SUBSCRIBE TO OUR FREE NEWSLETTER
Daily news & progressive opinion—funded by the people, not the corporations—delivered straight to your inbox.
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
5
#000000
#FFFFFF
salvador allende
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!”
Keep ReadingShow Less
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.
Keep ReadingShow Less
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.
Keep ReadingShow Less
200 Years of the Monroe Doctrine Is 200 Too Many
If the United States is serious about liberty and justice for all, respect for international law, and a rules based order that treats everyone fairly and even-handedly, it’s time to ditch the doctrine and its corollaries.
Nov 26, 2023
When those of us of a certain age were in school, we learned that the Monroe Doctrine committed the United States to protect the independence of Latin American nations, which had just freed themselves from Spanish and Portuguese rule. While it granted European nations the right to keep whatever colonies they still had in the Western Hemisphere, it declared that any attempt on Europe’s part to expand those colonies would be considered an unfriendly act against the United States. It looked like a brave and noble act, and a step forward for the U.S. on the world stage.
As the doctrine approaches its 200th anniversary December 2, we know it ain’t necessarily so.
At first, the U.S. couldn’t enforce it because its navy was too small to keep European powers out. However, the British navy was quite willing to do the job now that Latin markets were open to British trade. In that vein, British Foreign Secretary Lord George Canning suggested the U.S. and Britain issue a joint statement in defense of Latin independence. Secretary of State John Quincy Adams rejected the idea, arguing that it would make the U.S. “a cock-boat in the wake of the British man-of-war.”
Marine General Smedley Butler, who took part in several such actions, confessed that he had become a bag man for U.S. corporations, and concluded that “war is a racket.”
Instead, Adams drafted his own statement, which became the Monroe Doctrine, since president James Monroe approved the draft and could take credit for it. And so, the U.S. got the glory while the British did the work, which they were content to do for the sake of their own economic advantage.
There was more tricky business involved. The U.S. wouldn’t recognize Haitian independence from France until 1862, since Haiti rose from a brutal slave revolt. Nor did it have any quarrel with France’s demand that Haiti repay it for the loss of its slaves, an insistence which plunged Haiti deeply into debt and made it what it still is—the poorest, least stable nation in the Western Hemisphere. It was a nasty thing to do, since the Haitian revolution made the Louisiana Purchase possible.
Ever since then, there has been more and more tricky business. When Texas detached itself from Mexico in 1836, the U.S. immediately recognized it, along with its territorial claims out to the Rio Grande, which then included parts of New Mexico and Colorado. Mexico disputed those claims. Matters got worse when Texas became a U.S. state in 1845, the evident objective all along, and there was still the question of disputed territory. When President James K. Polk sent troops to Corpus Christi, which was just inside the disputed area, the Mexicans saw it as an invasion. War with Mexico followed, and in 1848, Mexico surrendered half its territory in return for a $15,000,000 payment.
During the mid-1850s, a Tennessee soldier of fortune named William Walker set off a series of coups in Central America, whereby he attempted to unite it into one slaveholding country and offer it to the U.S., either for annexation or as a client state. In 1853 and 1854, he had already tried to do something similar in northwestern Mexico. Though President Franklin Pierce recognized his short-lived regime in Nicaragua, the United States had too many problems at home to follow through with the idea. By 1860, both the offer and the daring Mr. Walker’s own life were finished.
Nonetheless, the U.S. did covet Cuba, and considered buying the island from Spain in the 1850s and 1870s. Spain wasn’t interested, but by the 1890s, the Cuban revolution was well enough along for the United States to see an opportunity and take it. When the battleship Maine blew up in Havana harbor, the U.S. blamed Spain and the Spanish-American War followed. And so we helped Cuba oust Spain, but with a catch. In 1902, the U.S. insisted on fastening the Platt Amendment to the Cuban constitution, which gave the U.S. the right to supervise Cuban foreign policy. In effect, the island was a U.S. protectorate until Fidel Castro took over in 1959.
