Article

Miguel Herberg's Story

A Native of GijÛn who Wormed-His Way into the Pinochet Camp

Miguel Herberg Hartung had a ring-side seat in the military coup that broughtdown Salvador Allend's constitutional government in Chile on 11 September1973. This reporter and film-maker, a native of GijÛn, wormed his way intothe lower reaches of the coup plotters in the months leading up to the armyrevolt and got wind of the preparations made for the uprising that was tocrush Chilean democracy; he was also a witness to the national andinternational connivance that made the military revolt possible.

Miguel Herberg's tape-recordings in the concentration camps in Atacamaenabled Amnesty International to identify and secure the release of upwardsof 400 of the 'disappeared".

Film-maker Miguel Herberg recorded self-incriminating confidences from someof those implicated in the civilian and military ramifications of the revoltagainst Salvador Allende's constitutional government, witnessed the influx ofmoney used as a slush fund in order to create a climate of destabilisationand, from the fifth floor of the Hotel Carrera watched the bombing of the LaMoneda palace and the introduction of a regime for which the price was 3,197victims - 2,095 lives lost and 1,102 citizens disappeared.

Herberg secured permission to enter the concentration camps in Pisagua andChacabuco in the Atacama desert, where he filmed and recorded the testimonyof the inmates. His film, made available to the Bertrand Russell Tribunal andAmnesty International, was not merely an indictment of the mass detentionmethods used by Augusto Pinochet's regime, but amounted to a safe conductpass for more than 400 inmates whom the Military Junta were thereby preventedfrom adding to the sinister list of the "disappeared". The film gave a voiceand a face to the nameless.

Herberg made seven separate trips to Chile. At the time he was working forthe Italian state broadcasters RAI. Prior to that he had worked for RTF inFrance. He had reported on Vietnam and had already managed to film a reportin the former German Democratic Republic. He was drawn to Chile by theAllende experiment and the rumours of sabre-rattling in Santiago. He arrivedin the company of Roberto Rossellini. "He was very highly regarded incultural circles out there.

"1 started by making contacts among the Chilean right. I passed myself off asa television producer. I was trying to make contacts that might help me tofind out what was in the offing", he now recalls. With an old Nikon, a Nagrasound-recording system and a 16 millimetre Arri-flex camera with direct sound(and with which he shot 135,000 metres of film) he started doggedlycollecting testimony on the basis of which he was going to piece together thehistory of the coup.

"Pinochet a stooge"

"Nobody wants to know the truth, as I see it. It looks as if the only desireis to see the buck stop with Augusto Pinochet and nobody else. But Pinochetwas merely a stooge. Other people laid the groundwork for the coup.

And Herberg contends: "The key men were General Alfredo Canales and a CIAagent by the name of Federico Willoughby MacDonald who acted as his liaisonwith the USA. But nobody mentions their names. Alfredo Canales was presidentof the far-right paramilitary group that set the preparations for the coup inmotion. Canales and MacDonald set up the chain reaction that was toprecipitate the coup. It was Pinochet who spearheaded it at the last moment,with the blessing - as my film testifies - of the Chilean archbishop SilvaHenriquez."

Miguel Herberg is 55 years old. He has just travelled to Asturias fromMadrid. His stay will be brief. He is to return to Madrid and thence to hishome in Rome. With him he carries the very same Nikon that he has carriedhalf way round the world. In Llanes he is to revisit his teenage haunts. Heis acting as guide to a young Madrid man looking for locations for his firstfull-length film. The sea off Cantabria is calm, but Chile is a churningocean. A quarter of a century on, Chile cannot forget. It is an open wound.The furious mass of Pinochet supporters taking to the streets to registertheir protest against Spain run into the lately emboldened masses of thepersecuted and the relatives of the disappeared, frenziedly hoping now to seethe General placed the dock.

But Miguel Herberg reckons that that is not enough. That the revolt thatclaimed Allende's life and those of his compatriots - and some Spaniards - in1973 was not the handiwork of just one man nor the product of a single will.

