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After 42 years, crimes of Chile coup perpetrators continue to surface
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by: Emile Schepers
October 22 2015
tags: Chile, world, international, crimes
emilearticle530
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. liked to quote an old abolitionist saying:
"The Arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice."
Both the victims and the perpetrators of the coup d'etat in Chile,
carried out with U.S. support on September 11, 1973, are finding out the
truth of this.
On Oct. 5, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry delivered previously
classified documents to Chilean President Michelle Bachelet that show
that former Chilean diplomat and Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier and
his U.S. assistant, Ronni Moffitt, were murdered on September 21, 1976,
on the direct orders of the dictator of Chile, General Augusto Pinochet
Ugarte. The Institute for Policy Studies, for whom Letelier and
Moffitt worked at the time, issued a statement lauding the release of
this information.
Letelier had been captured during the September 11, 1973 coup against
socialist president Salvador Allende, and tortured. Later he was able
to get to the United States. He was one of thousands who suffered such a
fate; at least 3,000 people-union, student, indigenous and political
activists-were murdered or "disappeared" while hundreds of thousands had
to flee into exile.
Several other exiles were also murdered in countries where they had
sought refuge. The killings were carried out under the aegis of
"Operation Condor," a secret assassination program organized by the
South American right with the connivance of U.S. officials.
These included the former head of the Chilean army, General Carlos Prats
Gonzalez, who was murdered along with his wife in Argentina in 1974.
Former Brazilian president João Goulart, also a leftist, was poisoned by
operatives of Operation Condor in December, 1976 while in exile in
Argentina.
Former Bolivian President Juan José Torres Gonzalez, another leftist who
had been overthrown by a coup in June 1976 was also murdered in Buenos
Aires. There were many more.
Pinochet's chief hit man, DINA (National Intelligence Direction) head
General Manuel Contreras Sepulveda, who died on Aug. 7 of this year
while serving a 529 year prison sentence, arranged these and many other
murderous attacks. He was first convicted for the Letelier - Moffitt
murder in 1993, shortly after the end of the dictatorship. There
followed other indictments.
In 2005, Contreras claimed that he had carried out these murders on the
direct order of Pinochet, with the support of the U.S. Central
Intelligence Agency and using the services of right-wing Cuban exiles in
the United States. Contreras was also a notorious liar, but the newly
declassified materials prove that in this case, he was telling the
truth. The new information suggests that Pinochet, who died in 2006
without ever having been brought to book, was even willing to have
Contreras Sepulveda killed to cover his own tracks.
This has been a bad year for Chile's military murderers. During the
summer, the government of President Bachelet initiated prosecution of
military personnel accused of the 1986 burning death of Rodrigo Rojas, a
photojournalist who had been born in Chile but had moved to Washington
D.C. with his family.
Rojas had returned to Chile and had been photographing an anti-Pinochet
demonstration when he was captured, doused with gasoline and then burned
to death, allegedly on the orders of army Lieutenant Julio Castañer, who
is now on trial.
And in July of this year prosecution also advanced for the murderers of
singer-songwriter Victor Jara, killed in the days immediately following
the 1973 coup. The killing of Jara, a member of the Chilean Communist
Party, was exceptionally sadistic. His tormentors smashed his hands,
sneering that he would not be able to play his guitar again, before
riddling him with bullets.
Judge Miguel Velazquez formally charged three former army
officers-Hernan Chancon Soto, Patricio Vazquez Donoso and Ramon Melo
Silva-in the Jara murder case, with more to come. However, Jara's
family is trying to go after another former army officer, Lieutenant
Pedro Barrientos Nuñez, a U.S. citizen who lives in the United States,
via a civil suit in U.S. courts. So far efforts to get him extradited
to Chile have not succeeded.
So the arc of the moral universe is bending toward justice, but needs to
bend a lot more. The Chilean government has been trying to get
parliament to pass a law abolishing an amnesty that Pinochet got
approved in 1978 to shield his henchmen and himself from prosecution.
What did certain U.S. leaders know, and when did they know it? That
former Secretary of State George Schulz and President Ronald Reagan knew
as early as 1982 that Pinochet had ordered the killing of Letelier, is
revealed by the new documents. But Letelier and Moffitt and many others
were murdered during the Nixon administration, which had an obvious hand
in the Pinochet coup and Operation Condor.
Dr. Henry Kissinger, who had been Nixon's National Security Advisor at
the time of the 1973 coup, was Secretary of State from 1972-1977, the
two roles overlapping for a while. According to a 2015 book by Greg
Grandin, professor of History at New York University, Kissinger had
known about Operation Condor and had been warned by Assistant Secretary
of State Harry Shlauderman that murders of exiled Chilean leaders were
being planned.
Kissinger then drafted a warning to the Pinochet government against such
murders. But then, writes Grandin, Kissinger withdrew the memorandum
before it could be delivered. Five days later Letelier and Moffitt were
murdered in the middle of Embassy Row in Washington D.C. (Grandin,
Greg, 2015: Kissinger's Shadow: The Long Reach of America's Most
Controversial Statesman. New York, Henry Holt, pp. 151 - 152).
U.S. citizen Michael Townley, who had hired the team of Cuban exile
assassins who actually planted the bomb under Letelier's car, was
allowed to go into a federal witness protection program after serving 62
months in prison. According to some reports, Orlando Bosch and Luis
Posada Carriles, Cuban exile leaders and former C.I.A. operatives with
known terroristic backgrounds, were in on the planning. Bosch died in
2011 but Posada lives openly in Miami Florida.
Chile's murderers and terrorists are belatedly being made accountable.
How about our own?
Photo: Marcos Orlando Letelier del Solar (April 13, 1932 - Sept. 21,
1976), assassinated in Washington D.C. by agents of DINA, the Pinochet
regime's secret police, in 1976. | Wikipedia (CC)
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