Now let’s backtrack a bit. In 1895, there was a border dispute between Venezuela and British Guyana. By that point, U.S. Secretary of State Richard Olney felt confident enough to issue a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine, which declared that the U.S. had the right to mediate all such disputes, which the U.S. did in this instance, without objection from either side.
In 1901, Britain and America reached a further understanding in the Hay-Pauncefote Treaty. Britain recognized America’s predominance in the Western Hemisphere, while America did the same for Britain in the East. And so the English-speaking nations went halfsies on the entire planet.
By the early 1900s, the United States was getting used to rearranging Latin America to its liking. When Colombia insisted on more money from the United States than the U.S. was willing to pay to dig the Panama Canal, President Theodore Roosevelt purchased a Panamanian revolt which let him have his way. He openly boasted, “I took Panama!” He was right, since he created the country. In 1989, when Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega became inconvenient to U.S. interests there, the U.S. removed him. The operation featured the bombardment of Panama City.
In 1905, Roosevelt added a corollary of his own to the Monroe Doctrine, announcing that whenever the United States thought a Latin American nation was unable to protect foreign lives or property, or pay debts to foreign lenders, the U.S. had the right to intervene and put its affairs in order. During the first half of the 1900s, military interventions and occupations followed in Haiti, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and Mexico. Marine General Smedley Butler, who took part in several such actions, confessed that he had become a bag man for U.S. corporations, and concluded that “war is a racket.”
The interventions continued during the Cold War. In 1954, after Guatemala’s democratically elected government nationalized United Fruit Company’s idle holdings there, intending to turn them over to small farmers, the CIA moved in and installed a dictatorship, in part because Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and CIA boss Allen Dulles were major stockholders in United Fruit and were annoyed. Then there was the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba in 1961, followed by economic sanctions which continue to this day. In 1964, when the Dominican Republic’s democratically elected government decided to pursue a friendlier policy toward Cuba than the Johnson administration liked, the Marines moved in and set up a dictatorship there. The next year, the U.S. backed a military coup in Brazil.
The 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s saw no essential change, with ethnic massacres, interventions, overthrows, and assassinations in Guatemala, Grenada, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Colombia, and the previously mentioned one in Panama. Quite often, Latin troops and officers trained in the U.S. took part. Nor did our government bat an eye when a Salvadoran death squad murdered archbishop Oscar Romero, who had protested against what the death squads were doing across that suffering country. In 1999, as part of the U.S. drug war, President Bill Clinton initiated Plan Colombia, which included aerial bombardment in that country.
The most glaring example was against Chile’s democratically elected president, Salvador Allende. By 1973, Allende had nationalized International Telephone and Telegraph’s holdings in Chile. ITT head Harold Geneen was furious about what he thought was inadequate compensation. He complained to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, who had been working to destabilize the Allende government, and who were ready to arrange Allende’s overthrow and murder. A 17-year dictatorship under the more agreeable Augusto Pinochet followed, and Geneen cleaned up when he got back his business in Chile.
Economic sanctions against Cuba and Venezuela have continued in this century. And in 2009, the U.S. shrugged its shoulders when a military coup overthrew the democratically elected Zelaya government in Honduras. The unlucky President Manuel Zelaya had supported Indigenous objections to U.S. investments there that were doing environmental damage. In that same country, the fate of Berta Cáceres was worse. She had successfully blocked the building of a dam that would have flooded her Indigenous homeland and fouled its waters. Her murder in 2011 was the price she paid for that success. No condolences or protests came from our government.
Readers of this column quite likely know about all these things and more. After all, there is extensive literature and broadcast reporting on the subject. The essential point of this modest offering is a simple one. If the United States is serious about liberty and justice for all, respect for international law, and a rules based order that treats everyone fairly and even-handedly, it’s time to ditch the Monroe Doctrine and its corollaries. Adios, Olney. Adios, Roosevelt. Adios, Adams. Adios, Monroe.
