By Cecilio Morales
It was hard to get wrapped up into the event obsessing everyone in the United States in recently, when mention of the other Sept. 11 was so sorely lacking.
Just as Osama bin Laden died certain he was right, no American apology is forthcoming for the other Sept. 11, the one in Chile in 1973 that ended with an elected president dead and thousands of Chilean citizens from all walks of life kidnapped, tortured and killed.
The initial toll (people killed at the stadium in Santiago in the immediate aftermath of the violent overthrow of Salvador Allende) was similar in Chile to that on Manhattan island 28 years later: 3,000 people killed.
Gen. Augusto Cesar Pinochet had laid out in the military journal Estrategia in 1965 his plans for a "national security state" to struggle in defense of what the military regimes of South America came to call "Christian, Western civilization." He died without ever apologizing for his crimes.
Nor for the $250 million paid to the Anaconda Copper Mining Company by the Pinochet regime to offset the loss of two-thirds of its copper production under Allende. Anaconda, ruled a major polluter by the Environmental Protection Agency in the 1980s, was bought by the Atlantic Richfield Company in 1997, In turn, it was purchased by BP, the former British Petroleum, and the source of the recent environmental disaster in the Gulf of Mexico.
I can sympathize with anger about this date when I think of Sept. 11, 1973.
As for the one 10 years ago, I wish that instead of talk of retribution, there had been more room for understanding those who witnessed the pillage in their countries by U.S. and other Western interests with which most of us feel no commonality whatsoever ― and how misdirected, grief-stricken rage was the real pilot of the four crashed planes.
Then they might have come to forgive us for unwittingly enjoying the living standard sustained by our society's plunder. And we could forgive them back.
Cecilio Morales is the executive officer of newsweekly Mii Publications in Washington, D.C., and is written for Hispanic Link News Service (www.HispanicLink.org). Email him at Cecilio.morales@gmail.com.