Chile 1973, the OTHER 9/11 -- not America's finest hour. (somewhat long)

Great Debates
41

I see. So, it is OK for the US government to ignore and even promote and support human rights abuses in Chile, including torture and killings, if that serves the narrow interests of a few corporations even at the expense of the Chilean people. . . but the USA had no other option but to invade Iraq to stop human rights abuses. . . and protect the narrow interests of a few corporations. I think I am beginning to see the common thread here.

So what is wrong or immoral with other people believing it is OK to kill Americans if it furthers their own interests? Why are Americans not subject to the same rules of the game?

42

Diferent time, different morality. Governments play only by the rules of neccessity. We’re better now.

The Cold War was a time of slow panic. there was more than mre panaoia here: the Reds pretty much came out and said they wanted to crush us like insects, and possibly kill us. At the time, we figured a few hundred thousand killed by their own sucky leadership was better than millions dead if the Communists really took over in force. In somecases we were wrong. But look at North Korea and Cambodia and China and Russia and, yes, Cuba. Every one of these states has seen mass death and/or political persecution to make Pinochet look like a Piker. (Not that the left’s ignorant love affair with Cuba will let them admit it).

Yeah, he was a bad man, and an evil one. They were evil times. Yes, I say, better to have Pinochet in power in Chile than to see the Communists slowly gobble up the world.

We might have been wrong about what would have happened. But hindsight, as they say, is 20/20. Which is not true, since people always take their own biases, and time is one of these. The world changed a lot in the last 30 years.

43

There is an old “saying” that there have been no military coups in Washington DC because there arent any US embassies there.

Even indirect support of a coup from the USA is a lot of incentive to all sorts of power hungry rightwingers.

44

The US’s foreign interest at that time lay mainly in protecting American markets, maintaining access to important resources, establishing a military presence around the world, and stopping the expansion of Marxism.

Whether a country was democratic or not, whether a country protected the rights of its citizens or not, and in general, our interest in the internal affairs of a country, so long as that didn’t interfere with our main interests, was secondary.

45

Except U.S. Presidents in particular have a long track record of saying that the U.S. is a freedom-loving country that wants to see the spread of liberty and democracy world-wide, because that is the best guarantee of international peace (a sentiment I strongly agree with, BTW). See any recent speech by GWB, but it’s a common theme in presidential speeches on foreign affairs.

In the long run, I would suggest that such a narrow view of U.S. interests is extremely counter-productive.
If your analysis is the correct one, that the foundation of U.S. foreign affairs is simply to protect U.S. economic interests and to hell with democracy worldwide, then your statement suggests a very high level of hypocrisy within your government. It also would suggest to me that other countries are right to be highly suspicious of U.S. motives in foreign affairs, most particularly when the US leadership is talking about liberty and democracy.

46

I was wrong on this particular point. Yesterday’s edition of the Los Angeles Times (9/11/03) has a front-page story on Chile today, and it seems that at least some of the murderers and torturers are paying for their crimes. But not Pinochet himself, who has been excused from standing trial because he suffers from “dementia.”

" In Chile, a handful of former “repressors” have been convicted in the last two years and are serving prison sentences. Before then, officers had been tried in only one prominent case, the 1976 assassination in Washington of Orlando Letelier, Allende’s exiled defense minister.
Gen. Manuel Contreras, head of Pinochet’s secret police, who was found guilty in 1993 by a Chilean court of ordering Letelier’s assassination, was arrested again this year on new charges.
….
Several prominent officers have been convicted, dozens of ex-soldiers and security agents are in custody, and about 200 other military men are facing charges, while hundreds more cases remain dormant."

After the return of electoral democracy, Chileans did go through a period of denial, but slowly and surely they are gaining the courage to come to terms with their past. This year’s September 11th marked the first time that Allende has been publicly honored.

However, the fact remains that America has not distinguished itself in pursuing justice for the murderers of at least three American citizens.

There has been a lot of hair-splitting in this thread about America’s exact role in what happened. I regard the following as incontrovertible – and all of the basic elements have been referenced in this very thread:

*The CIA attempted to overthrow the democratically elected Chilean government on at least one occasion. It does not matter that the first attempt failed.

