[The question of where Chile’s true identity lies becomes ever
more pressing as the fiftieth anniversary of Pinochet’s coup
approaches.]
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DEFENDING ALLENDE  
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Ariel Dorfman
August 30, 2023
The New York Review
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_ The question of where Chile’s true identity lies becomes ever
more pressing as the fiftieth anniversary of Pinochet’s coup
approaches. _

Salvador Allende campaigning before Chile’s parliamentary
elections, Santiago, February 1973, STF/AFP/Getty Images

 

On September 4, 1973, an enormous multitude of Chileans—I was one of
them—poured into the streets of Santiago to back the besieged
government of Salvador Allende. Ever since he had won the presidency
three years earlier with 36.6 percent of the vote in a three-way race,
forces from inside and outside the country had been conspiring to
destroy his attempt—the first in world history—to build a
socialist state through nonviolent, democratic means. One shout from a
chorus of voices echoed through the air: “Allende, Allende, el
pueblo te defiende,” emphasizing the need to defend the president.
After one thousand days of unrelenting opposition, his enemies seemed
close to orchestrating a coup d’état that would wipe “the Marxist
cancer” from Chilean society forever.

Allende felt cornered. I knew this because, though only thirty-one at
the time, I had been working for the previous two months at the
presidential palace of La Moneda as a cultural and press adviser to
Fernando Flores, Allende’s chief of staff, and our reports indicated
that many admirals and generals were openly plotting against him.
Allende nevertheless remained hopeful. Unlike that of so many Latin
American nations, Chile’s military had a lengthy tradition of
respect for constitutional rule, with smooth transitions between
presidencies guaranteed by its strict nonintervention in political
affairs. Thus far the army, at least, had continued to profess loyalty
to the government. I remember Flores telling me with glee that General
Augusto Pinochet, the head of the army, was in his pocket, nicely tied
up: “Este Pinoccho! Lo tengo en este bolsillo, bien amarrado.”
Allende also believed this was the case, but he placed his real faith
in the mobilization of _el pueblo_ (a term that encompasses several
meanings in Spanish: the people, the masses, the poor, the great
unwashed). And the Chilean _pueblo_ had many reasons to support the
Allende experiment.

His cabinet—the first to include a peasant and an industrial worker
as ministers—had undertaken a series of reforms, the most impressive
of which was the nationalization of the enormous copper mines, until
then owned by predatory US corporations. It had also nationalized the
mining of minerals like nitrate and iron, as well as many banks and
large factories, a number of which were being administered by those
who worked in them.1 An ambitious agrarian reform had been handing
over latifundios—large rural estates—to the peasants who had
toiled on them from time immemorial; by 1973 almost 60 percent of
Chile’s arable land had been expropriated.

Though some of these initiatives (and blunders by the relatively
dysfunctional government of the Unidad Popular, the alliance of
left-wing parties that had supported Allende for president) caused
economic and financial disruptions, there had been a remarkable
redistribution of income and services to the most underserved members
of society. Other measures revealed Allende’s priorities: a
half-liter of milk daily for every child; cabins erected by the ocean
so workers could vacation with their families (most had never seen the
Pacific before); the acknowledgment of indigenous identities and
languages; the publication of millions of inexpensive books that were
sold at newspaper kiosks; and major advances in health, affordable
public housing, education, and child care.  All this was accompanied
by a blossoming of culture, particularly in music, mural painting, and
documentary film. But perhaps more important than these material
advantages was the dignity felt by so many disadvantaged citizens,
their sense that they were now the central characters of their
nation’s history.

I had one of the most moving epiphanies of my life on the night of
Allende’s election on September 4, 1970. After listening to him
promise a delirious crowd that he would be _el compañero
presidente_ when he entered La Moneda in two months’ time, I
wandered along the streets of Santiago with my wife and friends and
witnessed the wonder, pride, and determination on the faces of workers
and their families as they walked through the center of the city.
Unsurprisingly, then, in April 1971 the Unidad Popular parties
received nearly 50 percent of the vote—a plurality—in municipal
elections, which was interpreted by _The New York Times_ as “a
popular mandate to push ahead with [Allende’s] revolutionary
Socialist program.”

