Agustín Edwards Eastman
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Agustín Edwards Eastman (b.1927) is a right-wing media baron and one of Chile's richest men. He inherited several newspapers - including Chile's leading national dailies El Mercurio and La Segunda - when his father died in 1956.
On 5 September 1970, Edwards met with Henry Kissinger, John N. Mitchell and Richard Helms in Washington to request their financial support in his attempt to oust Marxist Salvador Allende who was about to win the Presidency.[1] Over the following year, Richard Nixon approved three covert payments totalling approximately US$2,000,000 to Edwards so he would use his media empire to help destabilise Chile's democratic process.[2] In the days and years following the military coup of 11 September 1973, Edwards' newspapers published falsifications in order to justify the coup and cover up the human rights violations of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship.[3]
The Chilean documentary Agustin's Newspaper (2008), which included revealing interviews with John Dinges and several of Edwards' former and current employees, exposed serious cases of disinformation in Edwards publications from the 1960s onwards.[4]
References
- ^ Seymour M. Hersh. "'Chile: Hardball' excerpted from the book The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House", 1983. Retrieved 18 June 2013.
- ^ Covert Action in Chile 1963-1973., released by the U.S. Department of State; printed version: United States Senate Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Staff Report, Covert Action in Chile (1963-1973) (Washington D.C.: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1975). Retrieved 18 June 2013.
- ^ Peter Kornbluh. "Operation Colombo transcript", 2006. Retrieved 18 June 2013.
- ^ Linda Crawford. "El Mercurio and the "Disappeared" of Chile", 2010. Retrieved 18 June 2013.