The culpability of U.S. President Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, Nixon’s national security adviser, in the violent overthrow in 1973 of Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president of Chile, remains hotly contested. Thoroughly reviewing the voluminous primary and secondary sources, Streeter concludes that the United States was not directly involved in the coup but that Washington helped create a climate of frenzied polarization that provoked the Chilean military’s bloody takeover. Streeter documents the CIA’s support for opposition movements in Chile and its role in spreading disinformation via Chilean media, as well as the surreptitious U.S.-imposed “invisible blockade” that callously starved Chile’s economy of external financing. Nevertheless, he argues, domestic factors, such as Allende’s mismanagement of the economy and tensions within the president’s coalition, played a more decisive role. Streeter wonders what decisions might have preempted the military coup: for example, Allende might have tried to negotiate a coalition government with the center-right Christian Democrats or agreed to a plebiscite on his rule. But deepening polarization purposefully abetted by U.S. policies blocked a peaceful compromise.
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Publish date : 2025-01-06 22:46:00
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