Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (4 page)

Alongside Castro’s respect for Allende’s final say in what happened in
his country, the Cubans faced other decisive obstacles when it came to supporting and safeguarding the Chilean Road to Socialism. One was the sheer difficulty of defending Chile’s revolutionary process in the U.S. sphere of influence and against the numerical power and strength of the combined branches of Chile’s armed forces that struck, especially as the Cubans had not suspected that Pinochet would join in a coup. With neither Allende’s permission to build up a substantial number of armaments and trained military cadres in Chile nor any apparent support from the Soviet bloc to do this on a scale that would have begun to redress the huge imbalance of forces, they faced a formidable task. And on top of this, they had to deal with the division within Chile’s left-wing forces. Ultimately, the Cubans believed that Allende was the only leader who could unite such disparate forces, but they were increasingly frustrated because he not only was unable to do so but also refused to lead the Left in a direction more akin to Cuba’s revolutionary experiences. Altogether, the advice that the Cubans gave to Chile’s left-wing parties—to unite and to coordinate preparations to resist a military confrontation—was only as good as the influence they had on the Chileans they worked with. Last but by no means least, because the Cubans had to protect both Allende’s legitimacy and their own country’s reputation within Latin America, they were circumscribed by effective propaganda campaigns launched by the CIA and the Chilean Right accusing the Cubans (both falsely and justifiably) of interfering in Chile’s internal affairs, trying to provoke armed conflict, and delivering arms to the Left.

On the Chilean side of our story, these allegations obviously shaped perceptions of Allende. Not only did the questions of who he was and what he stood for spark endless debate at the time, but they have also done so ever since. Mainly, this is because Allende was a highly contradictory figure. His friend, the Chilean writer and diplomat Gonzalo Rojas Pizarro, probably described him best when he depicted him as simultaneously having had the body and mind of a democratic statesman and the heart of a revolutionary.
²⁷
For Allende, the two were not mutually exclusive and were able to coexist as a result of his faith in Chilean exceptionality—the belief that Chile’s circumstances and commitment to constitutional democracy made it different from other countries in Latin America, where armed struggle was the only route to true independence and socialist revolution. Even so, this apparent contradiction has led to multiple portraits of Allende, which depict him as being everything from a saintly martyr to
a villain and a misguided democrat hopelessly intoxicated—or in some cases “bewitched”—by Fidel Castro. And in what is the most comprehensive study of twentieth-century Chilean foreign policy to date, the Chilean scholar Joaquín Fermandois argues that Cuba’s revolution was a “concrete model” or “paradigmatic horizon” for the UP government.
²⁸

Although this is an exaggerated snapshot of Allende’s admiration for Castro’s revolution, it does underline a central trend: the effort to understand exactly who Allende was by examining his international friends.
²⁹
And yet, because Allende simultaneously embraced ties with Cuba and sought amicable relations with the United States, proclaimed nonalignment but journeyed to the Kremlin in search of aid, and gave sanctuary to Latin American revolutionaries while promising not to export revolution, tying Allende and the heterogeneous coalition he led to neat categorizations has proved impossible. To some, his policies were ad hoc, even “schizophrenic,” whereas to others he was a passive instrument of the KGB, and to others still he was a “principled pragmatist.”
³⁰
So which of these labels is most accurate?

Like other accounts of Allende’s presidency, this book argues that he acted to avoid isolation and manage conflict without sacrificing the ideals he fought for. However, I think it would be a mistake to view Chilean foreign policy as a cohesive strategy of “principled pragmatism,” as others have.
³¹
For one, Allende led a broad left-wing coalition of parties that spanned the Chilean Left’s various Marxist and non-Marxist tendencies and proved hard to unite when it came to putting policy into practice. Broadly speaking, from left to right, the coalition included Allende’s own heterogeneous party, the Socialist Party (PS); the Movement of Popular Unitary Action (Movimiento de Acción Popular Unitario, or MAPU), the country’s principal left-wing party; the pro-Soviet Communist Party (PCCh); the Radical Party (PR); and two smaller parties. Furthermore, the PS increasingly stood to the left of Allende and the other members of the coalition to such an extent that Allende ultimately ended up siding against his own party with the more moderate PCCh. As a result of these differences within the UP government and between arguing foreign policy advisers—a problem that basically paralyzed Chile’s U.S. policy from mid-1972 onward—Allende pursued an international strategy toward the United States that was more often hesitant, imprecise, and reactive than purposefully pragmatic.

To be sure, Chile’s impressive outreach to Latin America and the Third
World during this period was prescient. It is also an interesting picture of how the global South interacted with world politics in the early 1970s. Not only did Santiago host the third United Nations Conference on Trade and Development in 1972, for example, but Santiago’s foreign minister was a pivotal figure in attendance at the G77’s meeting in Lima in October 1971 and the Non-Aligned Movement’s Summit in September 1973. In the early 1970s, Chile also significantly contributed to the radicalization of the global South’s agenda as it prepared what would be the groundwork to fight for a New International Economic Order in 1974. Indeed, Allende defined Chile’s foreign policy as a “reasoned rebellion” in an age of decolonization and Third World emancipation. And asserting his country’s independence, he demanded that he and other Third World nations be allowed to dissent from U.S. prescriptions on economic and political relations.

However, Allende obviously overestimated the power of Chile’s ability to resist U.S. intervention and the extent to which Chile could rely on Third World or Latin American unity for concrete assistance, not least because of his government’s hopeful reading of détente. Unable to solve his main dilemma of how to lessen Chilean economic dependency on the United States without losing U.S. financial credits, trade, and economic aid, Allende was also increasingly stuck between his goal of independence and Chile’s greater dependency on foreign powers.

