Pre-dictatorship violence
The first major action by the MIR took place in September 1967 during violent clashes between MIR-led students from the University of Concepción and riot police. ''Carabineros'' were seeking to arrest those responsible for destroying a police vehicle, but students reorganized and kidnapped carabinier Héctor Gutiérrez Orellana. Chilean president Eduardo Nicanor Frei Montalva sought to defuse the situation through intermediaries and obtained the release of the policeman in exchange for dropping charges against students earlier arrested in the confrontations.Determinants of Gross Human Rights Violations by State and State Sponsored Actors in Brazil, Uruguay, Chile and Argentina: 1960–1990, Wolfgang S. Heinz, Hugo Frühling, p. 423, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers, 1999 During 1968, the MIR presence continued to be felt in various universities with armed actions increasing in 1969 through multiple acts of vandalism, intimidation and physical assaults on conservative/right wing students and faculty members. On 1 May 1969, fifteen MIR activists armed with knives took over the Bio Bio radio station in Concepción and transmitted a special broadcast calling for the locals to take up arms and overthrow the government of Frei. On 2 May 1969, MIR activists operating in Concepción attacked the branches of ''National City Bank'', the building of the ''La Patria'' newspaper and the offices of the ''Weigner Stein'' business. In June 1969, the MIR kidnapped journalist Hernán Osses Santa María, Director of the ''Noticias de la Tarde'' in nearby Talcahuano (15.6 kilometres), in an effort to silence the in depth reporting on the leftist violence in Concepción. Police Investigations and ''Carabineros'' soon surrounded the University of Concepción and forced the students to release the newspaper director unharmed. A specially appointed judge was soon named and a criminal suit was filed with the Courts of Appeals of Concepción against the MIR and 13 of its identified leaders for breaking the Law of Interior Security of the State. The "fugitives from justice-list" consisted of Luciano Cruz, Miguel Enríquez, Marcello Ferrada de Noli, José Goñi (later Chile's ambassador to the U.S.), Nelson Gutiérrez, Aníbal Matamala, Bautista van Schouwen, Arturo Villabela and other five. Consequently, the MIR had no option but to go largely underground and into hiding. In the ensuing police and military operations against the MIR, a guerrilla training camp is discovered in San José de Maipo (Guayacán) and another at Corral (Chaihuín). Nevertheless, MIR guerrillas continue to operate, and in Santiago alone carry out 12 armed robberies of banks and businesses between August 1969 and September 1970 to finance their operations. The Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) were absolved of criminal charges under an amnesty under the Popular Unity (''Unidad Popular'' or UP) government of Allende and was allowed to operate again openly, encouraging and carrying out illegal expropriations of farms and businesses, and assaulting outspoken conservatives/rightist members of the public and security forces. According to police figures submitted to the Chilean senate, 1,458 farms were illegally occupied between November 1970 and December 1971. Starting in the southern provinces of Cautin and Malleco the MIR organized a series of armed takeovers or ''tomas'' working slowly northwards up into the provinces of Nuble and Linares and eventually Santiago. In April 1971, Juan Millalonco, a member of Christian Democratic Youth, was shot dead in Aysén by socialist militants, and VOP guerrillas in Santiago killed 33-year-old Raúl Méndez Espinosa at his sweet shop for not paying protection money to the guerrillas targeting small businesses.La Violencia Política Popular en las "Grandes Alamedas": La Violencia en Chile, 1947–1987, Gabriel Salazar Vergara, p, 259, Lom Ediciones, 2006 That same month in the expropriation of land on the part of leftist militants and guerrillas, Rolando Matus is shot dead resisting the takeover of the Carén farm in Pucón, and Jorge Baraona and Domitila Palma died resisting the takeover of their farms in southern Chile. On 24 May 1971, VOP guerrillas in an armed robbery of a bank money transfer van shoot and mortally wound a carabinier (Corporal José Arnaldo Gutiérrez Urrutia) and wound two other accompanying ''Miramar'' supermarket employees. In June 1971, VOP guerrillas killed Edmundo Perez Zujovic, a Christian Democrat and former interior minister. That same month, another marxist guerrilla (46-year-old Heriberto Salazar) of the VOP walked into police headquarters in Santiago with a sub-machinegun and kills three detectives (Gerardo Romero Infante, Heriberto Mario Marín and Carlos Pérez Bretti) before