Word: chiles
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Since that day, Chile has become a byword in the annals of modern brutality. Pinochet's regime is believed to have killed as many as 20,000 Chileans in the six weeks following the coup, and has certainly killed, imprisoned and tortured many thousands more since then in its effort to eradicate those who sympathize with Allende's goals...
...Chile's experience is less significant because of Pinochet's bloodthirstiness than it is because of the nature of the government that preceded it, and the method in which that government was overthrown. Allende was elected by a popular vote on a platform calling for a peaceful transition to socialism. During its three years in power, the Popular Unity government--a coalition of Chile's leftwing groups--nationalized the country's coppper mines, gave the land of absentee landowners to the farmers who worked it, and took the first steps toward enforcing a more equitable distribution of income...
...first time since the Spanish conquistadors came to Latin America, Chile's poor and working class had enough to eat; for the first time, they had elected a government interested in helping solve the problems of inadequate housing, unemployment and illiteracy that plagued them. The Popular Unity government was dedicated to eliminating the imperialist and monopolistic structure that dominated Chile's economy, in the hope that by doing so it would end the centuries-old exploitation of the Chilean people...
Observers will argue for years about where the Popular Unity strategy failed. A few will say it tried to do too much too fast, and so lost the support of the more moderate wing of Chile's left. Others will say Allende moved too slowly in his efforts to restructure Chile's economy and society, failing to create an alternative to capitalism attractive enough to bring the lower middle class into the U.P. coalition against the foreign and big capital that controlled the economy. Still others will say that the U.P. should have given up trying to conciliate the middle...
...everyone who examines what happened will agree on one thing: a factor that no one in Chile foresaw became a keystone in the opposition's effort to undermine the U.P. No one predicted that American companies would place a silent boycott of Chilean copper after the mines were nationalized, or that American banks would refuse to lend the U.P. money. This quiet ostracism crippled Chile's economy, ending its sources of foreign exchange so that it could not buy the imported goods upon which it had relied. Shortages of luxury and some basic goods--created both by the foreign exchange...