Nuestra Patria: The Chilean-Argentinian Border War, 1978-80

Nuestra Patria(continued)

Chapter 7

Players on the Chilean national soccer team took to adorning their jerseys with shoulder patches that
read “Argentina’s finished!” while their fans took to carrying signs that not only mocked Argentina in
general but also trashed the Argentine army. (The patches were subsequently removed at the behest
of FIFA.)

Even some of Chile’s spiritual leaders got swept up in the patriotic fervor that followed the
Chilean victory at Los Flamencos. A prominent Catholic bishop in southern Chile drew stinging
criticism from the Vatican when he openly prayed for the entire Argentine army general staff to be
struck down. A pastor at Santiago’s largest Protestant church devoted one of his Sunday sermons
to attacking the Argentine government, prompting the Archbishop of Canterbury to send him a letter
criticizing what the archbishop called the pastor’s “spiritual myopia”. A shaman from Chile’s massive
indigenous community led ceremonies calling for the gods to sweep the Argentine army all the way
back to the streets of Buenos Aires. Church bells were rung to celebrate the withdrawal of the last
Argentine ground forces from Los Flamencos.

In August of 1979, on the eve of the one-year anniversary of the Mendoza incident that had
started the border war, the BAP Almirante Grau achieved a naval victory over the Argentines even
more impressive than the one she’d scored at the beginning of the conflict. Acting as lead vessel for
a joint Peruvian-Chilean task force, Grau coordinated a massive strike against Argentina’s second-
largest naval base that caught the base’s defenders almost completely by surprise; most of the naval
vessels docked at the base were sunk in the attack and the base itself was crippled for weeks. Even
though the Argentine government tried to spin the raid as only a minor setback for its war effort, the
stark truth was that the Chileans and their Peruvian allies had landed a jarring body blow on Buenos
Aires’ war machine. The reality of the destruction inflicted by the Chilean-Peruvian task force on the
Argentine naval base was further driven home by a photograph printed in the Times of London two
days after the raid; one corner of the photograph clearly showed massive clouds of smoke billowing
into the sky over the Argentine base, while in another corner readers could see the overturned hull of
an Argentine warship as it slowly sank into the water.

The photograph also helped stoke already blazing fires of discontent among Argentina’s civilian
population. Far from being the glorious triumph they and their leaders had hoped for, the border war
with Chile was if anything shaping up to be a fiasco; worse yet from their perspective, the conflict was
giving Argentina’s old adversary Great Britain the perfect excuse to bulk up its military presence in the
South Atlantic. Whitehall had already dispatched British Army engineers to the Falklands’ capital city,
Port Stanley, to upgrade the main runway at Stanley’s airport and the islands’ Royal Marine garrison
would soon receive an infusion of extra manpower. Two of Britain’s key NATO allies, Portugal and the
United States, made pacts with the Thatcher government to let the British military use their respective
bases in the Azores and the Caribbean as staging and re-supply checkpoints if or when the situation
warranted it.

There was even a rumor one of the Royal Navy’s front-line submarines, the HMS Conqueror,
was set to be deployed to the South Atlantic. This turned out to be more paranoid fantasy on the
Argentine military’s part than actual fact, but the notion nonetheless reflected the collective anxieties
of the Argentine people after a year of war. Those anxieties would soon become even greater: Peru,
a de facto ally of Chile almost from the second the war began, made the partnership official in early
September of 1979 with the signing of a mutual defense pact; this meant Peru was now once and for
all in Chile’s corner in the border conflict with Argentina.

 
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How are they going to fix the Arica/Tacna issue?

Excellent updates! Everyone of them gives me new surprises... But how the North Bloc (Colombia, Ecuador, Venezuela) of South America receives that situations?
 
Chapter 7
....

Even some of Chile’s spiritual leaders got swept up in the patriotic fervor that followed the
Chilean victory at Los Flamencos. A prominent Catholic bishop in southern Chile drew stinging
criticism from the Vatican when he openly prayed for the entire Argentine army general staff to be
struck down. A pastor at Santiago’s largest Protestant church devoted one of his Sunday sermons
to attacking the Argentine government, prompting the Archbishop of Canterbury to send him a letter
criticizing what the archbishop called the pastor’s “spiritual myopia”.

The largest section of Protestants in Chile are Pentecostal. Why on earth would the Archbishop of Canterbury be sending a Pentecostal pastor a letter!?!?
 
Well, the Archbishop is the closest thing Protestantism has to a Pope...at least that's my understanding.

Anyway, apologies to my fellow AHers for letting this TL get neglected for so long. I'll get back to work on it shortly.
 
