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Fifty years ago this month, on Sept. 11, 1973, Chile’s armed forces, backed by the CIA, staged a brutal coup that overthrew the democratically elected socialist government in Santiago. President Salvador Allende was killed, and power was seized by the right-wing dictator Augusto Pinochet, who led 17 years of military rule — a period when thousands of Chileans were tortured, killed or disappeared.
Three years after the coup, on Sept. 21, 1976, a car bombing at Sheridan Circle killed an exiled former Chilean diplomat, Orlando Letelier, and his American assistant, Ronni Moffitt. The crime was ultimately traced to agents of Pinochet’s secret police.
I know about the annual ritual at the circle because I worked and lived in Chile as a journalist for long stints during the Pinochet era, during which I had some of the most horrifying and moving experiences of my career. Later, back in Washington, I attended the ceremony once or twice, briefly reliving the intensity of those times, but the news increasingly took me to other distant conflicts — especially after 2001, when the date Sept. 11 acquired a new notoriety, in the United States and around the world.
On Saturday, however, I found myself back at Sheridan Circle, crammed into a tent with several hundred people sheltering from the pouring rain. This time the mood seemed more hopeful than bitter and sorrowful. It was still a memorial service; three of Letelier’s middle-aged sons attended. But it was also a buzzy reunion of people close to the Chilean cause — activists, scholars, exiles, former officials — who in some cases had not seen one another in years.
For many, it was also first chance to meet, hear and appraise Chile’s current president, Gabriel Boric, a 37-year-old former student leader, legislator and center-left politician who has seemed at times to represent a more pragmatic, millennial version of Allende.
A sense of outrage still lingered, especially over the role of the Nixon administration in covertly encouraging the coup — and in a country once famed as the oldest democracy in Latin America. In a blistering opening speech, Rep. Jamie B. Raskin (D-Md.) denounced U.S. complicity in the coup. His reference to the passage of a new House resolution expressing “profound regret” for those long-ago actions elicited cheers.
But when Boric took the podium, he was poised, diplomatic and focused on the present. Chileans of all political “colors,” he said, must work together to solidify democracy. He noted that some still believe the coup was justified, adding in Spanish, “I humbly ask that we work together to seek truth and justice” — an effort that includes a new initiative to identify some 1,500 Chileans, among thousands detained after the coup, who were never seen again.
When he mentioned Villa Grimaldi, a notorious torture center, I snapped to attention. Suddenly I was back in Santiago in the 1980s, taking notes as a former labor leader described his detention there. He had been confined upright in a metal cabinet for days, so hellishly hot he was barely able to breathe, while guards splashed in the villa’s swimming pool nearby. “It was horrible,” he told me.
Several people at the ceremony spent years trying to track detainees who remain unaccounted for. Judy Kelly, a white-haired activist from Maryland, held up a poster of a young government accountant in southern Chile who was imprisoned in a frigid military camp and never re-emerged.
When she named the camp — Dawson Island — I flashed back to another disturbing interview. It was with Sergio Bitar, a former minister in Allende’s government, who had been confined there for many months after the coup. The conditions, he said, were appalling and the cold nearly unbearable. But one detainee, a man in his 60s who had worked for Allende’s program to expropriate private mines, washed and wore his shirt and tie every day as a gesture of defiance. “That was the only thing that kept our spirits up,” Bitar told me.
In some ways, I think, the loss of dignity was the greatest tragedy of the coup. The regime, bent on “extirpating” communism from Chilean soil, imposed strict neoliberal economic policies that left many thousands of government workers, from teachers to mayors, jobless and humiliated. The poor were left clutching at scraps. A carpenter confided to me with embarrassment that he had been forced to sell off his tools, one by one, and finally his wife’s wedding ring.
But by the mid-1980s, a current of defiance was beginning to stir, and the grip of fear was weakening. Students and labor unions started holding protests in downtown Santiago, facing fire hoses and tear gas. I remember choking and weeping from the gas as hundreds of people surged around me, chanting that Pinochet was going to fall.
At the same time, political parties began to regroup, join forces and call for a referendum on military rule. In Washington, the Reagan administration sent a new ambassador to Santiago, Harry G. Barnes Jr., who met with Pinochet’s moderate opponents and quietly urged officials to restore democracy.
On Oct. 5, 1988, a nationwide plebiscite was held with one question on the ballot: Should Pinochet remain in power? As evening fell, the “no” vote surged at the polls, but tension mounted amid concern that Pinochet would refuse to go. Finally at 2:40 a.m., a senior regime official announced stiffly on television that the “no” vote was ahead.
At that moment, I was out in the streets of the capital among thousands of Chileans. As the news spread, a joyful pandemonium erupted. People burst into tears, danced with strangers, hugged police officers. Later that day, a grim-faced Pinochet appeared briefly on TV to say he “accepted the verdict” of the majority.
The night 35 years ago, amid that jubilant crowd, remains one of the most memorable of my life.
Since then, the return of civilian rule to Chile has been erratic and complicated, but it has held. Presidential power has transferred peacefully six times, zigzagging among seasoned moderates, a center-leftist, a conservative businessman, and in March 2022, back to a boyish-faced leftist who is now struggling to find a balance between ideological ideals and practical problem-solving.
Since taking office, Boric has paid symbolic homage to Allende at home and in the United States. His first act after being inaugurated was to silently salute the slain leader’s statue outside the presidential palace. On Friday during his first official visit to Washington, he attended a ceremony at the Organization of American States, where a portrait of Allende was hung at an ornate entrance.
As the Sheridan Circle gathering ended, Boric knelt at the tree stump and laid carnations in honor of Letelier and Moffitt. Then he got up and mingled with the crowd, hugging old friends and posing for selfies with new ones.
Back home, Boric has been trying to govern pragmatically as the leader of 19.5 million Chileans, with a mixture of setbacks and success. He has struggled to handle noisy economic protests similar to those he once led as a student, and to appease the demands of a hodgepodge of leftist groups while also reaching out to conservatives who have little reason to trust him.
“Boric is facing a real uphill battle,” Michael Shifter, former director of the nonprofit Inter-American Dialogue, said before the event Saturday. “He represents a new generation of liberal leaders that Latin America desperately needs, but he faces difficult circumstances and tough decisions, especially with the economy and crime. I’m concerned.”
Still, Shifter said, Boric is more of a conciliator than an ideologue. Chile’s leader was raised in a renewed and fast-modernizing democracy, but he clearly realizes that his country cannot risk being torn apart by the extreme political divisions that led to such tragic consequences half a century ago.
Pamela Constable has worked as a foreign correspondent for more than four decades. She is the co-author, with Arturo Valenzuela, of “A Nation of Enemies: Chile Under Pinochet.”
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