Truthout | Op-Ed Thursday, 19 September 2013
The most important anniversary of the year was the 40th anniversary of September 11, 1973 - the crushing of the democratic government of Chile by Gen. Augusto Pinochet and Henry Kissinger, then US secretary of state. The National Security Archive in Washington has posted new documents that reveal much about Kissinger's role in an atrocity that cost thousands of lives.
In declassified tapes, Kissinger is heard planning with President
Richard Nixon the overthrow of President Salvador Allende. They sound
like Mafiosi thugs. Kissinger warns that the "model effect" of Allende's
reformist democracy "can be insidious." He tells CIA director Richard
Helms, "We will not let Chile go down the drain," to which Helms
replies, "I am with you." With the slaughter under way, Kissinger
dismisses a warning by his senior officials of the scale of the
repression. Secretly, he tells Pinochet, "You did a great service to the
West."I have known many of Pinochet's and Kissinger's victims. Sara De Witt, a student at the time, showed me the place where she was beaten, assaulted and electrocuted. On a wintry day in the suburbs of Santiago, we walked through a former torture centre known as Villa Grimaldi, where hundreds like her suffered terribly and were murdered or "disappeared."
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