> The Guardian
> Comment
>
> Getting away with murder
> The US has admitted its involvement in Latin America, but those
> responsible are immune
>
> Isabel Hilton
>
> Tuesday November 21, 2000
>
> It has been a curious few days for followers of US foreign policy.
> President Clinton, now safely at the end of his presidency, has
> afforded himself a trip to Vietnam in a long-delayed postwar
> reconciliation. Meanwhile, on the other side of the world, the latest
> release of US declassified documents has added more detail to the
> suspicion that has been officially denied for decades - that US
> interference in the internal politics of Latin America over fifty
> years from the end of the second world war was widespread, relentless
> and, for the most part, disastrous in its consequences.
>
> Last week, the US released 17,000 previously classified documents
> relating to CIA interference in Chile. The documents - many of them
> heavily censored - were released by the US state department, the
> defence intelligence agency, the CIA, the FBI and the justice
> department. They are the fourth and last round of disclosures ordered
> by President Clinton.
>
> The "revelation" that the US helped to bring Augusto Pinochet to power
> by destabilising the government of President Salvador Allende can have
> come as a surprise only to those who have spent the last 27 years in a
> state of acute denial. (This includes, notoriously, substantial
> sections of the British Conservative party as well as many Chilean
> supporters of the right.)
>
> But still, the documents confirm that, in addition to the well-known
> dirty tricks against Allende, between 1971 and 1973 the US government
> gave $4m to opposition political parties, mostly to the Christian
> Democrats; that the CIA spent $2.6m supporting the Christian Democrats
> in the 1964 election in Chile; and that the US went on paying
> political parties into the 1980s. The newspaper El Mercurio received
> about $1.6m in covert support from US agents. El Mercurio was a
> leading critic of the government of Allende. None of this has raised
> public confidence in Chile's political parties, or in their version of
> history.
>
> A CIA memo prepared three years before the 1973 coup states: "If civil
> disorders were to follow from a military action, the USG [US
> government] would promptly deliver necessary support and material,
> (but not personnel)." In a state department memo written weeks after
> the coup that put Pinochet in power, Jack Kubisch wrote: "The junta
> does not appear to represent a threat to our major national interest.
> No overriding national objective seems to me to be served by
> supporting opposition to it."
>
> Chile, of course, is not the only case. The truth is that US policy in
> Latin America was for several decades in thrall to a security doctrine
> that argued that considerations of human rights or democracy were
> secondary to the fight against what the US perceived as Soviet and
> Cuban influence, however broadly defined. It came to include almost
> all attempts to achieve political change or social justice. Its
> executives were the Latin American military officers trained by the US
> in the School of the Americas in Panama. There they learned to conduct
> dirty warfare against their own civilian populations and went on to
> practise their lessons with enthusiasm.
>
> So while US diplomats publicly promoted democratic ideals, US
> government was sponsoring armies and intelligence services that waged
> savage internal war against political opponents - many of the left,
> others simply reforming democrats, trade unionists or campaigners for
> land rights. When this provoked civil war or military dictatorship,
> successive US administrations colluded in the concealment of massive
> human rights violations, misinforming not only US public opinion but,
> on occasions, Congress itself.
>
> The price was paid in Latin America in the deaths and disappearance
> of, at a conservative estimate, around 100,000 people throughout the
> subcontinent. Their ghosts continue to haunt the countries in which
> they occurred.
>
> Anything up to 30 years later, the truth is partially leaked, long
> after the guilty men are dead, retired or, in the case of President
> Reagan, senile. The Gipper himself, of course, was pardoned by George
> Bush, without the crimes for which he was pardoned ever being
> officially acknowledged. Is there such a great moral difference
> between Bush's granting a pardon to Reagan for his pursuit of a war
> that was in violation of US law and his government's publicly stated
> policy, and Pinochet's amnesty for himself and his cohorts for the
> crimes they committed in Chile? As an operation, the concealment of US
> operations in Latin America for long enough for the guilty men to
> escape punishment rivals the worst practices of the countries that
> were victims of these policies.
>
> It has been, though, an effective strategy. By the time the documents
> are allowed to filter out, the events they reveal are over; domestic
> public opinion in the US, in that depressingly anti- historical
> phrase, has "moved on"; the details have grown fuzzy. On the ground,
> the orphans have grown up and the widows are dead or discouraged.
>
> Just for the record, then, what were the consequences of that era
> when, in the words of one US analyst, "the gang that blew Vietnam went
> Latin"? Chile was the most notorious case, Central America an even
> more tragic one. It covered the civil war in El Salvador, the Contra
> war in Nicaragua and the genocide perpetrated against the Indian
> population of Guatemala by a series of military regimes that held
> power after a US-sponsored coup in the 1950s. A legion of US officials
> spent their careers pretending that the deaths and disappearances, the
> torture and terror, were the responsibility of a few isolated
> extremists who were out of the control of the fine democrats whom the
> US supported. Limited US admissions, produced decades after the event,
> come too late for the victims.
>
> In Argentina, Chile and Central America, the consequences of US policy
> persist in over-powerful militaries and in the conflicts provoked by
> the continuing efforts of the victims' families to locate the remains
> of their relatives and bring the perpetrators to justice. But in the
> country that proclaims itself the world's best democracy there is
> impunity for the men who conceived and executed these policies. In the
> case of the Iran-Contra affair, for instance, in the words of the
> Walsh report, "the underlying facts ... are that ... President Reagan,
> the secretary of state, the secretary of defence and the director of
> central intelligence and their necessary assistants committed
> themselves ... to two programmes contrary to congressional policy and
> contrary to national policy. They skirted the law, some of them broke
> the law, and almost all of them tried to cover up the president's
> wilful activities."
>
> George Bush pardoned Reagan, but what of Bush's own role? After
> heading the CIA, he was vice-president throughout the Reagan
> presidency then succeeded Reagan as president. On December 24 1992, 12
> days before former secretary of defence Caspar W Weinberger was to go
> on trial, a trial in which Bush himself might have been called as a
> witness, Bush pardoned him and five other defendants. The criminal
> investigation of Bush himself was never completed.
>
> Bush continues to enjoy his position as ex-president and respected
> father of the man who may well get the current presidential job.
> Justice and accountability, it seems, are strictly for export.
>
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