What Gabriel Boric’s victory in Chile will mean for Palestine

Chile's new president, Gabriel Boric, supports BDS and has promised to take an aggressive stance in defense of Palestinian human rights.

 But will he be able to shift Chilean foreign policy?

BY RAMONA WADI

MONDOWEISS

JANUARY 18, 2022 

GABRIEL BORIC GIVING HIS VICTORY SPEECH AT 2021 CHILE 

PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION, DECEMBER 19, 2021

 (PHOTO: FOTOGRAFOENCAMPANA/WIKIMEDIA)

When Chile announced the results of its presidential elections, Israel and its supporters were not at all pleased with the result. Gabriel Boric, Chile’s pro-Palestine, left-wing contender for the presidency, emerged victorious over the right-wing, pro-Israel Jose Antonio Kast.

A former student leader, 35-year-old Boric rose to prominence during the 2011 mobilizations for free, quality education in Chile. In 2013, Boric was elected to parliament as an independent candidate representing the Magallanes region. Running against Kast in the 2021 presidential elections, his rallying cry to bury neoliberalism reflected the nationwide uprisings against outgoing president Sebastian Pinera.

Boric is also a vociferous critic of Israel and supports the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions Movement (BDS). In October 2021, after committing to support a bill to sanction goods from Israeli settlements, Boric pledged to take a stronger stance in defense of Palestinian human rights.

In the end Boric defeated Kast by a vote of 56-44 percent signaling that Chilean voters are ready to make a break from the past.

Chile and Palestine share similarities in terms of their struggle with neoliberal violence. Both indigenous populations – the Mapuche of Chile, and Palestinians – face the horrors of Israeli military weapons and surveillance technology. However, the question at this point is whether Boric will align with international consensus over the two-state compromise or maintain his support for Palestinian liberation.

Israel responds to Boric

In the Israeli press Boric is being described as antisemitic for his earlier pro-Palestine activism, including direct challenges to the Jewish community in Israel which is largely supportive of the Zionist colonial policies. His links to Daniel Jadue, a Chilean-Palestinian who was also a candidate for the 2021 presidential elections and who is very outspoken against Zionism, have also been raised as objectionable by Israeli media.

Emilio Dabed, a Palestinian-Chilean lawyer who also holds a doctorate in political science and who specializes in constitutional matters, international law and human rights, spoke to Mondoweiss about how Israel’s propaganda is manipulating Boric’s stance, and also shed light on the complexities of Chilean foreign policy towards Israel and Palestine.

“Boric has been accused of antisemitism because he has expressed the view that Israel should withdraw from the occupied Palestinian territory, with his detractors implying that calling for the application of international law is unjust or could amount to antisemitism. Also, in an open letter to Boric by prominent Jewish women in Chile, the elected president was criticized for holding ‘Jews responsible for policies of a government in power in Israel.’ But Israeli propaganda and its supporters insist that Israel represents all Jews, and accuse all Palestinians of being antisemites for criticizing the policies of the state of Israel,” Dabed explained.

“Moreover, the President of the Jewish community in Chile has also criticized Boric for supporting BDS, a non-violent, international law-based initiative to force Israel to abide by its international legal obligations. From the perspective of Israel and Israel’s supporters, calling for the respect of international law is almost a crime, supporting Palestinian rights is antisemitic, and the establishment of a just peace in Palestine is a danger threatening them.”

And yet the doomsday headlines in the Israeli media about Chile electing a pro-Palestine president almost entirely gloss over the fact that Israel would have preferred Kast to win the election, despite the fact that his father, German-born Michael Kast, was a Nazi Party member and whose family was involved in the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Chilean author and investigative journalist Javier Rebolledo, whose research about the Pinochet dictatorship brought many previously guarded secrets to public scrutiny, states in his book “A La Sombra de Los Cuervos” (In the Shadow of the Crows) that both Kast’s father, as well as one of his brothers, Cristian Kast, were involved with the National Intelligence Directorate (DINA). Kast’s brother, Miguel Kast, was one of the Chicago Boys – the group of economists trained by Milton Friedman who were tasked with the neoliberal experiment in Chile. He was also appointed by Pinochet as Minister of Labor and later President of Chile’s Central Bank.

During the 2017 presidential campaign in Chile, Kast shone a spotlight on himself with his staunch support for Pinochet. “If Pinochet were still alive, he would vote for me,” he boasted. He also proclaimed himself against the closure of the Punta Peuco luxury prison, where former DINA agents and torturers are serving their sentences. Kast’s 2017 campaign was funded by Pinochet supporters, among them the daughter of former DINA agent Marcelo Castro Mendoza.

Israeli media confirmed that out of 111 Chileans in Israel, 73 voted for Kast. Speaking about Boric’s electoral triumph, Gabriel Colodro, the president of Israel’s Chilean community, stated, “There is concern for the Jewish community [in Chile], but we wish him success.”

Historic erasure

Israel’s response to the Chilean election is reflective of its own colonial enterprise, and the international diplomatic support it is used to receiving. Israel’s ties to the Pinochet dictatorship, to which it sold weapons when the US decided it was time to distance itself from the crimes against humanity it had funded in Chile, are also part of the legacy between both countries which continues to today.

Both Israel and Chile from the dictatorship onwards, at least until the latter’s previous presidency, thrived upon ignoring the past.

Dabed maps out the impact of this erasure by Israel, and how this played out in terms of the Jewish community’s choice of Kast in the 2021 presidential elections in Chile.

“What the Israeli response to Boric’s election reveals, once again, is the schizophrenic nature of Israeli politics and its supporters. They have created a parallel reality pretending to desire peace but continuing the colonization of Palestine, and the exploitation and oppression of Palestinians. On the other hand, their politics is the reflection of the negative ethics that they have adopted. Negative ethics and politics in the sense that their objective is the negation of the existence of Palestinians, the negation of their rights, the erasure and negation of their history, the negation of the human nature of Palestinians.”

This erasure was also demonstrated by the Chilean community in Israel in its preference for Kast. “The same negative politics operates within a part of the Jewish community in Chile as shown by their choice in the Chilean elections. They mostly voted for Kast. The Chilean community in Israel, for instance, voted almost 70% for Kast, negating the crimes of Pinochet’s dictatorship that Kast supported and still defends, negating the torture, the assassinations, the disappearances of political dissidents during the dictatorship, all of which were carried out with assistance and training from the Israeli state to Pinochet’s security forces,” Dabed explained.

What to expect from the Boric government

Despite Israel attempting to depict the new Chilean presidency as dangerous in terms of its diplomatic relations, Boric will be navigating old and new political terrain, both in terms of Chile’s own turbulent history since the dictatorship and the transition to democracy, as well as its foreign policy.

Chile is home to the largest, and well-organized, Palestinian community in Latin America. Its activism in terms of BDS continues to grow and has influenced Chilean politics. For example, in November 2018 the Chilean congress passed a resolution calling upon the government to review its agreements with Israel and to provide Chileans with information about Israel’s colonial expansion in order to make an informed decision about doing business with Israel or visiting the colonial state.

To view earlier pro-Palestine activism as a game-changer in Chile’s foreign policy, however, is a simplistic view.

“Boric is a young leftist politician who will be confronted during his government by the anti-democratic Chilean right-wing; the same that helped to overthrow the socialist government of Salvador Allende almost 50 years ago, and the establishment of the Pinochet’s dictatorship that they defend until today. In these circumstances it would be very dangerous for Boric to completely alienate the Jewish community of Chile which, by and large, is very influential, supports right-wing politics and voted for Kast. Given the radical changes that Boric has promised and the support that he would need to put them forward, I do not think he would risk more confrontation,” Dabed explained.

“I do not think there will be important changes in the Chilean foreign policy. Regardless of political leanings, Chilean governments have retained the same foreign policy regarding Palestine/Israel. It repeats the mantra established by the international community about the fact that it supports a two-state solution for the conflict. It does so, even when we all know that this strategy has not led Palestinians anywhere. Negotiations for a two-state solution have become the name for maintaining the colonial status quo subjecting Palestinians until today. This discourse has allowed Israel to ignore its commitments during the Oslo negotiations in the sense of exchanging land for peace, and to reach its objective of conquering the land and imposing peace terms that consolidate their colonial project.”

However, Boric’s impact in terms of activism and politics should not be discarded. While the two-state diplomacy dominates political discourse, Chile now has a president that is outwardly aligned with the Palestinian cause, and Chile is well-placed to influence the regional political debate about the Israeli colonization of Palestine.

Dabed concludes, “I also think that Boric coming to power represents tremendous support for Palestinians and the Palestinian community in Chile. Even though he may not change Chilean foreign policy in this respect, he and his team and supporters are aware of the Palestinian colonial condition, they oppose it, and they are not shy in expressing these views. Not only Boric, but many others in his circle know the injustices and crimes that Palestinians are subjected to by the Israeli state, and they are prepared, I hope, to make at least discursive changes in the way Palestine/Israel is viewed and spoken about, and this is not without importance. This could lead to the creation of initiatives at the international level that could bring Palestinian back to the public debate, after so many years of silence in the mainstream media and international forums.”