Momentum seemed to be with us, but formidable barriers remained.
Months before Allende’s victory, on June 27, 1970, Henry Kissinger,
President Nixon’s national security adviser, indicated what American
policy would be regarding the Chilean road to socialism: “I don’t
see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to
the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important
for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.” Once
Allende won—in spite of an American-funded campaign of
misinformation that depicted him, a man of impeccable democratic
credentials, as a Communist stooge—the next step was to try to stop
his inauguration. A CIA-financed terrorist group killed General René
Schneider, the commander in chief of the army, who was committed to
the rule of law. When Allende was nonetheless sworn in on November 3,
covert operations were launched to “make the economy scream,” per
Nixon’s instructions.

Over the following years, an international credit squeeze of both
private and public funds strangled Chile. Efforts to renegotiate the
foreign debt were hampered, copper exports were stalled in reprisal
for nationalization, technological expertise was denied, and essential
imports (including parts needed to repair machinery and trucks) were
prevented from reaching the country. In December 1972 at the UN
General Assembly, Allende declared, “before the conscience of the
world,” that his country was being subjected to an invisible
blockade from abroad that was meant to create chaos and foment a
coup.3

Such chaos could not prosper without allies in Chile. The US funneled
funds to bolster the right-wing Partido Nacional and to persuade the
centrist Christian Democratic Party to oppose Allende. Equally
consequential was substantial support for the media hostile to the
socialist project, particularly _El Mercurio_, Chile’s main
newspaper. All these actions influenced public opinion as well as
Congress, where the Unidad Popular was a minority.

A coup always seemed a possibility.4 But Allende’s enemies in Chile
hoped to oust him through legal means by winning a majority in the
March 1973 parliamentary elections, which would allow them to impeach
him and remove him from office. The economic situation was dire as
those elections approached. Galloping inflation, a thriving black
market, and critical shortages of food and staples seemed to be
eroding the government’s popularity. The uncertainty was enhanced by
insurrectionary strikes by right-wing entrepreneurs, miners, and truck
drivers that dealt severe blows to production and distribution. And
extensive sabotage and terrorist acts were being carried out by
fascist militias flaunting Nazi paraphernalia.

Not all of Allende’s problems came from the foes to his right. Even
before his victory in 1970, many left-wing militants had viewed with
suspicion his confidence that he could use the bourgeois legal system
to achieve radical change. That was only possible, they claimed, if
total power was in the hands of the working class and its
revolutionary vanguard, which would mean an inevitable confrontation
with the military. This thesis was supported by many within
Allende’s Socialist Party but mainly by the Movimiento de Izquierda
Revolucionaria (MIR, the Revolutionary Left Movement), which, like so
many groups of my generation in Latin America, was inspired to embrace
armed struggle by the example of Fidel Castro and Cuba.

As soon as Allende was elected, the MIR incessantly pressed the
government to go beyond the limits of its own program. Certain that
Allende, no matter how “reformist” he might be, would not repress
them (they were right), the MIR encouraged workers to occupy
factories that were supposed to remain in the private sector and
incited peasants in the countryside and the homeless poor in the major
cities to seize land that had not been targeted for expropriation.
This situation—ominously amplified by the media being subsidized by
the CIA—gave the impression that the president had lost control of
his own partisans and would, therefore, be unable (or perhaps
unwilling) to honor his vow to remain within the legal system. This
eroded the trust of those citizens—mostly from the middle classes
(small entrepreneurs and shopkeepers, professionals, technicians), but
also workers and shantytown dwellers who were anti-Marxist and also
patriotic and antioligarchic—whose support was essential, at least
in theory, for the Unidad Popular to win a majority in parliament. The
insecurity created by the actions of the extreme left, which were
tolerated by the government, fed into the wariness that many Chileans
already harbored about an administration brimming with Communists who
owed allegiance to Moscow and socialists enamored of Che Guevara.

