Coop Scoop: My .22 and Me. Reporter War Stories #2

Getting caught with a gun and getting lucky with the Chilean Police

I wrote a few weeks ago that I would be sporadically posting occasional adventurous incidents I have collected during my 50 years as a reporter/writer. This is the second in the series and it dates back to Chile in 1973. Enjoy! Or not. I am just grateful to still be here to tell the stories. Whatever you do with this edition, make sure to see the short video at the end of a cameraman filming his own murder by a Chilean soldier.

This is a modern Smith & Wesson .22 revolver. A fine if compact sidearm. Not nearly the stopping power of Dirty Harry’s .44 Magnum but at close range in the right place just as lethal. And it’s like a Howitzer if you are a rabbit or a squirrel. A minor nuisance if you are a bear.

When I lived in Chile in the early 70's I had, instead, the worst, saddest, most pathetic .22 ever made in history. I think it was called an Argentine Star, a six shooter with a snub barrel and it cost me exactly $6 on the black market, and I got ripped off. Comparing it to the gun pictured above, it was a jalopy compared to a Rolls Royce.

Even though I worked then as a translator for Chilean President Salvador Allende, that was not the main reason I had the revolver. I had it mostly because I was a dumb and reckless 22 year-old kid.  A smarter kid would have had a better gun. :) Thank God it wasn't. The crappy revolver saved me some hard prison time that would have probably ruined my life and created a major political scandal.

Here's the story:

Lest you think ill of me, I had some legit reasons to carry. After all I worked for a Socialist president at a time of great social unrest and turmoil. And there were literally armed fascist gangs running in the streets. And being a good citizen and all, I did legally register the gun with the Ministry of Defense as required by law. I did not, however, have a permit to carry. And I can't imagine I would have ever used the gun except to maybe throw it at somebody.

On a night in late May 1973, the evening before Allende was to deliver that year's equivalent of the State of the Union speech, the fascists had blown up a major oil pipeline. Allende declared a state of emergency, putting more militarized carabinero police and some regular army units out on the street.

It really wasn't that big of a deal.  I had finished translating an advance copy of the speech that afternoon and I spent the evening with friends at a very good French restaurant called La Cascade.  On the way home, around midnight, our taxi driver spotted a police roadblock and check point. No problem he said. “No sweat, as long as nobody in the car had a gun.”

Um….

As we slowly rolled toward the checkpoint with a few cars in front of us, a female friend with us told me not be stupid and to give her the gun. She would put it in her panty stockings crotch and the macho Chilean cops would never check there.

I did my on-the-spot risk assessment and decided against the Crotch Option.  I figured there was, indeed, little chance the police would pat down a car full of happy half-lit gringos. And if they did, it would be easier to talk my way out of it all rather than tick them off by hiding it on a girl.

That didn't work out quite so well.

About three minutes later, the very polite cop who very gently patted me down and removed the pistol from my coat pocket also gently put me in a waiting paddy wagon and was nice enough to neither cuff me nor take my wallet.

So there I sat with a couple of drunks and a very nice older and rather bored cop keeping an eye on us, still hoping of smooshing my way out of this jam. 'Too bad," he said to me. "With the new gun control law, you're going to do a mandatory minimum of two years in prison. And then they will deport you."

Christ, I remembered. He was right. To tamp down the then-current right-wing propaganda that Allende was building a secret leftist militia, the president had recently signed a conservative-sponsored and draconian gun control law that imposed a maximum minimum of two years in prison for illegal possession of any firearm (can you imagine the U.S. government doing the same?).

Now at this point, you might ask me, why didn't I just identify myself as a translator for the president and pull rank and tell the cops to piss off? Answer: that was unthinkable. First of all, it was plain against the law to have the gun on me. Second, nobody knew where the political sympathies of a supposedly independent police force resided (most probably to the Right) and the risk was just too great. Saying I worked for Allende might have made things worse not to mention generate some screaming headlines.

So I felt obligated to take one for the team. If the cops reacted poorly to any truthful story about working for the Prez it would make a wonderful scandal for the right-wing tabloid press. Not exactly in scope like the Hunter Biden saga but bad enough.

