I do not romanticize Salvador Allende. I believe he was creating chaos in Chile and would have had his own coup if he could have.

Where do you get this idea that Allende would have had a coup? He ran in clean elections, and won fair and square, which is a lot more than one can say for the current occupant of the White House. He was the legitimate president of a country that was renowned in Latin America for its stable democracy. How dare you slander Allende while observing the death of his murderer.

And the real chaos came with Pinochet, and his murderous terror squads, allied with the other murderous military terror squads in Argentina and Uruguay, and aided and abetted by the US, with Nixon and that sinister bastard Henry Kissinger. When you have an entire soccer stadium turned into a concentration camp, complete with torture and murder, now that's chaos.

I do not romanticize Salvador Allende. I believe he was creating chaos in Chile and would have had his own coup if he could have.

we may not have liked him, and his administration may well have ended up a complete disaster, but allende was the duly, freely, democratically elected president. pinochet was a thug, and remained so to his death. his rule was no more a democracy than that in kuwait, and a hell of a lot less benign.

the school of the americas had many graduates stationed at quantico mcb, 20 miles up the road from me, when i was a kid, and my father was still active duty. as a result, i got an opportunity to meet many of them. without fail, they were all polite, well spoken, clearly quite intelligent,  and very, very creepy. they also almost all had very colorful uniforms, by comparison to the marines.

An article from The Economist in 1999 punctures that myth:

For further evidence, go to a source of the time: The Economist, non-Chilean but firmly critical of Allende and what its then Chile specialist was later to entitle his savagely critical book, "Chile's Marxist Experiment". That title was in fact overblown. Allende's economics were, approximately, Marxist and certainly disastrous. Not so the political system he ran. The opposition press and parties carried on. So did elections, and even in March 1973 the regime could win only 44% of the vote for Congress. Still, this paper was deeply suspicious, and the more so--in those days of raging cold war--because of Allende's friendship with Fidel Castro.

Twice it sent its specialist for long visits. He wrote a six-page report in March 1972, one of five pages in October 1973, a month after the coup. The second time, our man clearly had free access to the regime and its evidence against Allende. But even in 1972 he talked widely to enemies of the Allende government. Both his reports damned it. Both produced mild versions of some charges now laid against Allende: for instance (1973), of Cubans training his personal guard, or guerrillas "tolerated" by the government, (though the actual ones our reporter met were a fairly hopeless, partly Amerindian group, more like Mexico's Zapatists than the strike force of revolution). But what did this ferocious critic of Allende's regime say of its now alleged political tortures or killings? Not a word. [my emphasis]

"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people." --Henry Kissinger, June 27.

Salvador Allende is without question a romantic figure, symbolizing democracy and the voice of the underclasses.  Pinochet is the counter symbol of military brutality and the guard-dog of the wealthy. Seldom do we see the famous class conflict so clearly depicted. The good vs evil pageant was played out in the tragi-romantic last stand of democracy vs authoritarianism in the presidential palace as the Chilean military bombed and strafed.

Brazil 1964, Chile 1973, Uruguay 1973, Argentina 1976.

The three largest economies in S. America each suffered particularly brutal military regimes. Thousands of opponents were tortured, disappeared, drugged and dumped into the sea. The US didn't just stand by watching. Our government, our CIA and our military gave aid, comfort and training. Of course this story was repeated elsewhere, but Pinochet's coup against Allende gave lie to the pretense that the US is a force for democracy.

Allende came close to winning Chilean elections in 1958, and he won by a small margin in 1970. The specific reason for the 73 coup was the realization that he was exceedingly popular and would have won a stronger mandate the next time around.

so, one could well argue that papa bush, by extension, is also responsible for the deaths and torture of hundreds of thousands of iraqis, at the benign hands of saddam.