CHILE

Lithium king crowned in dictatorship sees $3.5bn fortune at risk

Bloomberg News | June 24, 2022 |

SQM’s evaporation pools in Chile’s Atacama Desert. (Image courtesy of SQM.)

Few people are better positioned for the electric-vehicle revolution than the billionaire Julio Ponce Lerou.


He retired years ago, but the former son-in-law of late dictator Augusto Pinochet is still known in Chile as the lithium king. And Ponce has never been richer: The shareholder group he leads has seen its approximately 25% stake in SQM, the world’s No. 2 lithium miner, quintuple over the past seven years amid record profit, increasing the value of the portion he owns to $3.5 billion.

Like billionaires across the globe who have seen their wealth soar, from Elon Musk to Chinese property moguls, Ponce, 76, has become a target at home amid the boom times for lithium, a key mineral for making electric vehicle batteries. One of his main adversaries may turn out to be Chile’s 36-year-old president, Gabriel Boric, who supports a constitutional rewrite that may impose environmental curbs on mining and wants to create a national lithium company that could compete with SQM, which sits on the planet’s richest deposit.

Boric’s brand of left-wing politics is much more investor friendly than that of Salvador Allende, whose 1971 nationalization of US-owned mines led to the creation of state copper giant Codelco. But there are signs that the lithium business is about to get increasingly complicated in Chile, with authorities recently rescinding new contracts amid calls for the state to get a bigger share of the mineral windfall.

The shifting landscape for the lithium king has its roots in a wave of street protests in 2019, which led to a rewrite of a constitution born in the Pinochet era that enshrines private property, including minerals and water. Writers of a new charter want to tip the balance back toward community rights, environmental protection and state-run social services, with a greater say for indigenous groups in where and how natural resources including lithium are extracted.

Julio Ponce Lerou. (Screenshot 24 Horas | YouTube.)

Ultimately, the moves could force SQM to adopt extraction techniques that push up costs or limit production, potentially marking an end to booming profits. Ponce — Chile’s second-richest person — is the only disclosed name from the shareholder group, whose entire stake is worth more than $6 billion. Filings show his portion is equivalent to about 16% of SQM. The shares fell 3.2% in Santiago trading Thursday.

The movement is increasing scrutiny of SQM’s business model, which is based on pumping up vast amounts of brine from beneath a salt flat in northern Chile’s Atacama Desert and storing it in giant evaporation ponds for a year or more — a footprint that can be seen from space. The resulting concentrate is turned into lithium carbonate and hydroxide at nearby plants and sent off to Chinese and Korean battery makers.

As simple as it is profitable, the process uses far less fresh water, chemicals and energy than hard-rock mining. But the solar evaporation technique means billions of liters of brine are extracted and then vaporized in one of the most arid places on Earth, which some say is a threat to wildlife such as pink flamingos that inhabit its Mars-like landscape.

Radical proposals such as nationalizing the entire industry have fallen short in the constitutional process. But if the new charter opens the way for the mineral-rich brine under the Atacama to be considered a type of water — an idea the company disputes — that type of mass extraction may come under threat.

There are already calls from some communities and politicians to move to a more selective or direct process of mining that would mean far less evaporation — and probably less output and profit. Both SQM and Albemarle Corp., the only two lithium producers in Chile, are investigating such techniques, which are relatively untested commercially.

Across the developing world, the growth in EVs has created a new demand for minerals from Atacama lithium to nickel in Russia’s Siberia to cobalt in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Powering the world with less fossil fuels presents a new set of social and environmental challenges. In the short term, it’s made mineral moguls like Ponce fabulously wealthy.

But the energy transition is leaving behind the communities where the metals are extracted, says 70-year-old Sara Plaza, an indigenous resident of Peine, a village near the Atacama operations.

“Mining dried out the salt flats,” she said from her modest home, with a view to the chalky expanse and mountaintops that surround her town. “Julio Ponce has done whatever he wanted.”

Ponce’s shareholder group didn’t respond to requests for comment made through SQM.

SQM says it is reducing its brine pumping rates even as it ramps up production, through efficiencies and by focusing on lithium and less on minerals used in fertilizers. The company is also spending a lot more time and money trying to win indigenous groups’ favor, and points out that its contribution to state coffers of about 60% of earnings is among the biggest in the industry.

The company has a new marketing campaign that highlights its contributions, and even plans to put up a sign at its Santiago headquarters for the first time to boost local visibility. All this comes as it prepares for talks to renew its mining lease with the government that expires in 2030.

“We want to tell people what we do,” said Carlos Diaz, SQM’s head of lithium. Namely, production of a critical mineral that “helps to decarbonize the world.”

As for Ponce, his journey to lithium king took many twists and turns.

Ponce in 1969 married Veronica Pinochet Hiriart, whom he met because their families had neighboring beach houses. Four years later, Pinochet led the bombardment of Chile’s presidential palace in the coup that brought him to power.

Ponce in 1969 married Veronica Pinochet Hiriart, daughter of dictator Augusto Pinochet. (Screenshot Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional de Chile | Wikimedia Commons.)

Ponce was working at a sawmill deep in the jungle of the Darien Gap at the time and heard about the attack from a television in Panama. Under Pinochet’s rule, his fortunes quickly began to change.

During the dictatorship, the former forestry student was named president of a state cellulose company, and helped guide its privatization. He rose to lead other companies controlled by the government and, eventually, the development agency in charge of converting state-run enterprises into private businesses, Corfo. The agency had also commissioned early research on critical minerals in the Atacama, including lithium.

Ponce stepped away from those roles in 1983 to fight allegations of illegal enrichment in the acquisition of ranch lands, of which he was acquitted. When Soquimich, as SQM is also known, sold shares in 1986, he was back in the privatizations, but this time on the buy side. He and his family members bought shares, and when Ponce became chairman in 1987, the board was still stacked with military officials. Years later, Chile’s comptroller found that parts of Soquimich were privatized for as little as a third of market value.

Maria Monckeberg, a Chilean author who is an expert on the fortunes derived from Pinochet-era privatizations, said the reforms urged by economic advisers who studied at the University of Chicago — known as the Chicago boys — opened the way for Ponce’s wealth boom.

“Thanks to the roles he had in Corfo, he detected the importance of Soquimich,” Monckeberg said of Ponce. “And he began designing the plan to own it.”

Chile was only beginning to discover lithium’s potential in the Pinochet era. A copper miner called Anaconda documented deposits when it went on a search for water resources in the Atacama desert in the 1960s, according to Monckeberg’s book. In 1969, a research institute tied to the development agency noted the location of the deposits could make for relatively cheap extraction.

The lightest metal on the periodic table, lithium was discovered in 1817 by Swedish chemist Johan August Arfwedson, and was initially used in tiny amounts to treat depression and bipolar disorder. It later became the focus of military powers interested in the hydrogen bomb, and eventually researchers found a variety of uses: waterproofing, gunpowder, heat-resistant glass, air-conditioning and electric car batteries.

SQM evaporation ponds at the Atacama salt flat. 

(Image from: SQM Corporate Presentation.)

“With bland consistency, white color and surprising properties, lithium opens the doors to applications of great complexity and sophistication,” said a 1986 book edited by Gustavo Lagos, a scientist at Universidad de Chile. Lithium had “an almost magical meaning, containing in it the hopes that neither copper nor even salt reached in the life of the nation.”

Ponce became chairman of SQM in 1987 and continued building up his stake. Six years later, after Chile had returned to democracy, it obtained a lease for exclusive mineral exploitation rights on 81,920 hectares (202,428 acres) in the Atacama salt flats. The company invested hundreds of millions at the site, initially with a focus on potash.

As SQM became one of Chile’s most profitable companies, Ponce fended off a 2006 takeover attempt by PotashCorp. (now Nutrien), North America’s largest potash producer, by signing a pact with Japanese trading firm Kowa. In 2018, while no longer chairman but still a large shareholder, Ponce got a deal to protect the firm’s trade secrets amid an effort by a larger Chinese competitor, Tianqi Lithium Corp., to take a stake. Ponce’s brother Eugenio remains an adviser to SQM.

He also endured scandals. He resigned from his decades-long reign as chairman in 2015 amid a probe over illicit political campaign financing, which led to a $30 million settlement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission and a fine for SQM’s then-CEO (Ponce himself was not charged). Ponce also fought allegations of market manipulation in courts, and successfully reduced a record $70 million fine — an outcome that critics saw as the sign of a system that unfairly favors elites.

Today, Ponce makes time for visits to his polo club in Santiago, horseback rides at his estate of about 5,000 hectares and even equestrian jumping during the pandemic. His children sometimes join him on rides — all four were banned from SQM management in 2018, but not from SQM holding companies, where his daughters are directors. A Panama-based trust holds SQM shares for benefit of the family. Ponce keeps family close, including his brother Gustavo, a yoga guru who has defended Julio on Chilean TV.

“It’s not easy to be in his position,” Gustavo said of his brother in text reply to Bloomberg.

