Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov's article for the Rossiyskaya Gazeta on the 50th anniversary of the Chilean military coup, September 11, 2023

Chilean coup 50 years on: memories and lessons learned

Fifty years ago, on September 11, 1973, a significant event took place in Chile that became an immense shock to the global community. The Popular Unity government was overthrown in a bloody coup d'etat and the military dictatorship of the General Pinochet-led junta was established. The entire world saw photos of fighter jets patrolling over the La Moneda presidential palace in downtown Santiago, as well as the legitimately elected President Salvador Allende during his final moments, defending the country’s democratic foundations with a helmet on his head and a machine gun in his hands.

To cite Pablo Neruda, famous Chilean poet and Nobel Prize laureate, who ardently condemned the usurpers: “… hienas voraces de nuestra historia, roedores de las banderas conquistas con tanta sangre y tanto fuego.” The poet, who died shortly after the coup, is considered one of its best-known victims.

The coup in distant Chile shook our country as well; Salvador Allende was widely known here, having visited Moscow several times, including during his tenure as president. The Soviet Union actively engaged in the international campaign to show solidarity with the Chilean people and provide refuge to numerous political exiles. We demanded the release of Chile’s heroic son Luis Corvalan from his imprisonment in a concentration camp, and succeeded in attaining this aim. We refused to take part in an important football match at the National Stadium in Santiago, which was used as a detention facility and drenched in the blood of Chilean patriots. People in our country were singing songs written by brutally murdered iconic Chilean singer-songwriter Victor Jara, Venceremos (We Will Win) and The People United Will Never Be Defeated.

I would go as far as to say that the tragedy of Chile became our tragedy, and the history of Chile became a page in our history as well.

The violent events that took place a half-century ago, extinguished the democratic tradition in Chile for seventeen years, becoming a political divide in the country’s modern history and providing the entire world with certain major lessons for generations to come.

It is widely known that the Popular Unity government, led by socialist leader Salvador Allende, came to power in 1970 as a result of Chilean voters’ free expression of will, in accord with the procedure stipulated in the republic’s constitution. Popular Unity had acquired an obvious international dimension, seeking to abandon foreign dependence and boost national and Latin American foundations. The left-wing alliance aimed to achieve Chile’s political and economic independence and rejected such methods of international influence as discrimination, pressure, intervention, or blockade. Popular Unity was going to review and, if necessary, denounce agreements that imposed sovereignty-limiting obligations on the country; it also intended to maintain relations with all countries, regardless of their political and ideological orientation. The alliance considered the Organisation of American States as an instrument of North American imperialism, and called for efforts to establish an organisation that would actually represent Latin American states.

To follow the notorious neocolonial logic of the White House, such strategic plans of the Chilean leadership obviously posed an almost existential threat to the United States. Washington has always been opposed to the very idea of other states having the right to choose their own political and socio-economic development model, or being guided by their own national interests, boosting state sovereignty, and respecting cultural and civilisational identity.

I would rather not dive into the details of the Chilean political situation and economic policy during that period. This is a solely internal matter for the country, and it is up to the Chilean people to draw conclusions about it. Yet, obviously, many of the challenges that the Allende government was facing were, to a decisive extent, not only provoked but also directly orchestrated by Western politicians and business.

Declassified US archived documents only confirmed what was already known immediately following the coup. Even before Salvador Allende took office, Washington had pursued a policy seeking to overthrow him, using an entire arsenal of political blackmail and pressure methods, making every effort to destabilise the internal situation in the country.

This extensive array of tools included unleashing a multifaceted economic war (including external isolation as well as threats of restrictions against Chile’s foreign partners); funding the opposition and antagonistic civil society organisations as well as the notorious ‘fifth column’; measures of informational and psychological pressure and misinformation of citizens through controlled media; promoting a ‘brain drain’; provoking confusion in the professional movement; creating and sponsoring far-right organisations and radical militant groups; political blackmail, provocations and violence against supporters of the new government. To put it another way, Americans made extensive use of the tools which, in their concentrated form, were later dubbed as colour revolutions.

