Today marks the 50th Anniversary of the U.S.-backed Chilean coup, a day when a democratic alternative to capitalism was destroyed.
On September 11, 1973, twenty eight years before planes hit the twin towers, a terroristic overthrow of the Chilean government was carried out by the country's military with active support from the United States.
Three years prior to the coup, in 1970, following decades of political organizing up and down Chile’s 4000-mile span and after forming a broad coalition of six far-left and center-left political parties called "La Unidad Popular" (Popular Unity), socialist politician and medical doctor, Salvador Allende, was elected president of his country.
On Left: Chilean President Salvador Allende (source); On Right: The attack on the Chilean presidential palace, La Moneda, on September 11, 1973 (source).
During Allende's previous presidential run in 1964, the CIA spent three million dollars to fund propaganda campaigns against him and almost the same amount to fund his opponent’s campaign. When similar efforts failed in 1970, an angry Richard Nixon swore to "make the Chilean economy scream." Alongside his Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, and the wealthiest segments of the Chilean population, Nixon unleashed economic warfare on the country—sanctions (that soon left thousands of Chilean cars and buses in disrepair for lack of machinery and tires), food delivery slowdowns, inflation-inducing schemes, and more—all to depict Allende as a failed leader.
Despite this, the president quickly began work to provide adequate daily nutrition to all Chilean youth, significantly expand the right to vote, encourage public participation in political and workplace decision-making, create size-limitations on the massive "Latifundia" plantations and establish peasant farming cooperatives in their place, universalize social security, double maternity leave, reduce burdensome taxes on the poor and middle class, make higher education tuition free, print tens of millions of books and establish thousands of libraries, and nationalize the huge Chilean copper industry that was dominated by U.S. corporations, shifting profits away from foreign shareholders and toward the common good.
Since 1970, the prospect of a coup had been on the minds of both right-wing segments of the Chilean military and the U.S. intelligence agents who they regularly communicated with. Only days after Allende's election, in a kidnapping attempt gone wrong, a group of Chilean military officers killed René Schneider, the Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean Military, who vehemently opposed military intervention in politics. The CIA saw him as "a major stumbling block for military officers seeking to carry out a coup" and provided these vigilante officers with untraceable weapons to use in what was supposed to be a covert kidnapping. The public criticism of military interventionism that occurred after Schneider's death delayed continued considerations of a coup.
In the lead up to the mid-term parliamentary elections in March of 1973, there was relative confidence among reactionary Chilean elites and the CIA that the Popular Unity coalition would lose seats in congress, weakening Allende's power. This, in part, had to do with drastically rising inflation rates (driven largely by a secret U.S.-government plan) for which the Allende government was being widely blamed. But when the opposite happened and the coalition made significant electoral gains, CIA operatives and Chilean military officials began once again discussing violent overthrow.
The coup finally happened on September 11, 1973—50 years ago to the day—when tanks surrounded the presidential palace, La Moneda, and fighter jets shot 24 rockets inside. The new military commander, Augusto Pinochet, assumed the presidency and established an anti-democratic military dictatorship that would last for seventeen years.
A little over a decade ago, I spent a semester studying in Chile. My academic advisor was a survivor of one of Pinochet's most notorious torture camps, Villa Grimaldi. Other professors of mine had photos in their offices of their relatives and friends who the regime had "disappeared." Yet I quickly learned that while the thousands of killings, disappearances, and exilings were the most internationally visible forms of violence, there was also a vast economic violence that devastated the country.
In anticipation of the coming coup (and only months before it happened), a group of University of Chicago-trained Chilean economists, known as the "Chicago Boys," with support from CIA-employed scholars, finalized a blueprint for the post-coup economy. Called "El Ladrillo" (The Brick), it was a 200-page document prescribing tax cuts for the rich, the privatization (selling off) of hundreds of government-run businesses and services, massive cuts to social welfare spending, economic deregulation (i.e. removing price controls on essential goods like food and fuel), and unlimited, free international trade. Within just a few years, local businesses began to shutter due to international competition, hundreds of thousands of industrial and public sector jobs disappeared, and unemployment reached 20%. By 1980 it had reached 30% (ten times the rate under Allende) and overall government spending was now only half of what it was before the coup. Social services, health care, and education budgets suffered the most. Public school became virtually non-existent and hunger became rampant. While nearly half the country plummeted below the poverty line, the wealth of the Chilean 1% and the international corporations occupying the country ballooned.
Author Naomi Klein described this economic project as, "the most extreme capitalist makeover ever attempted anywhere" and "a mutually supporting alliance between a police state and large corporations, joining forces to wage all-out war on the third power sector–the workers...." In 1976, Orlando Letelier, former Allende cabinet member later assassinated by Pinochet's secret police while serving a professorship in Washington D.C., said that "during the last three years several billions of dollars were taken from the pockets of wage earners and placed in those of capitalists and landowners... concentration of wealth is no accident, but a rule."1 Even in 2012, when I was in Chile, it was one of the ten most economically unequal countries in the world. Today shantytowns fill the eastern hills of many coastal Chilean cities, where thousands of people live in makeshift shelters built of discarded scrap wood, metal, and plastic.
