When it covers right-wing, US-backed coups in Latin America, the Globe and Mail, Canada’s paper of record, omits Ottawa’s role. From Chile in 1973 to Peru today, the paper erases Canada’s role in undermining democracy.

“Chilean poet Pablo Neruda died with toxic bacteria in his body, say forensic scientists,” read the front page of a recent edition. In the story about the Nobel laureate killed after Chile’s elected government was toppled in 1973, the Globe ignored Ottawa’s complicity in the repression that felled the famed poet.

From economic asphyxiation to diplomatic isolation, Ottawa’s policy toward elected Marxist president Salvador Allende was clear. Canada recognized Augusto Pinochet’s military junta within three weeks of the September 11, 1973, coup. Immediately after Allende was overthrown, Canada’s ambassador to Chile cabled the Department of External Affairs (now Global Affairs) to state that Pinochet “has assumed the probably thankless task of sobering Chile up” from “the riffraff of the Latin American Left to whom Allende gave asylum.” Neruda’s murder was apparently merely part of the process of “sobering Chile up.”