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Make the Economy Scream: Chile, 1970–1973
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Salvador Allende won a free election — so the CIA set about destroying him anyway. This is the full story of Track One, Track Two, and the coup that brought Pinochet to power.
Audio is available on Spreaker — see link below.
Here's what's genuinely difficult about Chile. Salvador Allende won a free election.
September nineteen seventy. Allende wins Chile's presidential election with just under thirty-seven percent of the vote in a three-way race.
Allende took office in November nineteen seventy. What followed over the next three years was a sustained and coordinated effort by the United States to make his government fail.
By the middle of nineteen seventy-three, elements of the Chilean military were in active contact with the CIA. The agency's station chief in Santiago was running a network that included military officers, political figures, and business leaders who wanted Allende gone.
Pinochet moved fast. Within hours of the coup, stadiums were converted into detention centers.
The Chile operation didn't stay hidden. It came apart in stages through nineteen seventy-four and nineteen seventy-five.
Chile nineteen seventy-three sits in a specific line of cases in this series. Iran in nineteen fifty-three.
What declassified documents show is a programme that was deliberate, sustained, and understood at the time to be operating outside normal channels. Nixon's instructions to Helms were clear.
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