Santiago, Chile - On a cloudy Tuesday morning in September 1973, Chile's top military officers led by Augusto Pinochet deployed naval ships, fighter jets and soldiers in a coup that overthrew Marxist president Salvador Allende.

Within hours, the 18th-century presidential palace in Santiago was ablaze, Allende was dead and carabineros paramilitary troops were burning books in the capital city's cobblestone plazas.

In London at the time, Chilean economist Alejandro Foxley watched the events unfold on television.

"I knew I had to go back and fight it out," he recalls.

Foxley would wind up with an improbable ally: a little-known Canadian development agency that eventually broke with convention and helped fund a virtual safe house for Foxley and other Chilean academics under siege.

While Canadian efforts to ferry food and emergency relief to victims of conflict and natural disasters have been well documented, the International Development and Research Centre's efforts in Chile during the post-junta years of terror have largely escaped attention.

With the junta in charge and police picking Pinochet's political adversaries off the streets and out of their beds – interrogation tactics included rape, drugging, electric shock treatments to the genitals and even mock executions – the IDRC helped finance a liberal think-tank in Santiago called Cieplan, the Economic Research Corporation for Latin America.

In effect, the IDRC helped to prevent a brain drain that could have crippled this country when civilian order was restored in 1990.

"The funding meant many of the academics could keep doing their work; they didn't have to leave the country or go drive cabs," notes Ron Harpelle, a Lakehead University professor who teaches Latin American history and received a grant to study the IDRC's efforts in Chile.

Moreover, even as more than 3,200 Chileans were executed or disappeared from 1973 until 1990 and nearly 28,000 others were imprisoned and tortured, the IDRC funding made it awkward for Pinochet to dispose of the troublesome academics.

"The international community would have started asking questions," Harpelle explains.

Today, many of the academics propped up by Canada – including at least three current federal ministers – have become linchpins of Chile's economic and social renaissance.

"This is a great untold Canadian story," says Elizabeth Fox, an official with the U.S. Agency for International Development who worked for the IDRC in South America during the 1980s.

Fox says that while the Ronald Reagan administration was propping up the Pinochet government (making it unlikely Cieplan would receive funding from U.S. authorities), prime minister Pierre Trudeau was trying to position Canada to be more influential on the global stage.

"It was absolutely huge that Canada did this. There just wasn't any other big funder around."

By the time the IDRC approved funding for the Chilean academics, Fox says, "Chile had been under a dictatorship for seven years. It had very little independent social science and economic analysis. Research is not just developing better seeds or a vaccine. It's also about trying to figure out how to keep an economy going."

In an interview in his office overlooking Santiago's gleaming presidential palace, where some of the 34-year-old bullet holes left by Pinochet's advancing troops were only recently patched over, Foxley, now Chile's foreign minister, suggests that ties to Canada might have helped save lives during a time of tense uncertainty.

Pinochet's cronies entertained thoughts of eliminating their meddling left-of-centre critics during his 17-year junta.

When Cieplan books were banned by the government, copies were ripped apart and chapters handed out separately as academic papers. And while opposition political parties here were outlawed, Cieplan members took to writing op-ed pieces for Chilean newspapers.

In the wake of Pinochet's recent death, Foxley recalls the day he found that the dictator's secret police had left a sinister warning at his Santiago home.

"They clipped the word `death' out of lots of newspaper stories and left them throughout the house," Foxley said. "They were even in my bed."

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The IDRC funding nearly didn't get off the ground, according to Tony Tillett, a former IDRC official who is now retired and still living in Santiago.

When he brought a proposal to the IDRC board in 1980 to help Cieplan cover its costs, Tillett says, some board members believed Canada shouldn't meddle in Chile's political affairs.

After all, Chile's ambassador in Ottawa was telling anyone who'd listen that the situation in the South American country wasn't nearly as bad as was being reported by foreign news agencies.

It would take a year for Tillett to coax the IDRC's board into approving funding for the Chilean think-tank.

"It was a terrible and unnerving time in Chile," he says. "The government was attempting to crush the hopes of an entire generation, but at the IDRC there was still an unwillingness to take a political position."

Tillett says he continued to bombard the IDRC board with paperwork and a comprehensive report on Chile until it finally agreed to help cover Cieplan salaries and expenses.

As IDRC was gearing up, Cieplan member Rene Cortazar, who would later become Chile's labour minister, published a paper that criticized Pinochet's economic advisers, a group of economists known collectively as the Chicago Boys because they were schooled at the University of Chicago.

Cortazar alleged the government had fudged its consumer price index.

"It was not just one month; it was for 30 months in a row," Cortazar said in an interview. "We published our findings and they became the data still used today for Chile during that period."

To be sure, ties to a country like Canada were no guarantee of safety.

Consider the case of Carmelo Soria, a 54-year-old United Nations' worker from Spain.

Soria disappeared one night in July 1976 after his car, bearing diplomatic licence plates, was pulled over by security officials impersonating traffic police.

Suspected of using his status with the UN to transfer money to Chilean communists, Soria was questioned and tortured. His body was found in a car that had been pushed over a cliff into a canal in downtown Santiago.

A government commission after civilian order was restored concluded the killing was the work of the secret police.