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Alejandrina Cox incident

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1973 Chilean political scandal

General Carlos Prats, commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army and Allende's minister of the interior

The Alejandrina Cox incident (Spanish: Incidente Alejandrina Cox) was a political scandal in Chile that occurred on 27 June 1973, when General Carlos Prats — then commander-in-chief of the Chilean Army and Minister of the Interior in the government of President Salvador Allende — fired his service revolver at a car whose occupant, a middle-aged woman named Alejandrina Cox, he had mistaken for a man mocking him in traffic. The confrontation, which took place on a crowded avenue in Santiago, drew a hostile crowd, cost Prats his official car's windows and tires, and made front-page news across the political spectrum.

Although Prats immediately offered his resignation, Allende refused it. Two days later Prats partially restored his reputation by personally facing down the tank crews of the failed Tanquetazo coup attempt. The Cox incident nevertheless left a lasting mark on his standing within the officer corps, and after weeks of public agitation against him — including a demonstration by the wives of fellow generals outside his home — Prats resigned as commander-in-chief on 23 August 1973. President Allende replaced him with General Augusto Pinochet, a move later seen as having removed the last senior officer standing between the armed forces and the coup that overthrew Allende on 11 September 1973.

While most contemporary Chilean accounts describe the episode as a spontaneous overreaction by an exhausted and frequently harassed general, other historians and journalists have argued that it was, at least in part, a staged provocation engineered by the right-wing group Patria y Libertad, with alleged assistance from the Central Intelligence Agency, intended to discredit Prats and clear the way for military intervention.

Background

By mid-1973, Chile was gripped by an unusually severe bout of civil and institutional unrest. Popular Unity's efforts to deepen the country's economic transformation had provoked repeated clashes between the executive and the Supreme Court, a wave of impeachment proceedings against cabinet ministers in the Chamber of Deputies, and a prolonged strike at the El Teniente copper mine.[1] As both Army commander-in-chief and Minister of the Interior, Prats bore direct responsibility for keeping order in an increasingly polarized country, a burden that weighed heavily on him even as he clung to hopes that a political solution — rather than a coup and eventual military dictatorship — could still be found.[1]

The Chilean military was itself divided over how to treat Allende, a self-described Marxist: some officers pushed for his removal, while others, including Prats, argued for institutional restraint. Prats was a prominent proponent of the so-called Schneider Doctrine — named for his predecessor, General René Schneider, who had been assassinated in 1970 for opposing a coup — which held that the armed forces should stay out of civilian politics and defer to the elected government.

According to later journalistic accounts, right-wing groups, including Patria y Libertad, and CIA operatives had for months been working to discredit Prats as part of a broader effort to strip away the remaining institutional obstacles to a coup. Some of these accounts allege that a CIA psychological-warfare specialist, Keith Wheelcock, compiled a profile of Prats' personality specifically to anticipate and exploit his reactions under stress.[2]

Incident

Alejandrina Cox.jpg
Alejandrina Cox

On the afternoon of 27 June 1973, at around 3:00 p.m., General Prats was being driven from his residence to his office at the Ministry of Defense on Zenteno Street in downtown Santiago in his official car, a blue Ford LTD.[1][3] Given the animosity directed at him at the time, he was frequently insulted by motorists in nearby cars as he traveled through the city.[4] As his car passed along the Costanera avenue near the former Compañía de Cervecerías Unidas plant (the site now occupied by the Costanera Center), a small red Renault pulled up alongside it; its occupants began laughing, mocking him, and making obscene gestures.[5][6]

Contemporary accounts differ on the exact sequence of events that followed. According to most reports, Prats took his driver's revolver, pointed it at the Renault, and ordered its driver to stop; when the driver failed to comply, Prats fired a single shot into the car's left front fender, and both vehicles came to a halt.[5][6] It was only then that Prats discovered the other driver was a woman — Alejandrina Cox Palma de Valdivieso, an upper-class housewife whose short, masculine haircut had led him to mistake her for a man — traveling with her nephew, Juan Pablo Cox.[5][6][3] A number of accounts also describe Cox as a sympathizer of Patria y Libertad, a detail cited by proponents of the theory that the confrontation was not accidental.[7]

