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Chile: Ex-leader's father likely died of torture
Updated 03:07 p.m., Wednesday, June 20, 2012
SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) A judge in Chile says investigators have determined that the father of former President Michelle Bachelet apparently died of torture after the 1973 coup in that country.
Judge Mario Carroza said Wednesday that a new forensic study found that Army Gen. Alberto Bachelet probably died of heart problems caused by torture after he was arrested by his comrades in arms because he opposed the military coup that overthrew Socialist President Salvador Allende.
The 51-year-old general died in March 1974.
His daughter became Chile's first female president in 2006. She has run the U.N. women's agency since 2010, when she left the presidency.
http://www.mysanantonio.com/news/article/Chile-Ex-leader-s-father-likely-died-of-torture-3649716.php#ixzz1yMtJkgYo
Demeter
(85,373 posts)pro patria mori
Judi Lynn
(160,602 posts)Chile and the United States:
Declassified Documents Relating to the Military Coup, September 11, 1973
by Peter Kornbluh
September 11, 1998 marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet. The violent overthrow of the democratically-elected Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende changed the course of the country that Chilean poet Pablo Neruda described as "a long petal of sea, wine and snow"; because of CIA covert intervention in Chile, and the repressive character of General Pinochet's rule, the coup became the most notorious military takeover in the annals of Latin American history.
Revelations that President Richard Nixon had ordered the CIA to "make the economy scream" in Chile to "prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him," prompted a major scandal in the mid-1970s, and a major investigation by the U.S. Senate. Since the coup, however, few U.S. documents relating to Chile have been actually declassified- -until recently. Through Freedom of Information Act requests, and other avenues of declassification, the National Security Archive has been able to compile a collection of declassified records that shed light on events in Chile between 1970 and 1976.
These documents include:
** Cables written by U.S. Ambassador Edward Korry after Allende's election, detailing conversations with President Eduardo Frei on how to block the president-elect from being inaugurated. The cables contain detailed descriptions and opinions on the various political forces in Chile, including the Chilean military, the Christian Democrat Party, and the U.S. business community.
** CIA memoranda and reports on "Project FUBELT"--the codename for covert operations to promote a military coup and undermine Allende's government. The documents, including minutes of meetings between Henry Kissinger and CIA officials, CIA cables to its Santiago station, and summaries of covert action in 1970, provide a clear paper trail to the decisions and operations against Allende's government
More:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/nsaebb8i.htm
[center]~ ~ ~
NIXON ON CHILE INTERVENTION
WHITE HOUSE TAPE ACKNOWLEDGES INSTRUCTIONS TO BLOCK SALVADOR ALLENDE
KISSINGER SECRETLY LOBBIED PRESIDENT
AGAINST "DRIFT TOWARD MODUS VIVENDI"
WITH ELECTED SOCIALIST PRESIDENT
DECLASSIFIED KISSINGER TRANSCRIPTS REVEAL
STRONG SUPPORT FOR PINOCHET FOLLOWING CHILEAN COUP
National Security Archive Electronic Briefing Book No. 110
February 3 , 2004[/center]
WASHINGTON D.C. - President Richard Nixon acknowledged that he had given instructions to "do anything short of a Dominican-type action" to keep the democratically elected president of Chile from assuming office, according to a White House audio tape posted by the National Security Archive today. A phone conversation captured by his secret Oval Office taping system reveals Nixon telling his press secretary, Ron Zeigler, that he had given such instructions to then U.S. Ambassador Edward Korry, "but he just failed, the son of a bitch
. He should have kept Allende from getting in."
A transcript of the president's comments on March 23, 1972, made after the leak of corporate papers revealing collaboration between ITT and the CIA to rollback the election of socialist leader Salvador Allende, was recently published in the National Security Archive book, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability by Peter Kornbluh; the tape marks the first time Nixon can be heard discussing his orders to undermine Chilean democracy. The conversation took place as Zeigler briefed the President on a State Department press conference to contain the growing ITT/CIA scandal which included one ITT document stating that Korry had been "given the green light to move in the name of President Nixon
to do all possible short of a Dominican Republic-type action to keep Allende from taking power." Other declassified records show that Nixon secretly ordered maximum CIA covert operations to "prevent Allende from coming to power or unseat him" in the fall of 1970 but that Ambassador Korry was deliberately not informed of covert efforts to instigate a military coup.
