Kiwi diplomats hid trade unionist during Pinochet’s deadly purge
Will Harvie recounts a little-remembered story from 1973.
On September 11, 1973, General Augusto Pinochet seized power from elected Chilean president Salvador Allende. It was a violent coup. The presidential palace where Allende was holed up was shelled and when all seemed hopeless, Allende committed suicide rather than face capture by his military.
Meanwhile, tens of thousands of Marxist and Left-leaning supporters of Allende were rounded up and imprisoned, many in Santiago’s still infamous Estadio Nacional or national stadium.
Hundreds or thousands were executed at the stadium and Chile was under the boot of a particularly South American brand of dictatorship until 1990.
New Zealand diplomats in Chile played minor roles as the coup unrolled, but their stories are almost forgotten.
Nobody at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and Trade could remember the events of late September, early October 1973. MFAT’s files from the period have been shipped off to Archives NZ, where some remain under seal for national security reasons.
But details of Kiwi diplomats in Chile surfaced in a 2012 book by Joanna Woods called Diplomatic Ladies: New Zealand’s Unsung Envoys. It’s primarily a social history on the wives and daughters of New Zealand’s male foreign service officers overseas, but tells some other previously unpublished stories too.
New Zealand’s man in Santiago was John McArthur; his wife was Piera.
They had recently established New Zealand’s first embassy in Chile and rented a suitably grand residence complete with staff.
As diplomats, the McArthurs were largely untouched by the violence of the coup. Piera remembered hearing planes pass overhead on their way to bomb the presidential palace.
Over the next few weeks, Pinochet put down resistance and his goons tracked down and arrested Leftists and pretty much anyone they wanted.
‘‘Santiago was overrun with people trying to evade capture,’’ wrote Woods. ‘‘The most prominent were being hotly pursued and anyone who could claim political asylum was looking for an embassy where they would be safe from arrest.’’
The German ambassador was sheltering about 40 and the Swedish ambassador was ‘‘collecting political figures enthusiastically’’.
Perhaps inevitably, one of these fugitives found his way to New Zealand’s embassy.
Actually he broke in and the ambassador was summoned by a guard.
Piera recounted what happened next in Diplomatic Ladies: ‘‘He rang me at home saying, ‘I’m coming home and I’m bringing someone with me’.’’
McArthur smuggled the man across the city in his car and into the garage at the residence.
‘‘Out got a hefty figure that looked rather like a Belgian charwoman with a wig and a hat and an astrakhan coat,’’ she recounted.
He bowed and said in good English, ‘‘Madame, I ask your forgiveness for arriving in such a manner’’.
He was Luis Figueroa, a prominent trade unionist, Communist and Allende supporter. He was, according to Woods, one of the top 10 most wanted men in Chile at the time and his photo had been in the papers for weeks.
A history of international trade unionism had another version of the story: ‘‘Figueroa had spent weeks fighting in the underground [and] the military junta put out a reward for his capture’’.
And suddenly here he was in the residence of the New Zealand ambassador and his wife, asking for protection.
He got it.
At some point his girlfriend arrived. Asylum – using diplomatic premises to shelter those being persecuted – is a tradition dating back to the ancient Greeks, Egyptians and Hebrews. Medieval churches sometimes offered sanctuary to those in need.
In modern times, asylum is uncertain at best.
MFAT, for example, last week told Stuff in an email that ‘‘there is no right to asylum at New Zealand’s offshore posts and such requests are not able to be considered’’. New Zealand will only help refugees selected for resettlement by the UN Refugee Agency (UNHCR).
Of course, instances of diplomats helping out are not hard to find. Canadian diplomats hid six Americans in Tehran during the Iranian Revolution and hostage crisis of 1979-80. The award-winning film Argo got it mostly wrong.
And Julian Assange has been living in the Ecuadorian embassy in London since August 2012.
Over recent months, MFAT has sidestepped whether its diplomats have temporarily assisted people in need.
In any event, Figueroa and his girlfriend stayed in the New Zealand residence for 10 days and were never detected by the Pinochet regime.
Much of the actual sheltering was done by Piera McArthur because she stayed at home while her husband went to work most days.
The Chilean couple were handed off to the enthusiastic Swedish ambassador and the McArthurs were ‘‘quite glad to be rid of them’’.
Figueroa escaped from Chile and spent a couple of years roaming the world to build support for anti-Pinochet movements. He died in 1976.
Other Kiwis were caught up in the coup. A Kiwi backpacker named Derek Paterson was travelling in Chile at the time with a Canadian friend. They were arrested and imprisoned at the stadium for many days before being rescued by New Zealand diplomat Don Hunn.
Paterson witnessed many of the horrors inside the stadium and wrote an ebook about the ordeal, called Second Time Lucky.
He returned to live in Chile in 2009, as his wife, Rosie, had been appointed New Zealand’s ambassador there.
This was entirely fitting because much of Diplomatic Ladies concerns the unpaid work done by diplomatic wives and daughters. They were expected to endlessly entertain on behalf of New Zealand and were often forbidden from taking paid employment in the host country.
In this regards, Piera McArthur found a way forward. While in Chile, she learnt to paint and was in 2012 made an ONZM for services to the arts.