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augusto pinochet
Chilean Judge Convicts US-Trained Pinochet Agents for 1976 Murder of Ronni Moffitt
The 25-year-old American, her newlywed husband, and former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier were driving to work at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, DC when their car was bombed.
Jun 23, 2026
The Institute for Policy Studies on Monday welcomed a judge's homicide convictions and prison sentences for three agents of former US-backed Chilean dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet who murdered Ronni Karpen Moffitt, one of the progressive think tank's employees, during a 1976 car bombing targeting her colleague, the exiled leftist diplomat Orlando Letelier.
Last Thursday, Chilean Judge Paola Plaza González sentenced three former agents of the Directorate of National Intelligence (DINA)—Pedro Octavio Espinoza Bravo, José Octavio Zara Holger, and Raúl Eduardo Iturriaga Neumann—to 15 years' imprisonment each for the qualified homicide of Moffitt, who was 25 at the time she was killed with her Institute for Policy Studies colleague Letelier.
There is no legal status of murder in Chile, where homicides are divided into two categories, simple and qualified (aggravated).
On the morning of September 21, 1976, Moffit, Letelier, and Michael Moffitt—Ronni's husband of four months, who also worked at IPS—were on their way to work when the Chevy Malibu in which they were traveling was blown up in Sheridan Circle on Washington, DC's Embassy Row.
Michael, who was sitting in the back seat, survived the blast and watched as Ronni staggered from the mangled car, mortally wounded in the neck, drowning in her own blood. Letelier, whose legs were blown off and torso mangled, died before an ambulance arrived.
It was the first and last time a foreign diplomat was assassinated on US soil.
Associated Press coverage of the Letelier-Moffitt assassination, as published in the Fargo-Moorehead Forum on Sept. 22, 1976.
“For a half century, IPS has turned this heinous act of international terrorism into a force for justice and for lifting up new human rights champions in the United States and Latin America,” IPS executive director Tope Folarin said in response to the sentences. “We are thrilled to see this huge step towards accountability for the murder of Ronni Karpen Moffitt, a young American woman whose work to improve lives in her community and her world was cut tragically short.”
Moffitt's niece, Rebecca Karpen, said that "the recent sentencing of three of the men responsible for my aunt’s murder comes 50 years after their crime was committed—17 years after the death of my grandfather, Murray Karpen, who dedicated his life to fighting for justice for his daughter, and four years after the death of her brother, my father Harry, who carried her picture in his wallet for decades after his big sister was murdered."
"It is often said that justice delayed is justice denied," Karpen added. "So many of my family members who loved Ronni never lived to see this measure of justice applied, and that is a tragedy."
"So many of my family members who loved Ronni never lived to see this measure of justice applied, and that is a tragedy."
Plaza noted that the attack was planned under the direction of then-DINA Director Gen. Manuel Contreras Sepulveda and his deputy, Pedro Octavio Espinoza Bravo, as part of "a series of attacks outside the national territory against the lives of Chilean citizens" during Operation Condor.
The secret, US-backed effort, which ran from 1975-83, saw right-wing military dictatorships in Chile, Argentina, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, Brazil, Peru, and Ecuador collaborate on an international campaign of terror in which an estimated 60,000 leftists were killed, while tens of thousands of others were arrested and tortured.
Letelier was targeted because he was once a Chilean foreign minister under former socialist President Salvador Allende and had become a prominent critic of the Pinochet dictatorship while living in exile after the US-backed 1973 coup that overthrew the democratically elected reformist government and brought Pinochet to power.
Other prominent leftists forced into exile during Pinochet's reign of terror—including former Army commander Gen. Carlos Prats and his wife Sofia Cuthbert—were assassinated during Operation Condor. In fact, Contreras and the three men convicted last week were also found guilty in 2010 of killing the couple in a 1974 car bombing in Buenos Aires.
Officials in the administration of US President Gerald Ford, including Secretary of State Henry Kissinger, knew Pinochet's government and other Condor partners were planning to murder their political opponents abroad. The State Department drafted warnings regarding the impending assassinations but withdrew them shortly before the Letelier-Moffitt killings.
In her sentencing order last week, Plaza affirmed the role of DINA Capt. Armando Fernández Larios in obtaining passports for members of the hit squad, as well as for Michael Townley, a US citizen and DINA operative who built the remote-control bomb and placed it under Letelier's driver's seat.
However, last week's convictions and sentences were solely for Espinoza, Zara, and Iturriaga—and exclusively for Moffitt's murder.
In 1993, Contreras and Espinoza were convicted in Chile for ordering and implementing Letelier's assassination. Contreras was sentenced to seven years in prison, where he died in 2015 while serving hundreds of years of cumulative sentences for Pinochet-era crimes. Espinoza was sentenced to six years behind bars.
Townley, Fernández, and five right-wing Cuban exile militants were separately convicted in the United States in connection with Letelier's assassination. Townley served just over five years before being placed in witness protection due to his cooperation with investigators. Fernández was released after seven months, due to a plea bargain. Two of the Cubans served eight years; the convictions of their three co-defendants were overturned on appeal.
All three men convicted and sentenced last week for Moffitt's murder attended the US Army School of the Americas (SOA), then located in Panama. So did Contreras and Fernández.
SOA is sometimes called the School of Assassins and the School of Coups due to its notorious graduates and their crimes, including the drug trafficking Panamanian president Manuel Noriega, Bolivian despot Hugo Banzer, Haitian death squad commander Raoul Cedras, and Argentine “Dirty War” dictator Leopoldo Galtieri
At least hundreds of war criminals from throughout the hemisphere have been trained at the SOA, whose graduates planned, ordered, committed, or covered up some of the most notorious atrocities of the era, including the Guatemalan genocide; El Mozote massacre; assassination of Archbishop Óscar Romero; Jesuit massacre; and kidnapping, rape, and murder of four US churchwomen.
Juan Pablo Letelier, the son of Orlando Letelier and a former Chilean senator, called last week's sentences "an act of justice."
"Truth has prevailed," Letelier asserted. "Many years have gone by in this effort for truth and justice. Yet, with perseverance and with conviction, we’ve reached the point where, in a Chilean court, this act of terrorism in which an American citizen was assassinated by Chile’s secret police in 1976 has finally had a case, an investigation, and a sentencing of the three main people responsible."
"We hope that US government authorities will now consider that what has been done in Chile should also be done in the US regarding the investigation and the sanctioning of those responsible for this terrorist act," he added. "There are persons who are responsible for Ronni Karpen Moffitt’s death 50 years ago who are still in liberty on US soil, and there are pending Chilean requests for their extradition with which the US government has not complied."
Chile is seeking the extradition of Fernández, who was arrested by US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in Florida last year but has not been handed over to Chilean authorities to stand trial.
“Justice is slow," Letelier recently wrote. "There are many families in Chile who were victims... and they want justice... Armando Fernández Larios should never have been free in the United States.”
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Apologist for Pinochet Dictatorship Will Be Next President of Chile
José Antonio Kast has described the dictator who ended democracy for nearly two decades and presided over the persecution of tens of thousands of dissidents as someone who brought "order" to Chile.