But a constitutional rewrite represents a challenge that could be harder for Ponce to resolve than his previous court battles.

Cristina Dorador, one of the members of Chile’s constitutional convention, says the current charter fails to recognize the Atacama salt flats as ecosystems that are affected when large volumes of brine are pumped for lithium extraction. A scientist, she has published studies on the dwindling flamingo presence at lagoons in the vicinity of lithium mining.

SQM says those studies fail to consider the impact of tourism on the migratory birds, adding that while lithium production is up, brine pumping rates are down and food conditions haven’t changed. Monitoring systems show flamingo populations have remained stable over time, SQM said, adding that it welcomes scientific efforts to better understand the relationships between mining and the environment.

Dorador said the promise of addressing climate change by supplying the materials needed for a shift to renewable energies has enriched miners like SQM, but few EV consumers are aware of the new types of environmental problems that the transition is creating.

“If we are going to do any exploitation then it needs to be done using the latest in technology and ensure that the consequences are minimal,” she said. “There has to be a national decision.”

Joe Lowry, founder of advisory Global Lithium LLC, said SQM needs to address environmental concerns, but at these heights — with a lithium shortage propping up prices near record highs — it’s not a “major hurdle,” at least financially. Even a constitutional rewrite is unlikely to upend forces that are working in Ponce’s favor, he said.

“The new government certainly will not want to stop the massive royalty income,” he said.

(By Blake Schmidt and James Attwood)

Pinochet in Piccadilly: Britain and Chile’s Hidden History 

by Andy Beckett.

Faber, 280 pp., £15.99, May 2002, 0 571 20241 1

Vol. 24 No. 13 · 11 July 2002

11 September 1973

Christopher Hitchens

I have a more or less fixed memory of the end of the ‘Sixties’. In the autumn of 1970 I went to join a strike picket at the General Motors plant in Fremont, California. Handy for Berkeley and Oakland, the factory was one of the salients of a national labour shutdown that was scheduled to begin at 12 o’clock at night. In the ranks of supporters were hardened veterans of the battle against the Vietnam War, especially of the famous blockades of the military recruiting centres in the Bay Area. Sympathisers of the not yet discredited Black Panther Party were in evidence, as were those who had been beaten and tear-gassed alongside César Chávez in his fight to unionise the near-serfs of the Salinas Valley agribusiness empire. All the strands of ‘the movement’ were still in some kind of alignment. Just before the deadline, the company cops tried to smuggle some scab trucks through the gates, and the resulting bonfire of overturned vehicles gave a lovely light. In the next edition of the People’s World, the splash headline was a very Sixties one: ‘Fremont – In The Midnight Hour’. It competed for space with another, smaller headline, which announced the victory of Salvador Allende’s ‘Popular Unity’ coalition in Chile.

The Nixon-Kissinger regime was then only in its opening years, but it had become clear to some of us that the long, withdrawing roar of the Vietnam crisis was at least half over. What nobody quite suspected was that Chile, a country far below the Equator and seemingly well out of the line of fire, would have such a determining effect on what it meant to be ‘left’ or ‘right’ in the ensuing two decades. Andy Beckett was born a few months before the moment I have just described, and I am stirred and astonished at his brilliance, and by the imaginative sympathy with which he rekindles the arguments and emotions of a period he never knew.

For many people including myself, 11 September has long been a date of mourning and rage. On that day in 1973, lethal aircraft flew low over a major city and destroyed a great symbolic building: the Presidential palace in Santiago, known (because it had once been a mint) as La Moneda. Its constitutional occupant, Salvador Allende, could perhaps have bargained to save his own life, but elected not to do so. Instead, over a crackling radio, he made a speech that will bear comparison with the last broadcasts from Athens in 1941 and Budapest in 1956:

This is certainly the last time I shall speak to you ... History has given me a choice. I shall sacrifice my life in loyalty to my people, in the knowledge that the seeds we planted in the noble consciousness of thousands of Chileans can never be prevented from bearing fruit ... Much sooner than later, the great avenues towards a new society will open again, and the march along that road will continue.

There’s also an echo here of some of the defiant speeches made in defence of the Spanish Republic and the Popular Front. And, as a young politician in prewar Chile, Allende had arranged to give refuge to many anti-Franco Spaniards and Catalans and Basques. Moreover, he had sent a delegation to the Bolivian frontier in late 1968, to rescue the cadaverous survivors of Che Guevara’s doomed insurgency. If you visit the Bodeguita del Medio in Havana today, there to sample the bogus Hemingway-style mojito cocktail that the management offers to the new tourist trade, you can see where Allende once added his signature to those scrawled on the wall. ‘Cuba Libre,’ it says. ‘Chile espera.’ That was on 28 June 1961. The inscription possesses an almost antique quality these days, like a graffito from a revolutionary Pompeii. Allende, in other words, was Old Left: a dedicated physician, an anti-clerical Freemason, a tireless campaigner and reformer and internationalist. But, unlike the Fidelistas of the 26 July movement who promised an election in Cuba and have still never got round to holding one, he was absolutely committed to the routines and even the rituals of what was once known as ‘bourgeois democracy’. His victory in 1970 was the coronation of innumerable previous attempts to assemble a coalition of the Chilean Left, large enough to include the radical Christians and those of the middle class who wanted some say in how the country’s natural resources were exploited, and by whom. Pablo Neruda may have been a dank Stalinist in his politics, and have allowed this to infect his poetry, but he was writing as a patriot when he composed the potent verses entitled ‘They Receive Instructions against Chile’ (translated here by Robert Bly):

But we have to see behind all these, there is something

behind the traitors and the gnawing rats,

an empire which sets the table,

and serves up the nourishment and the bullets.

They want to repeat their great success in Greece.

Greek playboys at the banquet, and bullets

for the people in the mountains ...

the generals retire from the army and serve

as vice-presidents of the Chuquicamata Copper Firm,

and in the nitrate works the ‘Chilean’ general

decides with his trailing sword how much the natives

may mention when they apply for a rise in wages.

In this way they decide from above, from the roll of dollars,

in this way the dwarf traitor receives his instructions,

and the generals act as the police force,

and the trunk of the tree of the country rots.

This warning was published in 1967, just after the CIA had abolished civilian rule in Athens. Allende’s election was principally a test of the limits of Chilean independence, but it was also a laboratory experiment in what used to be termed ‘the peaceful road to socialism’. Would oligarchy and empire permit an election result to stand if it went against their interests? A good number of people on the left, myself again included, were convinced that no such window would be allowed to stay open for long. Graham Greene made a visit to Chile in the early Allende years and spent a good deal of time with the supporters of the MIR (Movement of the Revolutionary Left), who kept on warning that there would be a violent confrontation, engineered by the ruling class and the Yanquis without respect for ‘the rules’. Allende himself gave a series of interviews to Régis Debray, Guevara’s former epigone, in which he maintained to the contrary that a democratic transition was possible. Reviewing Debray’s book for the Times in 1971, I quoted Tawney’s old dictum that while you could peel an onion layer by layer, you could not skin a live tiger claw by claw.

In truth, as we now know in annihilating detail, the principle was not allowed to be tested. Even before Allende had taken the oath of office in 1970, death squads paid for by Henry Kissinger had embarked on a campaign of murder and destabilisation, and had shot down the chief of the Chilean General Staff, René Schneider, in the street, for nothing more than his legalistic opposition to a coup. There was an initial revulsion at this, on the part of the centre and even the Right, and the sheer voting strength and level-headedness of Popular Unity enabled it to postpone the evil day for three years. But in the meantime Nixon yelled orders, which were obeyed by his corporate and intelligence allies, to ‘make the Chilean economy scream.’ (As Daniel Ellsberg’s wife commented when she first saw the Pentagon papers, the American authorities in those days were fond of using ‘the language of torturers’.) So that when the Chilean Armed Forces came out of their barracks in September 1973, and began their hysterical mop-up, there were depressingly many who found harsh authority a respite from shortage and scarcity, and from the kind of socialist rhetoric that brings diminishing returns. This moment is captured with consummate skill in the Costa-Gavras movie Missing, where the conservative American father of the ‘disappeared’ Charles Horman arrives in town just after the coup and hands his son’s girlfriend a bag of goodies from the prosperous North. ‘Here are some things Charlie said were in short supply.’ The girl (Sissy Spacek) fixes Jack Lemmon with a pitying look. ‘Not any more,’ she says. The scarcities, like everything else, were politically conditioned.

