France 24 / FRANCE24
While leaders around the world remember Henry Kissinger fondly and praise him as a brilliant, hard-driving US statesman, the silence from Latin America is deafening. "A man has died whose historical brilliance never managed to conceal his moral wretchedness," Chile's ambassador to the United States, Juan Gabriel Valdes, wrote on X, the former Twitter. The envoy posted his acerbic remark after the death Wednesday of Kissinger, who greenlighted the 1973 coup that brought down Chile's elected socialist president and installed the rightwing dictatorship of general Augusto Pinochet. Chilean President Gabriel Boric quietly reposted that X message, and the foreign minister said nothing at all about the man who dominated post-World War II US foreign policy and is often associated with "realpolitik" -- diplomacy driven by raw power and a country's self-interest. Kissinger, first as national security adviser and then secretary of state under Richard Nixon (1969-1974) and Gerald Ford (1974-1977), was instrumental in the establishment of ties between the United States and China and in expanding the war in Vietnam to Cambodia and Laos. But he also approved the putsch in which Pinochet overthrew president Salvador Allende, and was key in backing other authoritarian regimes in Latin America, such as in Brazil and Nicaragua. For in-depth analysis and a deeper perspective on the life and legacy of Henry Kissinger, FRANCE 24's François Picard is joined by Dr. Jeremi Suri, Historian, Author of "Henry Kissinger and the American Century", Mack Brown Distinguished Chair for Leadership in Global Affairs and Professor of Public Affairs and History at The University of Texas at Austin's Department of History and the LBJ School of Public Affairs.
