Salvador Allende and Africa’s Unfinished Struggle for Economic Sovereignty

Fifty-three years after the overthrow of Chile’s democratically elected socialist president, the struggle over natural resources, economic sovereignty and the right of nations to determine their own development remains unfinished. In this article, Baba Yunus Muhammad argues that nowhere is that struggle more consequential today than in Africa.

On 11 September 1973, the skies over Santiago darkened as the Chilean armed forces attacked La Moneda, the presidential palace. Inside was Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president whose attempt to transform Chile through constitutional and democratic means had brought him into direct confrontation with powerful domestic and international interests. Before the day was over, Allende would be dead, his government overthrown and Chile placed under the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. But the economic and political questions raised by his brief presidency did not disappear with him. More than half a century later, they have returned with remarkable force as the world enters a new struggle over strategic resources, industrial power and the changing architecture of global politics.

To understand Allende, one must first understand Chile. Like much of Latin America, the country possessed considerable natural wealth but had inherited an economic structure shaped by colonial extraction and subsequently reinforced by foreign capital. Copper was the foundation of the Chilean economy, yet much of the wealth generated from its extraction flowed abroad. By 1929, American investment in Chile had reached approximately $400 million, and over the following decades companies such as Anaconda and Kennecott became dominant forces in the copper industry. The central contradiction was therefore not that Chile lacked resources, but that the country possessed resources without exercising full control over the economic benefits they generated.

When Allende was elected in 1970 as the candidate of the Popular Unity coalition, he sought to change that structure. His government nationalised the foreign-owned copper industry, which accounted for roughly three-quarters of Chile’s exports, and argued that Chileans had the right to recover the wealth generated from their own natural resources. His administration also nationalised major industries, redistributed millions of acres of land, increased wages and expanded housing and social programmes for poorer citizens. Whatever one’s ideological position on socialism, the significance of the experiment was clear: Allende was attempting to connect political democracy with economic sovereignty and to demonstrate that a government could use democratic authority to alter the distribution of economic power.

That was precisely what made Chile such a difficult proposition for the forces that benefited from the existing order. Washington regarded Allende’s election as a major strategic challenge during the Cold War, and the United States subsequently supported efforts to undermine his government. Declassified American records have established the extent of US involvement in destabilisation efforts, while economic pressure and political interference contributed to the increasingly difficult environment in which Allende attempted to govern. The famous instruction associated with Richard Nixon’s policy of making the Chilean economy “scream” remains one of the most enduring illustrations of how economic pressure can become an instrument of political warfare.

It would be historically inadequate, however, to attribute every problem that confronted Allende to foreign intervention. Chile was already deeply polarised. Inflation, shortages, political conflict and opposition from powerful domestic groups placed enormous pressure on the government. The Popular Unity coalition itself contained competing visions of the pace and direction of Chile’s transformation. Yet these internal contradictions should not obscure the larger historical reality: when a government attempts to alter who controls strategic resources, the conflict rarely remains a purely domestic political dispute. Economic interests quickly acquire political and geopolitical dimensions, particularly when those resources are strategically important to powerful external actors.

The overthrow of Allende consequently became more than the destruction of one presidency. It represented the defeat of one conception of development and the emergence of another. Under Pinochet, Chile became an important laboratory for market-oriented economic reforms associated with the Chicago School, while the state-centred developmental ambitions of the Allende period were dismantled. Chile’s experience therefore became part of the wider transformation of the global political economy that would eventually produce the ascendancy of neoliberalism.

The significance of this history for Africa today is difficult to ignore. Africa is once again at the centre of a global contest over natural resources, except that the resources in question are no longer simply the oil, gold and copper that dominated the politics of the twentieth century. They increasingly include cobalt, lithium, graphite, manganese, rare earth elements, platinum-group metals and other critical minerals required for batteries, renewable energy, advanced electronics, artificial intelligence and modern defence technologies. The continent possesses an extraordinary share of the world’s mineral wealth, yet much of that wealth continues to leave Africa in relatively unprocessed form, while the higher-value stages of production remain concentrated elsewhere.

This is the paradox that Africa has failed to resolve for generations. The continent exports the raw materials required for industrialisation while importing many of the manufactured products created from them. It can export cobalt and import sophisticated batteries; export lithium and import advanced technologies; export crude oil and import refined petroleum products. The problem, therefore, is not simply the ownership of individual mines. It is the structure of the entire value chain, from extraction and financing to transportation, processing, manufacturing and technology.

That is where Allende’s experience becomes relevant again. His central insight was that possessing a resource is not the same thing as controlling the economic benefits that resource can generate. For contemporary Africa, the challenge is to move beyond the old model in which foreign capital extracts African resources, transports them through infrastructure designed primarily for export and processes them elsewhere. The objective must be to transform natural wealth into African productive capacity.

The intensifying rivalry between China and the United States makes this question even more urgent. China has spent decades establishing strong positions in African infrastructure, mining and mineral-processing networks and has become particularly important in the global cobalt supply chain. The United States and its allies are now seeking to reduce their dependence on Chinese-controlled supply chains by strengthening their own relationships with African mineral producers. The competition is visible in initiatives such as the Lobito Corridor, which links mineral-producing regions of the Democratic Republic of Congo and Zambia to Angola’s Atlantic coast, as well as in renewed Western interest in African critical-mineral projects.

There is nothing inherently illegitimate about major powers pursuing their economic and strategic interests. China has its industrial requirements, just as the United States and Europe have their own concerns about supply-chain security. The danger arises when African countries interpret this rivalry as an invitation to choose sides rather than an opportunity to negotiate from a position of greater collective strength. Africa should not become the terrain upon which another great-power contest is fought. Its strategic objective should be to use the emergence of a more multipolar international system to widen its choices while steadily reducing its structural dependence on any external power.

