Pod Insights Throughline Democracy Dies in a Day About this episode How quickly can a government fall? Chile was once one of Latin America's oldest democracies, but that all changed in a matter of hours after a military coup on September 11, 1973. Some supported the coup; many did not. But for the next 17 years, all Chileans lived in the grip of brutal authoritarian rule. Today on the show, the story of a democracy’s collapse and rebirth, told through the eyes of four people who lived through it.
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0:18 Speaker 01 At 6:00 in the morning, I remember that somebody called, saying that the Navy's coming.
0:29 Speaker 01 I was told if it happens, it would be very violent. So, take care, protect yourself, try to leave your houses.
0:40 Speaker 01 My name is Sergio Vitar.
0:43 Rund Abdelfatah? Sergio has been a lot of things: a civil engineer, an author, and at the time he's speaking about, he's a government worker. We'll get to all that later. Right now, Sergio needs to make a decision. He has to leave his house, but where should he go? Where is even safe anymore?
1:06 Speaker 01 Should I go to the palace, government palace?
1:11 Speaker 01 It was completely blocked.
1:13 Rund Abdelfatah? The only information he could get was by tuning into the radio. So he flipped it on in the car as he headed for a friend's house on the outskirts of the city.
1:27 Rund Abdelfatah? The president of Chile, Salvador Allende, came on the radio.
1:35 Speaker 03 "I will not resign," he says.
1:43 Speaker 03 "I will pay with my life for the loyalty of the people. The seed we planted in the dignified conscience of thousands and thousands of Chileans will not be shriveled forever."
1:59 Rund Abdelfatah? Sergio reached his friend's house. Throughout the day, he could hear bombs, airplanes buzzed low to the ground, and gunfire echoed throughout the neighborhood. That afternoon, over the radio, the announcement came. The president was dead.
2:24 Speaker 01 By the radio, there was a list of people called by the military that we should present ourselves.
2:31 Speaker 03 The next day, at 7:00 a.m., Sergio's name became one of them.
2:37 Speaker 01 I called my wife, saying, "Could you come? I've been called."
2:41 Speaker 03 His mind was racing, and some embassies had called and offered asylum. But if he tried to take refuge there and the embassies fell, then he might be in even bigger trouble. So Sergio decided to turn himself in.
2:55 Speaker 01 I have nothing to hide. This is a democratic government.
3:01 Speaker 01 So I presented myself.
3:03 Speaker 03 The soldiers took his documents and detained him along with a bunch of other people, some of them who he knew.
3:10 Speaker 01 So we stayed 24 hours or 48 hours.
3:14 Speaker 01 And at the time, I think there was a decision among the heads of the military, what is called the junta. Should we kill these guys or send them abroad?
3:28 Speaker 01 An helicopter arrived, but it was no answer. They took us. And then they pushed us to a bus with guys with the machine guns.
3:39 Speaker 03 The soldiers told them if anyone moved, they would be shot.
3:43 Speaker 01 And they took us to a plane.
3:45 Speaker 03 On the plane, armed men guarded them closely.
3:49 Speaker 01 We didn't know what we were going.
3:57 Rund Abdelfatah? Just days before, Sergio Batar worked for the Chilean government. He was living in Santiago, the capital city. He was a husband, a father.
4:08 Speaker 03 Now, he was a political prisoner.
4:12 Speaker 01 When I look at back, I realize my blindness. Because we were a democratic country for many years, democracy was sure, secure, guaranteed.
4:25 Speaker 03 Until it wasn't.
4:27 Rund Abdelfatah? I'm Rand Abdelfatah.
4:29 Speaker 03 And I'm Ramtin Arablouei.
4:32 Rund Abdelfatah? Chile was once one of Latin America's oldest democracies. That all changed in a matter of hours after a military coup on September 11, 1973.
4:43 Speaker 03 For the next 17 years, Chileans found themselves in the grip of brutal authoritarian rule. People lived in fear. There were no elections, and the people had no voice. Today on the show, how democracy collapses and how it is resuscitated through the eyes of four people who lived through it. The prisoner.
5:05 Speaker 01 The conditions were how to control your mind, that you feel that you are nothing.
5:12 Speaker 03 The journalist.
5:13 Speaker 04 I was not able to use a byline, and as soon as I did, the reprisals came down on me.
5:20 Speaker 03 The exile. Chilean dictatorship didn't eliminate just its enemies in the country, but also outside the country. And the child.
5:29 Speaker 05 And I don't know anything, and I am like, you know, a daughter of privilege. Like, what is this? It was more than an awakening is like the, you see, the kind of slivers of, you know, truth coming.
5:40 Rund Abdelfatah? Coming up, democracy dies in a day.
5:46 Speaker 05 Hello. This is Nathalie Valliere, calling from Montreal, Quebec. Montreal, Quebec. And you are listening to Throughline from NPR.
6:05 Speaker 00 I find it such a mind refreshing podcast. Thank you very much.
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7:25 Speaker 05 Part one. Estas son mis últimas palabras. These are my last words.
7:34 Speaker 04 I got up that morning. My girlfriend comes back and says, things are happening.
