The overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende Gossens

Between September 1970 and September 11, 1973, President Richard Nixon’s administration waged an economic and covert CIA campaign on Chilean President Salvador Allende’s Marxist Popular Unity (UP) government. Nixon’s campaign helped create the shortages, inflation, and propaganda necessary to compel Chile’s divided anti-Marxist opposition groups to join the same movement against the government in October 1972. The central thesis of this work is the following: Nixon’s administration helped create the internal conditions that drove groups of anti-Marxist Chileans into a unified movement that manifested itself during the Truckers’ Strike of October 1972 and delivered a mortal blow to the UP. Chile’s anti-Marxist movement weakened the UP so much that the Chilean military easily overthrew Allende on September 11, 1973. The administration, fearing that another Latin American Marxist leader might try to pursue the electoral path to power, used Allende’s fellow countrymen to bring down his democratically elected socialist government before it could spread communism to the rest of Latin America.