<
https://theconversation.com/kissingers-obsession-with-chile-enabled-a-murderous-dictatorship-that-still-haunts-the-country-218982>
"Noticing my nonappearance at the start of a black-tie dinner at the
Johannesburg home of Harry Oppenheimer, a mining magnate and Africa’s richest
man, the host assumed I was boycotting the event on principle. It was a
reasonable assumption: I was the Chilean ambassador to South Africa, and Henry
Kissinger was the chief guest.
By then, a quarter century had passed since the military coup that toppled the
democratically elected Chilean President Salvador Allende – an event that gave
rise to Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s brutal 17-year-long military dictatorship – but
the issue still lingered. Many Chileans bitterly remembered the role of the
U.S. government, and of Kissinger in particular, in the breakdown of Chilean
democracy.
It was something Kissinger himself acknowledged during that dinner – which I
did attend, just late due to encountering a hailstorm. Kissinger explained that
he always declined invitations to visit my home country out of fear over what
“Allende Chileans” would do to him.
Plenty of Chileans still despise Kissinger. On news of his death at the age of
100 on Nov. 29, 2023, Juan Gabriel Valdes, Chile’s ambassador to the U.S.,
summed up that sentiment when he posted in Spanish on X, the platform
previously known as Twitter: “A man has died whose historical brilliance never
managed to conceal his profound moral misery.”
It’s hard to overestimate the role Kissinger played in Chile. As national
security adviser and secretary of state during the Nixon and Ford
administrations, he oversaw policies that helped install and then prop up a
dictator."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
