The Final Vote For Salvador Allende

This week was the fiftieth anniversary of what is known as "America's Other 9/11". September 11, 1973 was when the coup took place in Chile that had been encouraged and promoted by Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. The Chilean military bombed and attacked the presidential palace in Santiago. The president of the country, Salvador Allende, was killed.

We saw Henry Kissinger in "Henry Kissinger At 100", June 2023.

What Nixon and Kissinger had against Allende was that he was a Communist. He had been legitimately elected but this was the height of the Cold War, Cuba and the Missile Crisis was still fresh in memory and Nixon was determined to keep Communism out of the western hemisphere. His administration did all it could to make it difficult for Allende to govern, until he was finally overthrown and killed in the coup.

The trouble was what came next in Chile. A right wing president came into power, Augusto Pinochet. The general consensus is that his rule was oppressive and dictatorial, although he did have a limited number of admirers. The Nixon Administration, of course, supported him but later U.S. administrations turned against him. Pinochet was finally removed from office although he never faced trial for crimes of oppression.

A division has remained in Chile over Allende against Pinochet. Allende is certainly the more popular of the two now and his statue stands adjacent to the presidential palace in Santiago. Image from Google Street View.

There is something that I have never seen written about the division involving Allende and Pinochet, and I think it can be considered as the final vote for Allende. I am no Communist myself but Chile is another country and it up to the people of that country to vote for what they want.

In 2010 the world watched while 33 miners in Chile were rescued who had been trapped far underground by a mine collapse. All of the miners were successfully rescued.

The world's attention was on the miners. Then came what I consider as the final vote for Salvador Allende. The miners pledged that all of the money earned from their sudden fame would go into a common pot that they would share equally. This was an act of pure Communism that would have made Salvador Allende smile.