While the big story has always been that Pinochet came to power through a CIA-organize military coup, most people forget the influence that the Soviet Union and Cuba had on Chile at the time. There’s really two sides to that coin, but most contemporary leftists ignore the inconvenience of the fact that the KGB gave money to Allende and helped organize the communist opposition. The Times has an interesting excerpt from a soon-to-be published book called The Mitrokhin Archive Volume II, which talks about this.