Fifty years after Chile’s coup, the region still not safe from US meddling

 

Destructive US efforts to control its ‘back yard’ continue to this day.

John Kirk

John Kirk is Professor Emeritus of Latin American Studies at Dalhousie University, Canada

Stephen Kimber

Professor of journalism at the University of King’s College

Al Jazeera, 11 Sep 2023

Today is the 50th anniversary of a devastating military coup in Chile which gave way to one of the most brutal dictatorships in Latin American history.

On September 11, 1973, a military junta, led by General Augusto Pinochet, overthrew the democratically elected government of President Salvador Allende. What followed was a 17-year dictatorship which tortured 40,000, killed more than 3000 and “disappeared” more than a thousand others. Hundreds of thousands were forced into exile.

The Nixon administration in the United States encouraged and supported the coup that paved the way for these atrocities.

Since former US President James Monroe effectively announced a protectorate over the Western Hemisphere in December 1823, known as the Monroe Doctrine, the US has been interfering in nations across Latin America, often in pursuit of its own interests, but always under the guise of protecting democracy and human rights in its “backyard”.

The 1973 coup in Chile was one such intervention.

Official documents and telephone call transcripts that were declassified and made public over the years paint a clear picture of how Washington worked to ensure Allende’s downfall ever since he scored a narrow victory in the September 8, 1970, presidential election.

According to handwritten notes of then CIA Director Richard Helms, just more than a week after Allende’s victory, on September 15, 1970, President Richard Nixon ordered him to “make the economy scream” in Chile to “prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him”. Three days earlier, in a phone call to Helms that he recorded, Nixon’s national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, had already confirmed the administration’s intention to overthrow Allende, noting “We will not let Chile go down the drain.”

And on September 16, 1973, just six days after Pinochet’s bloody putsch, Nixon called his national security adviser to ask whether the US “hand” in the coup would show. According to declassified call transcripts, Kissinger admitted that “we helped them” and that “[deleted reference] created conditions as great as possible.”

The US did not end its destructive meddling in Chile’s affairs after successfully instigating a coup against its democratically elected leader either.

Three years into Pinochet’s murderous rule, in June 1976, Kissinger personally visited the Chilean capital, Santiago, to reaffirm Washington’s support for the dictator. According to a declassified transcript of their one-on-one conversation, Kissinger advised Pinochet on how to improve his image in the international arena and dismissed all criticism of his regime’s human rights record as “leftist propaganda”. “In the United States, as you know, we are sympathetic with what you are trying to do here,” Kissinger told Pinochet, who had by then already killed and disappeared thousands of his regime’s detractors “We want to help, not undermine you,” he added. “You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende.”