Washington's Embrace: Recognising Pinochet Within 48 Hours

Salvador Allende won Chile's presidency through the ballot box in September 1970. Within seventy-two hours of the September 11, 1973 coup that destroyed his government, the United States had formally recognised the military junta that replaced him. This episode examines what happened in the three years between those two moments — and why Washington moved so fast to embrace what came after.

The CIA funnelled roughly eight million dollars into Chile between 1970 and 1973: funding opposition newspapers, backing right-wing political parties, subsidising truckers' strikes, and running propaganda operations designed to make Allende's government look ungovernable. Simultaneously, the Nixon administration applied pressure at the World Bank and blocked international credit lines to ensure Allende's economic programme failed on the world stage.

Beneath the political warfare ran a darker current. Nixon had ordered the CIA to prevent Allende's inauguration outright. A plot to kidnap General René Schneider — the army commander committed to constitutional rule — ended in his assassination, with CIA-supplied weapons in the hands of those responsible. Allende was inaugurated anyway, but the signal had been sent.

Henry Kissinger's framework was stark: a Marxist government anywhere in the western hemisphere was a Soviet foothold, regardless of how it arrived. The model of a democratically elected socialist government that could nationalise industry and remain stable could not be allowed to succeed. The example itself was the threat.

After the coup, General Augusto Pinochet's regime killed more than three thousand people and detained tens of thousands. The credit lines that had been weaponised against Allende began flowing freely to Pinochet within months. This is the story of how a Cold War doctrine translated into a democratic government's destruction — and an authoritarian regime's creation.

This episode includes AI-generated content.