Marking 50 years since democratically elected Socialist President of Chile Salvador Allende was overthrown by a CIA backed fascist military coup

On September 11, 2001 the USA experienced a great tragedy,I join people all over the world in remembering the lives lost on that day, and the hundreds of thousands more killed in Afghanistan, Iraq, and the other wars that followed.

Today though I also remember another 9/11, when on this day 50 years ago, on 9/11/1973, the socialist president of Chile Salvador Allende was overthrown by a CIA backed fascist military coup  led by General Augusto Pinochet, which established one of the most brutal regimes of the second half of the 20th century that ushered in decades of darkness, leading  to years of repression, torture, forced disappearance, false imprisonment, fear, death and for many Chileans exile.

Democracy would not return for 17 years with the Chilean people having to endure years of autocratic military rule. In Chile, which marked the 50th anniversary of the coup on Sunday, the events remain deeply divisive and continue to shape modern politics.

In 1970 Salvador Allende  democratically won 36.6% of the vote and established his Popular Unity government in power much to the alarm of the United States government who feared his leftist government would slide into one party rule like Fidel Castro's Cuba. 

Allende's political platform was populist and he promised the nationalization of many sectors of the Chilean economy and the distribution of wealth to the country's poor. These plans, however, were not accepted in Washington, which saw Chile as the new “red menace”, a cancer to be eradicated and in a way to make it an example to anyone who dared to follow in its footsteps.

During the thousand days that his government lasted: Copper was nationalised; agrarian reform was deepened; hundreds of thousands of homes were built; many industries and services were nationalised, and programmes were developed to improve health, education and welfare. Culture flourished for the working people. For the first time, the Chilean people felt involved in the transformation of their country. These reforms inevitably challenged the power of the upper classes. The Chilean hierarchical society could not tolerate the irruption of ‘the bottom’ nor could the US’s Nixon administration.

The involvement of the CIA was also proved by documents and files decrypted that confirm what we already knew: the coup had its legitimation from  President Nixon and the National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, the future Nobel Peace Prize.winner.

In the grips of Cold War fears of communism, the U.S. government had been working since the early 1960s to shape Chilean politics, culminating with "a massive covert effort to 'bring down'" Allende's government, as President Richard Nixon and his cabinet put it, according to "The Pinochet File."  Published in 2013, the book by National Security Archive senior analyst Peter Kornbluh thoroughly summarizes 30 years of declassified documents that expose the role the U.S. played in usurping Allende and supporting Pinochet. 

 “We want to do everything we can to hurt (Allende) and bring him down,” then-U.S. Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird said during a National Security Council meeting in 1970, according to one of the documents cited in "The Pinochet File."

About the U.S. role in the coup, former Secretary of State Colin Powell said in 2003: "It is not a part of American history that we are proud of."

In the early hours of the day of the coup, Allende learned from an aide that the navy had taken control of Chile’s major ports. Fearing the worst, and accompanied by a handful of bodyguards and his personal doctor, Danilo Bartulín, the president rushed to the presidential palace. At first, he thought the navy was acting on its own, and that the army, led by the recently appointed commander-in-chief, Pinochet, would defend the constitutional government.

Arriving downtown, he was reassured to see that the gendarmerie, the famed Carabineros, were defending the palace.  As cabinet members and others began arriving at the palace, the president tried to contact Pinochet. Failing to do so, he feared the insurgents had taken the commander-in-chief prisoner. Meanwhile, Minister of Defense Orlando Letelier, a lawyer who would be assassinated by agents of Pinochet’s junta three years later in Washington, DC, was arrested by the putschists.

At 8:20 AM, it became clear that Pinochet had betrayed the president and was leading the coup. Suddenly, the Carabineros changed sides and joined the insurgents, and the light Mowag tanks that were guarding the palace turned 180 degrees and left the Plaza de la Constitución. The government was isolated and cornered. The president and 60 of his supporters, including bodyguards, some cabinet members, and medical personnel, were on their own. Allende put on a helmet and moved from room to room, holding an AK-47 that Fidel Castro had given him for his birthday. .

At 9:15 AM, Vice-Admiral Patricio Carvajal, one of the putsch leaders, called the president and told him that if he did not resign, fighter jets would bomb the palace. Allende refused to surrender, and at 9:37 AM gave his last radio address, which would become known as the “Great Avenues Speech.” Toward the end of it, he said: “Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Go forward knowing that, sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again where free men will walk to build a better society.

Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers!  These are my last words, and I am certain that my sacrifice will not be in vain, I am certain that, at the very least, it will be a moral lesson that will punish felony, cowardice, and treason."

Within a few hours, the military had seized control of the government, and Allende and many of his ministers were left dead  in the presidential palace as the military unleashed a wave of brutal repression against the population and  the people's movements.

