The War at Home: Chile's Legacy in the United States
Hoeffel, Paul Health & Kornbluh, Peter
When Costa Gavras' Missing opened in February 1982 to packed theaters across the country, it stirred up more political controversy than had been associated with a movie in a long time. By...
...74-88...
...there were no large leftist parties poised on the brink of electoral victory...
...2 The Lessons of Chile Henry Kissinger's appointment to head the National Bipartisan Commission on Central America was a bitter turn for those who had opposed U.S...
...When the People Awake, anon., 1973...
...While the printed literature on the Popular Unity period and the coup is too voluminous to include here (even if we were to include just those works in English...
...Everett Briggs, "Bilateral Foreign Policy: The United States and Chile," Speech at the Chilean National Security Academy, July 20, 1982...
...On the other, the movie underscores how little North Americans really know or care about events in foreign lands...
...Costa Gavras knew how to draw on the broadest impact of events in Chile without requiring that we recall the specifics...
...weaponry behind such major customers as Iran, Saudi Arabia, Israel and Jordan-and Kissinger's State Department displayed its contempt for economic ceilings by simply redefining what "aid" was and manipulating the date it was "made available...
...Many of the North Americans returning to the United States after the coup in Chile were struck by this wide political gulf between the two countries...
...1 (January-February 1982), p. 46...
...It was an unprecedented act by Congress and a major victory for human rights activists...
...Congressional Record, September 21, 1976, p. 31464...
...More than any other issue, Chile provided a bridge between the massive activism of the Vietnam war years and the current opposition to administration policies in Central America...
...Not until the early 1970s, however, did Congress formally address the issue of human rights: Representative Donald Fraser's Subcommittee on International Organizations and Movements opened the first set of significant hearings on human rights and U.S...
...We share.., a commitment to Western ideals and values," the new U.S...
...policies in Central America...
...officials went to Santiago to convey personally the administration's "desire to fully normalize our relations," as UN Ambassador Jeane Kirkpatrick told General Pinochet during their "pleasant tea" in August 1981.22 Of particular interest to the administration was the regime's free market model (which several of the president's advisers used as the prototype for Reaganomics) and its rabid anti-communism, which translated into support for Washington's policies in Central America...
...the CIA had helped Colonel Manuel Contreras set up DINA, which had carried out the murders...
...On September 17, Gerald Ford admitted that the agency had indeed conducted covert operations in Chile although he falsely characterized them as an attempt to "preserve" democracy rather than destroy it...
...For, unless a broad sector of the American public comes to understand events in foreign countries as part of our own political process, with critical ramifications for our own lives, future administrations will always be able to whittle away the best efforts of the activists...
...1 But no investigation took place for over a year, and then only after the story broke in The New York Times...
...As they watched La Moneda burn in Chile, many, no doubt, felt they were witnessing what could be their own future as well...
...foreign policy only six weeks before the Chilean coup...
...Go back and work there...
...Why was Chile receiving almost 50% of all U.S...
...mind...
...government played a direct role 29NACLA Report in bringing it about, and because they, the American people, if mobilized, could do something to change the situation in Chile...
...On campuses across the country, professors lectured and debated events in Chile and the U.S...
...Human Rights and U.S...
...Novels and Poetry Patrick Breslin, Interventions (New York: Doubleday), 1980...
...Many members of the Chilean exile community in the United States participated in the solidarity and human rights organizations focused on Chile...
...Yet today, many of these advances, achieved during the zenith of congressional power and activism following the collapse of the Nixon Administration, have been reversed...
...During March and April of 1973, it produced over 1,000 pages of testimony on ITT and Chile.'o The ITT hearings, according to Committee Chairman Senator Frank Church, "peeled" the first "layer off the onion" of CIA intervention in Chile...
...The extensive military assistance program to Chile was abruptly severed in July 1976 with the passage of the Kennedy Amendment...
...Thus, debates over the viability of a peaceful transition to socialism vs...
...Human rights organizations that cut their eye teeth on opposing Pinochet's repression, are now lobbying forcefully, albeit with mixed results, against equally brutal regimes in Central America...
...He knew Washington well, having spent 10 years at the Inter-American Development Bank and two years as Allende's ambassador to the United States...
...Congress next moved to put human rights conditions on the military aid that the executive branch traditionally used to curry favor with third world generals...
...Michael Joseph...
...Congress, House Committee on Foreign Affairs, Subcommittee on International Organizations and Movements, International Protection of Human Rights: The Work of International Organizations and the Role of U.S...
...See also the Subcommittee Staff Report, The International Telephone and Telegraph Company and Chile, 1970-1971...
...9 Under pressure from the human rights lobby to institutionalize its gains, Congress in 1976 established the position of "coordinator for human rights and humanitarian affairs" in the State Department, and a year later upgraded the position to assistant secretary of state...
...Before we left, a Bolivian refugee told me they didn't need us down there," David Kalke recalls...
...For those of us who passed many a day standing on street corners, handing out flyers and trying to convince the passing crowds why they should care about torture in Chile, it is clear that people knew little about Chile even when the events should have been fresh in their minds...
...2 The savage atrocities of the Chilean junta would galvanize the human rights constituency in Washington...
...Teresa de Jesus, De Repente/All of a Sudden (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press), 1979...
