corrente

Instead of wallowing once again in our own "lost innocence" tomorrow, we might shed a tear or two for another country's citizens, whose lives were also forever altered on that fateful day, only 28 years earlier.

September 11 1973 was a day of terror and bloodshed in Chile. After months of rising tension, army troops stormed the presidential palace, leaving President Salvador Allende dead and thousands prisoners throughout this previously democratic nation.

Now, on the 30th anniversary of the coup, professors, journalists and citizen activists around the world are continuing to expose the full role of the US government in financing and promoting this bloody coup, which ushered in the 17-year military dictatorship headed by General Augusto Pinochet.
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The top secret documents accumulatively detail the crude workings of Washington during the Cold War. "It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup," reads a CIA document from October 1970. "It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG [US government] and American hand be well hidden."

Two days after this document was written, top CIA officials proposed a terrorist campaign to stun the Chilean people into accepting a military regime.

"Concur giving tear gas cannisters and gas masks ... working on obtaining machine guns," reads a CIA memo dated October 18 1970.

Read the whole thing.

And consider that under the Bush Doctrine, Chile had every right to attack the United States.

Proverbs for Paranoids, 2: The innocence of the creatures is in inverse proportion to the immorality of the Master. --Gravity's Rainbow