Latin American Culture

Coiffard Sarah

Latin American Culture

ABSTRACT:

Despite what the general populous, that wasn’t involved with the occurrences in Chile, would think, lower and middle class Chileans not part of the social elites were happy with the new government and the Popular Unity Project put in place by Allende.

I want to examine how the 11th of September 1973 changed the life of thousands and thousands of people in Chile. The U.S was scared about Chile becoming communist and doing what they felt necessary (Project Fubelt or also known as Track II) to stop Allende’s “revolution”, allied with the Chilean elite and army. We also have the populous talking about how the coup made their lives uncertain and made them scared of living.

It’s been decades, testimonies have now been discovered and have been allowed to be revealed to the public. When we look at all the information, what do we discover?

When looking at how different people have lived the 1970s in Chile, I found multiple videos. I will analyze the films: Missing (1982) by Costa-Gravas telling the story about an American journalist who disappears because he knew too much, “9/11/1973 Coup d’Etat in Chile” released in 2012 and “Chile, The Obstinate Memory” (1997) by Patricio Guzman, which recount the 1970s’ events and how two Chilean individual lived during those events.

I also came across the official Memorandum stating the actions taken in a meeting that took place on September 16th 1970 (3 years before the coup) with subject the “Genesis of Project Fubelt” and an interview by the channel Democracy Now of Peter Kornbluch (author and researcher part of the Chile Documentation Project), recapitulating history on September 10th 2013, 40 years after the Coup.

The research reveals that all the sides involved in what happened in Chile had reasons to do what they did. What I’m now more interested in discovering is why did they think that those reasons         were valid as they were for some at the expense of innocent’s lives.