Hello and welcome to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service with me, Jane Chambers.

I'm taking you back to Chile in 1973 in the turbulent months leading up to the military coup on September the 11th that same year.

37-year-old Immokinus Perez de Arce, as a lawyer and journalist.

In March 1973, he's elected as a member of Parliament for the National Party, a right-wing party.

His movements in fierce opposition to President Salvador Yende and his coalition of left-wing groups, the popular unity.

The atmosphere in Chile is at breaking point with rumours it's heading towards some kind of civil unrest.

It was the only time in the history of the House of Deputies that there were physical fights in the parliamentary sessions.

Yes, of course, there was a fight when some miners came to see us who were on a strike against the government and the left-wing politicians from the popular unity party tried to stop them taking part in the session.

So one right-wing and one left-wing politician got into a fight and then we all joined and started punching each other until things come down.

Chile's deeply divided between supporters of President Salvador Yende's socialist government and opposition groups, including business elites, who think Yende is ruining the country, wanting to turn it into a second Cuba with a totalitarian Marxist state.

Inflation, soaring, Yende's government has nationalized several key industries, including copper iron and coal.

It's taken land from large Chilean estate owners in an effort to redistribute wealth.

Chile is now running short on basic food, like onions, tomatoes and pork, although not everyone's affected.

Those of us who could afford it didn't have problems getting hold of food because we could buy it on the black market.

It was a parliamentarian, and as you know, politicians have a habit of granting themselves privileges.

So we made sure we could get hold of the things that we wanted, but they had other problems to deal with, political ones.

I would get threats from people on the left who came to take photos of my house and I didn't know why, and then they accused me of having meetings with some of the elite from the United States,

saying that they was trying to organize a coup, which wasn't true.

It's the Cold War, the US's jittery about the rise of communism around the world, and certainly doesn't want it in its backyard in South America.

To this day, many of the CIA documents regarding the coup in Chile are still classified, and it's hard to be sure just how much they were involved.

We know that they helped to finance some of the strife going on in the country, like the Lowry Drivers, and the aim was to destabilize the government.

There was a lot of propaganda against the Socialists, but they weren't actively involved in the actual coup. It came from inside Chile.

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