The Press: File Now, Die Later

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U.P.I. Correspondent Steve Yolen and four staffers were pinned down in their office for 36 hours, dodging hundreds of bullets fired through their windows. Stewart Russell of Reuters was arrested as a suspected sniper and transported in an open truck through heavy firing in downtown Santiago. Ari Rath, managing editor of the Jerusalem Post and a veteran of the Six-Day War, was hit by shrapnel on his way to his bathroom in the Carrera-Sheraton Hotel. Two students from the Catholic University in Santiago, members of a Chilean camera crew that got out the first film of the revolution, were shot to death — by accident, the new government said later.

Covering the news — and running for cover — during Chile's coup turned out to be a nightmare for reporters inside and outside the shaken nation. Curfews, censorship and closed frontiers conspired to bottle up the story. Satellite communications went dead moments after the coup started. Telephone lines to Buenos Aires were tightly restricted and monitored by the military, creating a backlog of 2,000 calls at one point. Air traffic in and out of Santiago was halted; telex lines were cut. For the scores of frustrated reporters waiting outside Chile, the obstacles were nothing less than the towering Andes and the treacherous passage around Cape Horn.

Four days passed before the first TV film of the coup got through. Nine days passed from the firing of the first shots at the presidential palace until any newsmen waiting outside Chile were allowed in. Despite the problems, however, most of the critical facts did get through, thanks to the ingenuity and persistence—and occasional lucky breaks—of the handful of foreign correspondents in Santiago. Reporters were able to make brief contact with Buenos Aires on a telephone line cutting through the Argentine town of Mendoza near the Chilean border. Through this route first bulletins about the revolt were flashed to wire services and newspapers round the world. The new government permitted film shot by the Catholic University crew to be transmitted to Mexico and the U.S. by satellite. The exclusive footage sold for $15,000 per station in some areas when it was finally fed out of Chile.

Two Mexican newsmen—one in Chile and one in Mexico City —scored coups of their own. Manuel Mejido managed to get into the Mexican embassy in Santiago. He was able to interview Chileans taking refuge there, including Mrs. Salvador Allende. He got his story out with a call through Mendoza to the Argentine news agency Telam, which then filed to Mexico. TV Commentator Jacobo Zabludovsky called the embassy from Mexico City and broadcast a twelve-minute interview with Mrs. Allende before she left Chile.