Search Query: chile

Search Results

You searched for "chile" and here's what we found ...

How a Rich and Proud Nation Went Broke

by
Amidst a multitrillion dollar spending spree, President Obama apparently believes it’s inconceivable that a mighty nation such as the United States could go broke. Yet France, once the most powerful nation in Europe, went broke and was plunged into a revolution that consumed the king and queen. Germany was bankrupted by reparations following World War I as well as the ruinous costs of sustaining money-losing, government-run enterprises (particularly railroads). Chile’s socialist regime was bankrupt during the early 1970s. In recent years, Thailand, Korea, and Hungary were bailed out by the International Monetary Fund. Russia, Ecuador, Pakistan, and Ivory Coast have defaulted on their debts. Argentina is probably the most intriguing case for Americans now. Argentina is currently broke, and last year President Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner seized private pension funds in a desperate effort to cover government budget deficits. Argentina has been in trouble for so long that it’s easy to forget that from about 1880 until World War I it ranked ...

DINA and CIA Assassinations

by
Two of my blog posts this week have caused me to ponder the similarities of the mind-sets of the people in Augusto Pinochet’s secret intelligence force (known as DINA) and those in George W. Bush’s and Barack Obama’s CIA. One blog post was about the CIA’s use of drone attacks to assassinate people in Pakistan and the other was about Pinochet’s assassination of a former Chilean president. In Pakistan, the CIA is using drone missile attacks to kill people who the CIA is convinced are guilty of terrorism. There’s no attempt to take such people into custody and let a court determine whether they are in fact guilty of the offense. Instead, they are simply taken out based on the CIA’s conviction that they’re guilty. That’s also how Pinochet’s DINA agents operated. If they were convinced that someone was guilty of being a communist, they simply took him out with an assassination. No trials were necessary to determine whether ...

Murder is Murder, Whether by Pinochet or the CIA

by
Thirty-five years after military strongman Augusto Pinochet took power in a coup in 1973 in Chile, the Chilean people have just discovered that Pinochet ordered the murder of former Chilean president Eduardo Frei Montalva. Even though Pinochet is dead, criminal indictments have been issued against people who allegedly participated in the assassination. Of course, Chileans know that immediately after Pinochet took power, his goons rounded up thousands of Chilean citizens, and incarcerated, tortured, raped, and executed many of them, on grounds of national security. They also know that the intelligence force that Pinochet founded, DINA, went into foreign countries and killed people, again on grounds of national security. An example was the assassination, on national-security grounds, of former Chilean official Orlando Letelier, who was assassinated on the streets of Washington, D.C., along with his American assistant Ronni Moffitt. But killing a former president of the country? Even Chileans ...