Publication: Race and Class
Publication Date: 01-JAN-05
Delivery: Immediate Online Access
Author: Webber, Frances
Article Excerpt
The Pinochet File: a declassified dossier on atrocity and accountability By PETER KORNBLUH, National Security Archive (NewYork, The New Press, 2003), 551 pp., cloth, 18.95 [pounds sterling].
The Chile Declassification Project came out of a compromise: the Clinton administration's desire to be seen to be cooperating in the drive to accountability in the wake of the London arrest in October 1998 of senator-for-life Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, versus its reluctance to provide active assistance in any prosecution. It resulted in the release of 24,000 formerly secret documents on Chile, comprising over 150,000 pages, from the US State Department, the White House, the Pentagon, the FBI and eventually, after much prevarication and resistance, from the CIA. This book re-tells the story of the Pinochet years in Chile, and of the involvement of the US in coup preparation and in sustaining Pinochet, with the help of the newly declassified archive.
The declassified documents were meant to cover human rights abuses, terrorism and political violence by Chilean governments from 1968 to 1991. The decision to start in 1968, rather than with the coup in 1973, was motivated by the desire to cover human rights abuses by Allende's regime as well as Pinochet's, but inadvertently opened the door to revelations of US sponsorship of terrorism before and during the Allende administration. By the time of Allende's election victory on 4 September 1970, the US had spent more than $1 billion over twenty years secretly supporting the Christian Democrat government in Chile to prevent just such an occurrence. This long interference created what Kornbluh calls 'an imperial sense of obligation and entitlement', which allowed Nixon to declare that an Allende government was 'unacceptable' and Kissinger to state that 'we set the limits of diversity in Chile'. Within days, the CIA was ordered to prevent Allende from taking office.
The book details, in the first of its eight chapters, the...
NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.
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