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.
Keep ReadingShow Less
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.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Under Pressure From Progressives, US Declassifies Documents Related to Chile Coup
"Huge congratulations to the U.S. members who made this call from the delegation, and to all those who have fought like hell to declassify these files and bring justice for the bloody crimes of September 1973."
Aug 28, 2023
The U.S. State Department has declassified a pair of documents related to events leading up to the 1973 coup in Chile, a violent assault on democracycovertly backed by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The two documents were made public late last week following renewed calls for transparency by U.S. Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), Greg Casar (D-Texas), and other progressive lawmakers who visited Chile earlier this month as part of a broader Latin America trip. The Chilean government and international human rights groups have also been calling for the declassification of documents containing details about the U.S.-backed coup for years.
The newly declassified files are daily briefs President Richard Nixon received on September 11, 1973—the day of the overthrow of Salvador Allende—and three days prior to the coup.
"A number of reports have been received... indicating the possibility of an early military coup," reads Nixon's daily brief for September 8, 1973. "Navy men plotting to overthrow the government now claim army and air force support."
The brief notes that Fatherland and Freedom, a fascist paramilitary group, "has been blocking roads and provoking clashes with the national police, adding to the tension caused by continuing strikes and opposition political moves. President Allende earlier this week said he believed the armed forces will ask for his resignation if he does not change his economic and political policies."
Nixon—who was closely involved in efforts to block Allende from assuming office and once ordered the CIA to "make the [Chilean] economy scream"—also received a daily brief on the day of the coup, just before Allende's ouster. The democratically elected left-wing president took his own life during the coup after refusing to step down.
"Plans by navy officers to trigger military action against the Allende government are supported by some key army units," the September 11 brief reads. "The navy is also counting on help from the air force and national police."
"Socialists, leftists, extremists, and Communists are equally determined not to compromise," the brief adds. "They are gambling that the military and political opposition cannot carry out moves to oust the government or even to impose restraints on it. President Allende, for his part, still hopes that temporizing will fend off a showdown."
Led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, the Chilean military seized control of the government on September 11. What followed was a vicious, decades-long reign of terror and repression during which tens of thousands of Chileans were killed, tortured, or disappeared by the Pinochet regime, which continued to receive support from the CIA.
As the CIA admitted in a 2000 report, "Many of Pinochet's officers were involved in systematic and widespread human rights abuses... Some of these were contacts or agents of the CIA or U.S. military."
Pinochet was arrested in 1998 and later indicted for a range of human rights violations. The dictator died before facing trial.
Peter Kornbluh of the nonprofit National Security Archive welcomed the declassification of the two presidential briefs but questioned why they had been kept under such tight secrecy for decades, given that they don't "contain not a single sentence that could compromise U.S. national security."
"I'm happy that the Freedom of Information Act, together with some positive diplomacy by the Chilean government, broke a secrecy barrier that has kept us from knowing this history for 50 years," said Kornbluh, National Security Archive's Chile specialist. "I hope the [Biden] administration will reinforce its commitment to transparency by releasing all the documents that, inexplicably, remain secret after all this time."
The Chilean government, currently led by progressive President Gabriel Boric, also hailed the release of the documents.
Gloria de la Fuente, Chile's undersecretary of foreign affairs, thanked the Biden administration for "its willingness to accept the request to declassify files related to our country."
"Fifty years after the coup d'état," the diplomat said, "the declassification of archives of this documentation promotes the search for truth and reinforces the commitment of our countries to our democratic values."
Keep ReadingShow Less
What Should We Give Henry Kissinger for His 100th Birthday?
How about a summons to appear at the International Criminal Court to answer for the blood of millions staining his hands?
