Contempt in Latin America for US policies that led to brutal regimes

John Bartlett - Santiago 

Uki Goñi - Buenos Aires 

Julian Borger - Washington

1 Dec 2023 - The Guardian

Henry Kissinger’s death has brought out some bitter epitaphs from Latin America where the legacy of US intervention helped saddle the region with some of the most brutal military regimes of the 20th century.

Nowhere has been the reaction been more damning than in Chile, where Kissinger was instrumental in the 1973 coup that led to the death of the democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende, and the installation of a dictator, Gen. Augusto Pinochet, and his military junta.

Kissinger was a man “whose historical brilliance was never able to conceal his profound moral wretchedness,” wrote Juan Gabriel Valdes, Chile’s ambassador in the US, on X, formerly Twitter.

The coup was seen a major victory by Richard Nixon’s White House, but it marked the start of 17 years of autocracy in Chile.

“Henry Kissinger was an incredibly important figure in the breakdown of Chile’s constitutional order,” said the historian Gabriel Salazar. “He provoked the downfall of [Allende’s] developmental policies, and then the installation of the neoliberal economic model which is still in place today — that’s why we associate Kissinger with Pinochet here in Chile.”

Kissinger’s influence in Latin America spread far beyond Chile. He played a role in Operation Condor, which linked the military regimes in an intelligence-sharing network to hunt down leftwing dissidents.

“Henry Kissinger did not believe in the sanctity of self-determination. He didn’t believe in the sanctity of sovereignty for Latin American nations or the smaller nations of the third world. He believed in superpower might makes right – realpolitik,” said Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst at the National Security Archive in Washington, which pressured the US government into declassifying Kissinger’s voluminous records. The veteran statesman did not want them made public until five years after his death.

“He didn’t believe in the safety of human rights either, which led him to embrace repressive authoritarian regimes as strategic chess pieces in the global chessboard of the cold war,” Kornbluh added.

“Latin America was – for the arrogant policymakers of whom Kissinger was the top dog – our backyard. If we did not have control of what happened in our sphere of influence, Kissinger’s argument went, the rest of the world would not take our exercise of power seriously further away.”

Myriam Bregman, a lawyer in Argentina’s ongoing human rights trials and a candidate for the leftwing FIT party (Leftist and Workers Front) during Argentina’s presidential elections this year described Kissinger’s legacy as “tragic”.

“Encouraging coups d’état in the region, justifying them, being aware that these coups implied a genocide against workers and students,” she said.

Miriam Lewin, a survivor of the ESMA death camp that was close by the River Plate stadium where Kissinger attended matches, said: “His trip to Argentina during the 1978 World Cup leaves no doubt regarding his support for these dictatorships. I could hear the cheering when goals were scored, from inside the concentration camp.”

The files published by the NSA make clear Kissinger’s central role in the Chilean coup. In 1970, he warned Nixon Chile could become the “worst failure” of his administration and that it might develop into “our Cuba” without US intervention. He chaired the committee that oversaw CIA operations to undermine the Allende government.

“I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,” he said. “The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”

Eventually, the Chilean military did step in, surrounding the presidential residence, where Allende died, apparently by suicide. Many of the soldiers involved in the putsch had been paid by the CIA.