Vicente Araujo, a Chilean diplomat, recently told Al Jazeera he saw the deal made by President Peña Nieto with the U.S. and the European Union coming to light when he visited the United States at the end of May. “I thought it was very simple for us and the other Latin American partners,” he said. “The U.S. can make a big market. As a result, Mexico will make a bigger market. If I’m thinking about other regions or other countries, I think the same is true.”
Nixon had an “important voice,” Araujo added, but he was never aware that he was the only one listening because the administration in the White House didn’t let him know.
“I did not believe what I was hearing,” Araujo said. “And I would have had a different opinion at the time.”
According to the CIA’s estimates, there were almost 700 covert CIA operations around Latin America in 1968, ranging from supporting the Contras in Nicaragua to drug running on the Caribbean island of Tenerife. The agency did not publish the total number of countries involved, or indicate which covert operations were conducted in which countries.
The CIA did not release specific numbers of covert operations, except to say that many countries are not available for detailed questioning or analysis because of “the need to maintain secrecy. Nevertheless our sources indicate that over 200 major Latin American countries were involved.”
The CIA has always resisted releasing its records and the Agency’s public relations office has released no details beyond describing the nature and details of the covert operations under discussion.
The American public was denied full disclosure of the activities of the Agency and the information it provided to Americans when former President Richard Nixon resigned because he was convinced there was a cover-up.
The CIA refused to answer two questions regarding the operation, referred to in this report, and one that stated the Agency has confirmed, “more than 4,000 military, intelligence, and political operations of all kinds and degrees throughout Latin America in the past decade, of which the largest number was conducted in Peru and Bolivia from 1959 to 1969.”
One of the subjects that has been investigated thoroughly in this investigation is the influence that the CIA in the Soviet Union, which became the United States’ strategic partner in the Cold War, had over the operations they carried out.
In January 1970, the Agency provided the American press with a number of