Round about 1 a.m. I was taken to the sleepy little 6th Precinct station about five blocks from my apartment in downtown Santiago. It was a tiny, poorly-lit shabby place with maybe one holding cell. The watch commander sat up front at an old wooden desk in the dead quiet room, with a few cops milling around behind us. The commander was about 35, pale, small and lithe. Very soft-spoken and quite a gentleman.  I was not jailed, but merely asked to wait on an otherwise empty bench. Soon, the desk sergeant called me up to the desk and, in pencil, wrote my name and I.D. number onto the night blotter or log and then told me to go back to the nearby bench -- still uncuffed.

A few minutes later he called me over in front of him.

'What were you doing with this gun?" he asked gently.

Here I had to decide to play the Allende card or the American card. I did the American thing.

I opened my wallet as if looking for a non-existent business card and hoping I did not have anything it that identified me as working in the presidential palace. And even though Chilean street police were notoriously immune to bribes, I let him see a bunch of $20 bills in my wallet and maybe, just maybe, he would bite. With the hyperinflation raging at the time, $20 was about the equivalent of a teacher’s monthly salary. I was probably holding his year’s salary on me.

"You know carrying this money is dangerous," I said, "The gun was only for self-protection. It's even registered. And I am not a criminal."

"Yes," he answered with the hint of a smile. "But you don't have a permit. I also KNOW you are not a criminal.” And he told me to put my wallet back.

"I know you're not a criminal because a criminal would never buy such a piece of shit gun," he said, sniffing the barrel. "You're lucky you never fired it. It would have melted in your hand."

He then opened his top desk drawer and pointed to the dozen or so identical pop guns that had been seized and stashed. “What did you pay? Like $4 or $5?," he asked.

"Six," I sheepishly answered.

"You got ripped off, my friend," said the Sergeant. "Please sit down again."

After about ten minutes of shuffling through papers and files and me the atheist trying to remember any prayer I could, he called me back to the desk. As I watched in relieved disbelief, he picked up his pencil and studiously erased my name and I.D. number from the arrest log. He picked up my gun, smiled and said "Una mierda," a piece of shit.

He handed me the phone and told me to call somebody to come take me home. 

While I waited 15-20 minutes for my ride to come, we amiably chatted. I brazenly lied and told him I was a sports reporter which triggered a brief review of the Colo-Colo and University of Chile soccer teams.

He told me he recently came from a desolate rural posting near his hometown in southern Chile and how happy he was to be in the big city and meet interesting people…like me! He then grilled me on well-known Americana like Disneyland, Hollywood and his baseball idol, Willie Mays who he thought was a better athlete than then Chilean soccer star Carlos Cazely (who ten years later turned out to be a very brave public critic of the Pinochet dictatorship). Carlos, 7 months older than me is still alive at age 73.

The Great Carlos Cazely

I thanked my stars I knew nothing about guns and had not bought a more serious one. Being a dumbass kid worked in my favor that night. I gave him a big and sincere hug goodbye and he told me to come visit him on the farm when he went on vacation break the coming December and made sure I noted down his address. I would have had not the Pinochet coup come in September.

There's a Part II to this story, And it gets even freakier.

The feared and brutal Chilean Riot Police 1973.

About a month after my temporary arrest, and about 10 weeks before Pinochet's military coup and overthrow of the Allende government that I worked for, there was an attempted coup staged by a single small Chilean tank regiment tied directly to an avowedly neo-Nazi group. I awoke that morning of June 29, 1973 to loud gunfire and exploding tank rounds. I switched on the radio and heard it was coming from ten blocks down the street where the tank regiment was amassing in front of the Moneda presidential palace.  It was an incident that came to be know as "El Tanquetazo."

I lived on the 17th floor of a new high-rise whose tenants were an oddball mix of middle-class conservatives, government types like myself, some foreign journalists and a lot of lefty exiles from Argentina and Uruguay (my neighbors were exiled Tupamaros) and the East German news wire offices were on the floor beneath me.

Our building was on the main city artery, the Alameda, and the entrance to the building was about 50 yards off the street and down a flight of stairs. On that bottom floor of our complex was a string of offices that belonged to the government’s Foreign Ministry.

