The “Problem”

It would be hard for many of us to understand how devastating it would be to go to sleep one night and wake up the next morning to a world that doesn’t remotely resemble the one we went to sleep in the night before. Nevertheless, that is exactly what the people of Santiago, Chile woke up to on September 11, 1973. Their world exploded in chaos. They never saw it coming. That fateful day, residents of the Chilean capital, Santiago, awoke to tanks rolling along the streets and the declaration of a coup. Salvador Allende, the first democratically elected Marxist leader in Latin America, had been deposed by a military junta under the direction of Augusto Pinochet. I would have thought that deposing a Marxist would have been a good thing, but I suppose it depends on what he is replaced by. Time would tell the horrific tale. In the months that followed, some 3,000 people, including two Americans, were be rounded up, tortured, and executed. September 11, 1973, began a dictatorship that would last 17 years. The first “new reality” was the sight of their own fighter jets bombing La Moneda, the presidential palace. I’m sure that sight burned into their memories, much like the sight of our own White House being bombed would do to us in the United States. Like the attacks of 9-11 in the United States, this was something you never forget.

The Presidential Palace in Chile is basically the Chilean White House, and suddenly it was blown to bits. The bombing took place at 11am, just moments after the coup had been announced. Allende and his most loyal followers were still inside, which was not the best place to be. While La Moneda was in flames, President Allende committed suicide with an AK-47. I’m sure he would have been killed anyway, but quite likely his death would not come until after he was tortured first.

Although the bombing of La Moneda marked the beginning of a long period of repression and misery in Chile, it also capped off a somewhat embarrassing period for the USA. The United States was not supportive of Allende’s regime either, and “under the orders of Richard Nixon, the CIA (as its own website attests) had spent the previous three years helping plot coups in Chile and trying to otherwise destabilize Allende’s government. Another foreign policy success!” Ironically, the democratically elected Allende was succeeded by the brutal dictator General Augusto Pinochet, who ruled over Chile with an iron fist for the next 17 years.

While Allende was democratically elected, he was also a Marxist leader and so not really what the United States wanted to see for Chile. When the coup began, Allende retreated with his supporters to La Moneda. The Presidential palace was a fortress-like structure. Pinochet’s army surrounded the palace with tanks and infantry and ordered air force jets to bomb it. Allende survived the aerial attack but then apparently shot himself to death as troops stormed the burning palace, reportedly using an automatic rifle given to him as a gift by Cuban dictator Fidel Castro.

Allende was born into an upper-middle-class Chilean family in 1908. By 1933, he was a Marxist activist and worked as a doctor and was a founding member of Chile’s Socialist Party. He was elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1937 and later served as minister of health in the leftist government of President Pedro Aguirre Cerda. His political career continued to grow, and in 1945, he became a senator. Then, he suffered a bit of a setback when he ran for president several times in the 1950s and 1960s but lost. Then in September 1970 he won a three-sided presidential race with 36.3 percent of the vote, but without a clear majority, his election had to be confirmed by the Chilean Congress. Once confirmed, Allende became president.

After Allende was declared the victor, President Richard Nixon summoned CIA Director Richard Helms to the White House and ordered him in no uncertain terms to prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him. Nixon knew that Allende had threatened to nationalize US owned industries in Chile. Nixon did not want another Fidel Castro coming to power in an American hemisphere during his watch. It was a serious concern, so President Nixon authorized $10 million for the covert operation against Allende and instructed that it be carried out without the knowledge of the US embassy in Chile. In the end, the “problem” was solved by the coup that took place. Of course, the solution was just as bad, if not worse than the original problem.