17 Apr Supreme Court Denies Cert. in Case Alleging U.S. Involvement in Chilean Coup
According to the D.C. Circuit opinion, the “complaint alleged that in 1970 the leader of the Chilean leftist coalition, Dr. Salvador Allende, won a slight plurality of the vote (36.3%) in Chile’s presidential election, and that this victory on his part created the expectation that he would, in the following months, be ratified by the Chilean congress as the first socialist president of the country…. Key United States policymakers opposed the choice of Allende as president of Chile and on September 8, 1970, policymakers began the process of assessing the pros and cons and problems and prospects involved should a Chilean military coup be organized with U.S. assistance.”
The D.C. Circuit ruled that the case raised nonjusticiable political questions. Here is an excerpt from that decision:
“Neither can it be gainsaid that the subject matter of the instant case involves the foreign policy decisions of the United States. In 1970, at the height of the Cold War, officials of the executive branch, performing their delegated functions concerning national security and foreign relations, determined that it was in the best interest of the United States to take such steps as they deemed necessary to prevent the establishment of a government in a Western Hemisphere nation that in the view of those officials could lead to the establishment or spread of communism as a governing force in the Americas. This decision may have been unwise, or it may have been wise. The political branches may have since rejected the approach, or not. In any event, that decision was classically within the province of the political branches, not the courts.”
I hope the use of nuclear weapons, the napalming of civilians, or the practice of genocide are never deemed necessary steps by those performing their delegated functions while ascertaining what is in the best interest of the United States (an interest, by the way, that in this case became detached from democratic principles and values enshrined in the Constitution). Where is the necessary ethical reflection on the intimate connection between means and ends? Recall Hitchens’ observation that ‘Chile had justified reputation as the most highly evolved pluralistic democracy in the southern hemisphere of the Americas.’ And this, at the ‘height of the Cold War’! Kissinger lied to the Foreign Relations Committee when he claimed the US government was not involved in Chile’s violent coup d’etat. Yet, ‘What is striking, and what points to a much more direct complicity in individual crimes against humanity, is the micrososmic detail in which Kissinger kept himself informed of Pinochet’s atrocities.’ Read Marc Cooper’s Pinochet and Me (2001), followed by Hitchens’ The Trial of Henry Kissinger (2001), and then conclude for yourself whether or not a decision described as ‘classically within the province of the the political branches,’ can be made without regard for democratic… Read more »
erratum: it should read ‘political’ questions.