Tag: chile

Who is José Antonio Kast, Chile’s new pro-Israel, ultra-conservative president?

Chile elected a new ultra-conservative and pro-Israel president on Sunday, a result set to mark a sharp shift in the country’s foreign policy.

José Antonio Kast, 59, defeated his communist rival Jeanette Jara by 58 percent to 42 percent, campaigning on a platform focused on security and immigration reform, including tighter controls along Chile’s northern borders with Peru and Bolivia.

Kast is a deeply polarising figure among Chileans, due to both his family history and his ultra-conservative views.

A controversial family

A lawyer by profession, Kast is a staunch Catholic and has been active in politics for around three decades, with this election marking his third presidential bid.

In 2016, he broke away from Chile’s main conservative party to found the Republican Party.

Beyond his opposition to abortion, same sex marriage, divorce and euthanasia, Kast has openly expressed admiration for the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, a period marked by widespread human rights abuses. One of Kast’s brothers served as a minister during that era.

His family background has also drawn scrutiny. Kast’s parents settled in Chile in 1950 after leaving post-war Germany.

His father was a member of the Nazi Party during the Second World War and served in the German military. Kast has denied that his father was a Nazi, saying he was “forcibly” conscripted.

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COLD WAR DISINFORMATION & ASSASSINATIONS by CIA in the GLOBAL SOUTH. Operation Colombo, Killing of Chile’s Allende and Ceylon’s Bandaranaike

September saw anniversaries in the chilling deaths of two democratically elected Socialist heads of state during the United States’ led Cold War anti-communist crusade that unfolded across the world between 1948-91:

The first assassination of concern here happened in Colombo, the capital of the geostrategic Indian Ocean island of Ceylon on September 25, 1959. The second death happened half way across the world fourteen years after the assassination of South Asia’s first Socialist Prime Minister S.W.R.D Bandaranaike.

On September 11, 1973, President Salvador Allende, South America’s first Socialist head of state died during a US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), backed coup as military helicopters strafed the Presidential Palace in Santiago de Chile. The campaign of murder, suppression and disinformation against the Left that followed Allende’s death was Code Named “Operation Colombo”.

Both deaths of democratically elected Socialist heads of State were Cold War operations, which sent shock waves around the world at the time.

Both Bandaranaike and Allende, had promised to fully de-colonize and nationalize their countries’ plantations, ports, minerals and mines to benefit their native peoples, rather than foreign corporations drawing profits from the resource wealth of Global South countries. Both Bandaranaike and Allende died three years into their terms in office before they were able to deliver on the promise of full Economic independence for their citizens.

Remarkably, Prime Minister Bandaranaike was killed minutes after the US Ambassador, Bernard Gufler, had visited him in Colombo. Details of Gufler’s brief visit to Bandaranaike and departure from the scene of the crime just minutes before the assassination were revealed in de-classified US State department documents, some published on Wikileaks and corroborated by British intelligence source reports.

The narrative that a Buddhist monk had shot the Prime Minister compounded the shock, horror and grief that engulfed the British Dominion of Ceylon which had received faux independence just 9 years earlier in February 1948.

US Ambassador Guffler’s profile is of interest here. He was a Special Ambassador and a veteran of GLADIO, the clandestine NATO and CIA ‘stay behind’ secret operations network in Europe, established after World War 2 in partnership with British intelligence.

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Carter and Chile: How humanitarian was the president?

On March 9, 1977, at one of Jimmy Carter’s earliest White House press conferences as president of the United States, the very first question was about Chile.

At a meeting of the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva the day before, a State Department official had expressed “profoundest regrets” for the covert U.S. role in undermining Chilean democracy, and the subsequent “suffering and terror that the people of Chile have experienced” under the military dictatorship. Now, the U.S. media wanted to know if those remarks reflected the new President’s unique position on human rights as a criterion for U.S. foreign policy.

President Carter bluntly disavowed the apology. “I think that the remarks made by the delegate concerning our past involvement in Chilean political affairs were inappropriate,” he declared, dismissing them as “a personal statement of opinion” that did not represent the U.S. government.

But Carter did take the opportunity to call attention to human rights, which, until his election, was utterly disregarded as a principle of U.S. foreign policy. “We are still concerned about deprivation of human rights in many of the countries of the world,” Carter noted. “I think Chile would be one of those [places] where concern has been expressed. And I want to be sure that the American people understand that this is a very sensitive issue.”

Jimmy Carter, the peanut farmer from Plains, Georgia, who rose to be the 39th president of the United States, ushered the “sensitive issue” of human rights into the White House. As the first post-Vietnam, post-Watergate President, Carter aimed to restore a righteous decency to a U.S. Government contaminated by the dishonesty and criminality of the Nixon-Kissinger era. Carter also sought to bring a semblance of integrity and morality to the exercise of U.S. foreign policy now known for Henry Kissinger’s imperial abuses of power in smaller countries around the world and embrace of dictatorships in Latin America –most notably the Augusto Pinochet regime in Chile.

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Lithium Fields: Another Dark Side to the Electrical Vehicle Industry

Chile’s Atacama Desert is hailed as one of the Earth’s most extraordinary places. It’s the driest nonpolar desert on Earth, which stretches across around 600 miles (1,000 kilometers, or km) in a piece of land between the coastal Cordillera de la Costa Mountain range and the Andes Mountains.