Nuestra Patria(continued)

Chapter 8

And as if that wasn’t enough to give the powers that be in Buenos Aires feelings of insecurity,
the same week that the Peru-Chile mutual defense pact was signed a Venezuelan military delegation
including a then-little known air force officer named Hugo Chavez held a press conference in Lima to
level the stunning accusation that the Argentine army was abusing Chilean and Peruvian POWs in its
custody. As proof of this alleged abuse the Venezuelan delegation produced photographs it said had
been smuggled out of Argentina and supposedly showed Argentine prison guards beating Chilean
and Peruvian POWs with canes; the Argentine government responded by labeling the photographs
as “forgeries” and accusing Chile and Peru of recruiting members of the notorious Colombian narco-
terrorist group FARC to act as mercenaries for the Chilean side. It was an accusation so obviously
and indisputably preposterous no reasonable person could have believed it, but the government-run
Argentine media dutifully repeated it as gospel truth.

******

In November of 1979, as Iranian student militants seized the U.S. embassy in Tehran, the
Chilean and Argentine air forces were gearing up for what would prove to be the most crucial air
battle of the war. Chilean intelligence analysts had gotten wind of a plan by the Argentine air force
general staff to strike at the heart of the Chilean military’s command/control structure with a series
of bombing raids on the respective central headquarters of the Chilean army, navy, and air force; the
principal objective of these strikes was to cripple the Chilean military’s ability to coordinate strategic
and tactical operations. Of course the Chileans weren’t about to let that happen, and accordingly they
were positioning their top fighter squadrons to challenge the Argentines head-on. The coming clash of
the rival air forces would capture the attention and imaginations of people all over the world; for once
even the “war of the mountains” would take a back seat in press coverage of the Chilean-Argentine
conflict.

It wasn’t just Santiago and Buenos Aires that were taking keen interest in the impending air
offensive; military analysts on both sides of the Iron Curtain saw the confrontation as opportunity to
gauge the likely effectiveness of their sides’ respective fighters in a future NATO-Warsaw Pact
conflict. The Sukhois and Mirages in the Chileans’ and Argentines’ respective fighter inventories
were facing the most crucial test in their operational histories; their success or failure would speak
volumes about the overall quality of the NATO and Warsaw Pact air forces. To cite just one example,
a Mirage V squadron based near the Argentine coastal town of Comodoro Rivadavia was on standby
alert to assist the first wave of the Argentine attack force in carrying out what Vidala's senior air force
generals anticipated would be a lethal blow to Chile's ability to wage war on Argentina.

On the afternoon of November 8th, 1979 the Argentine air force finally made its move, dispatching
two squadrons of attack aircraft to carry out the first strikes on Chilean command & control facilities in
Santiago proper. The Chileans quickly scrambled interceptors to meet the attack force, and one of the
most intense air battles in military history was on. For the next three and a half hours the skies above
Santiago would be a battleground as the Argentine strike force and the Chilean interceptors fought for
control of the Chilean capital's airspace. An American diplomat stationed in Santiago at the time took
out his home movie camera to film the attack for the benefit of State Department senior officials back
in Washington. That film would ultimately become the most vivid record in any medium of the struggle
between the Chilean and Argentine air forces that day. Losses of aircraft were heavy on both sides as
the battle progressed, and for that matter more than a few civilians died that day as burning wreckage
from downed aircraft fell onto houses and other buildings. There were also at least two verified cases
of Chilean aircraft being lost in friendly fire accidents.

When the smoke cleared, half of the Argentine attack force was gone, blasted out of the sky by
Chilean air defenses. But the Chilean air force had taken even heavier losses, as it turned out; nearly
65 percent of the fighters committed to the defense of Santiago had been shot down by Argentine jets
over the course of the battle. The surviving planes in the Argentine attack force, despite the Chileans'
best efforts to stop them, managed to break through Santiago’s air defenses and strike most of their
originally assigned targets before turning around and heading for home with a detachment of Chilean
air force reserve fighters hot on their heels. Back in Buenos Aires, the air strike was trumpeted as a
historic triumph for the Argentine armed forces-- and there may have been at least some justification
for that claim. The Argentine attack jets had succeeded in penetrating Chilean air defenses and hit at
least half of their assigned targets, and for good measure had racked up scores of kills on Chilean air
force fighter jets. Argentine state media hyped every one of these kills for all they were worth, rubbing
Santiago’s nose in them at every opportunity.