And yet, despite all these difficulties, Allende’s coalition gained
seats in Congress in May 1973 with 44.23 percent of the vote, down
from nearly 50 percent two years earlier but up eight percentage
points from Allende’s showing in the 1970 presidential election.
Having failed to achieve a veto-proof majority, the opposition,
instead of waiting for the 1976 presidential election to defeat the
Unidad Popular, now concentrated on creating the conditions for a
military _pronunciamiento_, as a putsch is often called_ _in Spain
and Latin America, where armed forces traditionally speak out before
deposing a government, pronouncing words to indicate their motives.

But the people could also speak out. That show of popular support for
Allende on the third anniversary of his September 4 victory marked one
last occasion for a mobilized populace to send a message of strength
and defiance to the armed forces, warning them not to destroy the
democracy they had sworn to uphold.

Although during the day I worked at La Moneda, that night I joined a
vociferous group of compañeros and militants who marched down the
Alameda, the central avenue of the capital, waiting for hours to pass
by the presidential palace and catch a glimpse of our leader. As soon
as we saw him next to his wife, Tencha, waving a handkerchief from a
balcony that overlooked the Plaza de la Constitución, we intensified
our chant, our vow that the _pueblo_ would defend Allende.

We kept roaring that oath, even after we turned the corner and left
him behind, and then we did something that I still recall, fifty years
later, with a tide of nostalgia and emotion. We went around the block
and smuggled ourselves into the next colossal contingent of militants
so we could pass by the same spot again, as if we wanted to make sure
he was still there—though also as if we were saying good-bye to our
president. We did not know—or did we have an inkling?—that we were
also saying good-bye to ourselves, to who we had been and what we had
aspired to, good-bye to a way of life and dreams, good-bye to the
country that would soon change.

We may have had an intuition that the battle for memory—a battle
that has continued to this day—was already beginning. We were trying
to fix that moment so that it would not be forgotten, so that when the
story was told that Allende had been alone as the coup materialized
and nobody came to the rescue, we could point to that march and to so
many actions during those years in defense of what he stood for, use
that memory to deny the lies of his enemies and the erosion of time.
We would have to defend him when he was gone. Maybe that was what, in
retrospect, we were really doing: envisaging a future with and without
him.

Maybe we already knew that we were going to lose.

One week later, on September 11, 1973, a military junta, headed by our
supposed man-in-the-pocket, Augusto Pinochet, and representing the
full fury of the army, navy, air force, and carabineros (national
police), made its _pronunciamiento_, which turned out to be
considerably stronger than the words shouted to the wind by our
scattered throats: Allende had been deposed and the junta would rule
“only for as long as circumstances demand.” When the president
refused to resign, the military shelled the palace from the air and
the ground. After many hours of combat during which Allende, along
with a handful of bodyguards, functionaries, and close friends,
engaged in armed resistance, La Moneda lay in smoldering ruins and the
president was dead.

It was not until the next day, after Allende’s body had been buried
in an unmarked grave in a seaside cemetery in Viña del Mar, that the
junta declared he had committed suicide, a claim that was, for many
years, repudiated by his family and followers as well as by public
opinion worldwide. Gradually the elite of the left in Chile, including
Allende’s widow, began to accept that he had taken his own life,
though many doubts still remain, and most Chileans of all ideological
stripes whom I have consulted over the years insist that he was
murdered, something that most people abroad also believe.5

Whatever the cause, Allende’s death was the first of many to come.
The military had not hesitated to raze the lovely neoclassical
building that since 1845 had been the seat of the nation’s
government and that had served as Chile’s mint in colonial times
(hence its name, La Moneda), and it was certainly not reluctant to
punish and persecute Allende’s supporters. Due to a chain of
fortunate accidents, I survived the coup, but most of those who served
with me as advisers at La Moneda were executed almost immediately,
while Allende’s prominent ministers and closest friends were flown
to a concentration camp on a freezing, windswept island in Patagonia.