Dec 15, 2025
José Antonio Kast, a far-right former lawmaker, won over 58% of the vote in Chile's runoff elections on Sunday over Jeannette Jara, the labor minister under outgoing left-wing President Gabriel Boric, to become the nation's next president.
The win came despite Kast's open admiration for General Augusto Pinochet, who ended civilian rule in Chile after taking power through a coup d'etat in 1973, overthrowing its democratically elected socialist leader in a US Central Intelligence Agency-backed plot and implementing a radical program of economic austerity.
Until he was ousted by a democratic referendum in 1990, Pinochet governed Chile as a military dictatorship rife with human rights abuses, resulting in his indictment by a Spanish court in 1996 for crimes against humanity. His regime assassinated or "disappeared" nearly 3,200 people, while tens of thousands were tortured and more forced into exile.
Human rights groups have accused Kast and his family—the patriarch of which was a member of the Nazi Party who fled to Chile in 1950—of collaboration with the Pinochet regime's detention of opponents. The president-elect's brother was a minister for Pinochet during the dictatorship.
Kast will be the first president of Chile since its return to democracy to have campaigned for and voted “Yes” in the 1988 plebiscite for the dictator to stay in power for another eight years despite his reign of terror.
But rather than distance himself from Pinochet's legacy, Kast has described himself as his spiritual successor.
In 2017, during his first of three presidential campaigns, Kast told a local newspaper that “if he were alive,” Pinochet “would vote for me.” Kast later described Pinochet as someone who brought “order” to Chile, comments that the Buenos Aires Times wrote in 2021, “railed many who are still scarred by this dark period in the country’s history.”
But Kast's nostalgia for that period of repression was not enough to hobble him this time around. At a time when the right is making gains across Latin America, Kast's policy agenda sits at the nexus point between the free market fundamentalism of Argentina's Javier Milei and the police state ambitions of El Salvador's Nayib Bukele.
He has pledged an economic program in the same vein as Pinochet's and, later, Milei's "shock therapy," proposing an unprecedented cut of $21 billion in public spending over his term, paired with a reduction in taxes on the wealthy.
Kast has pledged that these cuts would only affect "waste" and "political" spending, but not impact social programs that benefit Chileans. But economic analysts, including Javiera Toro, Chile's social development minister, have argued that a cut of that size would inevitably cut into the social safety net, including its popular state pension program and others related to health, housing, and education.
Kast successfully martialed fear of high crime (even though it actually fell under Boric's tenure) into outrage toward the nation's undocumented migrants—mainly from Venezuela—whom he has pledged to deport en masse. As in the US, where President Donald Trump is also spearheading a mass deportation operation, immigrants in Chile commit crimes at lower rates than those born in the country.
Last year, Kast visited the sprawling prison complex where Bukele has used emergency powers to detain tens of thousands of people as part of his sweeping war on gangs, often in punishing conditions where they've faced torture. Amnesty International described it as a "state policy of massive and arbitrary deprivation of liberty." Kast said he'd like to implement a similar policy in Chile.
Kast immediately raised fears for the future of Chile's democracy in his victory speech, vowing to form an "emergency government" when he takes power in 2026. However, he will not command a majority in Chile's legislature, which may make the delivery of his agenda more challenging.
Jenny Pribble, professor of political science and global studies at the University of Richmond, told Al Jazeera: “It remains to be seen if Kast could or would pursue such an approach, but if Chile follows the Salvadoran model, it would constitute significant democratic backsliding.”
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The American Reckoning
Someday Israeli leaders will stand in The Hague for what they have done in Gaza, and they will deserve to. But if we are honest, we know US leaders belong there too.
Sep 11, 2025
I have met people who gave me grace in Iran, in Mexico, in Haiti, in Gaza, in Cambodia, in Vietnam. People who understood the difference between ordinary citizens and the governments that rule them. People who offered me kindness when they had every reason not to. That grace stays with me.
As a US citizen and physician, I have lived my life trying to hold onto a sense of responsibility. But what I see now, in Gaza, in Haiti, in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan, is the full weight of what psychologists call diffusion of responsibility. It is the shrug that says: Someone else will answer for this, someone else will carry the shame.
The United States cannot keep living in that shrug. We armed, funded, and protected Israel as it has carried out the genocide of the Palestinian people. We have supplied not only weapons but coordination, intelligence, and political cover. We let the American Israel Public Affairs Committee function as the arm of a foreign government, not as a lobbying group. We looked away from the checkpoints, the administrative cruelty, the killing of children. This is our legacy.
But Gaza is not an aberration. It is a mirror held up to the long history of our interventions. We overthrew Mohammad Mossadegh, the democratically elected prime minister of Iran, in 1953, not because he was a tyrant but because he dared to nationalize oil. We turned that nation toward dictatorship and decades of repression, then had the arrogance to call it democracy. In Central America, we toppled leaders and propped up death squads. In Chile, we helped usher in the bloody reign of Augusto Pinochet, betraying yet another democratic choice in favor of authoritarian brutality.
We speak of Russian President Vladimir Putin’s murderous ways as if they are foreign to us. They are not. We have assassinated leaders. We have sanctioned extrajudicial killings, calling them “targeted strikes.” We have funded militias and trained torturers. We still carry Guantánamo on our conscience. We are not better than Putin. We are his rival and his mirror.
We should be an anti-interventionist nation, one that stops imagining itself as the builder of nations and instead takes responsibility for its own failures, its own violence, and its own complicity.
In Vietnam, we unleashed hell. Entire villages were burned to the ground. At My Lai, US soldiers slaughtered more than 500 unarmed civilians, women, children, elders. It was not an accident, not a one-off. It was part of a culture of violence we exported and excused.
And then there is the School of the Americas, now rebranded as Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation, a US military institution in Panama where we trained some of the worst dictators and death squad leaders in Latin America. The manuals we gave them were explicit: torture, execution, terror as tools of governance. We sowed horror and called it security.
Someday Israeli leaders will stand in The Hague for what they have done in Gaza, and they will deserve to. But if we are honest, we know we belong there too. For Mossadegh, for Pinochet, for Central America, for My Lai, for every extrajudicial killing and every sanctioned massacre, and most immediately for Gaza, we should be in the dock as well. We should stand in handcuffs, our heads lowered in shame, finally facing the truth of what we have unleashed in the world.
The truth is that our foreign policy has been one long history of intervention, violence, and betrayal of human dignity. We were in Haiti. We were in Iraq. We were in Afghanistan. We have left the Middle East, Latin America, and Africa littered with the bones of our experiments. Always we tell ourselves it was complicated. Always we tell ourselves we meant well. But what we meant was power, and what we left was ruin.
What reparation looks like now is not cash or aid dropped into a void. It is restoring justice. It is ending our culture of nation building and intervention, and replacing it with support for people, families, language, culture, dignity, and jurisprudence. It is standing against genocide, no matter who commits it. It is admitting that our strength lies not in military power but in whether we can build schools instead of prisons, communities instead of empires.
This is not just a populist opinion. It is a moral imperative. We should be an anti-interventionist nation, one that stops imagining itself as the builder of nations and instead takes responsibility for its own failures, its own violence, and its own complicity.
I am a doctor. My oath is to heal, to do no harm. But as a citizen, I see harm everywhere our government touches. We cannot keep pretending that this is someone else’s crime, someone else’s burden. This is ours.
