Should the United States apologize for the coup against Allende in Chile?

The phone conversation between Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger that Sunday morning began more like a chat between friends, with comments about a football game scheduled to be played that day.

But Nixon was then President of the United States, and Kissinger was National Security Advisor, and the dialogue between the two quickly led to the coup that had occurred in Chile five days earlier, on September 11, 1973, as well as the coup that had occurred in Chile. The military dictatorship that began there.

“Chile is being strengthened,” Kissinger informed him, rejecting criticism by some media of the overthrow of that country’s democratically elected government. He commented, “In Eisenhower’s time we will be heroes.”

“Our hands were not shown in this case,” Nixon noted.

“We did not do that. That is, we are helping them.”

This dialogue, one of many records that Washington has declassified over the years, is part of the evidence about the role the United States played in the downfall of Chilean socialist President Salvador Allende, and the institutional and social collapse he caused.

Now, as the 50th anniversary of that tragic incident approaches, a question that arose decades ago is resurfacing in different scenarios: Should the United States apologize for leading the coup in Chile?

Diplomatic sources told BBC Mundo that In fact, members of the US Congress are considering pushing for a resolution indicating some kind of error on Washington’s part.

In response to a question about this matter, the Chilean ambassador to the White House, Juan Gabriel Valdes, explained that his country focused on finding out the still secret American files about the coup, but that it would welcome a gesture of repentance or apology from Washington, although he does not claim that. He. She.

“I would say that a gesture of this kind for us would be something that we would appreciate very much and would have enormous value for our relationship,” Valdes told BBC Mundo.

“Our complicity”

Half a century after the coup, Chilean society remains divided in its opinion about the coup led by 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 condemn the armed uprising and the human rights violations that followed. For human rights, others believe that military intervention saved the country from the path it took under Allende.

There are clear signs that the wound caused by that chapter in Chile’s history has not yet healed.

President Gabriel Buric on Wednesday launched a plan for the Chilean state to begin searching for more than 1,100 people still missing, a mission so far carried out by relatives of the victims and human rights groups.

In the same week, seven former soldiers were convicted of kidnapping and brutally murdering singer Victor Jara on September 16, 1973 – the same day as that conversation between Nixon and Kissinger – in the Chilean stadium, which later became a detention and torture center. Allende precipitation.

At the same time, the United States continues to gradually publish secret documents that recorded what was happening in Chile and showed how its official agencies behaved during the Allende years, materials that the Buric government requested from Washington.

“It is natural for a country that has experienced a shock of this kind to try to reconstruct how and why that shock occurred,” explains Ambassador Valdés.

He points out that the American government, which he describes as a “friendly,” responded that it would work to declassify the materials that remained secret about the period of the coup in Chile.

“We want to understand that the United States, by publishing the documents that it will provide us, is basically declaring that this should never have happened, because the documents that we are reading are all the result of absolute interference,” says the diplomat. Inappropriate, and often brutal, influence on Chile’s internal affairs.

The already declassified files indicate that in the context of the Cold War, the main concern for the United States was about… Allende looked forward to the possibility of “consolidating his socialist government (the first to come to power through democratic means) and the image that will be presented to the world will be one of its success.”“, as Nixon himself explained to the National Security Council in November 1970.

To prevent this, the files show, Washington had boycotted Allende’s presidency since his election that year: it carried out covert operations in an attempt to prevent the Chilean Congress from certifying his victory, with the support of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA, by its acronym in English) and a failed plan to kidnap the commander-in-chief of the defending Chilean army. About the Constitution René Schneider was murdered, and after the installation of Allende’s government he sought to strangle it by weakening the economy or funding the opposition.

Available documents also indicate that the United States, with Kissinger as a major player, supported the Pinochet regime in its early years, despite concerns that its serious human rights violations generated global influence, including some of its offices in Washington.

In response to the Chilean request, Joe Biden’s government revealed two more secret files last week: reports Nixon received from the CIA on September 8 and 11, 1973.

The first warned the president of the possibility of an attempted military coup in Chile, and stated that Allende believed that “the only solution is a political solution.”

The second letter, received on the same day as the coup, indicated that the Chilean military was “intent on restoring political and economic order,” although it may lack “an effective coordinated plan that would capitalize on broad civilian opposition.”

The US State Department asserts that the publication of these documents, along with thousands of other previously declassified documents, demonstrates a commitment to the partnership with Chile and is consistent with “joint efforts to promote democracy and human rights.”

