REMEMBER SEPTEMBER 11TH
“In the years leading up to the coup, U.S. trainers, many from the CIA, had whipped the Chilean military into an anti-communist frenzy, persuading them that socialists were de facto Russian spies, a force alien to Chilean society—a homegrown ‘enemy within’. In fact, it was the military that had become the true domestic enemy, ready to turn its weapons on the population it was sworn to protect. With Allende dead, his cabinet in captivity and no mass resistance in evidence, the junta’s grand battle was over by mid-afternoon…Killing and locking up the government was not enough for Chile’s new junta government, however. The generals knew that their hold on power depended on Chileans being truly terrified, as the people had been in Indonesia. In the days that followed, roughly 13,500 Chileans were arrested, loaded onto trucks and imprisoned, according to a declassified CIA report. Thousands ended up in the two main football stadiums…death replaced football as the public spectacle. Soldiers prowled the bleachers with hooded collaborators who pointed out “subversives”; the ones who were selected were hauled off to locker rooms and skyboxes transformed into makeshift torture chambers. Hundreds were executed. Lifeless bodies started showing up on the side of major highways or floating in murky urban canals.” (92-93)
— Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine
(via kropotkinskaya-station)