The reckoning will not wait forever. The question is whether we face it with honesty now, or whether we let it destroy us later.
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GOP Congressman Suggests 'Pinochet Air' Death Flights for Migrants
"We wonder why the right-wingers aren't freaking out about Trump's dictator talk but we shouldn't," said one local Democratic leader in Georgia.
Feb 02, 2024
A Republican congressman from Georgia on Thursday suggested a novel way to stem the influx of migrants at the southern border: throw them from helicopters into the sea.
Responding to a photo showing a migrant flipping off the camera following his release without bail from a New York City court, Rep. Mike Collins took to social media to reply to a post by Rep. Anthony D'Esposito (R-N.Y.) advising the young man to "holla at the cartels and have them escort you back."
"Or we could buy him a ticket on Pinochet Air for a free helicopter ride back," Collins suggested. He was referring to former U.S.-backed Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose regime was known to "disappear" critics by throwing them from helicopters into the Pacific Ocean and other waterways while they were still alive in what became known as "death flights."
As Christopher Mathias—a senior HuffPost reporter who covers the far-right—noted, Collins "is parroting a meme that's been popular among white supremacists and neofascists like the Proud Boys."
After Collins' post was removed from X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, the congressman appealed directly to owner Elon Musk, saying that "he's apparently got a few more folks to fire," a reference to the site's purge of content moderators following its purchase by the multibillionaire.
Collins' post was restored with a notice that although it "violated the X rules," the site determined that "it may be in the public's interest" for it to remain accessible.
On right-wing sites including Daily Caller, commenters overwhelmingly voiced support for Collins' suggestion—although one reader found helicopter flights to be a "waste of time," preferring to "just shoot them at the border."
Pete Fuller, the Democratic Party chair in Jackson County, Georgia—which is part of Collins' district—tied the congressman's remarks to those of former President Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner for the November election.
"We wonder why the right-wingers aren't freaking out about Trump's dictator talk but we shouldn't," Fuller said. "The hard right would love Trump taking over dictatorial powers and to start disappearing the people that are inconvenient to them."
Trump infamously suggested shooting migrants and stocking the Rio Grande with alligators, a proposal that resurfaced this week when Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-Colo.) attempted to breathe life into her floundering reelection campaign by affirming she would co-sponsor legislation authorizing an alligator moat.
Collins is a more serious supporter of deadly obstacles in the Rio Grande. Responding to a recent U.S. Supreme Court ruling affirming the Biden administration's order for federal border authorities to cut down razor wire installed by Republican Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, the Georgia lawmaker said he will introduce the Restricting Administration Zealots from Obliging Raiders (RAZOR) Act. His bill would ban the federal government from removing or altering "any state-constructed barriers installed to mitigate illegal immigration."
The Supreme Court ruling followed a U.S. Justice Department lawsuit over Texas' razor wire-topped buoy barriers in the Rio Grande, in which numerous migrants have drowned while trying to cross into the United States. One migrant's body was found in the buoy barrier last year.
Meanwhile, U.S. President Joe Biden has come under fire from migrant rights advocates for expressing his willingness to "shut down the border" in exchange for a deal with Republican lawmakers that would continue U.S. funding for Ukraine's defense against Russian invasion.
Critics have warned that such a bargain would cost migrants lives and result in the evisceration of rights and protections for legal asylum-seekers and other immigrants.
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Can the US Follow Chile out of Its Crisis of Representation?
Both countries find themselves with a growing disconnect between citizens and the institutions that claim to represent them, but Chile has gotten more democratic since 2020 while the U.S. has gotten less so.
Dec 27, 2023
On December 17, Chileans voted once again on a new constitution, opting to reject—for the second time in two years—an attempt at constitutional revision. Rejecting a highly conservative text, voters chose to keep the dictatorship-era constitution for the time being. A political saga that began amid immense hope has now devolved into a dismal disarray that’s left countless Chileans tired and frustrated.
Here in the United States, we face an equally bleak political outlook. According to a recent Pew Research Center report, 25% of U.S. adults feel that neither of the nation’s two major parties represents them adequately enough. Some 63% of Americans express little to no confidence in the future of our political system.
Both the United States and Chile, in other words, find themselves at the center of what we can call a “Crisis of Representation,” a growing disconnect between citizens and the institutions that claim to represent them.
Each time Chileans took to the street, they sang louder and danced harder. The more their voices resonated, the harder they became to ignore.
This crisis has spared few countries. In 2019, major pro-democracy mass mobilizations erupted in nearly half—44%—of the world’s nations, an all-time high that surpassed previous records set during the fall of the USSR and the Arab Spring. People all over the world are demanding dignity and democracy. People all over the world feel that their voices are going unheard.
The U.S. and Chile share other links as well. Chile, according to the U.S. Department of State, rates as “one of the United States’ strongest partners in Latin America.” Our countries have maintained diplomatic relations for over two centuries and share proud, longstanding democratic traditions.
Yet this relationship has not always been positive. To say merely that the U.S. has “meddled” in Chilean politics would amount to a gross understatement. The CIA and Nixon administration stood behind the “first 9/11,” the September 1973 military coup that violently uprooted Chile’s then 143-year-old democracy. The U.S. would go on to prop up dictator Augusto Pinochet’s regime for nearly two more decades—17 years of rape, torture, and murder.
The Pinochet years essentially birthed what we now call “neoliberalism.” The conservative U.S. economist Milton Friedman and his disciples used the captive Chile as a testing ground for our world’s now-dominant right-wing economic ideology. Under Pinochet’s neoliberalism, inequality deepened and worker power dwindled. Chileans found themselves forced to operate as consumers not citizens.
Since Pinochet’s ousting by plebiscite in 1990, the neoliberal economic model has continued to constrain Chilean democracy, just as neoliberalism has in the United States and many other countries across the globe. Today, the U.S. and Chile rank among the world’s most unequal nations.
Even so, according to Freedom House, Chile has been getting more democratic since 2020, with one of the highest rankings of any democracy in the world: 94. The United States has only become less democratic, with an 83 ranking. Here in the United States, we clearly have a lot to learn from the recent Chilean political experience.
Twenty-first-century Chile has been a progressive success story. Starting in the mid-2000s, three cycles of protest changed everything. Chile’s 2006 Penguin Revolution, 2011 Chilean Winter, and 2019 Social Explosion each began with student protests and developed into mass movements. Each cycle grew larger than the last, forcing politicians to pay ever greater attention to the widely shared popular demands.
Before the December 17 election, I spoke with two 31-year-olds, the psychologist Gustavo Ignacio Mancilla Andrade and the professor Jose Luis Escalona Muñoz, about their experiences as student leaders in the Valparaíso region.
“2006 made us realize that change was possible,” Jose told me. “2011 was chaotic at first, but soon we became highly organized. We got to the point where we were all speaking the same language, all calling for education to be recognized as a human right.”
We can see the power of these mobilizations in the policy changes they helped trigger, everything from landmark education reforms to a national plebiscite. Each cycle’s expressive intensity correlated with its impact. Each time Chileans took to the street, they sang louder and danced harder. The more their voices resonated, the harder they became to ignore.