...Sectarian struggles imported from Chile and already present in the U.S...
...Prior to the coup, debate in this country did not include the issue of covert activities," one staff member of the Church Committee observes in retrospect...
...16 The second report, Covert Action in Chile 19631973, published on December 5, 1975-other committee reports on covert action in the Congo, Indonesia and Southeast Asia remain confidential-officially established the long legacy of U.S...
...people have the greatest respect and the greatest feeling of friendship for you, without intervening-which is the last thing we would want to do-in your internal affairs...
...Because of the U.S...
...1980...
...But the dam of information had broken and a flood of leaks to the press ensued...
...Fictional account of CIA officer in Chile during Allende period...
...Investigative Journalism, Drematic Non-Fiction Samuel Chavkin, The Murder of Chile (New York: Everest House...
...food assistance to Latin America at a time when the regime was being accused by the UN Commission on Human Rights of practising "barbaric sadism" on the population...
...The efforts of one congressman, Michael Harrington, were primarily responsible for exposing the CIA intervention against Allende...
...They must be communists...
...role in the overthrow of Allende...
...The first target was economic aid...
...In all these countries there were strong leftist parties with broad electoral bases...
...3. For a description of the origins of the human rights groups dedicated to Latin America, see Lars Schoultz, Human Rights and United States Policy Toward Latin America (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981), pp...
...Taylor Branch and Eugene M. Propper, Labyrinth (New York: Viking Press), 1982...
...For all the internal political differences within the solidarity movement-reflecting both different understandings of the Chilean process and a debate over whether to build a campaign in this country solely on human rights grounds or to raise a broader indictment of U.S...
...The first, an examination of CIA involvement in the 1970 murder of the Chilean Commander-in-Chief of the Army, General Rend Schneider, was released in November 1975 as part of a series of reports on CIA participation in assassination plots against foreign leaders...
...7 Revisionists, led by Henry Kissinger, have claimed that the report exonerates Washington because the committee found "no evidence" that the United States was "directly involved" in the 1973 coup...
...Even Henry Kissinger, who laments in his memoirs that "in the aftermath of Vietnam and during Watergate, the idea that we had to earn the right to conduct foreign policy by moral purity...had an inevitable attraction" to the public, was forced to begin giving speeches on human rights...
...SenatorJames Abourezk summed up the essence of the tragedy in a speech that day in the Senate: "It means that the tyranny of the dictatorship in Chile has now been extended to the United States.' '21 The crime shocked and appalled the country unlike any other act of the regime...
...For its investigation of ITT, see U.S...
...The debate stripped the CIA of the cloak of secrecy that had shielded it from the public eye, and the public did not like what it saw...
...4. U.S...
...The history of Chile from the nineteenth century through the coup...
...answered unequivocally, "No, Sir...
...COHA made its presence felt in Washington by forcefully opposing the nomination of Harry Schlaudeman, the deputy chief of the U.S...
...Christopher Hudson, The Final Act (London...
...His return to national policy-making prominence-at a moment in which the CIA steps up its war against Nicaragua, U.S...
...Yet all is not the same...
...Set in Pinochet's Chile, Hudson conjures up the full horror of a police state...
...But that, after all, was the director's brilliance...
...military aid to Chile...
...It is a situation which permits momentary victories, but also provides the grounds for undermining them...
...Controlling Interest: The World of the Multinational Corporation, California Newsreel, 1978...
...The assistant secretaries of state for inter-American affairs, Jack Kubish and Harry Schlaudeman, were the principal spokespeople for the Nixon-Ford Administration...
...These cultural products range from films that have been viewed by millions, to songs that have been sung by thousands, to poems that probably only a few hundred have read...
...The Subcommittee investigated a broad range of giant multinational interests, including the banking and petroleum industries...
...Congress, House Committee on Armed Services, Special Subcommittee on Intelligence, Inquiry into Matters Regarding Classified Testimony taken on April 22, 1974 Concerning the CIA and Chile...
...Grand Jury in the spring of 1978...
...The Select Committee took "this unusual step," Senator Church explained in his opening statement, "so that it may frame appropriate legislation and recommendations to govern what will be done in the future...
...This was bound to have an impact on the way Americans understood their government in the future...
...Several stand out, including the Council for Hemispheric Affairs (COHA), founded in 1975 by another Chile veteran, Larry Birns...
...Churches quickly set up administrative bodies to oversee human rights in Chile and to coordinate refugee affairs...
...The answer was quick in coming: when news of the CIA's massive paramilitary operations in Angola was leaked to the press, ironically at the very time that Senate reports on Chile were being published, Congress moved swiftly to legislate a halt to the covert intervention...
...But by the late 1970s, as Pinochet consolidated his power and little was heard about la resistencia, Chile as an issue in the United States began to fade...
...John Dinges and Saul Landau, Assassination on Embassy Row (New York: Pantheon), 1980...
...in the United States, however, few people paid any attention to the issue until Jack Anderson published the ITT memoranda in March 1972...
...93rd Congress, 1st sess., March-April 1973...
...We were driven, we were just compelled to go out and tell the story," he says, recalling how he took a copy of a movie on Chile's slum communities, "Campamento," and went up and down his native East Tennessee knocking on doors to get audiences...
