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rizo
rizoholic

Registered: Apr 2003
Location: sf south bay
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| quote: | 1964 –1973
American-backed Overthrow of the Democratic Government of Chile
Estimated civilian deaths: over 5000 people from the subsequent Pinochet terror campaign; at least 1000 people missing and presumed dead
“Not a nut or bolt shall reach Chile under Allende. Once Allende comes to power we shall do all within our power to condemn Chile and all Chileans to utmost deprivation and poverty.”
— U.S. Ambassador to Chile
three years before the US-supported coup
against Chile’s elected President Allende
From Killing Hope
by William Blum:
Salvador Allende was the worst possible scenario for a Washington imperialist, [who] could imagine only one thing worse than a Marxist in power — an elected Marxist in power, who honored the constitution, and became increasingly popular. This shook the very foundation stones on which the anti-Communist tower was built: the doctrine, painstakingly cultivated for decades, that “communists” can take power only through force and deception, that they can retain that power only through terrorizing and brainwashing the population.
After sabotaging Allende’s electoral endeavor in 1964, and failing to do so in 1970, despite their best efforts, the CIA and the rest of the American foreign policy machine left no stone unturned in their attempt to destabilize the Allende government over the next three years, paying particular attention to building up military hostility. Finally, in September 1973, the military overthrew the government, Allende dying in the process.
They closed the country to the outside world for a week, while the tanks rolled and the soldiers broke down doors; the stadiums rang with the sounds of execution and the bodies piled up along the streets and floated in the river; the torture centers opened for business; the subversive books were thrown into bonfires; soldiers slit the trouser legs of women, shouting that “In Chile women wear dresses!”; the poor returned to their natural state; and the men of the world in Washington and in the halls of international finance opened up their check-books. In the end, more than 3,000 had been executed, thousands more tortured or disappeared.
(End of Killing Hope excerpt)
In the bloody coup of September 11, 1973, Henry Kissinger and the CIA helped General Augusto Pinochet overthrow the democratically elected leftist government of President Salvador Allende.
The Fascist puppet-regime of Pinochet then embarked on a 17-year terror campaign against the people of Chile, which included mass arrests and executions, death squads, torture and disappearances.
Many of the victims were fingered as “radicals” by lists provided by the CIA.
Santiago’s national stadium was used as a mass execution site. Robert Saldias, the first army officer to come forward publicly without concealing his identity, said prisoners entering the stadium were identified by yellow, black, and red discs. “Whoever received a red disc had no chance,” Saldias said.
Many of the professional torturers and assassins in the Chilean military (and in every other Fascist country of Central and South America) were trained at the “School of the Americas”, in Fort Benning, Georgia.
Under Pinochet, Chile also participated in “Operation Condor,” a joint collaboration between the U.S.-backed dictatorships of Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, Uruguay and Brazil to hunt down and murder exiled opponents of those regimes. Successful hits included the 1976 car-bomb explosion in Washington, DC, which killed Allende’s exiled foreign minister Orlando Letelier, and his aide, American Ronnie Moffitt.
“I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist because of the irresponsibility of its own people.”
— Henry Kissinger
referring to Chilean voters
(after a few drinks, perhaps?)
1970
See also:
Remember Chile: General Pinochet and human rights abuses
http://www.remember-chile.org.uk/ |
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Sep-10-2003 16:44
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JudgeJulez
Senior tranceaddict

