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<h2 align="left">The ‘other special relationship’: Britain and Chile 40
years after Pinochet’s coup</h2>
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<div class="news_info"> Posted: Sunday, September 01, 2013 - By Patrick
Timmon<br>
<br>
<small><small><small><a class="moz-txt-link-freetext" href="http://www.ticotimes.net/More-news/News-Briefs/The-other-special-relationship-Britain-and-Chile-40-years-after-Pinochet-s-coup_Sunday-September-01-2013">http://www.ticotimes.net/More-news/News-Briefs/The-other-special-relationship-Britain-and-Chile-40-years-after-Pinochet-s-coup_Sunday-September-01-2013</a></small></small></small><br>
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<div class="news_kicker"> Recent criticism leveled at Chile by the U.N.
for the country’s treatment of its indigenous minority prompts a human
rights historian to question Britain’s current support for Chile’s
military establishment. </div>
<div class="news_body">
<p>COLCHESTER, England – Ask anybody from Santiago about the noise
heard in the Chilean capital’s skies on the morning of Sept. 11, 1973,
and they will probably tell you about the screeching roar of the
British Hawker Harrier jets as they bombed La Moneda. Within minutes
the planes had set fire to the presidential palace. After the air
attack on the president’s offices, Chile’s army, directed by Augusto
Pinochet and a group of generals, stormed the building. President
Salvador Allende died in the attack.</p>
<p>Britain had been supplying all branches of the Chilean military with
arms even under Allende, the democratically elected president ousted by
Pinochet, who was his defense minister. In 1973, with British matériel
and more than a nod and a wink from the CIA, a more than century-old
Latin American democracy fell to authoritarianism. Pinochet stayed in
power from 1973 to 1990 and sustained friendly, special relations with
London and Washington, D.C., even as concerns about human rights abuses
mounted.</p>
<p>In 2013, the anniversary year of Pinochet’s coup, Britain is
aggressively refreshing its ties to Chile’s military establishment.
>From May 28-30, Chile’s defense minister visited London for annual
bilateral defense discussions. Earlier in May, a 15-member delegation
of military and civilian security and defense officials from 11
countries came to Chile on a “study tour” organized by Britain’s Royal
College of Defense Studies with the support of the UK Embassy in
Santiago. Chile’s defense minister welcomed the group. In late July and
early August, “academics” from the British Army’s college at Sandhurst
traveled to Santiago to train students from Chile’s defense
institutions in counterinsurgency techniques.</p>
<p>There’s no secret to Britain’s current ties to Chile’s military: the
British government has advertised these visits on the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office website, stating that counterinsurgency training
“was organised as part of the ongoing efforts to reinforce and
strengthen the close ties between the British and Chilean Ministries of
Defence.</p>
<p>Chile is an ever-present reminder to the West of the excesses of
Cold War anti-communism. Pinochet seized power for the country’s
capitalist establishment and labeled his leftist antagonists violent
extremists. Pinochet did not shirk from calling his opponents
terrorists and subversives. The dictator governed Chile through
terrifying presidential rule from 1973 until 1990. A million people
went into exile, tens of thousands were tortured, and thousands died or
disappeared without a trace, often in the allied causes of
counterinsurgency, counterterrorism or anti-communism.</p>
<p>In the 1980s, Margaret Thatcher and Pinochet strengthened their
special relationship. Thatcher offered staunch support, staving off
criticism of the general’s human rights abuses since he shared
information to help defeat the Argentine generals who in 1982 attacked
Las Malvinas/Falkland Islands. Thatcher had supported Pinochet when she
came into office after her landslide victory against the Labour
Government in 1979. Thatcher dropped the de facto arms embargo imposed
by British parliamentary leftists in reaction to the human rights
abuses after the 1973 coup.</p>
<p>British support for Pinochet never waned, even with Thatcher out of
office and New Labour elected to government in 1997. A year after Tony
Blair’s victory, London police arrested Pinochet to face extradition to
Spain. While under house arrest, the ex-prime minister, since elevated
to Lady Thatcher, visited him at a rented mansion house in Surrey, a
leafy west London suburb. The BBC reported that Thatcher thanked
Pinochet on behalf of the British people, saying “I know how much we