 

Here are  Salvador Allende chilling final words to the world, broadcast ,live on the radio at 9:10 am on September 11, 1973, in the midst of the ultimately successful US-sponsored coup d'etat against the democratically-elected government. Barricaded inside La Moneda, the presidential palace, President Allende gave his life defending Chilean democracy .

He fatally shot himself when it became clear that he stood no chance.To many, Allende became a leftist icon, but others blame him for political failures that led to the coup. 

Pinochet assumed the presidency two days later, outlawing leftist parties and announcing that there would be no more elections. Addressing the nation, Pinochet said that the military was acting "solely out of patriotism, to save the country from the chaos that was caused by the Marxist government of Salvador Allende."  He would rule Chile for 17 bloody years.

The military and secret police began rounding up thousands of  people loyal to President Allende.Many disappeared into army-run, CIA-supported torture centers, never to be heard from again. Pinochet converted the national football stadium into a detention facility like Guantanamo Bay.

Over 20,000 people are established to have been killed during Pinochet's reign  of terror. and 60,000 tortured,  hundreds of Allendes supporters alone were gunned down in Santiago Soccer stadium,In response, the Nixon administration committed more money, more training, more torture equipment.

Chile's economy was turned into a plantation for the 1%, as inequality and poverty skyrocketed under the imposed Milton Friedman-style economic model. The Pinochet regime, sold off nearly two-thirds of Chile’s key copper industry nationalized under Allende and his predecessor, privatized sections of banking, the telephone company, metalworks and other companies placed under state control by Allende, returned factories and land taken by workers to private owners, privatized water, pensions, healthcare, education, transportation, utilities, and other sectors. Taxes and regulations were cut to the bone to turn the country into a playground for the emerging transnational corporations and the local oligarchy. 

The most disturbing and well-remembered tactic of the dictatorship wasn’t what it did in the open, but what it did in secret. The Pinochet dictatorship practiced a form of kidnapping, torture, and murder that has come to be known as “disappearing” so-called because while everyone knew that the missing persons had been taken by the government and were almost certainly being tortured, the government maintained complete silence about their absence and treated them like any other person who had gone missing. Throughout the 1970s, military governments across Latin America used this technique to inspire fear and crush left-wing oppositions.

Disappearance meant that the families and political comrades of the missing faced closed doors and bureaucratic walls when they tried to get any information: there was no way to request a visit, because the government maintained that the disappeared weren’t in detention. They couldn’t seek proof that their loved ones were alive, because the government said it had no way to know that. They couldn’t even get official acknowledgements of their deaths, because the government wouldn’t admit that they had died. 

Roughly three thousand people were disappeared by the dictatorship between 1973 and 1980. This meant lives cut short, funerals without bodies, and parents left not knowing if their children were dead or alive. 

The 1973 coup and resulting dictatorship led to thousands of Chileans going into exile all around the world. Britain, under an international agreement, was one of the countries that welcomed Chilean political activists who fled into exile. Many settled permanently in this country,

British people were profoundly moved by Chilean events and their solidarity strengthened resistance to the Chilean dictatorship. Founded in late 1973, the Chile Solidarity Campaign (CSC) coordinated events and marches, raised money, ran boycott campaigns and increased public awareness.  

Today in Chile  these events are still marked  with anger, people taking to the streets and displaying it, Chileans still having to deal  with the devastating legacy of life  under a fascist regime.As with previous anniversaries of the coup,violence erupted yesterday and  Chile is bracing for more violence on Monday.

Today on  this tragic anniversary, it is time to remember again, a time in our history that still holds daily reverence to most Chileans lives,and for much of Latin America, and for the  many democratic reformers and carriers of solidarity's message worldwide.

For many victims of the dictatorship has proven elusive. Many people  are still demanding truth and justice, and will not rest until they have found out was has happened to their loved ones, who were arrested, and went missing, never to return.

Barak Obama declared on Margaret Thatcher's death that she was "one of greatest champions of freedom and liberty." This is the same bit of poison that told her friend Pinochet that, she was " very much aware that it was you that brought  democracy to Chile, you set up a constitution  suitable for democracy."
Throughout Pinochets regime of terror he was supplied by UK Defence Manufacturers, the military junta that took power  bombed the presidential palace  using British Hawker Hunter aircraft. Margaret Thatcher personally after coming into power lifted the arms embargo on his regime. Whilst Thatcher fawned over him, Pinochet carried on killing critics, and any form of opposition, among them the revered Chilean singer Victor Jara, who was arrested by the military and tortured at Estadio Chile, in front of thousands of onlookers, who was subsequently shot as he defied the taunting soldiers by singing, his body left bloodied, his bones and his hands broken and battered full of bullet holes.