Aug 24, 2023
Henry Alfred Kissinger turned 100 on May 27 of this year. Once a teenage refugee from Nazi Germany, for many decades an adviser to presidents, and an avatar of American realpolitik, he’s managed to reach the century mark while still evidently retaining all his marbles. That those marbles remain hard and cold is no surprise.
A couple of months after that 100th birthday, he traveled to China, as he had first done secretly in 1971 when he was still President Richard Nixon’s national security adviser. There—in contrast to the tepid reception recently given to U.S. officials like Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry—Kissinger was welcomed with full honors by Chinese President Xi Jinping and other dignitaries.
“That ‘lovefest,’” as Daniel Drezner of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy wrote at Politico, “served the interests of both parties.” For China, it was a signal that the United States would be better off pursuing the warm-embrace policy initiated so long ago by Nixon at Kissinger’s behest, rather than the cold shoulder more recent administrations have offered. For Kissinger, as Drezner put it, “the visit represents an opportunity to do what he has been trying to do ever since he left public office: maintain his relevancy and influence.”
It’s fair to say that Kissinger either initiated or at least supported just about every one of the ugly tactics the U.S. military used in its ultimately losing war in Vietnam.
Even as a centenarian, his “relevancy” remains intact, and his influence, I’d argue, as malevolent as ever.
Rehab for Politicians
It’s hard for powerful political actors to give up the stage once their performances are over. Many crave an encore even as their audience begins to gaze at newer stars. Sometimes regaining relevance and influence is only possible after a political memory wipe, in which echoes of their terrible actions and even crimes, domestic or international, fade into silence.
This was certainly the case for Richard Nixon who, after resigning in disgrace to avoid impeachment in 1974, worked hard for decades to once again be seen as a wise man of international relations. He published his memoirs (for a cool $2 million), while raking in another $600,000 for interviews with David Frost (during which he infamously said that “when the president does it, that means it is not illegal”). His diligence was rewarded in 1986 with a Newsweek cover story headlined, “He’s Back: The Rehabilitation of Richard Nixon.”
Of course, for the mainstream media (and the House of Representatives debating his possible impeachment in 1974), Nixon’s high crimes and misdemeanors involved just the infamous Watergate break-in at Democratic National Committee headquarters and his subsequent attempts to cover it up. Among members of the House, only 12, led by the Jesuit priest Robert Drinan, had the courage to suggest that Nixon be charged with the crime that led directly to the death of an estimated 150,000 civilians: the secret and illegal bombing of Cambodia during the Vietnam war.
Unlike the president he served as national security adviser and secretary of state, and some of those for whom he acted as an informal counselor (Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush), Kissinger’s reputation as a brilliant statesman never required rehabilitation.
More recently, we’ve seen the rehabilitation of George W. Bush, under whose administration the United States committed repeated war crimes. Those included the launching of an illegal war against Iraq under the pretext of eliminating that country’s non-existent weapons of mass destruction, attempting to legalize torture and unlawful detentions, and causing the death of almost half a million civilians. No matter. All it took for the mainstream media to welcome him back into the fold of “responsible” Republicans was to spend some years painting portraits of American military veterans and taking an oblique swipe or two at then-President Donald Trump.
A “Statesman” Needs No Rehabilitation
Unlike the president he served as national security adviser and secretary of state, and some of those for whom he acted as an informal counselor (Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush), Kissinger’s reputation as a brilliant statesman never required rehabilitation. Having provided advice—formal or otherwise—to every president from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Donald Trump (though not, apparently, Joe Biden), he put his imprint on the foreign policies of both major parties. And in all those years, no “serious” American news outfit ever saw fit to remind the world of his long history of bloody crimes. Indeed, as his 100th birthday approached, he was greeted with fawning interviews by, for example, PBS NewsHour anchor Judy Woodruff.