“The arts kept the movement alive,” Gustavo explains. “If you march every day, you reach less people. If you adopt creative tactics, you draw people in. For this reason, you can trace the evolution of Chilean social movements just by looking at how protesters sing.”
Through protest, song, and dance, Chileans had begun resolving the Crisis of Representation.
The 2019 anti-inequality mobilizations turned out to be the largest in Chilean history. Millions flooded the streets to demand new forms of political representation.
“Pandora’s box is now wide open,” as Franco-Chilean historian and sommelier Francisca Herrera Crisan put it at the time, “letting the ghosts of the past escape, finally forcing us to face them. In pain, certainly, but also in the hope set free from the box: that of a people rediscovering themselves.”
Only a worldwide virus, notes the psychologist Gustavo, proved strong enough to slow that opening. Even so, Chile’s then president, the right-wing Sebastián Piñera, would soon concede to protester demands and announce a plebiscite to determine the fate of Pinochet’s constitution. In October 2020, 78% of Chileans voted to scrap the document, initiating a new and historic constitutional drafting process.
By early 2022, the future looked bright. A new constitution was taking shape, and Chile had just inaugurated its youngest president ever: the 36-year-old Gabriel Boric Font, a former student leader elected on an ambitious reform platform. Boric’s election signaled a new direction for Chile. He represented the voice of the young and the dispossessed.
But that hope soon dissipated. Assorted scandals plagued the constitutional assembly, and, after a concerted disinformation campaign, an overwhelming majority of voters rejected the assembly’s draft constitution. Chile’s far right used this political blunder to seize control of the constitution’s second drafting assembly.
In the meantime, Boric has faced strong political headwinds. Inheriting a deeply polarized country, he has found it difficult to build the broad coalitions necessary to pursue crucial reforms.
The story doesn’t end here.
The only way past the Crisis of Representation turns out to be through it, and in Chile the gears for change are still turning. Recent political setbacks have not detracted from Chile’s inspiring victories in deepening democratic engagement.
“These movements served as an important cultural catalyst,” explains the professor Jose. “They made us realize that it was possible to protest and demand a better future.”
Pushback, of course, will always come. Newton’s third law promises that. But if we look at the long trend, we’ll see it traces a positive trajectory. The social process initiated in 2019 has not run its course. The struggle remains alive, now more than ever.
During periods of demobilization, we must pause to regroup—using the lull in momentum as a chance to learn from the past and envision the future. This is the natural rhythm of change, the ebb and flow of progress.
I leave you with the last words of President Salvador Allende, delivered while defending Chile’s presidential palace from the conspirators of the 1973 coup:
“Neither crime nor force can delay social processes,” said Allende. “History is ours and it is made by the people.”
“Go forward,” he assured, “knowing that, sooner rather than later, the great avenues through which free men pass to build a better society will open once again. Long live Chile! Long live the people! Long live the workers!”
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Know the Names of Kissinger’s Victims
The death of Henry Kissinger allows us to remember that his 3 to 4 million victims are not just amorphous entities but individuals who had names, families, lives, hopes, and dreams.
Dec 05, 2023
Historian Greg Grandin, in his 2015 biography of Henry Kissinger, estimated that Kissinger’s policies were responsible for 3 to 4 million deaths around the world—from Vietnam to Pakistan, to Indonesia, to Chile, to southern Africa, to the Middle East. Grandin’s damning indictment against the former U.S. national security adviser and secretary of state is powerful and overwhelming.
But large numbers like 3 to 4 million mask the very real pain, terror, and tragedy suffered by those individuals and their families. Look at the cases of Charles Horman, Frank Teruggi, and Ronni Moffit. All three were Americans killed by the Kissinger-Nixon backed Chilean military junta that overthrew the democratically elected socialist government of Salvador Allende.
Horman and Teruggi were journalists in Chile in 1973 when the coup happened. They were taken to the infamous National Stadium in Santiago where they were executed along with thousands of Chileans. Their story was painfully yet meaningfully represented in the 1982 film Missing with Jack Lemon and Sissy Spacek.
My wish would be that anyone who praises Kissinger or cites his “accomplishments” must also acknowledge his victims and know some of their names.
"Ronni Moffit was a researcher at the Institute for Policy Studies in Washington, D.C, who was riding in a car with her husband Michael Moffit and the former Chilean diplomat Orlando Letelier in Sheridan Circle when their car exploded. It was determined that a bomb was planted by agents of the Chilean secret police most likely under orders from junta leader General Augusto Pinochet.
The record indicates that Kissinger told Pinochet in a phone conversation in June of 1976 that his regime was a victim of leftist propaganda on human rights:
In the United States as you know we are sympathetic with what you are trying to do here. We want to help, not undermine you. You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende.
A few months later, Moffit and Letelier were murdered. Letelier’s lower torso was blown away and his legs had been severed. Moffit’s larynx and carotid artery were slashed by a piece of shrapnel and she drowned in her own blood.
Most Americans today don’t know about these murders or the names of the three victims mentioned above. After all, it was almost 50 years ago and people have become inured to the many atrocities committed at home and abroad since then. The death of Henry Kissinger allows us to remember that his 3 to 4 million victims are not just amorphous entities but individuals who had names, families, lives, hopes, and dreams. They did not deserve to die miserable deaths.
My wish would be that anyone who praises Kissinger or cites his “accomplishments” must also acknowledge his victims and know some of their names. In particular, American media figures, politicians, and prognosticators should know who Charles Horman, Frank Teruggi, and Ronni Moffit were, how they died, and who was responsible for their deaths. Their families, friends, and descendants certainly know and deserve to have their pain and loss acknowledged.
Henry Kissinger never had to answer for his crimes or face his victims’ families. There is nothing we can do about this now that he is dead. But we can at least insure that his crimes and misdeeds are never forgotten.
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On Fleeing US-Backed Fascists and Disney's Donald Duck Imperialism
Our goal in 1973 Chile was to defeat our capitalist adversary not with bullets but with ideas, images, and emotions of our own. So why was the duck so angry at us?
Dec 03, 2023
This year marks the anniversaries of two drastically different events that loomed all too large in my life. The first occurred a century ago in Hollywood: on October 16, 1923, Walt Disney signed into being the corporation that bears his name. The second took place in Santiago, Chile, on September 11, 1973, when socialist President Salvador Allende died in a military coup that overthrew his democratically elected government.
Those two disparate occurrences got me thinking about how the anniversaries of a long-dead American who revolutionized popular culture globally and a slain Chilean leader whose inspiring political revolution failed might illuminate — and I hope you won’t find this too startling — the dilemma that apocalyptic climate change poses to humanity.
This isn’t, in fact, the first time those two men and what they represented affected my life. Fifty years ago, each of them helped determine my destiny — a time when I had not the slightest hint that global warming might someday leave them again juxtaposed in my life.
In mid-October 1973, as the Walt Disney Corporation was celebrating the 50th anniversary of its founding, I found myself in the Argentine embassy in Santiago, Chile, where I had sought refuge after the country’s military had destroyed its democracy and taken power. Like 1,000 other asylum seekers, I was forced to flee to those compressed premises — in my case, thanks in significant part to Walt Disney. To be more specific, what put me in peril was Para Leer al Pato Donald (How to Read Donald Duck), a bestselling book I had cowritten in 1971 with Belgian sociologist Armand Mattelart that skewered Uncle Walt’s — as we then called it — “cultural imperialism.”
