If you didn’t know, Augusto Pinochet was a Chilean military officer and politician who ruled Chile as a dictator from 1973 to 1990

From 1973 to 1981, he led the military junta, and in 1974 he declared himself President of the Republic, cementing his authoritarian grip on the country

During his reign, thousands of his political opponents were forcibly “disappeared”

I stayed in a hotel room in Chile’s capital, Santiago, which once played an unlikely role in a small-scale assassination attempt on Pinochet

Rebels had smuggled a rocket launcher into the hotel and set it up in the room to fire at the presidential palace

Rather than using it in the conventional way, rested on a shoulder, they decided to mount the weapon on a camera tripod for stability

But when they pulled the trigger, the recoil sent the launcher shooting backwards across the room

The rocket fired upwards instead of forward, missing the palace entirely

Today, there’s no trace of this chaotic event

The holes in the walls have been patched, and the room is freshly decorated, giving no hint of its violent past

It’s a strange feeling to stand in a place where history teetered on the edge of being rewritten

 That ordinary hotel room, now calm and unremarkable, once hosted a moment of desperate rebellion that could have changed the fate of a nation