11 September 2003

Today marks the 30th anniversary of the overthrow of the democratically elected regime of Salvador Allende in Chile. Allende had been a self-avowed Marxist, which meant his reign was unacceptable to the Cold Warriors ruling Washington, Henry Kissinger in particular. Thus the administration and CIA authorized considerable aid to a junta of Chilean generals led by Augusto Pinochet and charged them with removing loyal generals and the democratic regime of Allende. On 11 September 1973, the military leaders backed by Washington launched an all-out assault on the government and stormed the presidential palace where Allende, along with Chilean democracy, died.

In its stead came the military dictatorship of Pinochet. During the junta's 17 years in power, a campaign of systematic terror and torture targeted Chileans for their past associations with the socialist era of Allende, or those who had the courage to speak out against the dictatorship's human rights abuses. More than 3,000 people were killed simply for their allegiance to democratic socialism or their dissidence against the junta's atrocities.

All this occurred with the active complicity of Washington. As early as October 1970, the CIA began plotting Allende's ouster. The U.S. intelligence community proposed a campaign of terrorism that included bombings to shock the Chilean population into welcoming military rule (sort of like how the Reichstag fire in 1933 spared the Nazi regime from staging a similar incident to create the climate of emergency that enabled Hitler to assume unchecked dictatorial power). Political opponents of Allende and the Chilean left wing received heavy funding. Small arms went to the government's internal foes. And if that weren't enough, the CIA helped organize the entire coup.

Once in power, the junta continued to receive U.S. support to prop up its dictatorship. Even when the rest of the world became aware of the extent of the torture and executions perpetrated by the Pinochet regime, the U.S. government continued to ingratiate the junta with international business circles.

Today will be remembered in this country, and most of the world outside Latin America, as the second anniversary of the hijackings of four U.S. airliners on the East Coast and the devastation they wrought. 11 September 2001 pierced the sanctity and violated the innocence of a nation. So we thought. But few Americans are cognizant of the effects 11 September 1973 had on another nation. They wondered aloud, "Why us?" without grasping the reasons that seem so obvious to observers in the so-called Third World. What happened in Chile was part of the pattern of U.S. foreign policy in the past 200 years. It was a cornerstone of U.S. policy in Latin America in the 20th century. It's why, when 11 September 2001 occurred, one of the leading figures of Argentina's Mothers of the Disappeared took a sort of morbid glee, because America had reaped the fruits of its own terror.

I don't mean to diminish the human toll of 11 September 2001. But while you remember the lives lost in New York, Washington, D.C., and Western Pennsylvania two years ago, take a moment to remember what happened in the Chilean capital 30 years before. 11 September 2001 will become an even greater tragedy if America fails to gain the perspective from to understand that terrorism doesn't occur because the terrorists hate us for our freedom; it occurs because we deny people the world over of those much-ballyhooed freedoms.