Word: chileans
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...Robinson Rojas Sanford makes clear in The Murder of Allende, the weakness of Allende's political power was trivial compared to the threat of military rebellion. The Chilean armed forces, whose function until then had been to deter an unlikely Peruvian invasion and to suppress internal dissent, clearly held veto power over the Popular Unity government. But Allende, though imprisoned by these restrictions, refused to acknowledge them, speaking as though socialism had taken hold in Chile. His temerity and the myth of an apolitical armed forces made the coup a great surprise to those who had believed...
...socialist reformism of Allende and the raw power of the military. Rojas argues that the military and its cohorts decided to stop Allende as soon as it appeared that he would win the 1970 presidential elections. Acting in harmony or actual conspiracy with the Pentagon, the CIA, "the Chilean oligopolists, and the North American multinationals," they first attempted to defeat him through parliamentary maneuvers, economic sabotage, or a victory in the 1973 congressional elections. When it became apparent that his popular support was growing, they carefully prepared to take power without provoking a civil war and then...
...Chilean armed forces had a tradition of non-involvement that was rare in Latin America, but Rojas shows that only disagreements among three factions within the military postponed the coup until September 1973. The "reformists" wanted to run the country alone; the "hardliners" wanted to give power back to the centrist parties immediately; the "constitutionalists" wanted to enter into a coalition government, with Allende on hand to "control the masses." The deterioration of a compromise worked out by the "constitutionalist" generals--as well as the knowledge that powerful Chilean industrialists and the United States government urged intervention--precipitated the coup...
Unfortunately, Rojas's "accusation" has the defects of pamphletary polemics without the virtues of a police report's rigor and documentation. While it is understandable that much of his information about a conspiracy among members of the Chilean general staff would come "through channels that I cannot reveal at this time," it would be more convincing if he revealed who overheard the generals agree to enter Allende's cabinet so that "one of us can get some on-the-job training." There is a great contrast between the methods of a book like I.F. Stone's Hidden History...
...make concern the complicity of the CIA, the Pentagon, and American corporations such as ITT and Kennecott Copper in the plotting. There is now ample testimony before Congress on the sordid, illegal activities carried out under the innocuous name of "destabilization." From 1964, when the CIA bought so many Chilean escudos to contribute to Allende's opponents that it caused a shortage on the money market, through the conspiracy to kidnap General Rene Schneider and the 1972 truck owners' strike that was funded largely with CIA donations, the history of American intervention in Chilean politics is a catalogue of dirty...