9/11, US imperialism
9/11 is coming up, which means i'm legally obligated to point out 9/11 here in chile is a different tragedy & also important
the 11th of september is when the chilean right wing (funded by the US gov.) bombed our gov. building, killed our democratically elected socialist president, gutted the welfare state & enacted martial law
followed by 17 years of a violent fascist dictatorship in which at least 3k people died, 40k were victimized and half of the country was traumatized
9/11, US imperialism
i didn't expect this to explode but since it did, i'll elaborate a little on this
in 1970 allende was the first democratically elected, openly socialist president in history. he enacted many social policies despite being antagonized by most of the senate, and people will attest to the relative success of said policies
however, the US was still in the cold war, and they weren't going to let a socialist government flourish in their "backyard" that is to say, south america
9/11, US imperialism
but before an outright coup, they had to erase the idea that socialist policies worked at all. so they began imposing sanctions, working with the right wing, and paying business owners to disrupt the order of things
stores would "run out of stock" while having warehouses full of food, instead selling it to the higher classes for an increased price. lorries stopped bringing goods to impoverished neighborhoods. all to promote the idea that price control creates shortages
9/11, US imperialism
only when there was a considerable economic instability in allende's government, did the US finally facilitate a coup
after the coup, Pinochet undid nearly all the social policies Allende established, created many new policies and an entire new constitution aided by the Chicago Boys, specifically to test out a harsher neoliberal model in Chile, before implementing it in the US
and that's why today chile has a capitalist model eerily similar to that of the US, 50 years later
9/11, US imperialism
@syash it scares me that I see a lot of those tendencies still exist within our government. The politicians that got a pass 50 years ago now have NGOs named after them that drum up support for more global violence to this day
9/11, US imperialism
@Timmy so many american politicians and especially presidents have their blatant south american imperialism completely revised or overlooked when americans look back and laud them, even among leftists, and it's pretty frustrating