The Other Sept. 11

Editorial from  The New York Times, 11 Sept. 2003

eath came from the skies. A building — a symbol of the nation — collapsed in flames in an act of terror that would lead to the deaths of 3,000 people. It was Sept. 11.

But the year was 1973, the building Chile's White House, La Moneda, and the event a coup staged by Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Now, after decades of silence, Chileans are protesting in the streets for the reversal of amnesty laws that block prosecutions for the killings after the coup. The face of Salvador Allende, the overthrown Socialist president, is everywhere, and now behind La Moneda is a new statue of him wrapped in the Chilean flag. Chile's president, Ricardo Lagos, is proposing a truth commission to look into reports of torture, special judges to find the disappeared, new pensions for victims' families and an amnesty program for former soldiers who tell where the bodies are buried.

Chile is not the only country in South America focused today on the crimes of decades ago. In Peru, the truth commission investigating the guerrilla wars of the 1980's and 1990's just released a report concluding that more than 69,000 people were killed or made to disappear. In Argentina, a new president has just annulled two amnesty laws that the military forced through Congress after the "dirty war" ended in 1983.

In the United States, Sept. 11 will forever be a day to remember our victims of terrorism. Yet our nation's hands have not always been clean, and it is important to recall Chile's Sept. 11, too. "The Pinochet File," a new book by Peter Kornbluh, a researcher at the nonprofit National Security Archive, presents declassified documents showing that the Nixon administration, which had tried to block Mr. Allende's inauguration, began plotting to bring him down just 72 hours after he took office.

Mr. Allende, a Socialist but a democrat, had done nothing to Washington. President Nixon took his election as an affront — "it's too much the fashion to kick us around," he said — and he worried most that a successful Socialist would inspire others.

The United States did not directly participate in the coup, but it laid the groundwork for it and supported the plotters. Afterward, even as mass murder ensued, the Nixon administration secretly embraced Mr. Pinochet's regime.

Much has changed in 30 years in Chile. Today, a woman, Michelle Bachelet, is the respected defense minister, and she and the army's commander, Gen. Juan Emilio Cheyre, are modernizing and depoliticizing the military. General Cheyre has denounced past abuses and vowed they will never be repeated. The courts are trying more than 160 former military men, but retired officers feel betrayed. They still argue that they saved Chile from communism, and they say Chile needs reconciliation.

That is code for enforced silence, for forgetting. But the lesson of Chile, Peru and Argentina is that reconciliation requires the opposite. Silence prevents a nation from coming to terms. Real reconciliation comes from what the guilty are trying to avoid: full information, reparations and justice.