Chile's Popular Unity Government and the 1973 Coup

How did Popular Unity win Chile's 1970 presidential election?

In the 1960s Chile was, unusually for Latin America, a country with a long run of elections and parliamentary politics. In the 1964 presidential election the Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei Montalva won on the slogan of a "Revolution in Liberty". The US Senate's Church Committee later found that the CIA had spent close to three million dollars on that election to keep the left-wing candidate Salvador Allende out. Frei's government bought a 51 percent stake in the large foreign-owned copper mines, the "Chileanization of copper", and began a land reform, but it disappointed both the left, which found the reforms too slow, and the right, which found they went too far. In October 1969 the Socialist Party of Chile, the Communist Party of Chile, the Radical Party, MAPU (a split from the Christian Democrats) and other left-wing parties formed Popular Unity, and the Socialist Allende, who had lost three presidential elections, became its candidate for the fourth time. 1 2 3 4

The election of 4 September 1970 was a three-way race. Allende took 36.6 percent, the former president Jorge Alessandri, backed by the National Party, 35.3 percent, and the Christian Democrat Radomiro Tomic 28.1 percent. Allende's lead over Alessandri was only about 39,000 votes. When no candidate won an absolute majority, the Chilean constitution had Congress choose between the top two. The Christian Democrats, who held the casting vote, asked Allende to sign a Statute of Constitutional Guarantees writing freedom of the press and of education and the professional independence of the armed forces into the constitution. Allende accepted, Congress elected him on 24 October by 153 votes to 35, and he took office on 3 November. A Marxist president who had come to power through an election caused a great shock in Chile and abroad. 5 6 7

The Popular Unity programme proposed the "Chilean road to socialism": a path to socialism within the existing constitution and laws rather than through armed insurrection. Allende argued that the power of the big bourgeoisie rested not on institutions but on its economic resources and capitalist property relations, and that this economic base was what had to change. The plan had three pillars: nationalization of copper, an extension of land reform, and the creation of a Social Property Area made up of the main monopolies in banking, industry and distribution. Lacking a majority in Congress, the government revived forgotten legal provisions, such as Decree Law No. 520 from the short-lived Socialist Republic of 1932, to place firms under state management. The method was quick, but the opposition and the courts attacked it as an abuse of legal loopholes, and the dispute over legality ran through the next three years. 8 9

How did the US government try to stop Allende from taking office?

On 15 September 1970 President Nixon, with his national security adviser Kissinger and Attorney General Mitchell, summoned CIA Director Richard Helms. The notes Helms took at the meeting have been declassified and published in the State Department's documentary series. They contain phrases such as "1 in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile!", "$10,000,000 available, more if necessary", "no involvement of embassy" and "make the economy scream". Earlier, the US company ITT had passed $350,000 to the Alessandri campaign, and the CIA had run a propaganda campaign equating Allende with communist dictatorship. Kissinger later testified that the ten million dollars was never all spent. The notes are primary evidence of the president's intent, but they do not mean that every plan written in them was carried out. 10 11 1

The CIA operation ran on two tracks. Track I was political and economic pressure on President Frei and Congress to elect Alessandri and force a new election; Track II was a covert effort, hidden even from the embassy, to foment a military coup. On 16 October CIA headquarters cabled the Santiago station that "it is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup". The obstacle was the army commander René Schneider, who insisted on obeying the constitution. The CIA contacted the group of the retired general Roberto Viaux but judged it had no chance and turned it down on 17 and 18 October, while on the 22nd it handed General Camilo Valenzuela's group three submachine guns and tear gas. That day Viaux's men tried to kidnap Schneider and shot him; he died on the 25th. The CIA later paid the Viaux group $35,000. 12 7 13 14

Here what the documents confirm must be kept apart from what they do not. The Church Committee and the US intelligence community's 2000 report (the Hinchey Report) acknowledge that the CIA sought to instigate a coup, was in contact with plotters who saw Schneider's abduction as essential, and handed over weapons. They found no evidence that the CIA intended Schneider to be killed, and the weapons, which went to Valenzuela's group, were returned unused. Schneider's death in fact rallied the army behind the constitution and ended the coup plans of 1970. After Allende took office, Kissinger wrote to Nixon on 5 November that if Chile succeeded its "model effect can be insidious", and on 9 November National Security Decision Memorandum 93 ordered a "cool" posture toward the Chilean government and a squeeze on its credit. 7 1 15 12 16

What reforms did the Popular Unity government carry out?

