Salvador Allende

Author(s):  
Steven S. Volk

Salvador Allende Gossens (1908–1973), democratically elected President of Chile in 1970, pledged to move Chile to socialism within a constitutional framework. A medical doctor by training, and a long-time member of the Socialist Party, Allende won a seat in the Chamber of Deputies in 1937 and the Senate in 1945. He campaigned for the presidency four times (1952, 1958, 1964, and 1970), always at the head of a coalition of left-wing parties. He was deeply committed to improving the condition of the country’s poor, workers, peasants, and women, insuring Chilean ownership of its natural resources, strengthening state ownership of the economy, and deepening popular democracy and worker control of industry. His program was undermined by the conservative opposition, conflicts within his own governing coalition, spontaneous revolutionary activism, and the unrelenting antagonism of the Nixon Administration. He died in a military coup on September 11, 1973, which initiated a 17-year long military dictatorship.

Author(s):  
Stephen G. Rabe

This chapter details how the first crisis for the Nixon administration came with the news that leftist Salvador Allende had captured a plurality of the vote in the September 1970 presidential election. It reviews the U.S. role in destabilizing the Allende government. The historical literature tends to give scant attention to the United States and Chile after September 11, 1973. To recount the complete story about the U.S. role in Chile demands investigating not only the war against Allende but also the myriad of ways that the Nixon and Ford administrations and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger bolstered the Pinochet dictatorship. The chapter also analyzes Kissinger's lead role in encouraging the overthrow of President Juan José Torres (1970–1971), the socialist political and military leader of Bolivia.


Author(s):  
Michael Poznansky

This chapter investigates the factors that led the Nixon administration to pursue covert regime change against Salvador Allende, the democratically elected socialist President of Chile in the early 1970s. Initial attempts at preventing Allende from coming to power, including a military coup, failed. Although subsequent covert destabilization efforts contributed to Allende’s eventual downfall in 1973 at the hands of Augusto Pinochet and his co-conspirators, U.S. decision makers were not directly involved. They did, however, have advance warning. One of the primary reasons for the use of secrecy in this case was America’s commitment to nonintervention and the attendant credibility and legitimacy costs associated with brazenly violating it. Although U.S. officials never considered overtly invading Chile, they were reticent to pursue less dramatic overt policies aimed at overthrowing Allende, including sanctions and other hardline policies, unless they could secure legal cover.


2015 ◽  
Vol 67 (7) ◽  
pp. 14
Author(s):  
Intan Suwandi

In the early morning of October 1, 1965, self-proclaimed left-wing troops raided the houses of seven top army generals in Jakarta. In the process, six of the generals were killed&mdash;three were shot during the kidnapping attempt, while the others were taken to Lubang Buaya, an air force base located in the south of Jakarta, and then killed. The seventh general, Nasution, managed to escape. The perpetrators announced on national radio that they were troops loyal to President Sukarno, and they aimed to protect the president from the danger posed by the right-wing "Council of Generals"&mdash;who, they said, were planning to launch a military coup d'&eacute;tat.&hellip; This movement was very short-lived. Within one day, it collapsed. Major General Suharto&hellip;took control of the army during the morning of October 1 and quickly crushed the movement.&hellip; [W]hat happened on October 1, 1965 marked the fall of Sukarno and the rise of Suharto, who was soon to rule Indonesia under his military dictatorship for more than three decades. The brutality of Suharto's New Order is probably not news for people familiar with Indonesia. But there is "an episode the West would prefer to forget," as journalist John Pilger put it, that accompanied Suharto's rise to power: the destruction of Communism and the mass killings that followed&mdash;a phenomenon claimed by <em>Time </em>magazine in 1966 as "The West's best news for years in Asia."<p class="mrlink"><p class="mrpurchaselink"><a href="http://monthlyreview.org/index/volume-67-number-7" title="Vol. 67, No. 7: December 2015" target="_self">Click here to purchase a PDF version of this article at the <em>Monthly Review</em> website.</a></p>


Author(s):  
Alan McPherson

This chapter focuses on the relationship between Isabel and Orlando Letelier before the military coup by Pinochet on September 11, 1973. They met as stdents, fell in love and into politics, and lived in Washington for a decade when Orlando was ambassador. They also raised four boys who were bi-national in their culture. Right before the coup, Orlando returned to Chile as a minister for the socialist government of Salvador Allende. The chapter establishes the depth of the couple’s love, which is tested in later chapters.


2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcelo Casals

The election of Salvador Allende and the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) in 1970 unleashed a radical and original revolutionary process, discernible not only in the depth of its redistributive measures and the expectations it generated, but also in the ferocity with which those who identified with the counter-revolutionary ideal responded to that project. The counter-revolution, initially confined to the conservative and reactionary sectors, in a matter of months became an immense mass mobilisation that would end up paving the way for the military coup. This article analyses that counter-revolutionary process, exploring its historic roots, the main actors involved and the innovations in political practices it developed at the time. The ‘counter-revolutionary bloc’ was formed by a diverse array of political and social actors – some of whom did not have previous experience in political mobilisations – who based their actions on the adoption and socialisation of a long-standing anti-Communist script, through which they could make sense of the period’s changing reality. That script – based on decades of taking in events from other parts of the world, elaborations and accusations against all those who identified as Communists – aimed to reduce the originality of the Unidad Popular’s political project to a remake of classic socialist experiences in Chilean territory and processed in a dystopian key. The counter-revolution’s power would be projected into the military dictatorship that began in 1973, when it became a sort of official state ideology, and it would become a foundational experience for Chilean conservative sectors with reverberations even in in the present.