This has been welcomed by those calling for Washington to be more frank about its actions during the coup in Chile, although some say there is still much more to be done.

Joaquín Castro, the ranking Democrat on the US House of Representatives’ Western Hemisphere Foreign Affairs Subcommittee, believes it is necessary to identify and declassify remaining records on the subject to learn what happened.

“If the United States wants to have an honest relationship with Latin America, we have to be honest about our complicity in past events and take the necessary measures not to repeat our mistakes in the future,” Castro told BBC Mundo.

Castro recently visited Santiago with a delegation of US lawmakers that included Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who also called on Washington to declassify documents related to the coup in Chile and take “full and public responsibility” for its historic role in the region.

“Creating conditions”

The question of whether Washington should apologize for the collapse of Chilean democracy was first raised shortly after the coup.

In 1977, Brady Tyson, an American diplomat to the United Nations Human Rights Commission in Geneva, expressed “deep regret” for the role his country played in undermining Allende’s government.

But a few hours later, then-US President Jimmy Carter described that statement as “inappropriate,” while the State Department indicated that Tyson spoke in his personal capacity without prior approval and summoned him again to Washington.

This reflects how sensitive this issue is to someone in the White House: as a Democratic candidate, Carter himself had criticized the Republican administration that preceded him because it “overthrew an elected government and helped establish a military dictatorship” in Chile.

To justify his position as president, Carter cited a 1975 US Senate committee’s investigation into covert operations in Chile, which found no evidence of Washington’s direct involvement in the coup.

Peter Kornbluh, an expert at the National Security Archive in Washington who has researched the matter for decades, notes that although “US documents do not show a direct role for the US government, or the CIA, in the coup itself, they do.” . “Demonstrated three years of efforts to destabilize Chile.”

“The declassified record shows that the aim of these operations was to ensure the failure of Allende and to create the conditions so that he could be overthrown,” Kornbluh told BBC Mundo.

He adds, “In the first three years of the Pinochet dictatorship, the bloodiest, the United States provided economic and military aid.”

Times have changed and in recent times various countries and institutions have apologized for their past actions.

Another US president, Bill Clinton, did so in 1999 because of his country’s support for Guatemalan military forces and intelligence units that killed tens of thousands of people in a 36-year civil war, noting that Washington “should not repeat this mistake.”

More recently, under President Barack Obama in 2010, the United States also apologized to Guatemala for experiments conducted in the 1940s in which American scientists deliberately infected hundreds of people in the Central American country with venereal diseases as part of doctors’ studies.

But the United States “never bore the cost” of the collapse of democracy in Chile, asserts Monica Gonzalez, an award-winning Chilean journalist and author of “Conjura: A Thousand and One Days of a Coup.”

“At what cost? Not just more than 3,000 detainees, disappeared and executed. There are 250,000 exiles, and the families who were hit by a cluster bomb we see every day, because they are dispersed,” Gonzalez told BBC Mundo.

Neither Clinton nor Obama

In 2000, when the Clinton administration announced the release of thousands of declassified documents, it claimed that the public was able to “judge for themselves the extent to which U.S. actions undermine the cause of democracy and human rights in Chile.”

“Actions approved by the United States government during that period exacerbated political polarization and affected Chile’s long tradition of democratic elections and respect for the constitutional order and rule of law.“, the White House noted at the time.

When Obama visited Santiago as president in 2011 and was asked by a reporter whether the United States 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 is important that we learn from our history and understand our history, but not get distracted by it because we have many challenges ahead of us.“Obama said.

Later, his national security adviser for Latin America, Dan Restrepo, told reporters that some American actions in the region were “bad,” but he avoided going into details about Chile.

BBC Mundo tried to speak with the Biden government about the role the United States played in the South American country half a century ago and whether it would consider apologizing for what it did, but as of publishing this article it had not received a response from the White House.

“Governments don’t like to apologize or admit mistakes,” says Kornbluh. “There is definitely a nationalist (or) legal position.” But he adds, “Fifty years later, it is appropriate to express deep regret over the covert operations aimed at undermining the constitutional process in Chile.” And “The role of the United States in supporting the repressive apparatuses“By Pinochet.

The analyst concludes: “I believe both events violate the values ​​of the American public, and they are relevant today because many countries, including the United States itself, face the threat of authoritarianism and losing the strength of democratic institutions.”

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