That deregulatory free-market style of capitalism with its whittling down of the welfare state would, in the years to come, dominate so many other countries as well.
That book had been born out of Salvador Allende’s peaceful revolution, the first attempt in history to build socialism by democratic means rather than by conquering the state through armed insurrection. That Chilean road to socialism meant, however, leaving intact the economic, political, and media power of those who opposed our radical reforms.
One of our most urgent cultural tasks was contesting the dominant stories of the time, primarily those produced in the United States, imported to Chile (and so many other countries), and then ingested by millions of consumers. Among the most prevalent, pleasurable, and easily digestible of mass-media commodities were historietas (comic books), with those by Disney ruling the market. To create alternative versions of reality for the new, liberated Chile, Armand and I felt it was important to grasp the ideological magic that lurked in those oh-so-popular comics. After all, you can’t substitute for something if you don’t even know how it works.
Our goal was to defeat our capitalist adversary not with bullets but with ideas, images, and emotions of our own. So, the two of us set out to interpret hundreds of Donald Duck historietas to try to grasp just what made them so damn successful. In mid-1971, less than a year after Allende’s election victory and after 10 feverish days of collaboration, he and I felt we had grasped the way Walt’s supposedly harmless ducks and mice had subtly shaped the thinking of Chileans.
In the end, in a kind of frenzy, we wrote what John Berger (one of the great art critics of the twentieth century) would term “a handbook of decolonization,” a vision of what imperial America was selling the world as natural, everlasting, and presumably unalterable by anyone, including our President Allende. We did our best to lay out how Walt (and his workers) viewed family and sex, work and criminality, society and failure, and above all how his ducks and mice trapped Third World peoples in an exotic world of underdevelopment from which they could only emerge by eternally handing over their natural resources to foreigners and agreeing to imitate the American way of life.
Above all, of course, since the values embedded in Disney comics were wildly individualistic and competitive, they proved to be paeans to unbridled consumerism — the absolute opposite, you won’t be surprised to learn, of the communal vision of Allende and his followers as they tried to build a country where solidarity and the common good would be paramount.
The Empire Strikes Back!
Miraculously enough, our book hit a raw nerve in Chilean society. In a country where everything was being questioned by insurgent, upstart masses, including power and property relations, here were two lunatics stating that nothing was sacred — not even children’s comics! Nobody, we insisted, could truly claim to be innocent or untainted, certainly not Uncle Walt and his crew. To build a different world, Chileans would have to dramatically question who we thought we were and how we dreamt about one another and our future, while exploring the sources of our deepest desires.
If our call for transgression had been written in academic prose destined for obscure scholarly journals, we would surely have been ignored. But the style we chose for Para Leer al Pato Donald was as insolent, raucous, and carnivalesque as the Chilean revolution itself. We tried to write so that any mildly literate person would be able to understand us.
Still, don’t imagine for a second that we weren’t surprised when the reaction to our book proved explosive. Assaults in the opposition press and media were to be expected, but assaults on my family and me were another matter. I was almost run over by a furious driver, screaming “Leave the Duck alone!” Our house was pelted with stones, while Chileans outside it cheered Donald Duck. Ominous phone calls promised worse. By mid-1973, my wife Angélica, our young son Rodrigo, and I had moved — temporarily, we hoped — to my parents’ house, which was where the military coup of September 11th found us.
Salvador Allende died at the Presidential Palace that day, a death that foretold the death of democracy and of so many thousands of his followers. Among the victims of that military putsch were a number of books, including Para Leer Al Pato Donald, which I saw — on television, no less — being burnt by soldiers. A few days later, the editor of the book told me that its third printing had been dumped into the bay of Valparaíso by Navy personnel.
I had resisted, post-coup, going into exile, but the mistreatment of my book convinced me that, if I wanted to avoid being added to the inquisitorial pyre, I would have to seek the safety of some embassy until I could get permission to leave the country.
It was a sobering experience for the man who had brazenly barbecued the Duck to find himself huddling in a foreign embassy on the very day the corporation that had created those comics was celebrating its 50th anniversary. Consider that a sign of how completely Uncle Walt had won that battle, though he himself had, by then, been dead for seven years. Very much alive, however, were his buddies, those voracious fans of Disneyland — then-American President Richard Nixon and his National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, masterminds of the conspiracy that had destabilized and sabotaged the Allende revolution, which they saw as inimical to American global hegemony. Indeed, the coup had been carried out in the name of saving capitalism from hordes of unwashed, unruly revolutionaries, while punishing any country in the hemisphere whose leadership dared reject Washington’s influence.
Nor would it take long before the dictatorship that replaced Allende began enthusiastically applying economic shock therapy to the country, accompanied by electric shocks to the genitals of anyone who dared protest the extreme form of capitalism that came to be known as neoliberalism. That deregulatory free-market style of capitalism with its whittling down of the welfare state would, in the years to come, dominate so many other countries as well.
Fifty years after the coup that destroyed Allende’s attempt to replace it with a socialism that would respect its adversaries and their rights, such a revolutionary change hardly seems achievable anymore, even in today’s left-wing regimes in Latin America. Instead, capitalism in its various Disneyesque forms remains dominant across the planet.
On this increasingly desperate planet, I suspect the critique of Disney that Armand and I laid out so long ago still has a certain potency.
Nor should it be surprising that, in all these years, the corporation Walt Disney founded a century ago has grown ever more ascendant, becoming one of the planet’s major entertainment and media conglomerates (though it, too, now finds itself in a more difficult world). Admittedly, with that preeminence has come changes that even an obdurate critic like me must hail. How could I fail to admire the Disney corporation’s stances on racial equality and gay rights, or its opposition to Ron DeSantis’s “Don’t Say Gay” bill. How could I not note the ways in which its films have come to recognize the culture and aspirations of countries and communities it caricatured in the comics I read in Chile so long ago? And yet, the smiling, friendly form of capitalism it now presents — the very fact that it doesn’t wish to shock or alienate its customers — may, in the end, prove even more dangerous to our ultimate well-being than was true half a century ago.
True, I would no longer write our book the way Armand and I did all those decades ago. Like any document forged in the heat of a revolutionary moment eager to dismantle an oppressive system, imbued with a messianic belief in our ability to change consciousness, and tending to imagine our readers as empty vessels into which ducks and mice (or something far better) could be poured, we lacked a certain subtlety. It was hard for us to imagine Chilean comic-book readers as human beings who could creatively appropriate images and stories fed to them and forge a new significance all their own.
And yet, our essay’s central message is still a buoyant, rebellious reminder that there could be other roads to a better world than those created by rampant capitalism.
Warnings from the Fish
Indeed, our probe of the inner workings of a system that preys on our desires while trying to turn us into endlessly consuming machines is particularly important on a planet imperiled by global warming in ways we couldn’t even imagine then.
Take a scene I came across as I scanned the book just this week. Huey, Dewey, and Louie rush into their house with a bucket. “Look, Unca Donald,” they say, in sheer delight, “at the strange fish we caught in the bay.” Donald grabs the specimen as dollar signs ignite around his head and responds: “Strange fish!… Money!… The aquarium buys strange fish.”
