Secret Cables Reveal Britain Interfered with Elections in Chile
Declassified files show that Britain conducted a covert propaganda offensive to stop Allende from winning two democratic presidential elections, John McEvoy reports.
Almost 50 years after the September 1973 coup that overthrew the democratically-elected president of Chile, Salvador Allende, declassified Foreign Office documents reveal Britain’s role in destabilising the country.
Under the Labour government of Harold Wilson (1964-1970), a secret Foreign Office unit initiated a propaganda offensive in Chile aiming to prevent Allende, Chile’s leading socialist figure, winning power in two presidential elections, in 1964 and 1970.
The unit – the Information Research Department (IRD) – gathered information designed to damage Allende and lend legitimacy to his political opponents, and distributed material to influential figures within Chilean society.
The IRD also shared intelligence about left-wing activity in the country with the U.S. government. British officials in Santiago assisted a CIA-funded media organization which was part of extensive U.S. covert action to overthrow Allende, culminating in the 1973 coup.
Anyone but Allende
A Foreign Office planning document written in 1964 had noted that Latin America was “a vital area in the Cold War and checking a Communist takeover here is at least as important a British national interest as negotiating trading and stepping up exports.”
The report added that the U.S. was “anxious for the United Kingdom to do as much as possible in the propaganda field” in Latin America.
Several months before Chile’s 1964 presidential election, a British Cabinet Office unit called the Counter-subversion Committee’s Working Group on Latin America, advised the IRD that “it will be important to prevent significant gains by the extreme left” in Chile, “now and later”.
At this time, Allende was a presidential candidate in the election running as leader of the Frente de Acción Popular (Popular Action Front) against the Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei, who eventually won with 56 percent of the vote against Allende’s 39 percent.
The IRD initiated its propaganda offensive in Chile by covertly supporting Frei in the months leading up to the election. As Elizabeth Allott, a longstanding IRD officer, wrote shortly after Frei claimed victory, the unit had focused on “the distribution of our more serious material to reliable contacts and to securing the publication of certain press articles” critical of Allende, and favourable to Frei.
Allott had also proposed “SPA [special political action] with supporting action from the U.S.” to split the left vote.
British planners viewed the 1964 election as a landmark success. “In Chile we surely have a rare opportunity,” wrote Allott: “If we believe our work in Latin America to be important, then there are surely few places which have a better claim on our resources and where there is such scope for us in both our negative and constructive roles.”
Leslie Glass, assistant under-secretary for foreign affairs and former director-general of British Information Services, agreed. Writing days after the election, he noted that this was “a victory against the communists to press home” adding that there was now “a government to support whose policies, if carried out effectively, offer what is probably the best chance we have had in the continent of robbing the communists of their raison d’être.”
https://consortiumnews.com/2020/09/25/secret-cables-reveal-britain-interfered-with-elections-in-chile/