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"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 480,274 visits since April 18, 2000

Friends 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.

September 22-24 Press Briefing with Analysis of the Perú Crisis

September 21 Press Briefing on the Closing of the Geopolitical Drug Observatory

Archive of Press Briefings September 19-20

Archive of Press Briefings September 8-18

Archive of Press Briefings September 1-7

Archive of Press Briefings from August 24-30

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