THE AUSTRALIAN 15nov00
FORMER US president Richard Nixon ordered his administration to do everything it could to bring down Chile's elected socialist president Salvador Allende, secret documents on Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship show.
Release of a third and final batch of 16,000 documents - including 450 reluctantly handed over by the CIA - was accompanied by an acknowledgement that the US had ordered political destabilisation in Chile before, during and after the 1973 coup in which Allende was killed and General Pinochet took power.
"Actions approved by the US government during this period aggravated political polarisation and affected Chile's long tradition of democratic elections and respect for the constitutional order and the rule of law," the White House said in a statement.
The third tranche - the release of which was delayed for two months because the CIA initially refused to declassify several hundred Pinochet-related documents - includes detailed minutes of high-level meetings that record Nixon's commitment to "do everything we can to bring Allende down".
Other minutes of those meetings detail "drastic action" strategies intended to "shock" Chileans into preventing Allende from taking office, according to the National Security Archive, a private organisation instrumental in requesting the release of documents and cataloguing them.