...But despite a good deal of rhetoric and posturing, no legislative restrictions on CIA covert operations were ever passed...
...Medical groups demanded protection for Chilean health workers...
...31-37...
...The Clark Amendment (named after its proponent, Senator Dick Clark of Iowa), which cut off funds for the CIA's Angolan operations, is today the model for congressional attempts to end the Reagan Administration's not-so-covert war on Nicaragua...
...This creative contemplation of what happened in Chile-and in the United States-attests to that country's continuing impact on our own political consciousness...
...Senate Select Committee, Covert Action in Chile, Senate Resolution 21, Vol...
...As a candidate, Jimmy Carter elevated Chile to a national issue during the televised debates when he accused the Ford Administration of overthrowing "an elected government and help[ing] to establish a military dictatorship...
...Cited in "Chile-U.S...
...The bill prohibited economic assistance to governments engaged in gross violations of human rights...
...military aid, including cash and private commercial sales of all defense-related equipment to Chile and limited economic aid to $27.5 million...
...A weakened human rights movement could 37NACLA Report only pressure for the attachment of three conditions to any legislation which authorized the restoration of military assistance to Chile...
...7. Professor John Plank gave this testimony to the Kennedy subcommittee...
...Missing is a symbol of Chile's paradoxical legacy in the United States...
...XVI, No...
...policy, that is still very much in place...
...Kissinger, whom many have nicknamed the "Great Destabilizer," has come to personify the strategies of covert intervention, disregard for democratic process and calculated deception that characterized U.S...
...armed struggle were more furious than any discussion of how to systematically influence U.S...
...Filmmakers and songwriters made Chile the focus of their creative efforts...
...power by the Nixon White House...
...Faced with an equally abysmal level of understanding about Central America-only 8% of the U.S...
...Harrington urged the committees to hold hearings, concluding that "Congress and the American people have a right to learn what was done in our name in Chile...
...The U.S...
...public know which side its own government supports in El Salvador and Nicaragua-Reagan has been able to demolish many advances made in the 1970s to curb the CIA and apply human rights standards to U.S...
...The Schneider report is, to date, the most comprehensive document on the CIA's attempt to foment a military coup in Chile in 1970...
...A partial explanation for this frustrating phenomenon, this continual washing away of battles presumably fought and won, lies in the second half of the U.S...
...Ronni Moffitt was the Pinochet regime's third North American victim...
...Eager to reach a broad audience, the solidarity movement nevertheless alienated some potential supporters by incorporating political disputes at the heart of Allende's Chile into its own work...
...composer/singer, has entered the permanent repertory of progressive folk singing in the United States: "Hay Una Mujer Desaparecidal There Is a Disappeared Woman," by Holly Near...
...On the one hand, it demonstrates how foreign affairs can and do shape our own political consciousness and the course of domestic politics...
...It represented, Select Committee Chairman Frank Church explained, an "example of the full range of covert action" which permitted the committee, Congress and the country "to debate and decide the merits of future use of covert action as an instrument of U.S...
...A critique of the Allende strategy from a Left perspective...
...A friend drew near and, with tears in his eyes, asked Ed what was going on in Chile...
...27NACLA Report In the case of Chile, President Ford publicly admitted that the CIA had been used to "destabilize" a government with which we maintained full, if frosty, relations...
...Relations," NACLA Report on the Americas, Vol...
...Our own government had been caught in a plot to assassinate democratically elected foreign officials, and foreign officials had been assassinated on our own streets on the orders of other governments...
...5 The Nixon-Ford Administration's continued support of the Pinochet regime only reinforced the efforts of the human rights lobby and Congress to formally establish a moral criterion for U.S...
...34Sept/Ot 1983 0 "A solidarity movement...
...2 0 In the mid-1970s, the CIA became a significant political football, a hot story for the national press (which had failed to report on the CIA's intervention in Chile while it was ongoing) and a controversial issue for Congress...
...Horman and Frank Teruggi in the days following the coup...
...military and economic assistance to the Pinochet regime, and to extend such a cutoff to other gross violators of human rights...
...policy in Chile was exposed to the light of the national press, the CIA began to feel the repercussions of its clandestine war...
...They, and many others, did just that...
...The hearings provided a forum for lawyers, doctors, scholars and clergy who had witnessed first hand the institutionalization of a police state under the Chilean generals...
...Reaching Out The amorphous "Chile solidarity movement" set out to educate a parochial American public...
...policy during the Allende years...
...Nominated for three academy awards including best picture...
...See, Refugee and Humanitarian Problems, Part II, pp...
...Moreover, the bill became a model for cutting off aid to other countries...
...And much of this is attributable to the campaigns which were organized around Chile...
...For a North American, the mass level of participation and the sophistication of the political debate in Chile was astounding," remembers Jack Spence, who was doing graduate work in Santiago during the Popular Unity period and returned to help organize Chile Action Group, one of the solidarity groups in the Boston area...
...North Americans should be made aware of events in Chile because of the magnitude of the repression, because the U.S...
...The Letelier-Moffitt assassinations dramatically and painfully brought the ugly reality of U.S...
...Even lacking polls, it is fair to argue that the vast majority of people in this country know little today about what transpired in Chile a decade ago...
...And he promised to "devote all of my energies to the deepening and strengthening of this relationship...