"There were two coups in Chile. The first was the Tacnazo, so called becauseit emanated from the barracks in Tacna. That revolt was engineered by GeneralViaux. But the highest-ranking figure in the Chilean armed forces at thetime, General Schneider, set his face against it and proclaimed his loyaltyto Allende's lawful government. Viaux ordered him murdered. The actual kllerswere two paramilitaries, Ivan Alverar and Erwin Robertson. I have the filmedconfession of both killers and of General Viaux from when they wereimprisoned in Santiago in Chile. They thought that I was one of their own. Ihanded the film over to Allende and it was used to bring them to trial. Ihave photos of Alverar and Robertson in their offices, with photos of Hitlerand France and Falangist symbols on the walls."

The sit-in at the Odeon

Herberg's life has been an extraordinary rag bag of adventures. He was borninto a well to do family, but from an early age was active on behalf of"social" disquiets. He lived in SomiÛ, in Llanes and in Madrid before Parisopened up a different vista to him. He admits that he is as much of ananarchist today as he was in his teenaged years and in his carriage and dressthe mark of his youthful rebellions remains: he was active in the anti-Francostudent movement, being arrested several times over by the Social-PoliticalBrigade, dodged military service in the 1960s and in May '68 helped occupythe Odeon in Paris.

"The second coup, with Pinochet at its head this time, came three monthsafter the Tacnazo. Viaux was let out of jail and moved to the Chilean embassyin Argentina, where he orchestrated the Condor Plan to arrest Chileanrefugees there and Argentinian refugees in Chile. Up until the 11 September1973 bombing of the La Moneda Palace, Herberg mingled with the far rightcircles conspiring against Allende. "I was winning their trust. There were nobig secrets between us. 1 am trusting you when I tell you all this, eventhough we have never met before now.

It was the same in Chile. You make connections that open up other connectionsto you. The only ones aware of my true intentions were Salvador Allende, hisdaughter Isabel and one of his co-workers, Rodrigo Rojas, who was alsokilled. "In June 1973, three months before the overthrow, SergiÛ OnofreJarpa, speaker of the Chilean Parliament, advised me to stick around in Chileuntil late August or early September because, he said, that was when thedefinitive blow would be struck. I have his words on tape. So Pinochet wasmerely the instrument of all the people promoting that coup."

Herberg's ambition is to get the magistrate Baltasar GarzÛn to include hisevidence as proof of the guilt of General Augusto Pinochet AND hisaccomplices.

"I have nothing left to say now. My weapons are my cameras and what I filmed.I have done my bit. I did my bit 25 years ago in Chile. My documents are atthe disposal of the courts. But Pinochet, I must insist, is not the problem.The real problem is where the courts refuse to venture. If the documentationliable to incriminate not merely Pinochet but others as well is rejected,then there is no real desire to get to the truth, to the nitty-gritty of theconspiracy. By my reckoning, all this fuss is just a way of drawing a veilover it all. There is no talk any more of what that regime was like. All thetalk now is exclusively of Pinochet."

The TV news is on and the talk is of Chile, Pinochet and GarzÛn. On to thescreen comes US secretary of State Madeleine Albright, stating her country'sdetermination to de-classify some secret papers on the Chilean dictatorship.But she speaks with caution and with reservations. "Nations have to striketheir own balance between justice and reconciliation", she states. MiguelHerberg Hartung is sceptical. "is anyone really going to dare to put formersecretary of State Henry Kissinger on trial? Kissinger, President RichardNixon, ITT, the copper multinationals like Anaconda or Kennecott, areimplicated in the coup. I have photocopies of documents wherein the UStelecommunications corporation ITT asks Nixon to sponsor the coup and a copyof a text from Nixon to Eduardo Frei, the then president of the ChristianDemocrats, telling him that a coup must be prepared. But no one wants that tocome to light. It is very easy to go after Pinochet. And of course whathappened has to be denounced. But Pinochet did not act alone."

He goes on: "It is very easy to go after the general in his dark glasseswithout disclosing the true scale of the conspiracy. Today there are Spanishfirms in Chile managing interests that at that time were being managed by USmultinational companies. And then there is the Church's part in the coup.Today the Spanish Church too has a strong presence over there. And thenthere's the US's involvement in the coup. I took photos of striking truckersprotected by the Carabiniers and how the Chilean hauliers were paid off tokeep the strike going and bring the country to a standstill. I tookphotographs of the dollar payments arriving in trunks from the USA at amilitary airport, unloaded by night. And I saw for myself how, in order tofuel inflation, the Hertz offices were offering up to 2,500 escudos against adollar when the exchange rate was one for one. Can we really expect the USAto show us its records on this? That would amount to self-incrimination."

