The US government, guided by the Monroe Doctrine, and alarmed both by Chile's domestic policies and by the threat they offered to US regional hegemony, devoted substantial funding and efforts to sabotaging Allende's progress in 'establishing a totalitarian Marxist state in Chile'. … The US Treasury secretary, John Connally, argued that preventing a snowballing trend of expropriations across Latin America and the Caribbean required that Chile be made an example.

Jessica Whyte, The Morals of the Market, loc. 321