Word: chileanization
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...really big operation going to keep Salvador Allende from being elected President. He was almost elected at the last elections in 1958, and this time nobody's taking any chances. The trouble is that the office of finance in headquarters [Langley, Va.] couldn't get enough Chilean escudos from the New York banks; so they had to set up regional purchasing offices in Lima and Rio. But even these offices can't satisfy the requirement, so we have been asked to help." The results were gratifying. Frei won with 56% of the vote, and the future...
...Santiago," commented a former CIA agent assigned to the mission. But not enough votes were bought; Allende had a substantial following. He was prevented from winning a majority, but with only 36% of the vote he narrowly won a three-way race that was finally decided in the Chilean Congress. CIA officials in Washington were furious...
Covert assistance went beyond help for the democratic opposition. The CIA infiltrated Chilean agents into the upper echelon of the Socialist Party. Provocateurs were paid to make deliberate mistakes in their jobs, thus adding to Allende's gross mismanagement of the economy. CIA agents organized street demonstrations against government policies...
...economic crisis deepened, the agency supported striking shopkeepers and taxi drivers. Laundered CIA money, reportedly channeled to Santiago by way of Christian Democratic parties in Europe, helped finance the Chilean truckers' 45-day strike, one of the worst blows to the economy. Moreover, the strikers doubtless picked up additional CIA cash that was floating round the country. As an intelligence official notes, "If we give it to A, and then A gives it to B and C and D, in a sense it's true that D got it. But the question is: Did we give...
Clearly the CIA considers the junta to be the lesser of two evils. Still, it rates the Chilean enterprise a failure since it ended in military dictatorship. Several years of dangerous, costly and now nationally divisive intervention in another country's internal politics might better have been avoided. Though Soviet propaganda blames the CIA for the Chilean coup and the death of Allende, Soviet intelligence analysts do not give the CIA any credit. The Russians think the fault lay with Allende himself for not being enough of a strongman. He temporized with constitutional processes when he should have disregarded...