Books were burned publicly, shantytowns raided, students and
professors expelled from schools and universities. Detention centers
in which prisoners were tortured and executed sprang up all over the
country. (In Santiago the National Stadium was converted into one.)
Freedom of the press and assembly were abrogated; Congress was
dissolved, as were all political parties, trade unions, and
nongovernmental organizations. The only institution left in place was
the judiciary, which had opposed Allende’s measures and soon showed
its subservience to the new masters of Chile: when family members
petitioned the courts to learn the whereabouts of their missing
relatives, no habeas corpus was issued. Indeed, there were occasions
when the judges mocked the wives, suggesting they were so ugly that it
was no wonder their husbands had run off.

Disappearance became the regime’s iconic form of repression. It
allowed the authorities to eliminate troublemakers without being held
accountable, leaving families and friends in the inferno of never
knowing if the loved one was dead or still alive and being endlessly
tormented. There was no burial site or mourning, only the inchoate
fear that this sort of retribution could be doled out to anyone
exhibiting the slightest sign of dissidence.

Besides being a way of spreading grief and terror, disappearances laid
bare what the dictatorship, counseled by archconservative civilians,
intended to inflict on Chile itself: to disappear its past, to
systematically demolish all vestiges of the welfare state, an array of
civil rights that generations had fought for, and a communal notion of
a country that took care of its own. In its place, Chile became a
laboratory for Milton Friedman’s neoliberalism. The new regime
applied the pain of “shock therapy” to a captive land.6  Instead
of a shining example of a country that could peacefully aspire to a
radically just social order, we were turned into a model of extreme
free market economics that was imitated around the world.7

Any challenge to the new rulers or their “reconstruction” of Chile
to serve the interests of foreign corporations and local monopolies
was met with maximum violence. Behind such brutality lurked a
fear—perhaps a certainty—that those millions of Allendistas would
not be easily deterred, that they would resist, that our president was
still alive in the utopia of our hearts, that we would emerge from the
shadows.

Those who betrayed and overthrew Allende may have been haunted, as we
were, by his last words from La Moneda that day, just before the last
loyalist radio was silenced: “El metal tranquilo de mi voz ya no
llegará a ustedes” (You will no longer hear the serene metal of my
voice). In that speech, Allende excoriates the military and promises
that they will receive some form of punishment, even if only a moral
one, in the future. He tells his followers not to let themselves be
humiliated but also to avoid confronting the soldiers patrolling the
city and countryside—advice that saved thousands of lives. But what
has resonated most, the words that adorn hundreds of monuments erected
in plazas, streets, and playgrounds across the world, is his prophecy
that someday the _grandes alamedas_, the great avenues lined with
trees, would open for the free people of tomorrow to walk through.

He was right to give us hope, to offer that prophecy during his final
farewell. But once he was dead, it was up to the mourners he left
behind to figure out how to survive and resist and forge an alliance
that would defeat the dictatorship and perhaps make those luminous
words about the _grandes alamedas_ come true.

On September 4, 1990, Allende finally received the triumphant funeral
his enemies had denied him. Despite a concerted effort to denigrate
him from the day of his death (it was said that he was a corrupt,
cowardly drunkard, a sexual deviant who had orgies with nubile girls,
a traitor who had secret plans to assassinate the officers of the
armed forces and their families and to turn the country into a second
Cuba), his mythical stature had only grown over the years, culminating
in this public homage. It was orchestrated by the government of the
Christian Democrat president Patricio Aylwin, who had taken over from
a reluctant and embattled Pinochet when democracy was restored in
March 1990. The date of the funeral was carefully chosen to coincide
with the twentieth anniversary of Allende’s victory in the 1970
elections.