blowing himself up with dynamite, and a carabineer corporal (Jorge Cartes) is killed by MIR guerrillas in the MIR stronghold of Concepción. On 1 December 1971, 50,000-200,000 women took to the streets of Santiago to protest against Salvador Allende's UP government. Their peaceful march turned ugly when UP radicals attacked the women with rocks. However, their ''March of the Empty Pots and Pans'' signaled the beginning of a massive coordinated anti-Allende movement. To keep the memory afresh of the march, women in the middle-class and affluent suburbs of Santiago banged on pots every night for two hours for several months. On 30 August 1972, carabineer corporal Exequiel Aroca Cuevas was killed in the city of Concepción, when socialist militants open fire on the bus he was travelling. On 27 February 1973, MIR guerrillas attacked the Llanquihue police station, shooting and wounding 10 carabineers. In March 1973, 16-year-old Germán Enrique González and 17-year-old Sergio Oscar Vergara, both members of the Christian Democrat Party were killed while resisting the takeover of the La Reina estate. On 2 April 1973, MIR guerrillas operating in Santiago shoot and kill a police detective, Gabriel Rodríguez Alcaíno. In May 1973, Mario Aguilar, a member of the ''Movimiento Patria y Libertad'' is gunned down by leftists in downtown Santiago. On 27 July 1973, a farmer and member of the Christian Democrat Party, Jorge Mena, is surrounded by leftists and clubbed to death in Osorno.La Verdad Olvidada del Terrorismo en Chile, 1968–1996, Arturo Castillo Vicencio, p.80, Editorial Maye Ltda, 2007 The next day, another farmer, Juan Luis Urrutia, dies resisting the takeover of his land in Bulnes. On 30 July, MIR guerrillas kill Manuel Garrido, an employee of ''Paños Continental'' in a confrontation that also involved Brazilian militants. On 27 August 1973, Sergio Aliaga, while driving through a confrontation between anti-Allende striking truckers and leftist militants, was killed after being caught in the crossfire and shot in the throat. On 29 August 1973, a Mexican militant (Jorge Albino Sosa Gil) working in Chile, shoots and kills Second Lieutenant Héctor Lacrampette Calderón as the young army officer was waiting for a bus in the suburb of Providencia in Santiago. The next day, two farm workers (José Toribio Núñez and Celsa Fuentes) died of horrific burns after being caught in the bomb blast targeting the pipeline between Santiago and Concepción.September–December 1973
After the coup, left-wing guerrilla organizations tried to recruit resistance fighters against the Pinochet regime. Some of them had commando-training, having belonged to the GAP (''Grupo de Amigos Personales''), they had previously served as bodyguards of President Allende. Many activists created resistance groups from refugees abroad. The Movimiento Juvenil Lautaro or Lautaro Youth Movement (MJL) was formed in December 1982 and the Communist Party of Chile set up an armed wing, which became in 1983 the FPMR (''Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez''). The main guerrilla group, known as the MIR (''Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria''), suffered heavy casualties in the coup's immediate aftermath, and most of its members fled the country. Andreas Pascal Allende, a nephew of President Allende led the MIR from 1974 to 1976, then made his way to Cuba. Nevertheless, in the first three months of military rule, the Chilean forces recorded 162 military deaths. It is claimed that a total of 756 servicemen and police are reported to have been killed or wounded in clashes with guerrillas in the 1970s. Among the killed and disappeared during the military regime were at least 663 Marxist MIR guerrillas. The MIR commander, Andrés Pascal Allende, has admitted that the Marxist guerrillas lost 1,500-2,000 fighters killed or disappeared. Several hundred other young men and women, sympathetic to the guerrillas, were detained and tortured and often killed. An unknown number among those involved in resistance operations may have confessed under torture, most likely among non-combatant supporters (''ayudistas'') in the role of couriers and other clandestine tasks. Nevertheless, MIR leadership declared in an official document of March 1975: "Almost all of our imprisoned comrades have had exemplary behavior in the face of torture and murder". Further, nearly 700 civilians disappeared in the 1974–1977 period, after being detained by the Chilean military and police. Remnants of the MIR also joined Marxist guerrillas from the People's Revolutionary Army (Argentina) (''Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo'' or ERP) in Argentina in the protracted fight to control Tucumán Province. Some 30,000 former Chilean conscripts that served between 1973 