Santiago de Chile, September 6 (RHC/Prensa Latina)-- The United States had been plotting the coup d'état long before Salvador Allende was elected president, said Atilio Borón, who is visiting Chile on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the breakdown of democracy.
 
In a lecture given in Santiago de Chile, the Argentinean political scientist said that in 1958, when Allende lost the elections by only 30.000 to Jorge Alessandri, panic began to spread in Washington about the possibility of a leftist candidate coming to power.  

Borón recalled that U.S. companies in Chile had interests in copper and other resources.  In 1958, the United States began to focus its attention on this country, with the emergence in the south of the continent of a coalition that came close to winning, also overcoming Eduardo Frei Montalva, he said.

According to the Argentinean sociologist, that obsession was accentuated with the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and its profound economic, social and political reforms.  The U.S. government, he noted, feared that a leftist victory in Chile would become an example for the entire region and began to build an alternative to what they predicted was almost certain.

"The Chilean case has not been sufficiently studied," said the Argentinean professor and writer, who lived and studied in Chile from 1967 to mid-1972.

Atilio Borón attended at the headquarters of the Central Unitaria de Trabajadores the presentation of the 52nd issue of Araucaria Magazine, which contributes to the debate and reflection on the events that led to the rupture of institutionality.

The political analyst will offer a series of conferences in Concepción, Valparaíso and Santiago de Chile in the framework of the 50th anniversary of the September 11, 1973 coup d'état against the Popular Unity government.

The coup, led by Augusto Pinochet with the full support of the Richard Nixon administration in Washington, gave rise to one of the darkest episodes in the history of this country.  It is estimated that there were more than 40,000 victims of that fascist regime -- including murdered, disappeared and tortured detainees -- without counting the more than 200,000 exiled.