It must be noted that he had no easy alternatives. Both an outright confrontation and capitulation to the United States on key issues that offered Washington public reasons to oppose him—namely, his relations with Cuba and the UP’s nationalization program—had their drawbacks. The former risked repeating Cuba’s experience, something the Chileans were very consciously keen to avoid. And the latter entailed Allende giving up lifelong political aims and alienating members of the UP. Yet access to the declassified record demonstrates that the Chileans had more room for maneuver early on than they realized. True, U.S. sources show conclusively that the Nixon administration’s destabilization measures in Chile had begun
before
Allende even came to power and enacted his program. But it is now clear that U.S. policy makers privately felt far more vulnerable and threatened by Chile’s example than they let on. They were especially eager to do what they could to avoid an open confrontation or exposure of wrongdoing at a time of growing domestic and international criticism of U.S. foreign policy in the context of the Vietnam War. In fact, Washington was so concerned with Chile’s potential to become another Third World
“David” pitted against “Goliath” that U.S. diplomats expended considerable time reassuring the Chileans that the Nixon administration meant no wrong and opting for tactical shifts at key moments to lessen the appearance of hostility, and thus to limit Allende’s chances of rallying support on an anti-American platform. It is just possible, then, that the Nixon administration might have been backed into an uncomfortable corner and been forced to tactically retreat and modify either its covert operations in Chile or efforts to restrict credits to the country (or both) had Allende opted for a harder, more openly vociferous line when he was strongest, in the first six months of his presidency.

Certainly, when he embarked on a more active campaign to publicize U.S. hostility to his government, Washington felt intimidated enough to step away from more overt opposition to his presidency. But by then it was largely too late, not least because Allende’s “excess profits” ruling—by which profits reaped by private U.S. copper companies in Chile since the 1950s would be deducted from compensation owed to expropriated firms—provided a handy pretext that the United States was able to retrospectively apply when justifying their refusal to grant credits to him. When Allende opted to accept protracted negotiations as opposed to outright opposition with the United States at the end of 1972, the United States gained even more of the initiative when it came to U.S.-Chilean relations. By this stage, Washington needed the negotiations far less than the Chilean government, which was internally divided, battling growing opposition at home and a mounting economic crisis. And while Chile just managed to cover its financial deficit by September 1973 as a result of juggling assistance from socialist countries, Western Europe, and Latin America, this was far from sustainable. The more obvious the difficulties of this juggling act became, the more confident the United States was that Allende would ultimately fail. Indeed, Washington officials were thus prepared—and happy—to stage-manage lengthy, but cyclical, bilateral negotiations with the Chileans that promised little and avoided any resolution of core ideological or political differences, safe in the knowledge that Allende’s government was running out of time.

All of which leads me to one final point with regard to how we study the history of inter-American affairs (and international history more generally). U.S.-Chilean relations and the ties between Cuba and Chile were changing, dynamic, and interactive processes rather than static and inevitably determined structures. On the one hand, Latin American actors had considerable agency when it came to the decisions they took and the
way that the relationship between the United States and Latin America unfolded. On the other hand, what follows offers key insights into the rather haphazard way in which policy makers often navigated their way through different options, alliances, and policy choices. True, the balance of economic and military power between different actors in the story that follows circumscribed the paths they followed. But as Forrest Colburn has written with regard to Third World revolutionary processes, “A revolution is an explosive interaction between ideas and reality, between intention and circumstance, between political activity and social context.”
³²
The same can also be said of counterrevolutionary responses to the prospect of radical transformation. All sides had strategic objectives and interests, but rather than following predetermined paths and being constrained by inanimate social forces, each of them responded tactically to domestic, regional, and international developments they encountered in a far more fluid dynamic process than is sometimes accepted. As we shall see, who held the initiative against whom and for what purpose also changed repeatedly over the course of only three years as policy makers argued between themselves within government and states maneuvered around each other to shape the future. But if chance, coincidence, and personality mattered when it came to the decisions that were ultimately taken, the question here is
how
leaders chose which path to follow, how effective those choices were vis-à-vis their opponents, and what consequences these had for Chile and the inter-American Cold War.

Only by weaving various perspectives together in a multidimensional narrative is it possible to see the shifting patterns of the past. In doing so, we appreciate Castro’s involvement in Chile as being the result of Allende’s invitation and his previous ties with the Cubans in the 1960s as well as the effect that Cuba’s experience in Chile had on Havana’s already shifting regional policies. On the other side, we can also see how effectively the Nixon administration deceived the Chileans about its real intentions, the extent to which Chile’s international campaign to publicize its cause temporarily offset the United States’ economic and strategic advantage against Chile, the serious disagreements between policy makers in the United States about how to respond, and the fact that, in the end, it was only because certain U.S. policy makers arguing for tactical retreat won out over their hard-line colleagues that the United States was able to avoid what many within the Nixon administration feared might end up being a detrimental full-scale confrontation with Santiago. As a direct result, we
also see how Chilean opportunities for making the best of a clash with Goliath dissipated. In addition, a multidimensional narrative shows that a new counterrevolutionary offensive in the Southern Cone had taken its toll on the prospects for progressive change in the region by the end of 1972, leading many of the region’s revolutionary movements to seek refuge in Chile, which in turn boosted targeted attacks on the UP for letting “foreign extremists” flood the country. Well before September 1973, in fact, the Nixon administration found itself less concerned about “losing” Latin America than it had been and, hence, less desperate with regard to when and how Allende would be overthrown. Finally, an international history of the rise and fall of La Vía Chilena demonstrates that, while U.S. policy makers hesitated and waited in the wings for events to take their course, it was Chilean military leaders who launched the coup with the help of sympathetic Brazilian friends, not the United States. And our effort to understand why they did inevitably leads us back to the Cuban involvement in Chile and Latin America.