7:41 Rund Abdelfatah? This is John Dingus. He's written several books on Latin America.
7:45 Speaker 04 My recent book came out in April called Chile in Their Hearts.
7:49 Rund Abdelfatah? In 1973, he was an American reporter living in Chile.
7:54 Speaker 04 We turned on the radio immediately.
7:56 Rund Abdelfatah? All of the stations had been taken over by the military, except for one, Radio Magallanes.
8:03 Speaker 04 And I had my tape recorder. I flipped it on record and I recorded them saying, we are about to hear from the president of the republic. He is in La Moneda.
8:15 Rund Abdelfatah? La Moneda, the presidential palace.
8:18 Speaker 04 There are troops surrounding the palace and he is going to address all of Chile.
8:31 Speaker 03 This is the last opportunity for me to address you.
8:40 Speaker 03 The people must not let themselves be destroyed or riddled with bullets, but they cannot be humiliated either.
8:48 Speaker 04 He was not giving us any hope that he could beat back the coup.
8:54 Speaker 03 Long live Chile, long live the people, long live the workers.
9:01 Speaker 04 He implied that he was not going to leave alive.
9:10 Speaker 03 These are my last words, and I am certain my sacrifice will not be in vain.
9:15 Speaker 04 It was an amazingly eloquent speech for history.
9:32 Speaker 04 Then we said, well, what do we do?
9:41 Speaker 03 In the years leading up to this day, the day of the coup, Chile had been in crisis. It had some of the highest income inequality in Latin America. Despite high mining taxes, profits from Chile's main industry, copper mining, didn't trickle down to everyone.
9:59 Speaker 01 And it wasn't the hands of American companies.
10:02 Speaker 03 This is Sergio Bittar. You met him at the top of the episode. He was born and raised in Chile.
10:08 Speaker 01 We don't know what we receive for that. All the profits go abroad.
10:14 Speaker 01 Mostly when you go out from the area where middle classes existed,
10:20 Speaker 01 you saw the poverty there, the lack of housing, children without food. The mortality rate was very high, unemployment, and kids going, walking barefoot.
10:35 Speaker 03 A movement of working-class people began to demand change.
10:41 Rund Abdelfatah? Enter Salvador Allende.
10:47 Rund Abdelfatah? Allende was a self-proclaimed Marxist. And in 1970, he ran for president with the promise of a full socialist makeover of Chilean society. He wanted the Chilean government to take control of the US-dominated copper industry. He promised to increase wages for the poorest Chileans and vowed that every child would get a free half-liter of milk every day. Allende also wanted to redistribute farmland, taking it from rich landowners and giving it to the poor.
11:21 Speaker 03 I ask you to go home in joy with the fair victory we have achieved.
11:28 Rund Abdelfatah? Allende won the election.
11:34 Speaker 03 We'll have to put more passion and more love to make Chile ever greater and life in our homeland more just.
11:47 Speaker 01 So that's the beginning of my political life.
11:50 Rund Abdelfatah? Sergio was in the US studying at Harvard when Allende was elected. He didn't consider himself a socialist, but he saw Allende as an opportunity for change.
12:02 Speaker 01 So I said to myself, I will go back and I will be available to work with the Allende government.
12:10 Rund Abdelfatah? He was appointed the Minister of Mining as Allende made moves to nationalize the copper industry. Alarm bells started ringing in the US.
12:22 Speaker 01 Instead of seeing a movement towards democracy, they were seeing risk to their security, the security of their businesses.
12:31 Rund Abdelfatah? This was the Cold War era, and the US government feared communism was spreading across Latin America.
12:38 Speaker 04 This wasn't Castro. This wasn't the Cuban Revolution. This wasn't a takeover. This was a parliamentary system that had won enough of a majority to govern, and they were implementing a radical economic and social change.
12:55 Rund Abdelfatah? But still, the US saw Allende's reforms as a threat. The US government instituted an invisible blockade against Chile. They cut off loans and foreign aid in order to, as the Nixon administration put it, "make the Chilean economy scream."
13:13 Speaker 03 By October 1972, when John landed in Chile.
13:17 Speaker 04 There was a general strike against the government.
13:24 Speaker 04 Small businesses and truckers had basically closed down the country.
13:30 Speaker 03 The rich were panicking because Allende was instituting policies that threatened to take their land and their money and redistribute it. But the poor were also suffering as Chile's economy descended into chaos. Inflation was the highest in the world. There were food shortages everywhere.
13:49 Speaker 04 It was in the middle of a crisis. The country was very divided.
13:59 Speaker 03 Messing with the economy wasn't the only way the US put its hand on this scale. President Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger collaborated with all kinds of US government officials and the CIA to destabilize Allende. The CIA poured millions of dollars into covert operations to support opposition groups and spread anti-Allende propaganda.
14:22 Rund Abdelfatah? They paid almost $2 million to El Mercurio, Chile's New York Times, to slant its coverage against Allende. The paper ran headlines like "Marxists Threaten Middle Class" and "Reds Plan to Attack Army."
