Fifty Years Ago: Chile, September 11, 1973: The Ingredients of a Military Coup

Fifty Years Ago: Chile, September 11, 1973: The Ingredients of a Military Coup

By Prof Michel Chossudovsky

Global Research, September 08, 2023

Global Research. Unpublished Paper written in September, 1973 11 September 2003

Region: Latin America & Caribbean

Theme: Global Economy, History

We are commemorating September 11, 2001 as well as September 11, 1973 (Fifty years ago) 

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Half a century ago on September 11, 1973, the Chilean military led by General Augusto Pinochet, crushed the democratically elected Unidad Popular government of Salvador Allende.

The objective was to replace a progressive, democratically elected government by a brutal military dictatorship.

The military coup was supported by the CIA. Secretary of State Henry Kissinger played a direct role in the military plot.1

In the weeks leading up to the coup, US Ambassador Nathaniel Davis and members of the CIA held meetings with Chile’s top military brass together with the leaders of the National Party and the ultra-right nationalist front Patria y Libertad.  While the undercover role of the Nixon administration is amply documented,  what is rarely mentioned in media reports is the fact that the military coup was also supported by a sector of the Christian Democratic Party.

Patricio Aylwin, who was elected Chile’s president in 1989,  became head of the DC party in the months leading up to the September 1973 military coup (March through September 1973). Aylwin was largely instrumental in the break down of the “Dialogue” between the Unidad Popular government and the Christian Democrats. His predecessor Renan Fuentealba, who represented the moderate wing of the Christian Democratic Party (PDC), was firmly against military intervention. Fuentealba favored a dialogue with Allende (la salida democratica). He was displaced from the leadership of the Party in May 1973 in favor of Patricio Aylwin.

The DC Party was split down the middle, between those who favored “the salida democratica”, and the dominant Aylwin-Frei faction, which favored “a military solution”. 2 

On 23 August, the Chilean Camera de Diputados drafted a motion,  to the effect that the Allende government “sought to impose a totalitarian regime”. Patricio Aylwin was a member of the drafting team of this motion. Patricio Aylwin believed that a temporary military dictatorship was “the lesser of two evils.”3

This motion was adopted almost unanimously by the opposition parties, including the DC, the Partido Nacional and the PIR ( Radical Left).

The leadership of the Christian Democratic Party including former Chilean president Eduardo Frei, had given a green light to the Military. Unquestionably, US intelligence must have played an undercover role in the change of leadership in the PDC.

And continuity in the “Chilean Model” heralded as an “economic success story” was ensured when, 16 years later, Patricio Aylwin was elected president of Chile in the so-called transition to democracy in 1989.

At the time of the September 11 coup, I was Visiting Professor of Economics at the Catholic University of Chile (Instituto de Economia, Universidad Catolica de Chile). In the hours following the bombing of the Presidential Palace of La Moneda, the new military rulers imposed a 72-hour curfew.

When the university reopened several days later, I started patching together the history of the coup from written notes. I had lived through the tragic events of September 11, 1973 as well as the failed June 29, 1973 coup. Several of my students at the Universidad Catolica had been arrested by the military Junta.

In the days following the military takeover,  I started going through piles of documents and newspaper clippings, which I had collected on a daily basis since my arrival in Chile in early 1973. A large part of this material, however, was lost and destroyed by my research assistant, fearing political reprisals in the days following the coup.

This unpublished article (below) was written 50 years ago (see below). It was drafted on an old typewriter in the weeks following September 11, 1973.

 

Leaked Report: US-Backed Pinochet Dictatorship had High-Level Ties to Child-Torturing Ex-Nazi’s Fortified Cult

There’s a headline for you. Yet the terms come from a Yahoo News report, which seems to be fairly well buried, as it only has one comment. And, crucially, the report makes no mention whatsoever of the US support that brought Pinochet into power and kept him propped up for almost two decades. Schaefer But it does say that an ex-Nazi, Paul Schaefer, founded a German outpost in Chile called Colonia Dignidad, which was built up into a fortified, sub-state like entity, and that he ran it as a “cult”, “lord[ing] over [it] with sadistic brutality” and using the enclave for “sexually abusing and torturing children” and others. The colony consisted of 32,000 acres, and was home to “300 refugees from Nazi Germany and their descendants.” Pinochet According to the leaked report, there was “a close relationship between Colonia Dignidad’s leaders and high-ranking figures” in the US-backed Pinochet dictatorship. The close relationship between the US and Pinochet, which goes unmentioned in Yahoo’s coverage, is so well known that even CIA-edited Wikipedia provides an adequate summary, with a separate section on the 1973 coup, which brought Pinochet to power, titled “US Involvement“. The US began working against the mild leftist Allende movement in Chile in 1958, and on 9/11/1973 played a crucial role in overthrowing Allende, who had been elected president, and installing the fascist Pinochet military dictatorship, which went on to kill and/or torture tens of thousands. The US stated internally at the time that “[t]he U.S. has no vital national interests within Chile… The world military balance of power would not be significantly altered by an Allende government.” But Allende, a medical doctor, was “trying to deliver food, health care, and education to the poor”, giving free milk to children, “advocat[ing] income redistribution to the poor, expand[ing] trade with the Soviet Bloc, and, most worrisome, nationaliz[ing] Chile’s powerful mining corporations.” As Bob Harris puts it, “Wall Street was about to lose a few bucks”, so the game was on, and the first 9/11, a US terrorist operation to install a totalitarian state harsh enough to ally with Nazi child-torturers, was imminent, even if, as Yahoo and many in the US might prefer, unmentionable. Author focuses on force dynamics, national and global, and also writes professionally for the film industry. Contact on Twitter. - See more at: http://www.empireslayer.org/2015/10/leaked-report-us-backed-pinochet.html#sthash.VYIsMoHT.dpuf

Note:  Source empireslayer.org