Rally Against Heitman

WALTER HEITMAN, Chile's ambassador to the United States, is speaking this afternoon to the Harvard Club's World Affairs Council. Heitman's main task as ambassador has been to defend the military junta that overthrew Salvador Allende's democratically chosen Popular Unity government last year. Heitman has thrown himself into his task with an enthusiasm so exaggerated it's almost comic, an enthusiasm he demonstrated in a letter to The New York Times last week. In the letter, the former admiral announced that a charge by a member of an international jurists' commission that the junta was sending Popular Unity's supporters' children to work camps was an injustice "unequalled in history."

Heitman's speech this afternoon is presumably a step in his continuing campaign to make people forget other injustices--notably the thousands of killings, the mass imprisonments, the political repression, the cut in Chilean workers' living standards, and the forcible suppression of Chile's nonviolent, constitutional revolution carried out by his bosses with American support. Students should join the picket line at the Harvard Club this afternoon and let him know that however successful his employers may be for the moment, his campaign isn't working.