How Pinochet Took Chile

September 11, 1973

THE DATE MEANS SOMETHING DIFFERENT in Chile. On September 11, 1973, Chilean Air Force jets bombed the presidential palace in Santiago while tanks surrounded it and troops moved through the streets. Inside the Palacio de La Moneda, President Salvador Allende died, officially by his own hand though the circumstances have been disputed for decades. By nightfall, a military junta controlled the country. Chile's 41-year-old democracy, one of the oldest and most stable in Latin America, was over.

What followed was 17 years of military dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet, during which approximately 3,000 people were killed or disappeared, an estimated 40,000 were tortured, and hundreds of thousands went into exile. Chile also became a laboratory for radical free-market economic reform imposed at gunpoint, an experiment that divided economists and generated arguments that have not fully resolved themselves five decades later.

Allende and the Road to the Coup

Salvador Allende won Chile's 1970 presidential election with 36.3 percent of the vote in a three-way race, a plurality but not a majority. He was a Socialist, a physician, a Marxist who had run for president three times before and believed Chile could build socialism through democratic means rather than revolution. The election terrified the Nixon administration and its national security advisor Henry Kissinger, who reportedly said: "I don't see why we need to stand by and let a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people."

The United States immediately began working to prevent Allende from taking power, then to undermine his government after he did. The CIA's Track I operation attempted to convince the Chilean Congress not to ratify Allende's election. When that failed, Track II attempted to foment a coup before Allende's inauguration. A key figure in this operation, General René Schneider, the Chilean Army commander who refused to participate in any coup against the constitutional order, was kidnapped and killed by right-wing officers with CIA knowledge and equipment, though the CIA later claimed it had cut contact with the plotters before the kidnapping.

Once Allende was in office, the United States worked to "make the economy scream," as Kissinger later described it. This meant pressuring international lending institutions to cut off credit to Chile, supporting opposition groups and media, and funding strikes. The copper miners' strike of 1972 and the truck owners' strike that paralyzed the country in 1972-1973 were both supported by American money.

Allende's Policies and the Chilean Right

American opposition does not fully explain the coup, and accounts that treat it as primarily a U.S. operation miss something important. Allende's government faced genuine domestic opposition from Chilean business interests, the middle class, and the political right, opposition that was generated by Allende's own policies rather than just by American interference.

Allende nationalized Chile's copper mines, including the American-owned Anaconda and Kennecott operations, without compensation at market value. He accelerated land reform, taking estates above a certain size. He nationalized banks and other industries. He initiated a price control program and increased wages, which produced short-term economic gains and, eventually, severe inflation and shortages as the economy strained under the combination of disrupted production and excess demand.

By 1973, inflation was running at several hundred percent annually. Shortages of basic goods were common. The black market was thriving. The political atmosphere was polarized to a degree that made normal governance almost impossible. Elements of the extreme left were pushing for faster, more radical measures. Elements of the right were actively planning to bring the government down. The military was watching and waiting.

The Coup: Hours by Hour

The military had been planning the coup for months. The Navy moved first on September 11, seizing Valparaiso. Army units took up positions around Santiago. The Air Force prepared to bomb the presidential palace. At approximately 9:00 AM, Allende broadcast a final speech from La Moneda, refusing demands that he resign, saying he would not leave alive and that the broad avenues of a better society would eventually open again.

The bombing of La Moneda began at midday. The palace, which had no military capacity to resist air attack, burned. At some point during the afternoon, Allende died. The official autopsy conducted by military doctors concluded suicide by gunshot. An independent 2011 investigation confirmed this finding, determining that the wound was consistent with self-inflicted gunshot rather than execution. Some of his supporters have always disputed this.

By evening, a junta of four military commanders, Pinochet representing the Army, José Toribio Merino the Navy, Gustavo Leigh the Air Force, and César Mendoza the Carabineros, announced itself the new government. A state of siege was declared. Santiago's streets were under military control. The coup had taken a single day.

The Caravan of Death and the Repression

The killing began immediately. In the days after the coup, the National Stadium in Santiago became a detention center where thousands of people were held, interrogated, tortured, and in many cases killed. Similar scenes played out in military bases, police stations, and improvised detention centers across the country.

A military commission known as the Caravan of Death, led by General Sergio Arellano Stark, traveled by helicopter through provincial cities in October 1973, reviewing cases of political prisoners who had already been detained and sentenced. In city after city, Arellano's team executed prisoners who had already received sentences, bypassing whatever limited legal processes existed. At least 97 people were killed in these operations in less than two weeks.

