Reflections on the chilean revolution

September 4, 2020 marked 50 years since the election of president Dr Salvador Allende and the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) government he led. The Chilean Road to Socialism symbolizes the historical development of a program to abolish imperial and neocolonial rule over the vast majority of the population through political-economic reform from above and popular struggle from below. Popular Unity’s strength lay in a cross-sectional alliance of arguably the most advanced and highly-organized working and peasant classes in the Americas at the time. On September 11, 1973, a CIA-backed military coup brutally destroyed the Chilean Road and imposed a fascist dictatorship that would last 17 years.

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."

Radical Americas

This article examines the questioning indicated by some historians at the beginning of the twenty-first century regarding that they would be in debt to the study of the Allende government and the Popular Unity (UP) in Chile (1970–3). Although historians have investigated the diverse issues and problems of that period in varying depth, there are topics that have not been fully addressed: for example, the relationship between socialists, communists and President Allende, and the participation of left-wing women, native people and youth in the referred historical process. However, this work addresses the contributions on the subject made mainly by Chilean authors in books and articles on UP, namely: general studies on the period, works concerning Allende and some of his close collaborators, the economic changes that affected national and international private interests, some of the forces of the Left and Right (parties and movements), popular social sectors, the state coup, the militar...

The Pinochet dictatorship is generally considered the ‘laboratory’ of neoliberal policy experimentation and remains to date one of its most orthodox and iconic exemplars. The conventional portrayal of the military regime, which informs the mainstream political and intellectual debate between 'radical' and 'pragmatic' neoliberals, is of a counterrevolutionary neoliberal rollback of the decades of creeping statism that had culminated in the presidency of Salvador Allende. Building upon the work of more critical and class-based analyses, this paper will contend that the Pinochet dictatorship is best understood not as a neoliberal counterrevolution but rather as a state-led capitalist revolution that radically reconstructed state and society and institutionalized a contradictory and yet profound capitalist hegemony.

1991

Radical Americas, 2021

The election of Salvador Allende and the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) in 1970 unleashed a radical and original revolutionary process, discernible not only in the depth of its redistributive measures and the expectations it generated, but also in the ferocity with which those who identified with the counter-revolutionary ideal responded to that project. The counter-revolution, initially confined to the conservative and reactionary sectors, in a matter of months became an immense mass mobilisation that would end up paving the way for the military coup. This article analyses that counter-revolutionary process, exploring its historic roots, the main actors involved and the innovations in political practices it developed at the time. The ‘counter-revolutionary bloc’ was formed by a diverse array of political and social actors – some of whom did not have previous experience in political mobilisations – who based their actions on the adoption and socialisation of a long-standing anti-Com...

Reis, 1990

The essay details the Chilean government’s influence in democratic processes, internal and external opposition of each, economic plans to address imperialism, and how close to a social utopia Chile had reached. Through the analysis it will be clear that the citizens were especially important in recalling and recognizing a government who often manipulated and used them as political or economic prey.

2004

Hahr-hispanic American Historical Review, 1989

2007

Revista De Historia Iberoamericana, 2012

RECEPCIÓN 17 de octubre de 2011 APROBACIÓN 21 de junio 2012 DOI '2, 5+, V5.N2.02