“Watergate: ¿pero de qué escándalo me hablan?” (Watergate: what scandal are you talking about?)

In the midst of the Watergate scandal, the Chilean poet and politician Pablo Neruda published this article in The New York Times. The short opinion piece offers a withering assessment of Americans’ political awareness and the competency of the Central Intelligence Agency. While Neruda had “been used for some years now to finding intelligence services and their agents provocateurs, visible and invisible, even in the very soup on our dinner tables,” Americans seemed largely unaware: “How do they [the CIA] manage to know everything that goes on in the world minus what goes on in the White House?” In fact, unbeknownst to Neruda, the CIA was aware of plans for the 1973 Chilean coup d’état then brewing. Neruda died shortly after, possibly murdered for his politics, and his papers were destroyed. Very few manuscripts survive.