10/12/2023 0 Comments Lock code in sift heads 5“They include hundreds of CIA operational records, as well as around 24,000 other White House, National Security Council, FBI and State Department records on the US role in Chile from 1970 to 1990,” Kornbluh says. More were made available under President Barack Obama. Hundreds of CIA operational records were finally released under a special Chile Declassification Project mandated by former President Bill Clinton. Over lunch this week in Santiago, Kornbluh told me that Chile is one of the best-documented cases of covert US intervention for regime change. Placards with the image of victims of enforced disappearances are seen during a protest marking the 49th anniversary of the 1973 coup, in Santiago in 2022 Īnd just days after Allende took up his presidential post, a Novemdocument written by Kissinger went further: “The election of Allende as President of Chile poses for us one of the most serious challenges ever faced in this hemisphere.” With the US consumed by the Cold War, Kissinger argued that a democratically elected, socialist government in Chile could initiate a domino effect throughout the region and beyond. Henry Kissinger, then acting as Nixon’s US national security adviser, in August 1970 “ordered a study of the consequences of an Allende victory in the upcoming presidential elections”, Kornbluh says. Kornbluh is now back in Chile to release the updated, Spanish-language version of his book, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability, which he presented before a standing-room-only audience in Santiago last week.Īmong other things, the declassified documents that appear in the book reveal that financial and political efforts by then-President Richard Nixon’s administration to destabilise Allende began even before the Chilean president took office. The top-secret CIA, White House and Department of State documents detail the 1973 coup in Chile and Washington’s eventual withdrawal of support for Pinochet’s dictatorship. Kornbluh is a senior analyst at the National Security Archive, an institute at George Washington University established in 1985 by scholars and journalists to disclose information based on the Freedom of Information Act.Īs director of the archive’s Chile and Cuba Documentation Projects, he has obtained the declassification of thousands of US government files. “The verdict of history is an enduring legacy that makes it all worthwhile,” he tells Al Jazeera. The goal, says Kornbluh, is to set the record straight. We also know that the United States played a role in pushing for Allende’s overthrow and supported Pinochet until he became too much of a liability.īut thanks to one man in particular, we continue to learn more fascinating details about how the coup was hatched, and why: American Peter Kornbluh has been tirelessly working since 1986 to sift through declassified documents detailing US foreign interventions in general, and in Chile in particular. Much has been written about the 17-year Pinochet dictatorship that followed the coup – especially the tens of thousands of Chileans who were tortured, executed and forcibly disappeared. One might think that after half a century, there is little left to know about the circumstances surrounding the overthrow of the world’s first democratically elected, Marxist president, Salvador Allende.īut as details continue to emerge about what happened, nothing could be further from the truth. Santiago, Chile – Next week marks 50 years since the Septemcoup d’etat in Chile, led by General Augusto Pinochet in the middle of the Cold War.
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