Chilean lawmakers want ‘museum of truth’ to provide far-right take on Allende era

National Libertarian party wants museum to highlight ‘victims’ of socialist government ousted by CIA-backed coup in 1973

Far-right lawmakers in Chile have proposed the creation of a “museum of truth” to tell its own version of the years preceding Gen Augusto Pinochet’s bloody dictatorship – and emphasise the plight of what it calls the victims of Salvador Allende’s socialist government.

According to the seven congresspeople from the far-right National Libertarian party who presented the bill, the museum would highlight the “outrage, hunger and humiliation” of Allende’s Popular Unity government.

Allende was elected and took office in 1970, but his socialist government was beset by economic difficulties as inflation rose and supplies dwindled. He was overthrown by Pinochet’s CIA-backed coup d’état on 11 September 1973.

The lawmakers claimed that their museum would “preserve the complete and true historical memory of the victims of supply shortages, political violence … [and] economic chaos” of the Allende period.

The bill was presented by Johannes Kaiser, a former YouTuber who has erupted as a force on the extreme right of Chilean politics as the president of the National Libertarian party.

In the first round of the presidential elections last year, Kaiser took 13.9% of the vote while eulogising the Pinochet dictatorship, under which thousands of Chileans were murdered, forcibly disappeared, tortured, imprisoned or forced into exile.

Chile has lurched to the far right since José Antonio Kast, an ultraconservative Catholic father-of-nine, assumed the presidency in March, after a two-decade career railing against progressive values from the margins of frontline politics.

The bill calls on Kast to create a museum, as well as compile testimonies and photography from the Allende years to elevate what the far-right claim are victims of his reforms.

Kast has often publicly defended the legacy of the dictatorship, which continues to bitterly divide Chile.

A 2023 survey found that 36% of Chileans approved of the Pinochet regime, which came to an end after losing a 1988 referendum, before democracy returned in 1990.

A large and comprehensive national human rights and memory museum in the capital, Santiago, remembers the victims of the Pinochet regime.

The text of the bill, which calls for the preservation of the “complete and true historical memory of its people, without ideological bias, without convenient omissions”, conveniently omits all mention of the CIA’s role in fomenting economic chaos in Chile and numerous attempts to bring down the Allende government at the height of cold war panic in Latin America.

It will be submitted to a vote in the chamber of deputies in the coming days, and although it is non-binding, would result in a formal petition being made to Kast to initiate the creation of the museum.