🇨🇱 “History is ours, and people make history.

🇨🇱 “History is ours, and people make history.”

September 11, 1973. Salvador Allende’s final address to the Chilean people.

On another September 11, Chile’s democratically elected government was overthrown by the military following years of U.S. interference and covert action against Allende.

Three years earlier, President Richard Nixon had ordered the CIA to prevent Allende from taking power or remove him if he did, authorizing at least $10 million for the effort. CIA Director Richard Helms’ handwritten notes recorded Nixon’s infamous instruction: “Make the economy scream.”

Allende refused to surrender. As the military surrounded and bombarded La Moneda, he delivered this final radio address to his people. He died inside the presidential palace later that day.

The dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet that followed lasted nearly 17 years. Chile’s own official records document 1,469 victims of forced disappearance, 1,747 executions and 31,856 victims of torture under the dictatorship. More than 40,000 people have been officially recognized across the broader categories of political imprisonment, torture, execution and disappearance.

And the dictatorship became a laboratory for the radical free-market program associated with the Chicago Boys. When Chile’s economy collapsed in 1982–83, GDP fell 16% over two years, unemployment reached 30%, roughly half the population fell below the poverty line, and the state ultimately absorbed enormous losses from the collapsed financial system.

53 years later, remember Chile’s September 11.

🔴 @DDGeopolitics