Henry Kissinger, the controversial Nobel Peace Prize winner who supported the “dirty war” that left thousands dead in Latin America

Henry Kissingeran emblematic figure of American diplomacy during the 1970s, died this Wednesday at the age of 100 at his home in Connecticut, according to his consulting agency.

As an American foreign policy strategist during the turbulent 1960s and 1970s, Kissinger wielded enormous power.

LOOK: Henry Kissinger, the decisive man of the 20th century for his influence on international politics and his controversial legacy

His name has been linked to almost all the great events of those times, from the Vietnam War to the US confrontation with the Soviet Union.

The paradoxes of his life were extraordinary.

Despite being a controversial protagonist of the Cold War, in 1973 he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.

Sometimes identified with the anti-communist right, he was nevertheless the ideologue of the rapprochement between the US and China, until then isolated under the regime of Mao Zedong.

And despite being born in Germany and speaking English with a strong foreign accent, he became one of the best-known symbols of Washington and its global power.

A paradoxical figure

When Henry Kissinger met in June 1976 with the chancellor of the military regime that had been in power in Argentina three months earlier, he asked him if he minded if he spoke in Spanish because he had difficulties with English.

“Not at all,” responded Kissinger, then Secretary of State of the United States and a chess player on the world board, before breaking the ice with his Argentine interlocutor by announcing that he would attend the 1978 World Cup in his country, “no matter what happens.” .

“Argentina is going to win,” he predicted.

The chancellor, Admiral César Augusto Guzzetti, warned him moments later that his country had “terrorism” and economic problems, and asked for US support for the de facto government.

“We have closely followed the events in Argentina. We wish the new government the best and will do everything possible to help it succeed,” Kissinger responded, according to a declassified US document about the conversation, which took place in Chile under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.

Shortly after, Kissinger gave another warning to Guzzetti: “If there are things that must be done, they should be done quickly. But they must quickly return to normal procedures,” he told her in a phrase that his critics have interpreted as a green light for the new Argentine regime to violate human rights.

With this type of messages and policies, both in Latin America and in the rest of the world, the US promoted its interests in the middle of the Cold War through Kissinger, one of the most influential and controversial diplomats of the 20th century who died this Wednesday. at 100 years old.

The pragmatist

Henry Alfred Kissinger was born in Fürth, German Bavaria, on May 27, 1923, into a Jewish family who fled Nazi persecution by moving to New York when he was 15 years old.

In 1943, the same year he became a United States citizen, he was drafted into the United States Army and became a German counterintelligence interpreter during World War II.

After the war, he returned to the United States and received a scholarship to the exclusive Harvard University, where in 1950 he graduated in Political Science with full honors. He earned a master’s degree and a doctorate, and in 1954 he joined as a professor.

His good academic reputation allowed him to enter the great halls of politics when President Richard Nixon appointed him his National Security Advisor in 1969. and Secretary of State in 1973.

The veteran Republican politician and the Harvard intellectual formed a couple that marked US foreign policy with a series of unexpected and daring initiatives.

Kissinger advocated making decisions based on pragmatism and national convenience rather than based on ideological preferences.

Among other things:

• He actively contributed to the normalization of US relations with China and was the architect of détente or détente policy with the Soviet Union.
• In 1973 his mediation between Israel and Egypt helped end the Yom Kippur War.
• He was also key in the Paris peace accords to withdraw the US from the Vietnam War, which his government had prolonged, which earned him the Nobel Prize along with the North Vietnamese diplomat Le Duc Tho.

However, his critics point out that he was responsible for atrocities such as secret US air bombings in Cambodia, a nation he accused of harboring communist guerrillas from neighboring Vietnam.

But Kissinger is a controversial figure not only because of the role he played in US foreign policy, but also because of his personality.

“He had that kind of cold-blooded, calculating approach to war and peace,” said David Greenberg, author of the book “Nixon’s Shadow: The Story of a Picture.”

He had “all this intelligence, but without the moral or ethical basis,” he added.

Allende and Fidel

Latin America, where the Cold War often turned into a hot conflict, was one of the regions that knew Kissinger’s influence firsthand.

This has been evidenced by various official documents declassified and published by the National Security Archive at George Washington University.

These papers show, for example, that Kissinger indicated to Nixon in 1970 that the democratic election of Chilean socialist President Salvador Allende was “one of the most serious challenges ever faced in this hemisphere.”

Kissinger feared that the South American country would become an example of an “elected and successful Marxist government” and told CIA Director Richard Helms that Washington would prevent “Chile from going to waste.”

Days after Allende was overthrown by Pinochet in 1973, Kissinger spoke by telephone with Nixon about the military coup: “We didn’t do it. That is, we help them,” he told the president..

“We want to help, not weaken it. “You did a great service to the West by overthrowing Allende,” Kissinger personally told Pinochet in June 1976, when he was already Gerald Ford’s Secretary of State after Nixon’s resignation due to the Watergate scandal.

That meeting took place in Chile, when concern was growing around the world about the serious violations of human rights by the Chilean regime.

It was on that same trip that Kissinger met with Argentine Foreign Minister Guzzetti and conveyed his support to the de facto government that launched a “dirty war” in which up to 30,000 people would die or disappear.

Other declassified US documents show that Kissinger, furious over then-Cuban President Fidel Castro’s decision to send troops to Angola, outlined plans in 1976 to “crush Cuba” with air strikes.which never came to fruition.

No apologies

Following his departure from government in 1977, when Democrat Jimmy Carter assumed the US presidency, Kissinger founded the international consulting firm Kissinger Associates, which made millions selling advice to large corporations.

He also dedicated himself to another of his passions, football, and as he had announced to Guzzetti, He personally traveled to the 1978 World Cup in Argentina despite concerns expressed by the US ambassador to that country that his support for the military junta would harden its position on human rights.just as the Carter administration was pressuring her to stop the repression.

Kissinger never completely escaped the controversies he aroused.

In May 2001, while visiting Paris, a French judge summoned him to testify as a witness in an investigation into the coup and human rights violations in Chile, but the former Secretary of State refused to respond and left France.

There were also attempts to involve him in prosecutions in other countries for alleged abuses related to American foreign policy, but those efforts never came to fruition.

Asked in an interview with Atlantic in 2016 about the usefulness of going to other countries and making mea culpa for past US behavior, Kissinger used questions in his response, without offering a hint of an apology.

“Should every American public servant have to worry about how their views will sound 40 years later in the hands of foreign governments?”, he questioned.

When recently asked by a journalist from the American network CBS about the bombings of Cambodia, Kissinger defended himself: “You do this program because I am going to be 100 years old,” he said. “And you choose a topic from something that happened 60 years ago. You have to know that it was a necessary step.”

In that same recent interview he said he hoped that, with China’s participation, there would be negotiations at the end of this year to end the war between Russia and Ukraine.

And in dialogue with the British magazine The Economist He released advice so that the US and China learn to coexist without going to war, in a world where artificial intelligence can increase their rivalry.

“Both sides became convinced that the other represented a strategic danger,” he warned.

“We are heading towards a confrontation between great powers.”