On September 11th, the anniversaries of multiple misdeeds by the US government in recent years coincide.

On that date in 1973, the coup d’état against the constitutional government of Salvador Allende in Chile took place. It was organized, financed and led by the Pentagon and the CIA, in a conspiracy with the worst elements of the Chilean armed forces.

Between that fateful day and March 1990, Chile lived under a horrible dictatorship headed by General Augusto Pinochet (1915-2006), who led the coup against Allende’s legitimate government and headed the military junta that ruled the country. Pinochet was proclaimed president of the republic in 1974 and, in 1981, was confirmed in that position by the pseudo-constitution designed by the tyrant.

In 1988, after being defeated in a plebiscite, Pinochet announced he would retain the presidency until 1990. Although the 1989 elections forced him to give up the presidency, the dictator remained as supreme commander of the army. In 1998 a warrant was issued for him by Spain’s judicial system for his crimes.

Between 1973 and 1990, human rights in Chile were systematically violated by the fascist military dictatorship, with the support of the country’s upper classes. Repression included arbitrary arrests, kidnappings, imprisonments, killings, forced disappearances, exile and clandestine cemeteries. Torture was both physical and psychological. They used electric shocks, sexual violence, beatings, drugs, burns, water boarding, and even the rape of women by trained dogs.

Between 1973 and 1975 there were some 42,500 political arrests. In addition, there were 12,100 individual arrests and 26,400 mass arrests between 1976 and 1988. Then there were more than 4000 harassment and intimidation situations between 1977 and 1988 with a balance of a thousand missing prisoners and 2100 assassinated for political reasons.

Some 3200 people died or disappeared between 1973 and 1990 in the hands of repressive state agents. Of these, about eleven hundred people are considered missing, apart from the above-mentioned 2100 dead.

On September 11, 1980, in New York City, Cuban diplomat Felix Garcia, accredited to the Cuban Mission to the United Nations, was gunned down in the street by a member of a group of Cuban exiles organized, financed and directed by the CIA. The Cuban diplomat became the first foreign representative accredited to the United Nations to be killed in the United States.

According to an FBI report, hours after the crime, the Cuban-born counterrevolutionary gunman Pedro Remon made a call to New York media and took responsibility for the murder on behalf of “Omega 7”, one of the Cuban exile terrorist organizations operating in the United States under the umbrella of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).

Despite his long terrorist record, the murderer was not taken to trial until the mid-1980s. Meanwhile, the Cuban UN mission, its officers and families remained systematically harassed.

But for the US people the most painful September 11th was the one of the attack on the Twin Towers in New York in 2001. It left a balance of about three thousand deaths, including firefighters and other participants in the immediate rescue, who were affected by the toxic gases.

The definition of this act remains pending, given the inappropriateness of classifying the action as a classic terrorist attack due to the abundance of evidence suggesting it could have been an act of official self-aggression.

Evidence refuting the official version that was presented and used to justify the passage of USA Patriot Act is unquestionable. The Patriot Act has been seen as a state terrorism project derived from the attack which has brought horrible consequences worldwide reaching to the present.

Finally, as Néstor García Iturbe, a Cuban journalist and expert in the fight against terrorism, has rightly pointed out, the US government seemed interested in linking the date of September 11th with ignominious acts. President Barack Obama chose that very day, in 2015, to renew the inclusion of Cuba in the list of nations it sanctions under the Trading with the Enemy Act –enacted by Washington in 1917– to punish countries whose relations are incompatible with US foreign policy. This absurd list today has a single member in the whole world: Cuba.

August 27, 2016.

A CubaNews translation. Edited by Walter Lippmann. http://englishmanuelyepe.wordpress.com/