Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (36 page)

The other pressing issue dominating Chilean diplomatic preparations in the first few weeks of November was whether Allende should take advantage of his visit to New York to seek a meeting with Nixon. Clearly, the message from the Foreign Ministry in Santiago was to try and organize a summit, hoping that it would “impel” a new type of dialogue with the United States. But, as Letelier reminded Almeyda, the prospect was meaningless unless the UP agreed on precisely what the Chileans would bring to the table.
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In the end, it seems that the foreign minister chose to ignore much of this advice when he instructed Letelier to meet with U.S. ambassador Davis during his brief visit to Chile later that month. Not only was Allende due to travel to Moscow
after
New York, but the Chileans had clearly also decided to gamble on trying to arrange a meeting with Nixon. When the
Chilean ambassador met Davis during his stay in Santiago, he thus told him that the United States and Chile had reached a “crossroads” and that a meeting between Nixon and Allende was a “last chance” to defuse bilateral tensions before relations soured further and Santiago turned East. If Letelier was privately unconvinced by the message he delivered, Davis was unimpressed. He wrote to Secretary of State Rogers that Chile appeared to be playing a misguided Cold War game and offering only “formulas of contact”—“The present Chilean effort has overtones of stage-setting for a repetition of the myth of Castro’s 1959 visit to Washington,” he argued. “We are already aware of the … concept of the ‘the last chance’ before Chile turns to the East. There is some truth in Letelier’s allegation that this trip will be seen as a shift to the socialist camp. He also is probably right when he says it will make things harder. It is sad that the Chilean govt has structured it that way if not with care at least with weeks of tinkling cymbals.”
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What Letelier did not know was that the State Department had already unequivocally rejected a summit two weeks before he even approached Davis on the grounds that such a meeting would only raise Allende’s profile.
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The department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research concluded that the Chilean president was most likely only trying to attract international sympathy as a “useful backdrop” to prescheduled bilateral talks in December rather than offering anything substantially new. Allende also apparently wanted to improve his chances of renegotiating Chile’s debt by shifting “blame” for his economic performance onto “imperialist aggressors.”
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In this context, the administration therefore pressured news agencies to avoid interviewing him.
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Despite the Nixon administration’s best efforts, however, Allende’s speech to the UN General Assembly on 4 December resonated worldwide. According to U.S. news reports, he received a standing ovation similar to those received by the pope and President John Kennedy.
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During a televised press conference in Mexico before arriving in New York, Allende had promised his speech would be a “call for moral force against injustice similar to the moral effect of calls to end [the] ‘Vietnam genocide.’”
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And once at the UN, he delivered a compelling performance, appealing to the “conscience of the world” and publicizing Chile’s “financial strangulation.” Allende also detailed the “perversion” of international agencies (being used as individual states’ “tools”) and denounced multinational corporations that drove “tentacles deep” into sovereign countries while earning obscene profits from the Third World ($1,013 million from Latin America,
$280 million from Africa, $366 million from the Far East, and $64 million from the Middle East). Chile’s problems were part of “a long and ominous history in Latin America” of “imperialism and its cruelties,” Allende insisted. “Ours is not an isolated or unique problem: it is simply the local manifestation of a reality that goes beyond our frontiers and takes in the Latin American continent and the whole Third World. In varying degrees of intensity and with individual differences, all the peripheral countries are exposed to something of this kind … imperialism exists because underdevelopment exists; underdevelopment exists because imperialism exists.”
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In keeping with the idea of using the UN as a “tribunal,” Allende also made a case for his defense. He explained that Chile had been “forced” to adopt a new development model to solve poverty, inequality, and dependency. And he justified his “excess profits” ruling by citing international law and detailing the profits private companies had accrued. He did not explicitly denounce the United States by name, although he proclaimed that Vietnam had “taught the world that the abuse of power saps the moral fiber of the county that misuses it … whereas a people defending its independence can be raised to heroic heights by its convictions.”
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The Nixon administration was affronted by, and unsurprisingly unsympathetic to, Allende’s speech. At a last-minute meeting at the Waldorf Hotel between Allende and the U.S. ambassador at the UN, George H. W. Bush, the latter tore Allende’s arguments apart. “I told him that we did not consider ourselves ‘imperialists’ and that we still had a deep conviction that our free enterprise system was not selfish but was the best system—certainly for us, though we had no intention to insist on it for others,” Bush recorded. He also told Allende that, although there had been “excesses from time to time,” this system did not “bleed” people when it went abroad; “it was the best way to provide a better standard of living for all.” Bush then rejected Chile’s tactical attempts to distinguish between the U.S. government, U.S. companies, and U.S. people. Owing to a “deep conviction in the free enterprise system,” he told Allende, “the people, the government and the system” were “interlocked.”
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If the Chilean president had any hopes of persuading U.S. officials of the merits of his argument or pressuring them into making concessions with his speech, he must have walked away with his hopes shattered.

After leaving New York, Allende stopped, on his way to Moscow, in Algeria, where he met President Houari Boumedienne. Yet, here too, Allende received warning signals. As well as exchanging views on Third World
issues, the Algerian president pointedly asked what the situation was inside Chile’s armed forces. As Almeyda later recounted, Boumedienne was unconvinced by the notion of constitutionality among Chilean military leaders. Apologizing for his frankness, he ominously argued that the UP’s political experiment would fail if it did not stamp out all counterrevolutionary vestiges in its military institutions.
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Salvador Allende at the United Nations General Assembly, December 1972. Courtesy of Fundación Salvador Allende.

