Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (37 page)

The reception and mass adulation that Allende received when he arrived in Havana could not have been more different from the reception he had had in Moscow.
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Castro had been pleading with Allende to visit for a whole year. Back in February 1972, shortly after his own visit to Chile, he had written to Allende about this idea:

I can understand perfectly well that the intense work ahead of you and the tone of the political struggle in recent weeks have not allowed you to schedule the trip…. It is clear we had not taken these eventualities into account [when we talked about it]. That day, on the eve of my return to Cuba, when we dined in your house in the early morning hours, having little time and in the haste of the moment, it was reassuring for me to think that we would again meet in Cuba, where we would have the opportunity to converse at length. Nevertheless, I still harbor the hope that you can consider scheduling your visit for some time before May. I mention this month because, mid-May, at the latest, I must make a trip, which can no longer be postponed, to Algiers, Guinea, Bulgaria, other countries and the Soviet Union. This long tour will demand considerable time.
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Of course, Fidel had gone on his trip, and Allende’s visit had been postponed yet again. However, when the two leaders finally met just over a year after Castro left Chile, they addressed what the Chilean chargé d’affaires in Havana enthusiastically recorded as an “incalculable magnitude” gathered at the Plaza de la Revolución.
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Castro welcomed Allende as a leader who had shown Cuba the “most steadfast friendship” since 1959. He also likened the imperialist aggression Chile faced to the situation that Havana had encountered (even if he underscored that his country’s experience had been far worse). “We [have] lived that experience and know about the reserves of energy, self-denial and heroism that exist in the people,” Fidel
knowingly explained. But he also warned that “revolutions do not emerge as a whim of men but as the result of historical processes,” insinuating that Allende would not be able to dodge a class struggle and a confrontation with counterrevolutionaries. Castro finished with pledging Cuban “blood,” “bread,” and forty tons of the Cuban population’s sugar rations to help Chile’s revolution. “We must launch a gigantic wave of solidarity around the brother Chilean people,” he instructed, explaining what the imperialists had “tried to accomplish with bombs in Vietnam they are trying to accomplish in Chile by economic asphyxia.”
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Allende had finally got the recognition of his country’s international significance that he desired, and thousands cheered in support.
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Yet he was also uncomfortable. Before stepping up to the podium in his Cuban Guayabera shirt, his doctor observed his boss more nervous than he had ever seen him. The Chilean president, it seemed, was intimidated by speaking in this setting after Fidel.
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When he did, Allende paid tribute to Cuba’s revolutionary martyrs and the historic ties between Chile and Cuba. He thanked the Cuban people profusely, lambasted those who attacked his revolution, and expressed gratitude for the Order of José Martí President Dorticós had awarded him earlier that day.
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As Chile’s chargé d’affaires, Gonazlo Rojas Pizarro, proudly noted, the speech “showed the unquestionable personality of an American combatant and an authentic Marxist-Leninist.”
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Even so, Cuba’s understanding brought limited help. Moreover, sugar and blood could not solve the UP’s immediate economic problems, which were even causing problems for Havana and Santiago’s bilateral relationship. In November 1972 Castro had personally complained to Corvalán that he was unhappy with Chilean delays in fulfilling trade agreements.
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While Cubans were insistent on moving the pace of negotiations forward, the UP lagged behind, and the Cubans also voiced concerns that Chilean firms were not selling products at a competitive rate to Havana.
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Indeed, in this case the earlier celebrated idea that these two developing countries could work together to solve problems of development seemed increasingly untenable.
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Back in Santiago, there was no consensus about what Allende’s trip had achieved. The main focus of press speculation was on whether the USSR might possibly help Chile more than official communiqués had suggested. As the U.S. ambassador in Santiago noted, the UP may have been “gratified at [the] warmth, enthusiasm and respectful hearing Allende’s ‘David and Goliath’ portrayal seem[ed] to be eliciting abroad,” but most of Allende’s
UN speech was “old hat to Chileans,” and he reported that nothing “noteworthy” had come out of the president’s visit to Havana.
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Fidel Castro and Salvador Allende in Cuba, December 1972. Courtesy of Fundación Salvador Allende.

