In his the The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, Seymour Hersh gives a very interesting story of Henry Kissinger and a Chilean diplomat.

Page 263:

Any doubts in the Frei government about its standing in the White House we removed after an unusual face-to-face confrontation between Nixon and Gabriel Valdés, Frei’s Foreign Minister. The occasion was a June 1969 meeting of Latin American ministers in the White House, at which Valdés, a member of an aristocratic Chilean family, chose to turn a formal ceremony into a seminar on North-South policy. In this account of the Allende years, The Black Book of American Intervention in Chile, Armando Uribe, a diplomatic officer at the Chilean Embassy in Washington, writes that Valdés had been scheduled to present Nixon with a formal policy statement on commercial and financial matters. Instead, “he spoke of the impossibility of dealing with the United States within the framework of inter-American relations; the differences in power were too great … and Nixon was caught off guard … Masking his irritation, Nixon heard Valdés out, and them pulled himself together, lowering his eyelids, becoming impenetrable, withdrawn. Kissinger frowned.”

Valdés recalls his impromptu talks as “the most difficult time in my life.” He had come to the White House with other Latin American officials knowing that the State Department had lobbied against his visit. At one point in his Oval Office talk, Valdés says, he hold Nixon that Latin America was sending back 3.8 dollars for every dollar in American aid. When Nixon interrupted to challenge the statistic, Valdés retorted that the number had come from a study prepared by a major American bank. “As I delivered my speech,” Valdés says, “Kissinger was looking at me as if I were a strange animal.” The next afternoon, Kissinger asked for a private lunch with Valdés in the Chilean Embassy. The meeting was unpleasant. As Valdés describes it, Kissinger began by declaring, “Mr. minister, you made a strange speech. You come here speaking of Latin America, but it is not important. Nothing important can come from the South. History has never been produced in the South. The axis of history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What happens in the South is of no importance. You’re wasting your time.”

“I said,” Valdés recalls, “Mr. Kissinger, you know nothing of the South.” “No,” Kissinger answered, “and I don’t care.”

…

Until 1970, Kissinger wrote, when he became involved in the planning against Allende, “Latin America was an area in which I did not then have expertise of my own.” That may be so, but from the first months of the administration, he was an expert disciple of basic American policy: Latin America was to be permitted little independence. And the independence that did exist, Kissinger also understood, was to be controlled and manipulated by American intelligence.

Love me some Realpolitik!

Thanks for reading,

Notes:

Hersh, Seymour, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House, Summit Books New York, 1983

https://archive.org/details/priceofpower00hers/page/n5/mode/2up

Please read: U.S. Realpolitik in Latin America to see how the U.S. believes that Latin American belong to them, but more importantly, how the militaries in Latin American are power centers which can be controlled and influenced to do the bidding of the U.S.

All this eventually lead to the original 9/11. September 11, 1973.