Australian secrets on Augusto Pinochet’s coup d’etat | They demand declassification of 1973 documents on the overthrow of Salvador Allende in Chile

Australia is not all it seems. A multicultural nation, stable and without short circuits causing international alarm. But the Chilean diaspora that inhabits it – the fourth behind Argentina, the United States and Spain – is crossed by a conflict which has lasted for 48 years. Since the dictator Augusto Pinochet overthrew Salvador Allende. Many of these migrants are waiting for a gesture from the local government that never comes: declassification of documents on Australian intervention in the September 11, 1973 coup.

The secrecy of this constitutional monarchy still subordinate to a governor representing the Queen of England prevents them from knowing it. They demand a convincing answer on the role the intelligence services played in the overthrow of the socialist president. They want to know why they helped the CIA in a country nearly 8,000 miles away. It is not easy for them because the information is denied. Even so, they made small progress thanks to the bringing to court of an academic and former serviceman named Clinton Fernandes, leaks that the National Security Archives – a private entity based in Washington-,), and to the journalists who investigated the case to the best of their ability.

Sporadic reports

The politically persecuted people of the Chilean dictatorship were not the first of this nationality to arrive in Australia. In 1837, to a hero of Transandine independence, Ramon freire – Buenos Aires has a street named after him – they banned it in Sydney.

The history which unites the two countries began to be written in the 19th century and in the 70s of the 20th it experienced its most shocked chapter. On October 7, 1974, the newspaper Sydney Morning Herald titled a journalist’s article Ian Frikberg: “Australian spies helped the CIA plan the overthrow of Allende.” It was the first of many so sporadic that they did not move the informative ammeter.

ASIS closes

A year earlier, during the coup, the Labor government Gough Whitlam has closed the ASIS agency – which until today deals with foreign intelligence – in Chile. At least three spies had been in Santiago conspiring against Allende since 1971. The Liberal Prime Minister, William mcmahon, had approved in December 1970 the plot with the CIA to remove Allende. His successor Witlam, more contradictory, condemns the military coup, but his government recognizes the dictatorship of Pinochet on October 11, 1973. Within his Labor Party, there is such a stir that it is divided in two.

Fernandes, an intelligence specialist and professor at the University of New South Wales who follows the subject, obtained documents from the National Archives in Washington. They demonstrate the Canberra government’s complicity with the U.S. intelligence agency.Two journalists in Australia also investigated the case and provided testimony for the SBS network that gave it greater visibility: Claudianna Blanche and Florence Melgar Hourcade. The first wrote on September 11, on the anniversary of the Palacio de la Moneda attack: “A telegram sent by the head of ASIS, William T. Robertson, in May 1973 to the staff of Santiago to inform them of the decision to close operations, further explains that Whitlam struggled to make the decision to shut down the station, given his concerns about how it would be received by US intelligence.”.

The blow to Witlam

The Prime Minister’s fear was well founded. In 1975, he was overthrown by a palace coup concocted between the CIA, his British counterpart M15 and the governor of his majesty, John kerr. The departure of ASIS from Santiago, the threat of closure of the American satellite base at Pine Gap in the Australian desert, and certain autonomous foreign policy protests have misdirected Witlam’s enemies. Labor had withdrawn Australian troops from Vietnam, opposed France’s nuclear tests in the Pacific, and restored diplomatic ties with Mao’s China. He died in 2014 at the age of 98.

Melgar Hourcade learned of the involvement of ASIS services in Pinochet’s coup d’état while investigating the repressors of his country’s dictatorship in Uruguay. It’s Montevideo. One day interviewing the colonel Gilberto Vazquez in prison, he offers to follow the Australian trail in Chile. In 2013, 40 years after the fall of Allende and with a team from the SBS, he collected testimonies from several Chilean exiles who have lived in Australia since the 1970s. Most agreed that the documents should be declassified.

Victor Marillança is one of them: “There should be an investigation because some of the people who were directly involved are still there, some of those who did the dirty work. And I think it should be investigated because of what has been done in Chile; thousands of people have been killed, thousands have been tortured. Australia, as a democracy and as the democratic country we say it is, should do it because it is a black mark on its international politics. I think the government should clarify this”. In the sixth largest country in the world, there are around 25,000 Chileans and several thousand more if we count their descendants.

Diaspora

The community in Australia and within it the group of exiles that began arriving in the 1970s, are a small part of the casualties caused by the civil-military regime between 1973 and 1990. There were 3,227 murdered or missing and around 200,000 were forced to flee Chile during the regime which lasted nearly 17 years, according to the National Commission for Political Prisons and Torture or the Valech Commission.

Survivors who remain in Australia seek redress. The most active group sent a letter to the current foreign minister Marise Payne. In the most critical part of the text, they describe the “deepest disappointment and absolute disgust” with the involvement of the intelligence services in the overthrow of Allende.

Documentary film

In the documentary Allies of Marian wilkinson launched in 1983, the then Australian Minister for Immigration, Clyde CameronHe commented that upon taking up his post he discovered that there were between twenty and twenty-four posts with intelligence operatives spread around the world posing as officials in his department. “When I discovered the role Australian intelligence played in the overthrow of the Allende government in Chile in 1973, I was horrified to think that my own department was involved in this kind of work, and that our intelligence agents served as an intermediary for the CIA, if you will, which could not operate in Chile at that time. Between the CIA and the Pinochet junta ”.

The former soldier Fernandes, of Indian origin but of Australian nationality, achieved in the United States what he could not in his own country. At the National Security Archives in Washington, he stumbled upon the first documents the liberal-led state has denied him so far. Scott Morrison and for those who have resorted to Administrative Court of Appeal (AAT) local.

“The Australian government insists on secrecy to avoid having to admit to the Australian public that it has helped destroy Chilean democracy,” he said while waiting to be tested. They are hidden under the argument that they endanger national security almost half a century later.

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