Chile 1973 coup (1991): Rettig / Valech

Allende won a plurality in 1970. Land reform, nationalisations, and a Cold War reading in Washington and in the Chilean right produced a pre-coup crisis, not a sudden whim. The military's constitutionalist commander, General Prats, resigned in August 1973; Pinochet's rise was inside that vacuum.

Navy, air force, and army moved. La Moneda was isolated and attacked. Allende's last broadcast is a primary source. This paragraph names a sequence; it does not teach one. Foreign journalists and the stadium as a detention site entered the first week's record. DINA, exile, the 1980 constitution, the 1988 plebiscite that Pinochet lost -- a long afterlife of 11 September.

The 1990 concertacion transition left Pinochet as army commander for years -- an unfinished civilian control story. US declassifications (especially 1999-2000s) thickened the embassy-and-Track file without erasing Chilean agency. Guzman's Battle of Chile remains the documentary canon in English art houses.