Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5
During the 1960s, the U.S. government became obsessed with a man named Salvador Allende, a physician who had entered politics in Chile and repeatedly ran for president. Since Allende’s political and economic philosophy was communism, U.S. officials were determined to prevent his election as president. As Henry Kissinger, head of the U.S. National Security Council, put it, “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”
Of course, it was during the 1960s that the U.S. government failed to oust Cuba’s communist dictator-president, Fidel Castro, through a brutal embargo, a U.S.-sponsored invasion at the Bay of Pigs, repeated assassination attempts on him, and terrorist strikes in Cuba.
That was also the decade in which the U.S. government invaded Vietnam under the rationale of fighting communism and preventing the “dominoes” from falling to the communists.
It was the decade when the U.S. national-security establishment was spying on Americans who opposed the war, advocated socialistic ideas, opposed the embargo on Cuba, protested U.S. imperialism, and supported civil rights for minorities.
The prospect of an Allende presidency terrified U.S. officials, not because he was seen as a Soviet puppet — he clearly wasn’t — but simply because of his leftist philosophy. During the Cold War the anti-communist mindset that guided the national-security state likened socialism and communism to deadly contagious infections that could easily sweep across Latin America and ultimately reach the United States.
So the U.S. national-security establishment was charged with preventing Allende from being elected president. The CIA was put in charge of the secret operation.
The result was one of the most shocking political episodes in the history of both Chile and the United States.
During the 1960s, when Allende was running for president, the CIA secretly became one of the most dominant and powerful political forces in Chile, primarily through the distribution and expenditure of millions of dollars to support political candidates and parties and to publish political propaganda, all with the aim of defeating Allende at the polls.
Coup preparations
While the CIA was successful in preventing Allende’s victory during the 1960s, the agency’s efforts came to naught in the election of 1970. In a three-way race for president, Allende placed first, albeit with only a plurality, not a majority, of votes. Under the Chilean constitution, the election would be thrown into the Chilean congress.
U.S. officials immediately sprang into action with a two-track scheme. They spent millions of dollars to bribe members of Chile’s congress not to vote for Allende, and they explored the possibility of a military coup to prevent Allende from taking office.
Neither scheme worked. Chile’s congress had a long democratic tradition of choosing whoever received the most votes in the election. It did so this time — indeed, Allende’s two opponents endorsed him. The military coup failed primarily because the head of the Chilean military, Gen. Rene Schneider, steadfastly maintained it would continue to support Chile’s constitution, even if members of the military disapproved of the election of a communist as president.
Allende’s election in 1970, however, did not deter U.S. officials from pursuing their goal. Fearing that democratic socialism might spread throughout Latin America and ultimately reach the United States, American officials were determined to prevent Allende from serving his term.
So the CIA was charged with planning a military coup to destroy Chile’s long-time democratic system, oust Allende from power, and install a military dictatorship in his stead.
The first obstacle was Schneider, who wouldn’t even discuss the matter with U.S. officials. He obviously had to be removed before a coup could be planned and carried out. So the CIA conspired with pro-coup Chilean military officials to kidnap him. The CIA smuggled high-powered weapons into the country to enable the kidnappers to threaten deadly force if Schneider resisted.
Schneider, however, was armed during the kidnapping attempt, chose to defend himself, and was fatally shot.
Needless to say, the CIA’s role in the kidnapping and murder was kept top secret, especially given that the acts were considered matters of national security. Later it came out that the CIA had paid thousands of dollars in hush money to one of its Chilean coconspirators after Schneider’s assassination.
When CIA Director Richard Helms was questioned under oath at a congressional hearing on CIA involvement in Chile’s 1970 presidential election, he denied everything. He lied, and when his deception was later uncovered, he was indicted for perjury. Since the perjury involved an operation relating to national security, however, Helms was permitted to plead no-contest to a misdemeanor and was given a token fine.
One fascinating aspect of Helms’s conviction was the reaction of CIA agents. After his sentencing, Helms announced that he would proudly wear his criminal conviction as a badge of honor. When he returned to CIA headquarters, the agents threw a party and collected money for the fine. Clearly, for Helms and the CIA, perjury was good and honorable when national-security secrets, including kidnapping and murder, were protected.
