gallant knights, vying for the honor of the erstwhile chaste Lady of La Casa Rosada.

King George VI, on the other hand, refused to officially receive her. Oh, a cup of tea, perhaps, but no state dinner. A problem of pedigree, apparently. An actress? From Junín? Wife of whom? The English monarchs were no strangers to courtesan intrigue. His Majesty had perceived the real reason behind the tour. She was there to put her husband on the map. To declare that Masonic Positivists could be as prestigious as Popes and Kings, comrade. And Spanish dictators.

King George wasn’t taking the bait. His scorn made a statement, too. Without saying anything, (after all, he had a frightful stammer) he let it be known that he considered Perón a villain. Not “a bad guy” villain. Something rather worse than that, I’m afraid. A man from the village. A commoner.

In England, Perón was considered the lackey of German Nazis, Spanish Dictators and Italian Popes. And, it might have had something to do with the Falkland Islands. Evita insisted on calling them the Islas Malvinas, comrade.

Evita took her disinvitation as a personal affront. She was already in Calais, gazing across the channel at the White Cliffs of Dover when she learned that Great Britain would consider her just a wealthy tourist and nothing more. Eva Duarte de Perón was not amused.

That was 1947. Perón’s government had offered asylum to 50,000 Nazi fugitives after the war. Maybe that’s why George didn’t want to have dinner. George did have German ancestors, lots of them, but it was too soon. And the surviving Nazis were still friends of Perón. They had arrangements.

And Perón’s woman was an Aryan blond, even though she was a cabaret singer. That part didn’t sit well with George, either. Evita called off the rest of her trip. She returned to Argentina tired, humiliated and indignant. Not unlike Augusto Pinochet’s humiliating return from a failed official visit to the dictator of the Philippines in 1980. With his proverbial tail between his dictatorial legs.

Washington had put backchannel pressure on Ferdinand Marcos to withdraw the official invitation. Gringos maricones. That used to be a slur against gays, in Chile. Now, it is a generic term for traitors. Someone who would stab you from behind. OK, it’s still an anti-gay slur.  

The experts at the State Department wanted to isolate Pinochet for having put bombs in the cars of former ambassadors who were about to testify before Senate Committees about things that had happened in Chile after the coup with the help of the CIA. (That’s all?) Nothing was ever random, comrade. There was always a reason.

Augusto underestimated how valuable the pretense of democracy could be. He personally ordered the murder of Orlando Letelier in 1975. The cause of death was massive hemorrhage due to double traumatic amputation. On Embassy Row in Washington, right under the noses of the self-righteous human rights hypocrites at the Capitol.

The man in charge of the mission was Michael Townley, a Chilean-American and a DINA agent. His team mostly consisted of Miami Cubans. Guys who had been to the Bay of Pigs. Guys who had worked for the CIA. The king-pins were Virgilio Paz and José Dionisio Suárez, friends of Frank Sturgis, a CIA black-ops specialist, whose real name was Francesco Angelo Fiorini. He was a Watergate burglar, a mafia man and, reportedly, a conspirator and participant at Dealey Plaza in ‘63. He was not a little fish, comrade. Someone else would fry for him.

It wasn’t the first time that Virgilio had lent a hand to the DINA. He had participated in the attempt to kill Bernardo Leighton in Rome in ’76. DINA was growing up to be just like CIA, but CIA wasn’t liking it. DINA was allowed to do whatever it wanted within the Chilean borders, but for international operations, CIA claimed exclusive rights. A monopoly on international violence.

Virgilio and José Dionisio each got twelve years for following orders. That was in ’91. They are out now, but they did get thrown under the bus. The spy business gets complicated. Bottom feeders were expendable. Natural law, comrade.

CIA had a long history of vaporizing its own. Especially, if its own were about to testify before Congress. The rate of apparent suicide and unexpected deadly heart attack in the days before testifying to CIA mischief on Capitol Hill was statistically outrageous.

Townley and his boys probably thought the authorities would turn a blind eye. That was how it was done. But this wasn’t CIA, comrade, it was DINA. And it happened right on Embassy Row. That looked bad. Townley forgot to practice plausible deniability. That was like safe sex for political assassinations. Pinochet’s boys got set down, not for murder, comrade, for stupidity.

