The script for this 1975 documentary was the last piece of professional writing done by Charles Horman, the American journalist whose death in Chile was chronicled in Costa Gavras' recent feature film Missing (based on Thomas Hauser's "The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice"). "Twenty-four hours before his arrest, Horman had sought-and was refused-help in leaving the country from the U.S. Embassy in Santiago. One week after the 1973 coup, Horman was shot to death in Chile's National Stadium for ‘knowing too much' about U.S. complicity in the overthrow of the Allende government....
"‘A silent Vietnam' is how President Salvador Allende characterized the United States-sponsored campaign of low profile economic warfare waged against Chile. On September 11, 1973, this warfare climaxed with the death of Allende and the overthrow of democracy in Chile in the bloodiest military coup in Latin American history. Avenue of the Americas shows what Allende's Popular Unity government was all about and why it met with such deep-seated opposition from the United States and the propertied classes in Chile. It...involves its audience with a people who today suffer under a brutally repressive regime-a regime sympathetic to the objective of U.S. hegemony at the expense of a just social order...(and shows) how the CIA and transnational corporations such as ITT precipitated Allende's downfall...." --Pueblo Films.
"One of the year's best six independent feature film documentaries" --Bill Sloan/Amos Vogel, Film Comment