Word: chiles
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Even Latin American experts with reason to be skeptical of Nixon Administration statements on Chile tend to believe that the U.S. was not involved. Educator Ralph Dungan, who was Lyndon Johnson's Ambassador to Chile, contends that in the wake of Watergate and the ITT affair, the CIA would have been almost excessively cautious about getting involved in so potentially embarrassing an international scandal. "It all suggests to me that there was probably no mucking around," he says...
Charges have been made, however, that Washington played a large and possibly crucial role in Chile's economic difficulties. Pressure from Washington on such institutions as the World Bank seriously aggravated Chile's fiscal crises. As Latin American Experts James F. Petras and Robert LaPorte Jr. noted in Foreign Policy magazine, "Dominican style 'gunboat diplomacy' has been replaced by 'credit diplomacy.' " But the Chilean economy was already in a sorry state as a result of the drop in the world price of copper and inefficient fiscal management...
Moreover, the refusal of the Allende government to modify its socializing policies forced some international lending agencies to curtail their programs in Chile...
...light of Allende's nationalization of U.S.-owned properties, it was hardly to be expected that the Administration would help him. Yet the military coup was unfortunate not only for Chile but for the U.S. For as Dungan observes...
Journalists trying to enter the country, meanwhile, were totally frustrated. One Associated Press editor in New York phoned an A.P. reporter: "I see there is a lot of water around Chile. Have you considered going in by boat?" Indeed that had been considered, along with parachuting, chartering small planes, and going through mountain passes that might or might not have been guarded. All such schemes were abandoned as too dangerous...