Frei had instituted a number of land, tax and nationalization reforms considered too radical by the Right and too little by the Left, the Christian Democrats lost the rightist members of their coalition - allowing Salvador Allende of the Popular Unity party, a coalition of the Socialist, Communist and Radical (moderate) parties, to come in first in the 1970 presidential elections. It was a narrow margin of victory, only 36.3 percent versus 34.9 percent over his closest competitor, a former president heading a rightist coalition. According to the Chilean constitution, in the absence of a clear popular majority, Chile's congress had the right to select the president from the top contenders; in response to a botched CIA attempt to kidnap the Chilean army's chief-of-staff (staged to look like a leftist plot - the man was inadvertently killed instead), all factions of the Chilean political spectrum voted overwhelmingly to confirm Allende as president. Thus, on such a shaky, emotion-driven mandate did Allende - openly admiring Fidel Castro, embracing a far more extensive approach to reform than Frei - become the first democratically-elected pro-Marxist head of state, not only in Chile, but in the world.
It was a position demolished on September 11, 1973. After three years of domestic turmoil during which both the Left (inspired by Soviet interests) and Right (funded by the U.S.) became increasingly radicalized, a military coup led by Allende's own commander of the army, General Augusto Pinochet, seized control of the government, killing the country's elected president in the process. Within days Chile's congress was virtually suspended as an active part of government, replaced by an "authoritarian democracy" ruling by decree. Within the year the Pinochet-let junta had created an "army of the shadows": the DINA, or Directorate of National Intelligence. Thousands were executed, triple that amount arrested and held indefinitely; a "c...