Augustin Eastman; Chilean publisher backed Pinochet
Agustín Edwards Eastman, a Chilean newspaper publisher who collaborated with the CIA to help foment the 1973 coup that brought strongman Augusto Pinochet to power, and who used the power of his press to bolster Pinochet's regime through years of brutal repression, died April 24. He was 89.
His death was announced by his Santiago-based newspaper, El Mercurio. The publication reported that he had complications from surgery but provided no other details. Edwards had been in a coma for some time.
Edwards was a scion of one of Chile's most prominent and prosperous families. A grandfather had served as president of the League of Nations and as Chilean ambassador to London.
The Edwardses' business operations extended from banking to whaling to beverage sales to ownership of a national airline, said Víctor Herrero, a Chilean journalist and author of a 2014 biography of Edwards. But the family was best known for its ownership of newspapers throughout Chile. Since the 1800s they had owned the right-leaning El Mercurio, the jewel of their media empire.
Edwards assumed leadership of the newspaper at 29 and became, in the description of the National Security Archive at George Washington University, "the Rupert Murdoch of Chile." His media holdings gave him significant influence — in the United States as well as in South America — and he deployed it abundantly in the 1970s to help defeat the democratically elected Marxist president Salvador Allende.
"He lobbied for a coup at the highest levels of the Nixon White House," Peter Kornbluh, chief of the archive's Chile Documentation Project, wrote in an email. Kornbluh added that "he became the leading Chilean collaborator in CIA covert operations to overturn the democratic institutions of his own country."
According to the National Security Archive, an antisecrecy group, Edwards was "the only Chilean — civilian or military" — known to have met in person with then-CIA director Richard Helms in the effort to depose the newly elected but not yet inaugurated Allende in 1970. Counseled by then-National security adviser Henry Kissinger, President Richard M. Nixon favored deposing Allende to curb leftist influence in Latin America.
After Allende took office in 1970, Edwards's newspaper became one of the nation's most powerful critics of the government. According to documents examined by the National Security Archive, "Nixon personally authorized covert CIA funding to sustain El Mercurio so that it could become a media megaphone of opposition, agitation and misinformation against the Allende government."
On Sept. 11, 1973, Pinochet mounted a military coup and succeeded Allende after Allende committed suicide in the presidential palace. With continued financial backing by the CIA into 1974 — totaling around $2 million — El Mercurio reported favorably on Pinochet's junta in an effort to cement its control.
Later, the newspaper accepted money from Pinochet in exchange for further positive coverage, said John Dinges, a veteran foreign correspondent and author of books including "The Condor Years: How Pinochet and his Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents."