Democracy Dies in a Day

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. We’ve got a favor to ask: We know there are a lot of great NPR shows out there.. but we all know who's the best. NPR is celebrating the best podcasts of the year, and YOU get to crown the winner of the People’s Choice Award. Vote for Throughline at npr.org/peopleschoice http://npr.org/peopleschoice. May the best pod win! To access bonus episodes and listen to Throughline sponsor-free, subscribe to Throughline+ via Apple Podcasts or at plus.npr.org/throughline. See pcm.adswizz.com https://pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for sponsorship and to manage your podcast sponsorship preferences. NPR Privacy Policy https://www.npr.org/about-npr/179878450/privacy-policy

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:18Speaker 01

  At 6:00 in the morning, I remember that somebody called, saying that the Navy's coming.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  I was told if it happens, it would be very violent. So, take care, protect yourself, try to leave your houses.

• 0:40Speaker 01

  My name is Sergio Vitar.

• 0:43Rund 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?

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Should I go to the palace, government palace?

• 1:11Speaker 01

  It was completely blocked.

• 1:13Rund 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.

• 1:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  The president of Chile, Salvador Allende, came on the radio.

• 1:35Speaker 03

  "I will not resign," he says.

• 1:43Speaker 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."

• 1:59Rund 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.

• 2:24Speaker 01

  By the radio, there was a list of people called by the military that we should present ourselves.

• 2:31Speaker 03

  The next day, at 7:00 a.m., Sergio's name became one of them.

• 2:37Speaker 01

  I called my wife, saying, "Could you come? I've been called."

• 2:41Speaker 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.

• 2:55Speaker 01

  I have nothing to hide. This is a democratic government.

• 3:01Speaker 01

  So I presented myself.

• 3:03Speaker 03

  The soldiers took his documents and detained him along with a bunch of other people, some of them who he knew.

• 3:10Speaker 01

  So we stayed 24 hours or 48 hours.

• 3:14Speaker 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?

• 3:28Speaker 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.

• 3:39Speaker 03

  The soldiers told them if anyone moved, they would be shot.

• 3:43Speaker 01

  And they took us to a plane.

• 3:45Speaker 03

  On the plane, armed men guarded them closely.

• 3:49Speaker 01

  We didn't know what we were going.

• 3:57Rund 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.

• 4:08Speaker 03

  Now, he was a political prisoner.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  When I look at back, I realize my blindness. Because we were a democratic country for many years, democracy was sure, secure, guaranteed.

• 4:25Speaker 03

  Until it wasn't.

• 4:27Rund Abdelfatah?

  I'm Rand Abdelfatah.

• 4:29Speaker 03

  And I'm Ramtin Arablouei.

• 4:32Rund 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.

• 4:43Speaker 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.

• 5:05Speaker 01

  The conditions were how to control your mind, that you feel that you are nothing.

• 5:12Speaker 03

  The journalist.

• 5:13Speaker 04

  I was not able to use a byline, and as soon as I did, the reprisals came down on me.

• 5:20Speaker 03

  The exile. Chilean dictatorship didn't eliminate just its enemies in the country, but also outside the country. And the child.

• 5:29Speaker 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.

• 5:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  Coming up, democracy dies in a day.

• 5:46Speaker 05

  Hello. This is Nathalie Valliere, calling from Montreal, Quebec. Montreal, Quebec. And you are listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 6:05Speaker 00

  I find it such a mind refreshing podcast. Thank you very much.

• 6:11Speaker 00

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 6:15Speaker 05

  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. This week on the NPR Politics Podcast, the midterm elections are wrapping up and millions of people have already voted. We're taking one final check of the electoral pulse with a new NPR PBS News Marist Poll.

• 6:55Speaker 06

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• 7:25Speaker 05

  Part one. Estas son mis últimas palabras. These are my last words.

• 7:34Speaker 04

  I got up that morning. My girlfriend comes back and says, things are happening.

• 7:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  This is John Dingus. He's written several books on Latin America.

• 7:45Speaker 04

  My recent book came out in April called Chile in Their Hearts.

• 7:49Rund Abdelfatah?

  In 1973, he was an American reporter living in Chile.

• 7:54Speaker 04

  We turned on the radio immediately.

• 7:56Rund Abdelfatah?

  All of the stations had been taken over by the military, except for one, Radio Magallanes.

• 8:03Speaker 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.

• 8:15Rund Abdelfatah?

  La Moneda, the presidential palace.

• 8:18Speaker 04

  There are troops surrounding the palace and he is going to address all of Chile.

• 8:31Speaker 03

  This is the last opportunity for me to address you.

• 8:40Speaker 03

  The people must not let themselves be destroyed or riddled with bullets, but they cannot be humiliated either.

• 8:48Speaker 04

  He was not giving us any hope that he could beat back the coup.

• 8:54Speaker 03

  Long live Chile, long live the people, long live the workers.

• 9:01Speaker 04

  He implied that he was not going to leave alive.

• 9:10Speaker 03

  These are my last words, and I am certain my sacrifice will not be in vain.

• 9:15Speaker 04

  It was an amazingly eloquent speech for history.

• 9:32Speaker 04

  Then we said, well, what do we do?

• 9:41Speaker 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.

• 9:59Speaker 01

  And it wasn't the hands of American companies.

• 10:02Speaker 03

  This is Sergio Bittar. You met him at the top of the episode. He was born and raised in Chile.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  We don't know what we receive for that. All the profits go abroad.

• 10:14Speaker 01

  Mostly when you go out from the area where middle classes existed,

• 10:20Speaker 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.

• 10:35Speaker 03

  A movement of working-class people began to demand change.

• 10:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  Enter Salvador Allende.

• 10:47Rund 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.

• 11:21Speaker 03

  I ask you to go home in joy with the fair victory we have achieved.

• 11:28Rund Abdelfatah?

  Allende won the election.

• 11:34Speaker 03

  We'll have to put more passion and more love to make Chile ever greater and life in our homeland more just.

• 11:47Speaker 01

  So that's the beginning of my political life.

• 11:50Rund 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.

• 12:02Speaker 01

  So I said to myself, I will go back and I will be available to work with the Allende government.

• 12:10Rund Abdelfatah?

  He was appointed the Minister of Mining as Allende made moves to nationalize the copper industry. Alarm bells started ringing in the US.

• 12:22Speaker 01

  Instead of seeing a movement towards democracy, they were seeing risk to their security, the security of their businesses.

• 12:31Rund Abdelfatah?

  This was the Cold War era, and the US government feared communism was spreading across Latin America.

• 12:38Speaker 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.

• 12:55Rund 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."

• 13:13Speaker 03

  By October 1972, when John landed in Chile.

• 13:17Speaker 04

  There was a general strike against the government.

• 13:24Speaker 04

  Small businesses and truckers had basically closed down the country.

• 13:30Speaker 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.

• 13:49Speaker 04

  It was in the middle of a crisis. The country was very divided.

• 13:59Speaker 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.

• 14:22Rund 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."

• 14:37Speaker 03

  The US government was also trying to court Chilean military leaders.

• 14:44Speaker 04

  Augusto Pinochet is the number-two military person in the army.

• 14:50Speaker 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.

• 15:04Speaker 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.

• 15:15Speaker 04

  They wine and dine him.

• 15:17Speaker 03

  And at one point, a member of Pinochet's delegation has a conversation with some American officers who tell him...

• 15:24Speaker 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.

• 15:52Speaker 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."

• 16:01Speaker 04

  So Pinochet returns to Chile.

• 16:04Speaker 03

  And when he gets back, he gets a big promotion.

• 16:09Speaker 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."

• 16:25Speaker 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.

• 16:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  In the summer of 1973.

• 16:43Speaker 04

  There were demonstrations every week.

• 16:51Speaker 04

  And there were demonstrations by the right, demonstrations by the left.

• 16:58Speaker 04

  Comunista saqueroso tiene que salir todos de Chile. It was chaotic.

• 17:05Speaker 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.

• 17:13Rund Abdelfatah?

  They met with Pinochet on Sunday, September 9.

• 17:17Speaker 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.

• 17:31Speaker 04

  He decides that he's going to lead the coup.

• 17:42Rund Abdelfatah?

  That brings us back to September 11, 1973, when John turned on the radio to hear President Allende's final address.

• 17:56Speaker 04

  We said, well, what do we do?

