Pinochet's Coup Against Allende — Operation Condor Context
The Chilean armed forces bombed their own presidential palace on 11 September 1973 and Salvador Allende died inside it. He had been elected in 1970 with 36 per cent of the vote, the first Marxist anywhere to reach power through a competitive election, and had governed on a programme of nationalising copper, banks and large estates. The economy went badly wrong by 1972: nationalisation without compensation for the American copper companies, price controls, wage rises, inflation above 300 per cent, shortages and a black market. Washington's contribution was extensive and is documented. Nixon instructed the CIA to make the economy scream, credit was cut off internationally, and money went to opposition parties, newspapers and the lorry owners' strike that paralysed distribution. Chilean society polarised beyond the possibility of compromise, with the Christian Democrats moving into opposition and the far left occupying factories and farms. Pinochet was appointed commander-in-chief three weeks before the coup and joined it late. Allende refused an aircraft out, broadcast a farewell over Radio Magallanes saying that others would open the great avenues along which free men would walk, and shot himself with a rifle Castro had given him. The junta closed Congress, banned parties, and detained thousands in the national stadium; some 3,200 people were killed or disappeared and 40,000 tortured over seventeen years. The economy was handed to a group of Chicago-trained economists. Pinochet lost a referendum in 1988 and left in 1990. The two things the coup produced are usually discussed separately and belong together. Chile got the highest sustained growth in Latin America and a government that threw people out of helicopters, and forty years of argument about whether the first required the second.
- Year: 1973 CE
- Category: Covert
