Remembering the other 9/11: Chile’s brutal Pinochet dictatorship — and our place in it

While we have been sumberged here beneath royal mourning, Americans have naturally focused on the 21st anniversary of the 9/11 attacks overnight, commemorating the thousands of lives lost in those atrocities.

There is another “9/11”, one of longer historical provenance: yesterday marked the 49th anniversary of the coup in Chile that saw the democratically elected Salvador Allende removed from power and murdered by a military coup backed by the Nixon administration. The ensuing dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet saw the murder of thousands and the imprisonment and torture of tens of thousands of Chileans, and the brutal application of neoliberal economics by Chicago School economists (of which Milton Friedman would later boast).

Australia had its own role in that coup, but it remains a mystery: as Crikey discussed last year, the Australian Secret Intelligence Service (ASIS) was on the ground in Santiago during the Allende government, at the request of the CIA.

UNSW Canberra Professor Clinton Fernandes has long sought access to files on ASIS’ role in 1973, but has been blocked by the intelligence establishment and the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.

Unless things change, Chileans next year will commemorate 50 years since those bloody events while Australians are still kept in the dark about the role of our intelligence service in them.