What was it about Allende that made him so unpalatable to these factiousauthorities and to those segments of Chilean society that egged on the coup?"Allende wanted social change. His plan was almost Christian Democrat,although that term won't fit as he was an atheist. But no way was it arevolution. Allende was a doctor. He knew how to treat people. He had animpressive charisma. His charisma was his humanity. He had great powers ofpersuasion and an innate ability to explain things and make them understoodin a very straightforward way. Allende was not like Fidel Castro; he did notneed nine hour speeches to win people over. In 1972 1 had organised aninterview between Allende and Roberto Rossellini. Rossellini at that time wasa god. Allende spelled out his political programme to him. I filmed theirconversation.

In 1973 1 spoke with Allende at his home a several nights. I warned him, asdid lots of others, that the coup was in the offing. I even showed him therecorded testimony of those who had let me in on the preparations for theoperation. But he told me that I was a dreamer. 'We're not Spain', hesaid,'The Chilean army has upwards of a hundred years of democratictradition.'

Allende was never forgiven for his pledge that every Chilean child would havea half a litre of milk every day. That was the root of it. Unless that isunderstood, the rest is pointless. But these days nobody - not even Isabel,Allende's daughter - remembers these minor details which are crucial to anyunderstanding of what happened. Only two days after Allende made that pledge,LeÛn Villarin, the hauliers' president and another one of the couporganisers, halted every truck in the country so that the milk could not bedistributed. That was a very heartless decision.

Bombing

Miguel Herberg watched the bombing of the La Moneda palace from the CarreraHotel opposite, where he was staying. Some carabiniers opened fire on thehotel windows where we photographers had stationed ourselves. Any photos ofthe outside of La Moneda were taken from there. I have on tape the testimonyof some of the pilots who bombed the presidential palace. And it has to besaid that they did a great job because they bombed the right floor. Given thealtitude at which they were flying that must have taken a lot of training."

After the coup, Miguel Herberg went back to Chile again. This was to filminside the concentration camps and collect testimony regarding therepression. They let me in because they thought that I was trying to show howhumanely they were treating the prisoners. This was the camps in Piagua andChacabuco, army camps with huts in the middle of the desert, in 60 degrees ofheat.

In one of the films he made at that time Chile '73 o La historia se repite(Chile '73 or History Repeats Itself), Herberg interviews the militarycommanders in charge of the Atacama desert concentration camps which wereconverted from some old abandoned nitrate works by the labour of a largenumber of prisoners.

"The Atacama desert is the nearest thing to the Moon", the Asturian filmmaker notes. "The Pisagua camp was designed by a Jewish engineer who hadsurvived the Nazi concentration camp at Auschwitz and went on to specialisein building prisons. Escape was impossible. Their only way out was to swimthe ocean or cross the nitrate desert, which ends up burning you. All Iwanted was for the inmates to give me their names and to film as many as Icould so as to get the film out of the country and they could not claim thatthese people had simply disappeared. There were journalists there, andpeasants, workers, Allende's ministers, his personal physician DaniloBartulin, leftwing militants .. It was the Iast thing I did. After that Imade myself scarce."

He is reluctant to state how he left the country and who smuggled him out ofChile. Then he relents somewhat, but still gives no names and insists thatnone of this be made public. "I had been a war reporter for twelve years andhad learned something about how to protect myself. Once the generals woke upto the fact that I was on the other side they sentenced me to death for"betraying the trust of the Military Junta'. I made sure for the next threeof four years that I took some security measures."

Back in Europe Herberg circulated his film and handed the pictures over toAmnesty International and the Bertrand Russell Tribunal. From the BBC inLondon he interviewed Pinochet live. The general denied that anyone had beenthrown into concentration camps.

"History" - Herberg says - "is always repeating itself: people trying toforce others on to their knees and people who refuse to bend the knee."

Article by Javier Cuartas in Nueva EspaÒa of 7 December 1998, reprinted inBicel,(organ of the FundaciÛn Anselmo Lorenzo) No 8, March 1999, Madrid