From the outset, Allende's position in its full complexity was rarely understood by much of the left. When France's leading revolutionary of the time, Régis Debray, came to Santiago to depose Allende in now legendary and lengthy interviews, the young Frenchman was manifestly confused. In Debray's rigid thinking, either one was a bona fide armed revolutionary à la Che Guevara or a hopeless reformer following in the footsteps of the ineffectual European popular fronts of the 1930s. Allende had to repeat to Debray several times that the new Chilean government, coming to power democratically, would both respect and enhance democracy while not shying away from radical, socialist reform.

A few years after the coup, another high-profile European leftist finally got it right regarding Allende. The Italian Marxist philosopher Lucio Colletti (who died in 2001 after a disappointing political journey to the right) argued back in the mid-1970s that the left had bogged down in a false and perilous assumption: i.e., the more violent a revolution, the more transformative it must be. Consequently, peaceful transitions--like Allende's Popular Unity government--were doomed to dead-end reformism. Colletti argued that this facile thinking was itself a legacy of Stalinism and, indeed, had no real roots in socialist experience.

In the three decades since the coup, the criticism most frequently raised on the left about Allende was that he failed to "arm the workers" and that he was too tolerant of an opposition that eventually overthrew him.

The first point is beyond absurdity. Guns don't materialize either from the sky or from presidential decree. Chile's relatively advanced and stable democratic institutions made the option of armed revolt about as viable and attractive as it might seem in modern California. If the argument is that Allende, in the weeks before the coup, should have preventively armed his supporters, the follow-up question should be, how? Just as realistic--that is, unrealistic--is the suggestion that he should have disarmed the military.

The Allende government made many strategic mistakes--enough that a coup would probably have been inevitable even if the United States had never engaged in its covert program of subversion (though the American intervention certainly accelerated and paved the way for the putsch). At times the Popular Unity government I worked with was driven too much by a heady voluntarism, a hubris that kept it from making key alliances and compromises. At other moments, the government was paralyzed by its own internal divisions and disagreements. But among these mistakes was certainly not Allende's tolerance for the opposition or his commitment, to the end, to democracy. I don't know if historic circumstances would have ever permitted Allende's vision to triumph. I do know that if he had suspended democracy and ruled by dictatorship, it would no longer have been his vision, nor would it any longer have been a "revolution" much worth defending.

If one surveys the panorama of today's international left, Allende's legacy occasionally flashes and flourishes. The arduous two-decade march into power of Brazil's Workers' Party, and the unique balancing act of socialist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, draw directly from the lessons of Chile. The anti-authoritarian, egalitarian spirit of new social movements-- whether in Buenos Aires or Seattle--reflects the ethos of Allende, as do the recent moves by Argentine President Néstor Kirchner to lift immunity from prosecution of officers of the former military junta. Indeed, anywhere the left is willing to be open, innovative, nondogmatic and imaginative, both realistic and utopian, where it can reject Tony Blair's New Labour alliance with Dubya's neocons as firmly and unflinchingly as it denounces the wholesale jailing of dissidents and summary executions by an ossified and dictatorial Cuban state, the figure of Salvador Allende and his self-sacrifice for the principles of social justice and democracy loom ever larger, more inspiring and more worthy of reverence and respect.

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