# The United States covertly worked for years to destabilize Salvador Allende's Chile before the 1973 coup

**Verdict: Proven.** Confirmed by the Church Committee's own report and more than 20,000 declassified U.S. documents: Washington spent years and millions covertly working to prevent, and then to unseat, Allende. What the record does not establish is direct U.S. authorship of the September 11, 1973 coup itself, which the Chilean military planned and carried out.

Category: Government & Intelligence · Era: Cold War era · First circulated: 1970 · Believed by: Confirmed by a U.S. Senate investigation and declassified files
URL: https://theconspiratory.com/theory/chile-coup-1973

## Summary
For three years the Nixon administration ran a covert campaign to keep Salvador Allende out of Chile's presidency, and then to make his government fail: funding opposition media and strikes, backing a plot that got Chile's army commander killed, and, in Nixon's own recorded instruction, moving to 'make the economy scream.' All of this is documented in the U.S. government's own files. The harder question is what the United States did on the day of the coup itself, and there the plain answer is narrower than the shorthand.

## The claim
That from Salvador Allende's election in September 1970 until the military coup of September 11, 1973, the United States government, principally the CIA acting on orders from President Richard Nixon and national security adviser Henry Kissinger, ran a sustained covert program to prevent Allende from taking office and, failing that, to destabilize and overthrow his elected socialist government: spending millions of dollars to fund opposition parties, newspapers and strikes, and in 1970 backing a plot to abduct the constitutionalist army commander General René Schneider that ended in his death; and further, in the strongest version of the claim, that the United States directly organized and directed the September 11, 1973 coup that installed General Augusto Pinochet.

## Origin and timeline
- 1970-09-04: Socialist candidate Salvador Allende wins a plurality in Chile's presidential election. Because no candidate won a majority, the Chilean Congress must confirm the result in an October vote, opening a seven-week window U.S. officials move to exploit.
- 1970-09-15: In a brief Oval Office meeting, President Nixon orders CIA Director Richard Helms to prevent Allende from taking power. Helms's handwritten notes record the instructions: '$10,000,000 available, more if necessary... make the economy scream.' This launches the covert effort later known as Track II.
- 1970-10: Under Track II, the CIA works with Chilean officers to engineer a coup before Allende's confirmation. General René Schneider, the army commander who opposes military intervention, is targeted for abduction to remove that obstacle.
- 1970-10-22: Schneider is shot during a botched kidnapping attempt by a Chilean group and dies three days later. The CIA had supplied weapons and money to plotters, though the fatal attempt was carried out by a faction it had, days earlier, tried to distance itself from.
- 1970-11-03: Allende is inaugurated president. U.S. policy shifts from blocking his inauguration to undermining his government from within: what officials framed as making his rule untenable.
- 1971–1973: The CIA channels covert funds to opposition parties, private-sector groups and the anti-Allende press, with the Santiago daily El Mercurio receiving well over $1 million. Money also reaches groups tied to the crippling truckers' strikes of 1972 and 1973.
- 1973-09-11: The Chilean armed forces, led by army commander General Augusto Pinochet, launch a coup. La Moneda presidential palace is bombed and stormed; President Allende dies inside during the assault.
- 1975-12: The U.S. Senate's Church Committee publishes 'Covert Action in Chile 1963-1973,' laying out the scale of U.S. spending and operations while stating it found no evidence the United States was directly involved in the 1973 coup itself.
- 2000s: The National Security Archive's Chile Documentation Project, led by Peter Kornbluh, obtains and publishes more than 20,000 declassified CIA, State Department and White House records, deepening the documentary picture of U.S. covert action.

## The evidence, claim by claim
- Claim: Nixon personally ordered the CIA to stop Allende from taking power and to wreck Chile's economy.
  Evidence: Confirmed by the CIA's own contemporaneous notes. Richard Helms's handwritten record of the September 15, 1970 Oval Office meeting reads, in fragments, '1 in 10 chance perhaps, but save Chile... not concerned risks involved... $10,000,000 available, more if necessary... make the economy scream.' The Church Committee and later declassifications treat the meeting as the origin of the covert effort to prevent Allende's confirmation.
- Claim: The CIA ran two parallel tracks against Allende, one political and one aimed at a coup.
  Evidence: Confirmed by the Church Committee report. 'Track I' covered political, economic and propaganda moves to block Allende's congressional confirmation; 'Track II' was a separate, more secret effort, run without the knowledge of the U.S. ambassador and the State Department's own committee, to instigate a military coup before Allende took office in 1970.
- Claim: U.S. covert action played a role in the death of Chile's army commander, General René Schneider.
  Evidence: Proven, with an important limit. Schneider, a constitutionalist who opposed a coup, was an obstacle the CIA sought to remove, and the agency supplied weapons and money to Chilean plotters under Track II. The fatal October 22, 1970 attempt was carried out by a group the CIA had days earlier signaled it wanted to stand down, and Schneider drew a weapon and was shot. The CIA did not intend his death, but its documented backing of a kidnapping scheme is why its role is inseparable from the killing.
- Claim: The United States spent millions to fund opposition media, parties and strikes inside Chile.
  Evidence: Confirmed. The Church Committee found the CIA spent roughly $8 million on covert activities in Chile between 1970 and the 1973 coup, with earlier operations dating to 1963. Documented recipients include opposition parties, private-sector organizations, and the newspaper El Mercurio, which received well over $1 million; funds also reached groups connected to the truckers' strikes that paralyzed the country in 1972 and 1973.
- Claim: The United States planned, ordered and directed the September 11, 1973 coup.
  Evidence: Not established, and this is the crucial line. The Church Committee, with access to the classified record, stated it found no evidence that the United States was directly involved in the 1973 coup. Declassified files show years of destabilization, contact with coup-minded officers, and a U.S. posture that signaled a coup would not be unwelcome; they do not show the CIA planning the operation, setting its date, or commanding the Chilean units that carried it out. The coup was designed and executed by the Chilean military.
- Claim: President Allende was murdered by the coup plotters or by U.S. agents.
  Evidence: Not supported by the physical evidence. Allende died inside La Moneda on September 11, 1973 as the palace was stormed. A 2011 forensic investigation ordered by a Chilean court, including an exhumation and an international expert panel, concluded he died by suicide, shot by an assault rifle held under his chin. The finding is consistent with the account of those with him in the palace; it does not diminish the U.S. role in the years of pressure that preceded the coup, but the killing itself was not a U.S. or coup-plotter execution.
- Claim: Washington welcomed and quickly embraced the Pinochet dictatorship that followed.
  Evidence: Confirmed. The Nixon administration recognized the military junta promptly and provided economic and other support to the Pinochet government, which ruled until 1990. Declassified records also document extensive U.S. contemporaneous knowledge of the regime's repression, a separate and well-established part of the historical record.

