Investigators: Secret CIA files could help Chile

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press

Investigators: Secret CIA files could help Chile
By AP
Published Sunday, February 27, 2011

Survivors of Gen. Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship are hoping Barack Obama's visit next month will lead to the release of more classified US documents that could be critical to prosecuting the Chilean agents responsible for torturing and killing leftists decades ago.

They say the US president's visit should also encourage their own government to make good on its promises to deal more forcefully with the darkest period in Chile's political history.

Of all the Latin American countries that have shaken off dictatorships, none has made greater strides than Chile in convicting those responsible for torturing and killing political opponents. The U.S. has helped by declassifying huge troves of documents revealing what it knew about the Sept. 11, 1973 coup - Chile's own 9/11 - and the bloody crackdown that lasted through the 1980s.

~snip~
Authorities are under particular pressure from the daughters of two presidents whose deaths remain shrouded in mystery - Salvador Allende, who was said to have committed suicide as Pinochet's troops seized the presidential palace in 1973, and his predecessor Eduardo Frei Montalva, allegedly poisoned during routine hernia surgery in 1982, when he was a leading critic of the dictatorship.

Read more: http://www.emirates247.com/news/investigators-secret-cia-files-could-help-chile-2011-02-27-1.361216

[rabs]

1. Here is the 2000 report cited in the article

If anything, it provides a timeline of the events and some of the characters involved --Kissinger/Nixon, Pinochet, Contreras, Letelier and Moffit, the original junta, Horman and Terrugi, Plan Condor, El Mercurio and so on, themes we have discussed often in the Latam Forum.


https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/general-reports-1/chile/index.html#22

[Judi Lynn]

4. Can't believe they've actually admitted these things written in the report. Hmmmm.

I definitely would save it for future reference but I'm actually skitterish about having anything linked to their website in my records!

Amazed to see they, themselves put this admission right out there for any and everyone to see, considering it's still going on, as we all know! From your link:

CIA also provided assistance to militant right-wing groups to undermine the President and create a tense environment.

Amazing! Now where could we ever have heard about this going on for 10 years? It may take a while, but we'll remember.

They admitted in the most cursory possible way they operated in Chile's news media. It's easy to find information that they DID pump millions into El Mercurio, and handed it off to the owner, Agustín Edwards, who still runs his media crap in Chile, and is a participant along with his son in the AIPS based in Miami.

Google Wiki translation on Agustin Edwards:

Agustín Edwards Eastman Ivan Edmundo ( Paris , France , November 24 from 1927 -). Is an entrepreneur and journalist Chile , the current heir and owner of El Mercurio SAP , defined by many authors as the main asset of the CIA in Chile, being part of their Operation Mockingbird (Mockingbird). <1 >according to the Church Committee .

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agust%C3%ADn_Edwards_Eastman

also,

El Mercurio has been criticized for having received funds from the CIA in the early 1970s to undermine the Socialist government of Salvador Allende through continuous anti-Allende propaganda and for "setting the stage for the military coup of 11 September 1973"<1>, a fact the newspaper has always denied in spite of declassified documents which detail US interventions.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Mercurio

He and his son, Felipe T. Edwards are both members of the Miami-based Inter American Press Association which, for some reason, still does wield a lot of clout, getting all kinds of publicity for their statements and assorted anti-left sentiments. What a pathetic shame. Just look at the members of their various boards and committees. Felipe T. is on the Executive Board, while both he and Felipe T. are on the Board of Directors. A CIA-funded right-wing worse-than-Tea-bagging a-hole. Unbelievable.

Returning to read your link, going to do it in two attacks, as the first one was so horrible I got too upset to continue!

We owe you a lot for contributing that very important bunch of information, rabs. Thank you.

[lib2DaBone]

2. Wow.. the Repukes war against working people has been going on for decades...

.. all over the world.

[SpiralHawk]

3. True. Republicon 'eeleetes' HATE honest working people, and...

...have been waging occult war on them for decades to further enrich themselves and their fatcat cronies - not just in Latin America, but also in North America & elsewhere.

Now, thanks to their Republicon propaganda outlets like Fox 'news', Rush DraftDodger Limbaugh, Bill Felafel O'Reilly, Sean 'Gucci-loafers Deferment' Hannity, and Glenn Chickenhawk Beck, they have SUCKERED lots of working people into joining the war (against themselves).

How screwed is that?

[Solly Mack]

5. K&R

[Judi Lynn]

6. US 'undermined Chile's democracy'

Tuesday, 14 November, 2000, 02:18 GMT
US 'undermined Chile's democracy'

~snip~
Covert aid

It is the third and final batch of CIA records to be released on the period of military rule in Chile, following a review ordered by President Clinton.