and 1990, claiming to be suffering from post-traumatic stress after taking part in the cordon and search operations and night curfews, are currently seeking compensation from the Chilean government. Fewer than 60 individuals died as a direct result of fighting on 11 September although the MIR and GAP continued to fight the following day. In all, 46 of Allende's elite guard (the GAP, ''Grupo de Amigos Personales'') were killed, some of them in combat with the soldiers that took the Moneda. Allende's Cuban-trained guard would have had about 300 elite commando-trained GAP fighters at the time of the coup, but the use of brute military force, especially the use of Hawker Hunters fighter-bombers, may have handicapped many GAP fighters from further action. On the military side, there were 34 deaths: two army sergeants, three army corporals, four army privates, 2 navy lieutenants, 1 navy corporal, 4 naval cadets, 3 navy conscripts and 15 carabineros. Most of the ''carabineros'' were killed after two busloads of policemen were heavily engaged by armed leftists in the Pro-Allende shantytown of La Ligua. In mid-September, the Chilean military junta claimed its troops suffered another 16 dead and 100 injured by gunfire in mop-up operations against Allende supporters, and Pinochet warned, ''"sadly there are still some armed groups who insist on attacking, which means that the military rules of wartime apply to them."'' 22-year-old Corporal Hugo Yáñez Durán would be among the army fallen, killed on 15 September 1973 in a shootout with leftists students holding out in the grounds of the University of Chile. On 23 October 1973, 23-year-old Army Corporal Benjamín Alfredo Jaramillo Ruz, who was serving with the ''Cazadores'', became the first fatal casualty of the counterinsurgency operations in the mountainous area of Alquihue in1974–1979
On 19 February 1975, four captured MIR commanders went on national television to urge their guerrillas to lay down their arms. According to them, the MIR leadership was in ruins: of the 52 commanders of the MIR, nine had been killed, 24 were prisoners, ten were in exile, one had been expelled from the group, and eight were still at large. On 18 November 1975, MIR guerrillas killed a 19-year-old army conscript (Private Hernán Patricio Salinas Calderón). On 24 February 1976, MIR guerrillas in a gunbattle with Chilean secret police, shot and killed a 41-year-old carabinero sergeant (Tulio Pereira Pereira).''Informe de la Comisión Nacional de Verdad y Reconciliación'', Volume II, Page 605, Santiago, Chile, 1991. (SM, V, Chro) The Chilean secret police on this occasion were met with a hail of automatic weapons fire, killing a carabinero and a girl. On 28 April 1976, MIR guerrillas shot and killed a 29-year-old carabineros corporal (Bernardo Arturo Alcayaga Cerda) while he was walking home in the Santiago suburb of Pudahuel. On 16 October 1977, MIR guerrillas exploded 10 bombs in Santiago. In 1978 the MIR sought to reestablish a guerrilla front in southern Chile and launched Operation ''Return'' which involved clandestine entry, recruitment, bombings and bank robberies in Santiago that briefly shook the military regime. In February 1979 MIR guerrillas bombed the US-Chile Cultural Institute in Santiago, causing considerable damage. In 1979, about 40 bombings were blamed on MIR guerrillas. Several police, military and civilians caught in the crossfire and bomb blasts were killed in the renewed MIR attacks in the Chilean capital and at least 70 soldiers and policemen were wounded battling the marxist guerrillas.Neltume Guerrilla Front
In order to reinforce urban guerrilla warfare waged in the main cities, the MIR commanders in 1978 had set in motion Operación Retorno (Operation Return), ordering exiled militants back into Chile. In 1980, a platoon of thirty well-equipped MIR combatants of the ''Toqui Lautaro'' Battalion infiltrated into the mountains of Neltume in southern Chile and reestablished a guerrilla front. The MIR spearhead was commanded by 30-year-old Miguel Cabrera Fernández ( nom de guerre ''Paine''), who along with 120-150 Chileans had completed their training for this operation in Czechoslovakia, Cuba and North Korea. The Chilean Army moved against the guerrillas in Neltume in June 1981, in a massive operation spearheaded by the Chilean Para-Commandos (elite Black Berets) all under the command of Colonel Orlando Basauri, with support from 10 Puma and Lama helicopters. Flora Jaramillo had fed and attended three MIR guerrillas that had sought refuge in her house, and not wanting to be later accused of collaborating with the enemy had sent her 15-year-old son Juan Carlos Henríquez Jaramillo to warn the local police station. Carabineros soon surrounded her house and opened fire, killing all the