Angling for F-16s in the Land of the "Disappeared"

For a brief time in the 1970s, the U.S. didn't much care for Chile's government. This had nothing to do with the Chilean people, but rather was based on the fear that Chile -- which had just become the first country to freely elect a Marxist as its president -- was about to go Red. President Nixon famously vowed to make Chile's economy "scream," the CIA went to work, and pretty soon the economy was howling. It was all too much for the military; the generals staged a coup against President Salvador Allende, who killed himself rather than surrender.

Thus began the brutal, decidedly non-communist dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet was recently indicted in Spain for murder, torture, disappearances of civilians, illegal detention, and "forcible transfers" (forced relocation of Chileans). During his tenure as president, at least 3,197 people in Chile were murdered or "disappeared" by the military regime. Pinochet's reign ended with a transition back to democracy in 1990, just as the Cold War was petering out and U.S. defense contractors began looking for new markets for their wares.

U.S. arms sales in the Clinton years Direct government sales Government-approved sales (scale in millions of dollars)

Under Bill Clinton, the U.S. has approved sales to Chile of more than $299 million worth of weapons since 1993. Although some of it has been relatively benign, the bulk of the sales have consisted of attack helicopters. Since 1993, Chile has purchased 16 Boeing MD-530-F attack helicopters and four (French) Aerospatiale Super Puma attack helicopters the Pentagon no longer wanted. (Helicopters are especially noxious to human rights groups, since they are frequently used in situations that require the containment and control of civilian populations.)

In addition, Lockheed Martin has been negotiating the sale of 24 F-16 fighter planes to Chile for the past two years. However, the sale is on hold due to Chile's economic problems touched off by the Asian crisis.

Since Pinochet, Chile's human-rights situation has improved dramatically. Most of today's human-rights problems are confined to police brutality and a reluctance to look into Pinochet-era abuses. According to the State Department's 1997 report on human-rights in Chile, "The Government generally respected its citizens' human-rights. However, there continued to be some problem areas. The most serious cases involved allegations of torture, brutality, and excessive use of force by the police. Almost all other human rights concerns are related to abuses during the former military government, primarily between 1973 and 1978 ... Military authorities continued to resist disclosing abuses from the past."

However, just because Chile is no longer under Pinochet doesn't mean there is no harm in selling it weapons. In spite of fears of an arms race resulting from Clinton's 1997 decision to allow advanced weapons sales to Latin America, the Clinton administration seems to think, "Well, everyone else is doing it, so why shouldn't we?"

To this attitude, former Costa Rican president and Nobel laureate Oscar Arias said, "What if Colombia refused to crack down on its traffickers, saying that if they did not meet America's demand for cocaine, Peruvian ones would?"

In an interview with National Public Radio, Jan Nolan, chair of the 1995 President's Advisory Board on Arms Proliferation, said that, "The reason not to sell a particular weapon seems to dissolve in the face of the argument that if we don't, others will." In other words, if we aren't responsible for the potential foreign and domestic atrocities these weapons systems can deliver, someone else will be anyway, and we don't want to miss out on all that cash.

-- Mat Honan

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