The Foreign Service Journal, September 2003

68 F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L / S E P T E M B E R 2 0 0 3 s in the U.S., Sept. 11 is remembered in Chile for politically-motivated vio- lence. For it was on that date in 1973 that Chileans saw their democracy disappear for 17 years, overturned by the country’s military. Military coups in Latin America were not uncommon 30 to 40 years ago. Indeed, there were five in 1963 alone. But Chile was a special case. For the pre- vious 150 years, the country had prided itself in peaceful transfers of power from one elected government to another. That all ended when Gen. Augusto Pinochet, chief of the Army, deposed Chilean President Salvador Allende, an elect- ed Marxist who had been in office just under three years. In their book, A Nation of Enemies , Pamela Constable and Arturo Valenzuela, describe what happened on Chile’s day of trauma: “Two Hawker Hunter fighter jets streaked across the late-winter sky over Santiago. ... The jets dipped and fired a round of rockets into La Moneda Palace. As they banked gently away in tandem and returned for six more passes, windows shattered and curtains ignited in the pris- tine, sand-colored colonial mansion, which had stood for 130 years as a symbol of Chilean democracy.” Tanks and infantry troops advanced toward the building, exchanging gunfire with security guards. Soon Pinochet’s command post received a curt message: “Mission accom- plished. Moneda taken. President found dead.” He is believed to have died by his own hand. The events of that 9/11, coupled with the grim aftermath as Pinochet’s forces launched one of the most brutal waves of repression in Latin American history, led to some 3,000 deaths — about the same tally as the more recent Sept. 11, when terrorists attacked on U.S. soil. Thousands more Chileans were exiled or imprisoned and tortured. In Washington, the Nixon administration did not exactly mourn Allende’s demise. That attitude was not surprising, given the countries’ cool relations over the previous three years. Soon after Allende took office, Washington slashed bilateral assistance to a tiny fraction of what it was under the previous Chilean government, headed by President Eduardo Frei. Instead, American largesse was directed at anti- Allende labor unions and independent newspapers. In his memoirs, Henry A. Kissinger, who was Nixon’s national security adviser at the time (he did not become Secretary of State until 11 days after the Chile coup), acknowledged that he welcomed Allende’s ouster. “Though we had no hand in the military coup,” he said, “we thought it saved Chile from totalitarianism and the Southern Cone from collapse into radicalism.” As for the many abuses com- mitted by the Chilean Army following the coup, Kissinger said he expressed concern to Chile’s foreign minister about them. He added that the United States helped bring about safe passage for thousands of individuals who had sought asy- lum in various embassies. No More Castros The Nixon administration’s concerns about Allende actu- ally dated back to well before he took office in 1970. As Kissinger puts it, Pres. Nixon was so “passionately opposed” to the emergence of another “Castroite” regime in the hemi- sphere that when Allende gained only 36 percent of the pop- ular vote in the first round of balloting, the CIA tried to per- suade the Chilean Congress to order a runoff between the two leading candidates. When that didn’t work, the administration briefly pursued a second option, the so-called “Track II,” but called it off in mid-October 1970. Kissinger gives few details about that scheme in his memoirs, but a 2000 report issued by the U.S. intelligence community at the request of Rep. Maurice George Gedda is the State Department correspondent for the Associated Press. B Y G EORGE G EDDA C HILE ’ S O WN S EPT . 11 A LLEGATIONS OF A MERICAN INVOLVEMENT IN THE S EPT . 11, 1973, COUP IN C HILE WERE RECENTLY REVIVED BY AN UNEXPECTED SOURCE : S ECRETARY OF S TATE C OLIN P OWELL . A