In 1971, we chose that bit of Disney to illustrate how its comics then eradicated history, sweat, and social class. “There is a great round of buying, selling, and consuming,” we wrote, “but to all appearances, none of the products involved has required any effort whatsoever to make. Nature is the great labor force, producing objects of human and social utility as if they were natural.”
What concerned us then was the way workers were being elided from history and their exploitation made to magically disappear. We certainly noted the existence of nature and its exploitation for profit, but reading that passage more than 50 years later what jumps out at me isn’t the dollarization of everything or how Donald instantly turns a fish into merchandise but another burning ecological question: Why is that fish in that bucket and not the sea? Why did the kids feel they could go to the bay, scoop out one of its inhabitants, and bring it home to show Unca Donald, a displacement of nature that Armand and I didn’t even think to highlight then?
Today, that environmental perspective, that sense of how we humans continue to despoil our planet in an ever more fossil-fuelized and dangerous fashion, is simply inescapable. It stares me in the face as we now eternally break heat records planetwide.
Perhaps that fictitious fish and its castoff fate from half a century ago resonate so deeply in me today because I recently included a similar creature in my new novel, The Suicide Museum. In it, Joseph Hortha, a billionaire (of which there are so many more than in 1971), snags a yellow-fin tuna off the coast of Santa Catalina, California, a bay like the one where those three young ducks netted their fish. But Hortha, already rich beyond imagining, doesn’t see dollar signs in his catch. When he guts that king of the sea, bits of plastic spill obscenely out of its innards, the very plastic that made his fortune. Visually, in other words, that tuna levels an instant accusation at him for polluting the oceans and this planet with his products.
To atone, he will eventually make delirious plans to build a gigantic “Suicide Museum,” meant to alert humanity to the dangerous abyss towards which we’re indeed heading. In other words, to halt our suicidal rush towards Anthropocene oblivion, we need to change our lifestyles drastically. “The only way to save ourselves is to undo civilization,” Hortha explains, “unfound our cities, question the paradigm of modernity that has dominated our existence for centuries.” He imagines “a Copernican swerve in how we interact with nature,” one in which we come to imagine ourselves not as nature’s masters or stewards, but once again as part of its patterns and rhythms.
And if just imagining a world without plastic is daunting, how much more difficult will it be to implement policies that effectively limit the way our lives are organized around a petro-universe now blistering the planet? You have to wonder (and Uncle Walt won’t help on this): Is there any chance of stunning the global upper and middle classes into abandoning their ingrained privileges, the conveniences that define all our harried existences?
Walt Disney and Salvador Allende Are Still Duking (or Do I mean Ducking?) It Out
On this increasingly desperate planet, I suspect the critique of Disney that Armand and I laid out so long ago still has a certain potency. The values symbolized in those now-ancient comic books continue to underwrite the social order (or do I mean disorder?) that’s moving us towards ultimate self-destruction globally.
President Allende rarely spoke of the environment in his speeches, but he did want us to live in a very different world.
Such a collective cataclysm won’t be averted unless we’re finally ready to deal with the most basic aspects of contemporary existence: unabashed competition, untrammeled consumerism, an extractive attitude towards the Earth (not to speak of a deeply militarized urge to kill one another), and a stupefying faith that a Tomorrowland filled with happiness is just a monorail ride away.
To put it bluntly, our species can’t afford another century of the principles fostered by the Disney emporium.
And what of Salvador Allende, dead this half-century that’s seen Uncle Walt’s values expand and invade every corner of our souls? What of his vision of a just society that seems so much farther away today, as would-be autocrats and hard-core authoritarians rise up everywhere in a world in which The Donald is anything but a duck?
President Allende rarely spoke of the environment in his speeches, but he did want us to live in a very different world. While he was no eco-prophet, he distinctly had something to say about the catastrophic predicament now facing us.
To put it bluntly, our species can’t afford another century of the principles fostered by the Disney emporium.
Today, we should value his life-long certainty, reiterated in that last stand in defense of democracy and dignity in Chile’s Presidential Palace 50 years ago, that history is made by unexceptional men and women who, when they dare imagine an alternative future, can accomplish exceptional things.
As the symbolic battle between Walt Disney and Salvador Allende for the hearts and minds of humanity continues, the last word doesn’t, in fact, belong to either of them, but to the rest of us. It’s we who must decide if there will even be generations, a century from now, to look back on our follies, no less thank us for subversively saving our planet for them.
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For Media Elites, War Criminal Henry Kissinger Was a Very Great Man
The professional love affairs between Kissinger and many U.S. journalists endured from the time he got a grip on power in 1969—and continue even in his death.
Nov 30, 2023
For U.S. mass media, Henry Kissinger’s quip that “power is the ultimate aphrodisiac” rang true. Influential reporters and pundits often expressed their love for him. The media establishment kept swooning over one of the worst war criminals in modern history.
After news of his death broke on Wednesday night, prominent coverage echoed the kind that had followed him ever since his years with President Richard Nixon, while they teamed up to oversee vast carnage in Southeast Asia.
The headline over a Washington Post news bulletin summed up: “Henry Kissinger Dies at 100. The Noted Statesman and Scholar Had Unparalleled Power Over Foreign Policy.”
But can a war criminal really be a “noted statesman”?
The New York Times top story began by describing Kissinger as a “scholar-turned-diplomat who engineered the United States’ opening to China, negotiated its exit from Vietnam, and used cunning, ambition and intellect to remake American power relationships with the Soviet Union at the time of the Cold War, sometimes trampling on democratic values to do so.”
And so, the Times spotlighted Kissinger’s role in the U.S. “exit from Vietnam” in 1973 -- but not his role during the previous four years, overseeing merciless slaughter in a war that took several million lives.
"Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands." —Anthony Bourdain
“Leaving aside those who perished from disease, hunger, or lack of medical care, at least 3.8 million Vietnamese died violent war deaths according to researchers from Harvard Medical School and the University of Washington,” historian and journalist Nick Turse has noted. He added: “The best estimate we have is that 2 million of them were civilians. Using a very conservative extrapolation, this suggests that 5.3 million civilians were wounded during the war, for a total of 7.3 million Vietnamese civilian casualties overall. To such figures might be added an estimated 11.7 million Vietnamese forced from their homes and turned into refugees, up to 4.8 million sprayed with toxic herbicides like Agent Orange, an estimated 800,000 to 1.3 million war orphans, and 1 million war widows.”
All told, during his stint in government, Kissinger supervised policies that took the lives of at least 3 million people.
Henry Kissinger was the crucial U.S. official who supported the September 11, 1973 coup that brought down the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile—initiating 17 years of dictatorship, with systematic murder and torture (“trampling on democratic values” in Times-speak).
Kissinger remained as secretary of state during the presidency of Gerald Ford. Lethal machinations continued in many places, including East Timor in the Indonesian archipelago. “Under Kissinger’s direction, the U.S. gave a green light to the 1975 Indonesian invasion of East Timor (now Timor-Leste), which ushered in a 24-year brutal occupation by the Suharto dictatorship,” the human rights organization ETAN reported. “The Indonesian occupation of East Timor and West Papua was enabled by U.S. weapons and training. This illegal flow of weapons contravened congressional intent, yet Kissinger bragged about his ability to continue arms shipments to Suharto.
