Word: santiagos
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...covered the overthrow of Allende. While reporting from Chile last year at the time of the truck drivers' strike before the coup, Rauch had asked a group of truckers who were enjoying a hearty barbecue on the tailgate of one of the vehicles blocking the road leading into Santiago just where they had got the money for such a feast. "From the CIA," was the laconic reply, and the incident was included in our Sept. 24, 1973 story. What seemed like a joke then has since turned out to be more than that. Some of the truck drivers...
...gave Chile $618 million in direct economic assistance -more per capita than any other Latin American country. In a diary due to be published in Britain this year, former CIA Operative Philip Agee describes how he was called upon for assistance from his post in Montevideo in 1964: "The Santiago station has a 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...
...right for moving too fast and by the left for going too slowly. Allende's Socialist Party continued to grow, picking up defecting left-wing Christian Democrats and uniting with other opposition parties. It became a case for the CIA. A station chief had been sent to Santiago in 1964; later the agency's presence began to multiply in preparation for the 1970 election, when Frei would be constitutionally barred from seeking a second term and Allende would pose more of a threat than before...
...Security Council to keep the election "fair." The agents interpreted these instructions to mean: Stop Allende, and they asked for a whopping $20 million to do the job. They were given $5 million and ultimately spent less than $1 million. "You buy votes in Boston, you buy votes in 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...
...Still, the average laborer needs to work four hours to earn enough for a kilo of bread; between October and June of 1974, milk increased 300% in price, sugar 192% and cooking oil 224%. Add to that an unemployment rate of around 10% and, as one foreign ambassador in Santiago puts it, "there is no way they can have avoided real hunger in the poblaciones [shantytowns] this winter." To ease the pressure on the poor, Pinochet last week announced a 23% hike in the minimum wage and regular wage adjustments every quarter, based on the consumer price index...