1973 Chilean Coup d'Etat

The 1973 Chilean coup d'etat took place on 11 September, when the Chilean armed forces, led by General Augusto Pinochet and backed by the navy and air force commanders Jose Toribio Merino and Gustavo Leigh, overthrew the democratically elected socialist government of President Salvador Allende and his Popular Unity coalition. Military aircraft and artillery bombarded La Moneda Palace in Santiago while Allende was inside; he died during the assault, in circumstances long disputed but generally accepted as suicide rather than combat, as troops closed in. The coup installed a military junta under Pinochet that ruled Chile until 1990, a dictatorship marked by the systematic torture, disappearance and killing of thousands of political opponents, and it became, along with the extensive and later-declassified American involvement in destabilizing Allende's government beforehand, one of the defining episodes of Cold War intervention in Latin America.