Commemorations are being planned in Chile for September 11 to mark the 50th anniversary of the U.S.-backed military coup that ousted democratically elected President Salvador Allende and led to a 17-year dictatorship led by General Augusto Pinochet. A U.S. congressional delegation recently traveled to Chile ahead of the coup anniversary. During their trip, the lawmakers called for the Biden administration to declassify more documents on the U.S. role in the coup. Congressmembers taking part in the trip were New York’s Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Nydia Velázquez, Florida’s Maxwell Frost, who we spoke to yesterday, and Joaquin Castro and Greg Casar, both from Texas. The delegation also traveled to Brazil and Colombia. Texas Congressmember Greg Casar joins us now from Austin, Texas.
We did meet with many of the top leaders in Colombia, and our attaché in Colombia handles the issues in Venezuela. And the reason we visited these three countries, in particular, is because they had each elected new progressive and left leaders, left leaders trying to defend and build their democracies, to start to build that kind of relationship. And so we went to those three, but we spoke about the issues impacting Venezuela in each and every one of those countries, because, for
— source democracynow.org | Aug 30, 2023