Marian Schlotterbeck is assistant professor of history at the University of California-Davis and the author of Beyond the Vanguard: Everyday Revolutionaries in Allende’s Chile..
Socialist leader Salvador Allende became Chile’s president fifty years ago today. Allende’s election inaugurated a unique experiment in radical democracy that was cut short by Augusto Pinochet’s brutal US-backed coup.
The violent overthrow of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973 brought to a brutal close a thousand days of popular participation and radical democratic ferment.