In one way, this strangulation of Chilean democracy was a jewel in the crown of those successful Washington-inspired military coups and counter-revolutions that featured Iran in 1953, Guatemala in 1954, Brazil in 1964, went on through Indonesia in 1965 and Greece in 1967, and extended as far as Cyprus in 1974. (The slogan of the extreme Right in Chile during the Allende years was the single ominous word ‘Jakarta’: intuitive proof in itself that the poisoned apple did not fall far from the tree.) But, as a Chilean comrade of mine ruefully commented recently, he never expected that Pinochet could produce a revolution as well as a counter-revolution. The new model ‘free economy’ created in Chile became an inspiration for the British and the American Right, even as its police state provided a rallying point for the international Left. Andy Beckett makes both points with great acuity, but he confines himself to the British scene. In my view, Chile in those years had a catalytic effect on the entire political discourse. In Western Europe, it helped create the conditions both for Euro-Communism and for the ‘historic compromise’ by which important elements among the conservative order (especially in Italy) decided not to identify themselves with authoritarian rule. In Eastern Europe, meanwhile, the incessant Communist propaganda about solidarity with Chile had an unintended consequence. The moral grandeur of Allende’s death, which was simplistically employed to demonstrate the obvious barbarity of American imperialism, also derived from the fact that he had been murdered as a legitimate President in between two free elections. So perhaps there was some missing point to be made about political pluralism as well. The emblematic moment here was reached in 1975, when the Soviet Union swapped the conservative dissident Vladimir Bukovsky for the imprisoned Chilean Communist leader Luís Corvalán. The Party press reported only that Corvalán had been released as a consequence of international proletarian solidarity, but in Poland in the winter of 1975, there to report on the beginnings of the workers’ movement, I found that everybody in Warsaw knew the true state of the case. Some of the comparisons between Dubcek in 1968 and Allende in 1973 were facile. And some were obtuse – Corvalán had enthusiastically supported the Soviet invasion of Prague, while not even the Red Army went so far as to murder Dubcek or massacre his sympathisers. Over time, however, the idea of a universal human rights ethic gained enormous traction from both crimes. And in the United States, the identification of the authorities with the junta principle, and not just in Chile, was a perpetual source of embarrassment and discredit. (The recent Inspector Clouseau-like performance of the Bush team over Venezuela shows, perhaps paradoxically, that establishment confidence in such methods has not yet been regained.)

To take the British microcosm of these events, as Beckett does, is to recognise a somewhat neglected and in many ways rather charming aspect of our history. There is an old latent connection between the two countries, extending back as far as Admiral Cochrane’s opportunistic semi-freelance aid for the War of Chilean Independence against Spain. (Some distant booms and cannon shots from this episode may be found in the later novels of Patrick O’Brian.) Is it too fanciful to see a common and self-consciously phlegmatic character as well? Chile is divided almost as surely from its continental neighbours, by the spine of the Andes, as is Britain by the Channel. The outlook is maritime: the principal industry is, or was, mining. Gabriel García Márquez once described Chile as ‘a cornice of the Andes in a misty sea’. One could push this too far, no doubt (the sheer quality of Chilean wine would be a counter-indicator), but it remains the case that the Chilean upper class is highly anglophile, as are many of the liberals and leftists, and that it’s a cause of local regret that, whereas the Chilean Navy owes much to British traditions, the Chilean Army was trained by Prussians – who used to rehearse counter-insurgency on the local Aurucanian Indians until the supply of exemplary victims was exhausted. Even so, and in order to distinguish it from the grisly recurrence of juntas and pronunciamentos in adjacent countries such as Argentina, Chile became known sometimes as ‘the Switzerland’, and sometimes also ‘the England’, of Latin America.

Life in the British Labour movement in the mid-to-late 1970s was mediocre and uninspired. At the Wilson-Callaghan level of leadership, the main features were compromise, consensus and corruption. The future SDP was evolving within the Cabinet; the Liberals and even the Orangemen were abjectly wooed in Parliament. The IMF could dictate terms, often not very politely. Meanwhile, the activist Left was mired in arguments over the closed shop and the dull referendum on the Common Market. Not exactly the stuff of radical intoxication. The Chile Solidarity Campaign supplied a much-needed infusion of dash and authenticity. Here was a flagrant example of a regime of steel helmets and dark glasses, riding like a juggernaut over the wreckage of the unions, the universities and the free press. Many brilliant Chilean exiles found refuge in Britain, and many of them could recite poems and play musical instruments. Joan Jara, the English-born widow of the composer and musician Victor Jara, could still a large hall with the story of how, before Pinochet’s goons murdered her husband in the camp they had improvised in Santiago’s National Stadium, they had taken particular care to smash his hands. Concerts and rallies for Chile possessed real élan. Beckett doesn’t mention it, but I remember that a fluent young MP named Neil Kinnock became the darling of the constituency parties by his advocacy of the Chilean cause. A row over the sale of British frigates to the Chilean Navy led to Eric Heffer’s resignation from the Labour Government. And – in an episode Beckett does revisit in some detail – the workers at the Rolls-Royce factory in East Kilbride refused to touch, or let anyone else touch, the jet engines that were being repaired for Chilean Air Force Hawker Hunters (the very planes that had bombed their own capital city on 11 September 1973). The boycott was kept up for almost five years. It is strangely moving to read his reconstruction of that episode of gritty working-class internationalism, even if the minutes of the union meetings now sound a bit like the last signals from a dying planet.

Very much less publicly, and in meetings of which we do not possess the minutes, a faction of the British Right was drawing the exactly opposite conclusion. Commenting on the Pinochet blood-bath on the day it began, the Times outdid itself by saying that matters in Chile had deteriorated to the point where ‘a reasonable military man’ might have decided to become the saviour of his country. We have since been told, in the memoirs of Field Marshal Sir Michael Carver, that there was quite a lot of loose talk in the officers’ mess in those days, about taking Britain by the scruff of the neck and generally cleaning things up. The public face of this sinister idiocy was represented by blimpish figures of fun like former General Sir Walter Walker, who perhaps thought he had found a formula to negate one of the oldest maxims of the class war – that you cannot dig coal with bayonets. But there were other serving officers who clearly hoped that they might improve on the silent mutiny with which they had prevented Harold Wilson from using force against Ian Smith’s racist settler rebellion in 1965. For such people, the workers of East Kilbride were ‘the enemy within’, to be grouped with Irish Republicans and revolting students.

Much more significant in the long run were the policy intellectuals crystallising around the Thatcher candidacy, who wanted to revive the free market doctrines of Hayek and Friedman. The paradox in their case was obvious: it might take a very strong state to impose these libertarian values. Milton Friedman himself, and others of the so-called ‘Chicago School’ of political economy, had been engaged by the Pinochet regime as advisers. In 1976, Allende’s former comrade Orlando Letelier, by then living in exile in Washington, wrote an extraordinary essay for the Nation entitled ‘The Chicago Boys in Chile’. I remember getting the New Statesman to reprint it. It laid out the principle of the ‘free economy/strong state’ equation: ‘shock treatment’ number one being the application of electrodes to the recalcitrant, and ‘shock treatment’ number two being the withdrawal of public subsidy for the unfit or the inefficient. A few months after publishing the article, Orlando Letelier was torn to pieces by a car bomb in rush-hour Washington traffic, just a few blocks from where I am writing these words. The explosive device, which also murdered an American colleague and friend, was detonated by agents of the Chilean dictatorship who, until recently, had the distinction of being the first state-supported terrorists to dare an attack in the middle of an American city. This – the ‘blowback’ from Kissinger’s policy of giving Pinochet a fair wind and a green light – has now been fully investigated by the Justice Department and the FBI. Their finding, that Pinochet himself ordered the ‘hit’, awaits executive action at a moment when the US is at least officially pledged to combat such outrages without pity or discrimination.

Beckett explores the filiations between the Chilean ‘experiment’ and such Thatcherite figures as Sir Alan Walters and Robert Moss. In the course of his inquiries, he almost incidentally explodes one false claim, which is that Thatcher’s tenderness for Pinochet arose from his ‘helpfulness’ over the Falklands/Malvinas War. This is a canard, sometimes also given currency by those who thought that the battle against Galtieri and Videla was not worth fighting. In fact, Chilean opinion about Argentine expansionism and promiscuity is fairly solid across the political board. The long running Beagle Channel dispute in the Magellan Straits makes sure of that. No government in Santiago would have been anything but pro-British in such a confrontation. How nice it might have been to see Prime Minister Michael Foot thanking President Salvador Allende for his help in bringing down the gang of torturers and kidnappers in Buenos Aires. But the Left forbids itself such thoughts. And the Right, at least in its Baroness Thatcher incarnation, forgets to say that a free market that requires death squads may be to that extent somewhat unfit for human consumption.

At any rate, there was a certain symmetry to the arrest of Pinochet in London, during one of his many Savile Row-type gentleman’s vacations. His subsequent confinement in a Surrey mansion – Surrey with a lunatic fringe – was hardly less apt. A weekly visit from the Thatchers may not have seemed cruel, but was undoubtedly unusual. And it had been on a ‘thank you’ visit to Chile in 1994 that the unironic lady had experienced the first fainting fit and collapse that presaged her ultimate decline and rancorous retirement. The picture is completed by the absolute gutlessness of British Labour in its second incarnation, and by Jack Straw’s decision to send the old brute back to Santiago. In the post-Milosevic moral universe, and in the wake of a finding even by the House of Lords that universal jurisdiction must stand and ‘sovereign immunity’ must fall, that counted as a spectacular abdication. Indeed, it made Pinochet’s long confinement in England a violation of habeas corpus and of his human rights.