Today, Townley lives in hiding. Witness Protection Program. He testified against everyone he knew in exchange for immunity. If you ever see him at Walmart, run away. Michael Townley was the son of Vernon Townley, CEO of Ford in Chile and intimate friend of David Atlee Phillips, agent emeritus of CIA black ops and foreign meddling. Michael married Mariana Callejas. She belong to the ultra-right wing militant group, Patria y Libertad. And, she was a DINA agent, too. They had a son named Brian who went to Saint George. I taught there, but he was in a parallel section, so I never had him in class. Brian was a gentle, innocent boy, probably, a changeling.

His classmates actually protected him from ever having to take responsibility for who his parents were and what they did for a living. It was hard for him to hide who he was, though. There weren’t many Townley’s in Chile. Most people knew the story and they were afraid of Brian, and that made him lonely. After his father went into hiding, Brian had to be afraid of the remnants of the DINA, too. They couldn’t find Michael, but everyone knew where Brian was.

In that intriguing spy-versus-spy world of his, Michael Townley couldn’t have asked for more. He had had a good run. He had been top dog in Patria y Libertad. He was there when they tried to assassinate Salvador Allende at his home on Tomás Moro street in ’72. He was identified as one of the “doctors” who “treated” Pablo Neruda at Clínica Santa María before he died in September of ’73, and he got away with it. He participated in the murders of René Schneider, Carlos Prats and Orlando Letelier. That last one was the kicker, though. After the Letelier murder, Pinochet lost the support of Washington, so Townley lost his immunity. He had to buy it back by ratting out his friends.

Augusto Pinochet had not been Washington’s first choice. He was not the smartest of the generals. Roberto Viaux was Washington’s favorite back in 1970, when the coup was supposed to have happened. But General Viaux and the boys at Patria y Libertad botched the kidnapping of René Schneider. Schneider fought back, they killed him and got caught in the process. That made Viaux a man with a criminal record.

Augusto just happened to be Commander in Chief in ’73, when the order came down to just do it. Actually, Pinochet was Allende’s choice. A fellow Freemason from Allende’s own lodge.

After Townley’s fuck-up in Washington, the State Department wanted Augusto to know he was expendable. That CIA was ready for a new man in Santiago. That was why Pinochet decided to make an official visit to the Philippines, to show the world that he was not a pariah. Ferdinand Marcos was worse than Pinochet, if all you did was count the tortured and the dead. But Marcos was an obedient puppet, one who never sent his men to plant bombs in Washington. Pinochet, well, he was an idiot.

Pinochet didn’t discover that his visit to the exotic orient would not be an official state visit until the presidential plane had landed in Fiji for fuel. Augusto had already been in the air for more than 20 hours. The State Department had requested that he not be allowed to land in Philippines, but Marcos had to save face. He offered to let his dictatorial colleague take a few days off, visit a nice tourist resort, maybe a pizza in the penthouse with a view of the bay, a night of imported whisky and elegant prostitutes with local dignitaries. But an official visit with validating photos and a byline in the news, no. The same thing George VI had offered to Evita. She didn’t accept, either.

Augusto did not go to the Philippines. He did an about-face at Fiji and marched home to the beautiful country on the corner, protected in the east by a bulwark of mountains and, in the west, by two thousand miles of not-so-pacific sea coast. He had been publicly humiliated, and he was angry.

When he arrived at Aeropuerto Internacional Comodoro Arturo Merino Benítez, the band played as he climbed down the stairs onto the tarmac, triumphantly. He was Cesar returning from Gaul. There was a crowd of journalists with microphones and cameras, waiting for him. There and then, he made a pronouncement. Another pronouncement. I am breaking diplomatic relations with the Philippines. He lost a lot of credibility, that day.

Augusto had a tendency to handle affairs of state in the first-person singular. Like Louis XIV, but Louis really was enlightened. Louis knew he was despot, not because God had willed it, but because he was powerful and ruthless. Augusto was ruthless enough, but not quite so powerful, and he had never read a whole book in his life. He said he was an intellectual because he read 15 minutes a day. Comic books in the bathroom, maybe.

