Reply #11: US cookie cutter destabilization efforts are the same in any decade [View All]

[Say_What]

and any country. Take a look at what they did to Chilean President Allende in 1973.

<clips>

...Recall that arch reactionaries like the Dominican Republic's Leonidas Trujillo, moderate reformers like Brazil's Joao Goulart and of course radicals ranging from Chile's Salvador Allende to the Nicaraguan Sandinistas all fell victim to the CIA's punishing department. The covert tactics have included assassinations, coups, economic destabilization and psychological warfare; well, let's just call it state terrorism. In the case of Manuel Noriega. CIA and DEA agent who turned disobedient, President Bush I ordered the most expensive arresting force in the world. Naturally, the patterns of CIA efforts to overthrow popular governments also included attempts to influence the mass media. In 1970, while making a film in Chile, I witnessed parts of the "destabilization" operation that began even before Salvador Allende won his plurality in September of that year. After the election, as the CIA hatched plots to prevent Allende's inauguration, I occasionally dropped into Santiago's Hotel Carrera bar. Invariably, well-dressed Chileans would whisper that Allende had advanced syphilis. Another would confide that he was a homosexual, a sex tool of Castro, a love slave of Brezhnev, intent on turning over control of Chile to Moscow.

I almost gagged at the grossness of the anti-Allende cartoons in the right wing press (they controlled the majority of the Chilean media). I observed a campaign of planned violence, beginning with the October 1970 murder of Army Chief General Rene Schneider, by Patria y Libertad, a gang of fascists hired by the CIA. The "destabilization" continued through Allende's three years, by paying some labor leaders to call strikes in strategic sectors and by imposing economic hardships on Chile. Above all came the constant, daily flood of lies and distortion about the nature of the Allende government and its agenda, which was to better the lot of the poor working people urban and rural through legislation enacted under the existing Constitution.

When the various and combined tactics failed, the Chilean military aided by Washington resorted to a bloody coup. The US Navy played a crucial role, monitoring the traffic emanating from military bases so as to ensure that the coup makers could quickly dispatch any Allende loyalists.

September 11, 1973 stands for many Chileans as a day comparable to 9/11/01 for Americans. Chilean air force jets fired rockets into the president's office building and tanks blasted away at the revered structure as troops surrounded the symbol of democratic government and then proceeded with a campaign of terror: assassination, kidnapping, torture and exile for their political opponents backed by Washington. After seventeen years of Pinochet-led fascism, more than 3000 Chileans died at the hands of the terrorists that Washington had helped into the seat of government.

http://www.counterpunch.org/landau01112003.html