The Cold War
Allende and Pinochet in Chile Outline of the 1973 Allende Coup in Chile and Pinochet's Junta (this video under CC-BY-SA)
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- What I want to talk about in this video is
- one of the darker periods in Chilean history and
- depending on your point of view,
- also one of the darker periods in American history.
- And what I want to make clear
- in this video and it really applies to every video I make on history is
- be skeptical of everything that I'm telling you.
- I'm going to do my best attempt to give you a
- reasonably accurate series of events and draw connections when they're clear
- And also make it clear where there might be connections and
- no one is sure. But you should be skeptical
- and frankly, you should be skeptical of anything anyone is telling you
- I encourage you all to use this as a scaffold for
- your own research, for you to look up these names
- and these events and figure out what actually happened.
- Now wth that said, let us rewind back to 1970,
- when Chile was having an election for president and
- they have their election and it's considered a
- fairly free and fair election. One of the candidates of
- that election was this gentleman over here,
- Salvador Allende, who was a known Marxist.
- He has communist ideologies here and he is known to be
- sympathetic to what has happened in Cuba,
- sympathetic to the Soviets.
- So you can imagine in this context, America is concerned.
- It's in the middle of the Cold War.
- You have Richard Nixon, president.
- You have Henry Kissinger, as his secretary of state.
- They are actively watching this election.
- They clearly do not want Salvador Allende to become president.
- All of a sudden a major country in Latin America,
- controlled by a Marxist.
- Unlucky for them, Salvador Allende actually does get more votes than everyone else.
- He gets 36 percent of the votes, which is a plurality.
- Just so you know what plurality means,
- it means you got more votes than anyone else,
- but not necessarily the majority of the votes.
- If he had gotten 51% of the votes that would be a majority.
- In this case he didn't get a majority and the standard procedure in Chile is that
- if no one gets a majority it goes to Congress and Congress picks who's president.
- And the usual thing that they would do is that they would pick whoever has the largest amount of votes.
- They normally didn't do a runoff.
- So you can imagine Nixon and Kissinger, they're worried
- so they kind of get into "let's mess with what's going on in Chile" mode
- and this part is well-established, that they had this, what they called a Track 1 strategy,
- of actually trying to get the Chilean Congress to not do what they normally do
- to not pick the guy with the largest number of votes.
- So they were trying to mess there. Didn't seem like something they would be able to pull off.
- The other thing that it looks like they started to kind of get involved with, through the CIA, is
- they started to at least interface--it's not clear how much they actually supported--they actually started to talk to people in the military
- and see, well, how likely is a coup to happen?
- How likely is Allende to be overthrown if he becomes president?
- They were looking for people who could, I guess, keep this known Marxist from becoming president.
- And the number one problem was this guy right over here.
- The number one problem was this guy right over here.
- In this whole video, I would say that Rene Schneider was the only unambiguously good guy in this video.
- He was the commander in chief of the Chilean military
- and he said, "Look, I don't care who becomes president, I don't care how much I disagree with him,
- I don't care how much pressure the Americans put on me
- or how much pressure the rest of the military puts on me
- the role of the Chilean military is not to mess with politics."
- They call him the constitutionalist.
- The role of the Chilean military is not to overthrow people when we don't like them.
- The role of the Chilean military is only to defend Chile.
- Is only to literally do, I guess, what militarys are supposed to do, what constitutions say the military is supposed to do.
- So you can imagine that the people who wanted to overthrow Allende,
- now that he's, now that it looks like he's going to come to power,
- they say that this guy is not a convenient guy to have in power.
- He doesn't like to play the way we play.
- Even though there were other elements in the military that did want to do that.
- And so, and this is what is a little unclear, you have this former general in the Chilean military
- who is clearly anti-Allende, and he is also anti-Schneider.
- Because this guy right here, Roberto Viaux, he thinks that the military should be, I guess,
- actively overthrowing dictators.
- So there is some contact between him and the CIA.
- It seems like the CIA may have supplied some support to him and then gotten a little freaked out,
- at least Kissinger might have gotten a little freaked out, that this guy seemed a little bit extreme.
