Ambassador Who Helped Stop a Coup in Chile

[Judi Lynn]

Everyone knows how Nixon and Kissinger paved Pinochet’s path to power. The story of Harry Barnes, who played a crucial role in the Chilean dictator’s exit, is much less well known.

October 16/23, 2023, Issue

PETER KORNBLUH

The recent 50th anniversary of the military coup in Chile brought renewed international attention to the many villains of the US intervention to overthrow Chile’s constitutional government—chief among them Henry Kissinger, Richard Nixon, and CIA director Richard Helms. Their roles in undermining the presidency of the democratically elected Socialist, Salvador Allende, and then assisting the consolidation of the ruthless regime led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, remains one of the most renowned cases of official criminality in the annals of US foreign policy.

As the anniversary of the September 11, 1973, coup passed last month, the Biden administration faced a dilemma: how to acknowledge this sordid history without actually atoning, let alone calling more public and political attention to US involvement in Chile’s 9/11. In a small gesture of declassification diplomacy, the administration finally declassified two 50-year-old documents from a long list of still-secret records requested by the Chilean government; US Ambassador Bernadette Meehan quietly attended at least one 50th anniversary commemoration, and Biden dispatched his special emissary on Latin America, former Senator Chris Dodd, to attend the special ceremony on the actual anniversary in front of La Moneda palace. On September 11, a State Department spokesperson released a well-crafted statement citing “an opportunity to reflect on this break in Chile’s democratic order and the suffering that it caused”—while avoiding any reflection on the US role in aiding and abetting those events half a century ago. “This commemoration is also an opportunity for us to reflect on Chile’s courageous return to democracy,” the statement read, shifting the focus away from the beginning of the dictatorship to its ending, after Pinochet lost an October 5, 1988, plebiscite intended to legitimize the continuation of his bloody regime.

To reinforce that point and draw attention to the far more positive history of the US role in the dramatic events of October 1988, this week the US Embassy in Santiago held a special ceremony to honor Harry G. Barnes Jr., who served as US ambassador during the final years of the dictatorship. “The Chief of Mission’s residence will be named ‘The Barnes House,’ according to a US Embassy press advisory, “to recognize Ambassador Barnes’ support of and solidarity with the Chilean people who sought to defend human rights and restore democracy to their country via peaceful and democratic means.”

The event was pegged to the 35th anniversary of the October 1988 plebiscite that marked the beginning of the end of the Pinochet regime. But it will be remembered as the one substantive commemorative ceremony organized by the US government around the 50th anniversary of the military coup itself, refocusing on a time when the United States supported the forces of democracy rather than the forces of dictatorship.

More:
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/harry-barnes-ambassador-pinochet-chile/



Ambassador Barnes on the right, vicious, sadistic, greedy bloodthirsty Nixon puppet Augusto Pinochet, left.




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DAMN! First time to see this photo:

American Crime Case #87: George H. W. Bush shakes hands with former Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, the military dictator who took power following the CIA-orchestrated coup that overthrew and killed President Salvador Allende in 1973. December 6, 1990, Santiago, Chile. (Photo: AP)