The Overthrow of Salvador Allende

"Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely."
— Lord Acton, letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton, 1887

The modern American left has rehabilitated Salvador Allende into a secular saint, a democratic martyr cut down for the crime of caring about the poor. This myth is entirely false. But so is its right-wing equivalent, that Allende's removal was simply a story of the United States liberating a Latin American nation from communism with nothing left to answer for. Both myths survive only by refusing to engage in the real world where this history was made, and by refusing to follow the story past the one date everyone already knows. This account does both.

The Man

Allende was not the Chilean people's first choice, or their second, or their third. He ran for president in 1952 and won 5.45 percent of the vote. He ran again in 1958 and won 28.85 percent. He ran again in 1964 and won 38.93 percent. Only on his fourth attempt, in 1970, did he finally win the presidency, and he did so with 36.61 percent, less than he had received six years earlier, running against a divided opposition rather than on the strength of a growing mandate. Allende reached the presidency not because the Chilean people had embraced Marxism, but because three successive governments, a populist, a Liberal, and a Christian Democratic one, had each failed to deliver, and voters were searching for whoever was left. It was a protest vote that handed a minority government the presidency of a country that had never given him more than a bare plurality.

Before Allende ever stood for president, he had already put his views on record in ways that most modern analysts have never mentioned. In his 1933 medical thesis, "Mental Hygiene and Delinquency," he argued, consistent with the eugenic thinking fashionable across much of the world's political spectrum at the time, for the compulsory sterilization of the "mentally ill" and habitual criminals, describing Jews as inclined toward "fraud, deceit, slander and above all usury," Arabs as "thoughtless, lazy, and naturally inclined towards theft," southern Italians as prone to "barbaric and primitive crimes of passion," and Roma as biologically predisposed to criminality, all of it framed as "heritable conditions" that the state had a duty to prevent from perpetuating. Six years later, as Health Minister in Pedro Aguirre Cerda's government, Allende attempted to translate this thinking directly into law, requesting a commission draft sterilization legislation targeting drug addicts and the mentally ill, a proposal only abandoned after public revulsion forced its withdrawal.

The government he served in should be brought to scrutiny as well. Two years before Cerda took office, Chile's own homegrown Nazi movement had attempted an armed putsch against the government, an uprising crushed so brutally that dozens of young Nazi sympathizers were executed after surrendering, a massacre that left the movement's leadership newly desperate for any ally, however unlikely. That desperation is perhaps the most charitable explanation for what followed: Chilean National Socialists threw their support behind Cerda's Popular Front candidacy weeks later, and Cerda's government repaid the favor by installing former leaders of the movement atop a new "General Secretariat for the Defense of the Race & the Use of Free Hours." None of this required Allende's personal enthusiasm to be damning by association alone, but what happened next did not require any charitable explanation at all. In April of 1940, with the invasions of Poland, Belgium, and France already well underway and the mass persecution of European Jews already documented in the international press, President Cerda personally wrote to Adolf Hitler, declaring himself an unconditional admirer of Hitler's policies and expressing his wishes for "the greatness and prosperity of the German Reich" and Adolf Hitler's own "personal fortune." This is corroborated independently by Chile's own National History Prize-winning historian, Sergio Villalobos, whose research confirms that this letter was sent on the occasion of presenting Chile's new ambassador to Berlin, and that relations between the two governments remained warm through the rest of Cerda's term.

Allende never resigned his post over it, and never spoke publicly against it. History does not require a man to answer personally for every position taken by a government he served in. But it does require that we stop pretending that Allende was simply a gentle reformer whose only sin was caring too much.

The Wreck He Left Behind

None of that, however, is what actually destroyed Chile's economy, but this publication has no interest in the lazy alternative myth that everything was the CIA's doing. It was not.

Among Allende's very first acts in office was a pardon for members of the MIR (a communist terror group) who had been convicted of bombings, kidnappings, and assassination, followed immediately by the dissolution of the mobile police unit that had been responsible for policing them. The results were predictable. In 1971, the former interior minister was murdered by VOP gunmen whom Allende himself had just released from prison. The government's own instrument for managing the shortages that followed was the JAP system, the Supply & Price Boards. Within eighteen months, more than 2,000 of these neighborhood price-and-supply committees existed across the country, backed by inspection brigades sent to monitor individual merchants for hoarding and enforce official prices, distributing goods on cards comparable to the rationing in Cuba and the Eastern Bloc. For a shopkeeper who had spent a lifetime building a small business, a committee of random neighbors with the power to denounce him for the crime of managing his own inventory was nothing other than raw state terror.

