The First 9/11

Text I wrote for a facebook group. Here:
http://www.facebook.com/s.php?ref=search&sid=f099f67783b8a9b8bdbb542533c7cd93&init=q&q=noam%20chomsky#/group.php?gid=34855644828

Remember, Remember the 11th September - 1973 Chile

For those who don’t know, this was the day Chile’s democratically elected government was overthrown by a military coup with CIA assistance and replaced with the Pinochet dictatorship.

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THE STORY:

Dr Salvador Allende, a symbol of hope across South America was elected president of Chile in 1970. A social democrat in the style of the old school British labour party, he brought social programmes to alleviate the grinding poverty and widespread malnutrition faced by Chileans. He also promised a policy of independence from foreign governments.

The example this might set, a third world country successfully developing and improving the lives of its people by taking an independent course, was unacceptable to the United States. CIA director Richard Helms told his staff "The President asked the Agency to prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him.”(1).
On October 16, a secret cable from CIA headquarters to the CIA station chief in Santiago, read: "It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup... prior to October 24. But efforts in this regard will continue vigorously beyond this date. We are to continue to generate maximum pressure toward this end utilizing every appropriate resource."(2)
Edward Korry, the US ambassador to Chile described his job as follows: “not a nut or bolt will be allowed to reach Chile under Allende. Once Allende comes to power we shall do all within our power to condemn Chile and the Chileans to utmost deprivation and poverty”(3).
The next CIA director Wiliam Colby described the US campaign against Chile as a “prototype laboratory experiment to test the techniques of heavy financial investment in an effort to discredit and bring down a government”(4).

Despite this hostility, the US govt massively increased military aid to Chile in an attempt to woo army generals to their cause. After 3 years and 2 failed coup attempts, they were successful. On September 11th 1973 the military marched on the presidential palace. Allende gave a subsequently famous radio speech in which he spoke of himself in the past tense and expressed his belief that the Chilean people would overcome the challenges they now faced before shooting himself, not wanting to be taken alive.

The torture chambers filled as the new regime consolidated its power. Its primary instrument was the DINA, a secret police force which US military intelligence compared to the KGB and the Gestapo. According to the catholic institute for international relations the Pinochet regime killed over 11’000 people in its first 3 months and:
“... the single-minded ferocity of the coup and the subsequent deliberate use of torture, ‘disappearances’ and murder had at that time no parallel in the history of Chile or Latin America, a continent with a long experience of dictatorship and military brutality”(5).
A situation report from the US military stationed in Chile described the coup as ‘close to perfect’ and ‘our D-Day’(6).

Chile was made the test bed for the crackpot schemes of the far right Chicago economists. The results were devastating, with real wages falling 35% and unemployment trebling by 1976. Per capita consumption fell by 23% from 1972-87. The proportion of the population below the poverty line (the minimum income required for basic food and housing) increased from 20% to 44.4% between 1970 and 1987. Per capita health care spending was more than halved from 1973 to 1985, setting off explosive growth in poverty-related diseases such as typhoid, diabetes and viral hepatitis. The percentage of Chileans without adequate housing increased from 27 to 40 percent between 1972 and 1988.(7)

The damage went far beyond material concerns; "once accustomed to secure, unionised jobs [before Pinochet] . . . [Chile was turned] into a nation of anxious individualists . . . [where] over half of all visits to Chile's public health system involve psychological ailments, mainly depression. 'The repression isn't physical any more, it's economic - feeding your family, educating your child,' says Maria Pena, who works in a fishmeal factory in Concepcion. 'I feel real anxiety about the future', she adds, 'They can chuck us out at any time. You can't think five years ahead. If you've got money you can get an education and health care; money is everything here now.'" Little wonder, then, that "adjustment has created an atomised society, where increased stress and individualism have damaged its traditionally strong and caring community life. . . suicides have increased threefold between 1970 and 1991 and the number of alcoholics has quadrupled in the last 30 years . . . family breakdowns are increasing, while opinion polls show the current crime wave to be the most widely condemned aspect of life in the new Chile. 'Relationships are changing,' says Betty Bizamar, a 26-year-old trade union leader. 'People use each other, spend less time with their family. All they talk about is money, things. True friendship is difficult now.'"(8)

Reality aside, economic theory predicted a roaring success and economic theory confirmed it. That and the super rich/foreign investors were doing great. What Milton Friedman called ‘the miracle of Chile’ became the model for the neoliberal project – a series of extreme free market reforms imposed on the third world. All across the world, Chile style US/western interventions replaced democrac and benign regimes with mass murdering and frequently genocidal(9) dictatorships and terror states (off the top of my head: Nicuragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Haiti, Indonesia, East Timor – I’m sure I don’t know the half of it). More often subtler means were used. The economic impact was similar to that on Chile – taking the averages for the 20 years before and after, global growth halved as the super rich clutched for an even bigger slice of a smaller pie(10).

Daniel Santiago, a Catholic priest working in El Salvador, described the operation of the US proxy regime (which had been openly modelled on the Third Reich*): “People are not just killed by death squads in El Salvador -- they are decapitated and then their heads are placed on pikes and used to dot the landscape. Men are not just disemboweled by the Salvadoran Treasury Police; their severed genitalia are stuffed into their mouths. Salvadoran women are not just raped by the National Guard; their wombs are cut from their bodies and used to cover their faces. It is not enough to kill children; they are dragged over barbed wire until the flesh falls from their bones, while parents are forced to watch.”(11)

And of course, the violence is very much the tip of the iceberg. In terms of the numbers of people killed and otherwise affected, the real tragedies of neoliberalism are things like starvation, malnutrition, preventable disease and lives of grinding poverty and endless work. The violence is merely required to defend the political systems which produce these things against the massive opposition they inevitably provoke.

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When people jabber on about “western imperialism”, this is what they mean. When people riot at G8 summits, this is their beef. A rather heavy group, but this isn’t the sort of history they teach in schools - and its stuff people should know. Invite all your friends.

1(Quoted, William Blum, Killing Hope, Common Courage Press, 1995, p.209)
2&6(Kornbluh, ‘The Chile Coup - The U.S. Hand,’ iF magazine, October 25, 1998)
3(Quoted, Chomsky, Year 501 - The Conquest Continues, South End Press, 1993, p.36)
4&5(Quoted, Mark Curtis, The Ambiguities of Power, Zed Books, 1995, p.129)
7(Chomsky, year 501, pp190-191)
8(Quoted, Duncan Green, Silent Revolution: The Rise of Market Economics in Latin America, Cassell, London, 1995, p. 96 and p. 166)
9(East Timor; http://www.yale.edu/gsp/east_timor/unverdict.html, Guatemala; http://www.yale.edu/gsp/guatemala/TextforDatabaseCharts.html#_ftn1)
10 that’s growth of per capita gdp (Deepak Nayyar, "Globalisation, history and development: a tale of two centuries," pp. 137-159, Cambridge Journal of Economics, Vol. 30, No. 1, pp. 153-4 and p. 154)
11(Quoted, Chomsky, What uncle sam really wants; http://cyberspacei.com/jesusi/authors/chomsky/sam/sam.htm#_Toc515113645)

*Initiation rituals used by the death squads were adapted from those used by the SS etc