Peter Kornbluh is perhaps one of the people who knows the most about Chile and the military coup against President Salvador Allende (1970-1973) 50 years ago.. From his office at the NGO National Security Archives, he has been documenting the case for decades in a crusade to get the United States to reveal what it knows.
In fact, recently the Chamber of Deputies of Chile approved requesting from the Foreign Ministry secret files to the United States about his role in the coup d’état that broke democracy in the South American country and gave way to a bloody dictatorship (1973-1990) commanded by former Army general Augusto Pinochet Ugarte.
Kornbluh has just published Pinochet Declassified: The Secret Archives of the United States, an update of a previous book to mark the 50th anniversary of the coup and which includes fascinating never-before-revealed documents. EL TIEMPO interviewed him.
You have dedicated a good part of your working life to Pinochet’s coup d’état in Chile. Why do you think it is still so important to remember what happened?
The coup d’état in Chile, like the case of Francisco Franco in Spain, became a global symbol, and I believe it continues to be so for two reasons: Salvador Allende represented a peaceful search for change, for a significant change that really awakened the hopes and dreams of many people, not only in Chile but around the world. And I believe that the US Secretary of State at the time, Henry Kissinger, understood this and that is why he sought to make it fail through a bloody coup d’état led by Augusto Pinochet that resonated throughout the planet.
An alert that continues to resonate in our times…
The 50th anniversary of that coup remains relevant for many countries because there is currently an erosion of democratic institutions, just as there was in Chile with the help of the United States during Allende, and there is a growing threat in a number of countries where Authoritarianism advances. We are seeing it in the US with the case of (Donald) Trump, who openly challenged the democratic system (with the insurrection of January 6, 2021) and is still being talked about among his followers. The challenges that exist in issues such as immigration, crime, inflation… are giving oxygen to far-right movements that seek undemocratic ways to reach or stay in power. The coup d’état in Chile reminds us that what is needed is more democracy, not less.
Do you think that something like what happened in Chile could be repeated today?
I think that several countries, from Sweden to France, through the United States, Mexico, Chile itself and other places… are threatened by the drift towards extremes. Not only to the right, but to any extreme, towards systems that do not respect truth, dignity and democratic governance. Chile is a country from which many lessons can be learned. It’s not for nothing that the 50th anniversary is, I think, gaining attention around the world, in part, because it’s a good time to remember those lessons.
New revelations are included in the recent reissue of his book. One of them is a declassified document of a direct conversation between Kissinger and President Richard Nixon where they talk about their plans in Chile…
We are talking about political assassinations and how shocking they are. Imagine a Chile where there was no history of something like this and, suddenly, the commander in chief of the armed forces (General René Schneider) is murdered, shot in the middle of the street a couple of blocks from his house. Over time, we learned that this was the first step in a kind of Machiavellian plot to disrupt the transfer of power in the country and justify a military coup to stop Allende’s rise. And the CIA, under direct orders from the then US president, was involved. They sent weapons and money to pay the gang that was supposed to kidnap Schneider but ended up shooting him. They paid for life insurance policies for these individuals. And then, after Schneider was murdered, they spent a good amount of money so that the perpetrators would not be arrested and would not talk about the role of the CIA.
What specifically did Kissinger and Nixon talk about?
Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon, the two most powerful men in the world at that time, spoke about this entire plot without expressing any remorse for the political assassination of Schneider in Chile, they were rather upset by the error in the plan. Particularly Kissinger, because the Chilean military had not followed the script that had been agreed upon to take power. It is an extremely revealing conversation that my office obtained as part of the collection of Kissinger’s teleconferences, showing that he took more than 30,000 pages of transcripts of his telephone conversations, arguing that they were personal. And my office went to court to demand that Kissinger return them.
Based on these new documents, how responsible are Nixon and Kissinger for Schneider’s assassination and what followed?
The original plan was to kidnap him, take him to Argentina and then hold Allende’s followers responsible and then interrupt his rise to power. It was an illogical plan that went wrong and ended up strengthening Allende. But, the US has responsibility. The law says that if you are part of a conspiracy and someone dies in it, even if that was not the intention, you are responsible. The United States, as a foreign power, was involved at the highest level in this political assassination. Kissinger claimed that he did not know about this aspect of the plot before it occurred, but in his conversation with Nixon it is clear that he knew what was happening and that the president was supervising him, having given the order to the CIA to participate in the plot.