As an unintended consequence, however, it will also pass into history. Thanks to Straw’s scuttle, Pinochet was to be indicted in Chile itself, but then treated with the compassion which he had denied to his numberless victims. The judge in the case, Juan Guzmán Tapia, had voted for the extreme Right in the 1970 election, had welcomed the coup in 1973, and had voted to keep Pinochet as President in the semi-fixed plebiscite of 1988. His decision to put the General in the dock was a cathartic event for the whole society. And his current investigations, into the murder of Charles Horman and others in 1970, and into the nexus of the continent-wide ‘Operation Condor’ assassination scheme, remind one of nothing so much as the incorruptible magistrate in Costa-Gavras’s Z. We will very soon know some even more dreadful things about how our rulers behaved in that period of despotism and disappearance. (Those nostalgic for the Castro version of what might have been should take note, however: their beloved Fidel was one of the first to denounce Pinochet’s arrest, on the grandiose grounds that it infringed Latin American dignity. This demonstrated the autumnal character of his own patriarchy, and the shift towards caudillismo that now infects the sympathisers of people like himself, and of his ally Milosevic.)

Writing just after the coup in 1973, Gabriel García Márquez produced a minor masterpiece of quasi-Castroite prose, entitled ‘Why Allende Had to Die’. I remember helping this essay, too, into the pages of the New Statesman. Its closing passage still has the power to make me quiver:

He would have been 64 years old next July. His greatest virtue was following through, but fate could grant him only that rare and tragic greatness of dying in armed defence of the anachronistic booby of the bourgeois law, defending a Supreme Court of Justice which had repudiated him but would legitimise his murderers, defending a miserable Congress which had declared him illegitimate but which was to bend complacently before the will of the usurpers, defending the freedom of opposition parties which had sold their soul to fascism, defending the whole moth-eaten paraphernalia of a shitty system which he had proposed abolishing, but without a shot being fired. The drama took place in Chile, to the greater woe of the Chileans, but it will pass into history as something that happened to us all, children of this age, and it will remain in our lives for ever.

To reread this was like scenting a madeleine of the drama and struggle that once was. Allende had famously been given a present of a sub-machine gun by Fidel Castro, and he died wielding it – the first time he had ever taken up arms. Had he used that gun first, and mounted a pre-emptive strike of his own against the parasitic Armed Forces and their cold-eyed foreign patrons, he might well have been morally justified. But the subsequent regime would have become a stupid ‘People’s Democracy’ and would have expired, or been overthrown, in discredit, within a decade or two. Allende chose instead to die for the values which García Márquez satirised, and it can safely be said that the long struggle of the Chilean people to depose and replace Pinochet did no dishonour to those principles, which are now being slowly and painfully internationalised.

By accident – indeed by an opportunistic and cowardly deportation – Britain has repaid a portion of the debt it owes to Chile. Today, the family of General René Schneider is bringing a lawsuit in Washington against Kissinger, every page of which consists of a US Government declassified document. The Chilean courts are conducting inquests and autopsies on the mutilated bodies that continue to surface. The gargoyles and goons are having to try to dodge inconvenient questions. Like some other small or ‘faraway’ countries in our past, Chile is one of those which – to its glory and its misery – has produced more history than it can consume locally.

Christopher HitchensChristopher Hitchens is a columnist for Vanity Fair and a professor of Liberal Studies at the New School in New York.

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Letters

Vol. 24 No. 15 · 8 August 2002

It was not the Prussians who trained the Chilean Army, as Christopher Hitchens claims in his review of Andy Beckett's Pinochet in Piccadilly (LRB, 11 July), but the Germans: after 1871, the Prussian Army became part of the Imperial German Army. Incidentally, until Pinochet's coup the Chilean Army had an unequalled record in Latin America of not interfering in politics. It required the dismissal of General Prats, its Commander-in-Chief, who opposed the planned coup (and was later assassinated in exile), to put the Army firmly under Pinochet's control. Admiral Toribio Merino, on the other hand, of the British-trained Navy, was a key figure in Pinochet's coup and a senior liaison officer with its US backers.

Theresa Heine

London NW5

Vol. 24 No. 16 · 22 August 2002

Theresa Heine (Letters, 8 August) makes a fair point about the rarely mentioned political diversity of the Chilean Army in her response to Christopher Hitchens’s review of my book, Pinochet in Piccadilly. Besides the pro-democratic General Carlos Prats, whose dismissal she correctly cites as an important prelude to Pinochet’s coup in 1973, René Schneider, another Chilean general who believed that soldiers should obey elected politicians, was assassinated by local right-wingers in 1970. However, I am not sure that the Chilean Army tradition of non-interference in politics was quite as strong as Heine suggests. There was a well-established liberal and constitutional side to Army thinking, but there were also successful military coups in Chile in 1924, 1927 and 1932. The second of these brought General Carlos Ibáñez, ‘the Chilean Mussolini’, to power for four years. Chile reverted to elected civilian governments between 1932 and 1973, but whenever these threatened right-wing interests some Army officers would become restive. In 1969, for example, there was an Army revolt on the streets of Santiago against the mildly social democratic President Eduardo Frei, and throughout the Presidency of his more radical successor, Salvador Allende, there were escalating instances of insubordination and intimidation by Army officers, despite Schneider and Prats’s efforts to keep their soldiers out of politics. All this makes Pinochet’s coup look less like an American-financed aberration and more like the awakening of an old Chilean Army instinct.

Andy Beckett

London N5

Vol. 24 No. 18 · 19 September 2002

Theresa Heine is wrong when she writes that after 1871 the Prussian Army became part of the Imperial German Army (Letters, 8 August). Germany did have an Imperial Navy, but the armies of the individual German states retained their respective identities, although they were trained according to Prussian doctrine.

Wolfgang Eisermann

Augsburg, Germany

WAR CRIMINAL ESCAPES JUSTICE

'My blood boils': Kissinger's bitter legacy in Southeast Asia

Bangkok (AFP) – As global tributes to late US diplomat Henry Kissinger poured in, his death stirred fury across Southeast Asia.

Issued on: 02/12/2023

Former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger at a ceremony honoring his diplomatic career in 2016 at the Pentagon 

© Brendan Smialowski / AFP


Homage has been paid to Kissinger's realpolitik and intellectual heft as secretary of state to US presidents Richard Nixon and Gerald Ford.

But in Southeast Asia, millions have remembered when the United States bombed swathes of Laos and Cambodia during the Vietnam War, an onslaught ordered by Kissinger and Nixon.

"Every single time I hear Kissinger's name, my blood boils," Sera Koulabdara, who fled Laos with her family at age six, told AFP.

The bombing was a failed attempt to disrupt rebel movements and strengthen Washington's hand as it pulled out of Vietnam.

Koulabdara said her father remembered the bombing.

"He described it as a roaring rain, but instead of water, it was flames."

Laos became the world's most-bombed country per capita from 1964 to 1973 as the United States dropped more than two million tonnes of ordnance, equal to a plane load of bombs every eight minutes.

Since then, unexploded ordnance (UXO) in the impoverished country has killed or wounded at least 20,000 Laotians.

"The life-threatening problem that exists in Laos is a direct result of the US's barbaric decisions and one of the main architects, Kissinger," said Koulabdara, who heads advocacy group Legacies of War.

Demining work continues.

"Laos is still the country most polluted by cluster munitions in the world," said Reinier Carabain of Handicap International –- Humanity & Inclusion, an organisation that has destroyed nearly 47,000 pieces of UXO since 2006.

"Every day, civilians in a quarter of the villages in Laos run the risk of being killed or injured by explosive remnants".

'I am hopeless'

In neighbouring Cambodia, the bombing campaign helped fuel the rise of the Khmer Rouge regime, which killed about two million Cambodians between 1975 and 1979 in acts later ruled as genocide by the kingdom's UN-backed court.

Former leader Hun Sen had long called for Kissinger to be charged with war crimes.

UXO still litter the countryside, killing an estimated 20,000 Cambodians in the past four decades.

Heng Ratana, director general of the Cambodian Mine Action Centre, told AFP the decision to bomb "our beautiful country and peaceful people by destroying everything" was Kissinger's true legacy.

Henry Kissinger laughs during a press conference after the final communique on the Vietnam Peace Accords, signed by Kissinger and Le Duc Tho 

© - / AFP

"I am hopeless," said 60-year-old Cambodian Sam En, who was blinded and lost the use of both arms after he tried to remove a cluster bomb at his Kratie province home in 2014.

Sam En, who relies on his daughter for care, said he felt differently about Kissinger after his death.

"Before I felt angry. But now he has died, so as a Buddhist follower, I forgive him."
'Suffering'

In Vietnam, where some see Kissinger's rapprochement with China as paving Beijing's rise to dominance in the region, he leaves a complex legacy.

Kissinger was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for negotiations to end the Vietnam War, even though the conflict did not immediately finish and his North Vietnamese counterpart, Le Duc Tho, declined to accept the prize.

