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Salvador Allende perished on 9/11, 1973, but his vision of a just future has never been more alive
On 9/11, 1973, Chile’s democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, perished — along with thousands of his supporters — after the Chilean military, led by General Augusto Pinochet with the support of Washington, mounted a coup that succeeded in overthrowing his government.
For obvious though lamentable reasons this is the 9/11 anniversary that hardly makes the news, dwarfed by its more infamous counterpart, the terrorist attack unleashed against the United States in 2001.
However the significance of the fascist coup in Chile in 1973 cannot be overstated, as here ensued the world’s first experiment in that mass experiment in human despair more commonly known as neoliberalism. This free market economic doctrine was the brainchild of US economist Milton Friedman. It was an extreme variant of capitalism, shorn of regulation or constraint, which Friedman developed along with his disciples at the notorious school of economics at the University of Chicago in the 1960s and 1970s, which he headed.
