The Rise of Pinochet

In 1973, after a CIA-backed coup, democratically elected president Salvador Allende killed himself. General Augusto Pinochet took his post and unleashed a wave of horror that lasted for many years. He carried out a coup d'etat in which an estimated 3,000 people were killed, including 120 individuals who were famously dropped from helicopters. Regarding a specific cultural regression, women from the Association of Families of the Detained-Disappeared played a crucial role in Pinochet's removal from power in 1990 due to his outspoken anti-feminism.

Pinochet had little remorse for biting the American hand that provided for him. He ordered the assassination of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier in Washington, DC, in 1976. Such is the banality of evil that Ambassador Harry Barnes would refer to the dictator who presided over the deaths of so many Chileans and the revocation of rights for so many others as a "Chilean Archie Bunker" and that even as late as 1986 he was openly rejecting advice from the Reagan Administration to implement human rights, saying to General John Galvin he would "set Chile's course without advice without anyone else."

• Date: 11 September 1973