The release was ordered in 1999, to allow the public to "judge for itself the extent to which US actions undercut the cause of democracy and human rights in Chile".

The records show that just three weeks before President Allende was toppled, US officials had approved $1M in covert aid to political parties and private organisations.

The records also detail a long history of covert anti-Allende efforts, including actions aimed at preventing him from taking office, destabilising his government once he was in office, and helping General Pinochet consolidate his power.

More:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/1022347.stm

~~~~~
May 8, 2002

Opening of CIA Records under Nazi War
Crimes Disclosure Act

Walther Rauff

The CIA's name file on Walther (Walter) Rauff, one of Nazi Germany's notorious war criminals, contains some new information about Rauff's wartime efforts and detailed, if unconfirmed, reports about his postwar travels and career. As an official of the Criminal Technical Institute of the Reich Security Main Office, Rauff designed gas vans used to poison Jews and persons with disabilities. He later was involved in persecution of Jews in North Africa, and there is a postwar report in the file that he tried to arrange the extermination of Jews in Egypt during late 1942.

Near the end of the war Rauff, then an SS and police official in northern Italy, tried to gain credit for the surrender of German forces in Italy, but ended up only surrendering himself. After escaping from an American internment camp in Italy, Rauff hid in a number of Italian convents, apparently under the protection of Bishop Alois Hudel. In 1948 he was recruited by Syrian intelligence and went to Damascus, (only to fall out of favor after a coup there a year later). According to one report, he tortured Jews in Syria. He and his family then settled in Ecuador, later shifting to Chile, where he may have served in Chilean intelligence. CIA officials could not determine Rauff's exact position. In any case, the government of General Augusto Pinochet resisted all calls for his extradition to stand trial in West Germany, and he died peacefully in southern Chile in 1984.

http://www.fas.org/sgp/news/2002/05/nara050802.html

~~~~~
07/09/2008
Hunt for Nazi War Criminal
'Dr. Death' Believed to be Living in Chile

The hunt for "Dr. Death" Aribert Heim, the Nazi war criminal wanted for murdering hundreds of prisoners in concentration camps during World War II, has intensified after the Simon Wiesenthal's chief Nazi hunter received fresh leads during a visit to South America.

Efraim Zuroff, a Holocaust historian who heads the center's Jerusalem office, told media that he had received information that Heim was in the Patagonia region of southern Chile, where his daughter lives.

The Simon Wiesenthal Center has received leads that "Dr. Death" Aribert Heim, the center's most wanted Nazi war criminal, is alive and living in Patagonia, Chile. The center's chief Nazi hunter is due to travel there this week.

~snip~
Heim was arrested by American troops in 1945 and held for over two-and-a-half years. He was never prosecuted, and worked as a gynaecologist in Germany until 1962, when he fled after reportedly getting a tip-off about his impending arrest. There have been reported sightings of him in Egypt, Spain, Argentina and other locations.

More:
http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,564850,00.html

Paul Schäfer

Paul Schäfer Schneider (December 4, 1921 – April 24, 2010)<1> was the founder and former leader of a sect and agricultural commune of German immigrants called Colonia Dignidad ("Dignity Colony")—later renamed Villa Baviera—located in the south of Chile, about 340 km south of Santiago. Investigations by Amnesty International and the Chilean National Commission for Truth and Reconciliation Report have verified that Colonia Dignidad was used by DINA, the Chilean secret police, as a torture and detention centre during Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship.

More:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Sch%C3%A4fer

Which Nazis Fled To South America?
The dead, the captured and the fugitives

~snip~
Martin Bormann was the highest-ranking SS officer to take refuge in South America, specifically in Chile and Argentina. Bormann joined the Nazi party in 1925, and by the end of WWII was Adolf Hitler's personal assistant.

Bormann became so powerful that he was appointed by Hitler to collect the financial donations made by the richest German businessmen to the Nazi party, and also to look after Hitler's private estate, such as the Berghof (Wolf's Lair) in Bavaria. In 1941, Bormann was appointed Chancellor of the Nazi Party, whereby all official matters and meetings with Hitler had to be previously approved by Bormann.

In 1945, as the Soviet troops advanced on the Berlin Bunker, Bormann witnessed Hitler and Eva Braun's wedding. After the ceremony Hitler ordered Bormann to escape and save his life to carry out a mysterious "final mission."

There are many versions as to how Bormann escaped from Berlin, some claim that he died others that he escaped. Bormann's final fate remained an enigma until 1996 when a passport was found in Chile with Bormann's photo but under the name of Ricardo Bauer.

More:
http://english.ohmynews.com/articleview/article_view.asp?at_code=336951

ETC.