The story of Allende's overthrow illustrates how U.S. business and political elites' fears of socialism have always had little to do with any good-faith yearning to "promote democracy" and much more to do with the desire to protect corporate interests. At the same time that the CIA sought to portray Allende as "a dictator in disguise, a Machiavellian schemer who had used constitutional democracy to gain power but was on the verge of imposing a Soviet-style police state," CIA internal memos made clear the agency's actual belief that "Allende posed no threat to democracy."2
The most powerful financial interests have always sought to destroy democratic alternatives to capitalism. In Guatemala, Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and elsewhere similar stories played out—U.S. government and business elites supported local military factions to overthrow democratically-elected leftist leaders and then supported the creation of military dictatorships where unfettered capitalism could thrive. At the same time, these gaslighting elites uplifted propaganda to the public in the U.S., in Latin America, and around the world, that the only possible alternative economic systems to capitalism were themselves totalitarian and dictatorial.
Yet there has always been a tradition of those who, like Allende, saw democracy and socialism as one and the same. In his book, Democracy at Work, economist Richard Wolff encourages us to realize that there is an alternative to "private capitalism," the form we know, where large firms are owned by private individuals who leave workers uncompensated for the true value of their labor and who have undue influence on the political system, and to "state capitalism," a Soviet-style system where workers have a similar lack of ownership over their work and even fewer democratic political rights (industries are now just controlled by a small group of government bureaucrats rather than a small group of private citizens). Wolff describes this latter economic form as another form of capitalism because ownership is still consolidated in the hands of the few. He refuses to call it socialism, something that he, like many others, sees as synonymous with democracy.
A socialist society, or if we feel the need to clarify, a democratic socialist society, is one where the primary economic form is collectively owned, democratically-managed workplace cooperatives and where the primary political form is a truly robust democracy where everyday people can direct their government to ensure that the economic and human rights of all are guaranteed. Government-run services exist, too, in a major way, but they are embedded in deep democratic control. This system also goes beyond what one might call "welfare state capitalism," where the state simply regulates private capitalist firms to not be quite so brutal. The difference between all of these systems revolves around the question of ownership. Who owns the workplace, who owns "the means of production," and, in a broader sense, who owns society? Is it the masses of everyday people, or a privileged few?
The story of Chile also can show us the importance of international solidarity. The economic system forcibly pioneered for the first time in Chile is something that is today commonly called, "neoliberalism." It is a modern form of unfettered private capitalism characterized by rampant privatization, deregulation, tax cuts for the rich, and free trade.
The reality is, after they did it to them, they did it to us. Ronald Reagan (as well as England's prime minister, Margaret Thatcher) was inspired by the Pinochet economy. Reagan regularly carried around a copy of Milton Friedman's Capitalism and Freedom. Freidman, the Godfather of neoliberalism, trained the Chilean "Chicago Boys" and even traveled to Chile to advise Pinochet. Through the 1980s, Reagan created a new normal that also deeply impacted his successors from both political parties. He, Bush Sr., and even Bill Clinton, unleashed a corporate takeover of U.S. democracy where they busted unions, passed free trade deals that destroyed hundreds of thousands of industrial jobs, dramatically lowered taxes on corporations and millionaires, and relocated billions of taxpayer dollars from social spending to carceral spending.
We, too, now live in a society with one of the highest levels of inequality in the industrialized world, inequality that has steadily increased since 1980. In 2017, 140 million people in the U.S. were living in poverty and that number has only risen today; and as the cost of housing, healthcare, and education skyrockets every single year while wages remain flat, the vast majority of us exist in a state of economic fear.
The corporations who assert immense power in this world are multinational. Their strategy for expanding power is global in scope. The ruling class is united across borders. We have to be, too. The way to change the world is to build mass political organizations and labor federations that are not only powerful nationally, but also mutually supportive on an international basis. We must cultivate an ethic of solidarity that recognizes that "an injury to one is an injury to all," one that operates from our own version of the "domino theory" in which we clearly see how, as James Baldwin famously wrote to an incarcerated Angela Davis, "if they come for you in the morning, they will be coming for us that night."
As a global 99%, we need to collectively adopt the slogan spoken last night by 6,000 Chilean women, dressed in black, as they gathered in a vigil on the eve of the 50th anniversary of that terrible day in 1973 when the presidential palace was attacked by tanks and air raids: "Never again will democracy be bombed."
A few resources on Chilean history and the themes mentioned in this article that have been particularly inspiring and informative to me:
Pinochet and Me by Marc Cooper.
The Shock Doctrine, a documentary based on Naomi Klein's book with the same title.
AOC on US Hegemony and Latin American Sovereignty, The Dig Podcast.
The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism by Naomi Klein, pages 7 and 79-86.
Klein, 96-97.