...The ITT and Chile, p. 20...
...II, p. 1. 20...
...Assistant Secretary of State Everett Briggs summed up the new relationship between the United States and Chile during aJuly 1982 trip to Santiago: "The United States government and the U.S...
...Ultimately, however, the solidarity movement swelled and receded in response to the level of opposition to Pinochet in Chile...
...By itself, Missing was a gripping movie, the story of a regular American guy whose world was turned upside down during a futile search for his son, "disappeared" in a treacherous and violent foreign land...
...Their numbers may have been relatively small, but one cannot underestimate their ultimate importance in preventing the out-of-sight-out-of-mind syndrome from taking over...
...Film is still shown over 200 times a year in high schools across the country...
...Patricia Derian, a civil rights activist from Mississippi, who was the first person to fill that position, remembers Chile's significance as a "talisman"-a symbol of the movement to make human rights a permanent issue in the conduct of the United States abroad...
...technical assistance [and] assistance in agriculture...
...role in Chile and the brutality of the Pinochet coup, human rights became a major element of foreign policy debates for the first time...
...Schoultz, Human Rights and United States Policy, p. 34...
...Most of the original groups have by now been disbanded, but without doubt, their members and their experience have contributed to the rapid growth of a strong movement in opposition to U.S...
...many witnesses dissembled and others lied outright...
...Richard Pierce, 1972...
...The Select Committee produced two detailed reports on U.S...
...This non-binding resolution passed the Senate, but was not endorsed by the House of Representatives, and was ignored by the newly confirmed secretary of state, Henry Kissinger...
...The documents exposed CIA-ITT 33 irNACLA Report collusion to prevent Allende's accession to the presidency and prompted the Senate to establish a special investigative Subcommittee on Multinational Corporations...
...Frustrated by the reluctance of Congress to investigate CIA covert action in Chile, on July 18, 1974, Harrington sent a letter to the chairmen of the House and Senate foreign relations committees...
...What has changed is the level of awareness and public activism in opCHILE: THE CULTURAL IMPACT Three years of Popular Unity government, a bloody coup and a decade of military rule have inspired writers and artists in the United States and elsewhere as have few historical-political events...
...Solidarity with Chile As news of the coup against Salvador Allende spread, literally hundreds of thousands of people in countries around the world took angrily to the streets...
...Government officials must still pay lip service to human rights concerns, but Reagan's officials have made no pretense about using double standards when applying them to friends and enemies...
...The grassroots networks organized in the mid-1970s to bring Pinochet's atrocities to the attention of the American public were precursors of today's broadly-based movements against U.S...
...In December 1974, Senator Kennedy attached a rider to the Foreign Assistance Act which placed a $25 million limit on U.S...
...WOLA was founded in March 1974, then only a single desk in the building of the Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), precisely to make human rights a permanent issue in foreign policy debates...
...A number of legislators, most notably Senators James Abourezk and Edward Kennedy and Congressmen Donald Fraser, Michael Harrington, Tom Harkin, Toby Moffet and George Miller took the lead in exposing what was happening in post-coup Chile and attacking the State Department's lavish support for Pinochet...
...bilateral economic assistance," according to Lars Schoultz, author of Human Rights and United States Policy Toward Latin America...
...15-16...
...complicity in the coup and its aftermath...
...Intelligence Efforts Be Made Effective and Accountable...
...The United States temporarily recalled its ambassador from Chile...
...The Harkin Amendment is a prime example of the efforts of the human rights lobby and its collaboration with Congress...
...This junta, they are absolute monsters...
...Foreign Policy...
...It was the first time Congress had cut off military aid to a country on the basis of human rights violations," says Mark Schneider, Kennedy's chief aide on Latin America at the time...
...The Latin American Studies Association (LASA), the major professional association of Latin Americanists in the United States, forcefully spoke out for academic freedom in Chile and helped purged Chilean professors find work at U.S...
...policy toward Chile...
...1 Covert Action in Chile was released during the first, and up until now, the only public congressional hearings on CIA covert operations...
...The evidence of the regime's atrocities overwhelmed the junta's crude attempts to cover up its brutality...
...One of the first films produced after the coup...
...Documentary about the power of multinational corporations, part of which is set in Chile...
...Published in paperback by Penguin Books, 1983.1 The Letelier-Moffitt murders...
...John McCone, former CIA director and ITT vicepresident, for example, told a skeptical committee that the $1 million ITT offered the CIA for use in Chile was intended for "housing...
...But the movie's reception, complete with formal State Department denials, newspaper polemics, libel suits and counter-suits, made it clear that the movie was far more than just a Hollywood thriller...
...A second reason why Chile continues to leave a legacy in the United States is that many people worked to keep the issue alive...
...The bill effectively cut off all U.S...
...The next day Harrington publicly called for a congressional investigation...
...In the climate of the post-Vietnam, Watergate and Chile era, the public viewed covert operations as both immoral and dangerous...
...Presidential orders were signed declaring that the agency would no longer engage in assassinations abroad and the Senate and House both established formal oversight com35NACLA Report mittees and mandated that they be "informed" of all covert foreign activities by the executive branch...
...Eyewitness accounts of the coup, repression and the current resistance movement...
...2. For Fraser's hearings, see U.S...