This is particularly important because the mineral race is unfolding alongside an African debt crisis. Many African governments require enormous amounts of capital for infrastructure, energy, transport, healthcare and industrialisation, yet face high borrowing costs, weak currencies and limited domestic fiscal capacity. External financing therefore remains indispensable for many countries. The danger is that infrastructure and resource development become locked into a cycle in which countries borrow to facilitate extraction, export raw materials to earn foreign exchange and then use those earnings primarily to service external debt, leaving insufficient resources for the deeper transformation of their economies.

The answer cannot simply be to reject foreign investment or external finance. Africa needs both. What must change is the bargaining relationship. Foreign capital should be judged by whether it contributes to productive transformation, technology transfer, local employment, processing capacity and long-term development rather than simply by the size of the investment announcement. Infrastructure should connect African economies to one another as well as connecting mines to ports. Mineral agreements should encourage beneficiation and processing within Africa. And African governments should develop stronger domestic financial institutions and capital markets so that their enormous pools of pension, savings and sovereign capital can play a greater role in financing development.

This is where the emerging multipolar world could become an opportunity rather than another chapter in the history of dependency. Africa today has more potential partners than it did during the Cold War. China, the United States, Europe, India, Russia and the Gulf states are all seeking deeper relationships with the continent. African governments therefore have an opportunity to negotiate across competing centres of economic and geopolitical power. But multipolarity should not be confused with liberation. A world containing several powerful centres can still leave weaker countries dependent upon all of them.

The real objective must therefore be African strategic autonomy. This does not mean isolation, nor does it mean hostility towards China, America or Europe. It means developing sufficient economic and institutional strength to engage all of them on terms that advance African interests. It means moving from a continental economy that exports commodities to one that increasingly processes, manufactures and consumes what it produces. It means using the African Continental Free Trade Area to create markets large enough to support industrialisation, and it means treating Africa’s mineral wealth as a strategic foundation for continental development rather than merely as a source of government revenue.

In this sense, the most important lesson of Allende is not necessarily that Africa should nationalise its mines. The contemporary African situation is considerably more complex, and state ownership is neither the only nor always the most effective mechanism for achieving national development. The deeper lesson is that political sovereignty is incomplete without economic sovereignty. A country may possess a flag, a parliament and regular elections while remaining economically vulnerable because the most important decisions affecting its future are determined elsewhere.

Allende understood that contradiction. His government attempted, however imperfectly, to place the country’s natural resources at the centre of a broader national development project. His defeat demonstrated the enormous resistance that can confront such an effort when domestic economic interests, foreign capital and geopolitical power converge against it. But the failure of his particular experiment does not invalidate the questions it raised. Those questions are now being asked in a different part of the world.

Africa is sitting on resources that the next generation of global industry desperately needs. The United States wants secure access to critical minerals. China wants to protect and extend its industrial supply chains. Europe wants to diversify its sources of strategic materials. India and the Gulf states are expanding their economic engagement with Africa. At the same time, African countries are struggling with debt, infrastructure deficits, unemployment and the urgent need for industrialisation.

The danger is obvious. Africa could become the object of a new scramble in which different external powers compete for access to its resources while the continent remains at the bottom of the value chain. But the opportunity is equally significant. If African countries coordinate their policies, strengthen their institutions, develop regional infrastructure, deepen intra-African trade and insist on greater local value addition, the mineral revolution could become one of the foundations of a new African industrial age.

That is ultimately why Salvador Allende still matters. His story is not a blueprint for Africa, nor should it be reduced to a romantic celebration of twentieth-century socialism. Its enduring significance lies in the unresolved relationship between democracy, resources and power. Allende asked, in effect, whether political independence could have real meaning if a people did not possess meaningful control over the economic resources upon which their future depended.

More than five decades after the bombing of La Moneda, that question has acquired a new geography. It is now being posed in the copper belts of Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the cobalt fields of Congo, in the lithium deposits of Zimbabwe and Namibia, in Guinea’s bauxite and iron ore, in South Africa’s platinum-group metals and across a continent whose mineral wealth is becoming increasingly important to the global economy.

The new struggle will not necessarily resemble the Chilean confrontation of 1973. There may be no tanks outside a presidential palace and no single foreign power capable of determining the outcome. The instruments of power are more sophisticated: finance, supply chains, technology, infrastructure, trade agreements, debt, investment and control over processing capacity. But the underlying question remains remarkably familiar: who ultimately controls the wealth generated by a nation’s resources?

Africa now has an opportunity that Chile did not possess in the same form—the opportunity to operate within an increasingly multipolar world and to negotiate among competing centres of power. But that opportunity will only become meaningful if African countries develop a strategy of their own.

The choice before the continent is therefore not between Washington and Beijing, nor between capitalism and socialism in their twentieth-century forms. It is between remaining primarily a supplier of raw materials to other industrial economies and using its extraordinary resource endowment to build the productive, financial and technological foundations of its own development.

That is the unfinished struggle for economic sovereignty. And that, more than fifty years after Salvador Allende’s final stand in La Moneda, is perhaps the most important lesson his life and his political experiment still offer Africa.

Baba Yunus Muhammad is President of the Africa Islamic Economic Forum (AFRIEF), an intellectual, writer and policy advocate whose work spans Islamic economics, governance, political thought and ethical development. His writings focus particularly on Africa, the Muslim world and the relationship between leadership, economic justice and civilizational renewal. He has engaged with public affairs and political leadership for several decades.