Half a century ago, a commando coup by Nixon, Kissinger and the Chilean military leadership blew up one of the most stable democracies in the Southern Cone. Salvador Allende “committed suicide” with Fidel Castro’s gun. Because his death was an assassination attempt that ushered in further horror.
Sunday, September 10, 2023
50 years ago the September 11, 1973Chile was an earthquake. War tanks and military aircraft opened fire early on the Palacio de la Moneda, where the president was staying. Salvador Allende. The smoke lit up at noon with an apparent coup d’état, the ensuing “suicide” of the first president, and a macabre dictatorship.
At 10:15 a.m., after the armed forces had bombed the towers of the Portales and Corporación radio stations, President Allende chose Radio Magallanes to say goodbye to his people with his final message, without realizing such seriousness at the time:
“My words have no bitterness, but despair (…) I will pay with my life for people’s loyalty“, said. His voice did not tremble, but filled his compatriots with strength one last time: “Societal processes do not stop, neither from crime nor from violence,” he prophesied.
Salvador Allende. His first year in power saw spending, low inflation and GDP growth of 8%.
“Workers of my country: I want to thank you for the loyalty you have always had, for the trust you have shown in a man who was only the interpreter of great aspirations for justice, who gave his word that he would respect the Constitution and will respect the law, and he did.
“foreign capital, Imperialism, together with reaction, created the climate in which the armed forces could break their tradition. Above all, I address the humble woman of our country: the peasant woman who believed in us, the worker woman who worked harder, the mother who was aware of her concern for the children. (…)
“I address the youth, those who sang and expressed their joy and fighting spirit; I address the man of Chile, to the worker, to the farmer, to the intellectual, to those who are persecuted. (…) The people must defend themselves, but must not sacrifice themselves. The people must not allow themselves to be devastated or tormented, but neither must they be humiliated.
“Further know that the great avenues for the free man to tread will open up much sooner than later to build a better society. Long live Chile, long live the people, long live the workers! These are my last words, I know that The sacrifice will not be in vain. I’m sure there will be at least one moral sanction punishing crime, cowardice and treason,” he said, shifting his voice between the gunshots and the din of the bombings.
Salvador Allende. The idea of an assassination attempt persisted for decades; despite the forensic report.
The Condor plan, according to Martín Balza
And then he put on his colorful Chilean shamanto and, without hesitation, shot himself with it Russian AKMS assault riflewith a folding stock that his friend and companion had given him Fidel Castro. He first visited him in Havana in 1959, when he himself was president of the Chilean alliance Frente Nacional del Pueblo. He hugged him for the last time in Santiago in 1971. And Fidel Castro guided his hand.
At 2:20 p.m., with Allende receiving no word or surrender, General Javier Palacios grew impatient and gave the order to break down the palace door. He rushed to the Salon Independencia and found himself there an unrecognizable body bathed in blood. Beside him, the doctor Patricio Guijón looked at him from behind his eyelids, clouded by flatulence and impotence; He was lost with a useless gas mask in his hand. Palacios saw this Jaeger-Le Coultre watch on the dead man’s wrist and he had no doubt that it was Salvador Allende. No one had managed to twist his arm.
Salvador Allende. Every September 11, Chileans fill the Morandé 80 door of the Palacio de la Moneda with flowers; There his lifeless body was removed.
Salvador Allende, the world’s first “Marxist”
“I will finish the presidency of the republic when my term ends,” he had said, “they must shoot me so that I stop acting.” (…) I am not defending a personal cause, I defend the Chilean peoplein his just desire to bring about the changes that will enable him to live with dignity and with a just national purpose and make Chile an independent country and master of its own destiny.”
Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, whom Allende had appointed as commander-in-chief of the army only 19 days earlier, succeeding Carlos Prats, was the protagonist of one of the bloodiest coups in the southern cone and remained there for 17 years.
Salvador Allende and his secretary Miria Contreras Bell. Was Lover since 1969, but Allende never divorced his wife Hortensia Bussi, with whom he had two daughters. The President stayed officially with the First Lady at the Presidential Residence and at weekends at “la Payita” in El Cañaveral.
Left behind was the nationalization of copper to prevent the plunder of foreign companies, including some American companies such as Kennecott and Anaconda (owned by families owned by the Rockefeller and Rothschild families); agrarian reform, which included the confiscation of 2 million hectares of land and confronted large landowners and peasants with gunfire; public education and free healthcare; freezing the prices of goods; the increase in salaries with the issue of money; nationalization and constitutional reform.
Another plane used during the dictatorship is left behind in Uruguay: how it got there and what might happen to it
The events of 1973 marked the end of a commando operation that had begun ten years earlier and had its last most visible face in Pinochet, but not the only one.
On September 11, 1973, “the peaceful path of socialism” that Chilean society had chosen as the path to a new order was shattered. The dismay at the predicted coup made us forget the successful first year of Pinochet’s government, a GDP that grew by 8% with low inflation and increased production thanks to ample credit from the Soviet Union, China and Cuba.
