One immediate result of the CIA and ITT-promoted September 11, 1973 military coup in Chile was that, “a right-wing military junta took over in Santiago and soon after opened negotiations with ITT regarding compensation for Chiltelco;” and “on December 22 [1973] it was announced that the new Chilean government would pay $125.2 million for ITT’s equity and debt investments in Chiltelco, over a 10-year period,” according to Robert Sobel’s 1982 book "ITT: The Management of Opportunity".
The Chilean people, however, failed to profit as much from the CIA-ITT conspiracy to overthrow the democratically-elected Allende regime as did the corporation on whose board of directors sat the founder of the Lannan Foundation. According to "Nixon, Kissinger and Allende: U.S. Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile":
“By the end of 1973, 1,500 Chileans had perished…Judge [Juan] Guzman estimated that 3,500 Chileans were either killed or `disappeared’ during the 17 years of military rule…Indeed, the death toll could have been as high as 4,000…”
But other books have estimated the number of Chileans killed by the U.S. government-supported Pinochet regime during and after the September 11, 1973 military coup as being much higher. For example, according to Samuel Chavkin’s 1989 book "Storm Over Chile: The Junta Under Siege":
“…Immediately after the overthrow of the Allende regime, Washington rejected charges that it had had a hand in the coup, and it disclaimed having had advance knowledge of its imminence…It was only after the fact,…after some 30,000 Chileans had been tortured to death or shot by firing squads, after upwards of 100,000 others were languishing in prisons and concentration camps, that official documentation of this conspiracy came to light before the Senate Select Committee in 1975…”
If the editorial judgments and reporting about the role of the ITT Board of Directors and ITT in promoting the September 11, 1973 military coup in Chile of alternative media/left gatekeeper groups like "Democracy Now!", "The Nation", and "Mother Jones" magazine have been negatively affected as a result of their acceptance of “charitable grant”/blood money from the Lannan Foundation that ITT Director J. Patrick Lannan, Sr. set up, it would not be the first time that a Lannan family-linked organization attempted to influence news reporting and editorial judgments of a media organizations. When ITT Director Lannan’s firm attempted unsuccessfully to win U.S. Justice Department and U.S. court approval for a merger with ABC in the late 1960s, for example, the U.S. Justice Department noted the following in an August 3, 1970 memo:
“…In the course of the ABC-ITT proceeding, ITT exhibited its readiness to interfere with the judgment of reporters of independent news media; specific testimony covered attempts of ITT executives to influence the reporting of the ABC-ITT proceeding by newspaper reporters of the leading dailies. Some of this testimony included statements by ITT officials that reporters should be concerned about potential economic consequences in reporting news and making editorial judgments…The Department argues that the proposed merger was likely to result in significant and substantial detriment to the public interest, including loss of competition…”
Perhaps the “merger” of "Democracy Now!", "The Nation" and "Mother Jones" with ITT Director J. Patrick Lannan, Sr.’s Lannan Foundation in the 21st--century also results “in significant and substantial detriment to the public interest”—40 years after the CIA and ITT’s 1973 coup in Chile?
(end of article)
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