As I waded through the gigantic, seething, raucous crowd that had
gathered in the Plaza de Armas in hopes of catching a glimpse of the
dead president’s coffin as it left the cathedral, where a mass was
being celebrated in his honor, for a moment I harbored the illusion
that time had stood still. The chant of _Allende, Allende, el pueblo
te defiende_ transported me back to that march seventeen years
earlier in front of La Moneda, and here again was that _pueblo_,
battered and bruised and persecuted; here were these men and women and
their progeny who had resisted with enormous sacrifices and courage
and cunning the onslaught of the dictatorship and made this day
possible by refusing to forget their dead leader.

The illusion could not last. Too much had changed. Those crowds were
being tightly controlled, kept away from the official
ceremonies—both at the cathedral and at the cemetery where the
remains were deposited in a specially designed mausoleum. In the
cathedral, standing side by side next to Allende’s family and his
most eminent collaborators, were some of his fiercest rivals, most
notoriously Aylwin, who as head of the Senate in 1973 had refused
Allende’s offer to negotiate a resolution to the constitutional
crisis confronting the government and Congress, thereby facilitating
the coup.8 In his speech that day at the cemetery, Aylwin did not
hide his differences with the former president, while emphasizing
Allende’s statesmanlike qualities and service to democracy. But we
should not dwell on the past that divides us, he said. This occasion
was a _reencuentro_, a reunion and reconciliation between Chileans
whose disagreements had brought on the dictatorship.

That _reencuentro_ had not been an easy one. It entailed a painful
reflection on our part about the errors: we had promised paradise and
ended up in hell. There were two main analyses of what had gone wrong.
The MIR argued that the premise that radical change can be
undertaken through the ballot box was to blame, and that consequently
the only road ahead was an armed struggle for total power, with no
hesitation to use violence against merciless and hypocritical enemies
who had jettisoned democracy as soon it did not serve their
interests.9

This suicidal thesis was not what ultimately prevailed among most of
Allende’s followers. Profound changes could not be imposed from a
minority position; a grand multiclass alliance was
required.10 Resistance to the dictatorship should be based on
appealing to Chileans’ enduring respect for democratic traditions
and institutions that had roots in a century of nonviolent civic
struggle, an ideal shared by the middle classes and some workers
alienated by the pace of Allende’s revolution. Most of them were
represented by the reformist Christian Democrats, who had often
espoused progressive policies (their program in 1970 had been only
marginally different from that of the Unidad Popular) but who felt
that the revolutionary government was ruining the country. Led by
former president Eduardo Frei, they had paved the way for the coup,
trusting that the military would soon call elections that they would
handily win.11 Some left-wing members of the party had strenuously
denounced the junta and soon most others actively rejected its
reactionary policies, which opened them up to persecution.12

The slow convergence of socialists and Christian Democrats, overcoming
many years of bitter conflict, was spectacularly successful: Pinochet
was trounced in a 1988 plebiscite on whether he should remain
president when civilian rule was restored, and then he was humiliated
again when Aylwin won the presidency. There were limits, of course, to
what the new coalition could accomplish. This was partly because of
how the dictator’s fraudulent 1980 constitution thwarted major
changes to neoliberal policies and prevented the dismantling of
numerous authoritarian enclaves in the Senate, the Constitutional
Council, the bureaucracy, and the armed forces, but also due to
caution on the part of the political elite of the center-left. They
felt that to even suggest any eventual repetition of the Allende
experiment or attempt to judge those who had carried out human rights
violations would endanger the precarious transition negotiated with
the vigilant military, still headed by Pinochet, as well as upset the
entrepreneurs who, having increased their wealth and power under the
dictatorship, held the keys to the economy.

