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Chile is one of many countries in which the U.S. instigated a military coup and subsequent bloodbath in order to keep a society backward and oppressive, and ripe for economic exploitation. Immediately after the 1973 Chilean coup, led by traitorous fascist general Augusto Pinochet, the military junta put out the false story that President Salvador Allende committed suicide. In fact, he was executed in the Moneda Presidential Palace. The last photo we have of Allende is of him in a steel helmet carrying a gun, determined to defend the Moneda and Chilean democracy. And none other than the FBI, a rightwing U.S. secret police organization, concluded that the suicide story was false.
The FBI came to this conclusion in the course of investigating the murders of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt by terrorist bomb in Washington, D.C. Within a week of that bombing, Newsweek ran CIA disinfo in their "Periscope" column saying the junta and DINA, their secret police, had nothing to do with it. That was a lie, of course. Turned out the junta hired American terrorist Michael Vernon Townley and some fascist Cuban terrorists to make and plant a bomb in Letelier's car. Pinochet's cover story was that Letelier bombed himself to be a martyr. (So much for the credibility of their "Allende killed himself, we didn't" story.) George Bush the Elder was CIA director at the time, and thus a terrorist accomplice. The CIA also helped smuggle Townley into the country under a false passport. The Bush family's material support to terrorists also include sheltering Orlando Bosch, an architect of an airliner bombing that killed 73 people. The U.S. continued to employ, and shelters to this day the terrorists responsible for that terrorist atrocity. [See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cubana_Flight_455 or search "Cubana airliner bombing" for more.] [There are two good books about the Letelier-Moffitt assassinations and aftermath that I know of- Assassination on Embassy Row by Landau & Dinges, and Death in Washington: The murder of Orlando Letelier by Donald Freed. Only Townley was punished, and he only served 3 years. On the other hand, "ecoterrorists" get that and heavier sentences for vandalism, and Muslims running charities for Palestinians get 65 years in prison, which just happened. Which proves how blatantly political the U.S. "justice" system is.
So now, 36 year later, the New York Times is still running fascist propaganda. And apparently so is the rest of the U.S. corporate propaganda system (aka "the media"). They cribbed an AP obituary of Allende's wife, who just died, which repeats the suicide canard intended to exonerate the regime for its murder of the President and make Allende appear cowardly.
"By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
Published: June 18, 2009
"On Sept. 11, 1973, while under air and ground attack at the presidential palace, Mr. Allende killed himself rather than surrender to the military."
Of course, the Times was an enthusiastic backer and celebrator of the Chilean coup, and hired a noxious propagandist by the name of Shirley Christian to write pro-Pinochet propaganda for the paper, at which task she was quite prolific. (You can search the NYT archives under her name. Christian was also a big fan of U.S. client dictator Somoza of Nicaragua, and excoriated the U.S. press for what she took to be their insufficient enthusiasm for that butcher. But they only soured on him after his thugs murdered one of their members, a stupid move.)
It's a small lie as U.S. media lies go. Bigger ones: the Kennedy and King assassinations, "Yellow Rain" (bee pollen the U.S. media claimed was Soviet chemical warfare), the "Pope Plot," (Turkish fascist terrorist shoots a Pope, KGB and Bulgarian diplomat framed by CIA and their U.S. media pals) and on and on.
This is not the first time the Times has included political/ideological propaganda in an obituary. It seems there is no part of the Times that is off-limits for nonobjective content. (For example, after Oliver Stone came out with the movie JFK, the Times, an assiduous promoter of the official coverup of the assassination, went ballistic, and for months afterwards barbs aimed at Stone would pop up in the middle of unrelated articles. You'd be reading a restaurant review, say, and suddenly read something like "the soup left one with a feeling of nausea as if one had just viewed an Oliver Stone movie." I don't know if they put out a memo to the staff to "get Stone," or the kind of careerist creeps who work at the Times just took it upon themselves to score brownie points with their editors, but it was truly batty.)
Ironically, this pro-fascist paper (there are plenty of other examples of its support for fascist regimes, like in "South" Vietnam, Indonesia, Argentina, El Salvador, etc. etc.) is reviled as "liberal" by domestic U.S. fascists and reactionaries. Guess they don't know how to read. (Ranting, raving and reviling they do, not reading. Or thinking.)