As I looked out on the street from my high-rise window, and trying to follow the news on the radio, all of a sudden I saw a bus of riot police pull up in front of out building. The helmeted and heavily-armed cops piled out of the bus and formed a skirmish line on the sidewalk, sealing off our building from the street.

The big problem here is that I could not possibly know what side these cops were on and most likely they did not either and would wait to see the outcome of the coup attempt down the street.  The radio said nobody other than the one tank regiment was supporting the coup, so maybe these police were here just to protect our building and the Foreign Ministry offices. But they might have come to seize the government offices below and then raid the whole building. What to do?

Before I could decide, I saw a British/Italian couple who were very good friends of mine walk up to the police line, obviously coming to see me, but they weren't allowed to pass.

Still being a dumb kid, I immediately grabbed the elevator, rushed to the ground floor and was headed toward the police line with the intent of telling them to let my friends through.

As I got to the top of the stairs where the cops were lined up on the street, one of the police stopped me with a sub-machine gun pointed at my chest. "Identify yourself!" he commanded in Spanish. It was a strange request; you sort of expect someone to say something more like where are you going or what are you doing?  But identify yourself? Not such an easy question. I instinctively began to mumble and explain that I was trying to catch up with my friends he had just turned away.

The cop pulled the bolt back on his machine gun, jammed it into my chest and even louder said, "Identify yourself!"

I told him, OK, not to shoot me, I was going to slowly reach for my I.D. card. Which I did and then handed it to him.

He studied my card for a moment, pulled his riot mask up and said, "Wait. I know you."

"No, sir, you don't," I said totally bewildered. "We've never met."

"Yes, we have. I can't believe this shit," the cop sputtered. "You're the American who was arrested with a gun a few weeks ago in the 6th Precinct."

"No, sir, that's not me," I lied, ready to pee my pants.

"Yes, you are!," he retorted. "I was on guard duty that night. How the fuck are you not in jail? How did you get out?"

Before I could answer, he took my I.D. card (that had my address on it), put it in his pocket and told me to get back in my apartment and he would deal with me later.

Gawd, of all the gin joints…. I had run right into a cop who saw me got busted with that pop gun revolver! Now he had my I.D. and I figured as soon as the coup got completed he'd be kicking my door in and coming for me.

I scurried upstairs to my apartment and pulled a Socialist Party poster off my front window. I grabbed what money I could and took the elevator downstairs.

When I got down to our little residential lobby, the hired watchman had empowered himself to lock the glass doors and told me nobody could come and go. He was a rickety old man with no real authority except over the mops and brooms and I was a strapping 5 foot 3 inch 155 lb. youth.

I grabbed him by the collar and told him to either open the door or be prepared to get thrown through it.  This poor old man took the former course, fortunately. I doubt if I could have even lifted him.

I went out our back door that could not be seen from the street where the cops were and I hightailed it on foot to a friends' house a 1/2 mile away.

By the afternoon, the coup had been easily squashed by the loyal Army Commander-in-Chief Carlos Prats (who the next year was blown up with his wife by a car bomb in Buenos Aires by Pinochet’s death squads”. 

Twenty-two people were killed in the tragic-comedy attempt of the Tanquetazo including one foreign cameraman whose footage dramatically shows the soldier who was shooting at him and is in the opening sequences of Part II of director Patricio Guzman’s iconic documentary series, “The Battle of Chile.”

Below is the chilling clip filmed by Swedish cameraman Leonardo Henrichsen. Toward the end of the short clip you can see a soldier clearly aim at him and shoot and immediately turn away as he did not give a flying fuck. And the camera drops to the ground and goes black.

The coup was easily suppressed. But this one cop still had my I.D. and address not to mention that he clearly had a nasty Jones out for me.

I stayed out of my apartment for several days and this time I did use what official contacts I had in the government to try and get my I.D. back. After all there was no record of my arrest as it had been erased.

A week later, I came home one day and found my I.D. card slipped back under my door. Too bad the authentic coup came so soon after but I also survived that.

Have a good weekend and be thankful you are alive. +++

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