By Roberto Morejón

Nearly half a century after one of the most abominable crimes in Latin America, the coup d'état against Chilean President Salvador Allende, many sectors in the southern country are still delving into the truth of the facts.
 
Through its ambassador to Washington, Juan Gabriel Valdés, Chile is urging the United States to declassify more documents indicative of the growing role of the Northern power in the September 11, 1973 coup.
 
Valdes formally requested the Joseph Biden administration to release 1973 and 1974 files on what was said at the White House by former President Richard Nixon and his collaborators about the uprising against the socialist government in Chile.
 
Let us remember that Washington's crude interference put an end to Allende's life and gave way to a ferocious dictatorship, the founder of the State terrorism in which Augusto Pinochet and his henchmen plunged Chile for 17 years.
 
On the general's orders, Allende's former minister, Orlando Letelier, was assassinated in Washington on September 21, 1976.
 
Neither that crime nor the long night of the coup have been condemned by the Chilean right wing, as if it were not true that Pinochet and the military junta unleashed a hunt for political opponents through the most repudiatory methods of torture.
 
They ordered extrajudicial executions, imprisonments, forced disappearances, exile, labor dismissals and took the lives of more than 40,000 Chileans.
 
It is a tyranny whose execution the United States has resisted collaborating to the last consequences.
 
But from partially declassified documents, books and press articles we know of the hostility of Nixon and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger towards Allende, even before taking office.
 
The CIA, Central Intelligence Agency, supported and financed groups to destabilize the government and in general the tenants of the White House fed the resistance, supported the right wing and financed strikes and sabotage, as Ambassador Juan Gabriel Valdés emphasized in an interview with the EFE news agency.
 
The United States, self-styled champion of human rights in the world, collaborated decisively in the crushing of all prerogatives in Chile, and many citizens in that country and abroad want to know the details of the plot.
 
It is no coincidence that Kissinger went so far as to say, in the aftermath of the coup: "In Eisenhower's time we would have been treated as heroes".