Author(s):  
Josefina Vidal M ◽  
Macarena García O ◽  
Pedro Álvarez C

Abstract In the second half of the 1960s, prêt-à-porter (ready-to-wear) fashion was established in Chile. As an alternative to haute couture (high fashion), prêt-à-porter brought an eagerness for modernisation that was reflected in the setting up of a network of women-led boutiques, which developed strongly between 1967 and 1973. This article first examines the precedents that allowed for the creation of a ‘local fashion system’ that promoted collective work around trades such as knitting and dressmaking. It also analyses the arrangement of a circuit of boutiques in the comuna of Providencia, a strategic sector of Santiago de Chile (the capital city) that fostered the dynamics of social gathering. Later, the article describes the profile of the designer-entrepreneurs whose work was attuned to a female consumer segment that aimed to access a new formula of the modernising bourgeoisie. It also reassesses the rise of a movement called Moda Autóctona, which distanced itself from European fashion and was supported by the government during the socialist regime of Salvador Allende. Lastly, it tackles the eventual dismantling of this network of women’s fashion stores as a result of the installation of a military dictatorship in Chile.


Author(s):  
Filiz Meşeci Giorgetti

In the 1930s, the primary schooling rate in Turkey was significantly low compared to the European states. Ninety percent of the population lived in villages without any schools and teachers. Therefore, promoting primary education was addressed as an issue concerning villages in Turkey. The seeds of the intellectual infrastructure in the emergence of institutes were sown at the beginning of the 20th century, during the Ottoman rule. To train teachers for villages, Village Teacher Training School [Köy Muallim Mektebi] was founded in 1927 and Village Instructor Training Course [Köy Eğitmen Kursu] in 1936. However, these initiatives were not sufficient in terms of quality and quantity. Village teacher training experiences, new education, and work school trends of Europe were analyzed by Turkish educators, opinions of foreign and Turkish experts were received, and the Village Institutes [Köy Enstitüleri] project was carried into effect based on the realities of Turkey. The first Village Institutes opened in 1937. They were established in a restricted area, with a limited budget, and a non-common curriculum until the Village Institute Law was promulgated in 1940. On April 17, 1940, the law prescribing their establishment was approved by the parliament. The number of the Village Institutes, which spread over the Turkish geography evenly, reached 21 by 1949. The period between 1940 and 1947 was when the Village Institutes were most productive. Learning by doing and principles of productive work were embraced at the Village Institutes. The curriculum consisted of three components: general culture, agriculture, and technical courses. In addition to their teaching duties, the primary school teachers that graduated from the Village Institutes undertook the mission of guiding villagers in agricultural and technical issues and having them adopt the nation-state ideology in villages. World balances changing after the Second World War also affected the Village Institutes. In 1946, the founding committee of the Village Institutes were accused of leftism and had to leave their offices for political reasons. After the founding committee stepped aside, the Village Institutes started to be criticized by being subjected to the conflict between left-wing and right-wing. Following the government changeover in 1950, radical changes regarding the curricula, students, and teachers of the institutes were made. Making the Village Institutes unique, the production- and work-oriented aspects were eliminated, and the institutes were closed down in 1954 and converted into Primary School Teacher Training Schools. Although the Village Institutes existed only between 1937 and 1954, their social, economic, and political effects were felt for a long time through the teachers, health officers, and inspectors they trained.


2020 ◽  
pp. 165-188
Author(s):  
Sebastián Hurtado-Torres

This chapter describes the efforts by the United States and Eduardo Frei to prevent Salvador Allende from attaining the presidency. The Nixon administration, after choosing not to involve itself in the 1970 presidential race to the extent the Johnson administration had in the 1964 election, reacted with great alacrity to Allende's victory in the popular election. Richard Nixon himself instructed CIA director Richard Helms to conduct covert operations in Chile, behind Ambassador Korry's back. In addition, Chilean politicians, particularly Christian Democrats of the Frei line, tried or at least explored ways of averting an Allende victory and sought for that purpose the support of the U.S. embassy in Santiago. Though many of the documents that tell this part of the story have been available to researchers since at least the early 2000s, only one scholarly work has treated these attempts by Chilean politicians, especially Eduardo Frei, in depth. The tendency of scholars of U.S. foreign relations during the Cold War to assume rather uncritically that the only decisions that mattered were taken in Washington has narrowed the perspectives from which the history of Cold War Chilean politics has been studied and interpreted.


2020 ◽  
pp. 84-105
Author(s):  
Tanya Harmer

Chapter four examines the emergence of a revolutionary left in Chile in the first years of Eduardo Frei’s presidency. Although this process would not dominate left-wing politics at a national level until later in 1960s, it resonated soon after Allende’s 1964 electoral defeat, influenced both by reformist projects and repressive efforts to contain them. By 1966, Beatriz was part of a weak but emergent revolutionary wing of the Chilean Socialist Party, inspired by local circumstances and international influences. These first years of the Frei government were dynamic, and productive. Beatriz and her cohort of medical students and socialist militants came into direct contact with the state’s new approach to healthcare, family planning, women, agricultural reform, and poverty. Beatriz benefitted from, and was shaped by, the reformist environment she inhabited, emerging like many of the radical left as a product of combined frustrations and opportunities it provided. By 1967, Beatriz had her first formal job in a community health center, epitomizing many of the Christian Democrat’s reformist goals. Closer to home, she had also fallen in love and married a young Socialist Party militant, Renato Julio, involved in effervescent student politics.


Author(s):  
Shmuel Nili

December 2006 saw the passing of General Augusto Pinochet, who ruled Chile through a military dictatorship that lasted almost seventeen years. Pinochet’s regime, which had its roots in a 1973 military coup against Salvador Allende’s democratically elected government, murdered thousands and tortured tens of thousands. Upon Pinochet’s passing, the Chilean government allowed the military to hold official ceremonies mourning him, but refused to honor the military dictator with a head-of-state funeral....


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