Cuban packages
Chilean smuggling scandal
The Cuban packages (1972) was a Chilean conspiracy theory involving President Salvador Allende, his Minister of the Interior, Hernán del Canto and the Director of the Civil Police Eduardo Paredes. It was cited by the authors of the Chamber of Deputies' Declaration of the Breakdown of Chile’s Democracy as one of the instances of government officials' illegality.
The packages turned out to have contained automatic weapons, grenades and ammunition destined to form a small "revolutionary" army in Chile. These specific packages were part of an ongoing smuggling of weapons from Cuba that were delivered regularly twice a week via Cubana de Aviación, hidden inside the diplomatic pouches.
History
The regular flight of Cubana de Aviación arrived normally to Pudahuel Airport on the afternoon of March 11, 1972.
Nonetheless, as soon as the airplane touched ground, a caravan of cars and police patrols entered the runway and surrounded the plane. From the cargo hold they removed 11 big and heavy packages that were loaded onto the cars and sped away. Customs officials stopped the cars and insisted in processing the packages before they could be removed from the airport perimeter. Eduardo Paredes, director of the civil police, who had arrived from Cuba in the same plane (and who claimed the packages as his personal cargo) refused the officials' request for access and ordered them to withdraw. When the customs officers in turn refused to allow them to proceed, they received a personal call from the Interior Minister, Hernán del Canto, who ordered them to let the packages be interned without further ado.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Cuban packages” as chilean smuggling scandal. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Feb 9, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5192095. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1972.
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This entry incorporates text from “Cuban packages” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.