Pardoning Pinochet's Pals - United States role in dictator's rise to power

Progressive, The, Feb, 1999 by Elliott Negin

"It is shocking, in the post-Cold War era, that so few media accounts of the Pinochet affair mention the U.S. role in the coup," John Coatsworth, the director of the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard and a former president of the American Historical Society, told me. "If Henry Kissinger is ever arrested in Harrods on a Spanish warrant, perhaps we'll hear more."

U.S. media coverage made it seem as if the Chilean economy fell apart on its own during Allende's regime. I found numerous quotes in news stories from Pinochet supporters, as well as some columns and editorials, that applauded Pinochet for saving Chile from economic ruin.

Take the lone editorial The Washington Post ran on the topic. "Gen. Augusto Pinochet ... is not your typical Latin strongman," the paper explained on October 20. "He did remove a democratically elected government and see to the killing of thousands and the detention of tens of thousands in 1973-1990. But he also saw to the rescue of his country from a chaos to which he was only one contributor, and to its controlled evolution into a prosperous Latin democracy. So it is not only Chile's military right but others grateful for his positive role who are troubled now by his arrest."

When asked why the editorial did not mention that the United States was a major contributor to Chile's "chaos," the Post's editorial page editor, Stephen Rosenfeld, responded, "We prefer to let editorials speak for themselves."

None of the eighteen news stories in the Post that month mentioned the U.S. role in wrecking the Chilean economy. One out of four opinion columns did say that "the U.S. government played a shameful part" in "one of the worst episodes in Latin American history." But there was no further explanation.

The Post's foreign news editor, Eugene Robinson, spent four years covering Latin America from Buenos Aires and is well aware of the U.S. role. "We have run a number of fairly lengthy pieces on the case, and we should have found room in at least some of them to mention--and explore more fully--the U.S. connection," he conceded when I asked him about the coverage. He said he would "rectify the omission."

Elliott Negin, a former managing editor of American Journalism Review, writes frequently on the news media and military affairs.