*Nixon and Kissinger decided to destabilize Chile economically while continuing to support Chile’s military, setting in motion the conditions that would lead inexorably to a coup. “Make the economy scream.”

*American intelligence was in touch with the coup plotters.

*American intelligence, and probably the US Embassy in Santiago, had foreknowledge of the coup and made no effort to protect either Americans or Chileans.

*(Marc Cooper’s memoir says that the Embassy was malignly negligent in its lack of concern for Americans like him who were in danger for their lives. His own life was in fact saved by a renegade Embassy employee who was acting against orders, and who later resigned from the Foreign Service. Rent the movie Missing!)

*Even after the revelations of mass murder and sick, twisted torture came to light – even after it was revealed that Americans and Europeans had been tortured and killed – the American Administration continued to support the sick rapists and murderers who now ran Chile.

*(Did I mention that children were also executed?)

*Succeeding American administrations have not pursued the authors of the Letelier murder, nor their ultimate boss, Augusto Pinochet.

All of this is known. Whether or not the CIA “ordered” the 1973 coup is trivial. The US government wanted the coup, provoked the coup with destabilizing acts, knew about the coup beforehand and gave aid and comfort to the coup plotters afterwards. This would be enough in any court to convict someone for aiding and abetting murder and mayhem. In fact, a court trial for murder would be an appropriate fate for several American officials, starting with Mr. Kissinger.

I really cannot say much that has not been said already about Captain Amazing’s depressingly jaded Realpolitik, except that it saddens me, it does not represent what most Americans would like to think about their country, and, as sailor so aptly pointed out, it does not set a good precedent for the future treatment of American citizens by other countries.

Such a cynical, immoral point of view does not serve GW Bush very well when he talks about how free and good and moral we are compared to our evil and vicious enemies. Many otherwise liberal Americans were persuaded to support the war when they heard about Saddam’s atrocities, the human meat grinders and so on. What does it do to our sense of mission if we know that we are fighting against one set of murderers, rapists and torturers while supporting another set of murderers, rapists and torturers?

What, in the end, is America all about?

Are we just another country, with “interests”?

And if we are, why the hell should anyone fight for us? Or love us?

47

We’re better now? Tell that to the people being held in Guantánamo. Even in the paranoia of MacCarthyism people were not imprisoned indefinitely without due process of law.

48

Well, it’s always smart to be suspicious of U.S. motives in foreign affairs when the leadership is talking about liberty and democracy. :slight_smile:

More seriously, U.S. foreign policy goals during the cold war weren’t really hypocritical, and I’d say that protection of economic interests wasn’t the main goal (but it was a major one).

The main goal of US foreign policy during the Cold War was stopping the spread of communism, and American foreign policy experts saw Communism as the greatest threat to both US interests and to the world. This led us to oppose Communists (or the people who we thought were Communists) everywhere, and back anti-Communists (or the people who said they were anti-Communist) everywhere, regardless of their domestic policies.

So, in Chile, what you had was Allende, elected as a Marxist candidate, talking about nationalization, and making friendly overtures to Cuba and the Soviet Union. He therefore is seen by the US government as a wedge…the Communists will make a beachhead in Chile, communize the country, and then spread Communism throughout all of South America.

Then, when Allende is overthrown, and Pinochet comes in, the U.S. finds himself almost forced to back him, and then when he commits a human rights violation, he says to the U.S., “I’m just fighting the Communists. If I’m not brutal fighting against them, they’ll be another Allende, another Castro, another Lenin”. And then the US has to back him, because however much we don’t approve of what he’s doing, if he’s gone, the Communists will take over. He’s therefore the lesser of two evils. From the American cold war lense, Allende is a greater threat to human rights and democracy than Pinochet is, even though Pinochet, by his actions is less democratic and more violative of human rights.