Impossible to excuse…
The phone call gives true meaning to the role of these two powerful men. They were talking about his involvement in what ended up being a political assassination.
Another document revealed by you affects the Chilean communications magnate Augustine Edwards. Why is it relevant to the case?
Edwards, who has since died, always said that he had traveled to Washington to discuss the situation in Chile with the director of the CIA, but not to talk about coups d’état but about why Allende had come to power. We now have a document showing that Edwards met with Nixon hours before he gave the order to the CIA to block Allende’s inauguration and another in which he summarizes his conversation with the CIA director and makes it clear that half of the talk was dedicated to talking about an opportunity for a military coup. That document had never been seen or analyzed before. Now, we have evidence that Edwards talked throughout the meeting about potential coup plotters and potential officials who would be obstacles to a coup. In fact, two of the generals with whom the CIA ends up working and who become an integral part of the plot speak. Basically, we can say that Edwards was the CIA’s main informant on the Chilean coup plot from the beginning and that he met with Nixon in the Oval Office.
You asked President Joe Biden to use the anniversary of the coup to declassify more files. What else do you think is needed to know that Washington has not yet told?
Chile is one of the most documented cases of covert US intervention to foster regime change. It was the focus of the first major scandal over such CIA operations in the mid-1970s. It became the center of much attention after Pinochet sent a team of assassins to Washington to kill Orlando Letelier (Minister of State for Allende) and the American Ronni Karpen who perished in the attack. Although, thanks to an order from President Bill Clinton (1993-2001), thousands of documents about this period were declassified, there are still areas that have been kept secret. The story is incomplete since the US intelligence community has never published any documents, for example, on the role of Australia, which they asked for help. Nor about his communications with Brazil, which even played a more important role than the United States in helping to undermine Allende and then helping Pinochet establish himself.
Is there also little known about the CIA’s relationship with the Chilean intelligence services?
The United States has never published any of the documents on the CIA’s support for the Chilean intelligence service (Dina), which really became the main violator of human rights not only in that country but in all of Latin America, it was a leader of Operation Condor throughout the region and a kind of state terrorist agency. People don’t know that in the spring of 1974, when Dina was being institutionalized, Nixon sent a special emissary to speak with Pinochet and offer help for the agency. Manuel Contreras, head of the Dina, worked closely with the CIA and even came to Washington, but we know little about that relationship. In fact, Contreras was on the CIA payroll at the height of the repression, but we don’t know why and what the CIA did to earn that position. Then they took it out and there was a lot of internal debate about it, but we don’t have the details either.
Regarding the Letelier case, are there gray areas left?
Imagine a car bomb exploding a few blocks from the White House. We are talking about an act of international terrorism ordered by Pinochet about which we do not know much, despite the fact that a thorough investigation was carried out. Just as we want to know how Osama Bin Laden managed to carry out his attack in the US, we want to know how Pinochet could do it. These are incredibly valuable records for Chileans, in part because there are many deniers who, like the Trumpists who continue to deny the reality of the assault on the Capitol in Washington on January 6 (2021), still believe that Pinochet was some kind of gift from God and that he did not order all those people to be killed and that he was not corrupt. It is important to know all these details now that 50 years have passed since the coup and there is debate about Pinochet’s legacy.
Do you have any indication that the Biden administration may release more documents?
The Chilean government has been asking that the documents be delivered so that this story can be completed and a verdict can finally be reached on what happened. What I can tell you is that in the last ten years, the US has been in what I call declassification diplomacy with Chile. The Obama administration released some really interesting records about Pinochet and Operation Condor. Let’s hope Biden follows that trajectory.
In the case of Colombia, it has always been speculated that the US has information about the assassination of Jorge Eliécer Gaitán. What can you tell us?
I have to say that I have talked to Mike (Colombia expert at the National Security Archives) time and time again and I know that he has tried to get those documents through the freedom of information law. I understand that he has been told that there are indeed documents, but they have been denied. And I can’t understand why. We are talking about something that happened 70 years ago and remains unresolved. For now, the only thing I can think of is that the documents have to do with some other country’s role in the assassination that they can’t release or something like that. But, if I were the Colombian government, I would formally request these documents and really make a diplomatic issue of the fact that the United States has documents from the assassination that it has not released.
SERGIO GOMEZ MASERI
TIME CORRESPONDENT
WASHINGTON
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