How much money did CIA give TFP?
http://www.findthelordsavenger.com/the-crime/the-crime-links/the-goc/cia-and-churches/ TFP’s activities in Chile, Brazil, and elsewhere are an important part of the CIA story in Latin America, because its members were the intellectual and financial backers of military coups supported by the agency. After the military took over, TFP members and fellow travelers were active in these regimes’ persecution of the Catholic Church, as in the case of police agent Adolfo Centeno and the smear campaign against priests and bishops in Uruguay. In some countries-Brazil, for example, where
TFP established a series of training camps near Rio de Janeiro- members were instructed by the Army and the police, who, in turn, received military training and political orientation from the CIA, the Pentagon, and AID. But there were still closer ties: in Chile and Brazil the evidence points to both financial and political links between TFP and the CIA in plotting the overthrow of the Allende and Goulart governments.
When it supported right-wing Catholic groups, the CIA had principally in mind the political objective of removing left-wing governments by military intervention, but one result of the collaboration was to strengthen such organizations as TFP, which emerged as religious vigilante squads for the military regimes. Thus the CIA could be accused-and was accused by a number of prominent Catholic leaders, including Brazil’s Archbishop Helder Camara-of inciting one sector of the Church to attack another. Moreover, in some countries, Bolivia being one, this collaboration extended to persecution of U.S. citizens when the CIA provided military governments and right-wing Catholic organizations with confidential dossiers on American priests and nuns.
A good example of TFP’s connections with both the CIA and the military is the branch in Chile, which supplied the Chilean armed forces with a social philosophy-the generals had none – and a religious basis for the regime’s political witch-hunts.
In the last months of the Allende government, TFP, the gremios, Fatherland and Liberty, and other right-wing opposition groups merged in a common front. The National Agriculture Society, for example, was controlled by Fatherland and Liberty and received CIA funds through an organization called the Congress for Cultural Liberty. The society, in turn, worked with the Association of Manufacturers, whose president, Orlando Saenz, was one of the directors of the TFP-backed gremios as well as a secret leader of Fatherland and Liberty. A month before the coup Saenz publicly thanked the president of the Agriculture Society for “the services lent earlier by you to our cause.”
Both groups had close ties with El Mercurio, Santiago’s largest newspaper, which was financed by the CIA and used as an outlet for anti-Allende propaganda, according to U. S. Senate investigations. They also shared important Brazilian connections. Fatherland and Liberty obtained arms from Brazil through a Chilean coffee-importing firm which brought in, via the port of Valparaiso, crates of guns disguised as raw material for the manufacture of instant coffee. Saenz was in close touch with the
financial and ideological backers of Brazil’s TFP, which had been in at the kill of Goulart’s regime. (Several of the tactics used in Chile were tested by TFP in Brazil. With CIA help, TFP sponsored in Sao Paulo a march of several thousand middle- and upper-class women that was psychologically crucial to the coup ten days later. Similarly, women’s groups sponsored by TFP and Fatherland and Liberty held their largest demonstration five days before Allende’s overthrow.
U.S. congressional investigations have established that the CIA spent $13 million to thwart Allende, but with some exceptions, such as El Mercurio and Fatherland and Liberty, details of how the money was allocated have not been revealed.
How much the CIA gave the TFP may never be known, but there are numerous links between the two organizations, particularly through Fatherland and Liberty, in addition to an established connection in the campaign to discredit the country’s Catholic Church.