Volume 28, Number 253 — Thursday, September 14, 2023
CHILE 50 YRS: Allende Grandson Tells CN: US Empire ‘Is Going Down’
The grandson of Salvador Allende, the democratically-elected president of Chile who was overthrown by a U.S.-backed, fascist junta 50 years ago on Sept. 11, 1973, spoke with Consortium News during a conference in Australia remembering the coup.
Joe Lauria interviews Allende grandson Alejandro Salvador Fernandez Allende (Cathy Vogan/CN Live!)
By Joe Lauria
Special to Consortium News
Alejandro Salvador Fernandez Allende said he had “no doubt that Australia helped the C.I.A. and Henry Kissinger to overthrow Salvador Allende.” He said of classified documents detailing the Australian intelligence role in the overthrow of his democratically-elected grandfather 50 years ago on Sept. 11: “I would obviously love to read that once it’s available.” Allende said it would be “really helpful” if the people of the United States “cared and showed an interest” about what the U.S. government did to Latin America in the decades following the Second World War.
“The geopolitics of America is imperialistic but I think it is now an empire in decadence,” Allende told me in an interview on Tuesday at the New South Wales Parliament House in Sydney, Australia. “In Guantanamo, when they openly recognized the use of torture, that is moral decadence. Once you reach that you see that these people are going down,” he said.
Allende, who lives in New Zealand, was in Sydney to speak at a memorial to the victims of the U.S.-backed Pinochet on the 50th anniversary of the coup.
Allende’s grandson mentioned Adriana Rivas, a former member of Pinochet’s notorious Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional (Directorate of National Intelligence, or DINA). Rivas has lived openly in Australia since 1978. She is now under arrest in a Sydney prison awaiting extradition to Chile where she is wanted for kidnapping and torturing seven members of the Chilean Communist Party.
Navarro Associates, a law firm fighting for justice for Chileans who fled the dictatorship to Australia, wrote to Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus on Sept. 4, asking why her extradition hadn’t happed for “more than 15 months [elapsing] since Ms Rivas exhausted all judicial avenues to stop this extradition.” So far there is no explanation.
Australia’s role in the coup is still a subject of controversy. Activists are fighting for declassified documents explaining the role Australia’s foreign intelligence service ASIS played in Chile during the coup.
The online news site Crikey reported: “In 2017 University of New South Wales professor of politics Clinton Fernandes, together with barrister Ian Latham and solicitor Hugh Macken, took action to declassify early-1970s reports of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) station in Santiago, Chile — which assisted the CIA’s destabilisation of the Chilean government ahead of the military coup against Salvador.”
Crikey said: “On November 1 2021, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal handed down a ruling indicating that its full release of documents regarding ASIS operations in Chile between 1971 and 1974, plus records about the violent overthrow of the Popular Unity administration, would “cause damage to the security, defence or international relations of the Commonwealth. ‘It shows that the Australian government fears the people who elect it,” Fernandes said when asked about this ruling’.”
Fernandes sent this video message to the Sydney event at the New South Wales Parliament on Tuesday. In it he says there’s already enough evidence to show that Australian intelligence helped overthrow Allende by acting as an intermediary between the C.I.A. and the Pinochet coup plotters, giving the C.I.A. plausible deniability about involvement in the coup:
Navarro Associates, a law firm fighting for justice for Chileans who fled the dictatorship to Australia, wrote to Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus on Sept. 4, asking why her extradition hadn’t happed for “more than 15 months [elapsing] since Ms Rivas exhausted all judicial avenues to stop this extradition.” So far there is no explanation.
Australia’s role in the coup is still a subject of controversy. Activists are fighting for declassified documents explaining the role Australia’s foreign intelligence service ASIS played in Chile during the coup.
The online news site Crikey reported: “In 2017 University of New South Wales professor of politics Clinton Fernandes, together with barrister Ian Latham and solicitor Hugh Macken, took action to declassify early-1970s reports of the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) station in Santiago, Chile — which assisted the CIA’s destabilisation of the Chilean government ahead of the military coup against Salvador.”
Crikey said: “On November 1 2021, the Administrative Appeals Tribunal handed down a ruling indicating that its full release of documents regarding ASIS operations in Chile between 1971 and 1974, plus records about the violent overthrow of the Popular Unity administration, would “cause damage to the security, defence or international relations of the Commonwealth. ‘It shows that the Australian government fears the people who elect it,” Fernandes said when asked about this ruling’.”
Fernandes sent this video message to the Sydney event at the New South Wales Parliament on Tuesday. In it he says there’s already enough evidence to show that Australian intelligence helped overthrow Allende by acting as an intermediary between the C.I.A. and the Pinochet coup plotters, giving the C.I.A. plausible deniability about involvement in the coup:
Extraordinary performance by Chilean artists Magdalena Mira and Victor Martinez at Parliament House.
Below is Nancy Rivera Huencho telling the story of the Mapuche and their interaction with the Spanish — and with Allende.
Joe Lauria is editor-in-chief of Consortium News and a former U.N. correspondent for The Wall Street Journal, Boston Globe, and numerous other newspapers, including The Montreal Gazette, the London Daily Mail and The Star of Johannesburg. He was an investigative reporter for the Sunday Times of London, a financial reporter for Bloomberg News and began his professional work as a 19-year old stringer for The New York Times. He is the author of two books, A Political Odyssey, with Sen. Mike Gravel, foreword by Daniel Ellsberg; and How I Lost By Hillary Clinton, foreword by Julian Assange. He can be reached at joelauria@consortiumnews.com and followed on Twitter @unjoe
No comments:
Post a Comment