Before Sept. 11, 2001, the date of Sept. 11 signified to the progressive movement the fascist terror unleashed on the Chilean people at the hands of the CIA and U.S. imperialism.
On that day in 1973, General Augusto Pinochet overthrew the presidency of socialist Salvador Allende and plunged the
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On Dec. 10, Pinochet died of a heart attack at the age of 91, having escaped the justice that many in Chile sought for years. He was responsible for the deaths and torture of tens of thousands of Chileans.
Upon announcement of Pinochet’s death, White House spokesperson Tony Fratto cynically expressed sentiment for the victims of Pinochet. “Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile represented one of the most difficult periods in that nation’s history. Our thoughts today are with the victims of his reign and their families.”
But the U.S. government was responsible for those tens of thousands of victims. The 1973 coup was engineered in Washington. Pinochet’s 17-year rule received the full backing of the U.S. government. Henry Kissinger was widely known as the architect of the coup.
U.S. government, corporations oppose nationalization
During Allende’s campaign for president in 1970, the Nixon administration began to organize a campaign against him, knowing if Allende were elected, he would accelerate a move for nationalization of Chile’s copper that was already underway.
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger directed the CIA to do whatever was necessary to defeat Allende and the growing workers’ struggle. U.S. copper monopolies Anaconda Copper Mining Co. and Kennecott Utah Mining Co. helped provide the coup’s financing, along with telecommunications giant ITT, which owned 70 percent of Chile’s telephone company.
At the time, Chile derived over 80 percent of its national income from copper. But far more of the country’s wealth was funneled into the coffers of Anaconda and Kennecott Utah Mining Co., which had majority ownership of Chile’s copper.
Economist writer Norman Gall wrote in 1972, “In 1967, as the Vietnam War pushed world demand and prices for copper to unprecedented heights, Anaconda’s Chilean operations accounted for $4.05 of the company’s total earnings per share of $4.31.”
But starting in the 1960s, there was a growing national demand for Chilean control of its copper—embraced by even
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Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei—Chile’s president before Allende—had proposed a limited nationalization with indemnity to the U.S. companies. But in 1971, Allende, with the Chilean Congress’s unanimous approval, carried out a complete takeover of the country’s copper industry with no compensation. His new administration had determined that Anaconda and Kennecott made super-profits far exceeding the companies’ claimed book value of their operations.
Allende was a socialist of the social-democratic current. He believed that his elected government would be able to peacefully introduce socialism through a process of nationalizations and radical reforms, while still relying on the capitalist state—the police, armed forces, courts and other institutions.
This na?ve perspective of a parliamentary road to socialism proved fatal not only for Allende, but for the working class and entire progressive movement for many years.
With Allende’s radical reforms and the Chilean masses’ increasing struggle for socialism, the Chilean capitalists and reactionary middle class were mobilized by U.S. imperialism. They destabilized Chile’s economy with boycotts, industry stoppages and sabotage.
Allende strongly believed that Chile’s military and police would remain neutral and “defend the constitution.”
As the danger of a coup became more and more evident in 1972 and 1973, Allende ignored the call by many to arm the workers, students and peasants to defend their gains. Instead he relied more and more on the capitalist state.
Cuban President Fidel Castro expressed Cuba’s unswerving support for the Chilean people’s struggle and Allende, but he also recognized that Chile’s peaceful road to socialism was in danger of being crushed by imperialism. During one visit between the two leaders, Castro presented Allende with an automatic weapon for his defense.
Besieged by an economic boycott of the international banks and manipulation of the world copper market, and industrial sabotage by Chilean capitalists, it was clear to revolutionary Chileans that a confrontation was imminent.
The Marxist organization MIR—el Movimiento de la Izquierda Revolucionaria—supported the Allende government’s reforms, but warned that the Chilean masses needed to be armed and further the fight for workers’ power. “To not organize, to not mobilize, to not fight is to open the door to fascism,” said the MIR in 1972.
With the crisis deepening, on Aug. 23, 1973, Allende ironically named Pinochet as commander-in-chief of the armed
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The coup and ‘Operation Condor’
On the morning of Sept. 11, as tanks and personnel carriers circled the Moneda presidential palace in Santiago, Pinochet’s forces fired into the palace while planes dropped bombs. Inside, Allende and a core of his staff resisted until the fascist troops stormed the building. Allende was killed.
By afternoon, all government offices in the country were taken over by troops. Within weeks, thousands of leftists, intellectuals, unionists and supporters of Allende were rounded up and tortured in the National Stadium in Santiago. Many were executed. Congress was suspended, unions and political parties were banned, and habeas corpus was eliminated. Thousands of young people and other revolutionaries were killed in the following months and years.
Pinochet was one of the pillars of “Operation Condor,” a ferocious counter-insurgency campaign involving six Latin American right-wing governments that collaborated to torture and kill opponents of the dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay and Bolivia.
Again, with the direction by the U.S. CIA, the long arm of Pinochet’s fascist rule reached the streets of Washington in 1976.
On Sept. 21, 1976, agents of Pinochet’s feared DINA secret police, along with right-wing Cuban terrorists, planted a bomb underneath the car of Orlando Letelier, who was foreign minister under Allende. He and his assistant, U.S. activist Ronni Moffitt, were killed in the blast.
During Pinochet’s rule, one million Chileans fled into exile, seeking refuge around the world. Today, many in Chile and abroad are celebrating the death of Pinochet, although there is justified anger that he was never tried for his crimes.
The big-business media today decries the repression under Pinochet, but almost all temper their criticism with comments that he turned Chile into an “economic miracle.” But the re-privatization of industry and gutting of workers’ living standards under Pinochet’s reign of terror reduced 49 percent of the population to the poverty level by 1987. Today, the richest 10 percent of Chile’s population owns 47 percent of the country’s wealth.
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Chile’s lessons
The lessons of Chile must never be forgotten.
Fidel Castro spoke on Sept. 28, 1973 in Havana, in homage to the heroic people of Chile and to Salvador Allende. Of the challenges that Allende’s government faced, he said, “[H]e was faced with the fact that the bourgeois state apparatus was intact; he was faced with armed forces that were called, ‘apolitical, institutional,’ that is to say, apparently neutral in the revolutionary process; he was faced with that bourgeois parliament, where a majority of its members responded to the ruling classes; he was faced with a judicial system that responded entirely to the reactionaries.
“There was much reason and premonition with which we gave that weapon to the President. … Never was a weapon in better defense of the cause of the humble, the cause of the Chilean workers and peasants! And if each worker and each peasant had had a weapon in their hands like that one, there would never have been a fascist coup! That is the great lesson that the Chilean experience imparts to revolutionaries.”