guerrillas and destroying the house, but not before warning Mrs Jaramillo to get out. The Special Forces involved discovered the first guerrilla arms cache on 25 June killing Raúl Rodrigo Obregón Torres (nom de guerre ''Pablo'') in the process, and four more store dumps were uncovered by the end of the first week in July. Another gun-battle took place on 28 June, but it took some time before Basauri's men could corner the guerrilla force. Nevertheless, seven MIR guerrillas were reported killed in an ambush in the third week of September, just after the 8th-anniversary of the 1973 military coup, but the survivors were able to escape and blend in with the local population. On 19 September 1981, Army Private Victor Manuel Nahuelpan Silva is killed during operations in Neltume. On 16 October 1981, Juan Angel Ojeda Aguayo (nom de guerre ''Pequeco'') who had escaped the mountain fighting was caught and executed while resting at his parents' home. Miguel Cabrera Fernández was himself killed on 15 October 1981, in a clash with policemen at Choshuenco. The Pinochet regime launched another counterinsurgency operation in August 1984 to wipe out the remaining guerrillas, concentrating in the areas around Concepción, Valdivia and Los Angeles, killing seven more MIR fighters and forcing the remainder to go into permanent hiding. Some forty MIR fighters lost their lives between 1978 (when Operation ''Return'' was set in motion) and 1984 when the MIR insurgency was finally defeated in southern Chile. Another 41 supporting1980–1989
Post-dictatorship violence
The election of a civilian government in Chile did not end guerrilla activities. Within a few months after President Patricio Aylwin's accession to power, leftist militants showed that they remained committed to armed struggle and were responsible for a number of terrorist incidents. On 10 May 1990, two guerrillas wearing school uniforms killed ''carabineros'' Colonel Luis Fontaine, a former head of the antiterrorist unit of the carabiniers, Chile's national police force. Two policemen were killed on 10 August 1990, in a working-class Santiago suburb and two more were injured in an attack on a bus. In September 1990, leftist militants detonate 53 bombs that kill or wound 83 Chileans. On 14 November 1990, gendarmes transferred Marco Ariel Antonioletti, a senior MJL leader from jail to a hospital for treatment. MJL guerrillas fought their way into the Sótero del Río Hospital but were forced to withdraw, after having killed four gendarmes and one ''carabinero''. In retaliation, Chile's Investigations Police execute Antonioletti with a shot in the forehead. On 24 January 1991, MJL guerrillas ambushed and killed two carabineros. On 28 February 1991, a carabinero policeman died in a shoot-out in Santiago with leftist guerrillas of the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front. On 1 April, FPMR guerrillas assassinated right-wing senator Jaime Guzman, killing him as he left a university campus in Santiago. On 9 September three guerrillas kidnapped Cristian Edwards, whose family run El Mercurio newspaper. After his family paid $1 million in ransom, the FPMR freed him. On 22 January 1992, two FPMR guerrillas (Fabián López Luque and Alex Muñoz Hoffman) were killed trying to rob a ''Prosegur'' cash delivery armoured van at the Pontifical Catholic University in Santiago. On 11 September 1998, three police stations—La Pincoya, La Granja and La Victoria—were attacked with firearms, incendiary bombs and rocks and 36 were carabineros were wounded in violence related to the 25th anniversary commemorations of the military coup. In 2006, on the 33rd anniversary of the 11 September 1973, military coup, 79 carabineros were wounded in clashes with rioters. In September 2007, a carabinero policeman was killed after being shot in the face and around 40 were wounded during clashes with leftists marking the 34th anniversary of the military coup. The following month, MJL guerrillas killed carabineer Luis Moyano Farías during the robbery of Banco Security in Santiago. In clashes with protesters commemorating the 35th anniversary of the military coup, 29 carabineros were wounded in September 2008. In September 2009, 19 Carabineros were wounded in clashes with protestors marking the 36th anniversary of the coup. The lootings and other forms of appropriation that took place in the aftermath of the devastating 2010 earthquake in Chile, were in part promoted and legitimated by the MIR movement.Unarmed resistance
A broad range of Chilean Resistance activities were initiated in this period bySee also
*References
{{DEFAULTSORT:Armed resistance in Chile (1973-90) Cold War conflicts Communist rebellions Guerrilla wars Military dictatorship of Chile (1973–1990) Proxy wars Rebellions in Chile Resistance movements