The General Explains

More than five weeks have passed since the government of Marxist President Salvador Allende Gossens was overthrown by Chile's military junta. Yet the bloodletting goes on. Last week 21 more Chileans were slain, 15 by firing squads and six in a battle with soldiers.

Three jurists, members of the U.N. High Commission for Refugees, stopped in New York en route to Geneva last week with an account of widespread killings in Chile. "Every day, until the eve of the departure of the commission," said a group statement, "corpses were pulled out of the Mapocho River [which runs through Santiago] or brought in great quantities to the morgue, or left to decompose in the places where they were executed, as if to reinforce the effect of the terror." The jurists did not report on the number of persons slain since the Sept. 11 coup; an estimate based on official figures puts the toll at 588, but observers estimate it much higher, probably more than 1,000. In its economic policy, the junta was moving to restore free enterprise. Junta leader General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte announced that more than 300 foreign and Chilean companies taken over without compensation by the Allende regime would probably be returned to their owners. The companies include around 40 U.S. firms--but not the three large American copper companies of Kennecott, Anaconda and Cerro Corp. Combined assets for the copper firms is more than $500 million, and Pinochet said that his government was ready to negotiate compensation for them.

Murder Plot. To defend the junta's harsh rule, Air Force General Gustavo Leigh Guzman granted a lengthy interview to TIME'S Benjamin Gate and Rudolph Rauch in his suburban Santiago home. Leigh, 53, the most articulate of the junta's four members, showed Gate and Rauch a Soviet-made automatic rifle that, he said, was part of a leftist cache of weapons. The weapons were smuggled into Chile, presumably for use in "Plan Zeta," a supposed plot to murder top military leaders and rightists. The military did not learn of Plan Zeta's details, said Leigh, until after the coup, when the document was found in a safe in the presidential palace. Nonetheless, military intelligence had got wind of the general outlines of the plan by monitoring telephone calls into the palace. "We started thinking," recalled Leigh, "what does Zeta mean? We thought it would be dangerous for the security of the country. But we were worried by a lot of other more important things. Allende was cheating us, cheating the Chilean people. The country was paralyzed--industry, transport, everything."

The spark for action came, said Leigh, on Sept. 9, when Socialist Party Secretary-General Carlos Altamirano admitted during a radio speech that he had urged sailors to disobey military orders. Leigh said he immediately contacted General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, the army chief of staff, now the junta leader, and told him: "I can't resist one bit more. This country is going to disaster. The only thing I ask of you is, don't shoot at my troops, don't shoot at my planes, don't fire on my bases." Pinochet's answer was a surprise. He said: "Gustavo, you are not going alone. I will go with you; the navy too."

The decision to launch a coup was not an easy one, claimed Leigh, since the military had generally remained outside Chilean politics for the past 41 years. "I tell you, we sweated a lot," he said. "It was like childbirth." The speed with which Allende's government was crushed surprised even the military. "Never did we think we would rule the country so soon," Leigh admitted. "We were not prepared. Now we are in a real emergency. We have no agriculture. We are spending $600 million for food alone. We have a $4 billion debt."

No Compromises. Chile also has one of the world's highest rates of inflation, more than 300% for 1973. To bring the spiraling economy under control, the junta has devalued by more than half the wildly inflated escudo, and ordered huge price increases for such necessities as sugar (400%) and cooking oil (500%), which had been subsidized at prices far below their market value. It canceled the inflationary (300%) wage increase in minimum salaries approved by Allende, but instituted a system of bonuses and benefits that has increased the minimum income to $42 a month.

"We are not promising any easy solutions," said Leigh. "We are not saying that now the nightmare is over. We have to work hard. We will do what the politicians in the past 50 years in this country did not do. We want to reconstruct the country with our own resources, our own effort. We have made no compromises with anyone. We have our hands clean to operate. We are not politicians and we are not trying to be."

Leigh defended the appointment of military delegates to control Chile's universities, saying that the schools had become "political factories. They didn't care one bit about studies. If they try to get involved in politics or with politicians, we'll close them down. They'll stay closed until they decide to study."

Leigh hotly denied that the junta was embarked on a campaign of terror. "We have not executed anyone who is just a politician. We have executed people who have planned assassinations or who fired against the soldiers after the coup. There have been no executions of those who were arrested or detained for whatever reason other than armed resistance." As for the thousands of political prisoners, Leigh said that "right now we just want to keep them out of contact with the rest of the people. Later they will have to go before the military court and it will have to decide what to do to them. I don't know what charges can be made against these people. Many of them, I think, will have to be freed."

Leigh, like the other members of the junta, insists that the military's plans for Chile are basically democratic. "We are not fascists," he said heatedly. "We are not Nazis." A commission has already been formed to write a new constitution, he said. "We want a constitution just for Chileans. We want to build up a constitution that would give us safeguards against the control of Marxists." Asked when Chile would return to representative government, Leigh replied: "I think a decade is too long. But I'm not sure we could do it in five years. We do not want to rule this country forever. But we feel that if we pay this amount of blood, we want to leave to our descendants and to all the Chileans a country which is free and democratic and with the participation of all the people."

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