page_title: Agustín Edwards Eastman
section_title: Publisher
hierarchical_section_title: Agustín Edwards Eastman / Publisher
caption_attribution_description: English: Agustin Edwards Eastman (right) with Chilean Dictator Augusto Pinochet (left)
context_page_description: Agustín Iván Edmundo Edwards Eastman was a Chilean newspaper publisher, and one of the richest people in Chile. He inherited his family's newspaper company El Mercurio SAP, which publishes Chile's leading national dailies El Mercurio and La Segunda among others, when his father died in 1956. He has been described as a media baron, and is known for his right-wing views. Throughout his time as publisher, he has used El Mercurio SAP's newspapers to influence public opinion in Chile, and he supported the 1973 coup d'état to oust socialist President Salvador Allende.
context_section_description: In 1968, Edwards was elected president of the Inter-American Press Association. He founded the association's committee on press freedom, and commissions on technical issues and scholarships. He also is president of the Diarios America Group, another trade organization.
  On 5 September 1970, Edwards met with Henry Kissinger, John N. Mitchell and Richard Helms in Washington to request their financial support in his attempt to oust Marxist Salvador Allende who was about to win the Presidency. Documents recently declassified by the National Security Archive provide further details about this meeting, the first and only known meeting between a Chilean (civilian or military) and a United States CIA Director. According to these records, during this meeting Edwards pushed for a U.S.-led, preemptive coup to block the inauguration of Allende. He also provided the CIA with intelligence crucial to planning the coup, including specifying armed forces officers and government officials who would be allies in orchestrating it. After the meeting, Edwards stayed in Washington for several days where he shared more intelligence with the CIA, and as evidence suggests, may have even met with President Nixon (though this is not confirmed).
  Over the following year, Richard Nixon approved three covert payments totalling approximately US$2,000,000 to Edwards so he would use his media empire to help destabilise Chile's democratic process. In the days and years following the military coup of 11 September 1973, Edwards' newspapers published falsifications to justify the coup and cover up the human rights violations of President Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. Edwards' media outlets did not just create political instability through their reporting, but also conspired with the armed forces to facilitate a successful military takeover. In 1973, a CIA official referred to the El Mercurio chain of newspapers as among "the most militant parts of the opposition." 
  American financial support for Edwards' newspapers continued even after the coup to assist in the Junta's consolidation of power. Only after the Rettig Report detailing the crimes of the Pinochet dictatorship was released in February 1991 did El Mercurio stop referring to victims of human rights violations as "allegedly missing prisoners".
  The Chilean documentary Agustín's Newspaper (2008), which included interviews with John Dinges and several of Edwards' former and current employees, exposed serious cases of disinformation in Edwards publications from the 1960s onwards. Since the overthrow of Pinochet's military dictatorship, a number of journalists have attempted to have Edwards indicted for crimes related to his alleged breaches of journalistic ethics and documented payments from the Central Intelligence Agency. In an interview in El Mercurio in 2000, Edwards defended himself by saying "I honestly think that we always try to simply report what happened. However, there may be serious limitations that cannot be overcome by any means." In April 2015, he was expelled from the Chilean Order of Journalists (Colegio de Periodistas de Chile) for a "serious lack of ethics", due to his role in the conspiracy to overthrow Allende with the support from the United States government, and for the "staging to legitimize the torture of two young men during the visit of Pope John Paul II" in 1987 during Pinochet's dictatorship.
caption: Agustín Edwards Eastman (right) with Chilean dictator, Augusto Pinochet (courtesy: National Security Archive)
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