...225-255...
...Catholic Conference, and the Latin American Strategy Committee (LASC), had started grassroots educational projects and begun to talk to a few 30SOag/Od 1983 "Filmmakers and songwriters made Chile their focus...
...In 1977, Congress terminated military and economic assistance to Argentina and severely restricted military assistance to Uruguay, Brazil, El Salvador and Guatemala...
...The human rights movement in Washington was born in the 1960s, as a reaction to the landing of U.S...
...no sense, except in the most abstract sense-that what was transpiring in Chile could also happen here...
...intervention in Chile...
...We came to Washington to talk to people about Chile...
...The outrage was immediate: within hours of the murders, a spontaneous and angry crowd shouting "Pinochet, assassin" gathered in front of the Chilean Embassy...
...Ed Horman, upon whose experiences Missing is based, tells of going to church shortly after returning from Chile in October 1973 with the news that his son had been killed there...
...representatives to multilateral lending institutions were instructed to approve loans to Chile, and the Reagan Administration ended Carter's support for the continuing investigations of the UN Commission on Human Rights...
...The committee's mandate was to investigate the gamut of intelligence-related agencies and their controversial activities...
...According to Harrington, who had read a transcript of Colby's testimony, the CIA director revealed that between 1962 and 1973, approximately $11 million had been authorized "to help prevent the election of Allende and, in Colby's words, 'destabilize' the Allende government so as to precipitate its downfall...
...Harrington's letter is cited in U.S...
...Chile was the symbol of what the United States should not be doing in the world...
...foreign policy...
...The weight of public opinion was tested when, in the midst of the Senate Select Committee's investigation of the CIA's past practice, Henry Kissinger decided to unleash the agency again-this time in Angola...
...93rd Congress, 1st sess., September 28, 1973, p. 48...
...foreign assistance programs...
...policy toward Chile back to their place of origin-Washington, D.C...
...1978...
...During the mid-1970s, a host of human rights groups opened their doors in Washington and dedicated themselves to essentially the same task...
...Thomas Hauser, The Execution of Charles Horman (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), 1978...
...Reagan lifted Carter's sanctions on Chile only a month after taking office...
...paradox: foreign affairs shape our own political reality, yet too few people know or care about what happens abroad...
...By the end of 1973, there were literally hundreds of groups around the country which had taken up the Chilean cause...
...Avenue of the Americas, directed by Walter Locke, 1976...
...15 The CIA Uncovered For the CIA, Chile was one in a series of major scandals to discredit the institution...
...Documentary about the life and death of Chilean singer Victor Jara...
...Left also tended to weaken the solidarity movement's ability to attract and hold previously uncommitted people...
...Nevertheless, the committee established the first, albeit partial, record of U.S...
...Songs and Music The Chilean "new song" movement produced dozens of records during the Popular Unity period and from exile...
...Congress, Senate Committee on theJudiciary, Subcommittee to Investigate Problems Connected with Refugees and Escapees, Refugee and Humanitarian Problems in Chile...
...You come from the most politically underdeveloped country in the world,' he said...
...18% favored such intervention...
...Harrington was the first congressional official to go to Chile after Allende's overthrow-he spent two days there in October 1973 investigating his suspicion "that the United States had engaged in political and economic destabilization efforts that eventually led to President Allende's downfall...
...But there was no mass base to sustain it...
...5. Center for International Policy, Human Rights and U.S...
...One important reason for the difference is that Chile was transformed from the story of a brutal coup in a distant land to an American tragedy...
...All could realistically conceive of reaching the government in the not-too-distant future...
...Terrorism Comes Home to Roost The propriety of covert intervention abroad emerged as a major issue in the 1976 presidential campaign...
...Two ITT officials were later indicted for perjury, but after they threatened to reveal further information on the CIA in Chile, the charges were dropped...
...role in the destruction of Chilean democracy and in support of Pinochet's repression, Carter told millions of viewers, had "hurt us very much...
...Produced by the Maryknoll Order as an illustration of "popular power" and some of its conflicts with the Popular Unity government...
...The revelation of the "Houston Plan," a CIA program of domestic spying in violation of its charter, prompted the greatest public criticism and led the Senate to establish the Select Committee to Study Government Operations with Respect to Intelligence, in January, 1975...
...Exposure With Allende's overthrow, Chile joined Iran, Guatemala, Guyana and Brazil on the CIA's list of covert accomplishments...
...All three events, although not in equal measure, contributed to eroding American innocence...
...The letter contained a summary of classified testimony that CIA director William Colby had given to the House Armed Services Committee...
...But one would be hard put to demonstrate any con.sciousness of these coups among the American people...
...It leaves no doubt, as Deputy Director of Intelligence Thomas Karamessines told the committee, that the Nixon Administration ordered the CIA "to do what we could to contribute to the eventual achievement of the objectives and purposes" of overthrowing Chilean democracy...
...Wrongs "I hold the strong view that human rights are not appropriate for discussion in a foreign policy context," Henry Kissinger told General Pinochet's foreign minister in March 1975.' But by then, large sectors of the American public and the Congress disagreed...
...The issues raised by the Chilean experience-transforming a capitalist society by peaceful means, building cross-class alliances, neutralizing the military28Sept/Oct 1983 I z "Hundreds of thousands...