When the White House-ordered covert operations failed to prevent Allende's November 3, 1970, inauguration, Nixon's national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, lobbied vigorously for a hard-line U.S. policy "to prevent [Allende] from consolidating himself now when we know he is weaker than he will ever be and when he obviously fears our pressure and hostility," according to a previously unknown eight-page briefing paper prepared for the President on November 5, 1970. In the secret/sensitive "memorandum for the president" Kissinger claimed that Allende's election posed "one of the most serious challenges ever faced in the hemisphere" and that Nixon's "decision as to what to do about it may be the most historic and difficult foreign affairs decision you will have to make this year." The memorandum reveals that Kissinger forcefully pressed the President to overrule the State Department's position that there was little Washington could do to oppose the legitimately elected president of Chile and that the risks for U.S. interests of intervening to oppose him were greater than coexisting with him. "If all concerned do not understand that you want Allende opposed as strongly as we can, the result will be a steady drift toward the modus vivendi approach," Kissinger informed Nixon.
~snip~
According to the first transcript dated October 1, 1973, when Kissinger was informed by his assistant secretary of inter-American affairs of initial reports of massacres following the coup he told his staff that the U.S. should not defend what the regime was doing. However, he emphasized: "But I think we should understand our policy--that however unpleasant they act, the [military] government is better for us than Allende was."
More:
http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB110/index.htm
Judi Lynn
(160,602 posts)at the hands of Richard Nixon's bloody puppet fascist dictator the C.I.A. assisted in destroying Allende:
[center]
Michelle Bachelet and her father, General Alberto Bachelet.
Brigadier General Alberto Bachelet
General Bachelet, his wife, his son, daughter, Michelle[/center]
Justice for an air force general
Posted on August 26, 2011
General Bachelet's letters were published in 2006.
They broke me from within. I found myself with comrades from the Chilean air force, whom I had known for 20 years, students of mine, who treated me like a criminal or a dog. General Alberto Bachelet, in a letter to his son, October 16, 1973
He refused to go along with the coup and was arrested at his office in the Chilean defense ministry on September 11, 1973. He was released that night, but a few days later his home was raided and he was brought to the Chilean air force academy where he was interrogated and tortured over a 30-hour period by some of his former colleagues. He was moved to the air force hospital and held incommunicado. A few weeks later he was sent home and placed under house arrest, then on December 18 authorities arrested him again and brought him to Santiagos public jail.
Four months later a war tribunal began against Bachelet and others. But General Alberto Bachelet was already dead, having suffered a fatal heart attack while in prison. This blogger received an eyewitness account of Bachelets death from Nelson Morales Leal, a former army reserve officer so disturbed by the abuses committed in wake of the coup that while on a day pass he deliberately got himself arrested for disorderly conduct in order go get out of the army. Morales ended up in the same jail with Bachelet and other political detainees. He described how on March 12, 1974 he and his fellow prisoners were being herded out of their cells for lunch when Bachelet collapsed. Morales and other prisoners brought the general back to his cell, where he died. A sympathetic prison guard notified Radio Balmaceda, one of the slightly more independent radio stations still operating after the coup, and the subsequent broadcast prompted authorities to shut down the station.
Bachelet might never have imagined that his daughter Michelle would one day become Latin Americas first female defense minister, and later Chiles first woman president.And now an investigation has opened into the circumstances of his death, led by the same judge who led the recent inquiry into the death of former president Salvador Allende (which was deemed to have been a suicide). Judge Mario Carroza told Radio Cooperativa that he would review the case, which was presented by a group of relatives of political prisoners who died during the 1973-1990 military regime.
http://notesontheamericas.wordpress.com/2011/08/26/justice-for-an-air-force-general-2/
[center]
Chilean President Michelle Bachelet[/center]
Manuel Morales
(1 post)Hi, I am a child of NELSON MORALES LEAL and I found out the libro. Soldiers in a Narrow Land: The Pinochet Regime in Chile
and wanted them to see a picture of my father a week before his death
NELSON MORALES LEAL
1950-2002
[URL=.html][IMG][/IMG][/URL]
Judi Lynn
(160,602 posts)20 June 2012 Last updated at 20:47 ET
Chile ex-leader's father 'died of torture' after coup
The father of former Chilean President Michelle Bachelet probably died as a result of torture after the 1973 military coup, a judge has said.
Judge Mario Carroza said investigators had found that Gen Alberto Bachelet died of heart problems aggravated by torture sessions after his arrest.
Gen Bachelet was loyal to President Salvador Allende, who was deposed in the coup led by Gen Augusto Pinochet.
Ms Bachelet, who was tortured herself, was Chile's president in 2006-2010.
More:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-18528580