ABSTRACT
On September 11, 1973, Chile experienced one of the most tragic events in its twentieth-century political history – a military coup that overthrew the government of Salvador Allende Gossens, democratically elected in a tight election in 1970. 1 The electoral victory of a self-proclaimed Marxist presidential candidate brought Chile into the political spotlight. In his address to the Chilean Congress on May 21, 1971, Allende called his program “the second transition model to socialism,” a model without “a proletariat dictatorship” (Arrate and Rojas 2003). Chile’s experience brought the historical possibility to reach socialism via democratic elections as opposed to the path to socialism used by Cuba and Eastern European countries. President Allende’s program “the Chilean Road to Socialism” (Zammit 1973), boasted widespread approval and kindled significant expectation among progressive European groups, especially in Western Europe. This period in Chilean history is still subject to debate. Political scientists, sociologists, historians, and militants, among others, have contributed multiple accounts of this complex political process. Apart from the well-known United States intervention to shake Allende’s administration, 2 several studies have attempted to understand the behavior of political agents inside Chile (Garretón 1993; Collier and Sater 1998; Moulián in Sader, Gómez Leyton and Tarcus 2008).