...paradox...
...Nevertheless, Chile stood out as a special case...
...The State Department issued perfunctory denials that its spokesmen had lied to Congress in asserting that the United States had pursued a policy of non-intervention...
...Companero," PBS, 1975...
...but no mass base...
...anti-war movement and an increasingly activist force in the Church community to try to keep the issue of Chile alive...
...A Harris Poll taken in 1974 showed that 60% of those surveyed thought it "wrong for the United States to intervene in the internal affairs of Chile and to try to destabilize the government...
...In all, the issue of Chile did not shake the American soul as Vietnam had, but it did transcend the barriers to making Americans care in an active sense about events seemingly removed from their lives...
...Trade unionists, particularly from the traditionally progressive unions-a large sector of the AFL-CIO's leadership had supported the coup-sent delegations to Chile and pressured for a boycott of Chilean products...
...Events in Chile have also prompted a large number of novels, works of dramatic non-fiction and films...
...The New York Times, September 17, 1974...
...Coming as it did on the heels of the national traumas of Vietnam and Watergate, Chile-by which we mean a whole complex of events leading to the election, and then the destruction, of the government of Salvador Allende-had a direct and concrete impact on political affairs in this country...
...James Scully, Santiago Poems (Willimantic, CT: Curbstone Press), 1975/1982...
...Kissinger's avid support for the dictatorship, despite the terror wrought on the Chilean people, had apparently convinced the junta that it could conduct similar atrocities in the capital of the United States...
...9. Ironically, one of Kissinger's first major speeches on human rights was given on June 8, 1976, at the OAS Conference in Santiago, Chile...
...But truth was elusive...
...Reagan not only uses the CIA to fight an open "covert" war against Nicaragua, but makes a point of snubbing the expressed opinion of the House of Representatives that he should cease and desist...
...intelligence agency to be indicted, and convicted, of perjury...
...The efforts of one, Orlando Letelier, stood out...
...support for Pinochet...
...Ten years after directly intervening to remove a democratically-elected president from office, administration officials boasted of a new policy of non-intervention toward Pinochet...
...Carter sensed a strong public desire for a moral foreign policy that emphasized human rights and rejected cloak-anddagger intervention on behalf of murderous generals...
...Americans returning from Chile linked up with sectors of the U.S...
...While the solidarity network successfully kept alive the issue of Chile in the United States, it also faced a number of severe problems both of its own making and beyond its control...
...Nevertheless, the revelations of CIA intervention in Chile did have an impact on the agency and the nation...
...Wasn't there something hypocritical about the State Department's position that such atrocities were "an internal matter" in Chile...
...Caroline Richards, Sweet Country (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich), 1979...
...we list here a small part of the non-academic outpouring inspired by Chile...
...The author of the crime, General Pinochet, had been welcomed to 36Sept/Oct 1983 0 C 0 Washington D.C., 1974...
...2 3 U.S...
...policies in Latin America and elsewhere...
...Donald Freed with Fred Landis, Death in Washington: The Murder of Orlando Letelier (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill and Co...
...war ships maneuver in Central American waters and nearly 5,000 Marines conduct exercises in Honduras--symbolizes how little some things have changed in Washington since the destruction of Chilean democracy 10 years ago...
...Letelier's high profile and his network of relations in Congress and the State Department, made him a prime target for Pinochet's international assassins...
...93rd Congress, 1st sess., August-December, 1973...
...93rd Congress, 2nd sess., September 25, 1974, pp...
...Nor can the blame for this national myopia be laid at the doorstep of the press...
...Reality was very different in the United States...
...1980...
...It is still too soon to predict the effect of the rebirth of mass protest in Chile on solidarity efforts in the United States...
...Bilingual edition of poetry inspired by Chile...
...Embassy in Chile during the Allende years, as assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs...
...8. Ibid., p. 40...
...were their issues as well...
...39-48...
...WOLA's work initially focused on the need to cut off U.S...
...aid to Chile.' Congress Acts Chile soon became the battleground for the first major fight between Congress and the 31 E ig m a 3 t 81 4NACLA Report executive branch over human rights-and the focus for a wave of precedent- setting legislation...
...Film Missing, directed by Costa-Gavras, Universal Pictures, 1982...
...What was important in the United States was not Allende's political experiments or Pinochet's repression, but the fact that, for month after month, congressional committees and dogged journalists unravelled, in Watergate fashion, a tale of unethical, immoral and criminal U.S...
...The public disagreed...
...6. Joseph Eldridge of WOLA and Edward Snyder of the Friends Committee on National Legislation drafted the language of the bill...
...took angrily to the streets...
...The academic and scholarly press have produced dozens of original studies of the Popular Unity period and many heated debates over the role of the United States in the coup...
...The Reagan Administration now made it clear that its new policy was to "treat friends as friends...
...Marines in the Dominican Republic, Washington's support for the military coup in Greece, and cozy U.S...
...Campamento, directed by Tom Cohen...
...The secretary of state, according to a former member of his staff, saw Angola "as the place to find out if you could still have covert operations...
...Yet, precisely because so few people really understood or acted on events in Chile, it also demonstrated how transient such victories can be...
...actions abroad...
...But a year later, when the dark side of U.S...
