THE
ROVING EYE The other September
11 By Pepe Escobar
SANTIAGO, Chile - You don't need an Osama
bin Laden to pull a September 11. Forget
Boeings-turned-into-missiles crashing into twin
towers. Switch for a moment to four military
planes bombing a presidential palace - and replay
a different September 11 movie starring Dick and
Henry. "Dick", of course, is the late US president
Richard Nixon. "Henry" was his national security
adviser, Henry Kissinger. Foreign policy-wise,
it's quite an
enlightening plot.
Scene 1: Washington, the Oval Office,
September 1970. Dr Salvador Allende, a man of
culture, grand bourgeois and charismatic founder
of the Socialist Party, has just won the
presidential election in Chile fair and square,
with 36.22% of the votes. Nixon and Kissinger
receive Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) director
Richard Helms. Nixon tells Helms, according to
Kissinger, that he wants "a major effort to see
what could be done to prevent Allende's accession
to power. If there were one chance in 10 of
getting rid of Allende, we should try it."
Scene 2: Santiago, La Moneda Palace,
September 11 of the year 1973, 8am. Allende, the
democratically elected president of Chile, is
worried about a general called Augusto Pinochet.
Radio stations are mute. The navy has taken over
Valparaiso - where the president was born. But he
worries about his new army commander, chosen less
than three weeks ago: "Poor Pinochet, he must have
been arrested ..."
General Pinochet is far
from arrested: he is conducting a coup. Troops
march over Santiago. At 8.30am a solemn military
declaration makes treason official. Tanks roll
into the city center. At noon, four Stuka planes
destroy Allende's private residence on Tomas Moro
Street and bomb La Moneda Palace. The president
chooses resistance, fighting the troops
surrounding the palace and spurning offers of a
plane for himself and his family to leave the
country. When his capture is imminent, Allende
presses his chin against the AK-47 that Cuban
leader Fidel Castro gave him, and fires. At 2pm,
the military junta takes power. Systematic
arrests, torture and executions start almost
immediately.
Between these two scenes is
the story of a coup that unfolded in slow motion
for virtually three years. The United States was
still embroiled in Vietnam. Nixon's policy for the
whole of Latin America was one word short of "war
on terror": "to prevent another Cuba". Nixon
simply could not tolerate "that bastard Allende"
(in his own words). Chile had the largest copper
reserves in the world. Allende was about to
nationalize Chilean copper - thus sabotaging the
monstrous US corporate profits of Anaconda Copper
Mining Co and Kennecott Copper Co, which had been
bleeding the country for decades.
The
Chilean-destabilization strategy, presided over in
detail by Kissinger, developed into a series of
operations called Track 1 and Track 2. The CIA
tried to stage a coup even before Allende's
inauguration on November 1970, giving US$50,000 to
a crypto-Nazi gang to kill chief of staff General
Rene Schneider on October 22, and bribing generals
and admirals. It didn't work.
Allende
wanted to develop "a peaceful Chilean way towards
socialism". He was elected by workers, peasants
and the marginalized, urban lower classes.
Educated urban youth celebrated the "socialism of
red wine and empanadas" (stuffed pastry).
But Washington would prevent any turn to the left
by devastating the Chilean economy, deploying mass
bribery, spying and blackmail.
Allende in
fact was a moderate compared with Chilean popular
movements further to the left that occupied
factories, lands or just property (1,278
occupations in 1971 alone). Then strikes started
to spread (3,200 in 1972). Industrialists
sabotaged production. No one could explain how
Chilean credit was suddenly cut off in
international markets. Loans were suspended.
The CIA, apart from non-stop sabotage,
financed strategic strikes - doctors, bank clerks,
a very long truck drivers' strike. Conservative
newspapers conducted a non-stop vicious
disinformation campaign. There were coup
rehearsals. And political chaos compounded
economic chaos: the Christian Democrats - the
centrists - ended up joining the right and the
extreme right against Allende.
Nixon got
exactly what he wanted. On September 11, US Navy
ships monitored all Chilean military bases to warn
the plotters about who might be supporting
Allende. Pinochet took over and entered history as
the definitive, sinister Latin American dictator
from central casting.
Dictatorship in
Chile coincided with the ascension of
neo-liberalism (which in the 1990s would be
remixed as "globalization"). Chileans with
scholarships had been a fixture of the University
of Chicago for years. The charter of
neo-liberalism - and Pinochet's Holy Economic
Grail - was written by two of them, Sergio de
Castro and Arturo Fontaine. Afterward, it was
classic division of labor: the armed forces killed
while the "Chicago boys" applied neo-liberal
economic policies. Military repression assured
economic "freedom".
Some other dictators
were in place before Pinochet, more were to
follow. By the mid-1970s, six US-backed South
American dictatorships - Chile, Argentina, Brazil,
Bolivia, Uruguay and Paraguay - were united in
deep secret under the infamous, transnational
Operation Condor, a Latino war "of" terror
eliminating everyone who was or might become a
political adversary.
Condor had two key
players: Pinochet in Chile (who kept Condor's
centralized computers) and Alfredo Stroessner in
Paraguay (he died this year in Brazil). The
Pinochet regime kept a small lab for the
fabrication of botulism soup and nerve gas - which
were and remain certified weapons of mass
destruction; the chemist responsible later escaped
to Uruguay and was assassinated. Orlando Letelier,
Chile's ambassador to Washington under Allende in
1970-72, was assassinated under Condor. Who cared?
Military fascism was Washington's daily special,
every single day. Pinochet and Condor, in
Chile, were responsible for as many victims as
September 11: about 3,000, including 1,198
"disappeared". In Argentina, there were officially
at least 10,000 dead: for human-rights
organizations there were more than 30,000 dead and
"disappeared". In Paraguay, there were at least
2,000 dead; in Bolivia at least 350 dead and
"disappeared", in Brazil almost 300, in Uruguay
almost 200. Families of the "disappeared" are
convinced Kissinger knew about everything. He will
take his secrets to the grave, as will model
dictator Pinochet - who still refuses to die.
Behind the rebuilt La Moneda palace in
central Santiago, facing the Ministry of Justice
building, there is a statue of Allende.
Underneath, the words: "I have faith in Chile and
its destiny." These were his last words before he
committed suicide, instead of becoming a hostage
on South America's September 11.
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