TAKING ON A CHILEAN DICTATOR

Four Scottish workmates who took on Chilean dictator General Pinochet are immortalised in a new film. Here, they recall fighting fascism from their East Kilbride factory

SANTIAGO, TUESDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 1973 At 11.58am, five hours after news of a military coup against the Chilean government led by Salvador Allende began, the Chilean air force’s Hawker Hunter fighters join the fighting. Streaking through the Santiago sky, they open fire on the presidential palace, La Moneda, where Allende and his colleagues are holding out.

The coup’s endgame has started. Troops and tanks are already in the streets around La Moneda. The tanks have been firing on the palace since 10 in the morning.

The bombardment continues for almost 20 minutes. The Hawker Hunters fire around 17 rockets into the palace. One is a direct hit. Fires jump up and lick at the building. Ceilings collapse.

Two hours later Allende, the first openly Marxist president elected democratically in South America, places an AK-47 assault rifle between his legs, the barrel pointed at his head, and pulls the trigger. (Other accounts say he was assassinated.)

With his death more than a century of democracy in Chile comes to an end. In its place a brutal repressive dictatorship takes over, led by General Augusto Pinochet. In the days and months and years that followed, thousands of people would be killed or go missing.

From left to right: Stuart Barr, Bob Fulton, Robert Somerville and John Keenan at the Royal British Legion in East Kilbride. In the 1970s the group refused to repair warplane engines in an act of solidarity against the violent military coup in Chile