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Chile: 16,000 Secret Documents Declassified [1]

['Michael Evans']

Date: 2000-11-13

PRESS RELEASE

CHILE: 16,000 SECRET U.S. DOCUMENTS DECLASSIFIED

CIA FORCED TO RELEASE HUNDREDS OF RECORDS ON COVERT OPERATIONS

National Security Archive calls Release a Victory for Openness;

Pushes for further Declassification Jump to the Documents

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Washington D.C.: The National Security Archive today hailed the release of more than 16,000 secret U.S. records on the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, and Washington’s role in the violent overthrow of the Allende government and the advent of the military regime to power. The release, totaling over 50,000 pages of State Department, CIA, White House, Defense and Justice Department records, represents the fourth and final “tranche” of the Clinton Administration’s special Chile Declassification Project.

The declassification includes 700 controversial CIA documents that the Directorate of Operations had refused to release—records of U.S. covert operations between 1968 and 1975 to destabilize the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende and, after the violent 1973 coup, to bolster the military regime of Augusto Pinochet. The final release, originally scheduled for September 14, was delayed two months while the White House pressured the CIA to relinquish these documents. Some 800 other CIA intelligence records were also declassified.

Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst at the National Security Archive, the public interest research center that led the campaign to declassify U.S. documents on Chile, called the release a “victory for openness over the impunity of secrecy.” The documents, he said, “provide evidence for a verdict of history on U.S. intervention in Chile, as well as for potential courtroom verdicts against those who committed atrocities during the Pinochet dictatorship.”

The National Security Archive credited Clinton’s national security staff, particularly William Leary who coordinated the declassification project, as well as State Department officials with a strong commitment to using declassified U.S. documents to advance the cause of human rights abroad and the American public’s right-to-know at home.

The release includes dozens of records on the September 1976 assassination of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his American associate, Ronni Karpen Moffitt that had been previously withheld by the Justice Department as possible evidence in an ongoing investigation of General Pinochet’s personal role in the most famous act of international terrorism ever committed in Washington D.C. Intelligence records that could directly implicate Pinochet remain classified. The majority of the 16,000 documents come from State Department files covering the years 1970 to 1990.

Among the key documents declassified that shed considerable light on the history of U.S. involvement in Chile, and the repression of the Pinochet regime are:

Detailed minutes of the “40 Committee” meetings—the high-level interagency group chaired by national security advisor Henry Kissinger—which oversaw U.S. efforts to undermine the election and government of Socialist leader Salvador Allende. These meetings reveal strategies of “drastic action” planned to “shock” Chileans into taking action to block Allende.

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[1] Url: https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/news/20001113/

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