Today we celebrate 50 years the betrayal of the Chilean armed forces to its people and the cowardly assassination of one of Latin America’s most famous heroes, President Salvador Allende Gossens. This date is not and cannot be another anniversary in the civic calendar, because it contains many meanings and consequences that one can tell in a history of the world before and after the coup of September 11 , 1973. On that day there was not a simple change of regime in a third world country: the overthrow of the democratically elected government, which was killed by the Chilean military and organized by them, the most important businessmen of the country and the US government of Richard Nixon, sealed the fate of the region and almost the entire planet in ways that even today are difficult to assimilate.
Allende was a unique leader in the combination of his qualities: he combined a human sensitivity rarely equaled with extraordinary intelligence, incorruptible integrity, tireless perseverance and flawless harmony, until to the point of sacrificing his life as a final act of loyalty to his fellow citizens. When the government came to power in 1970, he launched an exercise unprecedented in history: the construction of socialism within the framework of liberal democracy. The work that he leads involves very delicate balances, because it requires going beyond the frameworks of social-democratic reformism, which always leads to the granting or copying of de facto powers, without breaking the legal-institutional structure erected by the elite as a retaining wall. the popular will. Against all odds, his movement succeeded in this task: he nationalized the copper industry (the country’s main source of income); He implemented the agrarian reform, which is the great pending of all revolutions of independence in Latin America; He nationalized banking and created a social economic sector as a counterweight to the market. All this with the unopposed democratic support that allowed him to win the municipal elections in 1971 and the mid-term elections in March 1973.
Unable to stop him at the polls, the Chilean oligarchy conspired with the CIA and the White House to overthrow him. Washington imposed an economic blockade as it continues today against Cuba, Venezuela and other worthy countries that did not submit to it; the business community creates an artificial shortage of goods to incite the people to revolt; The media sent a completely false account of events, and the Judiciary gave the right to victories that it could not achieve by voting. It is no coincidence that these maneuvers are the same as those deployed against progressive governments today, because the chilean method
designed by characters as sinister as Henry Kissinger, it has become a manual of destabilization for the right side of the continent.
With the assassination of Allende and the imposition of a military dictatorship in Chile, the genocidaires led by Augusto Pinochet established a permanent coup: not only did they destroy the Chilean society so much that 50 years later it was still under the laws and ideology of the generals. and homicidal businessmen, but they have shown oligarchs around the world that it is possible to restore the class power they lost in decades of workers’ struggle in favor of social rights and the welfare state. After using the Andean country as a laboratory of the neoliberal model, it was adopted by London and Washington and, from there, imposed on other peoples through an inseparable combination of media propaganda, financial war and armed violence.
Salvador Allende worked until his last breath to give life to one of the noblest causes, the liberation of humanity from the chains of ignorance, oppression and poverty. Its tragic end leaves us with the double lesson that it is possible to build social justice through a democracy that is well understood as the realization of the popular will, and that it is important to create social defense mechanisms against oligarchy and imperialist aggression.
