I think the historical consensus now is that the amount of work the US put into destabilizing Allende is overstated. Allende was unpopular due to mismanaging the Chilean economy without any help from the US. From what I understand, the US was actually surprised to learn that Pinochet had overthrown Allende because they considered it too early to do so. I believe, at most, the US had paid for campaign/propaganda material against Allende.
Pinochet goes into a bucket of other dictators like himself, such as Park Chung Hee and Lee Kwon Yu, who ruthlessly cracked down on political opposition (particularly leftists), but who modernized their respective economies and (in the case of Pinochet) brought them back from the brink of utter economic collapse. These figures remain controversial in their home countries because they were a double-edged sword: the economic advancement which benefitted everyone was paid for with blood
Today, the US Left remembers this as beginning a period of neoliberalism (Chicago school economics) in much of the developing world which had just begun to set its ambitions much higher than they could reasonably afford. They consider this to be a bad thing because they didn't live through the period of the 1970s in which expanded fiscal and irresponsible monetary policy allowed inflation to rise and governments to explode their debt/gdp ratio, with disastrous results
Pinochet goes into a bucket of other dictators like himself, such as Park Chung Hee and Lee Kwon Yu, who ruthlessly cracked down on political opposition (particularly leftists), but who modernized their respective economies and (in the case of Pinochet) brought them back from the brink of utter economic collapse. These figures remain controversial in their home countries because they were a double-edged sword: the economic advancement which benefitted everyone was paid for with blood
Today, the US Left remembers this as beginning a period of neoliberalism (Chicago school economics) in much of the developing world which had just begun to set its ambitions much higher than they could reasonably afford. They consider this to be a bad thing because they didn't live through the period of the 1970s in which expanded fiscal and irresponsible monetary policy allowed inflation to rise and governments to explode their debt/gdp ratio, with disastrous results