The Other 9/11

This issue of the Radical History Review revisits the history and memory of the September 11, 1973, coup in Chile, forty years later; evaluates its current legacy; and foregrounds contemporary debates about freedom, terrorism, and democracy in post–Cold War Latin America. In recent years, the date 9/11 has become firmly associated with al-Qaeda’s 2001 attacks on the United States and the presumed advent of a new era of global conflict between liberal democracy and fundamentalist jihad. “The Other 9/11: Chile, 1973—Memory, Resistance, and Democratization” reminds us not only that other seminal acts of violence occurred on a prior 9/11, beyond the borders of the United States, but that Allende’s 1973 overthrow was an act of documented state-sponsored terror supported by the United States against a democratically elected government. The issue’s title is therefore less ironic than it is insistent on historical memory, insofar as it encourages reflection on the continuities of US imperialist incursions beyond its borders from the Cold War into the present. At the same time, it encourages a reevaluation of Popular Unity’s transformative politics from a broadened perspective that accounts for the changes that came with Pinochet’s dictatorship and two decades of Concertación rule.