Chilean Media Mogul Expelled From Journalists Association

[Judi Lynn]

Chilean Media Mogul Expelled From Journalists Association
Published 21 April 2015


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Agustin Edwards gives a speech to the Horse Breeders Association of Chile | Photo: Las Condes Municipality
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Agustin Edwards, owner of the largest newspaper in the country actively helped the far-right military dictatorship.

Chile's National Journalists Association announced Tuesday it would expel Agustin Edwards Eastman, president and owner of El Mercurio, the country's largest newspaper.

The decision was ratified by the association's President Javiera Olivares, who described it as “historic” and is based on the businessman's role before and during the military dictatorship in Chile that extended from 1973 to 1989.

Edwards and his newspaper received money from the United States' Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to promote the 1973 coup against democratically elected President Salvador Allende.

More:
http://www.telesurtv.net/english/news/Chilean-Media-Mogul-Expelled-From-Journalists-Association-20150421-0032.html

About time, wouldn't you say?

[BainsBane]

1. I'll say, considering those CIA payments

have been part of the US public record since the late 70s. I'm pretty sure they are detailed in transcripts of the Church Committee hearings.

[Judi Lynn]

2. Good idea! It would be interesting knowing how much he got for his traitorous actions. n/t

[BainsBane]

4. You could also look in the ITT memos released by Jack Anderson

They've been published. Most of that is probably on the website of the National Security Archives.

[Judi Lynn]

5. Didn't see the Jack Anderson memos yet, but found this interesting info on ITT:

The U.S. Government's hostility to the election of Allende in Chile was substantiated in documents declassified during the Clinton administration, which show that CIA covert operatives were inserted in Chile, in order to prevent a Marxist government from arising and for the purpose of spreading anti-Allende propaganda.[38] As described in the Church Committee report, the CIA was involved in multiple plots designed to remove Allende and then let the Chileans vote in a new election where he would not be a candidate. The first, non-military, approach involved attempting a constitutional coup. This was known as the Track I approach, in which the CIA, with the approval of the 40 Committee, attempted to bribe the Chilean legislature, tried to influence public opinion against Allende, and provided funding to strikes designed to coerce him into resigning. It also attempted to get congress to confirm Jorge Alessandri as the winner of the presidential election. Alessandri, who was an accessory to the conspiracy, was ready to then resign and call for fresh elections.

The other approach of the CIA, also known as the Track II approach, was an attempt to encourage a military coup, by creating a climate of crisis across the country. False flag operatives contacted senior Chilean military officers, and informed them that the U.S. would actively support a coup, but would revoke all military aid if such a coup did not happen.[35] In addition, the CIA gave extensive support for black propaganda against Allende, channeled mostly through El Mercurio. Financial assistance was also given to Allende's political opponents, and for organizing strikes and unrest to destabilize the government. By 1970, the U.S. manufacturing company ITT Corporation owned of 70% of Chitelco, the Chilean Telephone Company, and also funded El Mercurio. The CIA used ITT as a means of disguising the source of the illegitimate funding Allende's opponents received.[39][40][41] On 28 September 1973, ITT's headquarters in New York City, was bombed, allegedly for the involvement of the company in Allende's overthrow.[42]

Sounds even more like the same tactics which have been used against the Venezuelan people's Presidents Chavez and Maduro. No learning new skills for these guys, they already learned how to do this long ago. It's as natural as breathing.

[BainsBane]

6. The Chile stuff is all well documented

because of the Church committee hearings and FOIA releases. Almost all of what you post above was in the public domain back in the early 80s when I wrote an undergraduate thesis on the coup. I'm not aware of that kind of documentation for Venezuela, but then I haven't looked either. Still, we know there haven't been high profile hearings like the Church committee.

[Judi Lynn]

9. It takes forever getting declassified documents through the Freedom of Information Act.

It may not be possible until well past they overthrow Maduro, if they do, as it's all still a work in progress, and as Nixon said, "Make sure our hand does not show..." We may not see anything until long after their war on the leftist president has been concluded.

It doesn't look as if there's a chance in the world this Teabagger Congress would ever allow any hearings, unless they can arrange it to only have the US-funded Venezuelan opposition pawns as the witnesses. It really can make you sick just considering it.

[BainsBane]

7. BTW

I just watched a documentary on Henry Kissinger, in which he blatantly lied about US involvement during the Allende govt. He admitted to the efforts to influence the election and to keep Allende from assuming office (there was a kidnapping of a general that went awry), but he blatantly contradicted the public record by saying the US government took no action to oust Allende after he took office. Yet all of that is documented by US government documents.

When Nail Ferguson (another RWer who pisses me off) first brought up Chile, Kissinger didn't want to talk about it and asked them to stop filming. He had no problem talking about the bombing of Cambodia, but Chile he tried to avoid.

[Judi Lynn]

10. That's insane, isn't it? There are records open to the US public about their operations.

Wow. I guess that's power, when you can lie in front of millions of people and can't be forced to admit the truth.

