Latin America remembers Kissinger’s ‘profound moral wretchedness’

Henry Kissinger smiles as he walks to a helicopter near Washington in August 1972, a year before a US-sponsored coup overthrew Chile’s elected government. Photograph: Anonymous/AP

Henry Kissinger’s death has brought out some bitter epitaphs from Latin America where the legacy of US intervention helped saddle the region with some of the most brutal military regimes of the 20th century.

Nowhere has been the reaction been more damning than in Chile, where Kissinger was instrumental in the 1973 coup that led to the death of a democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende and the installation of a dictator, Gen Augusto Pinochet, and his military junta.