Pham Ngac, a former Vietnamese diplomat and interpreter for North Vietnam's delegation during the Paris Peace Accords © Nhac NGUYEN / AFP

Pham Ngac, an interpreter for North Vietnam during the Paris Peace Accords negotiation, called Kissinger an "outstanding" diplomat.

"He was the most... persuasive diplomat, to the benefit of the US," the 88-year-old former diplomat told AFP.

Neither the Vietnamese nor Cambodian governments responded to AFP requests for comment on Kissinger's death.

"He was the one that helped cause a lot of suffering for Vietnamese people," Tran Quy Tuyen, a soldier in Hanoi's air defence division between 1965 and 1973, told AFP.

"I guess many Vietnamese would say that he should have died years ago," the 78-year-old said.

© 2023 AFP

Chile, where Kissinger backed coup, remembers his 'moral wretchedness'
Agence France-Presse
December 1, 2023 


Henry Kissinger warmlArchivo General Histórico del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores

While leaders around the world remember Henry Kissinger fondly and praise him as a brilliant, hard-driving US statesman, the silence from Latin America is deafening.

"A man has died whose historical brilliance never managed to conceal his moral wretchedness," Chile's ambassador to the United States, Juan Gabriel Valdes, wrote on X, the former Twitter.

The envoy posted his acerbic remark after the death Wednesday of Kissinger, who greenlighted the 1973 coup that brought down Chile's elected socialist president and installed the rightwing dictatorship of general Augusto Pinochet.

Chilean President Gabriel Boric quietly reposted that X message, and the foreign minister said nothing at all about the man who dominated post-World War II US foreign policy and is often associated with "realpolitik" -- diplomacy driven by raw power and a country's self-interest.

Kissinger, first as national security adviser and then secretary of state under Richard Nixon (1969-1974) and Gerald Ford (1974-1977), was instrumental in the establishment of ties between the United States and China and in expanding the war in Vietnam to Cambodia and Laos.

But he also approved the putsch in which Pinochet overthrew president Salvador Allende, and was key in backing other authoritarian regimes in Latin America, such as in Brazil and Nicaragua.

"For Kissinger, Latin America was a piece on the global geostrategic chessboard. His only priority was the war against communism. All other considerations were of little importance," said Michael Shifter, former president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank, and a professor at Georgetown University.

"In that context, Kissinger was indifferent to human rights violations under military governments in the region," he added.

Kissinger played a prominent role in destabilizing the Allende government, bringing it down and then supporting the Pinochet dictatorship, which ran from 1973 to 1990.

In 1970, before Allende was elected, Kissinger said: "I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves."

He said this to the 40 Committee, a multi-agency US government body that approved covert operations.

- Fear of contagion -

Declassified CIA documents show that after Allende was elected in 1970, Kissinger oversaw disruptive operations designed to keep him from taking power, such as the attempted kidnapping of the army commander in chief, General Rene Schneider.


Schneider resisted, opening fire to defend himself, and was shot dead.

"Kissinger's obsession with Chile stemmed from the path that Allende had chosen to move toward his socialist utopia project," said Fernando Reyes Matta, a Chilean diplomat and former official of the Allende government.

This path involved democratic elections bringing socialists to power, the diplomat said.

"If this experiment succeeded to some extent, it could spread to countries in Italy such as Italy, France or Greece," said Reyes Matta.

After the US effort to keep Allende from taking power failed, and Allende actually assumed office, Kissinger rejected any notion of working with the new Chilean government.

And, rejecting advice from those around him, he pressed on with clandestine operations and tried to undermine the Chilean economy.

"Unfortunately Kissinger did not pay attention to the recommendation of his own team, such as Peter Vaky, his national security adviser, who stated clearly that Allende did not represent a mortal threat to the United States. So Kissinger's strategy was immoral and went against democratic values," said Shifter.

After Allende was overthrown on September 11, 1973 Kissinger -- who that same year shared the Nobel peace prize for leading the US side in talks to end the Vietnam war -- was a firm supporter of the brutal Pinochet regime.

"My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going communist," Kissinger told Pinochet in 1976.

Kissinger said this even though he was under pressure to call Pinochet out over human rights violations under his regime, which left some 3,200 people dead or missing.

Henry Kissinger: War criminal

Robert Reich
November 30, 2023 

Henry Kissinger has died, at the age of 100.

When a former high government official as well known as Kissinger passes, the conventional response is to say nice things about what they accomplished.

I’m sorry but I cannot. In my humble opinion, Kissinger should have been considered a war criminal.

One telling illustration was Kissinger’s role in overthrowing the elected socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile, and encouraging the mass murder of hundreds of innocent Chileans.


On September 12, 1970, eight days after Allende’s election, Kissinger initiated a discussion on the telephone with CIA Director Richard Helms about a preemptive coup in Chile.

“We will not let Chile go down the drain,” Kissinger declared.

“I am with you,” Helms responded.

Three days later, Nixon, in a 15-minute meeting that included Kissinger, ordered the CIA to “make the [Chilean] economy scream,” and named Kissinger as the supervisor of the covert efforts to prevent Allende from being inaugurated.

Kissinger ignored a recommendation from his top deputy on the NSC, Viron Vaky, who strongly advised against covert action to undermine Allende.

On September 14, 1970, Vaky wrote a memo to Kissinger arguing that coup plotting would lead to “widespread violence and even insurrection.” He also argued that such a policy was immoral: “What we propose is patently a violation of our own principles and policy tenets .… If these principles have any meaning, we normally depart from them only to meet the gravest threat to us, e.g. to our survival. Is Allende a mortal threat to the U.S.? It is hard to argue this.”


After U.S. covert operations, which led to the assassination of Chilean Commander in Chief of the Armed Forces General Rene Schneider, failed to stop Allende’s inauguration on November 4, 1970, Kissinger lobbied Nixon to reject the State Department’s recommendation that the U.S. seek a modus vivendi with Allende.

While Schneider was dying in the Military Hospital in Santiago on October 22, 1970, Kissinger told Nixon that the Chilean military turned out to be “a pretty incompetent bunch.” Nixon replied: “They are out of practice,” according to documents released in August by the U.S. National Security Archive.

In an eight-page secret briefing paper that provided Kissinger’s clearest rationale for regime change in Chile, he emphasized to Nixon that “the election of Allende as president of Chile poses for us one of the most serious challenges ever faced in this hemisphere” and “your decision as to what to do about it may be the most historic and difficult foreign affairs decision you will make this year.”

Not only were a billion dollars of U.S. investments at stake, Kissinger reported, but so was what he called “the insidious model effect” of his democratic election.

There was no way for the U.S. to deny Allende’s legitimacy, Kissinger noted, and if he succeeded in peacefully reallocating resources in Chile in a socialist direction, other countries might follow suit.

“The example of a successful elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on — and even precedent value for — other parts of the world, especially in Italy; the imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it.”

The next day Nixon made it clear to the entire National Security Council that the policy would be to bring Allende down. “Our main concern,” he stated, “is the prospect that he can consolidate himself and the picture projected to the world will be his success.”

In the days following the September 11, 1973, coup, Kissinger ignored the concerns of his top State Department aides about the massive repression by the new military regime. He sent secret instructions to his ambassador to convey to Pinochet “our strongest desires to cooperate closely and establish firm basis for cordial and most constructive relationship.”

When Kissinger’s assistant secretary of state for inter-American affairs asked him what to tell Congress about the reports of hundreds of people being killed in the days following the coup, Kissinger issued these instructions: “I think we should understand our policy-that however unpleasant they act, this government is better for us than Allende was.”

The United States assisted the Pinochet regime in consolidating, through economic and military aid, diplomatic support and CIA assistance in creating Chile’s infamous secret police agency, DINA.

When Nixon complained about the “liberal crap” in the media about Allende’s overthrow, Kissinger advised him: “In the Eisenhower period, we would be heroes.”

At the height of Pinochet’s repression in 1975, Kissinger met with the Chilean foreign minister, Admiral Patricio Carvajal.

Rather than press the military regime to improve its human rights record, Kissinger opened the meeting by disparaging his own staff for putting the issue of human rights on the agenda.

“I read the briefing paper for this meeting and it was nothing but Human Rights,” Kissinger told Carvajal. “The State Department is made up of people who have a vocation for the ministry. Because there are not enough churches for them, they went into the Department of State.”

When Kissinger prepared to meet Pinochet in Santiago in June 1976, his top deputy for Latin America, William D. Rogers, advised him make human rights central to U.S.-Chilean relations and to press the dictator to “improve human rights practices.”

Instead, a declassified transcript of their conversation reveals, Kissinger told Pinochet 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,” Kissinger told Pinochet. “We want to help, not undermine you. You did a great service to the West in overthrowing Allende.”

The Chilean government has formally requested that the Biden administration publish documentation from 1973 and 1974 on what was said in the Oval Office before and after the coup led by Pinochet.

“We still don’t know what President Nixon saw on his desk the morning of the military coup,” Chile’s ambassador to the United States, Juan Gabriel Valdés, says. “There are details that remain of interest to [Chileans], that are important for us to reconstruct our own history.”

