Days before Salvador Allende’s confirmation as Chile’s president in 1970, US President Richard Nixon met with a rightwing Chilean media mogul to discuss blocking the socialist leader’s path to the presidency, newly declassified documents have revealed.
The documents, published in a new Spanish edition of the Pinochet files by archivist and writer Peter Kornbluh, include Nixon’s agenda for 15 September 1970, which shows a meeting in the Oval Office with Agustín Edwards, the owner of the conservative El Mercurio media group.
A day earlier, Edwards had met CIA director Richard Helms. Notes from that conversation detail the media baron’s observations on various members of the military, prompting Nixon to request a “gameplan” for a coup that would prevent Allende’s inauguration.
Allende had won a slender victory over rival Jorge Alessandri in presidential elections, but with no clear majority, the electoral system at the time required congress to ratify the candidate who would form a government.
In secret, and with the support of President Nixon’s White House, a plan was hatched for the military to seize power, dissolve congress and block Allende’s inauguration.
Alongside munitions and payments, Edwards conveyed the military’s demands for “clear and specific guarantees” as well as “assurances they would not be abandoned and ostracized”, according to a memorandum entitled “Conversation with Agustín Edwards, Owner of El Mercurio Chilean Newspaper Chain, 18 September 1970”, which had previously been heavily redacted.
“It is incredible that, 50 years later, we’re still learning key details of how the US were trying to block, thwart, undermine and destabilise the first elected socialist president in Chile,” said Kornbluh.
“Chile is one of the most infamous CIA covert operations, and one where you have an explicit link to the president of the United States ordering that you overthrow a democratically elected government. These documents remind us of the malevolence of US foreign policy in Chile.”
After the meetings in Washington, the CIA provided one of the conspirators with a life-insurance policy and “hush money”, while another received guns, ammunition and $50,000 in cash to carry out the plot, which involved the kidnap of General René Schneider, the then head of the Chilean armed forces, who was considered loyal to the constitution.
The attempt was botched and Gen Schneider died three days later of the gunshot wounds he sustained when his car was ambushed on 22 October 1970.
Transcripts of a telephone call Nixon made to his national security adviser Henry Kissinger the following day are also among the revelations, during which Kissinger confesses that “it’s probably too late” to prevent an Allende government, and dismisses the Chilean armed forces as a “pretty incompetent bunch”.
“Neither one of them showed any remorse that General Schneider was dying,” explained Kornbluh. “What they were pissed off about was that the Chilean military hadn’t carried out the plot that had been scripted.”
The incident went some way toward galvanising public support in favour of Allende, and Chile’s congress duly ratified his presidency in a vote on 24 October.
After Allende’s inauguration, Edwards’s paper, El Mercurio, and the CIA worked continuously to undermine Allende’s government. On 11 September 1973, Augusto Pinochet launched a bloody coup d’etat, in which thousands died – including Allende – and ushered in 17 years of military rule.
Ahead of the 50th anniversary of the coup, Chile’s current president, Gabriel Boric, has requested Joe Biden’s government for more information on US involvement in the plot.
Juan Gabriel Valdés, Boric’s ambassador in Washington, has formally asked President Biden to release documents detailing Oval Office conversations on Chile between 1973 and 1974.
Many records from the time remain classified or redacted and the bitter legacy of the dictatorship continues to divide Chile.
But while the trickle of declassified documents and revelations has edged Chile closer to understanding the US role in bringing down Allende, concerted efforts to conceal facts have made it unlikely that a complete picture will ever be formed, said historian Antonia Fonck.
“I’m not sure that we’re ever going to find a comprehensive ‘truth’, given the amount of information that was burned or has been lost,” said Fonck, the author of Miradas Desclasificadas, a book about Allende’s government through the lens of US documents.
Boric, 37, and a generation of student activists turned politicians are adamant that the dictatorship needs to be fully reckoned with and condemned.
But on the right, many remain loyal to Pinochet. On the 49th anniversary of the coup last year, the twice-defeated far-right presidential candidate José Antonio Kast tweeted that Chile had “chosen freedom” in the military coup.