“These weapons were essential to the Indonesian dictator’s consolidation of military control in both East Timor and West Papua, and these occupations cost the lives of hundreds of thousands of Timorese and Papuan civilians. Kissinger’s policy toward West Papua allowed for the U.S.-based multinational corporation Freeport McMoRan to pursue its mining interests in the region, which has resulted in terrible human rights and environmental abuses; Kissinger was rewarded with a seat on the Board of Directors from 1995-2001.”
Now that’s the work of a noted statesman.
The professional love affairs between Kissinger and many American journalists endured from the time he got a grip on the steering wheel of U.S. foreign policy when Nixon became president in early 1969. In Southeast Asia, the agenda went far beyond Vietnam.
Nixon and Kissinger routinely massacred civilians in Laos, as Fred Branfman documented in the 1972 book “Voices From the Plain of Jars.” He told me decades later: “I was shocked to the core of my being as I found myself interviewing Laotian peasants, among the most decent, human and kind people on Earth, who described living underground for years on end, while they saw countless fellow villagers and family members burned alive by napalm, suffocated by 500-pound bombs, and shredded by antipersonnel bombs dropped by my country, the United States.”
Branfman’s discoveries caused him to scrutinize U.S. policy: “I soon learned that a tiny handful of American leaders, a U.S. executive branch led by Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, and Henry Kissinger, had taken it upon themselves—without even informing let alone consulting the U.S. Congress or public—to massively bomb Laos and murder tens of thousands of subsistence-level, innocent Laotian civilians who did not even know where America was, let alone commit an offense against it. The targets of U.S. bombing were almost entirely civilian villages inhabited by peasants, mainly old people and children who could not survive in the forest. The other side’s soldiers moved through the heavily forested regions in Laos and were mostly untouched by the bombing.”
In the corridors of U.S. media power, Henry Kissinger never lost the sheen of brilliance.
The U.S. warfare in Southeast Asia was also devastating to Cambodia. Consider some words from the late Anthony Bourdain, who illuminated much about the world’s foods and cultures. As this century got underway, Bourdain wrote: “Once you’ve been to Cambodia, you’ll never stop wanting to beat Henry Kissinger to death with your bare hands. You will never again be able to open a newspaper and read about that treacherous, prevaricating, murderous scumbag sitting down for a nice chat with Charlie Rose or attending some black-tie affair for a new glossy magazine without choking. Witness what Henry did in Cambodia—the fruits of his genius for statesmanship—and you will never understand why he’s not sitting in the dock at The Hague next to [Slobodan] Milošević.”
Bourdain added that while Kissinger continued to hobnob at A-list parties, “Cambodia, the neutral nation he secretly and illegally bombed, invaded, undermined, and then threw to the dogs, is still trying to raise itself up on its one remaining leg.”
But back in the corridors of U.S. media power, Henry Kissinger never lost the sheen of brilliance.
Among the swooning journalists was ABC’s Ted Koppel, who informed viewers of the Nightline program in 1992: “If you want a clear foreign-policy vision, someone who will take you beyond the conventional wisdom of the moment, it’s hard to do any better than Henry Kissinger.” As one of the most influential broadcast journalists of the era, Koppel was not content to only declare himself “proud to be a friend of Henry Kissinger.” The renowned newsman lauded his pal as “certainly one of the two or three great secretaries of state of our century.”Keep ReadingShow Less
Sanders and AOC Unveil Resolution to Apologize for US Role in Chile Coup, Declassify Secret Docs
"We must make clear that we regret our involvement and commit to supporting Chilean democracy," said Sen. Bernie Sanders.
Sep 21, 2023
Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and several other U.S. lawmakers introduced a resolution on Thursday that formally commemorates the 50th anniversary of the deadly 1973 military coup in Chile and apologizes for the role the United States played in the toppling of the Latin American nation's democratically elected government.
The resolution also calls for the declassification of all remaining U.S. documents related to the coup and the events preceding and following it.
"Let me be clear: we must stand up for democracy here in the United States and beyond," Sanders (I-Vt.) said in a statement. "And that means we must also acknowledge that the United States has not always defended democracy abroad, and in fact, has sometimes done the opposite."
"As we mark the 50th anniversary of the horrific coup in Chile, we must make clear that we regret our involvement and commit to supporting Chilean democracy," he added. "To build the lasting partnerships we need in this hemisphere, we will need to establish a basis of trust and respect. Part of that process includes full accountability for the coup and its aftermath."
"Fifty years ago, the U.S. government supported a violent coup that toppled democracy in Chile and brought years of mass murder and authoritarianism to the country."
The new resolution comes after Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) joined a group of U.S. lawmakers on a Latin America trip that included a stop in Chile, where the New York Democrat stressed the importance of declassifying the coup-related documents to shed more light on the Nixon administration's role in the violent ouster of Salvador Allende on September 11, 1973.
That day, Gen. Augusto Pinochet led the Chilean military in seizing control of the nation's government and ushering in a decadeslong reign of brutal repression and terror. Tens of thousands of Chileans were tortured, killed, or disappeared by the Pinochet regime.
In the lead-up to the coup, then-President Richard Nixon ordered the CIA to make Chile's economy "scream" as part of an effort to prevent Allende, a democratic socialist, from taking office.
Decades after the coup—during which Allende took his own life after refusing to step aside—the CIA acknowledged that it "actively supported" the Pinochet regime and that some of its agents were involved in human rights abuses.
"The U.S. cannot credibly show up as a trustworthy partner that can help advance democracy in the present if we don't own up to our complicated past," Ocasio-Cortez said Thursday.
Following the congressional delegation's visit to Chile last month, the U.S. State Department declassified two briefs that Nixon received on the day of the 1973 coup and three days prior.
"While we appreciate President Biden listening to our call and declassifying two relevant documents, there are still many outstanding questions," said Ocasio-Cortez. "The people of Chile and the victims of Pinochet's violence deserve answers."
The new resolution—also backed by Sens. Tim Kaine (D-Va.), Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.), and Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) in the Senate and Reps. Greg Casar (D-Texas), Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.), and Joaquin Castro (D-Texas) in the House—highlights the CIA's support for the Pinochet regime and points specifically to the involvement of Henry Kissinger, who served as Nixon's national security adviser and later as the U.S. Secretary of State.
"Then-Secretary of State Henry Kissinger told coup leader General Augusto Pinochet in a private meeting, 'We want to help, not undermine you. You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende,'" the resolution states, citing a declassified transcript of a conversation between Kissinger and Pinochet in June 1976.
The resolution "expresses profound regret for the United States' contribution to destabilizing Chile's political institutions and constitutional processes" and praises "the Chilean people for rebuilding a strong and resilient democracy against the forces of authoritarianism."
The measure adds that "full accountability requires a full accounting in the form of disclosure and declassification of remaining United States records relating to events leading up to, during, and after the military coup of 50 years ago."
"Fifty years ago, the U.S. government supported a violent coup that toppled democracy in Chile and brought years of mass murder and authoritarianism to the country," Casar said in a statement. "We should apologize and be transparent about the role that the U.S. government and major economic interests played in supporting the coup and the following years of authoritarian rule. Together, we can build a new relationship based on mutual respect and a commitment to peace."
