Salvador Allende

Salvador Allende was a Chilean physician and politician who became the first democratically elected Marxist president in Latin American history in 1970. He sought to achieve socialism through constitutional and democratic means ('La vía chilena al socialismo'), nationalizing the copper mines and expanding education, before dying during the CIA-backed military coup by Augusto Pinochet in 1973.

Universal martyr of democratic socialism; proved that radical redistributive transformation could be pursued strictly within constitutional norms and democratic voting.