THE WORLD may be caught up at present in assessing the implications of the unprecedented September 11 terrorist attacks on the USA. But the people of Chile will also remember another infamy on that very date 28 years ago.
Terrorism comes in various modes and sponsorship. The political parties and the people of Guyana would know much about this from their own turbulent political history, though the experiences will vary.
On that tragic day of September 11, 1973, terrorism in Chile had manifested itself in the execution of President Salvador Allende in a successful military coup, led by Augusto Pinochet.
It was the climax of months of terroristic, anti-national, anti-democratic activities in which the CIA and leading strategists of then U.S President Richard Nixon were key players.
And the Cuban exile and CIA-trained Orlando Bosch, who was to be subsequently involved in the bombing of a Cubana passenger aircraft off Barbados on October 6, 1976, was among the subversive elements at work, with the connivance of the anti-Allende forces in the Nixon administration to topple Allende's legitimate socialist-oriented government.
Let Henry Kissinger, one of America's most celebrated Secretary of State and foreign policy experts, speak. He was at the time President Nixon's Secretary of State.
According to Kissinger himself, as confirmed by then CIA Director, Richard Helms, (see 'Covert Action in Chile 1963-1973') published in Washington 1973:
"He (Kissinger) told CIA Director Helms in a conversation that lasted 15 minutes that he wanted a major effort to see what could be done to prevent Allende's accession to power.
"If there were one chance in ten of getting rid of Allende we should try it; if Helms needed $10 million he would approve it....Aid programmes should be cut; (Chile's) economy should be squeezed until it 'screamed'....
"If I ever carried the marshall's baton out of the Oval Office", Helms boasted to a Senate Committee hearing, "it was that day" (day of meeting with Kissinger of the then influential 40 Committee, a sub-cabinet adviory body to the Executive Branch)
GOING FOR ALLENDE
Well, having failed to prevent the rise of Allende to the presidency, the combined anti-democratic forces in Santiago and Washington, aided by their hired thugs of Cuban origin---one now walking quite freely in America---more than succeeded in forcing the government and democratic forces in Chile to "scream".
They got Pinochet to lead the coup that resulted in the execution of President Allende and the overthrow of his legitimate government.
But the infamy of Chilean and Cuban-American terrorists, organised and financed by the CIA, was not over.
Two years later they were to be implicated in the assassination, on American soil, in Washington to be exact, of Allende's Defence Minister at the time of the September 11 coup---Orlando Letelier. They assassinated him and his American assistant, Ronni Moffit by blowing up his car as he drove to a restuarant for dinner.
It is all well documented, with sourced materials, in "Assassination on Embassy Row" (Pantheon Books, New York, 1980).
I must thank a journalist colleague of mine for reminding me of the Chilean coup of 1973 after she had read my column on "CARICOM, Terrorism and Justice" in the 'Sunday Chronicle"..
In that column I referred to the terrorist bombing of the Cubana aircraft in which 73 people perished, including 11 Guyanese, and of America's refusal to abide by a decision of the International Court of Justice for sponsored terrorism against the Sandinista government of Daniel Ortega.
I also urged that in its moment of horrendous tragedy, the Bush administration should not confuse revenge with justice or to assume that those governments of sovereign states that do not necessarily concur with its war of retaliation are, 'ipso facto' on the side of global terrorism.
BUSH'S DEAL WITH TALIBANS
As I was researching for this article, I received from a friend an article published in the 'Los Angeles Times" on May 22 this year of a very surprising deal made between the strangest of bedfellows---President George W. Bush and the Taliban regime of Afghanistan, one with a most notorious human rights record, including virtual enslavement of its women folk.
Robert Scheer, writing on "Bush's Faustian Deal with the Taliban", pointed to a development that Bush and his administration would like a lot of people to forget in the wake of the terrorist attacks of September 11 on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, masterminded, we are told, by Mr. "Hate America", Osama bin Laden, the Saudi militant who has been the special and influential guest in Afghanistan.
It was the US$43 million aid gift promised on May 17, as announced by Secretary of State Colin Powell, to the Taliban regime in Kabul for its declared war against opium cultivation and narco-trading since, it claimed, it would be in accordance of God's will.
Hardly suspecting what was to come some four months later in the terrorist attacks on the USA that were to put the Taliban regime at the centre of Bush's war of revenge against global terrorism, Scheer noted in his Los Angeles Times' article:
"Sadly, the Bush administration is cosying up to the Taliban regime at at a time when the United Nations, at U.S insistence, imposes sanctions on Afghanistan because the Kabul government will not turn over Osama bin Laden. The war on drugs has become our own fanatics' obsession and easily trumps all other concerns...."
Clearly upset by Washington's aid gift to Kabul in helping to wage the war on illicit drugs, Scheer noted: "The Taliban may suddenly be the dream regime of our own drug war zealots, but in the end this alliance will prove a costly failure.
"Our long sad history of signing up dictators in the war on drugs demonstrates the futility of building up a foreign policy on a domestic obsession", he concluded.
I seriously doubt that the American people would today find any comfort in being reminded about their country's "alliance" with the forces of evil that killed Allende and toppled his government on September 11, 1973. Or, with the anti-drug US$43 million "gift" announced just a few months ago to the Taliban regime that is now being profiled in Washington as "monstrous" and "barbaric".
As Trinidadians would say: "You think it easy!" They must be saying that of their own confusing political climate as well.