• 18:00Rund Abdelfatah?

  John and his roommate set out for the big working-class neighborhood of the city, the hub for Allende supporters.

• 18:06Speaker 04

  They were going to lead the opposition if any coup came.

• 18:11Rund Abdelfatah?

  They get to this part of Santiago, the industrial belt, where all the factories are. At the first factory...

• 18:18Speaker 04

  The workers said, "Go home. It's going to be really, really dangerous."

• 18:23Rund Abdelfatah?

  Then they went to a second factory, where the workers had blockaded themselves inside and were waiting for a weapons delivery.

• 18:30Speaker 04

  They'd been told that they were going to arrive in a green truck. They waited all day.

• 18:37Rund Abdelfatah?

  The green truck never arrived. The weapons didn't come.

• 18:47Speaker 03

  Back at the presidential palace, explosions rang out.

• 18:51Speaker 04

  They bombed the Moneda with the air force. And once they bombed it, it was clear that the resistance was over.

• 19:00Speaker 03

  The military moved into the palace. Allende was on the second floor.

• 19:05Speaker 04

  By the time they got up there, Allende was dead.

• 19:09Speaker 03

  From a bullet to the head.

• 19:17Speaker 03

  General Augusto Pinochet was in power now.

• 19:34Speaker 04

  There were military barriers on the corners. People with automatic weapons behind sandbags.

• 19:42Speaker 03

  The military imposed a curfew.

• 19:46Speaker 04

  During that period, we're listening to the radio. There's no information going on. On a regular basis, we would hear gunshots.

• 19:54Speaker 03

  John and his roommates hunkered down for the night, waiting to see what would happen.

• 20:02Rund Abdelfatah?

  Coming up, dawn breaks on a new reality for Chile.

• 20:13Rund Abdelfatah?

  Hi, this is Jewel from Toledo, Ohio.

• 20:17Speaker 00

  I love listening to Throughline on my drive and on my run and really anytime. You're listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 20:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.

• 20:34Speaker 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.

• 21:17Speaker 06

  American journalist Austin Tice vanished in Syria over a decade ago. For years, we've been searching for him, and now we finally have some answers. This is the prison that Austin was in. Oh my god, we found Austin's file. Listen to Where Is Austin Tice from NPR's Embedded and BBC Radio 4, on the NPR app, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 21:49Speaker 05

  Part two, Las Dos Caras de la Dictadura, The Two Faces of Dictatorship.

• 21:58Speaker 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.

• 22:09Speaker 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.

• 22:28Speaker 01

  It's very cold.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  The south of Majoran Strait is one of the closest islands to the Antarctic.

• 22:41Speaker 01

  With the worst guys they had in order to impose on us singing of military songs every day, every morning.

• 22:50Speaker 03

  Like the Navy hymn.

• 22:52Speaker 01

  The military anthem of each branch.

• 23:00Speaker 03

  Day and night, Sergio and the other prisoners were under the watchful eye of Pinochet's armed forces.

• 23:07Speaker 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.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  And the way to do it is to feel that the other one is an animal. You are not a human being.

• 23:31Speaker 01

  That's part of the logic.

• 23:34Speaker 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.

• 23:47Speaker 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.

• 24:17Rund 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.

• 24:27Speaker 04

  The democracy was over. They dissolved Congress, they rewrote the Constitution, they raided all of the universities and took over them by force.

• 24:40Rund 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.

• 24:48Speaker 04

  It was obvious that they were arresting people because of their sympathy with the Ayen government.

• 24:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  People were detained across the city.

• 24:57Speaker 04

  They were raiding the poor people's areas and the factories.

• 25:01Rund 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.

• 25:16Speaker 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.

• 25:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  And still amid this violence and chaos.

• 25:38Speaker 04

  Life was still going on.

• 25:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  Many people were still going to work, to school and to buy groceries.

• 25:45Speaker 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.

• 26:05Rund 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.

• 26:19Speaker 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.

• 26:33Rund 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.

• 26:43Speaker 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.

• 26:51Rund 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.

• 27:01Speaker 04

  The environment of fear was much, much stronger.

• 27:04Rund 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.

• 27:18Speaker 04

  So we thought that things are returning to normal.