Chile’s economy soon became a shadow of its former self as unfettered price controls emptied supermarket shelves, while workers and employers alike were forced to rely on the rising black market simply to eat. The Chilean money supply grew 413 percent in 1973 alone. Inflation reached 606 percent that same year, among the highest ever recorded in South American history. At the same time, real wages collapsed nearly 39 percent even as the government printed money to cover its own deficits. Chile's own most valuable export, copper, saw its shipments fall by a quarter under state mismanagement, while external debt climbed past a quarter-billion dollars.

Even Fidel Castro, hardly a natural skeptic of revolutionary economics, spent 24 days touring Chile in November of 1971 and came away unimpressed, reportedly telling associates that where Marxism was a revolution of production, Allende's was only a revolution of consumption. Declassified CIA analysis from the period reached a similar verdict in far blunter language, describing Allende's economic program as a "consumption spree" of "meat pies and red wine" that had by late 1972 already burned through hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign reserves. A plan to nationalize 90 strategic companies metastasized, without legislative authority and often without any compensation at all, into the seizure of thousands of small workshops, artisan shops, and family farms. Nationalized firms, once seized, frequently kept no accounting whatsoever, and government funds earmarked for public services were, by multiple contemporary accounts, simply lost or diverted.

Was there also American economic pressure? Indeed, there was. And yet despite that, multilateral lending from the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and the IMF continued throughout Allende's presidency, and American food aid actually expanded during this period, facts the American left rarely acknowledges when it reaches for the word "blockade." Later-declassified Soviet archive material indicates that Chilean and Cuban intelligence services were already discussing closer security cooperation with Salvador Allende's own government, and that the KGB were already privately criticizing Allende for being too reluctant to use force against his own opposition.

The Opposition

Patria y Libertad, founded within weeks of Allende's 1970 victory by the lawyer Pablo Rodríguez Grez, became the country's most visible nationalist paramilitary movement of the 1970s. Patria Y Libertad was primarily composed of middle-class students and professional workers, organized into disciplined brigades, who fought street battles against leftist militants, ran their own radio station and propaganda operation, and provided armed security for the striking truckers during the paralyzing strikes of October 1972. A second, rival nationalist movement, known as Guildism, founded by the young law student Jaime Guzmán at the Catholic University, argued that professional and trade guilds, not political parties, were the natural and legitimate voice of civil society. This philosophy opposed Salvador Allende’s government through argument and direct action rather than with rifles and bloodshed, and it would go on, after the coup, to shape the constitution Chile still lives under today.

What united all revolutionary nationalists in Chile, whatever separated their methods, was the material fact that Allende’s communist government had just armed the men who assassinated the former interior minister. Allende’s coalition had already crossed from ordinary politics into managed political violence. They unanimously rejected liberal democracy as a spent, captured system that had already produced at least two failed governments in a row before Allende's. They rejected Marxism just as completely, and Patria y Libertad argued the point at length and in public. A movement built to resist tyranny, they said, could not turn around and embrace a doctrine that had produced the same tyranny, dressed in a different flag, everywhere it had been tried. In its place they wanted a third way, a state built on labor, professional, and student representation rather than parties captured by foreign ideology or foreign capital. That vision spoke to Chilean shopkeepers who were under constant surveillance by their own neighbors, families who were waiting in line for a ration card, and professionals who saw the machinery of a one-party state assembling in real time and refused to wait to find out what would come after. Tens of thousands of Chileans found that case convincing enough to organize, strike, and take to the streets for it, joined that December of 1971 by thousands of women marching through Santiago banging empty pots together, a wordless protest against shortages that needed no manifesto to make its point. The government had definitively lost the confidence of the people.

What actually brought Allende down was broader than any single movement, violent or otherwise. It was the truckers' union, 40,000 members and 56,000 vehicles, striking through October 1972 and again through the summer of 1973. It was the Confederation of Retail Commerce, the Confederation of Small Industry and Crafts, the copper miners of El Teniente, the nation's Medical College, its engineers, lawyers, dentists, and professors, its secondary and university students. It was, in short, nearly every organized, self-governing institution in Chilean civil society, left, right, and center, uniting against a government that had stopped respecting the boundaries of its own mandate. That the CIA helped fund some of this activity does not erase the fact that these were real Chileans, from every walk of life, exercising the oldest and most legitimate form of political power a free people has:

The refusal to keep working under squalid conditions that they never consented to.

