Pinochet: The Father of Contemporary Chile

As with most of my bibliographies, this list has two constraints: books, in English. I have included titles that deal with periods both before and after the coup, as well as works of political economy and specialized topics (e.g., human rights, transitional justice) related in one way or another to the effects and consequences of the military coup that replaced Salvador Allende's democratic government with authoritarian rule. Allende, a physician and Marxist, was elected president of Chile on the strength of the Unidad Popular (an alliance of much of the

The Hispanic American Historical Review, 1977

NOTE FROM THE PUBLISHERS: "Ever since 1973 coup in Chile there has been considerable speculation about what really happened and about the involvement of the U.S. government and U.S. business interests. Now, this explosive account by a Chilean journalist who lived through it all reveals the military, industrial, and commercial conspiracy, abetted by North American interests, to bring down the Allende government. "Beginning on the day of the coup with Allende's murder and the military's artful staging of his "suicide", the book goes on to reveal the background of intrigue and counter-intrigue; the participation of the CIA, the Pentagon, and U.S. business interests, as well as that of the Braziliangovernment; the sinister roles of the Chilean armed forces, police forces, and political parties; the events throughout Chile on the day of the coup as the massive military apparatus got under way; and the reign of terror and torture unleashed on the civilian population. This is a fast-moving, well-paced narrative, with a "State of Siege" quality to it. It will be an important and controversial book which neither Allendistas nor the conspirators and their respectable fronts will like. It shows the latter as a gang of premeditated murderers and the former, including Allende, as honorable but very foolish men, who, until the very last moments, believed that the military was made up of loyal soldiers, faithful to the Constitution they were sworn to uphold. The author is an excellent reporter and has carefully woven together the strands of seemingly unrelated events into a coherent, compelling, and well-documented story of who did what to whom, when." ===================================================== (excerpts from "A Necessary Explanation") "This book is an accusation. As such, it is written in the manner of an extensive police report. It recounts the story of an assassination: the assassination of one particular man, of thousands of other men and women, and of the ideas of those men and women. Here is the story behind the assassination of Dr. Salvador Allende Gossens, the constitutional President of Chile. The main actors in this drama are his murderers: their habits, their ideologies, their meetings, their plans, their conspiracies. "This is not a book that analyzes what happened. It is a book that tells what happened and how it happened. And because I am writing as a journalist, a Chilean, a leftist, and a personal participant in the events in Chile from 1970 to 1973, the reader will also find an Allende very different from the image created by the funeral eulogies, the statues, the posters, the worl-wide homages. Here is an Allende stripped of the mask of perfection, of "everything he did, he did well", that so many people have been at such pains to present. Here the heroic picture of Allende changes to one of a vacillating, contradictory man attempting to defend "the Chilean way to socialism" but making the political mistakes that opened the door to the forces of fascist repression in Chile, aided and abetted by U.S. interests, both commercial and governmental. "This is not to say that Salvador Allende was not a hero. No one doubts that. No Chilean is unaware that Allende went down fighting, without any hope of survival unless he surrendered. And he did not surrender. Heroes die like that, and that is how he died. And that is how many thousands of his fellow Chileans also died, hopelessly defending a democracy crushed by the tanks, armored cars, fighter planes, and machine guns of the rebel soldiers. Allende once said: "Let them know this, let them hear this very clearly, let it make a deep impression on them: I will defend this Chilean revolution and I will defend the Popular government. This people have given me this mandate; I have no alternative. Only by riddling me with bullets will they be able to end our will to accomplish the people's programa". So they riddled him with bullets. A few hours before his death, as the rebel attack was under way, he broadcast a speech to his countrymen: "Thus the first page of this story has been written. My people and the people of the Americas will write the rest." This is the Allende you will find in this book. And you will read how the common people, the victims of the coup, were denied the opportunity to organize for their own protection. In sum, while this book is a denunciation of Allende's assassins, the generals and admirals in Santiago, Chile, and in Washington, it is also a denunciation of the tragic and vacillating conduct of those who called themselves leaders of the people, but left their people defenseless against the fascist-imperialist attack... ...The Chilean people paid for this mistake with more than 15,000 dead, more than 30,000 prisoners, more than 100,000 brutally tortured, more than 200,000 dismissed for political reasons, and more than 30,000 students expelled from the university by the military...The Chilean military unleashed their reign of terror against the Chilean people in order to protect the interests of the great North American consortia (Anaconda, Kennecott, ITT, et al), as well as the strategic interests of the military-industrial complex in Washington...R.R.(1975)" CHAPTER 1. The Artful Staging of a "Suicide" "A disciplined, organized, and aware people is, along with an honest and loyal armed forces and military police, the best defense of the Popular government and of the future of the country."