• 27:22Speaker 03

  And for some Chileans, life wasn't just returning to normal, it was better than ever.

• 27:27Speaker 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.

• 27:55Speaker 05

  So basically, it depends on where you From where are you looking the dictatorship? And who is suffering the dictatorship?

• 28:03Speaker 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.

• 28:16Speaker 05

  I am like, you know, a daughter of privilege. I come from a family of landowner in the South.

• 28:23Speaker 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.

• 28:33Speaker 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.

• 28:41Speaker 03

  And frankly, as a child from a wealthy family, Camila had no real conception of the regime's violence.

• 28:48Speaker 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?

• 29:06Speaker 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.

• 29:30Speaker 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.

• 29:47Speaker 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.

• 30:07Rund 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.

• 30:30Speaker 05

  The system is created for the rich to get richer in a way and the poor to get stuck.

• 30:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  John Dingus saw these disparities firsthand. And it wasn't long before he realized that nothing had actually returned to normal.

• 30:48Speaker 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.

• 31:07Rund 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.

• 31:18Speaker 03

  As a reporter for Time Magazine and The Washington Post, John's stories made US readers face what was happening in Chile.

• 31:26Rund 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.

• 31:45Rund Abdelfatah?

  I will say that something that was really very impressive was the capacity of the capacity of human being to resist.

• 31:55Rund Abdelfatah?

  Orlando Letellier, the former ambassador to the US under the Allende government, emerged as one of the leaders of Chile's exile community.

• 32:04Speaker 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.

• 32:17Rund 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.

• 32:36Speaker 01

  Orlando Letellier, he was very effective communicating from a moderate point of view what we wanted to do, which was to recuperate democracy.

• 32:44Rund 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.

• 32:59Speaker 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.

• 33:14Rund 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.

• 33:24Speaker 01

  The Chilean dictatorship didn't eliminate just its enemies inside the country, but also outside the country.

• 33:32Rund Abdelfatah?

  And that fear proved to be well-founded.

• 33:42Speaker 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.

• 34:07Speaker 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.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  And I couldn't believe it.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  The Chilean government denied involvement in the car bombing that killed Orlando Letellier and a young American colleague.

• 34:35Rund Abdelfatah?

  Did you ever buy that story?

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Never.

• 34:37Rund Abdelfatah?

  Or did you kind of know?

• 34:38Speaker 01

  Never.

• 34:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  Yeah, you knew it was Pinochet.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  I was absolutely sure it was Pinochet.

• 34:43Speaker 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.

• 34:59Speaker 03

  At the time, the junta denied involvement, but the opposition was getting louder and louder.

• 35:06Rund Abdelfatah?

  The long tentacles of the dictatorship were starting to create cracks in the facade, and soon they would split wide open.

• 35:17Speaker 03

  That's coming up. Hi, this is Lea Marjolais from Paris, France.

• 35:23Speaker 06

  I'm a teacher and I love Throughline. And you are listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 35:31Speaker 06

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors. 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. I'm Kevin Ruse. And I'm Casey Newton. And together, we've been tech journalists for decades. Now, we're your hosts of Machine Gods, a new podcast from NPR that makes sense of what AI means for your work, your life, and all of our futures.

• 36:13Speaker 06

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• 36:25Speaker 00

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• 36:53Speaker 05

  El camino pa' atrás. The road back.

• 37:00Speaker 05

  I must have been around, you know, nine years old or eight years old.

• 37:05Rund Abdelfatah?

  It was the 1980s, and Camila Vergara was excited to spend the day with her mom.

• 37:11Speaker 05

  My mom was the CEO of the sugar industry, which was a state industry, and I would never see her.

• 37:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  Camila was usually at home.

• 37:20Speaker 05

  Very isolated from the real world.

• 37:22Rund Abdelfatah?

  But on this day, her mom surprised her and said,

• 37:25Speaker 05

  Oh, let's do something together. I will take you to a ballet in central Santiago.

• 37:31Rund 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.

• 37:46Speaker 05

  And it was closed.

• 37:49Rund Abdelfatah?

  Her mom was confused. Had they gotten the date wrong? Were they too early, too late? Where was everyone?

• 37:56Speaker 05

  And suddenly.

• 38:01Speaker 03

  Thousands of people come flooding down the street. The crowds chants mixed with the loud barking of police dogs.