The great symbol was the nationalization of copper. Copper made up most of Chile's exports; the Chuquicamata and El Salvador mines belonged to the US company Anaconda and El Teniente to Kennecott. On 11 July 1971 Congress unanimously passed a constitutional amendment nationalizing the large mines. That the Christian Democrats and even the right-wing National Party voted for it shows how broad the consensus behind the policy was in Chile at the time. The dispute was over compensation. Allende held that the foreign firms had for years taken "excess profits" beyond a normal return and had that amount deducted from compensation, so the main mining companies in effect received nothing. The US companies tried to have Chilean copper seized through international tribunals and foreign courts, and the US government used the dispute to justify cutting off credit to Chile. 3 17 8

Land reform used the law passed under Frei but moved much faster. The Popular Unity government sought to expropriate every large estate (fundo) above a set size, and over the whole course of Chilean land reform around 59 percent of agricultural land was redistributed. In the south Mapuche communities mobilized to recover their old lands, and peasants and left-wing activists often occupied estates faster than the government could follow. The government meanwhile widened the Social Property Area by taking banks and large firms under state management, and pursued free milk for children (half a litre a day), wider health care and education, and higher wages. In 1971 it also began Project Cybersyn with the British cybernetician Stafford Beer, an attempt to gather production data from state enterprises in real time for planning. 4 8 18

The first year went well. In 1971 GDP grew by 8.3 percent and industrial output by about 14 percent, unemployment fell to 3.8 percent and inflation dropped from around 35 percent to the twenties. Wage rises and price controls sharply raised workers' real incomes. In the municipal elections of April 1971 the Popular Unity parties took 49.7 percent, far more than in the presidential race. In November that year Fidel Castro toured Chile for more than three weeks, making speeches. But the growth came mostly from putting idle capacity to work to meet higher consumption, while investment was falling. Some in the government worried about overheating and the budget deficit, but the view that redistribution had to come first to widen political support prevailed. 8 9 2

Why did the Chilean economy collapse from 1972?

From 1972 the numbers turned. The public-sector deficit rose from 1.4 percent of GDP in 1970 to 22.9 percent in 1973, and the government covered the gap by printing money. Foreign reserves fell from about $394 million at the end of 1970 to $163 million a year later. Inflation figures of 225 percent for 1972 and over 600 percent for 1973 are widely cited, though they do not say whether they are annual averages or year-on-year rates at a given point; the World Bank report Chile: An Economy in Transition (1980) gives annual average inflation of 22 percent in 1971, 77.8 percent in 1972 and 188.1 percent for January to September 1973. As official prices drifted away from real values, staples vanished from shops and black markets spread, and the government handed rationing and price monitoring to neighbourhood Supply and Price Committees (JAP). At the same time the world price of copper, Chile's main export, fell. Queues and shortages turned the middle classes, shopkeepers and truck owners against the government, and the "March of the Empty Pots" of 1 December 1971, in which women marched banging empty pans, became a symbol of opposition mobilization. 8 9 19

