Editor's Pick

ON 11 SEPTEMBER 1973, a coup d’état led by Augusto Pinochet—seen here chairing a meeting a few days later—overthrew the Chilean government of Salvador Allende. Three years earlier, Allende had been elected the country’s first socialist president. Besides authorising large wage increases and freezing prices, his government nationalised the copper industry, much of which was controlled by companies from the United States.

The US, which had attempted a propaganda operation to prevent Allende’s election, retaliated by isolating the Chilean economy, funding the opposition and instigating a transport strike that led to food shortages and social unrest, giving the military a pretext to step in. Allende died—apparently by suicide—after the air force bombed the presidential palace. Five days after the coup, the US secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, told President Richard Nixon that their administration had “created the conditions as great as possible” to remove Allende from power.

Pinochet dismantled the legislature and outlawed left-wing political parties. His regime set up detention centres across Chile, the most famous being Santiago’s National Stadium, where around thirty thousand people were held. Political prisoners were sent to remote concentration camps, with more than three thousand people being killed or disappeared and over thirty-five thousand documented cases of torture. Chile also became known as the “laboratory of neoliberalism,” with Milton Friedman and other US economists prescribing the “shock treatment”—drastically cutting government jobs and welfare spending, ending wage and price controls, privatising state-owned companies and deregulating capital markets—that would eventually be implemented around the world.

Although he stepped down after losing a plebiscite in 1988, Pinochet continued to command the armed forces until he retired a decade later. He was briefly detained in London after Spain sought his extradition for torturing its citizens, but British and Chilean courts ruled him mentally unfit to stand trial. He died at home in 2006.