"If only now The New York Times,
and consequently, the grand Latin American press, are giving
wide coverage to this information, it is because it complies
anew with their ideological role.... They were accomplices when
the State Policy of Washington of subversion and State terrorism
in our América took place, because of their silence.
"Today... the complicity changes
lanes: those who remained silent for decades before the crimes
of US imperialism, today publish this information...marveling
at the super-democracy that rules in Washington and maintaining
global illusions about it."
-- Heinz Dieterich Steffan
The Narco News Bulletin
"The
Name of Our Country is América"
--
Simón Bolívar
September 24, 2000
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visits since April 18, 2000
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of the CIA
From
Chile to Perú, the New York Times and the Complicit
Press Corps in Latin America
by Heinz Dieterich Steffan
Translated from El Universal, Mexico City,
September 23, 2000
The
joke that in the United States there are no coups d'etat, because
there is no US Embassy in that country, is sad truth for Latin
American nations. Declassified documents about the Central Intelligence
Agency (CIA) how add new links to the endless chain of assassinations,
coups d'etat and crimes that have been committed against the
peoples of our América.
The CIA has acknowledged for the first
time that it participated in the kidnapping and assassination
of General René Schneider, commander of the Chilean Armed
Forces, in 1970, with the goal of impeding the rise to power
of the recently elected president Salvador Allende. Recognizing
at the same time that it knew about the military coup against
the constitutional Allende government before September of 1973,
which is to say, that it was a principal part of its organization.
One year after the coup, the CIA recruited
General Manuel Contreras Sepúlveda, chief of the Chilean
Gestapo (the DINA), as its own agent. This relationship, now
acknowledged by the CIA, lasted until 1977. That is to say that
it includes the time during which Augusto Pinochet and Manuel
Contreras ordered the murder of ex-ambassador to the United States
of the Popular Unitiy government, Orlando Letelier, in the diplomatic
zone of Washington. Once again, the CIA was accomplice in the
crimes of both assassin-generals.
At its root, none of this is new. It was
known since 1975 the role of the US Central Intelligence Agency
in the coup against Allende and, beforehand, in the dirty war
against the great Chilean statesman for most of the 1960s, because
the US Senate had already documented in its investigation report
number 94-465 published on November 20 of that year.
If only now The New York Times,
and consequently, the grand Latin American press, are giving
wide coverage to this information, it is because it complies
anew with their ideological role inside the Creole-United States
system of domination. They were accomplices when the State Policy
of Washington of subversion and State terrorism in our América
took place, because of their silence. They were silent because
the authors of these crimes, like Pinochet, Contreras, President
Richard Nixon, who ordered the CIA to organize a military coup
against Allende; his security advisor and Secretary of State
Henry Kissinger and George Bush, who was the CIA chief, were
in power.
Today, with the majority of these personalities
dead or without political importance, the complicity changes
lanes: those who remained silent for decades before the crimes
of US imperialism, today publish this information as it is only
of historical importance, marveling at the super-democracy that
rules in Washington and maintaining global illusions about it.
The recent revelations about the grand organizer of State terrorism
in Perú, Vladimiro Montesinos, as CIA agent and whose
activities today are characterized by the general secretary of
the Organization of American States, César Gaviria, as
"criminal," illustrate this ideological mechanism all
over again.
They knew everything that they would want
to know. They knew that Alberto Fujimor was a puppet of the military
forces that executed the coup d'etat of 1992 supported by the
United States and that the true man of State terrorism that was
needed to apply the neoliberal economic policy was Montesinos:
the confidante of Washington and its military leadership.
Montesinos and his possible connections
with drug trafficking were taboo in the US and international
press while he served the interests of the empire. Montesinos
was the Pinochet of Perú and Fujimori was the image to
sell across the world. That's why the entire press has repeated
ad nauseum the stupid notion of the "self-coup" that
Fujimori committed in 1992.
The CIA is, without a doubt, the most
important organized crime group that exists in the world. The
victims of this organization, that takes direct orders from the
White House, have since the Post-War era mounted to tens of millions
of human beings. Even more worrisome for the Third World is that
in 1998 the CIA began a new campaign to recruit more new spies
than in its entire history. Based on the 1995 numbers, the recruitment
plan for 1998 had as its goal to contract 500-percent more spies
and for 1999 an even larger number. At the same time, the CIA
reopened stations in the Third World that had been closed in
the early 1990s.
However, these facts are not adequately
discussed in the Latin American press, because following the
party-lines of the great powers, the pages are filled with puff-pieces
on the supposed war on drugs, while the CIA conducts its politics
of subversion without scrutiny. And the media, once again, dance
to the song that the empire plays.
Heinz Dieterich Steffan,
a German philosopher and professor at the Autonomous University
of Mexico, is author of more than 20 books, among them "Latin
America: From Colonization to Globalization" together with
Noam Chomsky. His recent reports from Ecuador and the impact
of Plan Colombia appear on our Press Briefing for September
7, 2000.
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