14:37 Speaker 03 The US government was also trying to court Chilean military leaders.
14:44 Speaker 04 Augusto Pinochet is the number-two military person in the army.
14:50 Speaker 03 Pinochet was a bit of an enigma. He grew up in a middle-class family and joined the military as a teenager. He climbed the ranks, doing just enough to get promoted, but not so much that he stood out.
15:04 Speaker 03 In September 1972, Chile's military is trying to purchase tanks from the US government. So Pinochet heads to Panama, where the US had bases.
15:15 Speaker 04 They wine and dine him.
15:17 Speaker 03 And at one point, a member of Pinochet's delegation has a conversation with some American officers who tell him...
15:24 Speaker 04 I'm not quoting it exactly. If there's a plan to overthrow the Marxist government, we want you to know that we will support it. And Pinochet did not tip his hand. And I'm pretty convinced that at that time, he hadn't decided whether he was going to be involved in the coup. But the US has basically given him the green light.
15:52 Speaker 03 The US was saying, "Okay, we won't organize the coup for you, but we also won't stand in your way. And we think it's a good idea."
16:01 Speaker 04 So Pinochet returns to Chile.
16:04 Speaker 03 And when he gets back, he gets a big promotion.
16:09 Speaker 04 Allende names Pinochet as the commander of the army, the top military officer. People did not suspect. They thought, "Okay, that's good, because Pinochet is a loyalist. He's somebody who believes in the Constitution."
16:25 Speaker 03 In other words, Pinochet could be a stabilizing force that would help uphold democracy in Chile at a time when life in Chile was reaching a breaking point.
16:36 Rund Abdelfatah? In the summer of 1973.
16:43 Speaker 04 There were demonstrations every week.
16:51 Speaker 04 And there were demonstrations by the right, demonstrations by the left.
16:58 Speaker 04 Comunista saqueroso tiene que salir todos de Chile. It was chaotic.
17:05 Speaker 04 In those final days, there were a coterie of high-ranking officers who had decided that they were going to pull off a coup.
17:13 Rund Abdelfatah? They met with Pinochet on Sunday, September 9.
17:17 Speaker 04 And he was reluctant. His choice is divide the armed forces and oppose this military coup, which would be bloody, almost a civil war, or take charge of it.
17:31 Speaker 04 He decides that he's going to lead the coup.
17:42 Rund Abdelfatah? That brings us back to September 11, 1973, when John turned on the radio to hear President Allende's final address.
17:56 Speaker 04 We said, well, what do we do?
18:00 Rund Abdelfatah? John and his roommate set out for the big working-class neighborhood of the city, the hub for Allende supporters.
18:06 Speaker 04 They were going to lead the opposition if any coup came.
18:11 Rund Abdelfatah? They get to this part of Santiago, the industrial belt, where all the factories are. At the first factory...
18:18 Speaker 04 The workers said, "Go home. It's going to be really, really dangerous."
18:23 Rund Abdelfatah? Then they went to a second factory, where the workers had blockaded themselves inside and were waiting for a weapons delivery.
18:30 Speaker 04 They'd been told that they were going to arrive in a green truck. They waited all day.
18:37 Rund Abdelfatah? The green truck never arrived. The weapons didn't come.
18:47 Speaker 03 Back at the presidential palace, explosions rang out.
18:51 Speaker 04 They bombed the Moneda with the air force. And once they bombed it, it was clear that the resistance was over.
19:00 Speaker 03 The military moved into the palace. Allende was on the second floor.
19:05 Speaker 04 By the time they got up there, Allende was dead.
19:09 Speaker 03 From a bullet to the head.
19:17 Speaker 03 General Augusto Pinochet was in power now.
19:34 Speaker 04 There were military barriers on the corners. People with automatic weapons behind sandbags.
19:42 Speaker 03 The military imposed a curfew.
19:46 Speaker 04 During that period, we're listening to the radio. There's no information going on. On a regular basis, we would hear gunshots.
19:54 Speaker 03 John and his roommates hunkered down for the night, waiting to see what would happen.
20:02 Rund Abdelfatah? Coming up, dawn breaks on a new reality for Chile.
20:13 Rund Abdelfatah? Hi, this is Jewel from Toledo, Ohio.
20:17 Speaker 00 I love listening to Throughline on my drive and on my run and really anytime. You're listening to Throughline from NPR.
20:30 Rund Abdelfatah? Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.
20:34 Speaker 06 This message comes from Live Right, publisher of John U. Bacon's New York Times bestseller, The Gales of November, a chronicle of the S.S. Edmund Fitzgerald's 1975 shipwreck. Never has it been told better than by Mr. Bacon in this colorful book, writes John J. Miller of The Wall Street Journal, while author Hampton Sides proclaims it's destined to be a classic. The Gales of November, now in paperback. The 2026 midterm elections are upon us. On November 3rd, voters will determine what the next two years of their local leadership and the balance of national government will look like. Listen to the NPR News Now podcast for all the updates you need ahead of and after November.
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21:49 Speaker 05 Part two, Las Dos Caras de la Dictadura, The Two Faces of Dictatorship.