His crimes did come up in the mainstream, only to be dismissed as evidence of his career’s “broad scope.” CNN ran a piece by David Andelman, a former New York Times foreign correspondent and one-time student of Kissinger’s at Harvard. He described watching “in wonder” as demonstrators gathered outside New York City’s 92nd Street YMCA to protest a 2011 talk by the great man himself. How, he asked himself, could they refer to Kissinger as a “renowned war criminal”? A few years later, Andelman added, he found himself wondering again, as a similar set of protesters at the same venue decried Kissinger’s “history concerning Timor-Leste (East Timor), West Papua, Vietnam, Cambodia, Chile, Cyprus, Bangladesh, Angola, and elsewhere.”
The “events they were protesting were decades in the past,” he observed, having happened at a time when most of the protestors “were only barely alive.” In effect, like so many others who seek to exonerate old war criminals, Andelman was implying that the crimes of the past hold no meaning, except perhaps in testifying “to the broad scope of people, places, and events that [Kissinger] has influenced in the course of a remarkable career.” (“Influenced” serves here as a remarkable euphemism for “devastated” or simply “killed.”)
The Vietnam War might well have ended in 1968, rather than dragging on until 1975, had it not been for Henry Kissinger.
Fortunately, other institutions have not been so deferential. In preparation for Kissinger’s 100th, the National Security Archive, a center of investigative journalism, assembled a dossier of some of its most important holdings on his legacy. They provide some insight into the places named by those protestors.
A Dispassionate Cold Warrior
If nothing else, Kissinger’s approach to international politics has been consistent for more than half a century. Only actions advancing the military and imperial might of the United States were to be pursued. To be avoided were those actions that might diminish its power in any way or—in the Cold War era—enhance the power of its great adversary, the Soviet Union. Under such a rubric, any indigenous current favoring independence—whether political or economic—or seeking more democratic governance elsewhere on Earth came to represent a threat to this country. Such movements and their adherents were to be eradicated—covertly, if possible; overtly, if necessary.
Richard Nixon’s presidency was, of course, the period of Kissinger’s greatest influence. Between 1969 and 1974, Kissinger served as the architect of U.S. actions in key locales globally. Here are just a few of them:
Papua, East Timor, and Indonesia: In 1969, in an effort to keep Indonesia fully in the American Cold War camp, Kissinger put his imprimatur on a fake plebiscite in Papua, which had been seeking independence from Indonesia. He chose to be there in person during an “election” in which Indonesia counted only the ballots of 1,100 hand-picked “representatives” of the Papuan population. Unsurprisingly, they voted unanimously to remain part of Indonesia.
Why did the United States care about the fate of half of a then strategically unimportant island in the South China Sea? Because holding onto the loyalty of Indonesia’s autocratic anticommunist ruler Suharto was considered crucial to Washington’s Cold War foreign policy in Asia. Suharto himself had come to power on a wave of mass extermination, during which between 500,000 and 1.2 million supposed communists and their “sympathizers” were slaughtered.
In 1975, Kissinger also greenlighted Indonesia’s invasion of East Timor, during which hundreds of thousands died. In contravention of U.S. law, President Gerald Ford’s administration (in which Kissinger continued to serve as national security adviser and secretary of state after Nixon’s resignation) provided the Indonesian military with weapons and training. Kissinger waved off any legal concerns with a favorite aphorism: “The illegal we do immediately; the unconstitutional takes a little longer.”
For all his supposedly “brilliant statesmanship,” Kissinger proved incapable of imagining any event as having a significant local or regional meaning.
Southeast Asia: Beginning in 1969, Kissinger was also the architect of Richard Nixon’s secret bombing campaign in Cambodia, an attempt to interdict the flow of supplies from North Vietnam to the revolutionary Viet Cong in South Vietnam. He believed it would force the North Vietnamese to the bargaining table. In this, the great statesman was sadly mistaken. It’s fair to say, in fact, that Kissinger either initiated or at least supported just about every one of the ugly tactics the U.S. military used in its ultimately losing war in Vietnam, from the carpet bombing of North Vietnam to the widespread use of napalm and the carcinogenic herbicide Agent Orange to the CIA’s Phoenix Program, which led to the torturing or killing of more than 20,000 people.