A separate recollection, given decades later by American diplomat Samuel Hart — who was posted in Santiago at the time and lived near Prats' home — described the general firing repeatedly into the woman's car in front of a large crowd of commuters, rather than firing a single shot; Hart's account also identifies the vehicle as a Citroën rather than a Renault, illustrating how details of the episode diverged even among eyewitnesses and those close to the events.[8] A more dramatic version, related by author Robert Moss and later repeated by commentator Mario Spataro, holds that Prats pressed his pistol to Cox's head and threatened to kill her unless she apologized before he realized his mistake; this account is not corroborated by contemporaneous Chilean press reports and appears to have circulated mainly in anti-Allende literature published after the coup.[9]

Alternative accounts go further, suggesting the entire episode was a coordinated provocation. Journalist Robinson Rojas reported that Cox's vehicle was part of an operation involving several cars that had deliberately crowded, cut off, and harassed Prats' car for roughly twenty-five blocks before the confrontation, with journalists and photographers from sympathetic outlets tipped off in advance and waiting nearby.[10] Luis Vega Contreras similarly attributed the scheme to Patria y Libertad operatives and CIA assets, describing it as the first stage of a two-part operation intended to discredit and ultimately remove Prats from command.[2]

As Prats confronted Cox, a crowd gathered, and many bystanders sided with the woman, accusing the general of trying to kill her. Prats reportedly held out his pistol by the barrel to show the crowd he would surrender it and had no fear of being lynched.[11] His official car was blocked in traffic, spray-painted with graffiti — a farmer, Juan Luis Boezio Sepúlveda, was arrested after scrawling an accusation of murder on it and throwing a paint can at a police officer — and its tires were slashed.[1][11] A passing taxi driver, Carlos Rodríguez, pulled Prats from the mob and drove him away in his Fiat before the situation escalated further.[1][4] The confrontation took place within a block of the site where General René Schneider had been fatally shot three years earlier, a proximity later noted by commentators as symbolically significant.[12]

Immediate aftermath

General Prats went directly to the Palacio de La Moneda and tendered his resignation to President Allende, who refused to accept it and persuaded him to remain in government.[6] News of the incident nonetheless dominated the front pages of Chilean newspapers the following day. The opposition seized on the episode, portraying Prats as a coward who had lost control of himself by opening fire on an unarmed woman, while the government press countered that he had been deliberately provoked and may even have survived an attempt on his life.[13] In the days that followed, Allende invoked the affair — among other justifications — to declare a state of emergency in Santiago Province, temporarily suspending certain civil liberties and placing police under direct military control.[13]

The Chilean Army's general staff publicly backed Prats, but the controversy, layered onto existing social unrest, continued to simmer.[11] Two days later, on 29 June, Prats partially recovered his standing by his handling of the Tanquetazo, a short-lived tank mutiny led by Lieutenant Colonel Roberto Souper. Prats personally confronted the rebel officers and negotiated their surrender, an act of evident physical courage that briefly made him a hero to Allende's supporters.[14] This recovery, however, proved short-lived, and it did little to erase the damage the Cox incident had done to his reputation among fellow officers.[8]

Political consequences

The episode struck at the heart of Prats' public image as a disciplined, level-headed defender of the Schneider Doctrine, and his authority within the officer corps never fully recovered.[15] Prats and Cox eventually apologized to each other, but the damage to his public standing was lasting, and he remained in his post for less than two months after the incident.[15] According to journalist Mónica González, a lawyer close to right-wing circles, Carlos Cruz Coke, later described the Cox affair — in 1977 — as one element of a broader scheme, referred to as "Operación Charly," designed specifically to undermine Prats' image as Army commander.[11]

Matters came to a head on 22 August 1973, when the wives of several Army generals and officers staged a noisy protest outside Prats' home, an action reportedly encouraged by right-wing women's organizations and organized with the involvement of Brazilian operative Glaycon de Paiva, who specialized in what he termed "mobilizing female power" for political ends.[2] Prats convened the Army's generals that same day and asked them to sign a declaration of support; of the twenty-two present, only four backed him, and he resigned as commander-in-chief the following day, 23 August 1973, reportedly telling Allende he was stepping down so as not to divide the Army.[2][11] His resignation removed the last senior obstacle to those in the armed forces pressing for Allende's overthrow, and it coincided with the Chamber of Deputies' approval of a resolution alleging that the government was violating the constitution. The next day, Allende named General Augusto Pinochet as Prats' successor. Three weeks later, on 11 September 1973, the armed forces overthrew Allende in the 1973 Chilean coup d'état.[2] Prats went into voluntary exile in Argentina; just over a year later, on 30 September 1974, he and his wife, Sofía Cuthbert, were killed in Buenos Aires by a car bomb planted by agents of the Chilean secret police, the DINA.[8]

