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On September 15, 1970, during a 20-minute meeting, the President of the United States, Richard Nixon, gave the order to prevent the elected socialist leader of Chile, Salvador Allende, assumed power, according to documents published Tuesday by the National Security Archive center.
“The Extreme Option: overthrow Allende” The title is this set of declassified reports, which are the annex to a national security study that analyzed the assumptions, advantages and disadvantages of a military coup in Chile. They can be accessed through the website of the US Secretary of State.
This “roadmap”, which ended with the coup on September 11, 1973, was completed in mid-August 1970, that is, before Allende’s electoral triumph.
The file includes memoranda from the officials involved. “No matter (the) risks involved,” then-CIA director Richard Helms noted after meeting with Nixon on September 15. And he also noted: “I work full time, with the best men we have” and “make the economy scream” From Chile.
Helms’s Cryptic Memo on the Conversation with Nixon it remains the only record of a US president ordering a covert coup to defeat an elected leader “said that Washington-based research center
The documents selected prior to the meeting trace the “genesis of this presidential directive.”
“These documents outline a roadmap for the coup planned by the United States,” said Peter Kornbluh, who directs the documentation project on Chile and is the author of the book “Pinochet: the secret files”.
The researcher indicated that the September 15 meeting in the Oval Office marks “the first major step to undermine democracy in Chile and support the advent of a military dictatorship.”
Opposition in the State Department
After Allende’s election, on September 4, 1970, the United States debated between two scenarios. One was “The Frei formula”, that he was counting on the former president of Chile, Eduardo Frei “to handle the coup.”
This option was scrapped as the embassy and the CIA concluded that they could not count on Frei.
The alternative was the “Formula of chaos” to create a “coup climate” and give the army the pretext to seize power, according to the National Security Archives.
“A significant number of CIA agents, embassy and State Department personnel” opposed the plans, noted the National Security Archive.
Officials called the plan “unrealistic, prone to failure, and diplomatically dangerous, and noted that the risks of exposure outweighed the potential gains for US interests.”
The Latin American division of the State Department formally opposed the overthrow of Allende, stating that “exposure to an unsuccessful coup would imply a prohibitively high cost for relations with Chile, the Hemisphere, and the rest of the world.”
Even the White House National Security Advisor’s own advisers, Henry Kissinger, they expressed reluctance.
The ambassador in Santiago, Edward korryHe warned that he was “convinced” that they could provoke a coup and that there should be no risk of having “another Bay of Pigs” in relation to the failed invasion of Cuba.
“What we propose is a patent violation of our own principles”, Kissinger’s deputy Viron Vaky pointed out.
Kornbluh told Agence France-Presse that “these documents provide a cumulative paper trail that exposes one of the most shameful and discredited operations in the annals of US foreign policy, the promotion of a preventive coup in Chile.”
“These documents are a stark and painful reminder that attempting regime change is an illegitimate, costly and counterproductive goal,” Kornbluh concluded.
The overthrow of Allende, who died besieged in a burning La Moneda palace after air force bombings on the day of the coup, gave way to 17 years of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship, which left more than 3,200 dead and missing.
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