Chileans continue calling for justice fifty-one years after coup (+Photos)

With tributes to the dictatorship victims and calls for missing people, Chileans recall on Wednesday the 51st anniversary of the coup d'etat against the Popular Unity (UP) government.

On September 11, 1973, tanks and military planes attacked La Moneda, Chile’s Presidential Palace, and other buildings, overthrowing the government of President Salvador Allende. Augusto Pinochet, then commander-in-chief of the army, led the military takeover that ushered in a 17-year dictatorship during which more than 40,000 crimes against humanity, including torture, assassinations, and disappearances, were committed.

Fifty-one years after those events, there are still more than 1,100 people whose remains are unknown.

Under the slogan “Years of impunity will not silence our clamor for justice,” the Party and the Communist Youth called for a rally from La Alameda Avenue to the monument to the former president in Plaza de la Constitución (Constitution Square) this Wednesday.

Participants in the march will pass outside Morande 80’s side door, the place where Allende’s body was removed the day of the coup.

“I am not going to resign. Placed in a historic transition, I will pay for loyalty to the people with my life… Go forward knowing that, sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again, and free men will walk through them to construct a better society.,” the former president said in his last speech to the Chilean people.