The violent overthrow of Chile's democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, on 11 September 1973, when the armed forces under General Augusto Pinochet bombed the presidential palace and seized power. It opened seventeen years of dictatorship marked by torture, execution, and forced disappearance, and it made Chile one of the early laboratories of the free-market revolution that reshaped the global economy.
On the morning of 11 September 1973, the Chilean air force bombed the seat of its own government. Two jets fired rockets into La Moneda, the presidential palace in Santiago, while tanks closed in below. Inside was Salvador Allende, the elected president the military had come to remove, a Marxist who had promised a peaceful road to socialism. By the established account, he took his own life as troops stormed the burning building rather than surrender. By nightfall the generals held the country. What followed was seventeen years of dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet: a national stadium turned into a prison and torture center, thousands killed or made to vanish, and an economy handed to free-market technocrats who made Chile the first great experiment in what the world would later call neoliberalism. A democracy was bombed from the air, and the rubble became a model.