Noticing my nonappearance at the start of a black-tie dinner at the Johannesburg home of Harry Oppenheimer, a mining magnate and Africa’s richest man, the host assumed I was boycotting the event on principle. It was a reasonable assumption: I was the Chilean ambassador to South Africa, and Henry Kissinger was the chief guest.
By then, a quarter century had passed since the military coup that toppled the democratically elected Chilean President Salvador Allende – an event that gave rise to Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s brutal 17-year-long military dictatorship – but the issue still lingered. Many Chileans bitterly remembered the role of the U.S. government, and of Kissinger in particular, in the breakdown of Chilean democracy.
