So, Pinochet was simply the next senior commander up for the job. There are a couple of reasons why Pinochet was not suspected, namely Chile’s recent political history. It was considered, by the early 1970s, to be the most stable country in South America. It had the longest tradition of representative democratic, republican government, unbroken by authoritarianism or military intervention for decades. No one really saw a coup d’état coming because of this democratic tradition, which, especially by the 1970s, was unfortunately one of the exceptions in the region.

The other reason why Pinochet was appointed commander-in-chief of the Army was because of some amount of meddling by the United States. The commander-in-chief of the Army before Pinochet was General Carlos Prats, who was never as radical as Pinochet and was known to have opposed any independent action taken by the military against the government. This embodied what was known as the Schneider doctrine, named after the commander-in-chief of the Army directly before Prats. Richard Nixon, upon Salvador Allende’s election, placed a number of economic sanctions upon Chile as a sort of punishment for its election of a socialist president. While the sanctions crippled Chile’s economy, they failed to remove Allende from power. So, the Nixon administration turned to the military in Chile as a way to forcibly remove Allende. The issue was that they understood that Prats, as commander-in-chief, would refuse to head any sort of coup d’état against the democratic government. The economic sanctions imposed on Chile resulted in large-scale protests from moderate and conservative middle and upper class people. A failed coup in June 1973 resulted in gatherings of women, mainly the wives of Chilean army officers, outside of General Prats’s house, yelling at him and shaming him for failing to restore order. They used some rather rude words that I would rather not share here. There is some evidence to indicate that it was the American diplomatic corps and the intelligence services who organized for these women to stage these protests, which resulted in Prats’s resignation. With Prats out of the way, it was only three months later, on September 11, 1973, that Allende was overthrown by Pinochet. Prats and his wife escaped to Buenos Aires, where they were both murdered A little over a year later by members of Pinochet’s secret police, the National Intelligence Directorate (Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, or DINA). There was also a former CIA agent named Michael Townley who, after he left the intelligence services, became a mercenary hired by the DINA to participate in General Prats’s assassination. He was also involved in the assassination of Allende’s ambassador to the US and later Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier in Sheridan Circle in Washington DC two years later.