The entire area is an oasis of geologic formations and has provided scientists with seemingly never-ending research opportunities.

As with so many areas in our wonderous planet, it also has a history of being raped for its minerals. Prior to the 1930s, it was for nitrate minerals that were used in fertilizers and explosives. But more recently other minerals such as lithium, copper and iodine are also being mined.

Unfortunately, lithium mining is hugely toxic and poses a significant danger to the environment, particularly in South America.

Despite the mining industry’s exploration of technological advancements aimed at reducing the industry’s ecological footprint, the question remains … Should we continue to rape the earth for lithium in the race to electrify?

Do electric vehicles (EVs) do more good than harm? Are the supply chains for the resources needed to electrify our world sufficiently transparent for us to evaluate them properly? Can we really call the move away from fossil fuels toward hyper-electrification another green revolution?

None of us are in a position to fully answer these questions as the data required are just not available. But what we do know suggests we should be concerned — very concerned.

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Chilean Senator Reveals Astounding Alien Abduction Experience

A Chilean senator recently shared an astounding account of being abducted by aliens and then being visited by an individual claiming to be from out of this world. According to a local media report, Karim Bianchi revealed the jaw-dropping experience last week during an interview with a Chilean media outlet. The incident, the senator recalled, occurred on an evening back in 2012 as he was driving to the city of Punta Arenas. While speaking to a friend on the phone, Bianchi was stunned to see a large circular light comprised “of different colors” in the night sky. His car then suddenly shut down, he said, and “in a very short time, less than a minute, I show up” around 100 miles away from the site of the strange sighting.

Reflecting on the moment, Bianchi mused that he was deeply shaken by what had just occurred, especially since was alone at night and fearful that “something else would happen to me.” While the senator made it to his destination without any further incident that evening, his concerns that the UFO was not quite finished with him were seemingly borne out a few days later when a mysterious stranger visited his office. “He told me he was an alien,” Bianchi shockingly said, indicating that the “bald man” gave him “photocopies of a magazine that had to do with an alien presence.” Eerily, the self-described ET told the senator that he would someday reveal his story to the world.

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Chile’s 9/11: how the CIA and Pinochet destroyed Allende and Chile’s democracy

On 9-11, 1973, the Chilean army assisted by the CIA, staged a military coup against the democratically elected Chilean president, Salvador Allende, which ended up turning Chile from a democartic country into a brutal dictatorship headed by a US backed dictator, Augusto Pinochet. On 9/11/1973, during the air raids and ground attacks that preceded the coup, Allende gave his last speech, in which he vowed to stay in the presidential palace, denouncing offers for safe passage should he choose exile over confrontation. President Allende died during the coup. The junta officially declared that he committed suicide with a rifle given to him by Fidel Castro, however recently discovered documents suggest that he was murdered.

Chile had for decades been hailed as a beacon of democracy and political stability while the rest of South America had been plagued by military juntas and dictators. The collapse of Chilean democracy ended a streak of democratic governments in Chile, which had held democratic elections since 1932. Over 3,000 Chileans were murdered by Pinochet after he became dictator and over 40,000 were were imprisoned and tortured. The systematic human rights violations that were committed by the military government of Chile, under General Augusto Pinochet, included gruesome acts of physical and sexual abuse, as well as psychological damage.

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Newly-Released Top Secret Docs Show Nixon’s Intel Briefings On US-Backed Chilean Coup

Two fifty-year old documents related to the coup in Chile were released by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the State Department last week. The democratically elected, left wing government of President Salvador Allende was overthrown in 1973 by the Chilean military, with covert CIA backing. A US-supported dictatorship led by General Augusto Pinochet was subsequently installed.

President Richard Nixon’s daily briefs related to the coup on September 8th as well as the 11th – the day the Chilean military seized control of the government – were released. This declassification followed repeated calls for increased transparency by progressive members of Congress, human rights groups, and Santiago.

Nixon and then National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger strongly opposed the leftist Allende government and attempted to prevent its rule. George Washington University’s National Security Archive issued a statement which says “[the documents] contained information that went to President Nixon as a military takeover that he and [Kissinger] had encouraged for three years came to fruition.”

Nixon’s daily brief for September 8, 1973 reads “a number of reports have been received… indicating the possibility of an early military coup… Navy men plotting to overthrow the government now claim army and air force support.”

The document – written three days before the coup – continues with a discussion of how a fascist paramilitary group “has been blocking roads and provoking clashes with the national police, adding to the tension caused by continuing strikes and opposition political moves. President Allende earlier this week said he believed the armed forces will ask for his resignation if he does not change his economic and political policies.”

On September 11th, Nixon’s daily brief said “Plans by navy officers to trigger military action against the Allende government are supported by some key army units… The navy is also counting on help from the air force and national police.”

After Allende’s initial refusal to resign, tanks opened fire, Air Force aircraft launched rocket attacks and bombed the presidential palace. Troops stormed in and Allende shot himself.

“What followed [the coup] was a vicious, decades-long reign of terror and repression during which tens of thousands of Chileans were killed, tortured, or disappeared by the Pinochet regime, which continued to receive support from the CIA,” as Common Dreams’ Jake Johnson has written.

Indeed, in 2000, the CIA conceded that “many of Pinochet’s officers were involved in systematic and widespread human rights abuses… Some of these were contacts or agents of the CIA or [US] military.”

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