This story has been updated to include Rep. Nydia Velázquez (D-N.Y.) on the list of lawmakers backing the resolution. Her name was mistakenly left off an earlier press release about the measure.
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Red Wine and Empanadas: Remembering the First September 11
Museum exhibitions, concerts, theater, film screenings, colloquia, and marches mark 50 years since the Chilean coup on September 11, 1973.
Sep 11, 2023
Throughout Chile today, there is a massive outpouring of artistic and cultural activity to commemorate the events of September 11, 1973, when the democratically elected, socialist government of Salvador Allende was overthrown by a brutal military dictatorship that was supported by the Nixon administration through the aid of Nixon’s Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, who helped to orchestrate the events that led to the coup. Thousands of Chileans were arrested, disappeared, tortured, or driven into exile under the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet who went on to rule the country for the next 18 years.
Allende famously proclaimed that his Popular Unity government would “have the flavor of red wine and empanadas.” And it is in that spirit that hundreds of events are happening throughout the month of September.
On the political front, both Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) have visited the country and met with Chilean President Gabriel Boric. In an interview with The Guardian, AOC stated: “I believe that we owe Chile, and not just Chile but many aspects of that region, an apology. I don’t think that apology indicates weakness; I think it indicates a desire to meet our hemispheric partners with respect.”
The idea that a country might develop a peaceful road to an alternative economy not based on rapacious greed, war mongering, profiteering, and the myth of the meritocracy was inspiring.
Tonight (September 11) a concert featuring three foundational music groups of the Nueva Canción Chilena (“New Chilean Song”) movement, Quilapayun, Inti-illimani, and Illapu will perform (along with other musical performers) outside the Estadio Nacional in a “Homage for Salvador Allende and the victims of the dictatorship.”
As part of a series of exhibitions, panel discussions, and cultural presentations, the Museum of Memory and Human Rights opened a new exhibit on September 6, entitled, “Judging and Filming Trials Against Humanity,” mounted as a collaborative project with the National Archive of France. Thematically based, it traces the experience of Chile, France, and Argentina explicating the history of legal trials against those who perpetrated crimes against humanity. This is one of a number of events that the museum is sponsoring.
The theater company La Situación is presenting an immersive, site specific experience that will allow spectators to relive the dramatic moments at the University of Santiago de Chile at the time of the coup, when students, officials, and academics were all set to attend the opening of an exhibition entitled “For Life…Always!”, which was to open on September 11, 1973, with Allende in attendance. The narrative unfolds through the spaces of the university where a group of 15 actors become the protagonists of what happened on that historic day.
The renowned ICTUS theater company has been presenting a reprise of their highly acclaimed 1984 play, Primavera con una Esquina Rota (based on Mario Benedetti’s novel and translated as “Springtime in a Broken Mirror”) in its own theater space since June.
Now celebrating 60 years of ongoing socially committed theater in Chile, ICTUS is the company that produced the internationally acclaimed play Something in the Air in 1985, based on the tragic murder of José Manuel Parada (the son of actor Roberto Parada) by the agents of the Carabineros Communications Directorate. The play is a a testimonial work (which starred Roberto Parada) where the story of the kidnapping already experienced is told in fiction. Something in the Air was given a North American premiere in 1988 in Toronto, produced by Toronto Workshop Productions and directed by Robert Rooney.
Another site specific event will happen on the eve of the coup at La Moneda, the presidential palace that was bombed by the military and the place where Allende died after delivering a final live radio broadcast to the nation. The commemoration is a woman only event, and organizers have asked those attending the silent memorial to dress in black and come with a candle and one sign for each woman that reads: “NUNCA+ (never).”
Professor Lidia Casas is director of the Institute for Human Rights at Diego Portales University. She explains the significance of the march this way:
The gender dimension of torture was silenced by most survivors and human rights organizations, today there is a new political scenario with negationist narratives from hard liner right-wing politicians. A congress woman declared sexual violence was an urban myth. For us feminist women, embracing in a human chain around the government palace is an act of resistance and a cri de coeur for a “never again” and remembrance.
Professor Casas also recently presented an open lecture on sexual violence at Santiago’s former Estadio Chile, inviting students to the women change room. The stadium was the largest site used for detention and torture in the days following the coup.
“Victor Jara. Two looks. 50 years,” is a photographic exhibition honoring the folksinger, theater director, and composer, Victor Jara, who was also a leader in the Chilean New Song movement of the 1960s and 70s. These photographs are seen through the lenses of Louis Poirot and Antonio Larreat, two essential names in the history of Chilean photography. The photographs and negatives comprise a collection of images that survived the dictatorship by being hidden within the country as well as being exported for safe keeping abroad during the period of the dictatorship.
Jara, often described in North America as the Chilean Bob Dylan, was one of the earliest victims of the coup when he was arrested by the regime and taken to the then-named “Estadio Chile,” where he was brutally tortured before being executed by the military on September, 16, 1973.
In further tribute to Jara as one of the leading cultural figures of the period, the Victor Jara Foundation has organized the Arts and Memory Festival. This four-day arts and music event, running from September 28 through October 1, is being held at the Víctor Jara Stadium (actually an arena now; the former Estadio Chile, where Víctor was held and killed).
The impressive lineup of artists includes Inti-Illimani; celebrated pianist Roberto Bravo; singer-songwriters from the period including Eduardo Peralta, Luis LeBert, and Mauricio Redolés; the iconic rock band Los Prisioneros; the Santiago Youth Symphony Orchestra; the Haitian-Chilean band; LA FA MI; and a whole host of plays and presentations by theater and dance ensembles as well as independent solo artists. The 2023 Joan Jara Arts and Memory Award will also be presented at the festival.
In Chile this month there is certainly “the flavor of red wine and empanadas,” throughout the country, which is how Allende described his uniquely Chilean experiment with democratic socialism. In September 1973, I was 25 years old and enrolled as a graduate student in education at Lehigh University in Pennsylvania. During that bleak period that saw Richard Nixon being sworn in for a second term as president of the United States, the events in Chile seemed so encouraging. The idea that a country might develop a peaceful road to an alternative economy not based on rapacious greed, war mongering, profiteering, and the myth of the meritocracy was inspiring. To then see this fragile movement succumb to the iron fist of reaction and brought to such a cruel and tragic end was equally depressing. Up to that time in my life I was never much of a joiner, but later that week when I read that a group called the “Chile Emergency Committee” had been formed, I joined immediately.
Now, fast-forward 50 years (and it does seem like just the blink of an eye), I’m seeing a whole new progressive movement still struggling to get a grip just as Popular Unity tried to do five decades ago. Here we are in North America looking South to the Chileans again with many of the same hopes and aspirations that were embodied in the Popular Unity government of Salvador Allende. Once again, so many of us are rooting for the Chileans to find a better way.
I read that Gabriel Boric, at 37, is the youngest president ever elected in Chile and he is the third youngest head of state in the world. I read also that he is the first president ever to have visible tattoos, one of which is apparently a lighthouse. A lighthouse! What a powerful metaphor as once again Chile tries to light the way—and all the while not wanting to forget its past.
As many Chileans today still proudly proclaim: “Salvador Allende presente!”
This article was written with research assistance from Patricio Mason in Santiago.
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