Files reveal Nixon role in plot to block Allende from Chilean presidency

[Eugene]

Source: The Guardian

Files reveal Nixon role in plot to block Allende from Chilean presidency

President hosted rightwing mogul Agustín Edwards in September 1970 and discussed plans to foil socialist election-winner

John Bartlett in Santiago
Tue 8 Aug 2023 18.49 BST
Last modified on Tue 8 Aug 2023 20.25 BST

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.

-snip-

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/aug/08/richard-nixon-plot-allende-chile-presidency

Non-walled link: https://archive.li/LyY66

[Kid Berwyn]

1. What they do overseas, they bring home.

"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves." -- Henry Kissinger

[Judi Lynn]

2. This is a superb article. Here's hoping Chile can get more info. on Nixon's actions

leading up to September, 11, 1973, from the classified documents being withheld from the world all these decades later.

50 years really should be long enough to hide this, even though Nixon told Kissinger to make sure "our hand doesn't show on this one though."

It would be a different world if our own corporate "news" media actually had told the truth to the US public at any point throughout our history.

Thank you for this article. Sure hope the White House will decide to allow at least some of the truth to be revealed at very long last.