On September 11, 1973 — exactly twenty-eight years before the attacks on the World Trade Center — the Chilean military bombed the presidential palace in Santiago and overthrew Salvador Allende, the world’s first democratically elected Marxist head of state. Allende died in the palace that day, and the coup installed Augusto Pinochet’s seventeen-year dictatorship. The CIA’s role in destabilizing Allende’s government remains one of the Cold War’s most controversial chapters.

This episode traces Allende from his decades of democratic socialist politics through his narrow 1970 election victory, the economic chaos and CIA interference that followed, and the military coup that killed him and democracy together.

• Allende’s four attempts at the presidency and the narrow 1970 victory that shocked Washington
• The socialist reforms, the economic disruption, and the CIA campaign to destabilize his government
• September 11, 1973 — the military coup, the bombing of La Moneda, and Allende’s death
• The legacy debate — martyr of democracy or failed socialist, depending on who tells the story