The Vietnam War might well have ended in 1968, rather than dragging on until 1975, had it not been for Henry Kissinger. He was acting as a conduit to North Vietnam for the administration of President Lyndon Johnson, which was working on a peace deal it hoped to announce before the 1968 presidential election. Believing Republican candidate Richard Nixon would be more likely to advance his version of U.S. strategic interests in Vietnam than Democratic candidate and Vice President Hubert Humphrey, Kissinger passed information about those negotiations with the North Vietnamese on to the Nixon campaign. Although Nixon had no clout in Hanoi, he had a channel to U.S. ally and South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu and convinced him to pull out of the peace talks shortly before the election. Thanks to Kissinger, the war would follow its cruel course for another seven years of death and destruction.
Pakistan and Bangladesh: In 1971, in a famous “tilt” towards Pakistan, Kissinger gave tacit support to that country’s military dictator General Agha Muhammad Yahya Khan. In response to a surprise victory by an opposition party in Pakistan’s first democratic election, Yahya then loosed his military on the people of East Pakistan, that party’s geographical base. Three million people died in the ensuing genocidal conflict that eventually led to the creation of the state of Bangladesh. In addition, as many as 10 million members of Bengali ethnic groups fled to India, inflaming tensions between Pakistan and India, which eventually erupted in war. Although the U.S. Congress had forbidden military support for either nation, Kissinger arranged for an American nuclear-powered aircraft carrier to travel to the Bay of Bengal and provide war materiel to Pakistan. (By then, contempt for congressional restrictions had become a habit for him.)
But why the tilt toward Pakistan? Because that country was helping Kissinger create his all-important opening to China and because he also viewed India as a “Soviet stooge.”
For all his supposedly “brilliant statesmanship,” Kissinger proved incapable of imagining any event as having a significant local or regional meaning. Only the actions or interests of the great powers could adequately explain events anywhere in the world.
Latin America: There was a time when September 11 called to mind not the terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon but the violent 1973 overthrow of Salvador Allende, Chile’s elected socialist president. That coup, which made General Augusto Pinochet the country’s dictator, was the culmination of a multi-year U.S. campaign of economic and political sabotage, orchestrated by Henry Kissinger.
Once again, a genuinely indigenous economic reform movement was (mis)interpreted as evidence of growing Soviet strength in South America. Within the first few days of the coup, 40,000 people would be imprisoned at the National Stadium in the capital, Santiago. Many of them would be tortured and murdered in the first stages of what became a regime characterized for decades by institutionalized torture.
Similarly, Kissinger and the presidents he advised supported Argentina’s “Dirty War” against dissidents and the larger Operation Condor, in which the CIA coordinated coups d’état, repression, torture, and the deaths of tens of thousands of socialists, students, and other activists across Latin America.
So, what should we give a 100-year-old presidential adviser for his birthday? How about a summons to appear at the International Criminal Court to answer for the blood of millions staining his hands?
What’s Real about Realpolitik?
If you google images for “realpolitik,” the first thing you’ll see is a drawing of Henry Kissinger holding forth to a rapt Richard Nixon. As a political thinker who prides himself on never having been swayed by passion, Kissinger would seem the perfect exemplar of a realpolitik worldview.
He eschews the term, however, probably because, given his background, he recognizes its roots in the19th century German liberal tradition, where it served as a reminder not to be blinded by ideology or aspirational belief when taking in a political situation. Philosophically, realpolitik was a belief that a dispassionate examination of any situation, uninflected by ideology, was the most effective way to grasp the array of forces present in a particular historical moment.
