In the search for truth, 50 years are worth much more than 50 hours. This became clear in a recent visit to the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, in Santiago, Chile, which exhibits the covers of the September 12 to 16, 1973 editions of a dozen Chilean and international newspapers.
In the display cases, next to the newspaper display: Salvador Allende's broken glasses, a chilling note by the musician Víctor Jara from the Olympic stadium converted into a detention and torture center after the coup, and the video testimonies of some of the estimated 40,000 victims of the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet.
The press titles of those days capture the drama of the news of Allende's death and the black and white photos of the La Moneda palace in flames, too. But something is conspicuous by its absence: there is not a single mention of the United States.
La Vanguardia – this newspaper – makes a fairly precise and fair summary of the coup in its edition of Wednesday, September 12, and accurately summarizes: “The question asked so many times can now be answered: Is the 'Chilean path' to socialism possible? Not for now".
But he does not mention that the democratic and free path of Chilean socialism was closed precisely because Washington did not want to complicate the central message of the Cold War: communism or freedom.
On Sunday the 15th, the British Observer publishes a tour titled “Champagne and Death in Santiago”, a report with a lot of atmosphere, local color and anecdotes about drinks of Chivas and Fred Astaire dances in the clubs of the Chilean elite. But not a word about Henry Kissinger.
Le Figaro, from Paris, headlines on the 13th: “A tragic lesson”, without explaining that the tragedy is not the work of the Greek gods but of Richard Helms and James Schelsinger, successive directors of the CIA in 1973. La Nación, from Argentina , titled: “Triumph of the revolution in Chile.” In its edition of Wednesday the 12th, the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio praises the patriotism of “the intervention of the armed forces (to) liberate citizens from an imminent Marxist dictatorship.” He does not mention that the CIA has given thousands of dollars to the same newspaper to guarantee its support in the destabilization of the Allende government.
The New York Times, on September 13 – which is not in the museum – chooses a title that is at least naive: “The United States was aware that there would be a coup in Chile, but decided not to act.” Which is a bit like saying that Jack the Ripper knew about the murder in advance, but chose not to act.
It took a year for the young investigative journalist Seymour Hersh to break the news that the administration of Richard Nixon and Kissinger had actively supported the coup plot since before Allende's victory in the November 1970 presidential election.
Sergio Bitar, Allende's young minister, imprisoned after the coup on an island in the Strait of Magellan, said at a conference in Santiago last week that he only became aware of US involvement when he read Hersh after going into exile in the US. USA, in mid-1974. It would be the beginning of a long process in which Washington's responsibility would become increasingly evident. Despite this, the United States has never apologized for what happened in Chile in September 1973.
Fifty years after the coup, after the declassification of hundreds of documents over the years, especially during the Bill Clinton administration, almost all the details of American interference in the coup are known. “Chile is the most studied case of US intervention in Latin America,” says Peter Kornbluh, a researcher at the National Archives in Washington, specialized in analyzing declassified documents, who has just presented in Chile a new updated edition of his book Pinochet: the archives. secretos, now titled Pinochet declassified (Catalonia publishing house).
“The Chilean military were not direct clients of the CIA; They had their own agenda. But they never had any doubt that the US would support them,” said Kornbluh, in a telephone interview from Santiago.
There are dozens of tests. A declassified document from May 1973, for example, confirms the decision of the Nixon administration to “financially help the opposition to Allende and exert our influence on important military personnel so that they play a decisive role alongside the coup forces.” .
“In Chile it is often said that Pinochet came late to the coup,” says Kornbluh. But there are documents that prove that a year before the coup, the man who would be the Chilean dictator between 1974 and 1990 "held a meeting with US officials in the military zone of Panama where he asked for and obtained US support for a coup."
The CIA boasted that the propaganda program through El Mercurio “was instrumental in staging the 1973 coup,” says Kornbluh. The newspaper was key to calling the truckers' strike and the constant protests against Allende, coordinating an investment strike in the industry and legitimizing the terrorist actions of the extreme right.
For Nixon and Kissinger, “the objective was to demonstrate that the Chilean model of democratic socialism was a failure,” explains Kornbluh. Of course, unlike Latin American coups in the first phase of the Cold War, Washington chose not to provide direct support – personnel, weapons – to the coup plotters and did everything possible to publicly distance itself. "USA. he did not want to run the risk of being accused of having been directly involved in a coup; “It was a different time in the 1950s.”
These misgivings had to do with a public opinion that was much more critical of American interventionism after the Vietnam War. Although the first media reaction – as seen on the front pages at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights – does not highlight the American role in the coup, newspapers such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, already at the beginning of the Watergate era, they were more willing than before to investigate the CIA's illicit activities.
Kissinger was well aware of this when he spoke to Nixon on the telephone on September 16, 1973, a conversation that, for Kornbluh, is conclusive proof of the guilt of the Machiavellian national security adviser who just turned 100 years old.
“The Chilean issue is being consolidated,” Kissinger explains to the president, according to the transcript of the declassified conversation. Immediately afterwards, he regrets that the media begins to “complain with sheep's bleats.”
“In the years of Eisenhower (president during the coup d'état against Jacobo Arenz in Guatemala, in 1954, designed by the CIA) we would have been heroes,” he laments.
Nixon, aware of the problem of the media that will soon bring him down with the Watergate scandal, agrees on the communication strategy with his advisor: “It goes without saying that officially we have had nothing to do with this…” he says in reference to the coup in Santiago, five days earlier, and the arrest of thousands of Allende's followers, many of whom will never be seen again. “We haven't done anything,” Kissinger responds.
