On August 25, the Biden Administration made public a pair of previously classified documents related to what President Richard Nixon knew in the days leading up to the 1973 coup d’etat against Chilean President Salvador Allende, a socialist who was democratically elected in 1970. The release of these documents comes just ahead of the fiftieth anniversary of the September 11, 1973, coup and follows a previous set of documents declassified in 2000 by the Clinton Administration.
Gobierno de Chile, CC BY 3.0 CL
Official Portrait of President Gabriel Boric Font, March 2022.
The announcement by the U.S. State Department comes after newly elected Chilean President Gabriel Boric had requested that more documents about the 1973 coup be declassified, a request that has been repeatedly made by the Chilean government and human rights groups for years.
The declassification was praised by officials from Chile.
“[Thanks to] President Biden’s administration for its willingness to accept the request to declassify files related to our country” Gloria de la Fuente, Chile’s undersecretary for foreign relations, said. “Fifty years after the coup d’état, the declassification of archives of this documentation promotes the search for truth and reinforces the commitment of our countries to our democratic values.”
The coup ushered in the seventeen-year-long dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet, and became the first active experiment with neoliberal economics carried out by Milton Friedman and a group of economists from the University of Chicago, using the post-coup environment to implement an extreme economic model.
The most recently declassified “President’s Daily Brief” documents show what information President Nixon had access to as the coup was developing. According to the now declassified briefing from September 11, the coup’s military leaders were said to be “determined to restore political and economic order.” But at the time, it continued, they “may still lack an effectively coordinated plan that would capitalize on the widespread civilian opposition.”
"The briefings are among the most historically iconic of missing records on the September 11, 1973, military coup."—Peter Kornbluh
According to Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive, the briefings “are among the most historically iconic of missing records on the September 11, 1973, military coup because they contained information that went to President Nixon as a military takeover that he and his top advisor Henry Kissinger had encouraged for three years came to fruition.”
For decades, the United States denied its part in the coup against Allende and his Popular Socialist Party’s administration. But in 2000, the CIA finally admitted its role in the human rights abuses carried out by their people in Chile.
“Many of Pinochet’s officers were involved in systematic and widespread human rights abuses,” the CIA admitted in a report published in 2000. “Some of these were contacts or agents of the CIA or U.S. military.”
Ahead of the coup’s anniversary, the Boric administration has launched an initiative to search for individuals who were “disappeared” during the Pinochet dictatorship. The initiative is a part of Boric’s larger plan to address human rights violations during the dictatorship.
Many of those forced disappearances were carried out following the coup d’etat and during the regionally coordinated Operation Condor. The campaign of forced disappearances targeted supporters of Allende, leftists, and other dissidents, a tactic that was later copied across the region, and became all too common in Central America in the 1980s and 1990s. Those targeted were often imprisoned and tortured, and later killed or disappeared.
Razi Sol, CC BY-SA 2.0
Disappeared people represented in artwork at Parque por la Paz at Villa Grimaldi—Santiago, Chile.
In Chile, at least 40,175 people were documented to have been imprisoned, executed, and forcibly disappeared, or tortured due to political leanings. It is estimated that 1,469 people were forcibly disappeared in total.
In recent years, there have been advances in the quest for justice for those affected by crimes against humanity following the Chilean coup. Numerous criminal trials have been held over the past two decades to prosecute perpetrators of crimes committed during Pinochet’s rule.
In August, a Chilean court upheld the conviction of seven soldiers for the torture and murder of famous Chilean folk singer Victor Jara. The two had originally been convicted in 2018.
The crimes of the Pinochet regime have left scars on families, many of whom still do not know what happened to their loved ones.
But the crimes of the Pinochet regime have left scars on families, many of whom still do not know what happened to their loved ones. The opening of efforts to find the missing offers a sense of hope for closure.
“We had the illusion that they were alive, but over the years, we realized they weren’t,” Juana Andreani, a former detainee and friend of a person who was disappeared, told Reuters. “At least they should tell us what happened to them, what was done to them. That is the worst part of these fifty years.”