The causes of the crisis are still explained in two ways. One view puts the government's own policy first: wage rises and price controls that inflated short-term demand, deficits covered by printing money, and investment and output that collapsed under expropriations and occupations brought hyperinflation and shortages. The other stresses outside pressure. Under NSDM 93 the United States cut bilateral aid and blocked new World Bank and Inter-American Development Bank loans, and according to the Church Committee the CIA covertly gave about $8 million to opposition parties and media in 1970 to 1973, more than $700,000 of it to the right-wing newspaper El Mercurio alone. The French scholar Christian Delois counted that of $270 million intended for Chile in 1972, only $32 million arrived. The two explanations do not exclude each other, and much research sees policy overreach and US pressure combining to deepen the crisis. 8 1 12 11

The Soviet role has to be treated with more care. According to material the former KGB archivist Vasili Mitrokhin brought to the West, the Soviet Politburo gave Allende a personal subsidy and also funded the Communist Party of Chile. But these are claims resting on Mitrokhin's notes, not originals released and verified like the American documents. What is clear is that the Soviet Union did not give Chile economic aid on anything like the scale needed to sustain a "second Cuba". Chile's crisis was less a proxy war of the Cold War than domestic politics driven to extremes between active American pressure and cautious Soviet distance. 8 20

How did the strike of October 1972 change Chilean politics?

In October 1972 truck owners in the southern province of Aysén struck against a plan for a state trucking company. On 9 October the national truckers' confederation called an indefinite strike, and as shopkeepers, professional associations, some unions and the Christian Democratic and National parties joined in, the strike grew into a campaign to bring the government down. From the 12th the roads were blocked, and the government declared a state of emergency in 18 provinces. The far-right group Fatherland and Liberty helped by scattering nails (miguelitos) on the roads. On US involvement the documents draw distinctions. The 40 Committee that oversaw the CIA did not approve direct payments to the strikers; whether money given to opposition parties reached the strike is not established; and one private group funded by the CIA did pass $2,800 to strikers against the rules. 21 1 22 7

The strike ended after about 24 days. On 2 November Allende formed a cabinet with military ministers, with the army commander Carlos Prats as Interior Minister, and order returned. For the first time the military had entered the cabinet as political arbiter. During the strike workers built their own organizations to guard factories and move supplies. The industrial belts (cordones industriales), which grouped the factories of Santiago's industrial districts by area, grew rapidly at this time and sometimes went beyond government control into factory occupations and workers' management. This exposed the split in strategy within the left. The Communists and Allende put "consolidation" first so as not to lose the middle classes and the Christian Democrats, while the Socialist left and the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR) outside the coalition called for building popular power and to "advance without compromise". 21 23 24 25 2

The congressional elections of March 1973 disappointed both sides. The opposition alliance (the Confederation of Democracy, CODE) hoped to win two thirds of Congress so it could remove Allende by impeachment, but took only about 55 percent, while Popular Unity won about 44 percent despite the economic crisis. With the legal route of impeachment closed, voices in the opposition favouring a military solution grew louder. The Christian Democratic leadership drifted toward the right-wing National Party, and several attempts at dialogue between Allende and the Christian Democrats came to nothing. On 15 April the workers of the El Teniente copper mine struck for higher wages, and the strike lasted 76 days. It cost the government heavily in lost revenue and exposed cracks within the base of a government that called itself a workers' government. 26 19 20

How was the coup prepared, from the Tanquetazo to the August crisis?

On the morning of 29 June 1973 the 2nd Armoured Regiment under Lieutenant Colonel Roberto Souper drove tanks and armoured cars into central Santiago and attacked the presidential palace, La Moneda, and the Ministry of Defence. The revolt, known as the Tanquetazo ("tank putsch"), was put down within hours. The army commander Carlos Prats went to the scene himself and ordered the soldiers in front of the tanks to surrender, and no other units joined the rising. Yet 22 civilians and soldiers were killed. The Argentine cameraman Leonardo Henrichsen, filming the rebels, recorded the soldiers firing at him before he collapsed, and his colleague recovered the footage, which was shown on Argentine television. The leaders of the far-right group Fatherland and Liberty took refuge in the Ecuadorian embassy and from there issued a statement admitting that they had promoted the revolt. 27 22 23

