Almost 48 years have passed since the U.S.-backed military coup in Chile ousted the democratically elected socialist presidency of Salvador Allende. The outcome was 17 years of military dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet’s rule, resulting in thousands of Chilean opponents tortured, murdered and in over 3,000 cases, disappeared. The U.S. role has gradually been uncovered under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.

Less known, and still under wraps for alleged security reasons, is the role Australia played in Chile, in the years leading up to the coup.

Recently, former Australian military intelligence officer Cristian Fernandes presented a legal request to declassify documents pertaining to Australia’s role in Chile working as proxies of the U.S.’s Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The country’s role in the years leading up to the coup was exposed in 1977, but details have remained classified. The Australian government’s legal and security  representatives have deemed any declassification as harmful to Australia’s security interests and international relations.

Fernandes’s request was rejected by the Australian government, despite the fact that the request did not call for revealing the identities of the officers involved, or any surveillance techniques used by Australia’s Secret Intelligence Services (ASIS).

Australia’s role in Chile commenced with a request from the CIA in 1970 to have two ASIS officers stationed in Chile’s capital, Santiago, reporting directly to Washington.

Australia’s role in Chile commenced with a request from the CIA in 1970 to have two ASIS officers stationed in Chile’s capital, Santiago, reporting directly to Washington. Australia’s Foreign Minister William McMahon approved of the collaboration, starting the clandestine operation in 1971. With the CIA closely monitored by the Allende government, the U.S. turned to its allies for help, particularly where it risked exposure in Chile.

Conflicting reports have emerged over ASIS’s links to the CIA, with some stating that Australian’s security services were working independently. However, the Labour Prime Minister Gough Whitlam, who took office in 1972, was informed by ASIS director Bill Robertson of its officers’ role in Chile and that their presence was tied to the destabilization of Allende’s government. Whitlam’s order to revoke ASIS’s presence in Chile was either initially ignored or else, other sources say, Whitlam hesitated in signing the revocation of the ASIS officers in Chile, out of caution regarding the U.S.’s possible reaction.

The first CIA-ASIS links in Chile were reported by the Australian newspaper, the Sydney Morning Herald, who were contacted by ASIS to call off the investigation and to withhold publishing the names of the officers involved. In 1977, Whitlam stated to the Australian parliament, “It has been written – and I cannot deny it – that when my Government took office, Australian intelligence personnel were working as proxies of the CIA in destabilizing the government of Chile.”

Indeed, a search for the terms “Australia-Chile” turns up nothing in the U.S. National Security Archive’s database of declassified documents.

The Hope Report, commissioned by Whitlam, was published in 1977, confirming the presence of ASIS agents in Chile yet making light of the political situation and negating the links between ASIS and the CIA.

According to Nicky Hager, a journalist specializing in intelligence gathering, Australia would have asked the U.S. to refrain from declassifying documents that would highlight its role in the destabilization of Allende’s presidency. Indeed, a search for the terms “Australia-Chile” turns up nothing in the U.S. National Security Archive’s database of declassified documents.

Transparency as regards Australia’s involvement with the CIA in Chile has not been forthcoming. The Freedom of Information Act exempts documents dating back to 40 years from being published, ostensible for security reasons and the country’s national interest. While the identity of the ASIS officers in Chile has been established, Australia’s Intelligence Services Act of 2001 prohibits the publishing of names unless permission is granted by the security agencies’ directors.

Australia became a safe haven for Chileans escaping the horrors of Pinochet’s military dictatorship, even as its secret services collaborated against Allende and remained in Chile in the aftermath of the coup. In Australia, Chilean refugees were another target for ASIO and its espionage – the humanitarian welcome was juxtaposed against the politics of spying for Chile and the CIA.

Additionally, Australia was also a destination for Chilean torturers and agents, some settling in Australia to extend the espionage network on Chilean refugees. One notable case which received considerable national and international media attention is that of Adriana Rivas, a former torturer and secretary to Chile’s National Intelligence Directorate (DINA) Chief Manuel Contreras, who worked at the detention and extermination centre known as Cuartel Simon Bolivar.

Rivas absconded from Chile in 2010 through Argentina to escape facing justice and settled in Australia, working as a nanny.  Relatives of the disappeared have since 2013 worked with lawyers to have Rivas extradited from Australia to Chile, where she is wanted for her involvement in the torture and disappearance of seven detainees, among them the leader of Chile’s Communist Party, Victor Diaz. Rivas was detained in Sydney in 2019 and this week, the Federal Court of Australia rejected the former DINA agent’s appeal, declaring her extraditable to Chile.

Norberto Bobbio (1909-2004), the erudite Italian philosopher, noted that the distinction between ideological right and left lies “in the different attitudes that both sides automatically assume towards the idea of inequality.”

Latin America is a region with the highest inequality gap – even higher than Sub-Saharan Africa. For instance, in the report by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP), dated December 2019, the richest 10% in Latin America owns 37% of the total wealth, while the poorest 40% owns a mere 13%.

According to the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Economics Joseph Stiglitz this gap is a legacy of the region’s colonial past. At the same time, history has usually placed corrupt leaders in power.