Allende was thus back to square one—namely, to working out his country’s differences with the United States. Looking ahead to Chile’s bilateral negotiations with the United States, the Chilean Foreign Ministry continued to define the country’s overall strategy as being an effort to “win time” and “manage conflict,” while simultaneously consolidating Chile’s revolutionary process. If it could, diplomats also hoped to “induce a change” in the United States’ rigid position on compensation by trying to move discussion toward broader political issues.
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As the Chilean negotiators who arrived in Washington argued, Nixon’s reelection in November 1972 meant they would have to “live with each other” at least until Chile’s presidential elections in 1976, so it was time to reach some sort of understanding.
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By the end of 1972, the UP’s odds of exerting enough leverage on Washington to induce it to change its credit restrictions nevertheless seemed slim. Although Allende had never wanted to ally himself wholeheartedly with the USSR, economic necessities had driven him to seek solutions to the UP’s problems in Moscow. The advice he received to resolve Chile’s
dispute with the United States was consistent with the UP’s own continuing efforts and thus offered nothing substantially new to hold on to. In fact, rather than increasing economic assistance to Chile, the Soviet Union would actually reduce it from a total of $144 million in 1972 to $63 million in 1973.
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From the end of 1972 onward, Chilean approaches toward the United States therefore constituted an increasingly pivotal—albeit haphazard—process. Indeed, successive last-minute efforts to delay a showdown merely sought to “play for time” as Allende’s options diminished.

The CIA defined its overall task in 1973 as “slowing down the socialization of Chile.”
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And while U.S. policy makers stalled negotiations, Washington subverted Chile’s democratic process. Chile’s forthcoming congressional elections were widely considered as having the power to decide whether Chile’s future would be shaped by democracy, dictatorship (on the left or the right), or a civil war. But Allende’s UN speech and international grandstanding had raised the profile of Washington’s role in Chile, increasing the risks that intervention posed. Congressional investigations in Washington about ITT’s relationship with Nixon’s administration and the growing Watergate saga (with its possible link to the Chilean Embassy break-in) also raised awkward questions about the White House’s covert operations. Therefore, when the outcome of the March elections led those who opposed Allende to desperate measures, the costs Washington faced by intervening rose. Henceforth, U.S. policy makers were unsure how to speed up Allende’s downfall without offering the UP a pretext to hypothetically seize authoritarian control.

The Nixon administration obviously had no intention of making bilateral negotiations with Chile easy. After all, its hesitant agreement to enter into them in the first place had hinged on avoiding a confrontation with an internationally prominent Third World leader, denying Allende a role as a scapegoat, and gaining compensation for copper companies (considered to be a remote possibility). The Nixon administration also clearly doubted Chile’s sincerity. As Rogers had advised Nixon in November 1972, he saw “no evidence” Allende was “prepared to offer meaningful concessions” or that hard-liners in his coalition would let him act on these if he did.
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The United States therefore entered bilateral talks pessimistically, armed with “Article 4,” the clause it had inserted into the Paris Club agreement
explicitly linking compensation to any “normalization” of U.S.-Chilean economic relations.

