THE COUP

In Ariel Dorfman’s new novel, a billionaire has a scheme to save the planet.

- JONATHAN DEE

Salvador Allende’s election, in 1970, to a six-year term as President of Chile—though he got to serve only about half of it—was one of those rare moments which give the world reason to believe there might be an alternative to the rapacious, greed-based way we have always run things. He had campaigned on a series of profoundly power-threatening reforms he called the “Chilean road to socialism,” and his peaceful assumption of the Presidency—after three failed runs—seemed like something of a miracle. Over furious, often U.S.-backed opposition, he unleashed a torrent of changes, some of them socialist boilerplate (nationalizing the copper industry, redistributing farmland, supplying milk to schoolchildren) and others more visionary, such as the remarkable Project Cybersyn, aiming to link the then nascent technology of computers to factories and even to citizens’ homes as a way of managing the economy and exploring direct democracy. For a thousand days or so, the nation, and the watching world, seemed transformed. Comparisons to the American Camelot that John F. Kennedy conjured would be fair up to a point. Both figures bear out the sad truth that nothing lends itself to mythmaking, political or otherwise, like the vacuum left by an untimely death.