Realpolitik has, however, come to mean something quite different in the United States, being associated not with “what is” (an epistemological stance) but with “what ought to be”—an ethical stance, one that privileges only this country’s imperial advantage. In the realpolitik world of Henry Kissinger, actions are good only when they sustain and advance American strategic power globally. Any concern for the well-being of human beings, or for the law and the Constitution, not to mention democratic values globally, is, by definition, illegitimate if not, in fact, a moral failing.
The idea that the only “realistic” choices for Washington’s leaders require privileging American global power over every other consideration has led this country to its current desperate state.
That is the realpolitik of Henry Alfred Kissinger, an ethical system that rejects ethics as unreal. It should not surprise anyone that such a worldview would engender in a man with his level of influence a history of crimes against law and humanity.
In fact, however, Kissinger’s brand of realpolitik is itself delusional. The idea that the only “realistic” choices for Washington’s leaders require privileging American global power over every other consideration has led this country to its current desperate state—a dying empire whose citizens live in ever-increasing insecurity. In fact, choosing America first (as Donald Trump would put it) is not the only choice, but one delusional option among many. Perhaps there is still time, before the planet burns us all to death, to make other, more realistic choices.
Keep ReadingShow Less
Ocasio-Cortez Calls for Declassification of Documents on US-Backed Chile Coup
"It's very important to frame the history of what happened here in Chile with Pinochet's dictatorship. And also to acknowledge and reflect on the role of the United States in those events."
Aug 18, 2023
U.S. Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez on Thursday said her country's government should declassify documents related to its role in the violent 1973 overthrow of Chile's democratically elected president, Salvador Allende, nearly five decades ago.
"It's very important to frame the history of what happened here in Chile with Pinochet's dictatorship. And also to acknowledge and reflect on the role of the United States in those events," Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) said in a video conversation with Camila Vallejo, a spokesperson for the Chilean government.
"The transparency of the United States could present an opportunity for a new phase in our relationship between the United States and Chile," said Ocasio-Cortez, who led a congressional delegation to Chile and other Latin American nations—an effort sponsored by the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
The Nixon administration was closely involved in efforts to prevent Allende, a democratic socialist, from assuming power in 1970 and in the subsequent overthrow of the Chilean government on September 11, 1973. The CIA has acknowledged that it "actively supported" the viciously repressive military junta led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who was later arrested and indicted for human rights violations.
While some U.S. documents related to the Chile coup have been declassified, Ocasio-Cortez has called for the declassification of "all information" at the State Department, the CIA, and the Pentagon detailing U.S. involvement in the coup.
In July, Ocasio-Cortez introduced an amendment to the annual U.S. military policy bill that would have aimed to declassify the documents, but the Republican-controlled House Rules Committee blocked the amendment from receiving a vote.
"It's time for the U.S. to acknowledge its history of contributing to regime change and destabilization in Latin America,” the New York Democrat said at the time. "To reset this relationship, we must take full, public responsibility for our historical role—and demonstrate with our present actions that we will not support human rights abuses."
Ocasio-Cortez and fellow lawmakers, including U.S. Rep. Greg Casar (D-Texas), are now set to travel to Colombia.
In a statement earlier this week, Casar noted that "U.S. foreign policy has too often contributed to instability in Latin America: we should be protecting democracy rather than supporting coups, and we should be creating peace and prosperity across the Western Hemisphere rather than replaying the Cold War."
"Now is the time to talk about our history, jointly fight the climate crisis, and invest in lasting peace," said Casar.
Keep ReadingShow Less
To Prevent Coups Like Niger's, Ban the Recognition of Military Regimes
The institutionalization of such principles under international law would foster democracy and better governance throughout the world.
Aug 04, 2023
The recent military coup in Niger highlights a major weakness in worldwide efforts to promote democracy. It also underscores the need to establish a binding international precedent to ban the recognition of military regimes, particularly those that result from military coups. The institutionalization of such principles would foster democracy and better governance throughout the world.
