Human Rights in Chile: Remeberance and Reckoning

"Although Chiles’s economy is growing at a healthy pace today, it still lags behind most of Latin America. Much of the development is environmentally unsustainable. Inequality and poverty remain extreme. Furthermore, much of the country’s industry is now foreign-owned— meaning that profits do not stay in Chile, but are shipped to other countries." (“Chile: the laboratory test”)

Although Allende’s reforms were all legally binding to the Chilean system of democracy many feared the changes would lead to class warfare and extra-governmental measures:

"In the days and years after the coup, middle- and upper-class citizens said that they felt their very lives were threatened—that a class war was brewing; indeed it was reported that arms for the left were arriving from Cuba hidden in sugar sacks." (O’Shaunessy, 50)

On September 11, 1973, members of the military junta who had pre-coordinated their plans, including General Augusto Pinochet-Ugarte, gave orders for the air-force to attack President Allende in the presidential palace of La Moneda. Allende had immediately gone to La Moneda upon learning of unusual troop movements and being alerted of the impending military take-over. At 9:30 AM, several hours before the attack, Allende gave a final speech to Chilean citizens, addressed as “compatriots,” identifying the escalation of the conflict between the left and the right, and calling upon the traditional support from the left:

"Workers of my country: I want to thank you for the loyalty you have always shown, for the trust you have always placed in a man who has been no more than the interpreter of your great desire for justice, a man who undertook publicly to respect the constitution and the law and who did not betray that undertaking. This is the last chance I shall have to speak to you, to explain to you what has happened. Foreign capital and imperialism have allied with the forces of reaction to produce a climate in which the armed forces have broken with tradition. General Schneider and Commander Araya, who upheld and reasserted that tradition, have fallen victim to those people, to that class which now hopes, through its intermediaries— the armed forces— to regain the interests and privileges it had lost." (O’Shaughnessy, 57)

The conflict was clearly viewed both by the right and left not only in terms of the national society and economic structure, but in an international context.

International reaction to events in Chile also had much to do with the Cold War. At the time of the coup, the Nixon administration was in power in the U.S. and Henry Kissinger was the Secretary of State. During a meeting with a Chilean foreign minister in 1979, Kissinger is quoted as reacting to the government of dictatorship in the following manner, “what do we get out of removing military governments to turn them over to communists. Elections have to be held when stability can be obtained and not when governments are delivered to communists.” (O’Shaughnessy,105) Whatever the context of U.S. foreign policy with regard to perceived threats of communism, in this statement, as in other attitudes and actions toward the military regime, there is little real notice given to human rights abuses.

Additionally, destabilization policies and CIA intervention indicate that there was little respect for Chilean democracy, as the Allende government was, after all, in power in a legally binding situation. It should also be noted that the U.S. engaged in similar activities elsewhere in the Americas during the 20^th century, such as in Guatemala. However, Kissinger somehow manages to make the following conclusions about Chile in his autobiography, The White House Years: “...Allende represented a break with Chile’s long democratic history and would become president not through an authentic expression of majority will but through a fluke in of the Chilean political system.” (Keen, 435) Such clues prompted many human rights researchers to pressure the U.S. government to release classified documents revealing the full relationship between the U.S. and the Pinochet regime. Indeed, in one recently declassified document, Thomas Karamessines, the CIA deputy director of plans, is quoted as relaying Kissinger’s orders to the CIA station chief in Santiago in the following direct manner: “It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup.” (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarch)

With the thawing of the Cold War, many documents relating to U.S. involvement in Chile have been recently declassified. Some documents from 1970-76 have definitively linked CIA activities with the coup, as well as demonstrate the acute concern from the U.S. about the political scene in Chile and its potential effects on national security. Specifically, the actions include covert shipment of arms and propaganda against the Allende government. (http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv) It also provides information on groups that have been accused of human rights abuses, including the DINA (“the national intelligence arm of the Chilean government” under Pinochet) and those involved with Operation Condor (“a network of Chilean, Argentinian, and Paraguayan secret police”), and indicates communication between the CIA, FBI and these groups.