In September 1973, following months of political tensions and social unrest in Chile, the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende was overthrown in a US-backed coup d'etat. The coup d'etat was carried out by the Chilean military forces under Augusto Pinochet in response to Allende's leftist reforms and the perceived threat of communism. From its first days in power, the Pinochet regime was characterized by widespread human rights violations. In the period immediately following the coup, the junta declared a state of emergency and engaged in arbitrary arrests and abolished all political parties and unions, with tens of thousands of people facing torture, interrogation, and execution in the following years. There is some debate about exactly how many people were killed or "disappeared" into the regime's prisons, torture chambers and unmarked graves for suspected political reasons over Pinochet's 16 years in power. In 1991 the National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation Report found that the Pinochet Regime killed over 2000 people, and the 2005 Valech Report which focused on detentions reported that 38,254 people had been imprisoned for political reasons and that most of those detained had been tortured.