Unfortunately for U.S. officials, Schneider’s replacement as head of the Chilean army was Gen. Carlos Prats, who took the same pro-democracy position. Prats made it clear that the military would continue to defend the constitution and not engage in an illegal and unconstitutional military coup.
He was later pressured into resigning, and Allende replaced him with a general named Augusto Pinochet, who led Allende to believe that he was as loyal to the constitution as Schneider and Prats had been.
Meanwhile, the CIA continued to promote the conditions necessary for a coup by fomenting economic chaos and encouraging the military.
“Make the economy scream”
Soon after his election Allende began implementing his socialist agenda, which mirrored much of what Franklin Roosevelt had done during his welfare-state revolution in the United States during the 1930s. For example, Allende raised the minimum wage, provided state-financed health care for the poor, and gave milk to the nation’s children. Just as Roosevelt had confiscated Americans’ gold coins, Allende nationalized the copper industry and other businesses, many of which were owned by big and powerful U.S. corporations.
Early on, economic conditions appeared positive, as they often do in the early stages of a state’s confiscation and redistribution of people’s wealth. Before long, however, the economy went into a tailspin as a result of Allende’s policies.
Unfortunately, however, Allende’s policies were not all that pushed Chile into chaos. The U.S. government provided the other side of the vise that squeezed the Chilean people, much as the U.S. embargo did in Cuba.
In fact, as part of his plan to provoke a coup, Richard Nixon ordered the CIA to “make the economy scream.” To accomplish that, the CIA did everything it could to foment economic distress in the country, including bribing Chilean truckers to strike to prevent food from reaching the people.
U.S. officials also ensured that foreign credit would be denied Chile, placing Allende’s regime in difficult financial straits, especially considering the large foreign debt incurred by his predecessor.
Additionally, U.S. officials did everything they could to prevent U.S. firms from trading with Chile, which produced distress among the many firms whose equipment depended on parts from the United States.
With one big exception, U.S. foreign aid, which had flooded to the Chilean government before Allende, was drastically reduced. The exception? U.S. military aid to Chile. It continued to flood directly into the coffers of the military, nurturing the Chilean national-security establishment’s loyalty, trust, dependency, and cooperation towards the U.S. national-security establishment.
As part of the U.S. coup planning, thousands of Chilean military personnel were invited to attend training sessions in the United States and Panama, where the U.S. Army’s infamous School of the Americas was based. That’s the school that taught torture techniques, among other things. It goes without saying that during those training sessions, close relationships were built between American and Chilean military officials.
According to notes written by General Prats, as reported in Hugh O’Shaughnessy’s book Pinochet: The Politics of Torture, Chilean military officials were taught at the School of the Americas that it was the moral and legal duty of a country’s national-security establishment to oust a president when his policies posed a grave threat to national security.
Think about that. U.S. national-security-state officials were saying that a constitution is not a suicide pact. If, in the view of the national-security establishment, citizens elect the wrong man president, a man whose policies are destroying the country, it is the solemn duty of the military and intelligence forces to violate the constitution and save the country by ousting the president.
That’s precisely what happened on September 11, 1973. The Chilean military, led by commander Augusto Pinochet, launched a violent coup against the democratically elected president, Salvador Allende. That led to an orgy of kidnapping, rape, torture, incarceration, and execution of tens of thousands of innocent people — that is, people whose worst “crime” was believing in socialism or communism.
The partner in this endeavor — the U.S. government — stood silently by, not daring to object in a serious way to what was happening as part of the global war on communism. After all, by 1973 the handwriting was on the wall that South Vietnam was likely to fall to the communists, notwithstanding the deaths of more than 58,000 American soldiers and more than a million Vietnamese. Yet here was Pinochet’s army rounding up, torturing, raping, kidnapping, and executing tens of thousands of communists and socialists, and hardly suffering casualties.
It was in that context that two American citizens, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, lost their lives at the hands of their own government and the Chilean military dictatorship under Gen. Augusto Pinochet.
This article was originally published in the January 2015 edition of Future of Freedom.