I would suspect he won't talk because he knows there isn't one excuse in the world for what they did in Chile. Pure aggression to remove a President.

What a monster.

It would have been interesting, however, to see him wanting to escape the filming. At least he was uncomfortable for a moment.

[Judi Lynn]

8. Have just scratched the surface on this Congressional Report, but it says ITT bought advertising

in huge amounts, apparently, at El Mercurio and that was one of the ways ITT and the CIA were able to pump tons of money into the e newspaper system. It also mentions the propaganda then started getting moved around Latin America by El Mercurio.

http://americanempireproject.com/empiresworkshop/chapter1/TheTwentiethCentury-CompletingTheRevolution/ITTInChile1970-1971.pdf

This sounds so familiar.

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Information on Democratic Senator Frank Church, who investigated CIA propaganda:

Profile: Jack Anderson

~ snip ~

April, 1976: Church Committee Reports on Domestic Surveillance and Other Illegal Activities by US Intelligence Agencies

A Senate committee tasked to investigate the activities of US intelligence organizations finds a plethora of abuses and criminal behaviors, and recommends strict legal restraints and firm Congressional oversight. The “Church Committee,” chaired by Senator Frank Church (D-ID), a former Army intelligence officer with a strong understanding of the necessity for intelligence-gathering, notes in its final report that the CIA in particular had been overly cooperative with the Nixon administration in spying on US citizens for political purposes (see December 21, 1974); US intelligence agencies had also gone beyond the law in assassination attempts on foreign government officials in, among other places, Africa, Latin America, and Vietnam. Church himself accused the CIA of providing the White House with what, in essence, is a “private army,” outside of Congressional oversight and control, and called the CIA a “rogue elephant rampaging out of control.” The committee will reveal the existence of hitherto-unsuspected operations such as HT Lingual, which had CIA agents secretly opening and reading US citizens’ international mail, and other operations which included secret, unauthorized wiretaps, dossier compilations, and even medical experiments. For himself, Church, the former intelligence officer, concluded that the CIA should conduct covert operations only “in a national emergency or in cases where intervention is clearly in tune with our traditional principles,” and restrain the CIA from intervening in the affairs of third-world nations without oversight or consequence. CIA director William Colby is somewhat of an unlikely ally to Church; although he does not fully cooperate with either the Church or Pike commissions, he feels that the CIA’s image is badly in need of rehabilitation. Indeed, Colby later writes, “I believed that Congress was within its constitutional rights to undertake a long-overdue and thoroughgoing review of the agency and the intelligence community. I did not share the view that intelligence was solely a function of the Executive Branch and must be protected from Congressional prying. Quite the contrary.” Conservatives later blame the Church Commission for “betray[ing] CIA agents and operations,” in the words of American Spectator editor R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr, referencing the 1975 assassination of CIA station chief Richard Welch in Greece. The chief counsel of the Church Committee accuses CIA defenders and other conservatives of “danc[ing] on the grave of Richard Welch in the most cynical way.” It is documented fact that the Church Commission exposed no agents and no operations, and compromised no sources; even Colby’s successor, George H.W. Bush, later admits that Welch’s death had nothing to do with the Church Committee. (In 1980, Church will lose re-election to the Senate in part because of accusations of his committee’s responsibility for Welch’s death by his Republican opponent, Jim McClure.) [American Prospect, 11/5/2001; History Matters Archive, 3/27/2002; Assassination Archives and Research Center, 11/23/2002]

Final Report Excoriates CIA - The Committee’s final report concludes, “Domestic intelligence activity has threatened and undermined the Constitutional rights of Americans to free speech, association and privacy. It has done so primarily because the Constitutional system for checking abuse of power has not been applied.” The report is particularly critical of the CIA’s successful, and clandestine, manipulation of the US media. It observes: “The CIA currently maintains a network of several hundred foreign individuals around the world who provide intelligence for the CIA and at times attempt to influence opinion through the use of covert propaganda. These individuals provide the CIA with direct access to a large number of newspapers and periodicals, scores of press services and news agencies, radio and television stations, commercial book publishers, and other foreign media outlets.” The report identifies over 50 US journalists directly employed by the CIA, along with many others who were affiliated and paid by the CIA, and reveals the CIA’s policy to have “their” journalists and authors publish CIA-approved information, and disinformation, overseas in order to get that material disseminated in the United States. The report quotes the CIA’s Chief of the Covert Action Staff as writing, “Get books published or distributed abroad without revealing any US influence, by covertly subsidizing foreign publicans or booksellers.…Get books published for operational reasons, regardless of commercial viability.…The advantage of our direct contact with the author is that we can acquaint him in great detail with our intentions; that we can provide him with whatever material we want him to include and that we can check the manuscript at every stage…. (The agency) must make sure the actual manuscript will correspond with our operational and propagandistic intention.” The report finds that over 1,000 books were either published, subsidized, or sponsored by the CIA by the end of 1967; all of these books were published in the US either in their original form or excerpted in US magazines and newspapers. “In examining the CIA’s past and present use of the US media,” the report observes, “the Committee finds two reasons for concern. The first is the potential, inherent in covert media operations, for manipulating or incidentally misleading the American public. The second is the damage to the credibility and independence of a free press which may be caused by covert relationships with the US journalists and media organizations.”

