CHILE-US: 25 Years Since Coup that Ignited US Rights Movement

By Jim Lobe Reprint | | Print |

Jim Lobe

WASHINGTON, Sep 9 1998 (IPS) - “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go Communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people,” declared Henry Kissinger, then President Richard Nixon’s national security chief, in June 1970 – shortly before the Salvador Allende’s election as president of Chile.

Little did Kissinger suspect where his remarks – and the policy they embodied – would lead.

Of course, he could not have been surprised that they would culminate in a violent military coup d’etat against Allende on Sep 11, 1973. But what he almost certainly did not expect was the chain reaction set off by the coup back home in the United States.

“The coup was absolutely seminal for the human rights movement in this country,” says Tom Quigley, senior adviser on Latin America to the U.S. Catholic Bishops Conference and one of the key architects of the religious community’s role in that movement.

“Chile was the catalyst for the human rights movement and for Congress to take on the executive branch for its support of foreign governments regardless of how they treated their own people,” according to Joe Eldridge, who worked as a Methodist missionary in Chile until he returned home after the coup to become the first director of the church-backed Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA).

Reaction to the coup of 25 years ago contributed not only to the enactment by the U.S. Congress of the first of a series of historic human rights laws targeted against the military junta in Chile and other repressive regimes. It also sparked Congressional hearings that badly embarrassed the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and placed unprecendented restraints on its freedom of action and supervision.

“The coup created a ‘Chile Syndrome’,” says Peter Kornbluh, a researcher at the National Security Archive who dates his 25 years of political activism in Washington to the coup.

“That syndrome is a combination of moral introspection about interventions against democracies abroad coupled with human rights really taking hold in this country as a national issue” – much to the chagrin, it may be added, of Henry Kissinger.

When Kissinger made his remarks in 1970, he was referring only to Washington’s intervention in the Chilean elections, much as it had done repeatedly since 1958 to ensure that the socialists, led by Allende, did not capture La Moneda, the presidential palace.

In 1962, for example, the CIA spent four million dollars to on behalf of Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei. In the 1964 elections, the agency reportedly covered half of Frei’s campaign costs and organised its own media “campana de terror” against Allende.

In 1970, however, CIA subsidies – as well as parallel funding from U.S. multinationals Anaconda and International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) – did not have the desired effect. To the shock of the Nixon administration Allende narrowly won a three-way race on Sep 4, prompting Nixon and Kissinger to order a two-track operation to prevent Allende’s installation by the Chilean Congress at the end of October.

“Track I” consisted of a political, economic, and propaganda campaign to create panic, bribe congress, and, if necessary, persuade Frei to interrupt the constitutional process. “Track II,”about which even the State Department was not informed, was designed to foment a military coup.

Neitherplans worked although two generals, armed by the CIA, tried to trigger a coup by kidnapping the military chief of staff, Gen. Rene Schneider. The effort collapsed after Schneider was killed while resisting abduction.

From that moment, U.S efforts were aimed at destabilisation. The administration cut off all but military aid to Chile which was also denied export credits and multilateral loans. “Make the economy scream,” Nixon reportedly ordered.

At the same time, the CIA secretly continued with “Track II – Project Fubelt,” through psychological warfare; funding and advising anti-Allende newspapers; backing violent right-wing groups, including the notorious Patria y Libertad; financing strikes by anti-Allende labour unions; and maintaining close contact with sympathetic military brass.

While no concrete evidence emerged that the agency ordered or played any actual role in the Sep 11 coup that brought Gen. Augusto Pinochet to power, top CIA officials admitted that all of its activities were designed to create the conditions for a coup.

Kissinger and Nixon, however, had not counted on the public reaction, particularly to the televised scenes and stories of the sheer brutality with which the coup and its aftermath were carried out.

“What made Chile unique was the suddenness and brutality of the coup and the repression,” says Quigley who, with church and other activists moved quickly to establish WOLA, the first Washington-based organisation dedicated to human rights advocacy.

In addition, says Kornbluh, “an extraordinary number of very dedicated and articulate people – including many missionaries – were in Chile and came back committed to really telling people about it.” Among others, these included Eldridge and Pat Breslin, a doctoral student in Chile at the time who later wrote a novel, Interventions,’ about the CIA’s role.

“This was such a betrayal of what the U.S. said about democracy and how the only way to achieve a revolution was to win elections. That’s what Allende had done,” says Breslin, now with the Inter-American Foundation here. “The hypocrisy was so clear, and it gave those of us from the United States a greater responsibility to do something about it.”

After WOLA’s creation several months after the coup, legislation banning military aid to Chile was enacted over Kissinger’s angry opposition. At the same time, the Congress, convened special committees to investigate CIA covert operations, particularly its actions in Chile.

Meanwhile, the military aid ban against Chile proved to be just the beginning of unprecedented human rights legislation. In 1975 and 1976, Congress passed new laws, banning all but humanitarian aid to Chile and any country found to engage in “gross violations of internationally-recognised human rights.”

In Nov, 1976, Jimmy Carter, who had made human rights the central plank of his foreign policy platform – and his critique of Kissinger’s Realpolitik – was elected president.

“Congress demanded that the administration factor in the way foreign governments treat their own people,” according to Eldridge, who now works as the chaplain of American University here. “This has stuck for the last 25 years, and Chile was the catalyst.”