My journalist husband was murdered because he knew too much about Pinochet's US backers.
Justice for Charles Horman – and the truth about the US and Chile's coup
My journalist husband was murdered because he knew too much about Pinochet's US backers. Accountability is 40 years overdue
Joyce Horman
theguardian.com, Wednesday 11 September 2013 07.30 EDT
Forty years ago, during Chile's bloody coup of 11 September 1973, my husband, Charles Horman, stepped into a car driven by "Captain" Ray Davis, the head of the US military group in Chile, for a ride from the coastal resort town of Viña del Mar to the capital of Santiago. That one journey forever changed our family, and placed me on a quest for justice that persists to this day.
Charlie was a journalist, and we both were enthusiastic supporters of the democratically-elected socialist president, Salvador Allende. When General Augusto Pinochet launched his coup against Allende from the same coastal town Charles was visiting, my husband was surprised to see not only many Chilean tanks and helicopters moving out, but US warships cruising just off the coast, and US military personnel on the ground. He overheard some of those personnel enthusiastically and eagerly taking credit for the success of the coup, implying US military involvement. Charlie dutifully took his notes.
Before he, and our visiting friend from New York, Terry, began their journey with Davis, Charles knew he had come upon dangerous information. The drive past heavy military roadblocks into the heart of Santiago where Pinochet's forces were on a search-and-destroy mission for Allende supporters, provided the perfect opportunity for Davis to evaluate Charles and his loyalties. This reality did not escape my husband, and he began to fear Captain Davis.
Charles returned to our home in Santiago, and as he recounted his journey and discoveries to me, we resolved to leave the country. On 17 September, we separately embarked on our errands for the day, and kissed each other goodbye. I did not realize at the time that I would never see my husband alive again.
More:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/sep/11/justice-charles-horman-us-chile-coup
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@TimothyS: The AFL-CIO has never apologized for its role in Chile's 9/11. It should and here's why. Nation/May 2003. bit.ly/b10FVc #AFLCIO13...September 11, in 1973, was the day Chilean President Salvador Allende was overthrown in a bloody military coup that ended a brief experiment in democratic socialism and took the lives of Allende and thousands of Chilean workers, students and political activists. Today, many trade unionists remain haunted by the knowledge that their own federation, the AFL-CIO, played a key role in the US campaign, led by the Nixon Administration and the Central Intelligence Agency, to destabilize Chile in the years before the coup. From 1971 to 1973, the AFL-CIO's American Institute for Free Labor Development (AIFLD), one of four US-government-funded labor institutes created during the cold war, channeled millions of dollars to right-wing unions and political parties opposed to Allende's socialist agenda. That aid helped finance the revolt by Chile's professional class and fanned the flames of social unrest that provided the pretext for Gen. Augusto Pinochet's violent crackdown and the justification for his seventeen-year dictatorship.
According to documents I've unearthed in the AFL-CIO's archives, AIFLD's program in Chile was closely coordinated with the US Embassy and dovetailed with one of the CIA's key aims in Chile: to split the Chilean labor movement and create a trade union base of opposition to Allende, who was viewed as dangerously anti-American and a pawn of the Soviet Union. The campaign's political agenda was summarized in a 1972 cable in the archives from Robert O'Neill, AIFLD's representative in Chile, to AFL-CIO headquarters in Washington. Chile, O'Neill proudly told his superiors, had become the site of "the first large-scale middle class movement against government attempts to impose, slowly but surely, a Marxist-Leninist system."
...
Questions about the past have mingled with concerns about the AFL-CIO's current activities abroad, such as its financial support for the Confederation of Venezuelan Workers (CTV), which is allied with Venezuela's business elite in a bitter campaign to topple the leftist government of President Hugo Chávez. Initially, the AFL-CIO's program in Venezuela was financed with a $150,000 grant from the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), which was created by Congress to support pro-US democratic movements abroad, and came to light last spring, shortly after Chavez was briefly overthrown in a military coup initially backed by the Bush Administration. To a few critics, the incident resembled the interventionist days of old--a comparison hotly denied by the AFL-CIO.
In response, labor councils on the West Coast have been pressing the AFL-CIO leadership to "come clean" about the past and set the course for the future by fully opening its archives--including materials from the Reagan era that remain off-limits to researchers--and creating a truth commission to analyze and publicize their contents. The strongest resolutions, passed in 2000 by the San Francisco and South Bay labor councils in California and in 2001 by the Washington State AFL-CIO, asked the federation to "renounce" what it did in Chile and elsewhere in labor's name, and allow union members and independent researchers to make a full accounting of the past. Last July the California Labor Federation put the weight of its 2 million members behind the effort with a resolution asking the AFL-CIO to open a dialogue about its government-funded foreign affairs activities, past and present, and "affirm a policy of genuine global solidarity in pursuit of economic and social justice." ...
http://www.thenation.com/article/labors-cold-war#axzz2eXx9SAdo
WTF did Teamsters endorse Reagan?