When delegates met on 20 December, Assistant Secretary Charles Meyer opened proceedings by thanking the Chileans for having brought “spring to Washington” on account of Washington’s unusually warm weather. Yet the temperature inside the negotiating room dropped over the next two days when both sides failed to map out a method of resolving disputes, let alone making progress toward solving them. Although each side promised to “leave ideology aside,” this belied what the disagreements were about. As Letelier himself acknowledged, differences revolved around contradictory “conceptual” approaches to economic development and international relations. More specifically, the Chilean delegation assumed an uncompromising initial stance, insisting that the United States ease its discriminatory economic policies and underlining Allende’s unwillingness to rewrite Chile’s constitution to overturn his “excess profits” ruling. All the while, U.S. delegates nonetheless maintained that the “stone” blocking progress was Chile’s refusal to pay compensation.
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Then, on the last day of discussions, the Chileans proposed submitting all disputes to unbinding arbitration along the lines of an unearthed bilateral treaty from 1914. But with Christmas festivities looming, delegates suspended talks until the New Year.
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After these talks, Allende gathered Letelier, Almeyda, UP party leaders, and legal experts in Santiago to discuss options. In focusing on the 1914 treaty, policy makers reasoned that it offered an unbinding framework that could comprise a range of topics instead of compensation alone. They regarded such a framework as an unlikely means of “solving” the conflicts, but a useful means of ensuring disputes would not overshadow Chile’s wider international relations, especially with a new round of Paris Club negotiations scheduled for January. Another advantage of the treaty, the Foreign Ministry noted, was that it placed the United States in the position of defendant, thus turning the tide on the balance of legal cases against Chile. By formulating arguments based on international law, Santiago thereby hoped to receive backing from Third World countries in similar situations.
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In the meantime, the abortive meeting in Washington offered Santiago short-term gains. When Chilean diplomats arrived in Paris for a new round of debt negotiations, they noted that it had produced a “positive climate” that helped disarm U.S. obstruction to a favorable deal. When the Paris
Club also decided to suspend any decision pending an International Monetary Fund report on Chile’s economy, this eased immediate pressure on Chile to resolve its disputes with the United States or comply with Washington’s demands.
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In early February 1973, having previously worried about U.S. delaying tactics, Allende thus instructed Letelier to postpone a second round of talks until after Chile’s congressional elections.
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In fact, as the U.S. ambassador in Santiago observed in early 1973, waiting for the elections had given Chilean politics a “brief Indian summer,” placing a virtual “moratorium on political decisions.” It was widely believed that this was going to be the country’s most important election for “decades.” Voters had a marked choice between socialism and capitalism broadly represented by a contest between the UP and the opposition’s purpose-built coalition, Confederación Democrática (CODE), that comprised Chile’s Christian Democrat and National parties.
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As Ambassador Davis reported, “the feeling of ‘it’s now or never’” was growing daily among opposition ranks.
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He also observed Chilean “society’s deep attachment to electoral politics” and preference for solving Chile’s political crisis “by constitutional means.”
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At the very least, CODE expected Chile’s economic predicament would diminish the government’s political strength, and U.S. analysts optimistically agreed.

Faced with economic and political upheaval, the Left acknowledged it would be difficult to match, let alone improve upon, the UP’s 49.7 percent gained at municipal elections in 1971. But Allende clearly needed to avoid the opposition winning two-thirds of the vote that would enable it to block his congressional veto. In the months leading up to March, his prospects did not look good, especially as the UP coalition campaigned divided. At an informal lunch during this period, Allende reportedly criticized parties for being “parochial, pursuing their own individual and party interests instead of those of the Unidad Popular.”
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And less than two weeks before the election, the Soviet Foreign Ministry predicted that the UP would be defeated. Even if the opposition did not win two-thirds, it posited, “a political storm” would follow within forty-eight hours.
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When a week before the election, an internal MAPU document leaked to the press exposed the extent of the split in government, this underscored the UP’s weaknesses. MAPU joined the PS and the MIR in condemning the PCCh’s “centrist” position and questioned the UP’s ability to survive without external support. Limited loans from the Soviet Union and other East European countries would “keep the ship afloat” until the end of April 1973, it warned, but after that MAPU predicted Chile would be faced by an “explosive”
situation and would be “unable to pay for debt servicing, necessary foodstuffs importation, or imported raw materials.” Looking ahead, the party decided not to “abandon ship” but, instead, to “turn the wheel as far left” as possible, “to prevent the boat from sinking, but to learn how to swim just in case.”
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