In international law, the issue of recognition of illegitimate governments has ancient roots. The Tobar Doctrine, proposed in 1907 by the then Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ecuador Carlos Tobar, calls for denying recognition of de facto governments emerging from revolutions against the constitutional order. However, this doctrine never gained widespread acceptance.
The Estrada Doctrine, formulated in 1930 by the Minister of Foreign Affairs of Mexico, Genaro Estrada, landed a similar fate. This doctrine also denies recognition to the government that has assumed power by extra-constitutional means. Although both doctrines are known in international law, they did not get the wide recognition they deserved.
It can be argued that non-recognition of de facto regimes will not by itself restore democracy. However, it is, a significant initial step that could be followed by stronger collective measures.
Politics is the driver behind the recognition of illegitimate governments; world powers have often encouraged overturning a constitutional government, as happened in 1973 when the U.S. supported Augusto Pinochet's takeover of the legitimate Allende government in Chile. Overt or implied recognition by Western democracies through ambivalent signs of disapproval have also encouraged military officers to overthrow constitutional governments.
Anthony W. Pereira, Director of the King's Brazil Institute at King's College in London, observed that since the end of World War II, military rule has occurred almost exclusively in developing countries. Military coups d'état reached their height in the 1960s and 1970s.
The playbook in these cases is similar. Although the military often promises a quick return to civilian rule, this almost never happens, and the military remains in power for long periods of time, often through a puppet regime. The military relinquishes power either when forced by popular will, or when its own incapacity to govern makes its position untenable. This happened to the Greek military junta in 1974 after its debacle in Cyprus, to the Chilean regime under Pinochet in 1990, and to the Argentine military after the Malvinas-Falklands conflict of 1982.
The United Nations General Assembly and its International Law Commission could be called upon to draw up appropriate legislation to declare the illegality of all military regimes. As the late U.N. Secretary-General Dag Hammarskjold observed, the United Nations is "the most appropriate place for development and change of international law on behalf of the whole society of states."
The non-recognition of military regimes as a universal principle raises some practical questions. First, is it possible to apply the precedent retroactively, when military regimes have already been recognized and established? This issue was relevant in the 1923 Tinoco case.
Federico Tinoco Granados was a Costan Rican general who overthrew the constitutional government of Costa Rica in 1917. Two years later Tinoco Granados left the country, after multiple accusations of corruption. The new government in Costa Rica nullified all agreements signed by Tinoco, among them a concession to a British oil company. The matter was submitted to the arbitration of U.S. President William Howard Taft.
The Costa Rican government argued that Great Britain could not enforce the contract because both Costa Rica and the U.S. had not recognized the Tinoco regime. According to Taft, however, Tinoco, who exercised de facto control of the state, even if he had not respected the constitution, had the right to incur debts on behalf of the State. Taft's decision created a debatable precedent whose consequences are felt even today.
Second, what if military forces stage a coup against an oppressive or corrupt civilian regime? An ousted civilian government that has been freely elected by the people should not be denied recognition in favor of a post-coup military regime unless the overthrown government was responsible for gross human rights violations. Further, after a coup, recognition should be withheld until another civilian government is chosen in free and democratic elections.
It can be argued that non-recognition of de facto regimes will not by itself restore democracy. However, it is a significant initial step that could be followed by stronger collective measures. To the contention that non-recognition implies undue interference in a state's internal affairs, this objection loses validity if non-recognition is a consistent precedent of international law as established by the United Nations.
Consistent with this approach, both the African Union and the Economic Community of West African States have condemned the coup in Niger.
Non-recognition of military regimes is a response to increasing worldwide demands to eliminate the plague of military coups d'état. Once established as a legal precedent, it could become a significant step toward world peace, justice, and democracy.
Keep ReadingShow Less
See More
Most Popular
To inform. To inspire. To ignite change for the common good.
News & Opinion
Trending
Common Dreams, Inc. Founded 1997. Registered 501(c3) Non-Profit
Privacy Policy