owed to you for your help.” Thatcher extolled the former dictator for
“bringing” democracy to Chile.</p>
<p>Britain’s current support for Chile’s military attracts attention
because Santiago’s law-and-order establishment have been criticized for
heavy-handed repression against student protesters, and for using
anti-terror legislation to permit violence against the indigenous
community of Mapuches. In Santiago on July 30, British academics from
the UK’s Army Officer School presented a counterinsurgency course to
participants drawn from Chile’s military. By coincidence, also on July
30 in the capital, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Human
Rights and Counter-Terrorism expressed concern over the “confused and
arbitrary … misuse” of Chile’s counter-terrorism legislation that had
“resulted in real injustice” against the country’s Mapuche indigenous
people. The state had met Mapuche land protesters with violent
repression, some of them detained and imprisoned as terrorists.</p>
<p>U.N. Special Rapporteur Ben Emmerson, a British human rights
barrister, concluded his two-week country visit to Chile in July with
the statement that the Carabineros (its gendarmerie, a type of police
belonging to Chile’s army) and investigative police had violently
abused the Mapuche using Chile’s anti-terror legislation. The Special
Rapporteur confirmed that these crimes by state agents remained
unpunished. The U.N.’s counter-terrorism and human rights expert
recommended a “new independent investigation body” regarding the
“excessive violence” by the state under the anti-terror legislation
against the Mapuche land protesters.</p>
<p>The British counter-insurgency courses included 20 students from
Chile’s military establishment. According to the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office’s press release these students came from the
Chilean Ministry of Defense, the National Intelligence Agency, the
Carabineros and all three branches of Chile’s military. Chile is, as
one British Foreign Office minister said in March 2012, “a
long-standing friend of the UK.”</p>
<p>It’s 40 years since the piercing screech of the British Harriers’
devastating attack on Santiago’s presidential palace. Britain’s support
for Chile’s military rides an all-time high. Since May 2010 Britain’s
Conservatives have had the upper hand in a coalition government with
the Liberals. Prime Minister David Cameron has been determined to keep
the special relationship with Chile alive, perhaps to defend London’s
claim in the ever-simmering dispute with Argentina over Las
Malvinas/Falkland Islands. Britain has entered into high-level talks
with Chile, either in Santiago or London, every year since 2010. In
2013, London has doggedly pursued ties with Chile’s military
establishment.</p>
<p>The democratic transition has not calmed Chile’s politics, or
restored complete faith in state institutions. Films, literature,
music, scholarly studies and Chile’s left-wing student protest movement
all demonstrate that the country has never reconciled itself to the
coup and the subsequent 17 years of authoritarianism. The country
remains divided between the Right and the Left, in spite of official
truth commissions that account for past excesses of torture, political
imprisonment and disappearances at the hands of Pinochet’s military
government. Human rights activists and observers have long criticized
Chile’s judiciary for its ongoing sympathy to Pinochet-era human rights
abusers.</p>
<p>The UK Coalition Government’s present support for Chile’s military
seems willfully ignorant of the history of the effects of a special
relationship forged 40 years ago in the crucible of the anti-communist
coup. Pinochet left office in 1990 but the wounds inflicted on Chilean
society have never healed. Over the past two decades Chile has
attempted to transition from dictatorship to democracy. Chile’s
democratic governments have signed up to human rights treaties, but the
legacy of abuses and impunity persist, creating deep divisions within
Chile. The Chilean state continues to abuse human rights, as the U.N.
Special Rapporteur on Counter-terrorism and Human Rights has observed –
he will present a full report on Chile in 2014. Britain has ignored the
consequences of its role: the United Kingdom government has never been
forced to reflect on its support for Pinochet, all the while cozying up
to Chile’s defense establishment.</p>
<p><i>Patrick Timmons is a writer, journalist, human rights lawyer and
historian of modern Latin America. He has published in CounterPunch,
the Texas Observer and the Latin American Research Review. He can be
contacted at: <a href="http://www.facebook.com/patricktimmonsauthor"
target="_blank"><b>http://www.facebook.com/patricktimmonsauthor</b></a>.</i></p>
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