Grounds for Appeal

The United States of America does not hold the monopoly on tragic events that occurred on a September 11.

On that date in 1973 the democratically elected government of Chile, led by Salvador Allende, was violently overthrown by a military coup d’etat led by the man who was to visit unspeakable tyranny and vicious oppression on the Chilean people for the next seventeen long years.

That man was General Augusto Pinochet, destined to die in his bed in 2006 at age 91.

The man whose government he overthrew, Salvador Allende, met a violent death on the day of the coup, aged 65. Now, forty years on, his body has been exhumed to put to rest, once and for all, the central controversy surrounding his death – whether he killed himself or was assassinated by the military as part of the coup plan.

Ironically the U.S. was deeply involved in Chile’s September 11 as well – as supporters of the coup.

It is a well-documented inconvenient fact that Pinochet’s military coup was CIA-backed and funded and went forward with the express knowledge and assent of then-President Richard Nixon who was informed, in advance, about the coup plans and assented to their execution.

So much for exporting democracy and freedom to other nations. The 1973 coup in Chile led to almost two decades of oppressive  military rule in the country with the strongest history of democratic government in South America.

The video posted here in six parts is the story of the Chilean coup d’etat of 1973.

It is the story of the death of democracy in that thin ribbon of a country.

It is the story of “The Other 9/11″.

Allende’s coffin was lifted today out of the family’s crypt in the general cemetery in Chile’s capital.

“Our conviction is that President Allende took the decision to die, as an act of political coherence in defence of the mandate that was given him by the people,” said his daughter, senator Isabel Allende.

The Allende family has trusted the version told by the only apparent eyewitness, Dr Patricio Guijon, who was one of Allende’s physicians and shared his final moments on 11 September 1973, as the presidential palace came under furious attack.

Allende had ordered his comrades to surrender, but instead of following them out, went alone into the hall of independence on the second floor.

Guijon said he too stepped away from the rest, to grab his gas mask, and happened to look into the hall at the moment Allende pulled the trigger of an AK47.

“What I saw was the body rising up from the impact of the assault weapon, which was a weapon of war, and I ran there and saw there was nothing I could do,” Guijon said last week.

Guijon’s account supported the official version put out by the military – that Allende committed suicide using the gun his friend Fidel Castro had given him.

But doubts arose immediately, partly because Pinochet’s military rushed his initial postmortem, performed in an irregular way only hours after his death, and then secretly buried Allende in a closed casket.

Also, many prominent leftists refused to believe their martyred hero would take his own life.

The exhumation took about 45 minutes on Monday. His body was carried a short distance to Chile’s official coroner’s office.

Carroza said Allende’s two daughters have already provided blood samples to help confirm the identity through DNA analysis at a foreign laboratory.

“It’s necessary to open the casket, see the condition of the remains, analyse any other related evidence such as clothing to pursue the questions,” said spokesman Dr Patricio Bustos.

He said it could take until early next year for the 12-member forensic team to determine the cause of death.

This is the second exhumation of Allende’s body. He was buried during a rapid night time ceremony, with only his widow present, in a crypt near Chile’s coast, where the coffin remained for 17 years.

Then, with democracy’s return in 1990, his remains were moved to the capital, Santiago.

Experts disagree on how much damage the corpse suffered in that move, which was complicated because the casket had disintegrated.

Salvador Allende’s career in politics spanned some 40 years within Chile’s established democracy as a senator and deputy before ascending to the presidency by election in 1970. It was finally his hour after failed runs at the top office in 1952, 1958 and 1964.

A founder member of Chile’s Socialist Party in 1933, Allende ran for office in 1970 on a platform of change entitled  La vía chilena al socialismo (“the Chilean Path to Socialism”), which included plans to nationalize Chile’s large-scale private industrial concerns. This, fatefully, included U.S. corporations in Chile prior to Allende’s presidency, including the Anaconda and Kennecott Copper companies, and ITT Corp., International Telephone and Telegraph. All in all, U.S. corporate holdings in Chile amounted to $964 million at the end of the ’60s.

The Nixon Administration was appalled at the thought of a socialist government in Chile headed by Allende, whose friendship with Cuba’s Fidel Castro convinced them he was a danger to American interests.

Even before Allende had assumed office, a C.I.A. supported coup attempt led by General Roberto Viaux resulted in the death of General Rene Schneider, Commander in Chief of the Chilean Army. Schneider was a defender of the so-called “constitutionalist doctrine” which held the army’s role to be exclusively professional, its mission one of protecting the country’s sovereignty without ever interfering in domestic politics.

Schneider’s death caused outrage and put an end for the moment to further coup attempts.

But the pressure never let up.

Nixon was positively apoplectic when Allende immediately embarked on his promised campaign of nationalization upon taking office.

Nixon had authorized a two-track policy toward Allende’s Chile, designed to engineer the latter’s downfall one way or another, and it swung into action, clamped its jaws on Chile’s throat and never let go, with Nixon personally allocating $10 million for Allende’s removal.

