By José R. Cabañas Rodríguez on August 31, 2023
photo: Abriendomundo
In recent days news circulated about the partial declassification by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States of two Presidential Daily Briefings (PDB), prepared to be read by Richard Nixon. The first is dated September 8 and the second 11 of the same month, during the 1973 coup d’état against Chilean President Salvador Allende.
In some media, including the Chilean media, the information was explained as exceptional, and both in Santiago and in Washington, there was talk of mutual commitment to truth and democracy.
The texts, made public in response to a request from the current Chilean authorities, do not really say much, nor do they commit US participation at the highest level in those events. Peter Kornbluh, a U.S. expert with the non-governmental organization National Security Archive, has even questioned why these texts have been kept secret for so long, given how little they add to the truth about those events.
Both documents refer more to the alleged confusion among the coup leaders and the existence, or not, of a real uprising, than to the direct involvement of U.S. agencies against the government of President-elect Salvador Allende, something that has been clearly reflected in investigations and documents made public years ago.
At least 25 years earlier (1998) the National Security Archives itself had achieved the declassification of another 30 documents, which highlighted among other issues that:
– In the fall of 1970 the CIA carried out a group of covert operations to prevent the ratification of Salvador Allende’s victory in the elections.
– Operation Fubelt” was then approved, to destabilize the newly elected socialist government.
– After Allende’s election, the United States considered, among other actions, to provoke the expulsion of Chile from the OAS, as part of its probable international isolation.
– The U.S. government learned in detail of the atrocities committed by the coup plotters during and immediately after Allende’s death. Nevertheless, an economic assistance package for Chile was urgently approved and the CIA was ordered to carry out covert propaganda operations to “improve the Junta’s image”.
The 50th anniversary of the siege of La Moneda and the overthrow by force of the socialist government, elected by popular vote and headed by an undisputed leader such as Salvador Allende, will soon be remembered in Chile and throughout the world.
However, little information is disclosed about a first frustrated attempt to prevent Allende from assuming power, at the end of 1970. Details of the 1998 general revelations became known through new declassifications that took place in 2014.
On August 19, 1970, a meeting of a high-level interagency committee, known as the Special Review Group, headed by U.S. National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, took place at which then CIA Director Richard Helms was given directions to present a detailed plan to President Richard Nixon, with the goal of getting the Chilean Congress not to ratify Allende’s victory at the polls.
Part of this story was edited at the time by State Department historians James Siekmeier and James McElveen in the volume “Chile: 1969-1973”. The same is also collected in the volume The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (2013), by the aforementioned Peter Kornbluh, who also then requested further declassifications around the so-called CIA-financed Truckers’ Strike, which helped destabilize the Allende government, as well as about the murder of two US citizens, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, just before the 1973 coup.
An updated version of Kornbluh’s book has been published in Chile this year 2023 to mark 50 years since the coup, under the title Declassified: The Secret U.S. Files on Chile, with new evidence.
In October 1970, U.S. agencies organized the kidnapping of the then head of the Chilean armed forces, General René Schneider, an officer committed to Chile’s constitutional order, with the aim of facilitating the action of other military figures who opposed the rise of Allende’s socialist government. In the action Schneider was wounded and died days later, without the United States achieving a concerted action by the commanders of the various forces, which were then considered by the White House as “unprepared” and “lacking in determination”.
It is known that in a conversation that took place between Kissinger and Nixon on November 2 of the same year, the advisor told his boss: “the congressional ratification is tomorrow. What they (the military) could have done is to prevent Congress from meeting. But that has not been achieved. They came close, but it’s probably too late.”
Kornbluh’s The Pinochet File also picks up a similar sentence from another conversation between Kissinger and Nixon regarding the ’73 coup, which is clearly compromising. When the president asks to what extent the direct US involvement with the coup plotters can be traced, the advisor replies “I mean, we helped them (…) we created as many conditions as we could”.
At the time of Augusto Pinochet’s arrest in 1998, to stand trial for his leadership in the coup and the crimes committed subsequently, the government of William Clinton made public 23,000 records of the CIA, the State Department, the National Security Council and the Pentagon, through which it became known of the work of the so-called Committee of 40, led by Kissinger, which supervised all the actions against the Popular Unity government.
That said, it can be concluded that U.S. participation in the plans to prevent Allende’s rise to power and, later, in the actions that led to his fall and death, have been duly documented for years, although several details have yet to be known. In other words, the United States was directly involved in the first failed coup against Allende in 1970 and in the 1973 coup, which ultimately achieved its objectives.
The overthrow of the Popular Unity forces not only meant the destruction of an alternative development project for the Chilean people, but also the unlimited opening of the country’s borders for the application of an extreme neoliberal economic “model”, which was synthesized in the precepts of the so-called Chicago School. The objectives of this project, its main ideologues and the facilitators of the conquest from the Chilean side are described in detail in the work of diplomatic expert Juan Gabriel Valdés Los economistas de Pinochet: La Escuela de Chicago en Chile (2020).
But there is still a third blow against the Chilean socialist leader, and against his entire legacy, which is being articulated these days.
The Latin American right wing, and particularly the Chilean right wing, is trying to rewrite history, to establish as a shared truth the assumption that rather than being a victim of the coup forces, Salvador Allende and his followers would have “provoked” the action of which they were victims, for trying to “impose” a social economic model that “did not have the support of the majority of Chileans”.
These political currents apparently already succeeded in preventing a future Constitution of the country from departing from Pinochet’s precepts, but now, 50 years after the crime, they would be trying to remove the roots of one of the most legitimate political processes in the region, which constitutes an obligatory reference for any Chilean political force trying to build a future of political sovereignty for their country.
Another undeclared objective of these same forces is to give legitimacy to the repeated action of the United States to prevent access to government, or to displace from it, political forces that aspire to constitute a real alternative to the demands of their peoples, as recent actions of U.S. diplomacy and special services in the region remind us.
Allende’s legacy transcends the borders of his country, it is Latin American history and, therefore, the defense of his work must be on that scale. A third coup can be avoided this time.
José Ramón Cabañas Rodríguez is Director of the International Policy Research Center (CIPI) in Havana, Cuba and former Cuban Ambassador to the US
translation Resumen Latinoamericano – English