Naturally the Chilean government sought to downplay the raid's effects.Government
TV commentators claimed the raid was nothing more than a feeble swat at Chile's growing
power and that all the Argentine aircraft committed to the attack had been shot down before
reaching their intended targets. Unfortunately for Pinochet, those claims were undermined by
an Agence France Press photographer whose shots of Santiago in the aftermath of the raid
clearly showed a number of key Chilean government offices, including the headquarters of the
defense ministry, lying in ruins. Try as they might, Chilean security forces couldn't apprehend
the offending photojournalist; he'd already left the country and was safely in Brazil by the time
the pictures in question hit the world press. The Chilean government did, however, revoke his
visa. There are also rumors the photographer's name was put on a Chilean secret service hit
list, but this has never been confirmed. Still, the fact those rumors exist is a telling sign of just
how stung the Pinochet regime felt by the exposure of the vulnerability of its central command/
control bases to air attack.
 
Nuestra Patria(continued)

Chapter 9

In January of 1980 the “war of the mountains” would leap back into the world spotlight
with a vengeance as Chilean commandos seeking to exact retribution on their country's behalf
for the humiliation it had suffered in the Santiago air strike attacked an Argentine command post
in a surprise nighttime assault. An Argentine army sergeant who was on duty at that post at the
time of the attack, and who barely managed to get out of it alive, would later remember that the
Chileans came at his position “like madmen”. In an operation that some outside commentators
would later compare to the Japanese kamikaze attacks on American naval ships in the last days
of the Second World War, the Chileans struck at the Argentinian defenses with almost reckless
bravado and suceeded in penetrating those defenses in at least four key sectors. But whatever
sense of triumph they might have felt at this accomplishment would quickly evaporate when the
Argentines initiated the inevitable counterstrike. While the Chileans were seeking to capitalize on
their initial gains, Argenine ground and air forces unleashed a four-pronged retaliatory strike on
the Chilean troops, forcing them into a hasty retreat back to their own lines. Veteran CBS news
anchor Walter Cronkite would later refer to this chain of events as “the Tet of the Chile-Argentina
border war”, in that it turned a sizable portion of public opnion in Chile against the conflict just as
the Tet Offensive had soured the American public on U.S. intervention in Vietnam.

Not that public opinion in Argentina was unanimously in favor of the war either at that point;
a growing sense that it was time to begin disengaging from the border conflict was taking hold with
Argetines of all classes whether they were for or against the Vidala government. Far from being the
indisputably glorious triumph the junta in Buenos Aires had been expected, the war was proving at
best a stalemate, and there was a genuine risk the conflict might end in disaster for Argentina. And
as if that wasn't enough to give the Argetine masses second thoughts about the border war, the U.S.
State Department had of late been giving subtle hints that it might push for Argentina's membership
in the Organization of American States to be suspended, which would have made it only the second
country in the group's history to be thus penalized. One prominent Argentine military leader, an army
general named Benjamin Rattenbach, drafted a confidential memo to then-defense minister David R.
de la Riva warning of “unprecedented catastrophe” for Argentina if the junta persisted in prosecuting
its war with Chile. His reward for his candor was to be abruptly cashiered from the military and placed
under house arrest until the end of the war.

By March of 1980 Peru, whose economy was in crisis as a result of the Chilean-Argentine war,
had started to scale back its military involvement in the conflict and Argentina found itself in need of a
new ally. To the Vidala government's dismay, there were no takers for the position; efforts to forge an
alliance with Uruguay collapsed when Uruguay's military demanded more concessions than Buenos
Aires was willing to give, and there was certainly no hope of getting any assistance from Venezuela.
Brazil? Brazil had done everything to sabotage the Argentine war effort short of directly declaring war
on Argentina itself, and there was still an outside chance it might do that too. Mexico could in theory
provide financial and military assistance to the Argentines, but it had close ties to both the U.S. and
Great Britain and its government was reluctant to do anything which might jeopardize those ties. As
for Cuba, the Castro regime had made no secret of its contempt for the Vidala regime and its fervent
backing of the then-suppressed Argentine Communist Party. In short Argentina's prospects for being
able to continue to prosecute its war with Chile looked bleak in the long term.

Not that things were any easier for the Chileans: in spite of the Pinochet regime's best efforts
to squelch dissent against its war policies, the streets of Santiago were now regularly playing host to
protest rallies by critics of the regime's war with Argentina. Students, dockworkers, taxi drivers, grade
school teachers, clergy, and even of some of the regime's own policemen were now parading in anti-
war rallies urging Pinochet to withdraw from the conflict. Returning war veterans, feeling abandoned
by the government, would soon join in these demonstrations, creating a political crisis for the regime
the likes of which Pinochet couldn't have imagined in his worst nightmares. To have elements of his
own army openly questioning his military and political judgment was equivalent to having the SS turn
on Hitler or the NKVD denounce Stalin.
 
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