09/12/2026
On September 11, 1973, Santiago woke up to see helicopters circling low above the rooftops. Inside La Moneda Presidente Allende, speaks his final words to the nation via state radio. By the afternoon the palace was on fire and a general named Augusto Pinochet had moved into the ruins of Chile’s democracy.
For three years, the Cold War world closely monitored the Unidad Popular’s attempt to establish a socialist government, which Salvador Allende had won at the ballot box rather than seized through a coup. That morning brought an end to the experiment with bombs, and for the next 17 years Chile would exist under a dictatorship based on fear.
The work of Henry Kissinger, Milton Friedman brought in the ‘Chicago Boys’. They came with spreadsheets and the ideas of free market economics, leading to widespread job losses, empty households, and inflation which consumed workers’ wages before they had a chance to spend them. At the same time, the system of terror was operating in the shadows. DINA agents would take trade unionists, students, and writers from their homes at night. Families call them Los Desaparecidos – the disappeared – since their bodies and records were deliberately hidden so only grief could serve as evidence.
University were taken over by military officers. Books were burned and dissent was re-labelled as a Mrxist virus, something that had to be surgically eliminated from the body of the nation.