When Allende took off from Algiers for Moscow, he was still unsure what he would achieve. Two weeks earlier, the PCCh’s secretary-general, Luis Corvalán, had traveled to East Germany and Moscow to discuss future assistance to the UP. On route, the president had sent this pro-Soviet leader with years of good relations with Moscow to Havana to consult the Cubans on how to deal with Moscow. One of the Cubans who attended the meeting recalls that Castro was concerned about the Chilean’s lack of detailed technical knowledge to win over the Soviets. In fact, drawing on his own experience in dealing with Moscow, Castro quizzed Corvalán on his figures for hours and had concluded he knew more about Chile’s economic situation than the Chilean sitting in front of him.
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Be that as it may, one of the essential problems that Corvalán encountered in Berlin and Moscow was that, as Dobrynin had indicated to Letelier, the Soviet Union did not want to risk a confrontation with the United
States by getting too involved in Chile. In Moscow, Corvalán had lengthy meetings with Brezhnev and other senior leaders of the Soviet Communist Party. Then, in a long meeting with East Germany’s leader, Erich Honecker, on 24 November, Corvalán outlined Chile’s problems, citing the growing strength of “united internal and reactionary forces,” a deficit of $200 million, and the omnipresent threat of U.S. imperialism. As he stressed, Washington was challenging the UP in the form of the withdrawal of U.S. technicians and credits, the ITT conspiracy, and embargoes against Chilean copper sales. To be sure, the UP had survived the October strike, but 1973, in his words, was going to be “the most decisive year for Chile … the year when decisions will be carried out that will determine our path to socialism.” Looking ahead, he also acknowledged that the Chileans would obviously have to make the biggest sacrifice to withstand challenges to La Vía Chilena (he mentioned butter and meat rationing as an example of savings already being made), but they could not do so successfully without “international assistance.” In this respect, he recognized that his proposals for substantial increases in Soviet bloc aid were “not easy,” but he said it was his “revolutionary duty to be open and honest” about what was needed.

After hearing the details of Corvalán’s specific suggestions for Soviet bloc purchases of Chilean copper (that he recognized could not be sold on the international market owing to embargoes against it but which could be used for reserves), a $220 million investment in steel production, and large short-term credits to offset a predicted Chilean deficit until 1976, Honecker responded in a sympathetic but noncommittal manner. On the one hand, he pointed out that the German Democratic Republic already had to juggle previous commitments to aid other revolutionary processes, not least $100 million a year to North Vietnam. He also ignored Corvalán’s efforts to single Chile out as a far better investment opportunity than Cuba. On the other hand, he also raised the issue of East Germany’s own deficit and foreign debts, and the problematic nature of internal discussions about how to deal with these in the year ahead. Promising Corvalán he would look into how Berlin might be able to offer more help to the Chileans, he left specific answers to the Chilean’s suggestions hanging in the air, noting only that he would send his views on to Moscow before Allende’s arrival.
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Meanwhile, Soviet leaders were divided. The KGB had a grim view of the situation in Chile, while the Soviet Communist Party’s ideologues were in favor of helping to consolidate the UP’s revolutionary road. As the Russian
historian Olga Ulianova has argued, it would seem that Moscow ultimately declined to help more because it both lacked faith in Allende’s project and was financially unable to commit to a new Cuba.
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However, the Chilean president did not know this when he arrived in the USSR. In an effort to raise the stakes of not helping Chile, Allende put forward the idea of his country being a “silent Vietnam”—“without the roar of airplanes or grenade explosions”—at a Kremlin banquet thrown in his honor.
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But despite ample quantities of vodka to wash down disappointments, the visit fell short of Chilean hopes. Allende’s cardiologist, Oscar Soto, recalled that his boss was “not happy at all.” In his Kremlin suite, he commented loudly to any of the walls that were listening that he would leave Moscow early if he did not receive more positive signals of Soviet assistance soon; “the Soviet
compañeros
don’t understand us!” he complained to Soto.
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He was right. Moscow did not need Chilean copper and could not comprehend the UP’s chaotic management of its economy or its failure to use previous Soviet credits granted to Chilean industrial development.
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Salvador Allende in Moscow, December 1972. Front row, left to right: Luis Corvalán, Alexei Kosygin, Allende, Leonid Brezhnev, and Nikolai Podgorny. Courtesy of Fundación Salvador Allende.

Rather than receiving enough to counter Chile’s foreign exchange deficit for 1973, Allende left with advice to resolve conflicts with Washington and promises of economic assistance that fell far short of hopes. Instead of
larger hard currency loans, for example, the Chileans received a new credit of $45 million and agreements using previously agreed credits to increase the USSR’s technical assistance in developing Chile’s copper, chemical, and fishing industries. Yet Santiago did not want Soviet technology, which it considered as being incompatible with Chile’s U.S.-orientated industry.
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And Allende also felt betrayed. “I never imagined that they would do this to me,” he lamented to the Chilean diplomat Ramon Huidobro, who vividly recalled the Chilean president describing himself as having been stabbed in the back.
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