Chile and the earlier September 11
M V Ramana
The Daily Times
Thursday, September 20, 2002
Last Thursday was the first anniversary of the
attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York. For those who
witnessed, directly or through the media, the sheer horror of
airplanes filled with hundreds of innocent people being rammed into
tall buildings with thousands of innocent people, the date,
September 11, is not easily forgettable. In another part of the
world, September 11 was already a date not to be forgotten, a
reminder of yet another slaughter from 29 years ago. This was the
military coup against Salvador Allende in Chile; this time the
United States was on the side of the aggressors.
US
involvement in Latin America goes back a long way. In 1823,
President James Monroe, through what has come to be known as the
Monroe doctrine, made clear that Latin America was to be in the
United States sphere of influence. About eighty years later,
President Theodore Roosevelt interpreted this to mean: “in the
Western Hemisphere the adherence of the United States to the Monroe
Doctrine may force the United States... to the exercise of an
international police power.”
The interest of the US in Latin
America was for the most part due to the entrenched presence of US
multinational companies. Many of these dominated — through legal and
illegal means — policy making in these countries. For example, the
United Fruit Company was the largest private enterprise in Guatemala
and managed to exempt itself of all taxes for 99 years. The name
Banana Republic did not come without a reason.
Chile was no
exception. US multinationals like Kennecott Copper, Anaconda and the
International Trade and Telegraph companies had operations in the
country. But by the 1950s and 1960s Chile also was the site of a
large, well-organised and militant labour movement. For example, in
the late 1960s, following a moderate land reform act that was
ineffectively implemented, thousands of peasants simply seized land
and occupied it. Urban industrial workers were even more militant.
In 1969 there were nearly 2000 strikes involving over 2 million
workers. The following year this grew to 5000 strikes involving over
3 million workers. The possibility that such labour militancy could
spread to other parts of the continent was at the bottom of the US’
concern about Chile and Washington’s desire to have a pliant
domestic government that would put down such struggles.
Chile came on the “watch list” when Salvador Allende, a
leftist candidate, came within three percent of winning the Chilean
presidency in 1958. That was considered too dangerous and in the
1964 elections the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) pumped in over
$10 million into the successful campaign of Eduardo Frei, the
Christian Democratic candidate. But six years later, Allende did win
the elections.
US President Richard Nixon was livid and
wanted to stop Allende from becoming president. So was National
Security Advisor Henry Kissinger who stated, “The issues are much
too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for
themselves...I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country
go communist due to the irresponsibility of its
people.”
Documents that surfaced decades later reveal that in
a meeting with the CIA director Richard Helms on September 15, 1970,
Nixon called for covert operations to block Allende’s ascension to
office and to promote a coup in Chile. Helms’ notes from the meeting
are full of graphic commands: “no involvement of embassy”,
“$10,000,000 available, more if necessary”, “best men we have” and
“make the economy scream.” (For references see
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/latin_america/chile.htm)
But
Allende did become President of Chile. A month later, a cable to the
CIA station chief in Santiago stated: “It is firm and continuing
policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup.” It also went on to
advise that the operations were to be conducted so as to hide the
“American hand”.
Hand in hand, a set of sanctions and
pressures against the Allende government, including intervention at
the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and Export-Import
bank to curtail or terminate credits and loans to Chile, were
formulated. From November 1970 until September 1973, the CIA spent
$8 million to undermine Allende.
On September 11, 1973, a
military coup deposed the Allende government and set up a military
dictatorship under General Augusto Pinochet. The coup was led by
extreme fascists and was ferocious. Allende was assassinated, though
some maintain that he committed suicide by shooting himself with a
sub-machine gun. Reaction to the coup among US officials ranged from
positive to ecstatic. The Naval Attach� described it as a “day of
destiny” or “our D-day”, which “was close to perfect”.
The
coup set off a wave of human rights abuses. The Rettig Commission
set up in 1990 described several stages of repression. In the first
few weeks, thousands of Chileans sympathetic to the socialist
government were detained. Many were tortured, and several hundred
were tried and executed by military war tribunals. In the next
stage, from 1974 to 1977, the army’s secret police squads waged a
“systematic campaign to exterminate” leftist dissidents. Inside
clandestine prisons, people were tortured with electric shocks,
choking, confinement and even animal rape. In all, the Commission
found 2279 such cases, many of who had been killed by the state.
Other non-governmental groups allege that there were tens of
thousands of cases of human rights abuses by the state and rightwing
squads.
The quest for justice has been a long and difficult
one. In 1998, Pinochet was arrested in London on charges brought by
a Spanish judge. This was a remarkable advance in international
human rights law since the crimes Pinochet was charged with were
committed mostly in Chile and mostly against Chileans. Pinochet was
returned to Chile on medical grounds in March 2000 and in July 2002
the Chilean Supreme Court dismissed the case against Pinochet
because he was mentally unfit to stand trial. But the effort to
bring others to justice continues.
M V Ramana is a
physicist and research staff member at Princeton University’s
Program on Science and Global Security. Some of his writings can be
found at http://www.geocities.com/m_v_ramana/nuclear.html