The big picture: an image that defined Chile’s brutal 1973 coup

When news broke of the overthrow of Salvador Allende’s elected government in Chile, 50 years ago this month, the Dutch photojournalist Koen Wessing took the first plane to Santiago. He was one of the few journalists on the ground to witness the mass arrests of Allende supporters and book burnings in the aftermath of General Augusto Pinochet’s CIA-backed coup. This picture shows groups of Allende supporters forced at gunpoint to remove democracy slogans from city walls. The man walking by, hands in pockets on the deserted street, completes the scene. He may affect indifference to what he is witnessing, like some parts of the international community at the time, but the automatic weapons of the trio of Pinochet’s henchmen are still aimed casually at the back of his head.

Wessing was 31 when he went to Chile. He had become famous in the Netherlands during the student riots of 1969 when he evaded a police cordon around the University of Amsterdam by creating a high footbridge between two buildings to make sure his film of the protests got out. Fearing the seizure of cameras in Chile, he employed similar determination and cunning to get his story to the world, enlisting the help of an air hostess to smuggle his film back to newspapers in Europe. A book of 24 of Wessing’s images, Chile, September 1973, printed without introduction or captions, became a definitive document of the initial repression of Pinochet’s regime, graphic evidence of the brutality of the dictator’s methods. Wessing was due to attend the first public exhibition of his work in Santiago when he died in 2011. By then, the accepted figure for the number of political prisoners tortured or killed by Pinochet had risen to 40,018. The Santiago exhibition of Wessing’s work was titled Indelible Images.