Answer to —

1. In which country did the CIA plot and sponsor a coup that brought to power a fascist general who murdered and tortured thousands and drove many more into exile?

May 17, 2021 | revcom.us

 

Answer: b

On September 11, 1973, the CIA orchestrated the overthrow of the elected government of Salvador Allende by the fascist general Augusto Pinochet. Mainstream sources document the death of some 3,000 people at the hands of Pinochet. Many more were tortured or forced into exile during Pinochet’s 17-year rule. The CIA had collected “arrest lists” and lists of “key government installations which need to be taken over,” according to a 1975 U.S. Senate investigation. Following the coup, tens of thousands of officials of Allende’s government along with workers, union leaders, activists, students, progressive intellectuals, artists, and people who just happened to be on the streets on the morning of September 11 were rounded up and held in stadiums and military installations and facilities converted to concentration camps around the country. They were subjected to physical and psychological torture or outright murdered. As many as one million of the country’s 11 million people were driven into exile.

Note: Although choice “b” most closely fits the question, the fact is that the CIA had a direct hand in coups against elected governments in all these countries. The CIA was deeply involved in reactionary coups that overthrew Haiti’s elected president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, in 1991; the nationalist government headed by Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala in 1954; the ouster of liberal reformer Juan Emilio Bosch in the Dominican Republic in 1963, eventually leading to full-scale U.S. military intervention in 1965.

And if you put your finger on a spinning globe, you’re likely to pick another place around the world that has seen a CIA-engineered coup. To name just three:

Indonesia: In a CIA-engineered coup in 1965, General Suharto’s military regime massacred at least 500,000 and perhaps more than a million people, mainly communists and those accused of being communists. There were so many people slaughtered that rivers in some areas were clogged with the bodies of victims.

Italy: After World War 2, the Communist Party (CPI) in this country had a strong political position. The CIA backed “centrist” parties with funds and carried out various undercover operations to prevent the CPI from winning the 1948 election. Millions of dollars of CIA covert “aid” to anti-CPI forces in Italy continued through the 1950s and early 1960s.

Iran: In 1953, the CIA, together with its British equivalent, MI6, engineered a coup against the elected president, Mohammad Mossadegh, in part because he threatened U.S. and British oil interests. The CIA installed Mohammad Reza Pahlavi as the Shah (king) and created his special police force, the SAVAK—notorious for its torture methods, including electric shock, inserting broken glass and pouring boiling water into the rectum, tying weights to the testicles, and extracting teeth.

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September 11, 1973, the Chilean military, with political guidance and secret backing from the U.S., carried out a military coup, dropping bombs on La Moneda, the Chilean presidential palace.

One of the last photos of Salvador Allende during the September 1973 coup.