In its 1988 World Report, Information, Freedom and Censorship, the London-based Article 19 human rights organization described the situation in post-Allende Chile during the 1970s and 1980s by stating the following:
“Gen. Augusto Pinochet Ugarte has ruled Chile in conjunction with the commanders of the four armed services since the military coup of 1973. Following the coup, publications sympathetic to the deposed Allende government were forcibly closed, printing equipment was destroyed, and personnel affiliated with the press and media were jailed, deported, `disappeared’ or killed. Radio and television stations were taken over by management appointed by the military so that news and opinion were disseminated in compliance with the wishes of the new regime…
“A leading journalist, Juan Pablo Cardenas, editor of the weekly Analisis, was sentenced after appeal on May 28, 1987 to 18 months night-time imprisonment on charges of slandering the President in a series of articles which had appeared in his magazine the previous year.
“The editor and assistant editor of the weekly Apsi were arrested and jailed in August 1987, and a satirical issue of the magazine was confiscated…
“The Chilean government employs many different methods in punishing the expression of dissenting views. On Nov. 28, 1986, 14,000 copies of the latest book by Gabriel Garcia Marquez were burned on arrival at the port of Valparaiso…”
During the 1980s, the special interests of the Military Mission of the Chilean Pinochet regime were represented in Washington, D.C. by the lobbying firm of Anderson & Pendleton, which also represented the special interests of China Airline Ltd. and the Federation of Japan Tuna Fisheries Cooperative in Washington.
(Downtown 9/1/93)
[Note: Since I’m taking a summer blogging break, I won’t be blogging here again until the end of July. But in the meantime: Keep The Faith!]
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