But how can a place like Latin America with such shameful indicators and a notorious legacy of violence and social turmoil experience a surge in the arrival to power of regimes identified as ultraright? Of regimes whose purpose is to defend the privileges of a small portion of the society at the expense of the majority. It seems that the colonial mentality never really left the Andes.

Slightly more than 13 years ago, in November 2007, at the Ibero-American Summit in Santiago, Chile, the President of Colombia Álvaro Uribe, the icon of the continent’s right-wing politics, was the summit’s black sheep when seen alongside his counterparts from Chile (Michelle Bachelet), Brazil (Lula da Silva), Venezuela (Hugo Chávez), Argentina (Cristina Fernández), Ecuador (Rafael Correa), and a handful of other Latin American presidents from the left.

Today, if a picture at the same summit were to be taken, it would be very different. Even though countries like Argentina and recently Bolivia have seen a comeback to power of leftist leaders, nations like Colombia, Brazil, Honduras, Guatemala, Chile, Uruguay, and Paraguay keep moving towards the right.

In countries like Venezuela, Mexico, and Bolivia, where left governments steer the wheel of their democracies, right-wing supporters are in constant watch for any opportunity to seize power in the next elections.

The right-wing Venezuelan opposition seems confident of the support of the hawkish U.S. establishment and doesn’t even consider that a democratic path to regain power is necessary as several pleas have been made for a U.S. military intervention to overthrow President Nicolás Maduro.

The right-wing Venezuelan opposition seems confident of the support of the hawkish U.S. establishment and doesn’t even consider that a democratic path to regain power is necessary.

According to some thinkers, Latin America is conceptualized as “America’s Backyard.” As the United States’ empire faces increasing challenges as a dominant superpower as a result of the rise of China, Russia, and smaller regional powers in Asia, Africa, and Europe that are stepping up their influence worldwide, Latin America seems to be turning into an “Alamo” of U.S. foreign diplomacy.

Right-wing regimes in Colombia, Brazil, Guatemala, and Honduras have some common values with Republicans in Washington, where the Evangelical voters matter the most. Jair Bolsonaro was elected with nearly 58 million votes as the president of Brazil, the most populous country in Latin America.

Evangelical voters, which constitute 30% of Brazil’s population, support the most radical right-wing parties and proved a goldmine for Bolsonaro’s victory.

Evangelical voters are having an ever-growing influence on Central American countries as well. Forty percent of voters in Guatemala, the most populated country in the subcontinent with more than 17 million people, are evangelical Christians; in Honduras, evangelicals account for 32% of voters, in El Salvador 31%, and in Costa Rica around 25%. El Salvador, one of the countries with higher immigration rates from the Middle East and whose president Nayib Bukele is a descendant of Palestinian immigrants, is very obedient to what Washington dictates.

Evangelical voters are having an ever-growing influence on Central American countries as well. Forty percent of voters in Guatemala, the most populated country in the subcontinent with more than 17 million people, are evangelical Christian.

Bukele, who considers himself “not religious” as he stated once on social media, relied on the evangelical vote to win the presidential elections. Bukele even had close contact with Trump’s evangelical pastors and one of his first visits to a foreign country after his inauguration was to Israel, a time-honored tradition of every U.S. president.

Guatemala’s president, Jimmy Morales, a declared Christian Zionist, moved his country’s embassy in Israel from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in May 2018. Morales stepped down from the presidency of Guatemala last January 14, 2020, when the elected Alejandro Giammatei, an ultra-conservative politician assumed power after winning the election with 58% of the votes.

But the growing influence of evangelical Zionists is not the only drive for the establishment and solidification of far-right regimes in Latin America. Colombia’s turbulent political past is perpetuated by the current president, Iván Duque, who follows in the tradition of right-wing leaders who claim that “Colombia will become another Venezuela,” if a leftist government is elected.

Even though some voices in the Colombian political spectrum consider Juan Manuel Santos, a former president and a winner of the Nobel Peace Prize, a leftist, he undoubtedly belongs to the traditional establishment.

Gustavo Petro, a former leftist guerrilla fighter in the 1970s and 1980s, lost the 2018 presidential elections by nearly two million votes to a candidate most of the country calls “Uribe’s candidate” – a reference to the controversial former Colombian president Álvaro Uribe, who was known to be a close ally of the U.S. and an advocate of neoliberalism and ultraright politics.

Gustavo Petro, proposing a more liberal agenda in the social, environmental, and economic fronts, will probably run again next year, but his past as a militant of a revolutionary guerrilla scares a big portion of Colombia’s population. This fear is exacerbated by the pro-right media in the country, which depicts him as a “new Chávez” or a “communist thug.” As Colombians have fresh memories from the 50-year-long internal conflict with Marxist guerrillas, this profile is not appealing.

Despite cases like Cuba, with 60 years of resistance against the U.S. sanctions, Venezuela and its more than two-decade-long legacy of Chávez, and the strong growing liberal movements in Chile, Argentina, and Mexico, the shadow of old-fashioned colonialism in new clothes is being cast over the region’s shores and mountains more strongly than ever. Operation Condor seems to have found plenty of loyal allies among the people of Latin America.