40th anniversary of the so-called “other 9/11,” the one that occurred in Chile on September 11th, 1973. A U.S.-backed coup led by General Augusto Pinochet ousted the democratically elected President Salvador Allende. It’s estimated over 3,000 people were killed during Pinochet’s dictatorship, which lasted a further 17 years.
Today, Chile continues to grapple with Pinochet’s repressive and neoliberal legacy, and the country is the middle of an intense presidential election between two contenders with family ties to the coup. Evelyn Matthei, candidate of the right-wing Independent Democratic Union party, is the daughter of retired Air Force General Fernando Matthei, who served in Augusto Pinochet’s military junta. Her opponent is Michelle Bachelet, Chile’s Socialist Party president from 2006 to 2010. She is the daughter of another famous Air Force general, Alberto Bachelet, who was imprisoned and tortured to death for refusing to support Allende’s overthrow. Chilean human rights groups have petitioned the courts to hold General Matthei, who commanded the base where General Bachelet died, responsible for his death.
Juan Garcés talking:
40 years before, Chile was the most developed, democratic country in the Spanish-speaking world, with a robust Parliament and robust political parties, effective freedom of the press, providence in the society to different opinions and worships. And suddenly, in one day, all changed. What is interesting to consider is that before this living—this living democracy was replaced by a regime where there were systematic torture, extraordinary—there were acts of terrorism against—against the democratic society, extrajudicial executions, extraordinary—how do you say—kidnappings and sending the people to another country to be tortured, rendition—extraordinary renditions. And the Plan Condor, the cooperation among the international— Operation Condor.That extended to places like Argentina and others.
And the coordination between the regional services to kidnap the respective archenemies and torture them and making them disappear. And what is a matter of concern that the methods that were applied by this dictatorship against the people that was for a representative form of government, those methods you can see them working now and being applied worldwide. You have extraordinary renditions. You have extrajudicial killings. You have secret centers of detentions.
I am very concerned that those methods, the habeas corpus ineffectiveness, were applied in Chile with the knowledge and the backing of the Nixon-Kissinger administration in this period. And I am very concerned that the same methods are being applied now under—in other explanations, in many countries with the backing of the United States. That is something that is—I consider as very dangerous for everyone.
I worked with President Allende the night before the coup. And I slept in his home, and I went with him to the presidential palace, because this was the day in which the president will address a message to the nation, calling for a referendum where the citizens will, in their box, decide which future they were preferring: the one that was proposed by the government and—or the one that was proposed by opposition in the Parliament. So, the referendum was open. And in place—and then we were preparing this message to the nation. And in the time that the message should be sent to the airwaves, through the TV, in place of that, there was the attack by airplanes, by artillery, by infantry, with the [inaudible] of killing the president. And, well, this was a political fight. At 9:00 a.m., I asked the president how—”Do you have some regiment, your side?” And the answer was, “No, no regiment.” So, in terms of—in military terms, the outcome was very clear: There were not any capability of military resistance.
So, why Allende resisted still three, four hours more and decided to fight until his death, this is a political message of resistance, of a legitimate commander-in-chief of the army forces that was facing an insurrection, an act of indiscipline, and he didn’t abandon his post of command, and he faced, with the resources that he had, particularly the legitimacy, democratic legitimacy, and that he wanted to let this heritage to his people. And we are now realizing that 40 years later this legacy, this political legacy, is being taken in their hands by Chilean people.
The land infantry and artillery attack began around 9:00 until 11:00. Then the silence said that the airplanes will bomb in a matter of 15 minutes. In this moment, his assistants, all civil assistants, his staff, around 15 people, were with him. We were with him, and he offered them, each one, to have freedom to outside the palace and saved their life, because for him it was very clear that he will resist until the last moment, because he considered that it was his duty as a president elected by the people and with the legitimacy of the republic institutions. And nobody accepted to leave him alone. He made with me an exception. He asked me to save my life, with some recommendations, so I—
one of the things that he told me is what you said a few moments ago, that given my very close, unique cooperation with him, I was in the measure of explaining what was the government doing during the three years in government, why we were doing what we have done, and which goal, object. And so, he considered that I was the person that could explain better what was the real meaning of this government.
