BOOK REVIEW/Graeme S. Mount, “Chile and the Nazis: From Hitler to Pinochet” (Montreal: Black Rose Books, 2002) $19.99, paper.

“At the end of World War II, if some prescient commentator had described the terror regimes that … dominate Latin America [in the late 1970’s], liberals would have derided this visionary for spelling out the likely consequences of a Nazi victory.”-Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman.

Book-burning, torture chambers, mass executions, the appointment of Nazi officials to top government posts, and raw anti-Semitism in the media did not go out of fashion with Hitler’s defeat by the Allies.

As a matter of fact, these Nazi-style practices were energetically resurrected in Chile under the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who led the bloody US-coordinated coup. The coup resulted in the death of democratically-elected President Salvador Allende, a socialist firmly committed to a democratic path, and plunged the country into barbarism during Pinochet’s gore-spattered18-year reign.

But where German Nazism was almost universally condemned, the Pinochet regime found eager allies among the US government and, and even more ironically, the Jewish state of Israel. While most Americans imagine their government to be following a benevolent, idealistic foreign policy based on promoting democracy, the reality has been more sordid. As several authors have carefully documented, the US hired Axis war criminals and adapted Nazi counter-insurgency manuals to assist in fighting leftist guerrilla movements in Greece, Malaya and elsewhere.
As with the blatantly anti-Semitic dictatorship of Argentina of the 1970’s and 80’s, America’s leaders strongly embraced a tyranny deeply associated with Nazi-tinged tactics and symbols.

 ‘An accumulation of arsenic’: How US planned to poison Chilean democracy Following the military coup of Sept. 11, 1973 in Chile, US officials’ denial of any US involvement could not have been more fervent or categorical.  But contrary to some liberals’ belief the the CIA was acting as a rogue agency running amok, James Petras and Morris Morley documented in”The United States and Chile: Imperialism and the Overthrow of the Allende Government “ (1975, Monthly Review Press) that the CIA was merely following the directives of a civilian officials committed to the destruction of democracy in Chile.

“As (then-CIA director) William Colby and others have pointed out, the CIA was carrying out orders fashioned by the Committee of 40 and the White House.” New dimensions of the US intervention have recently been uncovered. As startling as earlier revelations were, they pale beside newly-declassified documents surfaced by Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive . Kornbluh, editor of the “The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier of Atrocity and Accountability,” encountered an astonishingly frank cable sent by CIA officials in Langley to their operatives in Santiago Chile on Sept. 27, 1970.

Above all, the CIA called for a resolute commitment to thoroughly poisoning democracy in Chile.
The cable’s authors in the CIA chillingly urged:
“However, we must hold firmly to the outlines or our production will be diffused, denatured, and ineffective, not leaving the indelible residue in the mind that an accumulation of arsenic does.”