The systematic repression that followed was organized primarily through DINA, the Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, the secret police established in 1974. DINA operated torture centers throughout Chile, the most notorious being Villa Grimaldi in Santiago, where thousands of people were held and tortured. DINA's operations were not limited to Chile. Operation Condor, a coordinated intelligence and assassination program involving the military governments of Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil, targeted political opponents across borders and in Europe and the United States.

Orlando Letelier, Allende's former foreign minister, was assassinated by DINA agents in Washington, D.C. in September 1976, a car bomb killing on American soil that produced a serious diplomatic crisis and eventually contributed to the shutdown of DINA.

The Chicago Boys and Economic Shock Therapy

Pinochet's government is unusual in the history of authoritarian regimes for the degree to which it combined political repression with a genuine ideological commitment to free-market economics. The economists who shaped Chilean economic policy under Pinochet were known as the Chicago Boys, Chilean economists who had studied under Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger at the University of Chicago and returned to Chile convinced that radical market liberalization was the solution to the country's economic problems.

What they implemented was sweeping: tariffs were slashed, state enterprises privatized, price controls removed, the financial sector deregulated, and the pension system converted from a government-managed defined-benefit system to individual private accounts managed by pension fund companies. The implementation was rapid and comprehensive in a way that would have been politically impossible in a democracy, which was precisely the point that its advocates sometimes made explicitly.

The results were complicated. Inflation did come down. The economy grew strongly in the late 1970s. Then the deregulated financial sector, poorly supervised, generated a major banking crisis in 1982 that required massive government intervention. Growth resumed in the mid-1980s. By the time Pinochet left power, Chile had a functioning market economy with some of the strongest macroeconomic indicators in Latin America.

Whether the economic achievements justified or required the dictatorship is a question that still generates serious argument. The evidence that economic reform required authoritarian repression is weak: other countries liberalized their economies without military governments. The evidence that the Chilean model produced lasting benefits is stronger, though the inequality it generated was also persistent.

The Plebiscite and the Transition

Pinochet expected to win the 1988 plebiscite that he was constitutionally required to hold, asking Chileans whether he should continue in power for another eight years. His government controlled the media, the security forces, and the electoral machinery. His political opponents had been killed, imprisoned, tortured, or exiled. The economic situation was relatively good.

He lost. The "No" campaign, which ran under the slogan "Chile, la alegria ya viene" (Chile, happiness is coming), organized a peaceful, creative opposition that convinced 55.9 percent of Chilean voters to reject Pinochet's continuation. Elections followed in 1989. Patricio Aylwin, the Christian Democratic candidate running as part of a broad opposition coalition, won and took office in March 1990.

Pinochet did not simply disappear. He remained Army commander until 1998, a constitutional arrangement he had designed to protect himself. He was declared a senator-for-life under provisions he had also designed. When he traveled to London in 1998 for medical treatment, a Spanish judge issued an international arrest warrant charging him with torture and murder. British authorities detained him for 16 months before allowing him to return to Chile on humanitarian grounds, citing his health.

Back in Chile, Pinochet faced a cascade of legal cases. Stripped of his parliamentary immunity, he was indicted on multiple charges of human rights violations and tax evasion. He died in December 2006 without having been convicted of any crime, protected until the end by a combination of health claims, legal delays, and the incomplete reckoning of Chilean institutions with what had happened during his rule.

What Chile's Experience Revealed

The Chilean coup and its aftermath demonstrated several things clearly. American intervention in foreign democratic processes, justified as anti-communism, could produce outcomes far worse than the governments it displaced. Military institutions, once given power and impunity, build bureaucratic structures of repression that take decades to dismantle. And economic reform, however beneficial in some respects, cannot be separated from the conditions under which it was implemented: the torture chambers at Villa Grimaldi are part of the Chilean economic model's history whether its advocates acknowledge them or not.

Chile has done more than most countries to document and reckon with what happened. The Valech Commission's report documented over 40,000 cases of torture. The Rettig Commission documented the killed and disappeared. The courts have convicted hundreds of former military and intelligence personnel. The process is incomplete, but it exists.

September 11, 1973 remains a date that divides Chileans. Those who lived through it from different sides of the political divide often have irreconcilable accounts of what it meant and why it happened. That division is itself part of the legacy of the coup, a wound in the national memory that has not fully closed.