How Copper Sparked the Chilean Coup | Backyard Empire

Chile sits on the richest copper on earth, and for most of the twentieth century two American companies owned it. Anaconda ran Chuquicamata, the largest open-pit copper mine in the world; Kennecott ran El Teniente, the largest underground one — both as walled enclaves, with the profits flowing to New York while copper carried the bulk of Chile's export earnings. This episode of Backyard Empire — the first of a three-part "The Mines" arc — traces what happened when Salvador Allende was elected in 1970 promising to take the copper back. In 1971 the Chilean Congress nationalized the mines unanimously, and Allende deducted some $774 million in "excess profits," leaving the companies little or nothing. Washington answered on two tracks the Church Committee later documented: "Track I," the political and economic squeeze Nixon summed up as "make the economy scream," with ITT money in the mix; and "Track II," the secret CIA push for a military coup that led to the killing of the army's constitutionalist commander, General René Schneider. We carry it through the credit and copper embargo, the 1973 coup, and the compensation the Pinochet dictatorship then paid the companies — while copper itself stayed nationalized as Codelco. We work from the Church Committee report, declassified FRUS records, and the National Security Archive, and we keep the hardest question open: how much did U.S. covert action — versus Chile's own economic crisis — actually bring Allende down? Narrated by AI voices from sourced, human-reviewed research. ▶ Full series: [SERIES PLAYLIST LINK] 🔔 Subscribe:    / @letsrethinkhistory   #History #Chile #ColdWar