21:58 Speaker 01 When you are in prison, the most dangerous enemy is the sense of time. If you lose the sense of time, you lose your mind.
22:09 Speaker 03 This is Sergio Bittar again. In the hours and days that followed the bombing of La Moneda, Sergio's whole life was turned upside down. He was detained, and he was taken by Pinochet's forces to the very southern tip of South America, to a prison on Dawson Island.
22:28 Speaker 01 It's very cold.
22:31 Speaker 01 The south of Majoran Strait is one of the closest islands to the Antarctic.
22:41 Speaker 01 With the worst guys they had in order to impose on us singing of military songs every day, every morning.
22:50 Speaker 03 Like the Navy hymn.
22:52 Speaker 01 The military anthem of each branch.
23:00 Speaker 03 Day and night, Sergio and the other prisoners were under the watchful eye of Pinochet's armed forces.
23:07 Speaker 01 We felt that they had some sort of manual with orders on how to deal with the prisoners, or how to break the prisoners.
23:22 Speaker 01 And the way to do it is to feel that the other one is an animal. You are not a human being.
23:31 Speaker 01 That's part of the logic.
23:34 Speaker 03 Sergio and the others did hard physical labor for 10-plus hours a day with little to no food. Many were tortured, kept in isolation with glaring lights in their eyes.
23:47 Speaker 01 It was hard to understand where you were, who you were, what was happening. The mind is not able to recognize, it's not conscious about what is surrounding you. What would happen to my wife, to my children, to the earth? At that time, your body reacts in a different way. What happens at the moment is survive.
24:17 Rund Abdelfatah? In the days and months after the coup, Chile descended into chaos as the Pinochet regime took control of all facets of Chilean life.
24:27 Speaker 04 The democracy was over. They dissolved Congress, they rewrote the Constitution, they raided all of the universities and took over them by force.
24:40 Rund Abdelfatah? This is John Dingus again. As an American reporter in Santiago, he was on the ground trying to figure out what was actually happening in real time.
24:48 Speaker 04 It was obvious that they were arresting people because of their sympathy with the Ayen government.
24:54 Rund Abdelfatah? People were detained across the city.
24:57 Speaker 04 They were raiding the poor people's areas and the factories.
25:01 Rund Abdelfatah? 20,000 people were held in the National Stadium, which overnight transformed from a soccer pitch to an open-air prison. Some of the people who were sent there never returned.
25:16 Speaker 04 We had vague reports of a lot of violence going on in the countryside. And in fact, a lot of the deaths were owners of farms telling the police to kill certain peasants because they had been leading the political movements.
25:35 Rund Abdelfatah? And still amid this violence and chaos.
25:38 Speaker 04 Life was still going on.
25:40 Rund Abdelfatah? Many people were still going to work, to school and to buy groceries.
25:45 Speaker 04 In some senses, easier because the economic chaos that was happening right before the coup, where there were food shortages, there was a black market, there were protests all over the place, all of that ended, and it was, on the surface, more peaceful.
26:05 Rund Abdelfatah? A veneer of civility and normalcy seemed to return to Chile. Countries like the United States quickly recognized and legitimized the military government, also known as the junta.
26:19 Speaker 04 The immediate violence calms down by the end of 1973. The patrols, the constant raiding of houses, all of that had died down. They emptied the national stadium and the other stadiums.
26:33 Rund Abdelfatah? The junta played up the idea that rule of law had returned to Chile. In the poor, working-class neighborhoods, that narrative was a hard pill to swallow.
26:43 Speaker 04 There, the number of people who had lost their jobs, the number of people that had been taken to prison or had been forced into exile.
26:51 Rund Abdelfatah? They had seen the violence of the military coup with their own eyes. It was their family members that were gone, dead or simply disappeared.
27:01 Speaker 04 The environment of fear was much, much stronger.
27:04 Rund Abdelfatah? In 1974, some prisoners began to be released, including Sergio Bittar, who immediately left the country. John and others took it as a sign that the violence had finally come to an end.
27:18 Speaker 04 So we thought that things are returning to normal.
27:22 Speaker 03 And for some Chileans, life wasn't just returning to normal, it was better than ever.
27:27 Speaker 04 There was the rich neighborhoods, the Providencia and Las Condes neighborhoods, and they were overjoyed. I mean, they broke out the champagne on September 11th. For them, this was heavenly. This was what they had always dreamed of, that Chile would go back to the time when they were in charge and, basically, things were arranged in line with their privilege.
27:55 Speaker 05 So basically, it depends on where you From where are you looking the dictatorship? And who is suffering the dictatorship?
28:03 Speaker 03 This is Camila Vergara, a lecturer in political theory at the University of Essex. She grew up in Chile during the 1980s. Her family, like many middle-class and wealthy families, supported Pinochet.
28:16 Speaker 05 I am like, you know, a daughter of privilege. I come from a family of landowner in the South.
28:23 Speaker 03 The way her grandfather saw it, Allende and his communist cronies had threatened to destroy everything he had worked for by redistributing farmland to poor farmers.