- But remember, we are in this period where Allende was, he got 36% of the votes,
- Congress is kind of trying to figure out what they do about it.
- And during this period there are some people say,
- "Well, look, if Rene Schneider is not going to do what's in their mind the 'right' thing
- and depose the eventual Allende, then we'll have to depose Rene Schneider."
- So you have this plot that's worked up by Roberto Viaux
- to essentially kidnap Rene Schneider that would essentially depose him
- from being head of the military and they could put in his place
- someone who is more likely to have a coup, more likely
- to want to overthrow Allende.
- Unfortunately, when this guy's people try to kidnap Schneider,
- Schneider he's got a gun, he sees these guys kidnapping
- he takes out the gun and then the kidnappers shoot him, several times and he eventually dies.
- So this essentially turns into, this kidnapping turns into an assassination of Rene Schneider
- and they wanted to kill him just because or remove him
- or whatever just because he essentially wanted to do his job.
- So he's the only person in this whole narrative where I'll say he was an unambiguous good guy.
- Now what's not clear is how much involvement the Americans or the CIA had
- in supporting this kind of assassination or this kidnapping of Schneider.
- It does look like they kind of knew something was going on.
- This is a quote from Kissinger. Seems pretty well substantiated, where he told Nixon,
- a few days before Scheider was assassinated,
- when Nixon said, "Hey, what's going on in Chile?
- Are we working on any ways through the military, are we doing anything potentially, maybe about Schneider?"
- I don't know. Look that up for yourself. I don't know how much Nixon may or may not have known.
- Kissinger told Nixon, "This looks hopeless. I turned it off. Nothing could be worse than an abortive coup."
- So this quote is interesting because it looks like they thought about it.
- I mean, "I turned it off" which implies that at one point he had it turned on.
- So at one point they were actively thinking about working with Roberto Viaux,
- maybe to kidnap Schneider, maybe to orchestrate a coup against Allende
- but they turned it off. So it's definitely not, they're not morally above doing this type of thing,
- but they decided this guy was not as competent as maybe they thought he should
- and at least according to Kissinger, he's saying,
- "We turned it off because nothing could be worse than an abortive coup."
- And it turned out that's exactly what happened, because as soon as this guy go killed,
- everyone was like, oh my god, you have all of these shady elements
- who are trying to kind of overthrow democracy.
- And that actually put more pressure on Congress to say hey, we have to let Allende become president.
- So in November he gets inaugurated president.
- November, Allende becomes president.
- And this is always, there is a bunch of different stories here
- how much the CIA was involved.
- The counter-argument is look, the CIA would not have wanted to assassinate Schneider
- because this would have only made it, made Allende all the more popular.
- They would only have wanted to remove him and put someone else there
- who was more likely to have a coup against Allende later.
- Who knows? If you believe Kissinger's words, it looks like maybe he,
- they provided some initial support to Viaux and then they backed off a little bit.
- Who knows? Well regardless, by November of 1970 Salvador Allende became president.
- And he starting implementing his kind of Marxist ideology and it didn't go that well.
- Chile's economy, especially if you fast forward to 1972, 1973, not doing so well.
- He started doing price fixing. He tried to do the fairly naive approach
- of raising salaries while keeping prices fixed, which will obviously lead to shortages.
- So all around, he wasn't the most popular president.
- It didn't look like his, especially his economic policies, were working out that well.
- People who are pro-Allende would say, well look, just like what the United States did to Cuba
- they started doing in Chile.
- As soon as they had a Marxist in charge, someone they didn't like,
- the United States started swinging its huge economic power around to kind of hurt the Chillean economy
- so that this guy would come out of power.
- I let you decide that.
- You fast forward all the way to 1973. So now Allende has been in power for about three years.
- Things are not going well for him. There are strikes going on.
- He tries to clamp down on the media a bit.
- There is unrest. There people who definitely do not want him to be president anymore.
- And the people who don't think much of the United States will say
- Hey, but the United States the whole time was kind of actively undermining Allende and that's probably true.
- The United States will say no, look, we were trying to keep the press free.
- This guy was clamping down on free press.
