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in the name of Socialism.
    As many as 5,000 members of the Movement of National Liberation-Tupamaros were organized in urban cells in tiny Uruguay and had gained a worldwide reputation as Robin Hood–like romantic revolutionaries. Che Guevara himself seemed to live on even after being captured and executed by Bolivian soldiers and their CIA advisers. Argentina had a variety of radical groups arising from the traditional left and the Peronist movement. By 1974, the Peronist Montoneros had assassinated a former president, General Pedro Eugenio Aramburu, and kidnappings of businessmen for multimillion-dollar ransoms were common.
    Chile’s extreme left radicalism was mostly at the level of overheated rhetoric. Violence was mostly limited to rock-throwing against rightist youth groups. But in the first year of Allende’s government an extremist group assassinated a former cabinet minister, Edmundo Pérez Zucovic.
    Paraguay was a perennial caldron of conspiracy. Marxist ideology played little role in the plotting against the dictatorship of Alfredo Stroessner, whose Colorado Party had been in power for twenty years. Young Paraguayans studying in neighboring Argentina, however, were joining Marxist revolutionary groups, and a well-organized but unsuccessful effort was made to kill Stroessner with a car bomb in that year.
    It was an era of great violence and great idealism; the most radical groups on both left and right rejected democracy as a solution to society’s most pressing problems. It was an era in which the United States itself played a role profoundly at odds with its historical legacy and deepest values. Absorbed by the larger geopolitical competition with the Soviet Union, the United States could no longer be counted as an ally by the political forces in Latin America most committed to democracy.
    By 1970, and lasting until the inauguration in 1977 of President Jimmy Carter, the United States in effect had switched sides. In Allende’s election democracy had brought to power a Marxist proclaiming he would create a unique and peaceful “Chilean road to socialism,” an unacceptable outcome to the United States. Under the leadership of Henry Kissinger, first as Richard Nixon’s national security adviser and later as secretary of state, the United States sent an unequivocal signal to the most extreme rightist forces that democracy could be sacrificed in the cause of ideological warfare. Criminal operational tactics, including assassination, were not only acceptable but supported with weapons and money.
    A CIA internal memo laid it out in unsparing terms:
    On September 16, 1970 [CIA] Director [Richard] Helms informed a group of senior agency officers that on September 15, President Nixon had decided that an Allende regime was not acceptable to the United States. The President asked the Agency to prevent Allende from coming to power or to unseat him and authorized up to $10 million for this purpose. . . . A special task force was established to carry out this mandate, and preliminary plans were discussed with Dr. Kissinger on 18 September 1970.
    To extremists in the military, people like Manuel Contreras and others later placed in charge of security forces, Kissinger and the CIA sent an even more dangerous message that would echo later in Condor operations. The CIA “agreed with” and supported plans by military plotters to kidnap the top commander of the Chilean Armed Forces, an action considered “an essential step in any coup plan.” The officer, General René Schneider, was shot to death in the operation. Schneider’s offense, according to the CIA, was excessive devotion to democracy: “Schneider was a strong supporter of the Chilean constitution and a major stumbling block for military officers seeking to carry out a coup to prevent Allende from being inaugurated.”
    According to declassified documents, the CIA provided three submachine guns to one group of plotters at 2 A.M. on the day of the kidnapping. The