The telephone conversation between Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger that Sunday morning began almost like a conversation between friends, with comments about a football game that was to be played that day.
But Nixon was then President of the United States, Kissinger his national security adviser, and the dialogue between the two quickly led to the coup that had taken place in Chile five days earlier, on September 11, 1973, and to the dictatorship. military that started there.
“Chile is being consolidated,” Kissinger informed him, rejecting criticism from some media outlets about the overthrow of a democratically elected government in that country. “In Eisenhower’s time we would be heroes,” he commented.
“Our hand, however, is not shown in this case,” Nixon noted.
“We didn’t do it. That means we help them,” explained Kissinger.
That dialogue, one of several recordings declassified by Washington over the years, is part of the evidence of the role the United States played in the overthrow of Chile’s socialist President Salvador Allende and the institutional and social collapse it caused.
Now, as the 50th anniversary of this tragic episode approaches, a question that arose decades ago is resurfacing in various scenarios: Should the US apologize for leading to the coup in Chile?
Diplomatic sources told BBC Mundo Members of the US Congress are actually considering pushing for a resolution that suggests a sort of mea culpa from Washington.
When asked about this, Chile’s ambassador to the White House, Juan Gabriel Valdés, explained that his country had attached importance to knowing the still secret US files on the coup, but would welcome a gesture of remorse or apology from Washington. However, he does not claim this.
“I would say that for us a gesture of this kind would be something that we would greatly appreciate and that would be of enormous value to our relationship,” Valdés tells BBC Mundo.
“Our complicity”
Even half a century after the coup, the opinion of Chilean society is still divided on the coup of Augusto Pinochet, who ruled the country with an iron fist until 1990. Some condemn the armed uprising and the human rights violations that followed, others believe that military intervention saved the country from the course it had taken under Allende.
And there are clear signs that the wound caused by this chapter of history in Chile has still not healed.
President Gabriel Boric unveiled a plan Wednesday for the Chilean state to begin searching for the more than 1,100 people still missing, a task that has so far been carried out by relatives of the victims and human rights groups.
In the same week, seven former soldiers were convicted of the kidnapping and brutal murder of singer Víctor Jara on September 16, 1973 – the same day of the conversation between Nixon and Kissinger – at the Chile Stadium, which was later converted into an internment and torture center Deposition of Allende.
Meanwhile, the United States continues to gradually release secret documents documenting events in Chile and showing how its own official apparatus operated during the Allende years, material requested from Washington by the Boric government.
“It is normal that a country that has suffered such a trauma can try to reconstruct how this trauma occurred and why,” explains Ambassador Valdés.
And he points out that the U.S. government, which he calls a “friend,” responded that it would work to declassify classified material about the period of the coup in Chile.
“We want to understand,” says the diplomat, “that by publishing the documents that they are going to give us, the United States is basically declaring that this should never have happened, because the documents that we are reading absolutely come from an intervention .” inappropriate, often brutal, in Chile’s internal affairs.”
The files already declassified indicate that the Cold War is of greatest concern to the United States Allende had the prospect that his socialist government (the first to come to power through democratic means) “could be consolidated and the image presented to the world would be one of success.”As Nixon himself explained to his National Security Council in November 1970.
To prevent this, the files show, Washington boycotted Allende’s presidency since his election that year: it conducted covert operations to prevent the Chilean Congress from ratifying his victory, backed by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA, as the acronym is in English). The failed plan to kidnap the commander-in-chief of the Chilean army and defender of the constitution, René Schneider, was assassinated and, after the installation of the Allende government, tried to stifle it by weakening the economy or financing the opposition.
Available documentation also shows that the US, with Kissinger as a key player, supported the Pinochet regime in its early years, despite concerns about its serious human rights abuses that were a concern around the world, including in some offices in Washington.
In response to the Chilean request, Joe Biden’s administration last week revealed two more secret files: the reports Nixon received from the CIA on September 8 and 11, 1973.
The first warned the president of a possible military coup attempt in Chile and stated that Allende believed that “the only solution is a political one.”
The second statement, received on the same day of the coup, said the Chilean military was “determined to restore political and economic order,” although it may lack “an effective coordinated plan that would take advantage of the broad civilian opposition.” .
The US State Department claims that the release of these documents, along with thousands of other previously declassified documents, demonstrates a commitment to partnership with Chile and is consistent with “joint efforts to promote democracy and human rights.”
This was welcomed by those calling for more openness from Washington about its actions during the coup in Chile, although some believe more needs to be done.