A socio-economic success that has been crowned a Nobel Prize for the poet Pablo Neruda, a famous communist of world renown. In the 1971 local elections, Popular Unity received 49.73% of the vote.
In the first six months after the 1973 coup d’état, figures of 10,000 missing and around 90,000 imprisoned were circulating.
Salvador Allende. Augusto Pinochet led the coup d’état in Chile, he was the local arm of the destabilization plan he devised Richard Nixon.
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September 11, 1973, however, was not an improvised melody, but the execution of a laborious, diabolical score, orchestrated by the American President Richard Nixons (1969-1974) and his foreign minister Henry Kissinger.
Augustus Pinochet was funded by Salvador Allende to the commander-in-chief of the army, 19 days before the dictator ordered the coup and his capture.
In this symphony of horror against one of South America’s most reliable democracies, many forces had to come together to overthrow a single man. A requiem consisting of several bars a growing chaos, which from the distance of half a century seem crazy and unbelievable. Namely:
♦ The daily reports sent to Washington by Edward Korry, the United States Ambassador to Santiago, Chile, to blaspheme the “Marxist” Unidad Popular (UP) party, which won the general democratic elections of September 4, 1970 with 36, 6% had won the votes confirmed in the plenary session of Congress. That had been an achievement for Allende who he had failed in three presidential attempts However, in recent years it has triumphed with the strong support of the communist majority in the UP coalition, which also united socialists, radicals, social democrats, the MAPU and the API.
♦ The “poverty of Christian democracy” – Nixon’s hope – and the “short-sightedness and stupid arrogance of the conservative upper class,” as Ambassador Korry judges.
Pablo Neruda. The Communist Party preferred the poet to be the Unidad Popular’s presidential candidate; but the poet resigned to pay this honor to Salvador Allende.
♦ The murder useless by René Schneider, a loyal, constitutional and honorable general;
♦ The “Tanktazo“Military” of June 29, 1973; a blood pact between the Chilean Air Force, the Navy, the entire army and the Carabineros Corps;
♦ The purchase of an equally corrupt as sublime military, Augusto Pinochet.
♦ The Paranoia in the Cold War: France had already lost Indochina and Algeria; and the United States, Vietnam. Power didn’t want to lose again. Especially because the election victory of Salvador Allende, a highly respected surgeon, former representative and former senator, legitimized the rise of a Marxist to the most stable democracy in the Southern Cone. That should not happen;
♦ The black campaign that the CIA organized with the publication of to undermine the figure of the Chilean president internationally 726 newspaper articles about the dangerousness of his character and the “mistake” of the Chileans.
So there was nothing more to plan: “President Nixon has ruled that the Allende regime in Chile is unacceptable to the United States.”read a secret report dated September 16, 1970 in the FUBELT Project folder, the secret code that identified the Allende government’s “destabilization” plan to trigger a military uprising.
50 years ago Salvador Allende committed suicide
Fidel Castro and a relationship with Salvador Allende which began in 1959.
Allende’s political relatives never accepted the theory of suicide until a later, police rather than forensic investigation carried out in 2008 by Camilo Taufic (journalist at the University of Chile and journalist at El Mercurio) seemed to confirm this theory.
Based on the guidance of expert Luis Ravanal, Taufic claimed that despite Allende shooting himself in the right eye with a pistol, he remained alive until a member of his custody, Enrique Huerta, fulfilled the promise made to the leader to finish him off with a coup de grace if he found him dying alive.
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The truth is that the dead man could no longer speak and that on September 11, at 5 p.m., lifeless and with beaten feet, like a wounded man in battle, the soldiers carried him away on a painful stretcher with the remnants of his humanity, to the symbolic side door of Morandé 80, which was used by the heads of state and government at the end of their term in office. The one inaugurated by President Pedro Montt; the same one that Pinochet had bricked up so that it wouldn’t be talked about anymore; the one that President Ricardo Lagos reopened on September 11, 2003, when three decades had passed since the near-assassination.
Salvador Allende’s suicide. Causes of death range from assisted suicide, murder and sacrifice.
On the same day, the military hospital confirmed the death by suicide and his remains were buried secretly and without identification in the Santa Inés cemetery in Viña del Mar wife Hortensia Bussi, His daughter Laura Allende, two nephews and Commander Roberto Sánchez were the only ones present at the farewell. Allende remained another missing person for almost two years until the Independence Registry declared him dead, also in the public records, on July 7, 1975.
September 4, 1990, President Patrick Aylwin he wanted to bury him again with the national honors that a disgraced former president deserved.
On October 16, 1998, Pinochet was arrested in London, thanks to international pressure exerted by the victims of the Chilean coup through various forums: Institute for Policy Studies, Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, National Security Archive and the Spanish judiciary.
These events led the Clinton administration to authorize the declassification of hundreds of top-secret files held at the CIA and the United States Departments of Defense and State on “human rights abuses, terrorism and political violence during the 17 years of the dictatorial regime” Augusto Pinochet.
mm/ds