Forty-four
years after the U.S. supported military coup, the Santiago Museum of
Memory and Human Rights has inaugurated a special exhibit of
declassified CIA, FBI, Defense Department and White house records on
the U.S. role in Chile and the Pinochet dictatorship. The unusual
exhibit, which officially opened to the public on September 5, is
titled Secretos de Estado: La Historia Desclasificada de la Dictadura
Chilena—Secrets of State: the Declassified History of the Chilean
Dictatorship.
Curated
by National Security Archive senior analyst Peter Kornbluh, the
exhibit consists of 45 formerly classified documents dated between
1970 when Richard Nixon ordered to the CIA to instigate a coup in
Chile, and October 1988 when General Augusto Pinochet sought to
orchestrate a second coup after losing a plebiscite to stay in power.
Using
creative presentations and lighting, the exhibit examines:
- the CIA’s covert operations between 1970 and 1973 to undermine the socialist government of Salvador Allende,
- the secret CIA payments to, and meetings with, Chilean media mogul Agustin Edwards and his newspaper, El Mercurio;
- intelligence reports on the military repression
- Operation Condor, the Southern Cone secret police collaboration led by the Pinochet regime to track down and eliminate opponents.
- Pinochet’s Machiavellian plot to foment violence and a second coup the night he lost the plebiscite in October 1988.
“These
documents belong in a museum,” noted Kornbluh who directs the
Chile Documentation Project at the National Security Archive and is
the author of The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity
and Accountability. “They have generated news headlines; they
have been used as evidence in human rights crimes; and now they can
provide the powerful verdict of history.”
The
exhibit, mounted in the museum’s “Galeria de la Memoria,” will
run until March, 2018.
Among
the documents in the exhibit are several CIA and White House records
specific to the September 11, 1973, military coup. On the 44th
anniversary of the coup, the Archive posted 25 declassified records
dated on, or related to, Chile’s 9/11.
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