Ex-Chilean leader 'was murdered' (mustard gas)

[IndianaGreen]

Ex-Chilean leader 'was murdered'

The family of former Chilean President Eduardo Frei Montalva says new evidence shows that he was murdered under General Augusto Pinochet's regime.

During commemorations marking 25 years since Mr Frei Montalva's death, his son, Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, said the family would file a lawsuit soon.

Their actions come after Belgian researchers said they had found mustard gas in the former president's body.

Mr Frei Montalva was president from 1964 to 1970, and died in 1982.

His death in hospital was officially blamed on septicaemia following a stomach illness, but his family say they always suspected he was murdered.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6289209.stm

[1932]

1. If I remember correctly, Frei refused to participate in US efforts to undermine Allende

He was a strong believer in the constitution and felt that Allende won fairly and that he was also what Chile needed at the time.

Frei also won because of JFK's policy of not supporting RWs in Latin America, which was a huge shift from the Dulles years. JFK believed that it was in the US's interest NOT to have extreme right wingers in power. He thought that they were destabilizing since they inevitably supported policies that hurt the vast majority of their citizens. JFK believed that building strong middle classes through the election of liberal leaders would create economic stability and economic growth that would ultimately benefit the American middle class.

A good book on US foreign policy that everyone should read is The Pinochet File. It explains all this.

[tom_paine]

2. Now that the USA is under "Bush Foreign Country Rule", I wonder how many have met a similar

fate as this gentleman.

People say it's :tinfoilhat: to be thinking of Bush conspiracies in the matter of the half dozen or more second-tier Democratic leaders and mid-level State Department staffers who either mytiously jumped from tall buildings on a hard surface (as the CIA declassified assassination manual suggests as the best way to kill) or were killed by robbers who took no money, etc.?

people say it's :tinfoilhat: and of course, it might be just that...wild speculation.

Consider this: If you wanted to start Right-Wing Death Squads as the Bushveiks did in El Salvador, Iraq, and elsewhere, but do it HERE, how would you start?

Would you start by whacking the top tier of leaders? No, that's too visible and too soon. You would want to "test" how well you could get away with it, and who, if any, of the herd raised their noses at the killings, to assess as how best to proceed and escalate over the years.

Yes, I confess this is speculation and perhaps :tinfoilhat:tery, but time and again we have seen how the Bush Family and it's allies treat FOREIGNERS over the past decades.

Well, if anyone hasn't noticed, the Bush Family has apparently decided that the American People are so degenerate, stupid, lazy, and inferior to them, that we warrant no better than "foreigner rules", such as laughably stolen elections, openly stealing from the Public Treasury, and lying us into an ivasion that has crippled or kiled 50,000 of us and a million Iraqis.

As always, I hope I am wrong. But here is yet another piece of circumstantial evidence and was undoubtedly approved by the Busheviks, who worked closely with their friend Pinochet.

[w4rma]

3. I agree. (nt)

[Judi Lynn]

4. Information from last year, when his family was trying to get help on this murder:

Pinochet accused over murder of ex-president
Jonathan Franklin in Santiago
Thursday May 18, 2006
The Guardian

Army generals and aides in Chile have accused General Augusto Pinochet of involvement in the murder of the former president Eduardo Frei Montalva, who died mysteriously in January 1982.
Judge Alejandro Madrid has received evidence that the infection that killed Frei at a hospital in Santiago was the result of a secret biological weapons programme run by Gen Pinochet's secret police.

"At first they did not believe us," said Senator Eduardo Frei, son of the former president. "We have been convinced that there was intervention by a third party in the death of President Frei."

Retired army generals asked Judge Madrid for permission to present evidence that Gen Pinochet had ordered the "disappearance" of Eugenio Berrios, a secret operative who designed his biochemical warfare programme, including production of anthrax, botulism and the nerve gas sarin. Berrios is suspected of designing the bacterial agent that struck down Frei while he was in a hospital recovering from a hernia operation. Alvaro Varela, the Frei family lawyer, called the new evidence "precise, clear and concrete" in proving that Gen Pinochet announced the order to have Barrios kidnapped and killed. According to leaked testimony, the dictator was worried that Berrios would reveal he had personally ordered the murder of senior opposition figures including Frei and Orlando Letelier, a former chancellor.
Berrios's body was found with two bullets in his head on a beach near Montevideo, Uruguay, in 1995. The subsequent investigation by Jorge Molina, a Chilean journalist, proved that Berrios had been smuggled halfway across South America, then murdered with the complicity of Chilean and Uruguayan intelligence agencies.
(snip/...)

http://www.guardian.co.uk/chile/story/0,,1777125,00.html



Eugenio Berrios

Pinochet's Mad Scientist

By Samuel Blixen

On Nov. 15, 1992, a terrified scientist broke a window of a white bungalow in the Uruguayan beach town of Parque del Plata.

Chubby, in his mid-40s, the man struggled through the opening. Once outside, furtively and slowly, he picked his way to the local police station.

"I am a Chilean citizen," the scientist told the police when he finally reached the station. He pulled a folded photostatic copy of his identification papers concealed in his right shoe. "I have been abducted by the armies of Uruguay and my country," he claimed.

The scientist, rumpled with a graying beard, said he feared for his life. He insisted that his murder had been ordered by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, then the chief of Chile's army who had ruled as a dictator from 1973 to 1990.

The motive for the execution was the man's anticipated testimony at a politically sensitive trial in Chile, a case that could send reverberations all the way to Washington, D.C.

The scientist had worked as an accomplice in a terror campaign that included the bombing deaths of Chilean dissident Orlando Letelier and an American co-worker Ronni Moffitt as they drove to work in Washington in 1976.
(snip/...)

http://www.consortiumnews.com/1999/c011399a.html

[gratuitous]

5. Golly, Pinochet gassing his own people

I remember that used to be a casus belli for the Bush administration. I wonder why we didn't help the long arm of international criminal law reach out and apprehend such a monster?

Oh yeah, he was still our monster. Besides, it could besmirch the sterling reputation of one of our Nobel laureates.

[rman]

6. bookmarked and recommended

[tom_paine]

7. A kick for a story that NEEDS to be read

So we KNOW what is coming for us.

As I said above, how the Busheviks have treated foreigners in the past is how they are near to treating us now and almost certainly will in the future.

[Judi Lynn]

8. Absolutely. When they had dictators like Pinochet in their pockets,

and Hugo Banzer in Bolivia, and Stroessner in Paraguay, the Argentian military junta, whatever it was in Brazil, etc., etc. to cooperate in Operation Condor, murders could be pursued across international borders all over South America with complete impunity, going all the way to the streets of Washington, D.C., to bomb one of the men they despised who didn't please these right-wing idiots.

As they power has grown over the decades, it would be almost impossible to think they won't be more overt, and more ruthless from now onward.

[Commie Pinko Dirtbag]

10. The whatevers were a sucession of 5 generals. They were:

Castelo Branco 64-67
Costa e Silva 67-69 *
Médici 69-74 *
Geisel 74-79
Figueiredo 79-85

* Those were the really bloodthirsty ones. By Figueiredo's time, the dictatorship had hardly any teeth anymore.

[IndianaGreen]

9. President Frei was a moderate, like a Chilean version of DLC

but that wasn't good enough for the CIA and their hired guns in the Pinochet regime. President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala was also a moderate, he could pass for a Stevenson Democrat, but that wasn't good enough for the CIA which deposed him with a coup in 1954 with Colonel Armas.