By delicious irony, the local member of parliament for the impoverished Atacama region of Chile - which includes the doomed mine of San Jose - is none other than Isabel Allende. Allende is the daughter of Salvador Allende, who was a president of the country and who put a revolver to his head in the final hours of the August 1973 coup d'etat, which toppled the world's first, and only, elected Marxist head of state. That coup, which Henry Kissinger famously reported to Richard Nixon with the words "we didn't do it ... but we helped them do it" paved the way for decades of brutish dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet.
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