In September 1971, a year into Allende’s mandate, the top business leaders in Chile held an emergency meeting in the seaside city of Viña del Mar to develop a coherent regime-change strategy. According to Orlando Sáenz, president of the National Association of Manufacturers (generously funded by the CIA and many of the same foreign multinationals doing their own plotting in Washington), the gathering decided that “Allende’s government was incompatible with freedom in Chile and with the existence of private enterprise, and that the only way to avoid the end was to overthrow the government.”
