Fifty years ago tomorrow, the democratically elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, was overthrown by General Augusto Pinochet. In the aftermath, 3,000 leftists were murdered, tens of thousands tortured, and hundreds of thousands driven from the country. Allende’s Marxist policies, including the nationalization of some mining operations in Chile, were nullified as Pinochet laid the ground for the first neoliberal economy in the western hemisphere.

Allende disproved Western propaganda that painted Marxist governments as inherently violent, undemocratic, and authoritarian. His Popular Unity party did not achieve power through armed revolution, but at the ballot box. This worried the United States and its allies immensely. According to Chilean documentarian Patricio Guzmán, Allende represented a new and alternative political path that posed a threat to transnational capital. Such a path was intolerable to the business interests of the Global North and anathema to Cold War–era US policy makers. The result was that Chile was forced to experience an experiment in neoliberalism at gunpoint. Canada, often projecting an image of global friendliness and of a champion of human rights, was nevertheless deeply complicit in forcing Chile to become an unwilling neoliberal laboratory.