Chilean president Gabriel Boric in front of a statue of Salvador
Allende just after his inauguration, Santiago, March 2022. Martin
Bernetti/AFP/Getty Images

There were, in effect, two Allendes who died at La Moneda. One was the
man who had given his life for democracy. The other was the
revolutionary and anti-imperialist who believed there could be no
solution to the ills besetting a country like Chile (and so many
others in what was then called the third world), no way to be rid of
poverty, inequality, and exploitation other than to radically
transform the capitalist system. His funeral marked the apotheosis of
Allende the democrat to the detriment of the revolutionary, who was
sanitized, drained of all subversive, disorderly traits, and
comfortably incorporated into the national pantheon. As for the
hundreds of thousands who had been afforded the brief joy of watching
this funeral from afar and offered the chimera that their memories
mattered, they were now supposed to disband and leave governing to the
experts. The streets were not for marching and making impossible
demands.

For the next three decades, that compromise—yes to a monitored,
restrained democracy, no to the risky adventure of a
revolution—helped create political stability and faltering economic
and social reforms that bettered the lives of the majority but kept in
place one of the most unequal systems of income distribution in the
world. During those years, Pinochet’s reputation sank to ever-lower
depths, reaching its nadir when he was arrested in London in 1998 as a
torturer, in a case that electrified public opinion worldwide and
established the precedent that when former heads of state commit
crimes against humanity, humanity has the right and duty to prosecute
them beyond national borders.13 Pinochet’s image was further
diminished when in 2005 it was revealed that he and his family had
illegally stowed more than $17 million in hidden accounts at Riggs
Bank.

Meanwhile Allende became ever more legendary, ever more heroic, ever
more honorable—and ever more distant.

Then, in October 2019, a revolt shook Chile. Student protests,
savagely repressed by the police, turned into a full-scale popular
insurrection. Everything was questioned: the penurious education,
health, and housing systems; the pensions that, privatized under the
dictatorship, enriched the companies and impoverished the elderly; the
marginalization of women and indigenous communities; the persecution
of gays and lesbians; a society of greed and consumption and rampant
individualism.

And lo and behold, new life was breathed into Allende, the visionary
prophet of a new order. His photo was held up on thousands of placards
in the peaceful marches in which millions participated, his incendiary
words adorned innumerable walls, and his name was invoked by masked
militants who manned the barricades and battled the police with
cobblestones and Molotov cocktails.

In order to channel the discontent of this frustrated and suddenly
reawakened populace, a plebiscite was organized that asked voters if
they wanted to replace Pinochet’s constitution. In October 2020, the
measure passed with a walloping 78 percent of the vote and was
followed in May 2021 by the election of delegates who would write a
new constitution, with an overwhelming majority in favor of
drastically altering how the country imagined itself.

As if this renewal of Chilean dreams of justice and equality was not
enough, in December 2021 Gabriel Boric, a charismatic, tattooed,
thirty-five-year-old former student leader, was elected president,
defeating his rival, José Antonio Kast, an ultraright admirer of
Pinochet, with almost 56 percent of the vote. It seemed that Boric’s
vow that “if Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be
its grave” was about to come true.

Now Allende was not only in the streets and in the Constitutional
Convention, but also once more entering La Moneda. On the day of
Boric’s inauguration, the new president broke protocol: instead of
walking directly into the presidential palace, he crossed the plaza to
meditate for a minute in front of the statue of Allende that had been
erected near the balcony from which he had waved good-bye to
his _pueblo_ thirteen years before Boric was born. The torch was
being passed to a new generation, something that Boric emphasized at
the end of his speech that evening:

As Salvador Allende predicted almost fifty years ago, we are again,
fellow citizens, opening the _grandes alamedas_ through which will
pass the free man, the free men and women, to build a better society.

This vision of a different Chile was embodied in the constitution
written in those months, which assigned rights to Nature, women, and
indigenous communities, and made the state—not the
market—responsible for the well-being of the people. I saw it as
auspicious that the date of the referendum to ratify that new
constitution was September 4, 2022. What better way of celebrating,
fifty-two years after Allende’s victory and thirty-two after his
burial, that the country he had anticipated, as both a democrat and a
revolutionary, was becoming a reality? What better moment to say
good-bye, not to Allende as we did when we marched past his receding
figure, but to the dictatorship’s influence? It was not to be. The
constitution that Allende would have revered and that embodied
Boric’s dreams was rejected by almost 62 percent of voters.

