When the US Embassy predicted the failure of Pinochet's ambitious Voice of Chile project

Editor's note: This first appeared in my madrid kid blog on June 14, 2006.

Just days after dictator Augusto Pinochet inaugurated the powerful Voice of Chile on January 15, 1974, a U.S. diplomat told his superiors in Washington that he had reservations about the effectiveness of the shortwave radio station and predicted that it would fail because it wouldn’t be able to attract enough listeners.

This revealing appraisal is contained in a recently declassified cable sent by an American Embassy official in Santiago and obtained by George Washington University’s National Security Archive. The diplomat, who signed the missive using only his last name Villarreal, described Pinochet’s plans for his station as “grandiose.” Just four months earlier, Pinochet, with the U.S. government’s backing, led a bloody coup that toppled Marxist President Salvador Allende.
“This is a major propaganda effort by the government of Chile,” Villarreal wrote Washington on January 17, 1974. “Junta seems determined, however, to fight critics abroad and attempt to correct what they see as a distorted image of Chile peddled by former Allende supporters and fellow-travelers.”

On the morning of September 11, 1973, Allende was cornered inside La Moneda Presidential Palace in downtown Santiago just less than two hours after broadcasting an emotional last-stand speech on Radio Magallanes. In another part of the city, a faction of the Chilean army was confiscating new Soviet-made transmitters that had been supplied to the Communist-backed Radio Recabarren and Radio Magallanes, Villarreal’s cable explained. The powerful 70 kilowatt transmitters were then set up across the street from the Defense Ministry and put to the Junta’s use at Radio Nacional de Chile. During the inauguration ceremony, Pinochet said the station’s purpose was “to let world know of heroic Chilean struggle to save the country from the totalitarian claws of Soviet imperialists,” the diplomat summarized.

With domestic transmissions on 1140 kHz, Radio Nacional would begin broadcasting as the Voice of Chile in several languages including English on shortwave throughout the 1970s from Radio Cooperativa’s studios. Villarreal identified Col. Eduardo Sepulveda, “the Junta’s prime communications man” who would later become the Chilean consul in Miami, as head of the station’s board of directors. Station manager Gabor Torey and press officer Francisco Barahona were both hired from Radio Mineria by the Junta’s secretary general. “Although plans for Radio Nacional are grandiose, knowledgeable radio contacts doubt efficacy of international broadcasting effort pointing to high costs, limited listening audience and past failures to mount shortwave efforts from Chile,” Villarreal reported.

Villarreal’s observation was correct. By the mid 1980s, the Voice of Chile suspended its international broadcasts and in 1988 Pinochet was voted out of office in a referendum. The eight 100 kilowatt Harris shortwave transmitters that once belonged to the Voice of Chile were purchased in 1998 by Christian Vision, a religious broadcaster, for its Radio Voz Cristiana and are in use today.