28:33 Speaker 05 My grandfather says, "These communists, we need to kill them all. We need to just like get rid of them in a way." This was the narrative of the regime.
28:41 Speaker 03 And frankly, as a child from a wealthy family, Camila had no real conception of the regime's violence.
28:48 Speaker 05 If you are really in the richest 10%, which means that you are dressed a certain way, you have a car, you have all these other things that insulate you from the repression. Because when you're on the top, you're not really suffering. You are profiting from, right?
29:06 Speaker 03 After the coup, Pinochet undid Allende's efforts to bring Chile's land and resources back under national control. They returned more than 300 businesses into private hands and foreign investors. And with help from a group of Chilean economists educated in the US, called the Chicago Boys, transformed Chile's economy into a laboratory of neoliberal capitalism.
29:30 Speaker 05 They drafted a manifesto of this new society in which it was based on the individual rational consumer in a way. And it was basically the bible of neoliberal economics. And this bible then became the program of the Pinochet regime.
29:47 Speaker 03 The idea was simple. The government had little role to play in the economy. State-run services were largely privatized. Price controls were lifted. No big labor unions. The economy ran best when there was ample competition and very little to no regulation. Only the best would rise to the top.
30:07 Rund Abdelfatah? The change was a shock. Almost immediately, the price of common goods shot up. The price of sugar, for instance, went up 500%. This was great for profit margins and sugar CEOs like Camilla's mom. And in theory, these riches were supposed to trickle down. In reality, that's not how it played out.
30:30 Speaker 05 The system is created for the rich to get richer in a way and the poor to get stuck.
30:40 Rund Abdelfatah? John Dingus saw these disparities firsthand. And it wasn't long before he realized that nothing had actually returned to normal.
30:48 Speaker 04 Hundreds of people were being arrested and put in secret prisons. In other words, people that had been arrested and after months had gone by were not appearing. And this then is the phenomenon that is known as disappearance.
31:07 Rund Abdelfatah? Over the course of Pinochet's regime, more than 1,000 people disappeared without a trace. 3,000 were killed and 40,000 were tortured or imprisoned.
31:18 Speaker 03 As a reporter for Time Magazine and The Washington Post, John's stories made US readers face what was happening in Chile.
31:26 Rund Abdelfatah? And ironically enough, even though the US welcomed Pinochet and helped establish the conditions that led to Allende's overthrow, some of the loudest voices against Pinochet's regime were coming from the Chilean diaspora in the United States.
31:45 Rund Abdelfatah? I will say that something that was really very impressive was the capacity of the capacity of human being to resist.
31:55 Rund Abdelfatah? Orlando Letellier, the former ambassador to the US under the Allende government, emerged as one of the leaders of Chile's exile community.
32:04 Speaker 01 When Orlando Letellier came, he had access to ambassadors, even to ministers. And we decided, of course, that he was appointed as the head of the exiles in the US.
32:17 Rund Abdelfatah? This is Juan Gabriel Valdez. He's Chile's current ambassador to the US. At the time of the coup, he was a student in the US studying abroad. After Pinochet took power, he decided to stay in the United States and become Letellier's assistant to fight for Chile from afar.
32:36 Speaker 01 Orlando Letellier, he was very effective communicating from a moderate point of view what we wanted to do, which was to recuperate democracy.
32:44 Rund Abdelfatah? Letellier had been imprisoned at Dawson Island at the same time as Sergio Vitor, and he wasn't afraid to tell people what he had seen firsthand, including the press. In 1975, he told NPR this.
32:59 Speaker 07 There were, I would say, at least 60 or 70 minors, people, boys from 15 to 16, 17 years old. All of them were church, all of them.
33:14 Rund Abdelfatah? As Letellier's calls against Pinochet gained more and more attention, Juan Gabriel remembers being afraid that something would happen to his friend and mentor.
33:24 Speaker 01 The Chilean dictatorship didn't eliminate just its enemies inside the country, but also outside the country.
33:32 Rund Abdelfatah? And that fear proved to be well-founded.
33:42 Speaker 01 I was with my children at home, and suddenly I received a call from Orlando's secretary. And Orlando's secretary said to me, something happened. There was an accident, apparently, and everybody's left the institute and they are running there. Orlando was so careless when he drove, and it's raining, and probably he had an accident.
34:07 Speaker 01 And then this woman called me and said, are you going home to see the FBI? Or are you going to the hospital? And I said, what does the FBI has to do with an accident? An accident, it was a bomb.
34:24 Speaker 01 And I couldn't believe it.
34:26 Speaker 03 The Chilean government denied involvement in the car bombing that killed Orlando Letellier and a young American colleague.
34:35 Rund Abdelfatah? Did you ever buy that story?
34:37 Speaker 01 Never.
34:37 Rund Abdelfatah? Or did you kind of know?
34:38 Speaker 01 Never.
34:39 Rund Abdelfatah? Yeah, you knew it was Pinochet.
34:40 Speaker 01 I was absolutely sure it was Pinochet.
34:43 Speaker 03 Decades later, in 2015, newly declassified US intelligence documents concluded what Juan Gabriel and others already suspected. General Pinochet had personally ordered the killing of Le Telier on US soil.