• 38:10Speaker 05

  We were caught in the middle of the protest.

• 38:15Speaker 05

  My mom immediately started trying to cover me.

• 38:20Speaker 05

  And the police repressing the people who protested, beating up people. Tear gas everywhere.

• 38:28Speaker 05

  So for the first time in my life, I was exposed to the glimpse of what is happening.

• 38:36Speaker 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.

• 38:50Rund 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.

• 39:14Speaker 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.

• 39:30Speaker 05

  It was more than an awakening. It's like the kind of slivers of truth coming in.

• 39:40Speaker 03

  And for Chileans living in exile, these protests were a kind of invitation to return home and attempt to take down Pinochet.

• 39:51Speaker 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.

• 40:00Speaker 03

  Sergio Vitar understood the risks of crossing that border. He could be arrested, imprisoned again.

• 40:07Speaker 01

  So, looks a little bit crazy, but...

• 40:11Speaker 03

  But it was something he felt he had to do.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  To be in my country and to fight against the dictatorship.

• 40:17Speaker 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.

• 40:47Speaker 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.

• 41:12Rund Abdelfatah?

  Both Sergio and Juan Gabriel got involved in the growing opposition movement.

• 41:17Speaker 01

  The so-called Democratic Alliance.

• 41:20Rund Abdelfatah?

  Disagreements quickly arose. What were their goals? Who was allowed in? What kind of resistance was off limits?

• 41:28Speaker 05

  There was a guerrilla movement putting bombs everywhere. So we had, you know, outages of power that were due to the guerrilla people.

• 41:36Rund Abdelfatah?

  But many in the movement disagreed with that approach.

• 41:39Speaker 01

  We cannot fight a dictatorship through the armed resistance or violence.

• 41:46Rund Abdelfatah?

  Sergio says their weapons would never compare to what the government had. So instead of fighting fire with fire.

• 41:53Speaker 01

  We had to do it through rules, within the rules.

• 41:57Rund 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.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  No one of us can get democracy back alone. So we have to start building actions together and to define a strategy.

• 42:33Speaker 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.

• 43:06Speaker 04

  Telling me you are getting into a very difficult situation.

• 43:10Speaker 01

  A plebiscite decide that a dictator, they will count the votes. Are you crazy? It's impossible.

• 43:18Speaker 03

  Impossible, but kind of their only chance of ousting Pinochet while playing by the rules.

• 43:24Speaker 01

  So we said, let's create a big mass of people to vote.

• 43:29Speaker 03

  Convincing people to vote would be an uphill climb.

• 43:32Speaker 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.

• 43:53Speaker 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.

• 44:15Speaker 03

  On channels across the country, including Televisión Nacional de Chile, Chile's PBS.

• 44:23Speaker 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.

• 44:35Speaker 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.

• 45:14Rund Abdelfatah?

  The no campaign was given a late night time slot.

• 45:18Speaker 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

• 45:25Speaker 01

  wouldn't see it.

• 45:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  But Juan Gabriel was determined to make the most of those 15 minutes every night. He hired an army of ad men.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  People working in publicity, filmmaking, sociologists, and political analysts.

• 45:40Rund Abdelfatah?

  And they set out to sell democracy.

• 45:43Speaker 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.

• 45:54Rund Abdelfatah?

  In other words, give the people hope.

• 46:08Speaker 01

  The whole campaign was "La alegría ya viene." Happiness is coming.

• 46:25Rund Abdelfatah?

  These ads were high quality, optimistic.

• 46:27Speaker 01

  The young people singing.

• 46:30Rund Abdelfatah?

  With lyrics like, "Whatever they say, I'm free to think, because it's time to win freedom."

• 46:36Speaker 01

  And the colors.

• 46:37Rund Abdelfatah?

  The campaign had a rainbow logo.

• 46:39Speaker 01

  The feeling of community.

• 46:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  They avoided heavy ideological language and instead emphasized.

• 46:45Speaker 01

  How you can eat better food, have your kid go to school, have some place where to go if you are ill.

• 46:55Rund Abdelfatah?

  Let's say no.

• 47:00Speaker 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.

• 47:09Speaker 01

  Step by step, step by step, step by step.