An appropriate response to Kissinger’s death would be for the U.S. to own up to the ] entirety of what Nixon and Kissinger wrought.

Robert Reich is a professor at Berkeley and was secretary of labor under Bill Clinton. You can find his writing at https://robertreich.substack.com/.

https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/2023/11/henry-kissinger-war-criminal-beloved-by.html

Progressive Gabriel Boric elected president of Chile, vows unity and democracy

By UPI Staff

President-elect Gabriel Boric speaks to supporters in Santiago, Chile, on Sunday. 

Photo by Elvis Gonzalez/EPA-EFE

Dec. 20 (UPI) -- Chile has elected its youngest president in modern history -- a 35-year-old former student activist who has promised to lead a progressive charge away from decades of rule by dictator Augusto Pinochet and conservative Sebastian Pinera.

Gabriel Boric was declared the winner of the presidential runoff election on Sunday, winning about 56% of the vote over far-right lawmaker Jose Antonio Kast. He will be sworn in on March 11.

Kast won the first round of voting last month by 2 percentage points.

Boric has vowed to unite Chile, tackle poverty and inequality and fight elitism.

"I know that the future of our country will be at stake next year," he said according to The Guardian.

"I will be a president who will take care of democracy and not jeopardize it, a president who listens more than he speaks, who seeks unity, who looks after people's daily needs, and who fights hard against the privileges of the few and who works every day for Chilean families."

Boric also pledged to fight the climate crisis and block a proposed mining project in the world's largest copper-producing nation. He also called for an end to Chile's private pension system.

Boric will succeed Pinera, who in 2018 became the first conservative leader to be elected since the controversial Pinochet left office in 1990.

Leftist millennial vows to remake Chile after historic win

By PATRICIA LUNA and JOSHUA GOODMAN

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Chile's President elect Gabriel Boric, of the "I approve Dignity" coalition, celebrates his victory in the presidential run-off election in Santiago, Chile, Sunday, Dec. 19, 2021.

 (AP Photo/Luis Hidalgo)


SANTIAGO, Chile (AP) — Former leftist student leader Gabriel Boric will be under quick pressure from his youthful supporters to fulfill his promises to remake Chile after the millennial politician scored a historic victory in the country’s presidential runoff election.

Boric spent months traversing Chile, vowing to bring a youth-led inclusive government to attack nagging poverty and inequality that he said are the unacceptable underbelly of a free market model imposed decades ago by the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet.

The bold promise paid off. With 56% of the votes, Boric on Sunday handily defeated his opponent, far right lawmaker José Antonio Kast, and at age 35 was elected Chile’s youngest modern president.

Amid a crush of supporters in downtown Santiago, Boric vaulted atop a metal barricade to reach the stage where he used the indigenous Mapuche language to initiate a victory speech to thousands of mostly young supporters.

“We are a generation that emerged in public life demanding our rights be respected as rights and not treated like consumer goods or a business,” Boric said. “We know there continues to be justice for the rich, and justice for the poor, and we no longer will permit that the poor keep paying the price of Chile’s inequality.”

In his speech, the bearded, bespectacled president-elect highlighted the progressive positions that launched his improbable campaign, including a promise to fight climate change by blocking a proposed mining project in the world’s largest copper producing nation.

He also called for an end to Chile’s private pension system — the hallmark of the neoliberal economic model imposed by Pinochet.

It’s an ambitious agenda made more challenging by a gridlocked congress and ideological divisions recalling the ghosts of Chile’s past that came to the fore during the bruising campaign.

Kast, who has a history of defending Chile’s past military dictatorship, finished ahead of Boric by two percentage points in the first round of voting last month. But his attempt to portray his rival as a puppet of his Communist Party allies who would upend Latin America’s most stable, advanced economy fell flat in the head-to-head runoff

Still, in a model of democratic civility that broke from the polarizing rhetoric of the campaign, Kast immediately conceded defeat, tweeting a photo of himself on the phone congratulating his opponent on his “grand triumph.” He then later traveled personally to Boric’s campaign headquarters to meet with his rival.

And outgoing President Sebastian Pinera, a conservative billionaire, held a video conference with Boric to offer his government’s full support during the three-month transition. That will follow a runoff that saw 1.2 million more Chileans cast ballots than in the first round and raise turnout to nearly 56%, the highest since voting stopped being mandatory in 2012.

“It’s impossible not to be impressed by the historic turnout, the willingness of Kast to concede and congratulate his opponent even before final results were in, and the generous words of President Pinera,” said Cynthia Arnson, head of the Latin America program at the Wilson Center in Washington. “Chilean democracy won today, for sure.”

In Santiago’s subway, where a fare hike in 2019 triggered a wave of nationwide protests that exposed the shortcomings of Chile’s free market model, young supporters of Boric waved flags emblazoned with the candidate’s name while jumping and shouting as they headed downtown for his victory speech.

“This is a historic day,” said Boris Soto, a teacher. “We’ve defeated not only fascism, and the right wing, but also fear.”

Boric will become Chile’s youngest modern president when he takes office in March and only the second millennial to lead in Latin America, after El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. Only one other head of state, Giacomo Simoncini of the city-state San Marino in Europe, is younger.

The new government is likely to be closely watched throughout Latin America, where Chile has long been a harbinger of regional trends.

It was the first country in Latin America to break with U.S. dominance during the Cold War and pursue socialism with the election of Salvador Allende in 1970. It then reversed course a few years later when Pinochet’s coup ushered in a period of right-wing military rule that quickly launched a free market experiment throughout the region.

Boric’s goal is to introduce a European-style social democracy that would expand economic and political rights to attack nagging inequality without veering toward the authoritarianism embraced by so much of the left in Latin America, from Cuba to Venezuela. It’s a task made more urgent by the coronavirus pandemic, which sped up the reversal of a decade of economic gains.

Boric was able to prevail by expanding beyond his base in the capital, Santiago, and attracting voters in rural areas. For example, in the northern region of Antofagasta, where he finished third in the first round of voting, he trounced Kast by almost 20 points.

Also key to his victory were Chilean women, a key voting bloc who feared that a Kast victory would roll back years of steady gains. Kast, 55, a devout Roman Catholic and father of nine, has a long record of attacking Chile’s LGBTQ community and advocating more restrictive abortion laws.

Boric, in his victory speech, promised that Chile’s women will be “protagonists” in a government that seeks to “leave behind once and for all the patriarchal inheritance of our society.”

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Joshua Goodman reported from Miami.

Gabriel Boric vows to ‘fight privileges of the few’ as Chile’s premier

Leftist former student has vowed to unite country and tackle poverty and inequality



01:40 Leftwing millennial to be Chile's new president – video


John Bartlett in Santiago and Sam Jones
Mon 20 Dec 2021

Gabriel Boric has vowed to unite Chile, fight “the privileges of the few” and tackle poverty and inequality after winning a decisive victory over his far-right opponent to become the South American country’s youngest premier.

The 35-year-old leftist former student leader won 56% of the vote in Sunday’s second-round presidential election, cruising past his ultra-conservative opponent, José Antonio Kast, who took 44.2%.

The president-elect, who will be sworn in on 11 March, said the time had come for a radical overhaul of Chilean society and its economy.

“Men and women of Chile, I accept this mandate humbly and with a tremendous sense of responsibility because we are standing on the shoulders of giants,” he said in front of a vast crowd packed into a Santiago boulevard.

“I know that the future of our country will be at stake next year. That is why I want to promise you that I will be a president who will take care of democracy and not jeopardise it, a president who listens more than he speaks, who seeks unity, who looks after people’s daily needs, and who fights hard against the privileges of the few and who works every day for Chilean families.”

Boric said his generation wanted to have its rights respected and not be treated “like consumer goods or a business”, adding the country would no longer allow Chile’s poor to “keep paying the price” of inequality.

He added: “The times ahead will not be easy … Only with social cohesion, re-finding ourselves and sharing common ground will we be able to advance towards truly sustainable development – which reaches every Chilean.”

The new premier said he would be “the president of all Chileans … and serve everyone”.

Boric also highlighted the progressive positions that launched his improbable campaign, including a promise to fight the climate crisis by blocking a proposed mining project in what is the world’s largest copper-producing nation.

He also called for an end to Chile’s private pension system – the hallmark of the neoliberal economic model imposed by Gen Augusto Pinochet.

Boric thanked each candidate in turn – including Kast – and reinforced his commitment to Chile’s constitutional process, a key consideration for many as the country embarks upon this latest chapter in a turbulent period of transition.

The new administration is likely to be closely watched throughout Latin America, where Chile has long been a harbinger of regional trends.

It was the first country in South or Central America to break with US dominance during the cold war and pursue socialism with the election of Salvador Allende in 1970. It then reversed course three years later when Pinochet’s coup ushered in a period of rightwing military rule that quickly launched a free market experiment throughout the region.

Kast won the first round vote on 21 November by two percentage points, but Boric was able to prevail on Sunday by expanding beyond his base in Santiago and attracting voters in rural areas. In the northern region of Antofagasta, where he finished third in the first round of voting, Boric trounced Kast by almost 20 points.

