Presidents are doing in Latin America has been going on forever. WE know most surely Richard M. Nixon plowed MILLIONS of U. S. taxpayer dollars into Chilean newspaper magnate Augustin Edwards, and we know even more due to the investigations of the Church Committee led by Democratic Senator Frank Church.
Regarding the paper owned by Augustin Edwards, which became the source of daily boatloads of pure crap concerning Salvador Allende, concerning the evil plan executed to "make the economy scream" so the people would turn against him, and to paint a picture of Augusto Pinochet which bore no relationship to reailty in order to pacify and gull the Chilean public, and all the propaganda that flowed into our own country in order to utterly confound and mislead American citizens concerning what Nixon/Kissinger were doing to that country, and the real nature of Allende and Pinochet:
The El Mercurio File
Secret Documents Shine New Light on How the CIA Used a Newspaper to Foment a Coup
BY PETER KORNBLUH
September 11, a day of infamy in the U.S., is also a dark day in the history of Chile. This 9/11 marks the thirtieth anniversary of the coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power. Although former U.S. officials such as Henry Kissinger have insisted that Washington had no involvement in the military takeover, and was trying only to preserve democracy in Chile, CIA and White House records, analyzed here for the first time, show how the CIA used Chilean media to undermine the democratically elected government of Socialist Salvador Allende, an operation that "played a significant role in setting the stage for the military coup of 11 September 1973." From these documents emerges the story of the agency's main propaganda project — authorized at the highest level of the U.S. government — which relied upon Chile's leading newspaper, El Mercurio, and its well-connected owner, Agustín Edwards. In Chile, the aged Edwards remains an influential media power, and here in the U.S., covert action has again been unleashed and executive-branch secrecy is on the rise. The story behind 9/11/73 continues to echo.
For the better part of two years, a group of editors, journalism students, and human rights lawyers in Santiago, Chile, have been gathering evidence against their country's leading media mogul, Agustín Edwards, to, at minimum, have him expelled from the press guild, the Academy of Chilean Journalists. The editor of the leftist magazine Punto Final, Manuel Cabieses, has filed a formal petition accusing Edwards of violating the academy's code of ethics by conspiring with the Nixon White House and the CIA between 1970 and 1973 to foment the military coup that overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende and brought General Augusto Pinochet to power, thirty years ago this month.
"Doonie," as Edwards is known to his closest friends, is the patriarch of the press - a Chilean Rupert Murdoch. His media empire encompasses Chile's renowned national newspaper, El Mercurio, a second national paper, Ultimas Noticias, and Santiago's leading afternoon paper, La Segunda, along with a dozen smaller regional journals. In September 1970, when Chileans narrowly elected Allende, a Socialist, to the presidency, Edwards was widely considered to be the richest man in Chile — and the individual with the most to lose financially from Allende's election.
The ethics charges against Edwards are likely to receive a boost from a careful analysis of formerly secret U.S. documents that shed considerable new light on CIA covert media operations in Chile. Since 1975, when a special congressional committee chaired by Idaho Senator Frank Church issued its report, Covert Action in Chile: 1963-1973, it has been no secret that the CIA provided significant funding to El Mercurio, put reporters and editors on its payroll, and used the paper, in the committee's words, as "the most important channel for anti-Allende propaganda." But with the declassification of thousands of CIA and White House records at the end of the Clinton administration, the history of the "El Mercurio Project" emerges in far greater detail. Among the key revelations in the documents: - Even before Allende was inaugurated as president of Chile, Edwards came to Washington and discussed with the CIA the "timing for possible military action" to prevent Allende from taking office.
- President Nixon directly authorized massive funding to the newspaper. The White House approved close to $2 million dollars - a significant sum when turned into Chilean currency on the black market.
- Secret CIA cables from mid-1973 identified El Mercurio as among the "most militant parts of the opposition" pushing for military intervention to overthrow Allende.
- In the aftermath of the coup, the CIA continued to covertly finance media operations in order to influence Chilean public opinion in favor of the new military regime, despite General Pinochet's brutal repression.
More:
http://cjrarchives.org/issues/2003/5/chile-kornbluh.aspThese right-wing P.O.S.'s are still in the same business, doing the same things the same way, but now they are far slicker at it, far more proficient, and completely successful, especially as general interest in the world around us has faded as our own media has become completely owned and operated by only a handful of corporations, and the quality of information has been almost totally destroyed altogether, from an earlier already flawed condition.
It doesn't take long to start recognizing the pattern, does it? Reagan and the Contras, using his filthy scum propagandameister, evil little Cuban "exile" Otto Reich, in the State Department Office of Public Diplomacy to intimidate and harrass reporters, newspapers, television news organizations, threatening them, even attempting to slander the journalists personally with vulgar, sexual insinuations about them to others. They cooked up ungodly lies and passed them off as truth over and over again. Reich was investigated by the Congress and censured soundly. It was found he was doing illegal things in his blatant propaganda activities, but he somehow got the protection he needed from Reagan to escape prosecution, and was slid right into place in the State Department by
George W. Bush during a reccess appointment when the Senate was on vacation and couldn't refuse to accomodate the nomination as they had done earlier.
These guys couldn't be dirtier. Anyone who supports them supports pure evil. Period. No exception. Them's the facts.
What's more, Augustin Edwards is involved, along with his demon spawn, in a publishing group headquartered in Miami now, representing publishers and editors from all over the Western Hemisphere, and they somehow have a lot of power, are taken seriously by people who don't know any better, even though they are scum. Pity.
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