The crowd that thronged Santiago's 100,000-seat National Stadium was Chile's new elite. There were rural campesinos carrying scythes, cement workers in blue hardhats, electricians in yellow ones, copper miners whose helmet lights glowed eerily in the dusk. For nearly two hours they listened as their tieless. coatless President, Salvador Allende Gossens, reeled off numbers—of farms expropriated, factories nationalized, peasants resettled on their own new lands. "The Chilean road toward socialism," he boomed, "has been realized with the least social cost of any other revolution in the world."
The revolution that Chile's...