Pinochet and Saddam -- the Ironies

Posted by Barry Lando at 12:43 PM on December 11, 2006.

You have to admit there are certain ironies to the situation: on one side of the globe, General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, a ruthless, corrupt dictator, expired from natural causes in a hospital in Santiago, Chile. Though he will not be granted a state funeral, (after all, the current president of Chile was tortured during his reign), Pinochet is to be buried with full military honors. Meanwhile, in Baghdad’s Green Zone, another brutal, corrupt tyrant, Saddam Hussein, is on trial for his life, and will probably be twitching at the end of a hangman’s noose within the next few months.

Though Pinochet’s dictatorship was far less murderous than Saddam’s, just the same, at least three thousand people were killed or “disappeared” during the Chilean tyrant’s reign. Thousands more were tortured and imprisoned, while others considered enemies of the regime were murdered abroad, including Allende’s former Foreign Minister, Orlando Letelier, blown apart by a car bomb in Washington D.C. on Pinochet’s orders.

Pinochet and Saddam also had friends in common. During some of their most repressive periods, both tyrants were strongly backed by the U.S. government. Pinochet was seen as a staunch ally by the U.S. in the 1970’s ,during what the Nixon White House regarded as a life or death struggle against International Communism.

After first failing to block the election of Marxist Salvador Allende in Chile, under Nixon and Henry Kissinger’s direction, the CIA then spent millions to destabilize the new Chilean government. When the Chilean army under Pinochet finally overthrew and murdered Allende, they launched a wave of brutal repression. As thousands of bodies piled up in Santiago’s Central Morgue, Secretary of State Kissinger battled all attempts by the U.S. Congress to enact sanctions against Pinochet’s regime.

In November 1975, when he met with Pinochet’s foreign minister Patricio Carajal, Kissinger mocked his own State Department staff "who have a vocation for the ministry" for focusing on human rights. He reassured Carajal that the condemnation of Pinochet’s human rights record is "a total injustice," but that "somewhat visible" efforts by the regime to alleviate the situation would be useful in changing Congressional attitudes. " That said he spent the rest of the meeting emphasizing the U.S. government’s efforts to expedite Ex-Im Bank credits and multilateral loans to Chile as well as sales of military equipment..

When Kissinger finally met with Pinochet on June 7, 1976, the Secretary of State had just received a report saying that mass arrests, torture, and disappearances continued in Chile. "Numerous political prisoners have been killed arbitrarily or have died from torture received or from lack of medical treatment," the report said. An OAS report detailed those tortures: women beaten, gang raped, and forced to endure electric current applied to their bodies; men subjected to electric current, especially to their genitals, burned with cigarettes, hanged by the wrists or ankles.

Yet Kissinger assured Pinochet of the strong bond in their overriding anticommunism, and made it clear that, despite the U.S. Congress, the White House was determined to send new jet fighters to Chile. "In the United States, as you know, we are sympathetic with what you are trying to do here," Kissinger said. "We wish your government well." He later added, "My evaluation is that you are a victim of all leftwing groups around the world, and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government which was going Communist."

Though Kissinger warned Pinochet he was obliged to make some comments about human rights in his speech to the OAS, he never explicitly condemned the Chilean government. Back in Washington, Kissinger notified his staff that he did not want all he had said publicly applied too literally in practice.

Fifteen years later, in the 1980’s, the White House would be backing another tyrant—Saddam Hussein, then seen as the bulwark against America’s new archenemy of the day, the Ayatollah Khomeini and radical Islam, thought to be threatening the petroleum states of the Gulf. And, so it was that while Saddam’s critics in Congress attempted to enact trade sanctions against the Iraqi tyrant, the Reagan and then the Bush White Houses ignored horrific human rights reports from their own State Department to throttle attempts by the Congress to enact trade sanctions against the Iraqi tyrant, while refusing to meet with his victims.

There are other ironic parallels. In 2002, Colin Powell would condemn America’s policy towards Pinochet, saying, 'It is not a part of American history that we are proud of.'" But during the Reagan era, one of the White House officials leading the White House drive to protect Saddam Hussein from Congressional Sanctions was none other than the White House National Security Advisor, Colin Powell.

Tagged as: kissinger, saddam, pinochet

Barry Lando, a former 60 Minutes producer, is the author of "Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush." He also blogs at Barrylando.com.