Breaking ties with the Philippines was intended as a provocation. As if to say, OK, motherfuckers, let’s see if you can take me down. It would have been the perfect moment, comrade. The love story with the US had grown cold. Frío, frío, como el agua del rio. The real danger was not from the revolutionary left, right then. It was from the US Embassy.

March of 1980 was Pinochet’s weakest moment, and the clandestine resistance was starting to say, Pinocchio won’t be eating fruit-cake this year.

They really called him that. It was clever. It meant he was, not only a puppet, but a pathological liar. The hope was that Pinochet would not live until Christmas. That could have meant they hoped he would not survive politically, but it also could have meant that his assassination was in the works. CIA or FPMR, it didn’t matter.

But the resistance was weaker than Pinochet, and it wasn’t just the numbers. The DINA had decimated their ranks, but more importantly, they had broken the revolutionary spirit. People laughed about Pinocchio lying, but they were still afraid of him. With every passing day, Pinochet became less like Geppetto’s ingenuous marionette, and more like Chucky, the diabolical doll.

Argentina had three military presidents in a short period of time. Vietnam had a string of them, after Diem. I suspect that Washington decided to leave Augusto in place only because the University of Chicago’s free trade experiment was in progress. Milton Friedman’s boys didn’t want anyone to muddy the water in their austral terrarium because that might tarnish the credibility of their results. They were using Chile as a model to prove the effects of free trade and trickle down.

There was another reason, though. The State Department couldn’t find any other General capable of adding two plus two. Back then, people used to say that military intelligence was a contradiction in terms. All the generals who knew how to read, like Schneider and Prats, had been vaporized because they wouldn’t dance to the music. So, Augusto was still their best bet. If they could just keep him paid off and reined in.

Diplomatic relations with the Philippines remained broken until Corazón Aquino became President in 1986. It must have been strange for her to reestablish diplomatic relations with Augusto Pinochet. Considering that the return of democratic rule in the Philippines had cost her husband’s life.

Benigno Aquino was gunned down as he stepped off the plane onto the tarmac. As he returned from exile to challenge the dictatorship of Ferdinand Marcos. His murder was never investigated or explained. But most people didn’t need an explanation.

Benigno Aquino had been warned. He paid no attention. It was an anonymous bullet, fired out of loyalty to an absolute despot. The spilt blood of her husband detonated enough of a popular uprising to get rid of Marcos. Well, to convince the United States to allow Marcos to be gotten rid of. He was becoming a bad puppet, unmanageable and too powerful. And his wife, Imelda, had three thousand pairs of shoes. While thousands of people with no shoes died of hunger in the streets.

What happened in the Philippines was hardly a revolution, comrade. Under Corazón Aquino, the Philippines went back to being a peaceful client state with good conduct and big US Naval bases. The irony was that the Widow President made friends with the Chilean Widow-maker. At least she didn’t have to have tea with him. Diplomatic relations were reestablished through back channels. No smiling photos together. Embassies reopened quietly and soon it was business as usual. The Chicago boys were pleased. For them, it was all about business as usual.

There was high tea for Augusto in London, though. The honor denied to Eva Perón by King George VI in 1947 was bestowed on General Pinochet in 1999. Well, it wasn’t with the Queen, but the Former Prime Minister, Baroness Margaret Thatcher went to see the dictator emeritus at the London residence where he had been placed under house arrest.

In Spain, Judge Baltasar Garzón had charged him with the abduction, torture and murder of Spanish citizens. He had gone to Great Britain for medical treatment. Spain demanded his extradition, so the Home Office wouldn’t let him leave. But, they didn’t know what to do with him.

So, there was high tea. Don Augusto and Lady Margaret. It wasn’t their first time, and she didn’t even hold her nose. She did it publicly and unabashedly. She did it to show her personal gratitude for real technical support in the last colonial war against Argentina for the recuperation of the Falkland Islands.

Her Majesty’s Sovereign Empire and all that business. And Henry Kissinger’s doctrine of realpolitik: forget your principles, and watch out for your geographic, economic and political interests. An excuse for cozying up to tyrants.

It seemed ironic that Spain would have the gall to accuse anyone of cruelty in Latin America. The Spanish Empire had chopped off a lot of hands in the New World, and more than a few heads, too. Not to mention the smallpox. Maybe Judge Garzón was driven by a sense of ancestral guilt.