Richard Helms, C.I.A. Director at the time,  refers to a “blank check” from the Administration, authorizing the C.I.A. to do whatever was necessary in order “to get rid of” Allende.

At the overt level, Washington was frosty, especially after the nationalization of the copper mines; official relations were unfriendly but not openly hostile. The government of President Richard M. Nixon launched an economic blockade conjunction with U.S. multinationals (ITT, Kennecott, Anaconda) and banks (Inter-American Development Bank, World Bank). The US squeezed the Chilean economy by terminating financial assistance and blocking loans from multilateral organizations.

During 1972 and 1973 the U.S. increased aid to the military, a sector unenthusiastic toward the Allende government, and also stepped up training Chilean military personnel in the United States and Panama.

According to notes taken by CIA director Richard Helms at a 1970 meeting in the Oval Office, Nixon’s orders to him were to “make the economy scream.” It was widely reported that at the covert level the United States worked to destabilize Allende’s Chile by funding opposition political groups and media and by encouraging a military coup.

Certainly the agency trained members of the fascist organization Patria y Libertad (PyL) in guerrilla warfare and bombing, and they were soon waging a campaign of arson. The CIA also sponsored demonstrations and strikes, funded by ITT and other US corporations with Chilean holdings, while CIA-linked media, including the country’s largest newspaper, fanned the flames of crisis and dissent.

The first year of Allende’s presidency was extraordinarily successful in the implementation of his program of nationalization, with large industrial concerns taken over by the government and the larger land estates seized and the land re-distributed to the resident workers.

The Allende Government also sought to bring the arts (both serious and popular) to the mass of the Chilean population by funding a number of cultural endeavors.

Social spending was dramatically increased, particularly for housing, education, and health, while a major effort was made to redistribute wealth to poorer Chileans. As a result of new initiatives in nutrition and health, together with higher wages, many poorer Chileans were able to feed themselves and clothe themselves better than they had been able to before. Public access to the social security system was increased, while state benefits such as family allowances were raised significantly,

With eighteen-year olds and illiterates now granted the right to vote, mass participation in decision-making was encouraged by the government.

The initial success of Allende’s policies were reflected in the numbers – 12% industrial growth and an 8.6% increase in GDP, accompanied by major declines in inflation (down from 34.9% to 22.1%) and unemployment (down to 3.8%).

Nixon was outraged. He squeezed harder. And the economic pressure began to take a deadly toll.

In Allende’s second and third years in government, demand outstripped supply, the economy shrank, deficit spending snowballed, new investments and foreign exchange became scarce, the value of copper sales dropped, shortages appeared, and inflation skyrocketed, eroding the previous gains for the working class. A thriving black market sprang up, also diverting funds out of government hands.

Try as he might, Allende was stymied by a lack of investment and funding and a growing right-wing opposition. The latter thought they would inflict serious and debilitating losses on the government in 1973′ mid-term congressional elections (something of a tradition in Chile just as it is here). The two major opposition parties hoped to win two-thirds of the seats, enough to impeach Allende. They netted 55 percent of the votes, but not enough for a majority. Moreover, the Allende’s Popular Unity Party’s 43 percent share represented an increase over the presidential tally of 36.2 percent and gave Allende’s coalition six additional congressional seats.

The country, however, was becoming dangerous polarized and in mid-1973 descended into crisis. There was a failed coup in June and a general strike in July.A constitutional crisis erupted in August when both the Congress of Deputies, through the opposition parties therein, and the Chilean Supreme Court accused Allende of ruling by decree.

In tandem with these events, middle and upper-class business proprietors and professionals launched another wave of workplace shutdowns and lockouts, as they had in late 1972. Their 1973 protests against the government coincided with strikes by the trucking industry (secretly funded by the C.I.A., according to declassified U.S. government documents)and by the left’s erstwhile allies among the copper workers. The Nationalists, the Christian Democrats, and conservative students backed the increasingly subversive strikers and called for Allende’s resignation or for military intervention.

The scene was set for the “other 9/11″. General Pinochet, the newer appointed commander of the army – appointed by Allende – was happy to oblige the plotters and assume control of the country by way of violent coup, followed immediately by mass arrests, assassinations, and indefinite detention.

All with U.S. sanction and approval.

Allende’s dream for Chile was over.

In the aftermath, as Pinochet consolidated his power, opposition parties were banned and thousands of Chileans were tortured and killed, many fingered as “radicals” by lists provided by the CIA.

Pinochet was not to lift his boot from Chile’s neck for eighteen years – eighteen long years marked by fear, state brutality, ruthless suppression of dissent, systematic human rights violations, disappearances and the forced introduction of an economic system that would prove utterly disastrous.

You may know the sysytem. It’s called the free market economy.

Poor, poor Chile.

Victor Jara – Manifiesto

Chile returned to democracy in 1990.

~ by neil53 on May 24, 2011 . Tagged: anaconda socialist party, augusto pinochet. richard nixon, chile, cia, covert intervention, economic sanction, ITT, kennecott copper rene schneider, lvador allende, richard helms, roberto viaux, the other 9/11