Worse was to come. On May 7 of this year, the electorate chose the
fifty delegates who will try again to write a new constitution. The
right-wing parties obtained an overwhelming majority of thirty-four
seats, with twenty-three of them belonging to the Partido Republicano
led by Kast, who had been beaten emphatically by Boric and who has
declared many times that he prefers to keep Pinochet’s constitution.

It is too soon to predict what this stunning change in the
electorate’s fancies portends. Does it mean that we can expect Kast
to become the country’s next president, one more Trump imitator in
the southern hemisphere, another Bolsonaro? Does it signal a deep
realignment of Chilean politics and priorities, with millions of
Chileans who had not voted before now expressing their conservative
opinions? Or were these electoral results merely a temporary blip, a
protest against Boric’s inability to manage a series of cascading
crises (crime, immigration, inflation, and violent conflicts between
the state, large landowners, and indigenous communities)? Will he find
a way to reformulate his program and regain the initiative?

The real question is where the true identity of Chile lies, a question
that will again be debated as the fiftieth anniversary of the coup
approaches. Did Pinochet’s neoliberal policies—and the terror he
engendered—penetrate so deeply into the marrow of society that
future projects of radical change are doomed to fail? Or are
Allende’s _grandes alamedas_ still beckoning all these years
later? Will the horrors of the dictatorship be emphasized one more
time and convince Chileans that they must reject anyone who does not
strongly condemn the crimes of the Pinochet years?14 Or will the
mistakes of the Allende revolution be front and center, as a weary
citizenry seeks a country that will never again be so polarized?

The wounds of Chile are deep, but regardless of how Chileans decide to
deal with our trauma and conflicts, Allende’s legacy might have some
bearing beyond the borders of his country. The need for radical change
through nonviolence that this unique statesman posed—and did not
achieve half a century ago—has again become the crucial issue of our
era. With new variants of Pinochet troubling so many lands,
Allende’s insistence throughout his life that for our dreams to bear
fruit we need more democracy and never less—always, always more
democracy—is more relevant than ever. He calls out to us that there
can be no solution to the dilemmas plaguing the planet—war,
inequality, mass migration, the twin threats of climate change and
nuclear annihilation—without the active participation of vast
majorities of fearless and enthusiastic men and women marching past
the balconies of the future.

Fifty years after his death, Salvador Allende is still speaking to us.

—August 24, 2023

_NOTES_

1This led to fascinating experiments in self-management. See Peter
Winn, _Weavers of Revolution: The Yarur Workers and Chile’s Road to
Socialism_ (Oxford University Press, 1986)

2Allende, a physician, had devoted himself since his youth to serving
Chileans living in what he called “subhuman conditions.” Both as
minister of health and social welfare of the Popular Front government
(from 1939 to 1942) and then as a senator, he had been instrumental in
creating social security and national health systems, always
emphasizing that the best way to ensure public health was for people,
especially infants and mothers, to be well nourished. As minister (at
the age of thirty-one) he had declared, “For el pueblo I prefer a
plate of lentils to a bottle of tonic medicine.” For those
interested in Allende’s life, the best introduction is Mario
Amorós, Allende (Barcelona/Madrid: Ediciones B, 2013), one of a large
number of other texts on the subject in Spanish. The only (relatively
short) biography of Allende published in English is Victor Figueroa
Clark, Salvador Allende: Revolutionary Democrat (Pluto, 2013). An
excellent biographical introduction is available in an anthology of
his political thought, the Salvador Allende Reader: Chile’s Voice of
Democracy, edited by James D. Cockcroft (Ocean, 2000).