Registered: Aug 2002
Location: SOAS!
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more:
| quote: | ". . . and honoring the victims"
James Carroll
The Boston Globe, 9/9/2003
http://www.boston.com/dailyglobe2/2..._victims+.shtml
THE COINCIDENCE of dates is precious to human beings because it creates the impression that underlying the chaos of normality is a structure of order. The passage of time is not a mere matter of chance, and even things that seem unrelated are tied together, if not by links of causality, by meaning. In casting an eye back across the terrain of the past, a human being with a feeling for history looks for the juxtaposition of seemingly disparate events that will illuminate the hidden connection that alone explains their full significance.
Sept. 11 will live in the American memory. But as what? ''Memory,'' the novelist Paul Auster says, is ''the space in which a thing happens for the second time.'' On Sept. 11, 1941, at almost exactly the moment in which the Pentagon would be hit by American Airlines Flight 77 60 years later, ground was broken for that building in a solemn ceremony. On Sept. 11, 1944, Allied soldiers arrived at the German border, sealing Hitler's fate.
But also on Sept. 11, 1944, as I read in W.G. Sebald's ''On the Natural History of Destruction,'' distant Germans watched the night sky above the city of Darmstadt: ''The light grew and grew until the whole of the southern sky was glowing, shot through with red and yellow.'' It was a night of Allied terror bombing.
On Sept. 11, 1973, terrorists launched the violent overthrow of a democratic government in Chile. In that case, the result was the murder of the head of state, Salvador Allende, and the terrorists were sponsored not by an ad hoc nihilist group, but by the United States.
Sept. 11 as an anniversary of savage violence pushes the mind also to Sept. 11, 1945, the date that marks Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson's post-Hiroshima proposal to President Truman that the United States immediately share the secrets of the atomic bomb with the Soviet Union in order to head off an arms race ''of a rather desparate character,'' as Stimson put it. ''The chief lesson I have learned in a long life,'' Stimson said, anticipating his critics, ''is that the only way you can make a man trustworthy is to trust him.'' As I noted a year ago, Stimson's proposal marks the great American road not taken.
On Sept. 11, 1906, more than 3,000 men of Indian origin gathered at the Empire Theater in Johannesburg, South Africa, to denounce the just-passed Asiatic Law Amendment Ordinance -- a new set of racial laws condemning them to second-class citizenship.
As I learned from Jonathan Schell's recent masterwork ''The Unconquerable World,'' one of those who stood and took a God-invoking oath against obedience to such laws was Mohandas K. Gandhi. He recognized this joint commitment to a radically individual act -- ''a new principle,'' he later said of that day, ''had come into being'' -- as the generating spark of Satyagraha, the ''truth force.'' Gandhi said, ''The foundation of the first civil resistance under the then-known name of passive resistance was laid by accident . . . I had gone to the meeting with no preconceived resolution. It was born at the meeting. The creation is still expanding.'' What began on that Sept. 11 would generate the great counter-story of nonviolence running through the most violent century in history.
At the dawn of the new century, what story do we tell? Does Sept. 11 represent only the experience of American grief, victimhood, justification for revenge? Does Sept. 11 live on only as the engine driving America's shocking new belligerence? Or, in recalling the nobility of those selfless New Yorkers and Pentagon workers who reentered the wounded buildings, who remained behind to usher others out, or who simply maintained calm as worlds collapsed around them -- can we carry this date forward as an image of the possibility of public love?
It may help to see Sept. 11, 2001, in the context of those other days in other years. How, when the ground was first broken for the Pentagon, its builders assumed one day it would be a hospital. How the leader of America's greatest war sought in its aftermath to end war forever. How knowing that Washington, too, can sponsor terrorism must lead to humility. How the age-old dream of nonviolence became actual.
Ordinarily, we think of such incidents in isolation, but there can be an archeology of the calendar that uncovers harmonies in the layers of time.
Sept. 11 is an anniversary of the future, a day enshrining the worst of human impulses -- and the best. A day, therefore, that puts the choice before us. How are we going to live now? We are on the earth for the briefest of interludes. Thinking in particular of all those who died in New York, Washington, and Pennsylvania, let us honor them by building the earth, instead of destroying it. Let us make peace, instead of war.
James Carroll's column appears regularly in the Globe.
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Sep-10-2003 20:37
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rizo
rizoholic

Registered: Apr 2003
Location: sf south bay
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Sep-11-2003 01:22
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