...It would take three more years to accomplish what was attempted in that first resolution to end all aid...
...Why had the United States failed to protect the lives of American citizens such as Charles 32Spt/Oct 1983 Protests against the Chilean torture ship Esmeralda...
...During the interim, Congress chose to accept the assurances of CIA director Richard Helms who, when asked in February 1973 by Senator Stuart Symington, "Did you try in the Central Intelligence Agency to overthrow the government in Chile...
...On September 8, 1974, New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh published a front page story, "CIA Chief Tells House of $8 Million Campaign Against Allende in '70-'73," based on the Harrington letter...
...Nevertheless, as Michael Harrington noted, "a careful reader of this report is driven to the conclusion that the United States Government bears a major responsibility for the destruction of Chilean democracy...
...Moreover, Chile activists have contributed to a legacy in Washington, a moral pressure on the making of U.S...
...Thus, the U.S...
...intervention in Central America...
...Chile demonstrated that certain confrontations with the powers that be in Washington could be fought and won, that support for dictatorships could be terminated, and that torturers The Battle of Chile, directed by Patricio Guzman, 1973-1980 Three-part documentary covering the bourgeois attack on Allende, the coup and the organization of workers before the coup...
...In November 1979, blasting Chile for its "egregious acts of international terrorism," the Carter Administration issued a set of sanctions to protest "Chile's deplorable conduct in this affair...
...The murders of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt...
...involvement in its cover-up...
...CIA intervention, Ford told the press, was "in the best interests of the people of Chile and certainly in our best interest...
...Congress, Senate Select Committee to Study Government Activities with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders (Interim Report No...
...Letelier's was the first political assassination in Washington since Abraham Lincoln...
...If this seems an impressive legacy, it is...
...High-ranking Chilean officers told one team of investigators, for example, that "Chilean Marxists were so committed, so dedicated, so fanatical, that they literally tortured themselves in order to bring discredit upon the present Chilean regime...
...McCone cited in The International Telephone and Telegraph Company, p. 104...
...38Sept/Oct 1983 posing U.S...
...It has recently begun a vigorous revival in Chile While many of these songs are known in Latin American solidarity circles in the United States, one song, written by a U.S...
...Eleven poems set during and after the coup...
...foreign policy...
...Through demonstrations, teach-ins, leaflets, movie showings, rallies, pamphlets, letterwriting campaigns, concerts, bake sales, sermons, swim-a-thons, books, talk shows and a hundred other ways, Chile activists kept the issue fresh in the U.S...
...Chile with Poems and Guns, collectively produced by a group of Los Angeles solidarity activists, 1973...
...As a people whose government has exercised a global role for the better part of this century, we have an extremely narrow and parochial understanding of the world...
...Covert action," Senator Church later remarked, was revealed as "a semantic disguise for murder, coercion, blackmail, bribery, the spreading of lies, whatever is deemed useful in Washington in manipulating the internal politics of other countries...
...Co-authored by the assistant U.S...
...The secrecy that agents and policy makers depended on to hide their activities from the public was shattered, never to be fully restored thereafter...
...imperialism and stress support for the Chilean resistance movement-three themes underlay solidarity work in the United States...
...I never got over the fact that there were a dozen daily newspapers in Santiago and barely two in Boston...
...For his efforts to get Congress to take action on the CIA intervention in Chile, Harrington was censured by his colleagues for indirectly leaking classified information...
...Story If people in this country didn't really grasp what had happened in Chile, who Allende was and why he was overthrown, why does the issue continue to resonate in our national consciousness...
...The Ford Administration circumvented both laws with ease: the limit on military aid did not cover cash sales-by 1977, Chile was the fifth largest buyer of U.S...
...What mattered were not the countless stories of torture, murder and abuse in Chile, which the major papers did carry, but the violent assassinations of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt in Washington, D.C...
...Church quoted from his speech, "Can U.S...
...A number of small, primarily Church-related organizations, such as the Ecumenical Program for Interamerican Communication and Action (EPICA), the Latin American Bureau of the U.S...
...In 1976, for example, the LetelierMoffitt assassinations, the awarding of a Nobel Prize to Milton Friedman (the patron saint of Chile's Chicago Boys), and the arrival of more than 1,000 Chilean refugees to this country-all breathed new life into the solidarity movement...
...Congress, Senate Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Multinational Corporations, The International Telephone and Telegraph Company...
...attorney general who investigated and prosecuted the case...
...Documentary partially based on experiences of Chile...
...In 1975, Letelier returned to Washingtonafter a year's imprisonment on Dawson Islandto work at the Institute for Policy Studies and to lobby for an end to U.S...
...6 First applied to Chile, it would eventually affect a number of Latin American dictatorships...
...The same year, Isabel Letelier formed the Chile Committee for Human Rights, "to educate the North American public.., and to fight for the restoration of democracy [in Chile.]" And in January 1976, the Coalition for a New Foreign and Military Policy established a special Human Rights Working Group, whose first campaign was to lobby Congress for a cutoff in U.S...
...conduct of CIA clandestine operations...
...Published in paperback as Missing, Avon Books, 1982.] The story of an American death during the coup and U.S...
...Set in Chile in August and September 1973...