The Tanquetazo failed, but it served as a test for the coup plotters inside the armed forces, showing how fast the military could move and how the workers would respond. That day the leaders of the CUT labour federation and the industrial belts occupied more than 350 factories. On 26 July Fatherland and Liberty assassinated Allende's naval aide Arturo Araya Peeters, and that same day the truck owners began a second strike that lasted until the coup. Sabotage against power pylons and railways followed. In the navy, petty officers and sailors who learned that officers were preparing a coup reported it to the authorities and to the Socialist leader Carlos Altamirano, but they were the first to be prosecuted by the navy. As the state lost its hold on the armed forces, the left remained split between those calling for workers to be armed and those insisting that a clash with the military be avoided. 27 22 28 20

In August the last balance collapsed. On 9 August Allende again brought the service chiefs into his cabinet, with Prats as Defence Minister, but on 22 August the wives of generals gathered outside Prats's house and denounced him as a coward. Concluding that he had lost his fellow generals' support, Prats resigned the next day, and Augusto Pinochet, whom he recommended, was appointed army commander in his place. On the same 22 August the Chamber of Deputies passed, by 81 votes to 47, a resolution accusing the government of breaking the constitution and the law. It fell short of the two-thirds needed for impeachment, but its call on the military to restore legal order gave the coup forces a political justification. Allende is reported to have intended to propose a plebiscite to resolve the crisis and to announce it on 11 September. 23 19 20 28

What happened at La Moneda on 11 September 1973?

Before dawn on 11 September the navy moved first. By 6 a.m. it held the port city of Valparaíso and had shut down broadcasting. The navy commander, Admiral Montero, was cut off, and command passed to José Toribio Merino, a planner of the coup. Hearing the news, Allende reached La Moneda around 7:40 with his bodyguard (the GAP). Pinochet and the air force commander Gustavo Leigh did not take his calls. The military offered the president a plane to leave the country with his family if he resigned at once, but Allende refused. Over Radio Magallanes, the last pro-government station still on the air, he made a farewell speech to the nation. He said he would not resign, and that sooner rather than later the great avenues would open again through which free men would pass to build a better society. 20 28 7

Pinochet ordered General Sergio Arellano to advance on La Moneda with armoured and infantry forces. When the defenders answered with sniper fire, air force Hawker Hunter jets fired rockets into the palace, and the president's residence on Tomás Moro was attacked too. In the burning palace the defenders surrendered at about 2:30 p.m. Allende was found dead in his office. Doubts over whether he had taken his own life lasted for decades, but in 2011 a Chilean court ordered his remains exhumed, and the forensic examination by an international team concluded that it was suicide. That evening Pinochet, Merino, Leigh and César Mendoza of the Carabineros police formed a military junta. On the 13th it dissolved Congress, outlawed the Popular Unity parties, declared all political activity "in recess" and took control of the media. 20 29 28

What did the United States do on the day? The Church Committee concluded that there was no hard evidence of direct US assistance to the coup, adding that by its earlier actions, its posture and its contacts with the Chilean military the United States had signalled that it would not oppose a military government. The 2000 Hinchey Report wrote that the CIA did not instigate the 1973 coup but knew of the military plotting, had intelligence relationships with some plotters, and, since it had sought to instigate a coup in 1970 and did not discourage this one, "probably appeared to condone it". In a telephone conversation with Kissinger on 16 September Nixon says, "as you know, our hand doesn't show on this one". The documents confirm that three years of US pressure helped create the conditions for the coup, but no evidence has emerged that the United States directed the operation of 11 September. 1 7 20 16

How did the junta carry out repression right after the coup?

