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First we marched for Chile. Now it’s Palestine
LINDA PENTZ GUNTER recalls the anger and heartbreak over the 1973 coup in Chile, with its torture and massacres, which we now relive with the horrors carried out by Israel in Gaza – and also through our solidarity
Rosa Soto, sister of Enrique Soto who went missing after being detained during the Pinochet dictatorship, attends a ceremony in Villa Baviera, September 7 2024

THE first time I marched through London to protest Israel’s genocide in Gaza last January, along with half a million people, I found myself walking beneath the banner of the Palestine Solidarity Campaign (PSC).

It felt like a strange, if rather unwelcome, homecoming. Fifty-one years ago I joined the Chile Solidarity Campaign during my first weeks at university.

On September 11 of that year, 1973, a US-orchestrated military coup ousted Chile’s democratically elected socialist government and its popular president, Salvador Allende, who died during the attack on the presidential palace.

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