...The assassination became the key political conflict in U.S.-Chilean relations during the Carter Administration when the junta refused to extradite Contreras and two other DINA officials indicted by a U.S...
...4 On October 2, he offered the first "Sense of Congress" amendment to cut off all military and economic aid to the junta...
...7 The hearings also exposed the venal attempts by State Department officials to minimize the extent of human rights violations in Chile and to cover up U.S...
...ambassador to Chile, James Theberge, eagerly announced when he arrived in Santiago...
...In France, Italy, Sweden and other Western European countries, the popular reaction was particularly strong...
...Reagan would have to certify to Congress that Chile had made progress in improving human rights, was not "aiding or abetting international terrorism," and had taken "appropriate" steps to bring to justice the three DINA agents indicted in the Letelier-Moffitt murders...
...The New York Times, March 4, 1982...
...As Senator Kennedy bluntly told Kubish: "We are prepared to interfere in the internal affairs of Chile for ITT, but when it comes to the question of human rights, we say this is an affair that affects the internal policy of Chile and we do not want to rock the boat.' ' Embarrassing confrontations with Congress, and a groundswell of public criticism had a discernible impact on the State Department...
...in Congress who would listen...
...Following the disclosures about the activities of numerous multinational corporations in Chile, Congress first considered the shaping of a comprehensive set of ethical standards for all U.S.-based companies to obey...
...On the morning of September 21, 1976, agents working for DINA, Pinochet's secret police, detonated a bomb planted under Letelier's car, killing him and his IPS colleague, Ronni Moffitt...
...Eldridge, who had lived for three years in Chile as a Methodist missionary, returned to the United States shortly after the coup...
...Most significantly, aided by its allies in the Senate, the administration succeeded in repealing the Kennedy Amendment in December 1981...
...Lawyers formed delegations to oversee military trials of Chilean political prisoners...
...relations with the new military government in Brazil...
...The Nixon-Ford Administration's eagerness to support Chile's transformation into a police state had fostered a strong movement in the United States-determined to make human rights a formal criteria of U.S...
...In November 1975, Congress passed the Harkin Amendment which is today "the cornerstone of human rights legislation relating to U.S...
...Here, too, a solidarity movement emerged in response to the events in Chile...
...The move was the first of many that repealed or reversed the hard-fought gains of human rights activists and the solidarity movement from the mid-1970s...
...Human rights became part of the lexicon in Washington because of Chile," says Reverend Joe Eldridge, director of the Washington Office on Latin America (WOLA...
...A Public Embarrassment Between their two subcommittees, Senator Kennedy and Congressman Fraser held more than a dozen hearings on Chile between September 1973 and May 1976...
...I can't understand it," the friend wept...
...A steady stream of high U.S...
...Why was the U.S...
...For the first time in the history of its clandestine wrongdoings, the CIA was unable to provide a "plausible denial" for the president of the United States...
...covert intervention in Chile and recommended "an in-depth review by the appropriate congressional committee of the...
...94-465), November 18, 1975, pp...
...CIA intervention in Chilean politics during the 1960s and early 1970s was a recognized fact in Santiago...
...M ds for Teldwion "The Politics of Torture," ABC...
...Occasionally, when the opposition in Chile seemed to wane, events in this country brought the movement to life...
...Michael Harrington, "The CIA in Chile: A Question of Responsibility," The New York Times, January 2, 1976...
...But, as we are now witnessing in Nicaragua, the net effect of congressional oversight has changed little...
...1 9 The Select Committee did produce a list of recommendations for governing the future use of clandestine activities and submitted them to Congress...
...THE WAR AT HOME 1. Kissinger's comment to Patricio Carvajal cited in Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York: Summit Books, 1983), p. 137...
...Costa Gavras chose to place his film in an unnamed country, and it was not unusual to hear theater-goers, on leaving the showing, remark "Isn't it terrible what we're doing in Central America...
...This point was literally brought home when Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt were assassinated in Washington, D.C...
...policy...
...Later, when the truth was publicly revealed, Helms became the first director of a U.S...
...A year later, he amended the Development Food Assistance bill to put a $90 million ceiling on economic aid that could be "made available" to Chile in fiscal year 1976...
...universities...
...In front of standing room only crowds, these officials faced aggressive questioning from Congress...
...policy...
...The uproar was immediate...
...Decrying the lack of "a single public expression of remorse over the military coup which toppled a democratically elected government, or over the deaths, beatings, brutality and repression which have occurred in that land," Senator Kennedy held the first Senate hearings on Chile just 17 days after the coup...
...intervention against Allende...
...Embassy refusing to provide political asylum to Chilean refugees while the embassies of our Western allies were overflowing...
...During the same period in which Allende was overthrown, there were equally harsh coups in Uruguay, Bolivia and Argentina...
...Foreign Assistance Program, pp...
...could be discredited and individual lives saved...
...Reagan and Pinochet: "Friends as Friends" This posture changed dramatically with Ronald Reagan's election...
...For all the problems which one may have with the content of print journalism's coverage of Chile, the major papers did report the story more fully than most foreign stories, and they continued to report it for more than three years after the coup...
...Chile as a U.S...
...21...
...The same realization hit David and Darlene Kalke, two Lutheran missionaries who were arrested and forced to leave Chile after the coup...
Vol. 17 • September 1983 • No. 5