## Why people believe it
- Because the core of it is documented, not alleged: a U.S. Senate committee and tens of thousands of the government's own declassified files confirm a years-long covert campaign to unseat an elected leader, which is a rare and damning admission.
- Nixon's recorded order to 'make the economy scream' is so vivid, and so exactly matches what critics long suspected, that it makes the further leap (that the U.S. must therefore have run the coup itself) feel like common sense rather than an overclaim.
- The gap between what Washington confirmed doing (years of destabilization) and what it denies doing (authoring the coup) is narrow enough that many readers reasonably collapse it, especially when the documented conduct is already so serious.
- Chile's own long reckoning, the exhumations, trials and truth commissions, kept the story alive for fifty years and tied it to a broader, well-founded distrust of U.S. Cold War intervention in Latin America.

## Open questions
- Exactly how close the United States came to the coup itself, as opposed to the years of destabilization that preceded it, remains genuinely disputed. The Church Committee found no evidence of direct U.S. involvement in the September 1973 operation, but it also documented sustained contact with coup-minded officers and a policy meant to foster what it called a 'coup climate.' Where 'created the conditions and signaled approval' ends and 'directed the coup' begins is a line the public record narrows but does not fully close, and further declassification could still move it.
- The precise chain of responsibility for General Schneider's death is still argued. The CIA backed a kidnapping plot and supplied weapons and money, then appeared to try to call off one faction days before the fatal attempt; whether that late reversal was genuine or merely deniability, and how much moral and legal responsibility the agency bears for a killing it says it did not intend, has been litigated (including a civil suit by Schneider's family) without a settled answer.
- How decisive U.S. covert spending actually was to Allende's fall, as against Chile's own deep political polarization, hyperinflation and institutional crisis, is a matter historians weigh differently. The money, propaganda and strike support were real and were meant to make the country ungovernable; disentangling their effect from homegrown economic and political failure is not something the documentary record settles cleanly.
- Significant operational records remain classified or redacted. The United States has released a very large diplomatic and intelligence file on Chile, but researchers note that the CIA's own covert-operations records are less complete than its diplomatic cables, leaving parts of the day-to-day conduct of Track II and later operations documented only in outline.

## Sources
- Covert Action in Chile 1963-1973 (Staff Report of the Church Committee), U.S. Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities (1975): https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/08/sites-default-files-94chile.pdf
- Covert Action in Chile: The Significance of the Church Committee Report 50 Years Later, National Security Archive, George Washington University (2025): https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/intelligence/2025-12-04/covert-action-chile-significance-church-committee-report-50
- 'Extreme Option: Overthrow Allende': The 40th Anniversary of the September 15, 1970 Meeting, National Security Archive, George Washington University (ed. Peter Kornbluh) (2020): https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/chile/2020-09-15/extreme-option-overthrow-allende
- The CIA and Chile: Anatomy of an Assassination (the killing of General René Schneider), National Security Archive, George Washington University (2020): https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/briefing-book/chile/2020-10-22/cia-chile-anatomy-assassination
- Editorial Note: 'Make the economy scream' (Helms notes, 15 September 1970 meeting), Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, Vol. 21, U.S. State Department, Office of the Historian (1970): https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v21/d93
- 1973 Chilean coup d'état, Encyclopaedia Britannica: https://www.britannica.com/event/1973-Chilean-coup-d-etat
- The U.S. set the stage for a coup in Chile. It had unintended consequences at home, NPR (2023): https://www.npr.org/2023/09/10/1193755188/chile-coup-50-years-pinochet-kissinger-human-rights-allende
- Former Chilean President Allende's death confirmed as suicide, CNN (2011): https://www.cnn.com/2011/WORLD/americas/07/19/chile.allende/index.html
- The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, Peter Kornbluh, The New Press / National Security Archive (2013): https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/project/chile-documentation-project

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