Kissinger's Legacy in Latin America: Eight years of policy have left generations of damage.

• Author: Stockwell, Norman
• Position: Ex-secretary of state Henry Kissinger

Henry Kissinger is thought of mostly in relation to his role in the wars in Southeast Asia (and his questionable Nobel prize for "ending" one of them). Perhaps people also remember his role in negotiations between the United States and the Soviet Union (detente) and China ("ping-pong diplomacy"), and maybe for his role in supporting the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in Chile. But the U.S. public today very rarely discusses Kissinger's role in U.S. foreign policy in Latin America. Yet, as historian Stephen G. Rabe notes in the introduction to his 2020 book, Kissinger and Latin America: Intervention, Human Rights, and Diplomacy, "Kissinger directed inter-American relations between 1969 and 1977"--the entire terms of two U.S. Presidents.

"There's a paradox in that Kissinger considered Latin America of little significance in the balance of power, and certainly in terms of his priorities [it] was really low," Rabe tells The Progressive in a telephone interview. "But the paradox is that I found that he spent more time on Latin America than his predecessors or his successors because he works so hard. He works all the time, but he also wants to be in control of everything."

While serving in the Nixon and Ford Administrations, Kissinger spent significant time with dictators, oligarchs, and military generals. At the height of the Argentine dictatorship, he even traveled to Buenos Aires to attend the 1978 World Cup as a special guest of General Jorge Rafael Videla, who was later convicted of crimes against humanity. The Argentine dictatorship participated in the deadly Operation Condor with other countries in the region. As journalist John Dinges writes in the newly updated version of his 2004 book, The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents, "Henry Kissinger didn't become one of the most powerful men in the world as an advocate of human rights."

As Dinges tells The Progressive in an email, "It is a speculative but fair statement to say that the mass killings in South America during the 1970s would not have occurred without the green light Henry Kissinger gave to the brutal tactics of the military regimes, especially Chile, Argentina, and Uruguay," For example, he adds, "Long after it became clear that thousands of dissidents were being killed and that torture and secret kidnappings were the order of the day, Kissinger told Chile's dictator, Augusto Pinochet, in 1976, 'In the United States, as you know, we...