While the rest of the world remembers the attacks on New York and Washington, Chileans mark their own Sept. 11, the 1973 military coup that three decades later still scars the national soul.
During the coup, socialist President Salvador Allende was killed during an attack on the government palace and a military junta took power, ushering in the 17-year dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, whose regime claimed some 3,000 lives.
Allende's Marxist-inspired land expropriations and Pinochet's ironfisted purges split Chile along extremist lines, and even though democracy was restored in 1990 Chileans have moved only recently to a middle ground.
"This September is charged with painful memories for most Chileans. This country is still not reconciled and we still have a limited democracy," Allende's widow Hortensia Bussi, 89, said at an official tribute to Allende in the government palace today.
"Looking back I don't know how we had the strength to deal with it. I was followed all the time by secret service cars searching for my niece," Laura Moya, 76, said at a candlelight vigil last night outside the secret service house where her niece died under torture in 1974.
President Ricardo Lagos, the third center-left president since Chile returned to democracy in 1990, will preside over official ceremonies in the government palace today. In Santiago many fear marches could become rock-throwing, window-smashing mayhem as they have in the past.
Chile has the most stable economy in South America and an enviable new trade deal with the United States, the biggest market for its copper and salmon exports.
But pride in the economy is not enough to bury the thirst for justice for past human rights abuses. In August, Lagos introduced a new human rights plan aimed at speeding up dozens of trials already underway against members of the security forces accused of torture and assassinations.
The military, feeling besieged by the trials, held its own 9-11 commemoration this morning with a Mass for an estimated 200 of its own members who died under the dictatorship.
Some 3,000 Pinochet loyalists - who claim history will vindicate the man they say saved the country from Marxism - were to gather this evening to pay tribute to the former strongman, who is now 87, ill and homebound.