• 47:16Speaker 03

  On the eve of Election Day, no one had any idea what would happen.

• 47:23Speaker 07

  The United States has heard reports that the Chilean government plans to cancel the referendum or nullify its results.

• 47:30Speaker 03

  And on the morning of October 5th, 1988, when the polls opened.

• 47:36Speaker 01

  The fear was the people will not come out and will not vote.

• 47:42Speaker 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.

• 48:00Speaker 07

  By 10 o'clock this morning, there were lines six blocks long in many voting places here in Santiago.

• 48:07Speaker 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?

• 48:25Speaker 07

  The first results that were announced showed the no vote winning.

• 48:30Speaker 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.

• 48:47Speaker 03

  The no vote was expanding its lead by this point.

• 48:51Speaker 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?"

• 48:58Speaker 04

  Some people thought that the military would not recognize the result.

• 49:02Speaker 05

  I remember very vividly because there were phone calls being made, and Pinochet didn't want to step down.

• 49:08Speaker 03

  But his generals and the US government had told Pinochet, "We're done."

• 49:14Speaker 05

  "We're not going to support the dictatorship anymore. You need to move on."

• 49:17Speaker 04

  And that night, the government came back to the television and said...

• 49:29Speaker 01

  The no won.

• 49:31Speaker 07

  And from that point on, the mood in the headquarters of the no command was joyful.

• 49:37Speaker 04

  And I think we danced and we cried and we sang until the morning 5:00.

• 49:43Speaker 01

  It's a feeling of expansion, of big feeling of joy. Means that we are, we exist, we have rights.

• 49:54Speaker 07

  Chile today could be on its way back to democracy.

• 50:00Speaker 04

  Probably the most unforgettable day in my life.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  A moment that my life started again.

• 50:18Rund 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.

• 50:37Speaker 05

  Imagine the fear. Everybody was afraid of the military coming back out.

• 50:44Rund 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.

• 51:11Speaker 05

  The idea of defeating the dictatorship with a pen and pencil, that was kind of the narrative.

• 51:16Rund Abdelfatah?

  But in reality, defeating the dictatorship didn't automatically mean democracy was restored.

• 51:23Speaker 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.

• 51:34Speaker 05

  The first democratic government, Pinochet was the leader of the armed forces. Yes.

• 51:39Rund Abdelfatah?

  Wow.

• 51:40Speaker 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.

• 52:05Speaker 05

  Almost, you know, a decade of Pinochet in some kind of position of power during the young democracy.

• 52:12Rund 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.

• 52:27Speaker 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.

• 52:52Speaker 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.

• 53:20Speaker 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.

• 53:30Speaker 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.

• 54:17Rund Abdelfatah?

  That's it for this week's show. I'm Rund Abdelfatah.

• 54:21Speaker 03

  And I'm Ramtin Arablouei, and you've been listening to Throughline from NPR.

• 54:26Rund Abdelfatah?

  This episode was produced by me.

• 54:28Speaker 03

  And me, and.

• 54:30Speaker 06

  Lawrence Wu.

• 54:30Speaker 05

  Julie Kay. Anya Steinberg. Casey Minor. Christina Kim.

• 54:35Speaker 03

  Devin Kadyama. Irene Noguchi. Fact checking for this episode was done by Kevin Vogel.

• 54:41Rund Abdelfatah?

  Thank you to Ana Sofie Vera, Peter Cornblue, Micah Ratner, Maisha Galiba, Laura Schwartz, Johannes Sturgie, Beth Donovan, and Tommy Evans.

• 54:52Speaker 03

  This episode was mixed by Jimmy Keely.

• 54:55Rund Abdelfatah?

  Music for this episode was composed by Ramtin and his band, Drop Electric, which includes. Navid Marvi.

• 55:02Speaker 00

  Cho Fujiwara. Anya Mizani.

• 55:05Speaker 03

  And we've got a favor to ask. We know there are a lot of great NPR shows out there, and we all know who's the best, wink, wink. NPR is celebrating the best podcast of the year, and you get to crown the winner of the People's Choice Award. Vote for us at npr.org/People'sChoice. May the best pod win.

• 55:28Rund 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.

• 55:53Speaker 06

  Stay tuned for the following announcements and messages from our sponsors.