[Marxism] Documenting U.S. Role in Democracy’s Fall and Dictator’s Rise in Chile

[Dennis Brasky via Marxism]

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Documenting U.S. Role in Democracy’s Fall and Dictator’s Rise in Chile

By Pascale Bonnefoy - OCT. 14, 2017

SANTIAGO, Chile — An old rotary phone rings insistently.

Visitors at a new exhibition at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights here
in Santiago who pick up the receiver hear two men complain bitterly about
the liberal news media “bleating” over the military coup that had toppled
Salvador Allende, the Socialist president of Chile, five days earlier.

“Our hand doesn’t show on this one, though,” one says.

“We didn’t do it,” the other responds. “I mean, we helped them.”

The conversation took place on a Sunday morning in September 1973 between
former President Richard M. Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry
Kissinger. The two men were discussing football — and the violent overthrow
of a democratically elected government 5,000 miles away with their
assistance.

For the exhibition, two Spanish-speaking actors re-enacted the taped phone
call based on a declassified transcript.

The chance to listen in on the call is part of “Secrets of State: The
Declassified History of the Chilean Dictatorship
,”
an exhibition that offers visitors an immersive experience of Washington’s
intervention in Chile and its 17-year relationship with the military
dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

An enlarged and dramatically lit document sets the tone at the entrance. It
is a presidential daily brief dated Sept. 11, 1973, the day of the coup.
Its paragraphs are entirely redacted, every word blacked out.

A dimly lit underground gallery guides visitors through a maze of documents
— presidential briefings, intelligence reports, cables and memos — that
describe secret operations and intelligence gathering carried out in Chile
by the United States from the Nixon years through the Reagan presidency.

 “There is an arc of history that is very dramatic when you put these
documents together,” said Peter Kornbluh, the exhibition’s curator who is a
senior analyst at the National Security Archive in Washington and director
of its Chile Documentation Project
. “They have
provided revelations and made headlines, they have been used as evidence in
human rights prosecutions, and now they are contributing to the verdict of
history.”

On view are documents revealing secret exchanges about how to prevent
Chile’s Congress from ratifying the Allende victory in 1970, plans for
covert operations to destabilize his government and reports about a Chilean
military officer informing the United States government of the coming coup
and requesting assistance.

There is a cable from the Central Intelligence Agency to its officers in
Santiago after a failed operation in October 1970 to prevent Allende from
assuming office, which he did that November. The C.I.A. provided weapons
for the plan, which resulted in the killing of the commander in chief of
the army, Gen. René Schneider, and the agency later sent money to help some
of the plotters flee the country.

“The station has done an excellent job of guiding Chileans to a point today
where a military solution is at least an option for them,” the cable says,
commending the officers, even though their plot was foiled.

The exhibition includes only a small sample of the 23,000 documents on
Chile that the Clinton administration declassified between 1999 and 2000 in
response to international requests for evidence on Pinochet’s crimes. The
former Chilean dictator was arrested in London in October 1998 and awaited
extradition to Spain to face trial on charges of human rights abuses during
his rule.
As several other European countries also sought Pinochet’s extradition
based on the principle of universal jurisdiction, Mr. Kornbluh, the
curator, led a campaign to persuade the White House to release classified
records that could serve in an eventual trial against the general.

Documents on Chile from 1968 to 1991 from seven United States government
agencies, some of them heavily redacted, were released as part of the State
Department’s Chile Declassification Project
. Most were declassified
months after Pinochet was sent home from London for humanitarian reasons,
but just in time to contribute to new judicial investigations in Chile.

The documents have been used as evidence in several human rights inquiries
involving American victims, including the 1973 killings

[Marxism] Documenting U.S. Role in Democracy’s Fall and Dictator’s Rise in Chile | Pascale Bonnefoy | The New York Times

[Kevin Lindemann and Cathy Campo via Marxism]

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