Right after the coup the military rounded up Popular Unity supporters, trade unionists, students and foreigners on a massive scale. Santiago's National Stadium became a huge detention camp. The International Committee of the Red Cross counted more than 7,000 people held there around 22 September, and prisoners were interrogated and tortured in changing rooms and under the stands. The Americans Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi were taken and killed at this time. The smaller Chile Stadium held professors and students seized at the State Technical University. The singer and theatre director Víctor Jara was taken there on 12 September and beaten and tortured for several days; his body was found on the 16th by a road near a shantytown, with 44 bullet wounds. The poet Pablo Neruda died in hospital on 23 September, and the inquiry into the cause of his death has not been closed. 30 31 32 33

From 30 September to 22 October came the "Caravan of Death". General Sergio Arellano Stark, holding authority as Pinochet's delegate, toured army garrisons by helicopter with a group of officers, from Cauquenes in the south to La Serena, Copiapó, Antofagasta and Calama in the north. Wherever they landed, political prisoners who had already given themselves up or were awaiting trial were taken out and executed. The Rettig Commission established that 72 people were killed in these five places in October (26 in Calama alone), 40 of them Socialists; Spanish-language sources count 97 victims in all. Arellano also punished officers who had treated prisoners "too leniently". A State Department memo of 16 November 1973 put summary executions in the nineteen days after the coup at 320, more than three times the figure the junta admitted. 34 35 31 12

The full scale of the repression came out through official inquiries after the return to democracy. In 1991 the Rettig Commission (the National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation) identified 2,115 people killed or disappeared through human rights violations under the dictatorship and 164 victims of political violence, 2,279 in all, many of them concentrated in the last four months of 1973. The Valech Commission of 2004 and its later supplement identified more than 28,000 victims of political detention and torture, and found that about 69 percent of arrests took place between 11 September and 31 December 1973. At least 200,000 people left Chile between the coup and 1990. In 1974 the secret police DINA was created and the repression was systematized, later extending into Operation Condor, the joint repression system of the South American military regimes. 31 36 20 19

How has the Chilean experience been remembered and judged since?

Even after the coup, figures of the Popular Unity government were hunted abroad. General Prats, in exile in Argentina, was killed with his wife by a car bomb in Buenos Aires on 30 September 1974. The MIR leader Miguel Enríquez refused exile, fought underground and was shot dead in Santiago on 5 October 1974. Orlando Letelier, Allende's Foreign and Defence Minister, was arrested on the day of the coup and held in camps until international pressure won his release, but on 21 September 1976 he was killed in the heart of Washington by a car bomb planted by DINA. In the economy, economists trained at the University of Chicago, the "Chicago Boys", took charge of policy from around 1975 and pushed privatization and market opening, making Chile the first country where neoliberal policy was applied on a large scale. 23 25 37 38

The Chilean experience left the world left with a large question. Watching the Chilean coup, the Italian Communist leader Enrico Berlinguer set out the idea that a left-wing majority alone could not transform society and that a "historic compromise" with the Catholic mass party, the Christian Democrats, was needed. The revolutionary left drew the opposite lesson: that Chile had shown there was no electoral road to socialism that left the army and the state apparatus intact. Scholars are divided too. Researchers such as Peter Kornbluh stress US responsibility on the basis of the declassified documents, while others weigh more heavily Popular Unity's economic management, its political isolation and the divisions within the left. What the documents establish is that the United States ran a long covert campaign to reverse the result of a democratic election in Chile, and that the coup itself was carried out by the Chilean military. 39 16 8 1

Pinochet ruled Chile until 1990. In October 1998 he was arrested in London, where he was receiving medical treatment, on a Spanish court's warrant, setting the precedent that a former head of state could be tried abroad for human rights crimes. Released on grounds of health, he returned to Chile and died in 2006 without ever being convicted. Inside Chile truth commissions and trials continued, and many perpetrators were punished. Part of the old bleachers of the National Stadium remains as a memorial to the prisoners, and the Chile Stadium, where Víctor Jara was held, was renamed the Víctor Jara Stadium. The 11th of September still divides Chilean society, and at the coup's fiftieth anniversary in 2023 opinion remained deeply split over how to see that day. 40 30 32 20 28