3The speech, which received a ten-minute standing ovation, can be
found in the_ Salvador Allende Reader_. Paul E. Sigmund argued in his
essay “The ‘Invisible Blockade’ and the Overthrow of
Allende”_ _(_Foreign Affairs, _January 1974) that without denying
the scope of US covert action against Chile, the coup owed its success
to internal rather than external factors. For the full extent of
America’s economic war on Chile, see Peter Kornbluh, _The Pinochet
File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability_ (New
Press, 2003). See also Marc Cooper, “Kissinger and the CIA in
Chile: An Interview with Peter Kornbluh,” _Truthdig_, July 6, 2023.

4While most financial aid and investment to Chile was deterred,
American aid to the military dramatically increased between 1970 and
1973.

5On the evolving interpretations of Allende’s death, see my
memoir, _Heading South, Looking North: A Bilingual Journey_ (Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 1998), pp. 51–59. For a summary of the numerous
texts on this issue, including critiques of the suicide theory and an
extensive bibliography, see Hermes Benítez, _Las muertes de Salvador
Allende: Una investigación crítica de las principales versiones de
sus últimos momentos_ (Valparaíso: RIL, 2013).

6See Naomi Klein, _The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster
Capitalism_ (Metropolitan, 2007). For a more nuanced view of
Friedman’s influence on Pinochet’s policies, see Sebastian
Edwards, _The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the
Downfall of Neoliberalism_ (Princeton University Press, 2023).

7By the end of the decade Margaret Thatcher was imposing this
experiment on her country, and soon thereafter it was Ronald
Reagan’s turn.

8Under the auspices of the progressive Catholic cardinal Raúl Silva
Henríquez, Allende met secretly with Aylwin on August 17, 1973.
Although they were unable to reach an agreement, five days later
Allende sent Aylwin a long letter detailing how the problems could be
resolved. Aylwin never answered.

9Some years later, this thesis was adopted by the Communist Party,
which, afraid that the process was overaccelerating, had been the most
moderate force in Allende’s coalition.

10The failure of the Chilean road to socialism had consequences far
beyond its borders. Allende’s peaceful revolution was greeted with
sympathy by those forces all over the world, particularly in Europe.
Eurocommunism, the historic shift in the powerful Communist parties in
Italy, France, and Spain toward a project that was closer to social
democracy than to radical revolution, derived from a frank analysis of
the reasons why Allende’s project had ended so heartbreakingly, a
shift that would alter the political landscape and alliances in those
countries.

11The effects for them of this misjudgment were astutely noted by
Larry Birns in “The Death of Chile,” _The New York Review_,
November 1, 1973.

12A judge determined in 2019 that Frei was murdered in 1982 by the
dictator’s security forces while in a hospital for a supposedly safe
operation. Though a court of appeals revoked that ruling two years
later and the Supreme Court recently upheld the revocation on a
technicality, the proof of that assassination, according to many
experts and eyewitnesses, continues to be irrefutable.
See _Magnicidio: La historia del crimen de mi padre_ (Madrid:
Aguilar, 2017) by Carmen Frei, the former president’s daughter.

13For more on this arrest and its consequences, see my _Exorcising
Terror: The Incredible Unending Trial of Augusto Pinochet_ (Seven
Stories, 2002).

14It is significant that Sebastián Piñera, the only candidate of the
right to become president (twice) since democracy was restored, also
voted against Pinochet in the 1988 plebiscite. Kast’s party’s
embrace of Pinochet will not go uncontested. And when Luis Silva, the
Republican who garnered the most votes in the recent elections for the
Constitutional Council, expressed his admiration for Pinochet because
he was a statesman, President Boric sharply noted that Pinochet was
not only a dictator but “corrupt and a thief, and…never a real
statesman.”

ARIEL DORFMAN, a Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Literature at
Duke, is the author of the play _Death and the Maiden_, the poetry
collection _Voices from the Other Side of Death_, and, most recently,
the novel _The Suicide Museum_. (September 2023)

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* Chile
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* coup
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* Henry Kissinger
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* Salvador Allende
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* Gabriel Boric
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* socialism
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* Constitution
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* Struggle
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