- We were trying to keep things so that there will be another election.
- So that this guy won't turn into another Fidel Castro
- and essentially just turn Chile into a totalitarian, Communist regime.
- Regardless of which side you take, on September 11, 1973 Allende is deposed.
- The military surrounds the presidential palace and,
- it is said, that he commits "suicide."
- And I put that in quotes because, once again, some people believe that he really did commit suicide.
- Some people believe he was assassinated.
- And some accounts say that he committed suicide with an automatic weapon.
- Well, I guess you could commit suicide with an automatic weapon,
- but it doesn't seem like the weapon of choice for many people.
- But I'll leave that once again for you to decide.
- Maybe it's not even, well, whether or not he committed suicide,
- or whether he was killed,
- but regardless, on September 11th he gets thrown out of power
- and once again, it's not clear what role the CIA played.
- They clearly were sympathetic to the people who wanted to overthrow him.
- They clearly were providing indirect support throughout Allende's regime
- to all of the people who were anti-Allende.
- And you could look up, there are actually some declassified documents
- that hint at what the level of CIA involvement might have been.
- Regardless to say, Allende deposed, and this gentleman comes to power right over here.
- Augusto Pinochet. And he comes to power and he says,
- look, you know, this democracy thing is silly.
- I am the president. I am the commander in chief.
- Chile will be run by military junta. And let me write that word down.
- Chile will be run by a junta.
- And a junta just means a government that's run by the military.
- It's a military dictatorship. The military is now in charge of Chile.
- We don't need people to do silly things like voting anymore.
- And you can imagine Nixon didn't care so much that this guy didn't like democracy,
- but he was happy, let me see if I can put a smile on his face,
- he was happy that at least Pinochet was not a Marxist,
- that at least we had stopped the spread of Communism in Latin America.
- Unfortunately, and Nixon with that said, and this is explicit, he wanted to do everything in his power
- to make Augusto Pinochet successful, especially from an economic point of view.
- So Nixon does, we do, the United States does start supporting Pinochet.
- He's viewed as kind of an American friend.
- Unfortunately for America and unfortunately for Chile, this guy is one of those big time tyrants in history.
- So he is a tyrant. And he starts rounding up people.
- He starts killing people. He's one of those people that anything, anyone who had a whiff of Communism,
- or a whiff of political opposition, he would round them up
- he would round their family up, he would torture people.
- And just to kind of put some...and this is another picture of him when he's older.
- It's amazing how gentle some fairly evil people can look in the world.
- So I'll put some unambiguous horns on him.
- But he killed many, many people.
- And many, many people disappeared.
- And just to give an idea of what this...these are some of the people who disappeared.
- And it was anyone from people who were critical of him, people who were perceived to be left-leaning, whatever it was.
- And he tortured, including women and children and all the rest.
- So all around bad guy. He stuck around in Chile as president until 1990, so that's 17 years.
- And he really stayed in power until 1998 where he was commander in chief of the army.
- You can imagine if the military is in control, the president isn't that important of a title,
- commander in chief is.
- So for 25 years he hung around Chile and he continued to be kind of this totalitarian guy,
- although he was a big, he liked free markets, he was a capitalist in the traditional sense.
- And the one, I guess, silver lining, if you have to throw a silver lining on Pinochet's regime
- is that the Chilean economy actually did well during his regime.
- Chile is considered one of the success stories economically over that time period.
- So I'll let you decide.
- And some people would say, oh, that's because Pinochet was, he understood economics.
- He didn't try to do all this price fixing stuff that Allende tried to do.
- Regardless of the fact that he was a tyrant,
- at least people, you know, the economy was doing well.
- The other side of the equation would be, well look, of course the economy did well.
- Now you had the United States doing everything in its power,
- this huge, the largest economy in the world doing everything in its power
- to make sure that Chile's economy thrives while one of its buddies are in power.
- So I'll let you decide who's right, who's wrong,
- what was the actual involvement of the CIA and Nixon and Kissinger
- and all of this mess over here.
Be specific, and indicate a time in the video:
At 5:31, how is the moon large enough to block the sun? Isn't the sun way larger?
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