Peter Kornbluh talking:
Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger launched a preemptive strike against Salvador Allende. They decided to stop him from being inaugurated as president of Chile. He hadn’t even set foot in the Moneda Palace, when Nixon and Kissinger just simply decided to change the fate of Chile. Nixon instructed the CIA to make the Chilean economy scream, to use as many men as possible. The first plan was to actually keep Allende from being inaugurated as president. And then, when that plan failed, after the assassination of the Chilean commander-in-chief that the United States was behind, General René Schneider, Kissinger then went to Nixon and said, “Allende is now president. The State Department thinks we can coexist with him, but I want you to make sure you tell everybody in the U.S. government that we cannot, that we cannot let him succeed, because he has legitimacy. He is democratically elected. And suppose other governments decide to follow in his footstep, like a government like Italy? What are we going to do then? What are we going to say when other countries start to democratically elect other Salvador Allendes? We will—the world balance of power will change,” he wrote to Nixon in a secret document, “and our interests in it will be changed fundamentally.”
I just got back from Chile, and I did a number of TV shows there, and everybody said, “We’re trying to hold our own people accountable here for the atrocities that took place during the Pinochet regime, but why isn’t Henry Kissinger being held accountable? Why isn’t the United States held accountable for the role that they played in the atrocities that were committed in Chile, starting with the coup itself and then going on with the repression that followed?” And Kissinger really is the—not only the key survivor of the policy-making team of that era, but truly when you go through the declassified documents that are laid out in the book, The Pinochet File, you see that he is the singular most important figure in engineering a policy to overthrow Allende and then, even more, to embrace Pinochet and the human rights violations that followed.
He had aides who were saying to him, “It’s unbecoming for the United States to intervene in a country where we are not—our national security interests are not threatened.” And he pushed them away. “Nope, we can’t—we can’t let this imitative phenomena—we have to stop Allende from being successful.” He had aides that came to him the day after the coup and said, “I’m getting reports that there’s 10,000 bodies in the streets. People are being slaughtered.” And he said, “Go tell Congress that this new military regime is better for our interests than the old government in Chile.” And we have this fabulous document of him talking to Pinochet, a meeting in 1976, in which his aides have told him, “You should tell Pinochet to stop violating human rights.” And instead he says to Pinochet, “You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende. We want to support you, not hurt you.”
There were people inside the U.S. government pressing Kissinger not to take this course, and he completely shunted them aside, pushed Nixon forward to as aggressive but covert a policy as possible to make Allende fail, to destabilize Allende’s ability to govern, to create what Kissinger called a coup climate.
In the new edition of The Pinochet File, we have the actual transcript of Nixon and Kissinger’s conversation, their first phone conversation after the coup took place, in which Nixon says to Kissinger, “Well, our hand doesn’t show in this one, does it?” And Kissinger said, “We didn’t do it,” referring to direct participation in the coup. “We helped them.” He says, “I mean, we helped them. [Blank],” which I am sure is a reference to the CIA, “created the conditions as best as possible.” And this is the first conversation between Nixon and Kissinger after the coup. They’re basically laying out the role of the United States and setting—creating a coup climate in Chile, facilitating the coup.
What’s even worse—this was long before your program existed, but Richard Nixon is already complaining about the liberal crap in the media, and Kissinger says, “Yeah, the liberal—the media is bleeding because a communist government was overthrown,” you know, like as if the media is on the side of Allende. They’re focusing on the atrocities that are taking place. And Kissinger says, “In the Eisenhower period, we would be heroes.”
Juan Garcés talking:
Baltasar Garzón, through the famous Spanish judge, issue an arrest warrant for him
A matter of how do you understand the world. Should you go through peaceful means or using bombs and invasions? The law is very clear. Since ’40, ’45, 1945, the United Nations Charter, after a big World War—World War—decided that the sovereignty and independence of the countries should be respected and that all the nations should fight to avoid genocidal policies.
— source democracynow.org
Juan Garces, former personal adviser to Chilean President Salvador Allende. Juan Garcés later led the successful legal effort to arrest General Augusto Pinochet and prosecute him for crimes against humanity in the Spanish courts. Garcés received the Right Livelihood Award in 1999.
Peter Kornbluh, author of The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, just updated in a newly released edition for the 40th anniversary of the Chilean Coup. He is also director of the Chile Documentation Project at the National Security Archive. He just returned from Chile, and his latest article for The Nation magazine is “Chileans Confront Their Own 9/11.”