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Remembering Chile's 9/11 September 10, 2003 By Paul Street Close to Perfect:" A Different, Bloodier Nine-Eleven The events of September 11th were horrific, tragic, and criminal on a monumental scale. Planes flew low over an American nation's leading city. Buildings erupted in flames. There was an official death toll of more than 3,000. Thousands of innocent people were ruthlessly slaughtered. Their loved ones were placed in horrible suspense, waiting to learn the fate of missing husbands, wives, sisters, cousins, and children. An American country was left in shock, with an uncertain future, as the perpetrators evaded capture and punishment. September 11th was a dark, bloody day of historic proportions. It was a prelude to regression, repression and heightened bloodshed. Yes, the overthrow of the democratically elected government of Chile's president Salvadore Allende on September 11th, 1973 was a terrible watershed. The low-flying planes belonged to the Chilean Air Force. They came on the orders of Chilean General Augusto Pinochet to bomb La Moneda Presidential Palace, where Allende, a self-declared Marxist, killed himself before he could be assassinated. Hundreds of real and suspected Allende supporters were gunned down in Santiago's soccer stadium, fashioned into a torture center and concentration camp. Across the nation, in the streets and military detention centers, Pinochet's forces murdered 20,000 and tortured 60,000 in the first few months after 9/11/1973. One million Chileans were forced into exile. According to leading international relations analyst William I. Robinson, it was "the bloodiest coup in Latin-American history" (Robinson, Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony , p. 46).
According to a report from Patrick Ryan, the US Naval Attaché stationed with the United States Military Group in Chile that black September, the coup was "close to perfect." It was, Ryan told his superiors, a great victory for "free men aspiring to goals which are to the benefit of Chile and not self-serving world Marxism." (Situation Report, Navy Section, United States Military Group, Valparaiso, Chile, October 1, 1973, available online at http://www.gwu. edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/ch21-01.htm)
This state-terrorist rampage targeted the left and the mass popular social movements ("Marxist" and otherwise) that brought Allende to power in September 1970. Chilean trade unions and other popular organizations were dismantled. Clinics serving the poor were closed down. Twenty-six newspapers and magazines were shuttered. Chilean state and society, exceptional among Latin American states in the degree or its respect for civic freedoms and bourgeois-democratic political institutions, was militarized at every level.
More:
http://www.zmag.org/znet/viewArticle/9875
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Chile, 9/11/73
Declassified documents reveal the US government's role
in the Pinochet coup
by Peter Kornbluh
The Nation magazine, September 29, 2003
In September 14, 1970, a deputy to then National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger wrote him a memo, classified SECRET / SENSITIVE, arguing against covert operations to block the duly elected Chilean socialist Salvador Allende from assuming the presidency. "What we propose is patently a violation of our own principles and policy tenets," noted Viron Vaky. "If these principles have any meaning, we normally depart from them only to meet the gravest threat to us., e.g. to our survival. Is Allende a mortal threat to the U.S.?" Vaky asked. "It is hard to argue this."
Kissinger ignored this advice. The next day he participated in a now-famous meeting where President Nixon instructed CIA Director Richard Helms to "save Chile" by secretly fomenting a coup to prevent Allende's inauguration. When those covert operations failed, Kissinger goaded Nixon into instructing the entire national security bureaucracy "on opposing Allende" and destabilizing his government. "Election of Allende as president of Chile poses one of (the) most serious challenges ever faced in this hemisphere," says a newly declassified briefing paper Kissinger gave to Nixon two days after Allende's inauguration. "Your decision as to what to do may be most historic and difficult foreign affairs decision you will have to make this year.... If all concerned do not understand that you want Allende opposed as strongly as we can, result will be steady draft toward modus vivendi approach."
Had Washington adopted a "modus vivendi approach," it is possible that Chileans, indeed citizens around the world, would not be solemnly commemorating the thirtieth anniversary of the coup that brought Gen. Augusto Pinochet to power. In the United States, the meaning of this anniversary is, understandably, overshadowed by the shock and tragedy of our own 9/11. But Chile reminds us that the topics of debate on US foreign policy today-pre-emptive strikes, regime change, the arrogance of unilateral intervention, unchecked covert action and secrecy and dishonesty in government-are not new. From the thousands of formerly classified US documents released over the past several years, the picture that emerges strikes some haunting parallels with the news of the day.
Chile, it must be recalled, constitutes a classic example of a preemptive strike-a set of operations launched well before Salvador Allende set foot in office. Nixon ordered the CIA on September 15, 1970, to "make the economy scream" and to foment a military move to block Allende from being inaugurated six weeks later, in November; the Chilean leader had yet to formulate or authorize a single policy detrimental to US interests. "What happens over next 6-10 months will have ramifications far beyond US-Chilean relations," Kissinger predicted in a dire warning to Nixon only forty-eight hours after Allende actually took office. "Will have effect on what happens in rest of LA and developing world; our future position in hemisphere; on larger world picture...even effect our own conception of what our role in the world is."
More:
http://www.thirdworldtraveler.com/South_America/Chile_9_11_73.html
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