While leaders around the world remember Henry Kissinger fondly and praise him as a brilliant, hard-driving US statesman, the silence from Latin America is deafening.
“A man has died whose historical brilliance never managed to conceal his moral wretchedness,” Chile’s ambassador to the United States, Juan Gabriel Valdes, wrote on X, the former Twitter.
The envoy posted his acerbic remark after the death Wednesday of Kissinger, who greenlighted the 1973 coup that brought down Chile’s elected socialist president and installed the rightwing dictatorship of general Augusto Pinochet.
Chilean President Gabriel Boric quietly reposted that X message, and the foreign minister said nothing at all about the man who dominated post-World War II US foreign policy and is often associated with “realpolitik” — diplomacy driven by raw power and a country’s self-interest.
Kissinger, first as national security adviser and then secretary of state under Richard Nixon (1969-1974) and Gerald Ford (1974-1977), was instrumental in the establishment of ties between the United States and China and in expanding the war in Vietnam to Cambodia and Laos.
But he also approved the putsch in which Pinochet overthrew president Salvador Allende, and was key in backing other authoritarian regimes in Latin America, such as in Brazil and Nicaragua.
“For Kissinger, Latin America was a piece on the global geostrategic chessboard. His only priority was the war against communism. All other considerations were of little importance,” said Michael Shifter, former president of the Inter-American Dialogue, a Washington think tank, and a professor at Georgetown University.
“In that context, Kissinger was indifferent to human rights violations under military governments in the region,” he added.
Kissinger played a prominent role in destabilizing the Allende government, bringing it down and then supporting the Pinochet dictatorship, which ran from 1973 to 1990.
In 1970, before Allende was elected, Kissinger said: “I don’t see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its own people. The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves.”
He said this to the 40 Committee, a multi-agency US government body that approved covert operations.
Fear of contagion
Declassified CIA documents show that after Allende was elected in 1970, Kissinger oversaw disruptive operations designed to keep him from taking power, such as the attempted kidnapping of the army commander in chief, General Rene Schneider.
Schneider resisted, opening fire to defend himself, and was shot dead.
“Kissinger’s obsession with Chile stemmed from the path that Allende had chosen to move toward his socialist utopia project,” said Fernando Reyes Matta, a Chilean diplomat and former official of the Allende government.
This path involved democratic elections bringing socialists to power, the diplomat said.
“If this experiment succeeded to some extent, it could spread to countries in Italy such as Italy, France or Greece,” said Reyes Matta.
After the US effort to keep Allende from taking power failed, and Allende actually assumed office, Kissinger rejected any notion of working with the new Chilean government.
And, rejecting advice from those around him, he pressed on with clandestine operations and tried to undermine the Chilean economy.
“Unfortunately Kissinger did not pay attention to the recommendation of his own team, such as Peter Vaky, his national security adviser, who stated clearly that Allende did not represent a mortal threat to the United States. So Kissinger’s strategy was immoral and went against democratic values,” said Shifter.
After Allende was overthrown on September 11, 1973 Kissinger — who that same year shared the Nobel peace prize for leading the US side in talks to end the Vietnam war — was a firm supporter of the brutal Pinochet regime.
“My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going communist,” Kissinger told Pinochet in 1976.
Kissinger said this even though he was under pressure to call Pinochet out over human rights violations under his regime, which left some 3,200 people dead or missing.
