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Bereta_Eder
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By Gideon Long
LONDON (Reuters) - Britain welcomed General Augusto Pinochet (news - web sites)'s violent 1973 coup in Chile and regarded his military officers as "decent professionals" who were "on our side," documents released Thursday showed.
While accepting that the coup leaders would crack down hard on their leftist opponents, London's ambassador to Chile said Pinochet was better for Britain than the deposed Socialist government of President Salvador Allende.
"The current regime has infinitely more to offer British interests than the one which preceded it," ambassador Reginald Seconde wrote in a report on the coup three weeks after Pinochet seized power on September 11, 1973.
"The new leaders are unequivocally on our side and want to do business, in its widest sense with us."
The report is one of hundreds of papers relating to the Chilean coup released by Britain's national archive, the Public Records Office (PRO).
Intriguingly though, the government has decided to hold back files relating to the day of the coup itself. They could in theory cast light on the role Western governments -- led by the United States -- played in the overthrow of Allende.
In his report, ambassador Seconde describes Pinochet's officers as "decent professionals, with no political experience, and little subtlety or idea of public relations."
"Their twin aims are to root out Marxism and to restore order," he writes. "Their instinct will be to do this by disciplinary means and they are likely to be heavy handed."
More than 3,000 people were killed in the coup and its aftermath. Many were leftists who were tortured and whose bodies were dumped in the Pacific Ocean or in the Mapocho river in the Chilean capital Santiago.
Seconde tells his seniors in London that "it is unlikely that the military will hand back power to the politicians soon."
He was right. Chile had 17 years of dictatorship before Pinochet stepped down in 1990.
The British ambassador has mixed feelings about Allende, a democratically elected Marxist who killed himself on the day of the coup when the air force bombed his presidential palace.
He describes Allende as "sincere and single-minded" in his Marxist views but "thoroughly devious" as a politician.
"He was a brilliant tactician and manipulator but had only limited breadth of vision," the ambassador says.
The papers also give an idea of the atmosphere in Santiago in the months leading up to the coup and suggests the diplomatic community viewed a military takeover as inevitable.
Writing to the Foreign Office in May 1973, four months before the coup, Seconde is in gloomy mood.
"Everything I have heard and seen so far leads me to believe that the country is whizzing downhill both politically and economically at a rate of knots," he writes.
"Allende muddles on," one Foreign Office official notes in a letter from July 1973. "The sad fact is that Chile has now been led to a situation where... more Chileans accept the possibility of a violent solution."
Never forget either.
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Albert Speer
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Puerile Polemic
Mar 1999
time: 00:33
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Allende was arming a paramilitary group to do a coup of his own. being the president of a democratic gov't wasn't enough. He would've turned Chile into a Cuba.
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Bereta_Eder
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He was democratically elected.
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Bereta_Eder
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quote:
Originally posted by Oncle Boris
Was this supposed to be any surprise? |
No. Absolutely not. Just posting it for history's value and to never forget it.
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C0ckney
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Big Up The Macedonian Massive
Apr 2000
time: 05:33
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yeah but we helped get rid of another south american dictator in 1982, what's greece ever done for anyone?
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Bereta_Eder
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The point of this thread and the rememberance at least as I and many see it is that untill proper distribution of justice to the UK is being done this will remain an open subject awaiting vindification when the times will allow. Sooner or later.
A second point but no least of this thread and the remembrance is to pointing this out as this will affect peoples' views about the UK and bring them to the right proportions. Not that any help is needed about that but again the dead of that coup since they can't have justice yet they can at least have their voice be heard from the grave.
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thesilentone
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Paiktis, if you hate the UK so much why not just post a thread saying so instead of constantly pulling out all this bull**** which does nothing but make you look like a troll. I mean if we want to dig further into history which matters little in todays world, why not dig up stuff that shows the brits liberating greece from the ottomans, or the germans. Or how we insisted that greece remain democratic and not fall under soviet influence when we were dividing up eastern europe with the soviet union. Sheesh.
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03-01-2004 00:41
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