CIA's favorite newspaper in Chile praises Pinochet dictatorship on coup anniversary
CIA’s favorite newspaper in Chile praises Pinochet dictatorship on coup anniversary
September 16, 2019 2:33 PM CDT BY STEVE SWEENEY
Members of the Press Association union were joined by Communist Party activists outside the newspaper’s Bogota offices as the president of the Association of Relatives of Disappeared Detainees (AFDD), Lorena Pizarro, announced legal actions against El Mecurio.
“That newspaper is condoning terrorism, while on the other side of that publication we have survivors, we have relatives who are directly affected by this new infamy,” he said.
A total of 60 signatories are believed to have paid nearly $20,000 USD for the insert published on Sept. 11, the date of the U.S.-backed 1973 coup against democratically elected president Salvador Allende.
The military’s seizure of power led to two decades of dictatorship and the disappearance and murder of tens of thousands of Chileans under Pinochet’s brutal rule.
El Mercurio owner Agustin Edwards played a leading role in supporting the coup, and his media group, which included newspaper and radio stations, was handed $1 million by the administration of then U.S. President Richard Nixon.
Peter Kornbluh of the National Security Archive’s Chile Documentation Project has described Edwards as “the leading Chilean collaborator in CIA covert operations to overturn the democratic institutions of his own country.”
The media outlet played an important role in the propaganda war by publishing anti-Allende stories while the U.S. applied sustained external pressure—Nixon famously said that Washington must “make the economy scream.”
More:
https://www.peoplesworld.org/article/cias-favorite-newspaper-in-chile-praises-pinochet-dictatorship-on-coup-anniversary/