34:59 Speaker 03 At the time, the junta denied involvement, but the opposition was getting louder and louder.
35:06 Rund Abdelfatah? The long tentacles of the dictatorship were starting to create cracks in the facade, and soon they would split wide open.
35:17 Speaker 03 That's coming up. Hi, this is Lea Marjolais from Paris, France.
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36:53 Speaker 05 El camino pa' atrás. The road back.
37:00 Speaker 05 I must have been around, you know, nine years old or eight years old.
37:05 Rund Abdelfatah? It was the 1980s, and Camila Vergara was excited to spend the day with her mom.
37:11 Speaker 05 My mom was the CEO of the sugar industry, which was a state industry, and I would never see her.
37:17 Rund Abdelfatah? Camila was usually at home.
37:20 Speaker 05 Very isolated from the real world.
37:22 Rund Abdelfatah? But on this day, her mom surprised her and said,
37:25 Speaker 05 Oh, let's do something together. I will take you to a ballet in central Santiago.
37:31 Rund Abdelfatah? So Camila put on her leotard, her tutu and slippers, and then they drove into the city. When they arrived at the Teatro Municipal, a towering white stone theater, Camila and her mom eagerly walked up to the gates.
37:46 Speaker 05 And it was closed.
37:49 Rund Abdelfatah? Her mom was confused. Had they gotten the date wrong? Were they too early, too late? Where was everyone?
37:56 Speaker 05 And suddenly.
38:01 Speaker 03 Thousands of people come flooding down the street. The crowds chants mixed with the loud barking of police dogs.
38:10 Speaker 05 We were caught in the middle of the protest.
38:15 Speaker 05 My mom immediately started trying to cover me.
38:20 Speaker 05 And the police repressing the people who protested, beating up people. Tear gas everywhere.
38:28 Speaker 05 So for the first time in my life, I was exposed to the glimpse of what is happening.
38:36 Speaker 03 The protests had begun in May 1983. Copper miners took to the streets first. They demanded an end to government repression, disappearances, mass arrests, police violence, censorship of the press.
38:50 Rund Abdelfatah? And an end to a catastrophic economic crisis the country had been plunged into a year earlier, largely a result of the Chicago Boys' experimental policies. Unemployment was over 25%. Wages had dropped more than 30% for those who still did have a job. Almost half the population was living in poverty.
39:14 Speaker 03 It was a tinderbox waiting to erupt. And when the copper miners took to the streets, the fuse was lit. Before long, hundreds of thousands of others joined them in Jornadas de Protesta Nacional, a series of massive national protests.
39:30 Speaker 05 It was more than an awakening. It's like the kind of slivers of truth coming in.
39:40 Speaker 03 And for Chileans living in exile, these protests were a kind of invitation to return home and attempt to take down Pinochet.
39:51 Speaker 01 We went to Mendoza, the city that is close to the mountains from the side of the Argentinians. And we go, cross the border.
40:00 Speaker 03 Sergio Vitar understood the risks of crossing that border. He could be arrested, imprisoned again.
40:07 Speaker 01 So, looks a little bit crazy, but...
40:11 Speaker 03 But it was something he felt he had to do.
40:13 Speaker 01 To be in my country and to fight against the dictatorship.
40:17 Speaker 03 Some people believe that security is more important than freedom. And they will discover after some time that when freedom is lost, it is not security anymore. Juan Gabriel Valdez also returned to Chile around this time with his family. And he says almost from the moment they got there, they knew the government was keeping a close eye on them.
40:47 Speaker 03 Four days or five days after I came back, my wife and myself, we were invited by friends. The person who was in charge of our children called us at 10 at night, saying, "There are two people here who entered." I had to allow them to come into the house. And they are looking at your pictures. They are taking some of the pictures in your albums. These kind of things began to happen very often.
41:12 Rund Abdelfatah? Both Sergio and Juan Gabriel got involved in the growing opposition movement.
41:17 Speaker 01 The so-called Democratic Alliance.
41:20 Rund Abdelfatah? Disagreements quickly arose. What were their goals? Who was allowed in? What kind of resistance was off limits?
41:28 Speaker 05 There was a guerrilla movement putting bombs everywhere. So we had, you know, outages of power that were due to the guerrilla people.
41:36 Rund Abdelfatah? But many in the movement disagreed with that approach.
41:39 Speaker 01 We cannot fight a dictatorship through the armed resistance or violence.
41:46 Rund Abdelfatah? Sergio says their weapons would never compare to what the government had. So instead of fighting fire with fire.
41:53 Speaker 01 We had to do it through rules, within the rules.
41:57 Rund Abdelfatah? And they realized they needed to make the umbrella bigger to bring more people into the movement. Conservatives, trade unions, democratic socialists. They couldn't afford to box people out if they didn't agree on everything. The main thing they all needed to agree on was that democracy was the way forward for Chile, not Pinochet. The rest, they could figure out later.
42:22 Speaker 01 No one of us can get democracy back alone. So we have to start building actions together and to define a strategy.