Joaquin Castro, the ranking Democrat on the US House of Representatives’ Western Hemisphere Foreign Affairs Subcommittee, believes it is necessary to identify and declassify the remaining records on the subject in order to understand what happened.
“If the United States wants to have an honest relationship with Latin America, we must be honest about our complicity in past events and take measures to avoid repeating our mistakes in the future,” Castro told BBC Mundo.
Castro recently visited Santiago with a delegation of U.S. lawmakers that included Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez, who also called on Washington to declassify documents about the coup in Chile and accept “full and public responsibility” for its historic role in the region take over.
“Create conditions”
The question of whether Washington should apologize for the collapse of Chile’s democracy was first raised shortly after the coup.
In 1977, Brady Tyson, an American diplomat before the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, expressed his “deep regret” over his country’s role in undermining the Allende government.
But a few hours later, then US President Jimmy Carter called the statement “inappropriate,” while the State Department pointed out that Tyson had spoken in person and without prior authorization and recalled him to Washington.
That reflected how sensitive the issue could be for someone in the White House: as a Democratic candidate, Carter himself had criticized the Republican administration before him for “overthrowing an elected government and helping to establish a military dictatorship” in Chile.
To justify his position as president, Carter cited a 1975 U.S. Senate Committee investigation into covert actions in Chile that found no evidence of Washington’s direct involvement in the coup.
Peter Kornbluh, an expert at the National Security Archive in Washington who has been researching the matter for decades, notes that “while the U.S. documents do not show a direct role of the U.S. government, the CIA, in the coup itself,” they do show it three years of efforts to destabilize Chile.”
“The declassified records show that the intent of these operations was to ensure Allende’s failure and create the conditions for his downfall,” Kornbluh told BBC Mundo.
And he adds that “the United States provided economic and military aid in the first three years of the Pinochet dictatorship, the bloodiest.”
Times have changed and recently various countries and institutions have apologized for past actions.
Another U.S. president, Bill Clinton, did so in 1999 because his country supported Guatemalan military and intelligence services that killed tens of thousands of people in a 36-year civil war, suggesting that Washington “should not repeat this mistake.”
Most recently, under President Barack Obama in 2010, the US also apologized to Guatemala for experiments in the 1940s in which US scientists deliberately infected hundreds of people in the Central American country with sexually transmitted diseases as part of studies.
But the U.S. “never bore the costs” caused by the collapse of democracy in Chile, claims Mónica González, award-winning Chilean journalist and author of “The Conjura: The Thousand and One Days of the Coup.”
“What cost? Not just the more than 3,000 imprisoned, disappeared and executed. There are the 250,000 displaced people, the families hit by a cluster bomb that we see every day because they were scattered,” González tells BBC Mundo.
Neither Clinton nor Obama
When the Clinton administration announced the release of thousands of declassified documents in 2000, it argued that the public could “judge for itself the extent to which U.S. actions undermine the cause of democracy and human rights in Chile.”
“The measures approved by the U.S. government during this period exacerbated political polarization and undermined Chile’s long tradition of democratic elections and respect for constitutional order and the rule of law.“The White House announced at the time.
When Obama visited Santiago as president in 2011 and a journalist asked him whether the US would apologize for what it did in Chile in the 1970s, he replied that he could not “talk about all the policies of the past.” .
“It’s important that we learn from our history, that we understand our history, but that we don’t dwell on it because we face many challenges,” Obama said.
His national security adviser for Latin America, Dan Restrepo, later told reporters that some U.S. actions in the region were “bad” but avoided going into details about Chile.
BBC Mundo attempted to speak to the Biden administration about the role the US played in the South American country half a century ago and whether it would consider apologizing for what was done, but had to wait until publication This article received no response from BBC Mundo the White House.
“Governments don’t like to apologize or admit mistakes, there is certainly a nationalist (or) legal position,” says Kornbluh. But he adds: “50 years later, it is appropriate to express deep regret that the covert operations have undermined Chile’s constitutional process.” and “for the role of the United States in supporting the repressive apparatus” of Pinochet.
“I believe that both events violate the values of the American public,” the analyst concludes, “and they are relevant today as many countries, including the United States itself, face the threat of authoritarianism and the loss of the strength of democratic institutions are.” ”
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BBC-NEWS-SRC: https://www.bbc.com/mundo/articles/cd1nzv7pz70o, IMPORT DATE: 09/01/2023 11:30:07