I wonder if it will be joined in with in Chile, where they have their own September 11th anniversary....

A different September 11 anniversary By Alistair Bell

SANTIAGO (Reuters) - On the morning of September 11, airborne assailants devastated a landmark building in an attack that reverberated around the world.

There was an act of dramatic suicide.

Some 3,000 people were to die in the aftermath of the assault, ordered by a figure whose name is now synonymous for many with violence and extremism.

Not 2001, but 1973.

By a macabre coincidence, the strikes on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon share the same anniversary as one of the most controversial acts of political violence in recent Latin American history.

Twenty-nine years ago on September 11, General Augusto Pinochet staged a heavy-handed coup to overthrow Chile's elected President Salvador Allende.

The president, a leftist who leaned toward Marxism, chose to take his own life in the burning La Moneda palace rather than see his dream of an egalitarian state destroyed.

The putsch is still an open wound in Chile, a country of 15 million people that is now one of the most stable in South America.

"It was a tragic moment in Chile's history. September 11, 1973 marked the end of the democratic system we had in Chile and the beginning of a very dark period. It divided and scarred us," current President Ricardo Lagos told Reuters.

Although of much lesser global impact than the attacks in the United States, Chile's September 11 raised Cold War tensions.

Moscow accused the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency of arranging the coup. Allende became a martyr for the international left and Pinochet began his 17-year career as the archetypal Latin American dictator.

NO CONNECTION

The date aside, the two September 11 incidents are unrelated.

"Chronology on the calendar is one thing, historical events are another. There is no way to associate the U.S. September 11 with Chile's September 11," said Cristian Labbe, a right-wing mayor and one of Pinochet's closest friends.

In a clinically planned operation, military chief Pinochet sent Hawker Hunter jets to bomb the presidential palace in the heart of Santiago to force his rival to hand over power.

The bespectacled Allende, an ally of Cuban President Fidel Castro, was holed up on the second floor of the palace with a group of some 30 bodyguards and supporters.

After several hours under bombardment, Allende ordered everyone to leave the ruined building and surrender, vowing that he would come out last.

But the president ducked out of view, sat down on a sofa in the palace's Red Salon and shot himself.

"We were going down the stairs, being beaten in the back by soldiers with rifle butts and then a shot rang out nearby. Someone shouted, 'The president is dead,'" said Arturo Giron, Allende's doctor, who was in the palace.

For many years leftists accused the army of killing Allende but it is now widely accepted that he took his own life.

"He committed suicide," said Giron.

The military killed 3,000 suspected opponents of Pinochet, most of them murdered in the weeks following the coup.

Hatred was such that an army death squad abducted victims and carved them up with ceremonial swords.

The killings and "disappearances" went on for years. The bodies of 1,000 people who went missing have yet to be found, fuelling human rights protests even today.

SEPT.11 AVE

Many Chileans remember those times with horror, but a sizeable number are equally proud of September 11. So much so that in the 1970s they named a street after it in wealthy eastern Santiago.

Chilean conservatives, who make up around 40 percent of voters, say Pinochet brought prosperity compared to food rationing, strikes and property seizures under his predecessor.

"I supported Pinochet and still agree with what he did," said Marcia Manzano, dining in a fast food outlet on Avenida 11 de Septiembre (September 11 Avenue).

"There was more stability in his time, less crime and less unemployment," said the 42-year-old secretary, her shoulder draped with an elegant woollen shawl.

September 11 Avenue is a mile-long (1.6 km) stretch of banks, shops and glass-fronted skyscrapers -- a testament to Chile's economic boom of the last 15 years.

Despite the grim connotations of its name, U.S. companies like Citibank, McDonald's and FleetBoston bank have branches on the avenue.

Most of the shoppers are middle and upper class, those who benefited from economic reforms in the Pinochet era.

Pinochet, now 86 and ailing, hired a team of U.S.-trained advisers who liberalised the economy, laying the ground for an average annual seven percent growth in the 1990s.

Local mayor Labbe said people occasionally complained about the name of September 11 Avenue, but only because of its link to the Chilean coup, not the 2001 attacks believed to have been masterminded by the Saudi-born dissident Osama bin Laden.

CIA AND THE COUP

The Chilean coup, at the height of Cold War, was followed closely by the United States which was openly hostile to Allende, seen as too close to Moscow.

U.S. documents declassified in 1999 showed the CIA funded opposition activities against Allende.

Latin American leftists suspect direct CIA involvement in the 1973 coup but the exact role of the agency in Chile at the time has never been clarified.

Critics say that Washington, at best, gave moral backing to Pinochet and tacit support to his human rights abuses.

"The same United States that now promotes the war against international terrorism, as we well know, was the United States that supported the rather blatantly terrorist crew that perpetrated September 11 in Chile," said Marc Cooper, a leading U.S. leftist journalist.

Cooper, who was once Allende's translator, fled Chile days after September 11 and is now based in California.

"Having lived through September 11 in Chile I think it made me more generous and compassionate toward the pain that Americans felt about this September 11," he said.

While the United States is expected to grind to a halt for the first anniversary commemorations, Chile will be prepared for leftist protests which often break out around September 11th.

In previous years, human rights activists have thrown full-sized dummies of people into the Rio Mapocho river in central Santiago to commemorate leftists who were killed on September 11 and thrown in the water.