Ghosts and old divisions returned to haunt the bitterly fought campaign, during which Kast – who has a history of defending the military dictatorship – sought unsuccessfully to caricature his rival as a puppet of his Communist party allies who would upend Latin America’s most stable, advanced economy.

However, Kast proved unexpectedly magnanimous in defeat. After tweeting a photo of himself congratulating his opponent on his “grand triumph”, he visited Boric’s campaign headquarters to see the new president. Kast, a father of nine, also said: “Gabriel Boric can count on us.”

Chile’s outgoing president, the conservative billionaire Sebastián Piñera, held a video conference with Boric to offer his government’s full support during the three-month transition.

In Santiago’s subway, where a fare rise in 2019 triggered a wave of nationwide protests that exposed the shortcomings of Chile’s free market model, young supporters of Boric waved flags emblazoned with the candidate’s name while jumping and shouting as they headed downtown for his victory speech.

“This is a historic day,” said Boris Soto, a teacher. “We’ve defeated not only fascism, and the right wing, but also fear.”

On a sweltering day in Chile, voting was marred by public transport difficulties across the country, although the government claimed it had done everything in its power to guarantee voters could reach polling stations.

Turnout for the vote – in which 1.2 million more people cast their ballots than in the first round – was nearly 56%, the highest level since voting ceased to be mandatory nine years ago.

Boric will become Chile’s youngest modern president when he takes office, and only the second millennial to lead in Latin America, after El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele. Only one other head of state, Giacomo Simoncini of the city-state San Marino in Europe, is younger.

“It’s impossible not to be impressed by the historic turnout, the willingness of Kast to concede and congratulate his opponent even before final results were in, and the generous words of President Piñera,” said Cynthia Arnson, the head of the Latin America programme at the Wilson Center in Washington.

“Chilean democracy won today, for sure.”

The Associated Press contributed to this report

Who is Gabriel Boric? The radical student leader who will be Chile’s next president

Boric comes from a cohort that is grimly determined to bury dictator Augusto Pinochet’s bitter legacy once and for all

Gabriel Boric reacts before giving a speech to his supporters 

after the presidential runoff election in Santiago, Chile 

Photograph: Marcelo Hernández/Getty Images

John Bartlett in Santiago
Mon 20 Dec 2021 

Four months ago, 35-year-old Gabriel Boric confounded the polls to claim victory in a presidential primary he had barely been old enough to compete in. But on 11 March next year, he will now be sworn in as Chile’s youngest ever president – having amassed more votes than any presidential candidate in history.

Boric is the driving force behind Chile’s abrupt changing of the guard. He belongs to a radical generation of student leaders who are grimly determined to bury dictator Augusto Pinochet’s bitter legacy once and for all.

“Chile was the birthplace of neoliberalism, and it shall also be its grave!” he shouted from a stage the night of his primary win, his forearm tattoo peeking out from beneath a rolled-up sleeve.

General Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship bestowed Chile with its extreme economic model, and Boric and his influential cohort of student leaders have taken it upon themselves to dispose of it.

“I know that history doesn’t begin with us,” he declared on stage on Sunday night as president-elect before a baying crowd.

“I feel like an inheritor of the long trajectory of those who, from different places, have tirelessly sought social justice.

Boric was born in Punta Arenas in 1986 and is fiercely proud of his home region, Magallanes, below the Patagonian ice fields.

In 2011, as he entered the final year of his law degree, Boric became a leader of education protests across the country, in which thousands of students took over their campuses and faculties across a long, cold winter, spilling out into the streets to demand free, high-quality education for all.

The protests were quelled with a modest compromise, allowing some students to study for free. Several of the movement’s young leaders later ran for office and joined the country’s congress or took up positions in local government.

Boric never completed his degree, instead winning election to Chile’s congress in 2013 and serving two terms as a deputy, becoming one of the first congresspeople to come from beyond Chile’s two traditional coalitions in the process.

But since narrowly losing the presidential first round to José Antonio Kast, a far-right supporter of General Pinochet, he has moderated his programme markedly, appealing to the centrist voters who have now propelled him into La Moneda.

Unlike his firebrand days at the front of the marches, Boric is now neatly groomed, humble and serious – while he often wears a smart blazer covering his tattoos. His girlfriend Irina Karamanos joined him on stage on Sunday night after the results.

He has pledged to decentralise Chile, implement a welfare state, increase public spending and include women, non-binary Chileans and Indigenous peoples like never before. But it is Boric’s ultimate goal of extricating the country from the binds of Pinochet’s dictatorship that will define his legacy.

The next four years will see this process begin, as the 2011 student generation led by Boric, take on an even more important role than before.

Chilean election offers stark choice: 

a leftist or an admirer of Pinochet

The campaign has resurfaced deep divisions and revived bitter memories of the country’s recent past

Gabriel Boric told supporters ‘we will come together again to defeat Pinochetismo.’ Photograph: Rodrigo Garrido/Reuters


John Bartlett in Santiago
Sun 19 Dec 2021 

Chilean voters headed to the polls on Sunday to chose between two presidential candidates offering starkly contrasting visions for the future, in the country’s most divisive elections since it returned to democracy in 1990.

Leftwing candidate Gabriel Boric, a tattooed former student protest leader, has pledged to empower women and Indigenous people and raise taxes and spending in order to create a fairer Chile.

His far-right opponent José Antonio Kast is a staunch defender of the former dictator Augusto Pinochet and has promised to dig ditches along the country’s northern border to slow migrants.

After years of centrist rule, the sharp choice has resurfaced deep divisions in one of Latin America’s most stable democracies, and revived bitter memories of the country’s recent past.

Conservative Chileans are convinced that Boric is a crypto-Communist who would push Chile into a Venezuelan-style economic tailspin. Progressives fear that Kast would overturn fragile social gains and clash with the mostly progressive convention that is rewriting the country’s dictatorship-era constitution.

Both candidates claim that it is their rival who instils fear among voters.


‘Very worrying’: is a far-right radical about to take over in Chile?

“This Sunday we are going to say ‘no’ to intolerant people,” said Kast – who frequently rails against the supposed influence of the “gay lobby” – at his final campaign rally on Thursday. “We will defeat fear… We will win by a wide margin because this is what I have been hearing the length of Chile.”

Across town, Boric told his supporters: “We are a generation that learns from those who were here before us; we united to defeat the dictatorship, to democratise Chile, [and] to have a new constitution. And now we will come together again to defeat the heir to this government and Pinochetismo – and bring hope to Chile.”

“I’m putting my faith in young people,” said Boric voter Cecilia Galaz, 67, as she strode into her polling station in a central neighbourhood in the capital, Santiago.

“We are handing over a corrupt, self-centred world, so we need to change absolutely everything if we are to keep advancing towards the sort of society we want to live in.”

Close by, 37-year-old Fernanda Medina walked out of the polling station having also cast her vote in favour of Boric.

“I’m really excited,” she said brightly, clasping her young daughter’s hand.

“But I fear that disinformation is powerful in rural Chile, and some people are inclined to vote in line with the emotions Kast plays on rather than inform themselves of the candidates’ policies.”

In rural parts of the country, as well as peripheral districts of Santiago, some voters complained of a lack of public transport to take them to polling stations.

Videos circulating on social media showed long lines at bus stops – in bright sunshine and temperatures rising above 30C (86F) – as well as depots full of parked buses.

Transport minister Gloria Hutt gave a televised address to “categorically deny” that the government was holding back the buses. She also said that public transport was running “somewhat better” than on a working day.

Some Chileans have begun offering carpool solutions to neighbours in the hope of allowing everyone the chance to vote.

Acknowledging that the election will be won with the votes of those in the centre, both candidates moderated their platforms in the weeks since the first round.

Kast is backed by the right-leaning candidates whom he defeated in the first round, while Boric has has support from across the left, from the Communist party to moderate former president Michelle Bachelet, who this week said Chileans faced a “fundamental” choice, urging them to back a leader who could lead the country “down the path of progress for all”.

Kast’s policies resonated with voters unnerved by two years of social protests and recent debates about abortion (which remains illegal in most instances) and migration.

But his relationship with Chile’s past has loomed darkly over his campaign.

Kast, whose Germany-born father was recently revealed to have been a member of the Nazi party, has previously said that Pinochet would have voted for him and campaigned prominently against the transition to democracy in the late 1980s.

Boric, on the other hand, represents the progressive generation brought up in democracy – many of whom harbour a visceral hatred of General Pinochet and his enduring legacy.

A reminder of that history came on Thursday when the death of the dictator’s widow, Lucia Hiriart, brought hundreds of people to a Santiago plaza – some of them bearing photos of victims of the military regime.

“This has unexpectedly turned into one of the most closely-fought elections,” Mireya García told Reuters.

García’s brother was one of thousands forcibly disappeared after the army toppled the democratically elected president Salvador Allende in 1973.

“What is at stake is that on the one hand the extreme right is clearly a danger for Chile and on the other hand, there is a candidate who represents the youth,” she said.