Chile's Broken Democracy, Pinochet's Dictatorship, and Guerrillas in Colombia (History HL)

Not every Latin American story of this period ends in revolution or populism. Chile shows a different pattern: an elected government that collapsed from within, torn apart by its own reforms and by outside pressure. This is the case study for democracy in crisis — why elected leaders sometimes fail.

In 1970, Salvador Allende won the presidency of Chile by a narrow plurality (about 36% of the vote, ahead of two rivals). He led Unidad Popular (Popular Unity), a coalition of socialists, communists and radicals. He was the first freely elected Marxist head of state in the Americas, and he promised La vía chilena al socialismo — the Chilean road to socialism.

These policies caused an economic crisis. Nationalisation and heavy government spending fuelled hyperinflation (over 300% by 1973). Falling copper prices on the world market cut export income. Landowners and truck owners, hit hardest by reform and price controls, launched strikes — most damagingly the October 1972 truckers' strike, which paralysed the transport of food and goods across the country.

Political reasons for the crisis: Allende never had a majority in Congress, so he ruled through decree powers and confrontation rather than compromise. Chilean society polarised: the Christian Democrats (centre) and the National Party (right) united against him, while armed leftist groups pushed Allende to go further and faster. Politics became a battle between street mobilisations, not just Congress.

Social reasons compounded this: the middle class feared losing property and status, while food shortages and rationing turned ordinary consumers against the government. Women's groups organised the "March of the Empty Pots" in December 1971, banging pots in the streets to protest shortages — a powerful symbol of how economic pain became political opposition.

Foreign pressure: US President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger ordered the CIA to make the Chilean economy "scream" — funding opposition media, opposition parties, and the truckers' strikes, while cutting off US loans. This was covert pressure, not direct US action, but it deepened Chile's crisis alongside Allende's own policy failures.

Balance the causes: For Paper 3 you must weigh political (no majority, polarisation), social (polarised classes, shortages, protest) and economic (inflation, falling copper price, capital flight, US pressure) causes together — examiners reward answers that show these factors interacted rather than picking just one.

On 11 September 1973, the Chilean armed forces launched a coup. Air force jets bombed La Moneda (the presidential palace) in Santiago. Allende refused to surrender and died inside the palace — most historians accept he took his own life as troops closed in. General Augusto Pinochet, commander-in-chief of the army (appointed by Allende himself only weeks earlier), emerged as head of a military junta.

Once in power, Pinochet dissolved Congress, banned political parties, and ruled by decree until a new, more authoritarian constitution was imposed in 1980. His economic policy was a sharp break from Allende: he handed control to the "Chicago Boys", Chilean economists trained at the University of Chicago in free-market theory.

Repression and treatment of opposition: Pinochet's regime ran the National Stadium in Santiago as a mass detention and torture centre in the coup's first weeks. The secret police, DINA (National Intelligence Directorate), hunted down leftists at home and abroad — including the 1976 car-bomb assassination of former minister Orlando Letelier in Washington DC. Chile's official truth commission later documented over 3,000 people killed or 'disappeared' and tens of thousands tortured or imprisoned during the dictatorship (1973–1990).

Successes and failures: Failures: mass human rights abuses, loss of political freedom, huge social inequality. Successes (from the regime's own standpoint): inflation eventually tamed, sustained economic growth from the mid-1980s, and a free-market model that shaped Chile's economy long after Pinochet left power in 1990.

Not every response to inequality in Latin America came from elections or coups. In several countries, groups turned to armed struggle in the countryside — guerrilla movements. The clearest case study is Colombia, home to Latin America's longest-running insurgency.

Colombia's guerrillas grew out of La Violencia (1948–1958), a brutal civil conflict between Liberal and Conservative supporters that killed around 200,000 people. When the two elite parties made a power-sharing pact (the National Front, 1958) to end the fighting, it shut out other political voices — rural peasants and communists had no legal path to power. Many peasant self-defence communities that had survived La Violencia refused to disarm.

Origins of the FARC: In 1964, the Colombian army attacked one such community at Marquetalia. The survivors, led by Manuel Marulanda ("Tirofijo"), regrouped and in 1966 formally founded the FARC — the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia. It aimed to overthrow the government and redistribute land to the rural poor.

Why Colombia, specifically?: Colombia's weak central government, mountainous and jungle terrain, exclusion of the left from politics after 1958, and deep rural poverty all gave guerrilla movements space to survive that stronger, more centralised states (like Chile) did not have.

A different kind of challenge to the old order came from inside the Catholic Church: liberation theology. It argued that the Church should actively side with the poor against unjust structures, not simply preach patience.

Link, don't list: Liberation theology connects to everything else in this topic: it gave moral backing to peasants opposing military dictatorships (like Pinochet's Chile) and inspired some clergy to support guerrilla causes (like in Colombia and Nicaragua). Use it to show connections across your essay, not as an isolated fact.