Word: chiles
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...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...
Observers also agree that the CIA played a far larger role in Chile than the U.P. expected, or than Americans were told about. The American intelligence agency--in cooperation with America's International Telephone and Telegraph Co., which feared the U.P. would nationalize its Chilean branch--funded rightwing and fascist groups that tried to provoke chaos, preparing the way for a junta whose major bid for support came in the guise of promoting security for the middle and upper classes. The CIA also paid small shopkeepers to hoard goods, and truckers--who comprise one of the best-paid sectors...
...University of Chicago economist Milton Friedman last fall was roundly condemned: Friedman was one of the architects of the junta's economic policy. The New York Times reported last week that that policy, of inviting foreign investment and imports at the expense of a domestically-controlled economy, has turned Chile into "a bazaar filled with foreign goods that are snapped up by the well-to-do while millions of workers and their families are living hand to mouth." In many cases, workers are not living "hand to mouth" at all, but starving outright. At least 13 per cent...