At 6:00 a.m. on September 11, 1973, the Chilean Navy seized the port city of Valparaíso. By 7:00, the army had blocked the streets of Santiago. By 8:00, all radio stations except two had been silenced. At 11:52, Hawker Hunter jets bombed La Moneda, the presidential palace, while the democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, was inside. Allende was dead by approximately 2:00 p.m. — by his own pistol, a 2011 forensic re-examination confirmed, in the second-floor Salón Independencia under bombardment. The man who replaced him, General Augusto Pinochet, ruled Chile for seventeen years. Between 1973 and 1990, the Chilean state's own subsequent commissions documented 3,200 killed or disappeared and 38,254 imprisoned-and-tortured. The United States, through documents declassified in waves from 1999 through 2023, had been working to remove Allende since before he took office.
State & Intelligence Operations
1970-1990
