9/11/73

This day is also a dark anniversary for the people of Chile, where, thirty years ago, the democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende was brutally and relentlessly overthrown by a band of fascist military leaders under the command of General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte - with backing from our own Central Intelligence Agency.

The events of Tuesday, September 11, 2001, are difficult to think about, but the events of Tuesday, September 11, 1973 are equally hard for Americans to confront because it reminds us how our own government is willing to put a brutal murderer and dictator like Pinochet at the head of another country simply to achieve a political or economic goal for the American business elite. Allende, elected Chile's president in 1970, was a socialist who had sought to nationalize Chilean industry - including American-owned copper mines - and make life better for average Chileans. He was unabashedly leftist - too leftist for the Nixon administration, who saw Allende's reforms in Chile as an opening to communism in South America. Clearly, as Nixon and Henry Kissinger saw it, he had to go.

Having tried and failed to undermine Allende through diplomatic channels, a coup d'etat was unleashed on 9/11/73 in which planes from the Chilean air force and ground soldiers attacked the presidential palace in Santiago. Allende shot himself to death, the constitution was suspended, and leftist opponents to the Pinochet junta were subsequently rounded up and shot - many of whom were executed in a Santiago soccer stadium. A stable, democratic government that had withstood forty-eight years of economic hardship in Chile was obliterated.

Thirty thousand people died in the aftermath of the coup. Our government helped all this to happen. Pinochet held on to power until 1990, when Chile's democratic government was restored. In the seventeen years in which Pinochet ruled, though, dissidents were imprisoned, tortured, and killed. The gap between the rich and poor grew wider, and it remains a vast chasm due to the predatory capitalism that has taken over in the country. Pinochet, incredibly, remains a hero to the American right for "saving" Chile from communism. Another Pinochet fan is former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher.

Thirty years later, as Bush continues to lie about his intentions in Iraq and the Middle East at large, as he asks us to support him blindly, it's important to remember that we shouldn't trust our government to do the right thing all the time, and that what the government does is sometimes for selfish, swinish purposes that benefit the few at the expense of the many.

Coups for copper? War for oil? Not in our name!

More on the coup is here.