Allende's Legacy

The magazine n+1 takes a look at the fight between different strains of the Chilean left to appropriate the legacy of Salvador Allende. The gist seems to be that for hard-core leftists, Socialist presidents like Roberto Lagos and Michelle Bachelet have sold Allende out. It's an interesting read, but the article is predicated on a faulty idea: Salvador Allende was a political saint. Not so. He was a martyr whose death is all the more poignant given the monster who succeeded him, and he was the victim of one of the US's most Machiavellian schemes, but Allende himself had an intimate relationship with the USSR. Less than a decade after the Cuban Missile Crisis, the prospect of a KGB contact (code-named "leader") and Castro ally controlling Chile was unsettling. I don't think that justifies our support for the coup, and much less the years of close ties to Pinochet, but it does mitigate them a bit. And it makes painting Allende as a socialist Christ misleading.