https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin261002.mp3
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This week on CounterSpin: It may sound awkward, but there’s a reason that some of us refer to the lethal attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as “September 11, 2001.” It’s because those who have reference to a wider world know that “September 11” is not a trademark the US has on meaningful horror.
September 11, 1973, saw a coup d’etat in Chile, when military officers, directed by Augusto Pinochet, seized power from the democratically elected President Salvador Allende—and ushered in an era of devastating suppression of leftist opposition, including exile, torture and murder. The US saw Chile as a Cold War ally at the time—and so, while some will debate how much this country’s leadership actively, in real time, abetted the coup and the ensuing violence, or whether they just actively laid the ground for it and welcomed and supported it—that’s a distinction without a difference.
The history is reactivated this time every year, when we acknowledge the political murders of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt—killed in a car bomb in Washington, DC, on September 21, 1976, while they were engaged in work at the Institute for Policy Studies, illuminating the abuses taking place in Pinochet’s Chile and their relationship to US actions and inactions.
Some people will only be hearing about all of this now—50 years out—because at least one of the people identified as participating in the car bombing, a Cuban exile, is up for deportation. It seems worth underscoring that seeking accountability for the political murders directed by Pinochet does not require co-signing the Trump administration’s people-disappearing machinery—particularly as we know that will involve silencing things we need to hear, and that it is in no way in service to the kind of democratic life Chilean people were seeking with Allende’s election.
We talk about the killing of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt with Sarah Anderson. She directs the Global Economy Program at the Institute for Policy Studies, and co-edits the site Inequality.org.
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin261002Anderson.mp3
Plus Janine Jackson takes a quick look back at how media looked back at the “Global War on Terror.”
https://media.blubrry.com/counterspin/content.blubrry.com/counterspin/CounterSpin261002Banter.mp3
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