ABSTRACT
It is perhaps only a small exaggeration to say that the globalization of culture began on September 11 . . . 1973. On that day, with American backing, Chile’s democratically elected socialist government was overthrown in a military coup. President Allende was killed in the coup;1 hundreds of government officials were murdered and jailed; and over the years, thousands of Chilean citizens were simply “disappeared.” The problem was that Allende and his government represented a limit, a barrier to capital that had to be overcome. The coup ushered in a new era for capital in Latin America and for the United States. Chile became the model for a new regime of capitalist development; it became the model for the neoliberalism that we now all live in the midst of, and that is the basis of what we have come to call “globalization” (Ffrench-Davis 2002; Valdés 1995). The American sponsorship of the coup showed just how closely what we now see as universalizing globalization is always underpinned, as John Agnew (Chapter 9) shows in this volume, by specific geopolitical acts, particular historical circumstances.
