[center] THE CIA IN CHILE [/center]
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CIA agents organised a strike of private truck owners aimed at disrupting the flow of food and other important commodities. The Agency's propaganda merchants had a field day with newspaper headlines proclaiming "Economic chaos! Chile on brink of doom!" and exacerbating the food shortages by encouraging panic buying. CIA-supported newspapers alleged communist plots to disband or destroy the armed services, and told of Soviet and North Korean plans to establish bases in Chile. Textile mills were set ablaze, industrial plants bombed and mining machinery sabotaged. In May 1972 the Chilean embassy in Washington was burgled by some of the same men who the following month staged the Watergate break-in.
William Broe, chief of the Western Division of the CIA's Clandestine Services, met several times with officials of ITT (the International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation) and other U.S. corporations with substantial financial interests in Chile. Broe proposed to them a four-part plan of economic disruption to weaken the Chilean government to the point where the Chilean military would move to take over the government. A 1970 ITT memorandum stated: "A more realistic hope among those who want to block Allende is that a swiftly-deteriorating economy will touch off a wave of violence leading to a military coup." Three years after Allende's election, this was indeed what happened. Allende's government was ousted in a bloody coup d'etat by the CIA-backed forces in the army and replaced by a military dictatorship led by General Augusto Pinochet. Under the new junta, thousands of Allende's supporters and leftish suspects were rounded up in the national football stadium at Santiago and tortured; bodies piled up in the streets and floated in the river, and the country was beset by disappearances, executions and vicious political repression.
More:
http://www.american-buddha.com/cia.chile.htm
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The CIA's Campaign
Against Salvador Allende
excerpted from the book
The Lawless State
The crimes of the U.S. Inteligence Agencies
by Morton Halperin, Jerry Berman, Robert Borosage, Christine Marwick[/center]
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Some of the ClA's money flowed into paramilitary and terrorist groups such as the notorious Patria y Libertad an extremist private vigilante group. Other funds went through conduits, into support of strikes that plagued the Allende regime One hundred and eight leaders of the white-collar trade associations-some of which received direct CIA subsidies-received free training in the United States from the American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), an AFL-CIO affiliate which, according to ex-agency operative Philip Agee, was set up under the control of the CIA.
While the 40 Committee turned down specific CIA proposals for direct support to two truckers' strikes that had a devastating effect in 1972 and 1973 on Chile's economy, the CIA passed money on to private-sector groups, which in turn, with the agency's knowledge, funded the truckers.
