By Atilio Boron on September 11, 2026
September 11, 1973, was a dark day for Chile and all of Latin America, as it marked the bloody coup d’état that brought an end to the unprecedented experiment of building socialism within the framework of bourgeois democratic institutions.
This coup, which began to take shape in the White House on the evening of September 4, 1970—the very day Salvador Allende won the presidential election—demonstrated, for the umpteenth time, that for imperialism and our right-wing forces, any attempt to advance the construction of a more just, humane, solidarity-based, and ecologically sustainable social order (post-capitalist, in a word) is absolutely unacceptable, and that they will do whatever it takes to abort such a process. Among other things, by lying.
Allende—a man of integrity and impeccable political and moral consistency, whom I had the immense good fortune to meet—did not commit suicide, as the right-wing version claims, but died in combat, resisting the troops approaching his office. Those who have doubts should read this book by Francisco Marín, which definitively debunks the lie of suicide. Eternal honor to the great Comrade President, as he was called in those luminous years in Allende’s Chile!
Source: Resumen Latinoamericano – English