42:33 Speaker 03 They figured their best shot at ousting Pinochet would be in October 1988, when something called a plebiscite was scheduled to take place. Basically, the plebiscite would be an election in which Chileans would vote yes or no to keeping Pinochet as president for another eight years. It was a footnote that Pinochet had included in the new constitution he passed in 1980 to give the world the illusion of term limits and fair elections. I remember my best friends at the time in Spain.
43:06 Speaker 04 Telling me you are getting into a very difficult situation.
43:10 Speaker 01 A plebiscite decide that a dictator, they will count the votes. Are you crazy? It's impossible.
43:18 Speaker 03 Impossible, but kind of their only chance of ousting Pinochet while playing by the rules.
43:24 Speaker 01 So we said, let's create a big mass of people to vote.
43:29 Speaker 03 Convincing people to vote would be an uphill climb.
43:32 Speaker 01 The central key issue is to combat fear. The dictatorship uses fear as a control of the mind and the people. And people were afraid. If I go, if I say, if they say me, they can kill me, they can take me, they can take my job.
43:53 Speaker 03 It was risky. They needed people to buy into the idea that it was worth that risk to get out and vote no to another term for Pinochet. So they turned to the most powerful tool they had. Television.
44:15 Speaker 03 On channels across the country, including Televisión Nacional de Chile, Chile's PBS.
44:23 Speaker 04 I was called to be the leader of the television campaign, which was allowed by the dictatorship and was the first time in which the opposition would show itself on TV.
44:35 Speaker 03 You might be wondering why a dictator would give an opposition movement that's trying to oust him any TV time. Chileans were surprised too, when the junta passed a law that allowed yes and no sides to both have free time for their own political commercials. It was meant to give the whole process a veneer of credibility. So in the month leading up to the election day, the opposition was given 15 minutes of airtime on national television every day. Pinochet and his crew were sure wouldn't make any difference. That the yes side would dominate. And they figured it would appease the international community, especially the US, which had long since soured on Pinochet.
45:14 Rund Abdelfatah? The no campaign was given a late night time slot.
45:18 Speaker 04 The government considered that the program at 11 o'clock at night would be considered irrelevant by the majority of the population and they
45:25 Speaker 01 wouldn't see it.
45:26 Rund Abdelfatah? But Juan Gabriel was determined to make the most of those 15 minutes every night. He hired an army of ad men.
45:34 Speaker 01 People working in publicity, filmmaking, sociologists, and political analysts.
45:40 Rund Abdelfatah? And they set out to sell democracy.
45:43 Speaker 01 It's not just complaining for what we suffered. If we do that, you never win. In order to win, you have to propose something better than what you are doing now.
45:54 Rund Abdelfatah? In other words, give the people hope.
46:08 Speaker 01 The whole campaign was "La alegría ya viene." Happiness is coming.
46:25 Rund Abdelfatah? These ads were high quality, optimistic.
46:27 Speaker 01 The young people singing.
46:30 Rund Abdelfatah? With lyrics like, "Whatever they say, I'm free to think, because it's time to win freedom."
46:36 Speaker 01 And the colors.
46:37 Rund Abdelfatah? The campaign had a rainbow logo.
46:39 Speaker 01 The feeling of community.
46:41 Rund Abdelfatah? They avoided heavy ideological language and instead emphasized.
46:45 Speaker 01 How you can eat better food, have your kid go to school, have some place where to go if you are ill.
46:55 Rund Abdelfatah? Let's say no.
47:00 Speaker 03 Each night, more and more people tuned in to those 15 minutes and support for the no campaign, which would vote out Pinochet, grew.
47:09 Speaker 01 Step by step, step by step, step by step.
47:16 Speaker 03 On the eve of Election Day, no one had any idea what would happen.
47:23 Speaker 07 The United States has heard reports that the Chilean government plans to cancel the referendum or nullify its results.
47:30 Speaker 03 And on the morning of October 5th, 1988, when the polls opened.
47:36 Speaker 01 The fear was the people will not come out and will not vote.
47:42 Speaker 01 I went out to visit all the voting places. And it was impressive because it was very hot, I remember. And the lines were long, long, long, all the day. So that gave us the, the hope that we could win.
48:00 Speaker 07 By 10 o'clock this morning, there were lines six blocks long in many voting places here in Santiago.
48:07 Speaker 03 Ninety-seven percent of the country's registered voters came out to vote, including Pinochet himself, dressed not as a general, but in civilian clothes. The question was simple. Should Augusto Pinochet continue on as president for another eight years? Yes or no?
48:25 Speaker 07 The first results that were announced showed the no vote winning.
48:30 Speaker 04 There was a moment that day which created an enormous alarm. The Ministry of the Interior, that is in charge of giving the results of the election, and the plebiscite stopped giving the results around 3 o'clock or 4 o'clock in the afternoon.
48:47 Speaker 03 The no vote was expanding its lead by this point.
48:51 Speaker 01 Pinochet called the Commander-Senior Chief at 1:00 in the morning to his office. So I said, "What, what's going to happen here?"