Addressing the world community at the UN General Assembly in December 1972, Salvador Allende expressed his frustration over the state of affairs: “There have been efforts to isolate us from the world, strangle the economy and paralyse the sale of copper, our main export product, and keep us from access to international financing. We realise that when we denounce the financial-economic blockade with which we were attacked , it is hard for international public opinion and even for many of our compatriots to easily understand the situation because it is not open aggression, publicly proclaimed before the whole world. Quite the contrary, it is a sneaky and double-crossing attack, which is just as damaging to Chile.”

Now we can find a significant amount of publicly available materials that expose the unsavoury role of the US Department of State and the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as other American departments, in those events. These include documents, declassified in 1998, on a CIA operation codenamed FUBELT, aimed at overthrowing Allende. Back in September 1974, Seymour Hersh, a well-known US investigative journalist and Pulitzer Prize winner, was among the first to reveal the subversive activities of the White House towards Chile. In 1982, he published an investigative story on the matter, “The Price of Power. Kissinger, Nixon, and Chile.” Quite an eye-opener.

The cynicism of American politicians is astonishing. According to CIA documents, then-President Richard Nixon ordered that steps be taken to “make the economy scream” in Chile, while Edward Korry, US ambassador to Chile at the time, declared that the task of the US was “to do all within our power to condemn Chile and the Chileans to utmost deprivation and poverty.” The United States initiated a boycott of Chilean copper exports, a strategic commodity from which the country derived its main foreign exchange earnings, and froze Chilean bank accounts. Local entrepreneurs began to transfer capital abroad, cutting jobs and creating deliberate food shortages.

A report submitted to the US Senate, “Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973,” reveals that as early as in 1971, the Export-Import Bank of the United States brought its Chilean transactions to a halt, and from 1971 to 1973, the World Bank made no new loans to Chile.

American businesses were essentially directly involved in the CIA’s illegal covert activities. Those included ITT, a notorious telecommunications corporation that collaborated with the Nazis and that the Allende government made attempts to nationalise.

This truly Machiavellian modus operandi allowed those who orchestrated the coup in the South American country to achieve their goal. Given the successful ‘test-run,’ this package of destructive actions became a sort of template that Washington and its satellites are still putting to use in relation to sovereign governments across the globe.

Westerners constantly violate the UN Charter’s fundamental principle of non-interference in the internal affairs of other countries. Examples include the third round of elections in Ukraine, which was orchestrated in late 2004, as well as the colour revolutions in Yugoslavia, Georgia, and Kyrgyzstan. Finally, there was the outspoken support of the bloody coup in Kiev in February 2014, as well as persistent attempts to repeat the scenario of forceful seizure of power in Belarus in 2020. We should also mention the notorious Monroe Doctrine, which the Americans are seemingly willing to extend globally in order to turn the world into their ‘backyard.’

But this neo-colonial, blatantly cynical policy pursued by the collective West is meeting with increasing resistance from the global majority, which is obviously tired of blackmail and pressure, including power play, and also weary of dirty information wars and zero-sum geopolitical games. The states of the Global South and East are willing to choose their own destiny and pursue a nationally-driven domestic and foreign policy rather than pull the chestnuts out of the fire for the former colonial powers.

Russia-Chile diplomatic relations were restored immediately following the collapse of the Pinochet regime in March 1990; they have consistently developed since then. I am positive this will remain the case in the future, regardless of any opportunistic trends that certain Chilean politicians may follow. We are united by common chapters in history, the great Pacific Ocean and our trade and economic links, as well as cultural, humanitarian and educational exchanges. Over the years, Russia has been visited by Chilean presidents Patricio Aylwin, Ricardo Lagos and Michelle Bachelet, all three representing different political movements but always paying particular attention to the development of friendly ties between our countries. I am confident that the traditions established by Salvador Allende and continued by his true followers will grow stronger for the benefit of our nations.