Allende seeks Brazil documents on ’73 Chile coup

The daughter of overthrown Chilean President Salvador Allende requested via Twitter on Tuesday that Brazil open any secret archives that could shed light on any role it played in the 1973 coup that killed her father.

The request by Isabel Allende, a deputy in Chile’s Congress, follows publication in the U.S. of a declassified document about a 1971 meeting between U.S. President Richard Nixon and Brazilian military regime-era President Emilio Medici.

The two discussed coordinating intervention in Chile to overthrow the leftist Allende and also possible intervention in Cuba.

“I reiterate my request to President Lula to declassify documents and know the true history of intervention in A. Latina in the 1970s,” Isabel Allende wrote on her Twitter page, referring to Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.

A spokeswoman for Allende confirmed the entry.

The formerly top secret account of a Dec. 9, 1971, meeting between Nixon and Medici at the White House Oval Office spelled out a desire by the U.S. and Brazilian presidents to foment the overthrow of leftist governments.

The eventual CIA-supported coup in Chile, led by Gen. Augusto Pinochet, toppled the Allende government Sept. 11, 1973.

In the 1971 Oval Office meeting, Nixon said that “this should be held in the greatest confidence. But we must try and prevent new Allendes and Castros and try where possible to reverse these trends.”

Medici said he was happy to see that the Brazilian and American positions and views were so close.

Declassified in July, the memo is now part of the official history of U.S. foreign policy in a State Department series called “Foreign Relations of The United States.”

National Security Archive, a private group, posted the document on its Web site Sunday.

Paulo Vannuchi, head of Brazil’s National Secretariat of Human Rights, said any such documents may already be in the public domain among documents already released, or may be among those still locked up.

“There is also the possibility that any archives about it were destroyed. No one is going to say that dictators don’t destroy archives – obviously they do,” Vannuchi said in Rio de Janeiro, where he attended an event officially recognizing the deaths of 500 Brazilians at the hands of the nation’s 1964-85 military regime.

In 2002, then-Brazilian President Fernando Henrique Cardoso – a leftist who fled into political exile during the dictatorship – signed a decree to keep military intelligence files classified for 50 years.

But in 2005, Silva ordered the release of 13 steel archives and 1,259 boxes with photos, films, pamphlets and 220,000 microchips relating to the military regime.

Peter Kornbluh, a senior analyst at the National Security Archive who directs the group’s Chile and Cuba documentation project, called on Brazil to release all its archives.

“It seems to me Brazil owes an explanation, if not an apology, to Chile in the form of a full historical reckoning of its role in the overthrow of Allende and the advent of Pinochet,” he said.

In another Twitter entry, Allende called the most recent revelations “another one of Nixon’s nefarious interventions, this time using Brazil.”

But she also said times had changed, noting the election of U.S. President Barack OBama.

“There is a big difference between the Latin American policy of Obama, who condemned the Honduran coup, and that of Nixon, and his plot against Salvador Allende,” she wrote.