Archives and narratives for the recent coup-history of Chile

This paper describes diverse and conflicting narratives about the ‘covert action’ program of media propaganda undertaken by the United States administration against the Chilean leftist political movement and Government, from the mid-1960s and peaking in the 1973 coup crisis. To undertake this analysis, two types of texts will be examined. The first comprises reports from the administrations of the United States and Chile, which can be considered ‘official’ narratives. As the reports use declassified archival documents (publicly available at http://foia.state.gov, through the US State Department’s Chile Declassification Project that supplies more than sixteen thousand documents) they become a primary source. Furthermore, through institutional authorship or support they lose their ‘subjective’ status to become documents of objective ‘truth’ or authority. Secondly, Chilean and American narratives about the 1973 crisis that belong mostly to the social sciences will be examined. These depend strongly on the aforementioned narratives as well as on the original declassified documents, which they either evidence or discredit. These one-author and non-institutional narratives can be considered in a more ‘unofficial’ category, even though the authors claim that they stand for a thorough inquiry and pertain to have a larger scope and influence than one made by an average reader over a social event