Qualla: Attempted Assassination of Augusto Pinochet

Attempted Assassination of Augusto Pinochet: Introduction

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit for the drawing and composition, author unknow (fotos are my own work), Public domain. The road narrows here, hemmed in by rock on one side and a drop toward the river on the other. A vehicle towing a camping trailer had stalled across the lane, the kind of nuisance any driver might curse and steer around. Then the trailer's wall fell open. On the evening of 7 September 1986, at a bottleneck called the Cuesta de las Achupallas, roughly forty kilometers southeast of Santiago, two dozen members of the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front opened fire on the motorcade carrying Augusto Pinochet back to the capital. For a few minutes in the Cajón del Maipo, the most powerful man in Chile was pinned in the open, and the dictatorship hung on the reflexes of a driver.

Image: for the drawing and composition, author unknow (fotos are my own work) | Public domain

Attempted Assassination of Augusto Pinochet: Operation 20th Century

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit for the drawing and composition, author unknow (fotos are my own work), Public domain. The guerrillas called it Operación Siglo XX - Operation 20th Century - and they believed 1986 was the year the dictatorship could be ended. The plan was patient and precise. Pinochet spent weekends at El Melocotón, a country estate up the canyon, and the single road back to Santi...

Image: for the drawing and composition, author unknow (fotos are my own work) | Public domain

Attempted Assassination of Augusto Pinochet: The Men Who Died

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit for the drawing and composition, author unknow (fotos are my own work), Public domain. Pinochet survived with cuts to one hand from flying debris. Five of his bodyguards did not survive at all, and eleven more were wounded. It is easy, in a story about a dictator, to treat those five as scenery - the unnamed escort whose deaths made the headline about the man who l...

Image: for the drawing and composition, author unknow (fotos are my own work) | Public domain

Attempted Assassination of Augusto Pinochet: Escape Down the Canyon

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit for the drawing and composition, author unknow (fotos are my own work), Public domain. What the attackers managed next was almost theatrical. Reinforcements were already speeding up the hill toward the gunfire. So the guerrillas fled downward in vehicles fitted with red lights and sirens, and in the confusion the oncoming troops took them for fellow security forces...

Image: for the drawing and composition, author unknow (fotos are my own work) | Public domain

Attempted Assassination of Augusto Pinochet: The Reckoning

Sun, 21 Jun 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit for the drawing and composition, author unknow (fotos are my own work), Public domain. Pinochet answered the near miss with fury. A state of siege returned, and a wave of arrests and killings swept up dissidents who had nothing to do with the ambush. The fighters themselves met hard ends. Raúl Pellegrin and Cecilia Magni, two who took part, were dead within a coupl...

Image: for the drawing and composition, author unknow (fotos are my own work) | Public domain