                                             Victor Jara

In Florida in June,2016 a jury  found a former Chilean army officer liable for the murder of folk singer and activist Víctor Jara in 1973. Jara was tortured and shot more than 40 times in the days after the U.S.-backed coup, who after his death became a symbol of Chile's struggle against Pinochet's regime.. The verdict against Pedro Pablo Barrientos Nuñez marked what The Guardian newspaper called "one of the biggest and most significant legal human rights victories against a foreign war criminal in a US courtroom."https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/jun/27/victor-jara-pedro-pablo-barrientos-nunez-killing-chile

Speaking on the steps of the Florida courthouse, Jara’s widow Joan Jara Turner said at  the time, "What we were trying to do for more than 40 years, for Víctor, has today come true." Since then in a form of justice eight retired Chilean military officers have been sentenced to 15 years in prison for Victor's murder.This hero of the people whose life and music has been celebrated ever since.

Though the dictatorship ended in 1990, Pinochet and his allies remained largely shielded from prosecution for their crimes due to legal protections and the Chilean constitution they had drafted. While some of them faced prosecution later in life, many of them escaped it, including Pinochet himself. Pinochet would always be thankful to Thatcher, visiting her on an annual pilgrimage to London. Pinochet eventually died in 2006,  while under  house arrest, with many millions of pounds laundered in banks, but had  managed to avoid going on trial and thus avoiding justice..

General Pinochet  and Margaret Thatcher

 

                                             General Pinochet the murderous fascist dictator

Fifty years after Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship came to power, Chile’s government has now admitted guilt for the disappearance, and presumed deaths, of over two thousand individuals at the hands of the Chilean military and associated paramilitary groups. The government has also committed to searching for and identifying those whose fates remain officially unknown, numbering over a thousand.  This move marks a major shift for the government, which until now has either ignored the fate of the disappeared or treated them like events from a tragic  and hopefully forgotten  past. Acknowledging the disappeared will go some way toward bringing these victims and their families some closure and justice.  But the initiative isn’t without its detractors,  major sectors of the Chilean military and Chilean society in general oppose this move and continue to extol Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. The controversy over the government’s admission of guilt highlights the divisions that still rend the country, and which have presented serious challenges for progressive president Gabriel Boric since he took office, there are still those that think the Pinochet regime was justified, and that the violation of human rights though regrettable were  inevitable and  leaders like Pinochet could somehow be be justified. .

Pinochet is still seen by somel today, as a savior who oversaw a period of relative economic prosperity.  A survey conducted by pollster Cerc-Mori in May found that 36 percent of people believe the general "liberated Chile from Marxism," the highest figure measured in 28 years of polling.  However, when it comes to people born after the coup, 60 percent disapprove of Pinochet, according to a survey by pollster Activa Research.

For  many his legacy is one of state terrorism, and rampant disregard for human rights, he caused a whole society to become fearful, their daily lives one of terror. We must not forget, the dead and the missing, nor the human rights activists who shone a light on this dark regime.

Fifty years later, Chile is still trying to find its post-coup identity and shape a new political system amid ongoing debate over a new constitution. But Allende and Pinochet cast long shadows.

The coup anniversary comes as the country is led by Boric, a 37-year-old leftist who regularly pays homage to Allende. He came to power after a wave of social protests in 2019 which led to a referendum in which 80 percent voted to replace the Pinochet-era constitution widely blamed for Chile's deep economic inequity. 

However, more than 61 percent of voters last year went on to reject a constitutional draft which would have made Chile one of the most progressive countries in Latin America.  And in May, the far-right Republican Party led by conservative lawyer Jose Antonio Kast  a Pinochet apologist won 23 of 51 seats on the council that will write a new one.  In the days leading up to the anniversary, Kast's party, and other right-wing groups, refused to sign a commitment to "defend democracy from authoritarian threats" put forward by Boric.

But the fact that Chile is finally admitting to its participation in disappearing leftist activists is a testament to the efforts of those whose loved ones were killed by the dictatorship, and to the efforts of the socialist government of Gabriel Boric. The activists who have pushed for the government to make this move recognize it as merely the beginning of a long process of reconciliation for the government’s crimes. 

They commend the government for the “political will” it took to take this step, but also note that it’s too late for many, after all, it’s been almost fifty years since some of their loved ones and comrades were taken, tortured, and killed, and the government is only now acknowledging that it happened.

It is also worth noting that no US presidential apology, has ever been made for what was unleashed on the workers, students and ordinary people of Chile on this day. So today as America  remembers  their own  9/11 lets not forget the other injustice that they helped cause.In Chile, the US murdered tens of thousands and impoverished millions. This wasn't America's first foray in international terrorism, nor would it be the last.

My only hope now is that we continue to express true sorrow, whilst collectively recognising the terrible legacy of these two  9/11's. Let us chart a more just and peaceful path forward. Lets hope the forces of truth and reconciliation long continue to be fostered and that  all victims are  rightfully remembered.