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Less than ten days after he had been appointed Public Works Minister with responsibility for settling the truckers' strike, Air Force General Cesar Ruiz Danyau resigned, charging that he had not been given enough authority. Anti-Allende factions within the military then forced General Carlos Prats Gonzalez, the army's commander in chief, to resign as Minister of Defense. He was replaced by General Pinochet, now president of the junta.
The reunited Christian Democrats greeted the coup with jubilation. They issued a junta-approved statement deploring the violence but offering support for Chile's new leaders. The party statement went on to note that the Christian Democrats were certain that power would be returned "to the sovereign people" as soon as "the burdensome tasks of the junta have been completed."
Tragic History. Later in the week, the new Interior Minister, General Bonilia, promised that Chile would be returned to civilian rule, but did not say when. Most observers assumed that the military would be in power quite some time−long enough, at any rate, to try to wipe out whatever vestiges of Marxism remain in the country.
Democracy has all too often been the victim of South America's tragic history of violence and upheaval. Today fully 70% of its 200 million people an subject to some kind of military rule. In many cases the officers ousted leftist or populist leaders, such as Brazil's Joao Goulart or Guatemala's Jacabo Arbenz, who had tried to change their nation's rigidly oligarchic structures. Allende is the latest in this line of ambitious but unsuccessful reformers.
Chile's military junta succeeded in its basic goal, getting rid of Allende, but the real question is: At what cost? As a spiritual inspiration to leftists, Allende may prove to be more potent dead than alive. On the other hand, his overthrow may convince radicals that a violent revolution, repressing all dissent, is the only sure way to socialism. Certainly this "decent, godless man" will never be forgotten by the poor of Chile, who regarded him as a secular savior. Which means that the next time a popular Marxist leader appears in Chile, his path to power may not be quite so peaceful.
* One building attacked by troops in the first flurry of fighting was Communist Party headquarters in Santiago, shown on TIME'S cover with an Allende banner across its facade.