A-Infos (en) Italy, UCADI, #212 - What's New - September 11: The Military Coup in Chile (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

While mainstream newspapers and television news outlets tear their 
garments commemorating the Al-Qaeda terrorist attack on the World Trade 
Center towers in New York on the anniversary of that tragic event, no 
one has recalled that on this same day, a military coup was carried out 
in Chile-an event that culminated in the killing of Salvador Allende and 
the slaughter of his people. It was orchestrated by Secretary of State 
Henry Kissinger, who used the CIA to destabilize the country and 
lavishly funded the colonels led by Augusto Pinochet.
Yet, compared to the approximately 3,000 victims of the horrific 
terrorist act in New York, the dictatorship established in Chile 
following the coup of September 11, 1973, resulted in 3,216 people 
killed or "disappeared" (*desaparecidos*) and 38,254 victims of 
political detention and torture. The Chilean people were massacred and 
imprisoned en masse; the population was herded into stadiums where 
summary executions, torture, and violence took place. Opponents were 
made to vanish, and children were torn from their mothers and 
appropriated by others. The political repression was devastating, 
leading to the banning of political parties, the dissolution of labor 
unions, and the suppression of all social and solidarity-based activities.
These events bear witness to the selectivity of memory and the scant 
regard shown for the oppression of peoples!
Salvador Allende-the duly elected President of Chile, beloved by the 
people-was killed with a submachine gun in hand while defending the La 
Moneda Palace (the seat of the Presidency) against the military 
takeover. His "offense" was seeking to improve the living and working 
conditions of workers and peasants; promoting education and schooling 
for all, as well as the distribution of milk and food to poor families; 
and demanding better wages and acceptable working conditions for miners 
employed by major mining conglomerates. He intended to nationalize the 
country's resources to bring prosperity to its people and to create 
cooperatives that would allow peasants to manage the land themselves.
The dictatorship cost the country 17 years, during which Chile's entire 
economic structure was transformed along free-market lines. The country 
was sold off to multinationals, and the protégés of Milton Friedman and 
Arnold Harberger-the so-called "Chicago Boys"-were allowed to implement 
an exchange program funded by US foundations. This program linked the 
University of Chicago with the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 
enabling the coup-installed government to reshape the Chilean economy 
according to the principles of the free market, monetarism, and 
neoliberalism. These transformations drove the national economy to 
failure and ruin, eventually compelling the business community to accept 
a regime change-albeit a timid and controversial one, at least in formal 
terms.
In the immediate term, the Chilean coup set back all attempts to 
experiment with reformist processes for the emancipation of the 
proletariat-particularly in Italy. There, it inspired Enrico Berlinguer 
to pursue the disastrous policy of the "Historic Compromise," which was 
intended to avert a Chilean-style outcome but instead paved the way for 
the self-destruction of Italy's largest left-wing party. Today, the 
mismanagement of the freedom regained in Chile and the errors of 
bourgeois-democratic parties-compounded by the complicity of a business 
sector structurally tainted by the dictatorship-have led to the election 
of José Antonio Kast Rist, a Nazi and the son of Nazis, as President of 
the Republic of Chile.

https://www.ucadi.org/2026/09/29/cosa-ce-di-nuovo-11-settembre-1993-colpo-di-stato-militare-in-cile/
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