Word: chileanizing
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While working at the Times, Pulitzer prizewinner Hersh had written numerous stories Unking Korry with the Chilean debacle. In one article, he reported that Korry was about to be charged with contempt of Congress for misleading testimony before the Senate committee. Says Korry: "Hersh was the first reporter to stick it to me hard." Admits Hersh: "I led the way in trashing him." When Korry protested to Hersh and other reporters that some witnesses had lied to the Senate committee about his role, only one newsman, Joe Trento of the Wilmington (Del.) News Journal, investigated the case in detail...
...that Hersh had lost interest in the matter. Korry says the Timesman approached him on several occasions, first in 1976, offering to report afresh the Chilean story if Korry would talk with him about secret intlligence activities...
...trial might also have revealed that the Chilean secret police had attacked Bernardo Leighton, a founder of the Christian Democratic Party. Leighton commanded immense prestige both in Chile and among the vast exile movement of professional politicians, unionists, former state officials, and former military officers. After the junta learned that Leighton was perhaps close to unifying the exile movement behind a government-in-exile, gunfire on a quiet Rome street badly crippled him and his wife...
Even if this evidence had not emerged, the mere event of a trial would certainly have exposed and mobilized deep divisions within the Chilean military. Unlike, for instance, Franco's Nationalist Forces, the Chilean military did not undergo the intensely unifying experience of fighting and winning a civil war. Instead, it conducted a campaign of indiscriminate terror against an unarmed civilian population. Far from promoting a spartan sense of unity, this experience deeply conflicted with the espirit de corps of an institution which had never performed praitorian functions...
...extradition request named Gen. Contreras, the head of the military's secret torture-and-assassination bureaucracy, questioning by officers of the court during his trial would certainly have unearthed much of the military's deep involvement in new, distinctively unmilitary tasks. The possibility of extraordinary discredit to the Chilean military would simply have been too much for most of the Chilean military to tolerate. The spectacle of three high-ranking Chilean military officers on trial in the United States for murder would have generated tremendous pressure within the Chilean Armed Forces to stage a counter-coup against Gen. Pinochet...