Kissinger said it can't be left to Chilean voters "to decide for themselves."

[Peace Patriot]

Further down in the article:

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"Allende was a Marxist who came to power in 1970 when he won a narrow victory in Chilean elections. But his ascent to power was not welcomed by all.

Conservatives in Chile and Washington feared his attempts to pave 'a Chilean way toward Socialism' would usher in a pro-Soviet communist government.

Henry Kissinger, US secretary of state under then president Richard Nixon, made quite clear what US intentions were after Allende's election.

'The issues are much too important for the Chilean voters to be left to decide for themselves... I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due to the irresponsibility of its people,' Kissinger said at the time.

Allende, Chile's first socialist president, was found dead in the presidential palace as soldiers supporting the coup closed in and warplanes bombed the building. He was 65." --from the OP

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Just to be VERY CLEAR, for those who don't know this history or don't have time to read the whole article--the U.S./Nixon administration was thickly involved in the events in Chile in the 1970s, whereby Chilean voters were overthrown--not just the government--but the sovereign people of Chile and their right to have a government of their choice, was overthrown. DEMOCRACY was overthrown. On the fear--on the FEAR, not the reality, the FEAR--that a socialist government MIGHT ally with the Soviet Union--the U.S. supported, aided and abetted this horribly violent coup d'etat and the horrors afterwards--the tortures and murders of thousands of people for their political views.

This U.S. policy in Latin America has hardly changed in forty years. Thousands of trade unionists, human rights workers, teachers, community activists, peasant farmers and others have been slaughtered by the Colombian military (with $7 BILLION in U.S. military aid) and by its rightwing paramilitary death squads, with the Bush Junta tool in Colombia, Alvaro Uribe, stating publicly that everyone who opposed him is a "terrorist," while he himself is filthy dirty with ties to the death squads and the trillion dollar cocaine trade. This criminal is now under the protection of the CIA and the Obama administration, which have arranged for the removal of witnesses against Uribe from Colombia, out of the reach of Colombian prosecutors and over their objections. They furthermore have set him up with cushy academic sinecures at Georgetown and Harvard and appointment to a prestigious international legal commission.

And now the same thing is starting in Honduras, where the U.S.-backed, fascist coup government--with only the thinnest smear of democracy cosmetics provided by Hillary Clinton--is ignoring the murders of numerous anti-coup organizers and the rapes, beatings and tortures of others. While the military and the death squads decapitate the leftist leadership in these countries, in preparation for U.S. "free trade for the rich," the corrupt, murderous, failed U.S. "war on drugs" is additionally used to militarize and brutalize society--under way now, in Mexico, with new ops in Honduras as well. This latter--the "war on drugs"--is likely also being used to consolidate the cocaine trade under Bush Cartel/CIA control (i.e., smashing independent operations and protecting those who are "players"). This trillion dollar-plus revenue stream provides massive illicit funds for god-knows-who and god-knows-what, as well as providing liquidity to the banksters. But one thing that the U.S. "war on drugs" does NOT do, and NEVER WILL do, is stop the cocaine trade.

Nixon started the U.S. "war on drugs" while his regime was destroying Chilean democracy and the two things are very related. The U.S. "war on drugs" provided the method of continued control of Latin American countries, with vast corruption, brutalization and direct U.S. funding of the fascists and the militarists. It also provided a substitute "war" for our war profiteers, since Nixon-Kissinger were being forced to wind down the war on Vietnam, because, a) the people of the U.S. were rebelling against it, and b) the Vietnamese--those 'little brown people' in straw hats and sandals, who were fighting for their independence--were winning against the biggest war machine on earth. (Their democracy had also been destroyed when the U.S. forbade a UN-sponsored election in 1954--an election that independence hero Ho Chi Minh would have won.)

The use of the U.S. "war on drugs" to destroy democracy in Latin America continues to this day and has never been more intense. In September 2008, when the U.S. embassy was funding/organizing a white separatist insurrection in Bolivia, Bolivia's president, Evo Morales, not only threw the U.S. ambassador out of the country, he threw the DEA out of Bolivia, because they, too, were colluding with the white separatists. After defeating the insurrection, with the unanimous backing of South American countries, via UNASUR (an EU-type regional institution that had been formalized only that very summer), Bolivia then proceeded with its vote on Bolivia's new constitution (overwhelmingly popular, written by the people) which legalizes and protects the coca leaf (not cocaine) as a sacred Indigenous medicine. After Venezuela, Bolivia is the no. 1 target of the U.S. for this reason. It has rebelled against the U.S. "war on drugs"--the prime U.S. method of control--by opting for a SANE drug policy and legalizing the coca leaf (somewhat comparable to legaling marijuana here--another harmless and beneficial herb). This legalization calls into question the entire brutal edifice of control that has been operating since Nixon, and that the Obama administration fully supports--a policy that is costing us, all told, probably a trillion dollars--to war profiteers, Pentagon bases in Latin America, the "prison-industrial complex," our own police state and related corruption (for instance, pesticides to spray on food farms in Latin America, to drive the peasants off their land--land then goes to the preferred drug lords, Monsanto, etc.)

Let me just tell you what one of the Honduran coup generals said about their recent coup (June 2009)--a coup that the Obama administration abetted and secured. He said that their coup was intended "to prevent communism from Venezuela reaching the United States" (quoted in a report on the coup by the Zelaya government-in-exile).

Nothing has changed. Policies that benefit the poor, and democratic processes that enable the vast poor majority to elect governments that act in their interest, are STILL considered "communist" is some circles, and those who truly rule the U.S.--transglobal corporations and war profiteers--are STILL determined to exterminate those policies and those democratic processes and the leaders who represent them. The U.S. "war on drugs" is the chief means being used to that end, supplemented by multi-millions of our tax dollars being funneled to rightwing groups throughout Latin America, through agencies like the USAID and entities like the Pentagon, on top of unknown amounts of covert money, some of it directly out of our pockets and some from illicit revenue streams.

And the cocaine just keeps on flowing.

The U.S. "war on drugs" is the biggest scam in U.S. history, bar none. And its destructiveness, over time, is probably comparable to a number of unjust U.S. wars--in smashed up societies, vast social injustice, vast loss of human and civil rights and sheer carnage--not to mention the costs to our own society and resources.

Destroying Chile and the U.S. "war on drugs" had the same origin and the same purpose. And, while Chile begins, at last, to address that history--the U.S. continues to create more "Chiles" by other means. We are looking at one right now, today, in Honduras, the initial stages of one in Mexico and one that may be winding down in Colombia, having accomplished its purposes (thousands of dead leftists, terrorization of the poor majority, 5 MILLION displaced peasant farmers--THE worst human displacement crisis on earth--cocaine trade alive and well).