Historiography

Historians disagree on whether the incident was a spontaneous outburst or, at least partly, an orchestrated provocation. Political scientist Margaret Power, who conducted the only interview Cox is known to have granted on the episode, argued that regardless of its origins, the political right exploited the affair for its own ends: the right-wing parties used the incident as a pretext for demanding that Prats resign, thus removing the last significant impediment to the then-hatching coup.[16] Reviewing Power's work for the Chilean journal Historia, historian Ana María Stuven noted that Power herself struggled to fully credit Cox's insistence that her gesture toward Prats had been spontaneous and that she had not supported a coup, a tension Stuven suggested reflected the broader difficulty of separating individual motive from political consequence in accounts of the episode.[17]

The incident's proximity to the site of Schneider's assassination added to its symbolic weight for contemporaries. A retrospective published by La Segunda observed that Prats' psychological state was, understandably, badly deteriorated by that point, and suggested he could not help recalling the earlier traffic obstruction engineered to facilitate the killing of his predecessor along the same route.[12] Alejandrina Cox lived for decades afterward without publicly discussing the episode; she broke her silence in a 2001 interview and died in March 2015.[6]

See also

References

  1. ^ a b c d e "Pueblo y Ejército indignados por agresión al general Prats" [People and Army outraged by attack on General Prats] (PDF). La Nación (in Spanish). 28 June 1973. p. 4. Retrieved 20 December 2023.
  2. ^ a b c d e Vega Contreras, Luis. "La caída de Allende. Parte II" (PDF). Rebelión.
  3. ^ a b Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional de Chile (28 June 1973). "Situación actual de país. Anuncio del jefe de la zona de emergencia de Santiago sobre supuesto complot". Historia Política Legislativa (in Spanish). Retrieved 1 January 2024.
  4. ^ a b Prats González, Carlos (1985). Memorias: Testimonio de un soldado (in Spanish). Pehuén Editores.
  5. ^ a b c "El ocaso de Prats en el gobierno". Special edition (in Spanish). La Segunda. 5 September 2003. p. 9.
  6. ^ a b c d e "Falleció Alejandrina Cox, quien protagonizó incidente con el general Carlos Prats" [Alejandrina Cox, who was involved in incident with General Carlos Prats, dies]. El Mercurio (in Spanish). 7 March 2015. Retrieved 14 August 2017.
  7. ^ Salazar Salvo, Manuel (28 June 2023). "El levantamiento de los tanques con el apoyo de Patria y Libertad (I)". Interferencia (in Spanish). Retrieved 1 January 2024.
  8. ^ a b c Hart, Samuel (June 2013). "El Tanquetazo — Chile's Coup That Wasn't". Association for Diplomatic Studies & Training. Retrieved 15 September 2026.
  9. ^ Spataro, Mario. "Pinochet: Las 'incómodas' verdades — Capítulo 3" (PDF) (in Spanish).
  10. ^ Rojas, Róbinson. "Estos mataron a Allende" (PDF). Róbinson Rojas Databank.
  11. ^ a b c d e González, Mónica (2012). La conjura: Los mil y un días del golpe (in Spanish). Santiago, Chile: Catalonia. p. 185.
  12. ^ a b "Allende" (PDF) (in Spanish). La Segunda.
  13. ^ a b "Trouble, Terror and Takeover". Time. 9 July 1973.
  14. ^ "La sangre de los generales" (in Spanish). La Tercera.
  15. ^ a b "Se desata la crisis" (in Spanish). Archived from the original on 2 August 2007. Retrieved 22 September 2006.
  16. ^ Power, Margaret (January 2003). "Right-Wing Women in Chile: Feminine Power and the Struggle Against Allende, 1964-1973". Latin American Politics and Society. Archived from the original on 26 April 2005.
  17. ^ Stuven, Ana María (August 2003). "Margaret Power, Right-Wing Women in Chile: Feminine Power and the Struggle Against Allende, 1964–1973". Historia. 36. Santiago: 477–480. doi:10.4067/S0717-71942003003600025.
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