Chilean policies

Press, 28 June 1983, Page 20

Chilean policies

Sir,—Your editorial, “General Pinochet’s failures,” ignores a major issue. The United States, far from having “no wish to get involved by supporting the Junta,” was directly responsible, through the C.1.A., for the 1983 coup. The “economic and social chaos” was a direct result of United States sabotage of the economy, not incompetence on the part of workers’ cooperatives, described by you as “armed revolutionary gangs.” The take-over and 10-year dictatorship by the Pinochet regime was as you state certainly never welcomed “by Chileans as a whole.” The country has seen a decade of brutal oppression, unlike the situation under the popularly selected Allende Government, your “dictatorship of the far Left.” The people who were “outraged by the economic and social policies of their country’s far Left” were not the peasants or slum dwellers whom the Allende Government represented, but those who are now ruling the country by fear of torture, and benefiting from our trade. — Yours, etc., JOHN EDMUNDSON. June 26, 1983.