Government

"Such deliberate savagery was only feasible and normalised because millions of Chileans who had felt threatened to their core by the Allende revolution accepted this war on their compatriots as necessary to save the nation from communism – even if there had been no human rights abuses by Allende’s government and absolute freedom of assembly and the press. Whipped into a frenzy by a campaign of hate-filled lies, the supporters of General Augusto Pinochet were persuaded, as in Franco’s Spain, that democracy was a cancer that had to be eradicated in the name of western civilisation."

"In time, enough Chileans came to their senses and, through popular mobilisations and at great cost in lives and pain, created a coalition that restored democratic rule in 1990. But the consequences of those traumatic events, the division of the country against itself, persist today, 45 years after the military takeover. We also, however, emerged from that tragedy with insights that might be relevant to this current moment in history, when democracy is under siege in the US and across the globe, with countless citizens enthralled by strongmen who manipulate their frustrations and resentments and play to their worst nativist instincts."