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The news of the arrest of Augusto Pinochet in London has been spread widely
in the United States. While the New York Times promoted a legal process
against the dictator, The Wall Street Journal asserted that Fidel
Castro, and not Pinochet, should be arrested in Europe, since he bears the
entire blame for the creation of Latin American dictatorships. Nevertheless,
no one mentioned a key fact in this story of Chile and Pinochet: the hand
of the United States.
The United States media has given ample coverage to Pinochet's detention
on October 16. The dictator's career of repression during his regime was
recounted but, with few exceptions (those that merely point out that the
United States endorsed the coup) no mention is made of Washington's hardly
disguised hand in the events of September of 1973, and during the following
17 years of dictatorship.
"To make the economy scream," wrote Richard Helms, at the time
director of the CIA, in a memorandum dated September 15, 1970, during a
meeting with President Richard Nixon and the Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger.
A cable from the CIA dated a month later, declassified and published by
the National Security Archives in September, defined the strategy to be
followed by the CIA chief in Santiago: "It is our firm and lasting
policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup. We have to continue generating
the maximum pressure to this end using all appropriate measures. It is imperative
that these actions be carried out in a clandestine and safe way, so that
the hand of the United States government stay well hidden."
In the following years, according to official documents that are today declassified,
the United States made possible this strategy by sending millions of dollars
to finance economic sabotage campaigns, as well as projects of social and
political destabilization. The CIA spent $8 million between November of
1970 and September of 1973 in order to undermine the Allende presidency.
Relations grew cold in 1976 when Jimmy Carter became president, and after
the brutal measures taken by the Chilean regime were made known in the very
capital of the U.S. The news struck home with the assassinations of Orlando
Letelier (Allende's former minister of foreign affairs -- ed.) and Ronni
Moffit (American citizen), these being the worst cases of international
terrorism to occur in Washington.
"Our back yard"
Various official investigations have documented United States' contribution
to the Chilean dictatorship. The secret government documents of the United
States recently declassified and published by the National Security Archives
(www.seas.gwu.edu/nsarchive) show without a doubt the active role of the U.S. in the
coup d'etat and in the continuing support to the military and to Pinochet.
According to Helms, Nixon decided that "an Allende regime in Chile
wasn't acceptable to the United States." When Allende assumed the presidency,
Helms wrote that he had become the "first democratically elected Marxist
head of state in the history of Latin America, in spite of United States'
opposition. As a result, the prestige and the interests of the United States
in Latin America, and to a certain extent elsewhere, are being affected.
Washington cannot tolerate problems in an area that traditionally has been
thought of as the United States' back yard."
In spite of these documents, today editorialists and to a large extent reporters
have apparently lost their memory. There exists an abundant literature on
Washington's role -- including an extensive investigation by a congressional
committee in the seventies that revealed unequivocally the American program
set to destabilize Allende -- and the very close relation between the United
States government and Pinochet. These documents make obvious that the U.S.
was involved in the coup's plans, and that it provided the "green light"
to go ahead).
It is no secret that the CIA and the Chilean DINA (National Intelligence
Directorate) maintained good relations since the beginning of the Pinochet
regime at least until 1976 (it is little known what happened in the world
of intelligence after this period).
Neither is it a secret that Pinochet was greatly admired by conservative
political figures in the U.S. -- especially during the Ronald Reagan period
-- and by his British peer, Margaret Thatcher. The dictator always said
that his favorite country was England, especially because of Thatcher's
hospitality. Possibly, his mistake was not having realized the change of
British government. Even the Wall Street Journal editorial didn't
hide its admiration for the dictator, and described him as "the man
who probably did more that anyone else in Latin America to roll back their
revolution." "In September 1973," it adds," general
Pinochet headed the coup that saved his country," and turned it into
"an example of successful a free-market reform," with free commerce,
privatization, and other incentives that "inspired reform elsewhere
on the continent and throughout the developing world in general."
Although the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, The Washing Post,
and The Wall Street Journal published editorials on the subject,
none mentioned the role of the United States. The reports on CNN, ABC, NBC,
and CBS alluded to the coup d'etat "endorsed" by the United States,
period. Part of another story are the words of Nixon, Kissinger, and Haig,
among others, as well as the covert actions by the CIA and other agencies
of the United Sates to feed and consolidate the coup d'etat against a democratically
elected government. Perhaps Time magazine would like to forget that
the CIA was very happy with its cooperation, in what amounts to a pro-CIA
"propaganda" operation, when it published a cover article in 1970
that made an implicit invitation to invade Chile. At times, amnesia is an
appropriate medicine.
Translated by ISLA
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