More:
http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=jack_anderson_1

All this was known years and years ago. Amazing.

[Judi Lynn]

3. Agustin Edwards' Wikipedia, concerning his work as a "publisher." (Right, "publisher.")

Publisher[edit]

In 1968, Edwards was elected president of the Inter-American Press Association. He founded the association's committee on press freedom, and commissions on technical issues and scholarships. He also is president of the Diarios America Group, another trade organisation.[1]

On 5 September 1970, Edwards met with Henry Kissinger, John N. Mitchell and Richard Helms in Washington to request their financial support in his attempt to oust Marxist Salvador Allende who was about to win the Presidency.[2] Over the following year, Richard Nixon approved three covert payments totalling approximately US$2,000,000 to Edwards so he would use his media empire to help destabilise Chile's democratic process.[3] In the days and years following the military coup of 11 September 1973, Edwards' newspapers published falsifications in order to justify the coup and cover up the human rights violations of President Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship.[4] Only after the Rettig Report detailing the crimes of the Pinochet dictatorship was released in February 1991 did El Mercurio stop referring to victims of human rights violations as "allegedly missing prisoners".[5]

The Church Report, based on the findings of the U.S. Senate select committee formed in 1975 to investigate illegal activities by intelligence agencies, and released in 1992, referred to Edwards as one of the chief figures participating in Operation Mockingbird in Chile.[3] The Chilean documentary Agustín's Newspaper (2008), which included interviews with John Dinges and several of Edwards' former and current employees, exposed serious cases of disinformation in Edwards publications from the 1960s onwards.[6] Since the overthrow of Pinochet's military dictatorship, a number of journalists have attempted to have Edwards indicted for crimes related to his alleged breaches of journalistic ethics and documented payments from the Central Intelligence Agency.[7] In an interview in El Mercurio in 2000, Edwards defended himself by saying "I honestly think that we always try to simply report what happened. However, there may be serious limitations that cannot be overcome by any means."[8]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agust%C3%ADn_Edwards_Eastman

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American Imperialism and the Inter American Press Association (IAPA)
17th April 2008

~snip~
The IAPA blows

Parallel to its link with dictatorial governments, the history of the American great press cartel records a certain number of aggressions against the constitutionally constituted governments, in equal terms to the imperialist interests in the region. Thus, Garguverich stresses the soon conformation of an axis among the CIA, the IAPA and agencies of news as part of the structure of US domination, making a powerful instrument for the destabilizing plans in Latin America<5>.

Perhaps the most symbolic case of the destabilizing action of the IAPA has been the dirty campaign against the government of Salvador Allende in Chile, who was overthrown in 1973 due to the combination of Chilean reactionary forces and the CIA, since the implementation of a strong psychological war.

Chilean journalist Hernan Uribe affirms that along the whole history of Chile, there was no period in which dominated a freedom of information that even fell into debauchery and in clear violations to professional ethics as in Allende’s term in office. President Allende himself, in 1970, declared to /Prensa Latina/ agency that his government would favor unlimited freedom of press, but would also favor that all the social agents and ideological trends had access to opinion.

“Currently, those rights were officially established, but its practice appears restricted to the minor sectors which had a prominent situation from the financial point of view,” expressed Allende, according the also journalist Ernesto Carmona. His words, obviously, would not please the media magnates. Even less when Allende pointed towards a main topic, indicating that the media in capitalist regimes turned not in instruments of information, but in instruments of misinformations of the people’s interests.

Oriented by the CIA, the Chilean opponent media, headed by the journal /El Mercurio/, could not answer Allende’s request of informing with objectivity and to maintain with nobility their points of view. On the contrary, they devoted to spread lies and to try to give an image of persecution to the press, adding fuel to the fire in which they would cook Pinochet’s dictatorship. For that reason, Allende claimed, on February 12^th 1973, “We are obliged to point out the lack of moral authority and the distorted interest of those who shelter on the Inter American Press Association. We are not concerned about the critics. We not only accept it, we also claim for it.”

Uribe also stresses that it was also the CIA the responsible for directing the great Chilean press and the IAPA members in a campaign of black propaganda against Allende, fact proved by unclassified documents in the United States. On this context, the journal /El Mercurio/, property of Agustin Edwards, who performed as the IAPA vice president, received enough dollars for his campaign against Allende, and he even stopped circulating for a day, pleading threats “in order to form a misinformation scandal which claimed ‘for the closing’ of /El Mercurio/.”

More:
http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=405x32760