Noticing my nonappearance at the start of a black-tie dinner at the Johannesburg home of Harry Oppenheimer, a mining magnate and Africa’s richest man, the host assumed I was boycotting the event on principle. It was a reasonable assumption: I was the Chilean ambassador to South Africa, and Henry Kissinger was the chief guest.
By then, a quarter century had passed since the military coup that toppled the democratically elected Chilean President Salvador Allende – an event that gave rise to Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s brutal 17-year-long military dictatorship – but the issue still lingered. Many Chileans bitterly remembered the role of the U.S. government, and of Kissinger in particular, in the breakdown of Chilean democracy.
It was something Kissinger himself acknowledged during that dinner – which I did attend, just late due to encountering a hailstorm. Kissinger explained that he always declined invitations to visit my home country out of fear over what “Allende Chileans” would do to him.
Plenty of Chileans still despise Kissinger. On news of his death at the age of 100 on Nov. 29, 2023, Juan Gabriel Valdes, Chile’s ambassador to the U.S., summed up that sentiment when he posted in Spanish on X, the platform previously known as Twitter: “A man has died whose historical brilliance never managed to conceal his profound moral misery.”
It’s hard to overestimate the role Kissinger played in Chile. As national security adviser and secretary of state during the Nixon and Ford administrations, he oversaw policies that helped install and then prop up a dictator.
Chile’s 1973 coup
Upon Allende’s election on Sept. 4, 1970, Kissinger became obsessed with blocking his inauguration. The measures approved by Kissinger included a botched kidnapping attempt of Chilean Army Chief René Schneider, engineered by the Central Intelligence Agency, that ended with the general’s assassination.
Kissinger insisted on a hard line with the Allende administration. He did everything possible to make the “Chilean road to socialism” fail, among other things, by “making the economy scream,” as President Richard Nixon put it.
After a meeting with Kissinger in November 1970, a CIA cable to its station in Santiago stated that “it is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown in a coup.”
Not content with having helped to topple Allende, Kissinger then wholeheartedly supported Pinochet’s regime.
When the U.S. ambassador to Chile relayed his efforts to persuade the military to act less brutally against political prisoners, Kissinger wrote on the margins of the cable, “… cut out the political science lectures.” At a 1976 Organization of American States meeting in Santiago, far from urging Pinochet to tone down his regime’s repression, as some of Kissinger’s staff had recommended he do, he told the general, “we want to help, not undermine you.”
Operation Condor
Kissinger’s support for repressive military dictatorships extended beyond Chile’s borders.
Noticing my nonappearance at the start of a black-tie dinner at the Johannesburg home of Harry Oppenheimer, a mining magnate and Africa’s richest man, the host assumed I was boycotting the event on principle. It was a reasonable assumption: I was the Chilean ambassador to South Africa, and Henry Kissinger was the chief guest.
By then, a quarter century had passed since the military coup that toppled the democratically elected Chilean President Salvador Allende – an event that gave rise to Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s brutal 17-year-long military dictatorship – but the issue still lingered. Many Chileans bitterly remembered the role of the U.S. government, and of Kissinger in particular, in the breakdown of Chilean democracy.
It was something Kissinger himself acknowledged during that dinner – which I did attend, just late due to encountering a hailstorm. Kissinger explained that he always declined invitations to visit my home country out of fear over what “Allende Chileans” would do to him.
Plenty of Chileans still despise Kissinger. On news of his death at the age of 100 on Nov. 29, 2023, Juan Gabriel Valdes, Chile’s ambassador to the U.S., summed up that sentiment when he posted in Spanish on X, the platform previously known as Twitter: “A man has died whose historical brilliance never managed to conceal his profound moral misery.”
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