The Second Betrayal

Following the military coup of September 11, 1973, some officers and nationalist intellectuals, including men who had marched with the movements described above, briefly pursued the organic, pro-labor settlement they had spent three years arguing for.

It would not last.

In October 1973, barely a month after the coup, General Sergio Arellano Stark led a military death squad, later remembered as the Caravan of Death, on a helicopter circuit of provincial army garrisons, executing at least 75 political prisoners along the way, in some cases against the explicit objection of the local army officers actually running those garrisons. In Antofagasta, the regional army commander, General Joaquín Lagos, resigned his post rather than continue serving under a command structure that had executed 56 people behind his back. The men who rode with Arellano that October were folded soon afterward into a new secret police agency, the Directorate of National Intelligence, DINA, run by a colonel named Manuel Contreras whom Pinochet had personally handpicked. Contreras met with Pinochet every morning at 7:30 to brief him directly. By 1977, DINA had grown into a force of nearly 4,000 operating out of secret torture centers like Villa Grimaldi, where thousands of Chileans were interrogated, and from which many never emerged. One Chilean intelligence officer summarized the new order for an American military attaché in three words:

"Pinochet, God, and DINA."

In April 1974, the regime made brief concessions to the pro-labor vision its own early nationalist allies had argued for, and for a few years a labor union school operated to train a new generation of leaders who genuinely believed Chile was building something better than what the socialists had promised and never delivered. It was not. As early as 1977, the same nationalist figures who had once organized against Allende began publicly warning that Pinochet's economic model, increasingly captured by University of Chicago’s neoliberal economists, risked reviving the very grievances the coup had been fought to eliminate. In mid-1978, the copper miners of the same Large-Scale Mining sector whose strikes had helped bring Allende down staged what became known as the Lunchbox Protest, met with the same repression the regime had once promised to end. By 1979, Pinochet turned decisively against organized labor altogether, stripped away collective bargaining and left behind a labor market that answered to no organization at all, discarding the very people who had helped bring him to power. In February 1982, labor leader Tucapel Jiménez was kidnapped, shot five times in the head, and beheaded by DINA's successor agency, which then staged the suicide of an innocent civilian in a botched attempt to close the case.

In 1978, the regime issued a blanket amnesty decree covering crimes committed since the coup, a shield that held for most perpetrators for nearly two decades.

The Reckoning

In 1980, at the direction of Guzmán, by then Pinochet's own trusted constitutional advisor, the regime had drafted and imposed a new constitution containing a mechanism meant to legitimize indefinite rule: a single-candidate plebiscite in 1988, yes or no, on eight more years of Pinochet. Having spent sixteen years suppressing, exiling, or silencing an entire generation of Chilean political life, and having watched his own economic model finally deliver real growth in the years prior, Pinochet had every reason to expect the same result he had always gotten. On October 5, 1988, Chileans voted no, by nearly 56 to 44 percent, and the general accepted the result. Patricio Aylwin, a Christian Democrat who had himself supported the original 1973 coup as a lesser evil against communist chaos, believing, like so many of Pinochet's other former allies, that a single general was never supposed to hold the country this long, was elected president the following year and took office in March 1990.

Pinochet never answered for his crimes.

He remained army commander until 1998 and a senator-for-life afterward under his own constitution's own design, until he was arrested on an international warrant while visiting London that October, spent over a year fighting extradition, and was eventually returned to Chile on grounds of ill health. By the time he died in December 2006, roughly 300 criminal charges for human rights violations and embezzlement were still pending against him, unresolved, in Chilean courts. Manuel Contreras, the head of DINA, was finally convicted in 1995 and would ultimately die in prison.

Lesson Learned

Chileans in 1973 did not choose between a hero and a villain. They chose, exhausted and with real cause, to remove a government that had abandoned the limits of its own mandate. And history has shown them that despite what followed, they were right to fight for their country, and to ensure that their nation would never fall to the treacheries of communist rule. In spite of nearly two decades of military rule, today, Chile stands strong, as one of the most prosperous democracies in Latin America, and none of it is owed to Pinochet. The Chile of today is owed to the Chilean people, who fought, and were often killed, for a sunrise that they knew they might never get to see.