The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability

by Peter Kornbluh

On September 15, 1970, in a fifteen-minute meeting between 3:25 and 3:40 P.M., President Richard Nixon ordered the CIA to initiate a massive covert intervention in Chile. The goal: to block Chilean President-elect Salvador Allende from taking and holding office.

In his memoirs, Henry Kissinger identified Chilean millionaire, owner and publisher of El Mercurio and distributor for the Pepisco Co., Agustín Edwards, as the catalyst of Richard Nixon’s September 15 orders for a coup. “By then Nixon had taken a personal role,” he writes in White House Years. “He had been triggered into action on September 14 by Agustín Edwards, the publisher of El Mercurio, the most respected Chilean daily newspaper, who had come to Washington to warn of the consequences of an Allende takeover.

“Our main concern in Chile is the prospect that he [Allende] can consolidate himself and the picture projected to the world will be his success,” stated Nixon, providing the only candid explanation of his policy to prevent the democratic election of a socialist from becoming a model for Latin America and elsewhere.