It is now over a quarter of a century since the fall of the 17-year Pinochet dictatorship and the return of democracy in Chile. Yet the impact of this period remains profoundly felt in contemporary Chilean life. This is not only a result of the now well-known heinous crimes committed by the dictatorship: the more than 3000 Chileans murdered, the widespread use of brutal torture, the quarter of a million arbitrary arrests and the massive campaign of internal and external exile of political opponents. It is also a result of the ongoing damage inflicted by a series of radical economic, political and constitutional measures imposed during the dictatorship, many of which have proven almost impossible to unravel. These measures implemented in the late 1970s and early 1980s included the mass privatisation of public assets, the slashing of all state expenditure (aside from that of the military), outlawing of organised labour and the sudden removal of price controls and trade restrictions. As a consequence, Chile today has the highest level of income inequity and the lowest public investment in education in the OECD, as well as being one of the most privatised economies in the world. Significantly, these outcomes are a testament to the extreme free-market theories of Milton Friedman and the Chicago School of Economics, who—under the benign tutelage of dictatorship—were able to undertake their first 'real life' experimentation without fear of social consequences. And now in Chile, we are able to clearly observe the profound social and economic implications of four decades of neo-liberalist economic policy. So how did this disastrous social experiment emerge and what implications has it had for a generation of Chileans? As is the case with so much of the recent history of Latin America, what happened in Chile has deep roots in the obsessive desire of the United States to maintain its political and economic hegemony in the region. We know from declassified documents from the Nixon-era White House that the real prospect of the election of socialist Salvador Allende in the 1970 Chilean Presidential election was something the US refused to accept. Indeed, the now infamous Henry Kissinger (who was Nixon's Secretary of State at the time) argued to that 'the election of Allende as president of Chile poses for us one of the most serious challenges ever faced in this hemisphere'. The threat (and inspiration) of a democratic socialist who may threaten the interests of US capital was too much for the White House to bear. This was the catalyst for the commencement of a CIA-led covert campaign in Chile, which was to involve the funding of Allende's opponents and increased contact with the Chilean military forces. However, despite their best efforts—including an attempt to stop Allende's inauguration through the assassination of the Chilean Chief of the Armed Forces days before—the covert campaign failed and Allende became president in November 1970. Refusing to accept the democratic outcome and enraged by Allende's popular early moves to nationalise foreign capital and moves toward agrarian reform, the Nixon administration further stepped up its covert operations to bring the Allende government down. This involved 'making the economy scream' through an economic blockade and such things as funding truck drivers to strike and encouraging the stockpiling of goods to create shortages. More insidiously, the

The Wire , 2023

The article highlights that a socialist/Marxist alliance led by Salvador Allende won power through the democratic electoral process in Chile. This government was overthrown through a military coup led by General Pinochet that was engineered by the CIA. Massive human rights violations followed in the 17 year military dictatorship. Now Pinochet is thrown into the dustbin of history while Allende remains an icon of the socialist movement all over the world.

2006

Remembering Pinochet's Chile, the first book in a trilogy that studies how Chileans have struggled to define both individual and collective memories of political violence that occurred under the Pinochet regime (1973)(1974)(1975)(1976)(1977)(1978)(1979)(1980)(1981)(1982)(1983)(1984)(1985)(1986)(1987)(1988)(1989)(1990), is a valuable addition to a burgeoning literature on Chile's dictatorial and post-dictatorial periods. Historian Steve Stern, acknowledging the contributions of numerous social scientists who, since the 1980s, have paved the way for our current understanding of Latin America's authoritarian regimes and

2012

On September 11th 1973, the Chilean military, led by General Augusto Pinochet, overthrew the democratically elected Unidad Popular government of Salvador Allende, bringing forty years of democracy to an end in Chile. As troops blasted buildings and helicopters sprayed bullets into the top floors of the British Embassy, the Presidential Palace was ablaze following a direct-hit from an aerial strike. The country was in the final throws of ‘self-managed socialism’ and Salvador Allende in the midst of the epilogue of his reign. The Marxist experiment, or as some have labelled it, the initiation and implementation of radical and social reforms, crashed to a violent and bloody end. In a single day, a lifetime of work and dreams was torn asunder in a campaign of random violence and terror. This thesis reconstructs a history of life in Santiago, Chile in the aftremath of Allende's death by analysis the street murals of the Brigada Ramona Parra and the poetry of Raul Zurita through a microhistorical and subaletrn methodological framework. In doing so, aspects of personal and group suffering emegre as well as a sense of collective action in the face of unrelenting subjugation at the hands of the Pinochet regime.

A summary of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship rule over Chile and overthrow of the former elected communist government. Included: Relevance to approaching societies post-dictatorship and rehabilitating a nation after human rights crimes.

Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2007

eds.) (2004) Memoria, duelo y narración. Chile después de Pinochet: literatura, cine, sociedad (Memory, Mourning, and Narration. Chile after Pinochet: Literature, Film, Society), Iberoamericana Vervuert (Frankfurt am Main), 334 pp. £24.50 pbk.

Radical History Review, 2003

Chile has historically viewed itself as atypical compared to other Latin American countries, especially because of the political stability achieved following independence and the marginality of the military from explicit involvement in politics. Convinced of this particularity, the country was shocked by the violence exhibited by the armed forces on the morning of September 11, 1973, and during the days and months that followed the unseating of the constitutional president, Salvador Allende. Seventeen years of one of the most cruel dictatorships in the memory of Latin America brutally replaced Chile's long history of civilian rule. Terror took control of a large part of the population, incapable of understanding and, least of all, responding to the violence that hovered systematically over it. As Norbert Lechner has put it to so well, Chilean society "was dying with fear." 1 The level of political and social polarization in Chilean society during the months and days leading to the military coup constituted one of the factors that, from the beginning, allowed the Pinochet regime to justify the violence it employed against the population at large. The high degree of concentration of power and social control in military hands also facilitated a hegemonic discourse about the causes of, and those responsible for, the final crisis: the Marxist left that made up the overthrown Unidad Popular (Popular Unity). For seventeen years Chilean society had ample opportunity to internalize the messages emitted by the dictatorship. This rendered the regime's repeated refusal to recognize its systematic use of repression intelligible. During the entire period, General Pinochet and his followers rejected

Journal of Conflict Studies, 1992