Why backing coups in Latin America is a bad idea

SEPTEMBER 11th is best known for al-Qaeda’s attack on the World Trade Centre and the Pentagon in 2001. But in Latin America the date is remembered for another act of villainy. On that day in 1973 General Augusto Pinochet staged a military coup against the chaotic Socialist government of Salvador Allende in Chile.

This ushered in a 17-year dictatorship that murdered 3,000 people and tortured many more. The coup was hatched in Chile. But it was backed by Richard Nixon, who had earlier ordered the CIA to “make the economy scream”. It was one of the more notorious of many interventions by the United States in Latin America, starting with a war against Mexico in 1846, including other coups during the Cold War and culminating in the invasion of Panama in 1989 to topple Manuel Noriega, a former American intelligence asset turned ally of drug traffickers.