48:58 Speaker 04 Some people thought that the military would not recognize the result.
49:02 Speaker 05 I remember very vividly because there were phone calls being made, and Pinochet didn't want to step down.
49:08 Speaker 03 But his generals and the US government had told Pinochet, "We're done."
49:14 Speaker 05 "We're not going to support the dictatorship anymore. You need to move on."
49:17 Speaker 04 And that night, the government came back to the television and said...
49:29 Speaker 01 The no won.
49:31 Speaker 07 And from that point on, the mood in the headquarters of the no command was joyful.
49:37 Speaker 04 And I think we danced and we cried and we sang until the morning 5:00.
49:43 Speaker 01 It's a feeling of expansion, of big feeling of joy. Means that we are, we exist, we have rights.
49:54 Speaker 07 Chile today could be on its way back to democracy.
50:00 Speaker 04 Probably the most unforgettable day in my life.
50:04 Speaker 01 A moment that my life started again.
50:18 Rund Abdelfatah? Nearly 56% of Chileans voted no, which was a majority, a win. But not a resounding majority, even after years of torture, censorship and repression. Camila Vergara says it wasn't simply a vote on democracy versus dictatorship.
50:37 Speaker 05 Imagine the fear. Everybody was afraid of the military coming back out.
50:44 Rund Abdelfatah? Would a no vote lead to chaos, violence, another economic recession? By 1988, the economy was in much better shape and a new middle class was emerging. Some saw that as Pinochet's free market model working. So it was complicated. Still, Pinochet's reign as president finally came to an end.
51:11 Speaker 05 The idea of defeating the dictatorship with a pen and pencil, that was kind of the narrative.
51:16 Rund Abdelfatah? But in reality, defeating the dictatorship didn't automatically mean democracy was restored.
51:23 Speaker 04 We knew that it was not just a matter of replacing Pinochet with somebody else. It was a much more complicated thing and we had to make concessions. Of course, we negotiated with the military.
51:34 Speaker 05 The first democratic government, Pinochet was the leader of the armed forces. Yes.
51:39 Rund Abdelfatah? Wow.
51:40 Speaker 05 The police, basically, was the same police. There was no purge. And then Pinochet, after stepping down from the military, became senator for life in the senate and therefore with full immunity. So basically, he insulated himself and his people and not only insulated himself, he was an active voter in the senate, vetoing reform.
52:05 Speaker 05 Almost, you know, a decade of Pinochet in some kind of position of power during the young democracy.
52:12 Rund Abdelfatah? In 1998, Pinochet was arrested in London on charges of genocide, torture, and kidnapping. He was ultimately found unfit to stand trial and was released back to Chile, where he died in 2006.
52:27 Speaker 03 Today, Chile is in the middle of a close presidential race. The current election just went into a runoff. The next vote is scheduled for December 14th. Thirty-seven years after the plebiscite vote, there is still a big gap between the hopes and dreams of those TV ads and the reality of people's lives. For Sergio Bittar, that doesn't mean they failed. It simply means there's more work to do.
52:52 Speaker 01 It's a work in progress, and it's a cultural progress also. The idea of negotiations is part of democracy. The guys in power have the big responsibility of behaving in the way they want the society to become. You can't try to build a democracy with aggression. If you have a corrupt guy and winning lots of money, well, you cannot have a democracy under these conditions.
53:20 Speaker 03 Camila Vergara, who is now a lecturer in political theory at the University of Essex, says this isn't just a problem Chile is facing today.
53:30 Speaker 05 What we have today in the so-called free world is an oligarchy that keeps benefiting. Every year, doesn't matter who wins the election, they are the ones who are increasing their wealth. So basically, it's a system that formally looks like what we call democracy, separation of powers, universal suffrage, freedom of speech. But the people on the top, the wealthy few, the powerful few, are the ones really calling the shots, controlling everything, passing law to benefit themselves more than others. And that we see through the growing inequality of the system.
54:17 Rund Abdelfatah? That's it for this week's show. I'm Rund Abdelfatah.
54:21 Speaker 03 And I'm Ramtin Arablouei, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.
54:26 Rund Abdelfatah? This episode was produced by me.
54:28 Speaker 03 And me, and.
54:30 Speaker 06 Lawrence Wu.
54:30 Speaker 05 Julie Kay. Anya Steinberg. Casey Minor. Christina Kim.
54:35 Speaker 03 Devin Kadyama. Irene Noguchi. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel.
54:41 Rund Abdelfatah? Thank you to Ana Sofie Vera, Peter Cornblue, Micah Ratner, Maisha Galiba, Laura Schwartz, Johannes Sturgie, Beth Donovan, and Tommy Evans.
54:52 Speaker 03 This episode was mixed by Jimmy Keely.
54:55 Rund Abdelfatah? Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes. Navid Marvi.
55:02 Speaker 00 Cho Fujiwara. Anya Mizani.
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55:28 Rund Abdelfatah? And finally, if you have an idea or liked something you heard on the show, please write us at [email protected] . And make sure to rate us and leave us a comment on Apple or Spotify. It helps other people find the show. Thanks for listening.
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