Allende: History is ours and the people are making it

Salvador Allende, Former leader of Chile

By Laura Bécquer Paseiro

"THIS might be the last opportunity that I have to address you. The Air Force has bombed the Radio Portales and Radio Corporación towers. My words do not hold bitterness but disappointment, and they will be the moral punishment of those who have betrayed the oath they made (...) In the face of these facts, it is only fitting to say to the workers, I am not going to resign. Placed at a moment of historic transition, I will pay for the loyalty of the people with my life (...) They have the power, they can subdue us, but the social processes will not be halted, not with crime, not with force. History is ours and the peoples are making it."

These were the last words of Chilean President Salvador Allende to his people. The encouragement of a revolutionary whose government was truncated by the hatred of those who would not allow another socialist government in Latin America.

On September 11, 1973, Chile awoke to the news of a coup d’état against the constitutional Popular Unity government headed by Allende. Certain members of the Armed Forces, backed by the CIA, burst into La Moneda Palace, the seat of government, consolidating what was a known secret: the U.S. government would do whatever was within its reach to interrupt the democratic process and remove from the Palace the man who had a genuine commitment to Chileans.

For the United States, a political program establishing the redistribution of income and economic reforms, beginning with the most important industries, as well as a broad agrarian reform, was untenable.

"I don’t see why we have to sit here and see a country turning communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people," stated Henry Kissinger, principal national security adviser to President Richard Nixon (1969-1974). For him, the "irresponsible" people were the thousands of Chileans who voted for Popular Unity, a political coalition which won the elections in 1970.

In this scenario, the United States acted as it usually does: financing campaigns of discredit, manipulating public opinion, and implementing economic blockades to isolate the country, and to fuel internal destabilization. Certain documents record Nixon exultantly declaring, "Maybe there’s a 10% chance, but we have to save Chile! ...I’m not interested in the risks that this might imply… there’s 10 million dollars more available…"

Why such viciousness against a government? In Washington’s eyes, Allende was a provocateur, a constitutionally elected Marxist, who was shaking up the geopolitical scene and demolishing doctrine with popular unity for the dispossessed.
The Chilean coup signified the betrayal by soldiers of their constitution, their President, their people; it initiated one of the grayest chapters in the country’s recent history, giving rise to fascism, the systematic destruction of the work of Allende and the Chilean democratic workers’ movement, and finally, the instigation of the first model of savage capitalism in the neoliberal era.

Recalling this crime, 39 years after it was perpetrated, is to have the certainty that, so much time later, social process are continuing and will continue to open what that great Chilean, Salvador Allende, referred to as the "the grand poplar-lined avenues where free humanity passes, in order to build a better society.