And you see that pattern repeated throughout the cold war…in Guatamala, in Nicaragua under Somoza, in El Salvador, in Iran, in South Vietnam, the Phillipines, etc. And on the one hand, you say “Well, this is just the United States interfering in these countries, and protecting their business interests”, like Roger Mexico did, talking about ITT and corporate fascism, and in a sense you’d be right. But that’s not all it is. It’s also Chile, or El Salvador, or fill in the blank, manipulating the United States. Because they played on our (real, in many cases…the Soviets were trying to destablize these countries) fear of Communist revolution, we found ourselves backing regimes we didn’t like and whose human rights records we knew to be appalling.

In short, it’s not that we were cynical, using talk about democracy to cover our economic interests…it was that we were naive, and so paranoid about Communism, that we could be led by the nose.

49

Oh, I know all about the “fighting communisim” stuff. But let’s go back a step: why were the western nations fighting communism? Because that system denied individual rights, denied democracy, had atrocious human rights values (like the Gulags) - in short, were dictatorships that were fundamentally opposed to the values of the western liberal democracies. That’s what provided the moral basis for the western nations’ opposition to the communist system.

And to further that goal, the CIA subverted a democratically elected, constitutional government and encouraged a military coup. Once the military was in power, cancelling elections, undermining the rule of law and independent courts, killing and “disappearing” its own citizens, the U.S. continued to support it.

Where’s the moral authority in that? The goal of western nations should be to encourage the spread of democracy generally, not to substitute a nasty military junta for a democratically elected government.

50

There’s no law that says we have to give them anything. I any event, I didn’t say we were better now; I said that the morality of any era is determined by the politics of it. What is right and wrong for an government is often different from good and bad.

51

Hey… if the U.S. is going to start wars and overthrow government for money, that’s fine by me, as long as we’re all honest about it. No more of this “We’re doing this for the Iraqi people” crap and such. Let’s have it out in the open.

52

Well, no, you’re right, but I think the answer to that would be that, while Allende got elected democratically in a constitutional government, if he had stayed in power, the government would have become a communist dictatorship. (whether that’s true or not, the US believed it to be true.)

The other alternative the US saw was Pinochet, who at least was a US ally, and who, the US thought, could be pressured toward democracy. (Like Roosevelt said about Spinoza, “He may be a son of a bitch, but at least he’s our son of a bitch”)

So it turns into a lesser of two evils question…do you want a Soviet backed Communist dictatorship, or a friendly military dictatorship?

53

Well, gosh, don’t complain if the Islamic terrorist come and kill your neighbours, Captain. After all, for them, it’s just the lesser of two evils; do they want a capitalist-imperialist-Zionist-Great Satan dictatorship, or do they want an Islamic dictatorship? If the ends justify the means, don’t be surprised when other people sink to your level.

54

I think you meant Somoza. Spinoza was an ethical son of a bitch who died in 1677. :slight_smile:

55

Somoza, Spinoza, whatever. Leave me alone, it’s Friday and my brain is taking a long weekend. :slight_smile:

And Rickjay, if you think my explanation of the reasons behind American foreign policy during the cold war is wrong, please let me know.

And please note that I’m not saying the US’s mindset was rational. In a lot of ways we were fundamentally irrational. We elevated the Soviet threat beyond its reality, we overestimated both the unity between and the internal strength of the communist countries, we tried to force all world events into a US-Soviet Cold War framework, even when they didn’t fit very well, and we provided aid to a lot of pretty nasty people based on their claims that they were fighting against Communism.

56

Captain Amazing, except, we had been interfering in Latin America long before communism was ever a threat.

If anything, supporting thugs like Somoza and Pinochet only made it more likely that these people would turn to communism.

57

Oh, and Allende actually refused several times to declare marshal law, even though he would have been perfectly justified, and was pretty much signing his own death warrant.

Seems he WAS committed to democracy. D’oh!

Nor was he herding people into soccer stadiums and mowing them down.

58

Not that I have anything interesting to add to this debate, but another good resource to look at is The Last Two Years of Salvador Allende, by Nathaniel Davis (who was the U.S. ambassador in Chile during those two years.)

(I finally see a debate that I might know something about, and my points have already been made!:frowning: )