Obit: David Popper, ambassador to Pinochet's Chile

[MountainLaurel]

File under "Smoking turds in Hell today"

David H. Popper, 95, a career Foreign Service officer who became U.S. ambassador to Chile months after Gen. Augusto Pinochet overthrew socialist President Salvador Allende, died July 24 at Georgetown University Hospital of complications from a fall last week.

snip

Mr. Popper spent the next three years balancing U.S. policy to support anti-Communist military regimes, against public demands from Congress and humanitarian groups that the Chilean junta stop killing, jailing and torturing its political opponents.

The New York Times reported in 1974 that Mr. Popper was warned by Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to separate the issues of human rights and military aid.

snip

Dinges said Mr. Popper "presided over the delivery of such an ambiguous message on human rights that the Pinochet government heard what they wanted to hear -- that the U.S. supported the dictatorship, including the repression."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/07/30/AR2008073003069.html

[RaleighNCDUer]

1. Rest In Peace, Ambassador Popper

if you can...