Part I

This is a Smith & Wesson .22 revolver. A fine sidearm. When I lived in Chile in the early 70's I had the worst, saddest .22 ever made. I think it was called an Argentine Star and it cost me $6.Should have been called a Dud. Even though I worked as a translator for President Salvador Allende, that was not the main reason I had the revolver. I had it mostly because I was a dumb 22 old kid.  A smarter kid would have had a better gun. Thank God it wasn't. It saved me some hard prison time that would have probably ruined my life.

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 there were literally armed fascist gangs running in the streets. And being a good citizen and all, I had legally registered the gun with the Ministry of Defense as required. 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, 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 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 sweat he said. No sweat, as ling as nobody in the car had a gun.

My girlfriend at that time told me not be stupid and give her the gun. She would put it in her panty stockings crotch and the polite Chilean cops would never check there.

I did my on-the-spot risk assessment and decided against the crotch option.  I figured there was little chance the police would pat down a car full of happy 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 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 very nice older and rather bored cop keeping an eye on us. '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 right-wing mythology that Allende was building a secret leftist militia, the had recently signed a conservative-sponsored and draconian gun control law (can you imagine the NRA 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? 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 an independent police force resided and the risk was just too great,

I also felt obligated to take one for the team. If the cops reacted poorly to my story about working for the Prez it would make a wonderful scandal for the right-wing tabloid press.

Round about 1 a.m. I was taken to the sleepy little 6th Precinct station about five blocks from my apartment. The watch commander sat up front in a dead quiet room, with a few cops milling around. He was about 35, pale, small and lithe. Very soft-spoken and quite a gentleman.  He 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 take a seat on 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.

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 even though Chilean street police were notoriously immune to bribes, I let him see a bunch of $20 bills in my wallet.

"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."

I readily agreed.

"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 he had 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 Sergreant. "Go sit down again."

After about ten minutes of shuffling through papers and files he called me back to the desk. As I watched in disbelief, he took out his pencil and studiously erased my name and I.D. from the arrest log. he picked up my gun, smiled and said "Una mierda."

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. 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. He grilled me on Disneyland, Hollywood and his baseball idol, Willie Mays.

I gave him a big hug before I left and thanked my stars I knew nothing about guns. Being a dumbass kid worked in my favor that night. I gave him a hug goodbye and he told me to come visit him on the farm when he went on break,

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






                                                                                                      Part II

About a month after my temporary arrest, and about 10 weeks before Pinochet's military coup, there was an attempted coup staged by a Chilean tank regiment tied directly to avowedly neo-Nazi group. I awoke the morning of June 29, 1973 to loud gunfire. 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 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 few lefty exiles.

Our building was on the main city artery, La Moneda and the entrance to the building was about 50 yards off the street and down a flight of stairs. On that bottom floor was a string of offices that belonged to the 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 only problem here is that I didn't know what side these cops were on.  The radio said nobody other than the one tank regiment was supporting the coup, so supposedly these police were here to protect our building. 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 foreign couple who were very good friends of mine walk up to the police line but weren't allowed to pass. Clearly, they had come to check on my.

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 like where are you going or what are you doing?  I instinctively began to 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 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 said 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 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.

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

When I got to our little lobby, the Super ( a Communist troll) had empowered himself to lock the glass doors and told me nobody could come and go. He was a rickety old man and I was a strapping 5 foot 3 inch youth.

I grabbed him by the collar and told him to either open the door or be prepared to get thrown through it.  He took the former course,

I went out our back door that could not easily seen from the street and I hightailed to my friends' house a 1/2 mile away.

By the afternoon, the coup had been squashed.  But this cop still had my I.D. not to mention a regulation Jones out for me.

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

A week later, I came home one day and found my I.D. card slipped under my door.

My story is a fortunate one. A much happier ending than the one for Swedish cameraman Leonard Henrichsen who was one of 23 people killed that day.  In a garish turn of events, he filmed his own death, capturing on film the Chilean soldiers who opened fire on him.  That's the Youtube video you can see above.

The then-Commander-in-Chief Carlos Prats took heroic action and put down the coup by walking unarmed amongst the coup-makers and got them to surrender. Two months later, two weeks before the Sept 11, 1973 Pinochet Coup, Prats was forced to resign by right-wing pressure inside the military. A year later he was murdered along with his wife in Argentine exile when Pinochet's secret police set off a car bomb. Nice people.