Santiago Walking Tour

Oh our favorite, the walking tours. They can be hit or miss but overall have a decent batting average:). We started in the Plaza de Armas, which is common for many S American countries to have as their central plaza. The tour was focused on both culture and history.

The city itself has a European feel to it in its architecture and cobble-stoned streets. The Plaza de Armas has a line running down it that locals use to differentiate northern Chile from the southern Chile. The plaza itself is not exactly in the city center because they wanted to line it up with where the sun would come over the mountains and hit it in the morning, symbolizing a good harvest.

Our guide also spoke about the September 11, 1973 overthrow of the democratically elected government of Salavador Allende. This day is so infamous that it is often called the other 9/11. Most people are unfamiliar with the American role in this coup d'é·tat.

Allende was a democratic socialist during the height of the Cold War when the American government would put anyone with the name socialist into the same category as an enemy and a government that would eventually side with the communists.

Worse yet, from the American perspective, Allende nationalized many important sectors and commodities, such as copper mining and banking. This excluded many American companies from Chile. Under the guise of “national interests” we worked to organize protests that completely destabilized the country so that essentials, including food, could not get to the people in order to foment unrest.

This culminated in the September 11th overthrow of Allende with the military dictatorship, who was more open to our national interests. It was bloody and violent overthrow, Spanish Civil War style of 1936-1939, with the Capital and Presidential Palace being bombed by both tanks and aircraft. The Allende government quickly fell, Allende committed suicide.

The Pinochet dictatorship lasted for 17 years! until 1990. Arrogantly, Pinochet held a true and fair election in 1990 and asked the people if they wanted the dictatorship to last an additional 8 years. Amazingly, it was an incredibly close vote, but ultimately they voted no and the dictatorship was no more. During Pinochet’s time, upwards of 30,000 people were killed and/or disappeared.

You might be asking why it was such a close vote as to whether to overturn a dictatorship, but you must remember that, thanks to the US, what Chileans most remembered about Allende was that their basic needs weren’t being met, food, shelter and water, because of the strike and protests that were instigated by the US. Sorry for this to be so history focused, but hey, we just did a history tour:).Leer más