Introduction

On the afternoon of the 11th September 1973, national armed forces bombed the Chilean Presidential Palace, La Moneda, dissolved Congress and installed a military Junta headed by General Augusto Pinochet. This was the start of the Chilean military dictatorship that would last for 17 years, overseeing more than 3,000 deaths, 40,000 cases of torture and 200,000 cases of exile.

Compared to Brazil and Uruguay, which had installed its own military regime in an autocoup just a few months earlier, the military takeover in Chile almost immediately incited international outrage. Front-page news articles across Western Europe described the scene in which air and ground attacks destroyed parts of the presidential palace, where President Salvador Allende was reported to have committed suicide. At a most basic level, the comparatively weak reactions to the Brazilian and Uruguayan coups can be explained by the fact that they were carried out with comparatively less violence. In Brazil, the political opposition was initially repressed through the suspension of political rights and forced exile, with torture not being systematically employed until a few years later. In Uruguay, it was the democratically elected president at the time, Juan Bordaberry, who personally and willingly signed the decree to dissolve Congress.

Chile was important for another reason. Salvador Allende, president of the Republic of Chile, had proven the possibility of the ‘democratic road to socialism’. He had gathered significant international support from Western European countries with active Socialist and Communist parties, such as France and Italy, and had inspired Leftist movements and currents across the continent. The fall of the democratic regime and Allende’s subsequent death almost immediately drew mass national and international campaigns and protests of solidarity that cut across classes, including unions, politicians, Christian groups, artists and academics.