Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (5 page)

Incorporating Cuban, Chilean, and U.S. perspectives in a woven narrative, this book is divided into seven chronological chapters. Chapter 1 examines the inter-American system prior to Chile’s presidential election, focusing on changing Cuban strategies for supporting revolution in Latin America, the origins of Allende’s relationship with Castro, and the Nixon administration’s initial approach to inter-American affairs in the period before September 1970. Chapter 2 examines how Cuba and the United States reacted to Allende’s election, arguing that their subsequent aims and approach toward Chile were determined by their conceptualization of regional affairs. Chapter 3 then turns to the view from inside Chile, focusing on Santiago’s international relations during Allende’s first nine months in power and the beginning of a new phase of the inter-American Cold War. Chapter 4 subsequently charts the beginning of Allende’s declining fortunes and the shifting balance of power in the Southern Cone. During the latter half of 1971 Allende nationalized Chile’s copper industry, Fidel Castro paid a long visit to Chile (in the process becoming convinced that Allende would one day have to face a military confrontation), there was a coup in Bolivia, Uruguayan elections resulted in a decisive left-wing defeat, Brazil’s president was welcomed with open arms in Washington, and Chile built up considerable sympathy and support through an ambitious international campaign.

As chapter 5 then shows, Allende’s growing domestic and international
battles in the first ten months of 1972 began to take their toll, particularly as many occasioned serious disagreement between Chile’s left-wing leaders. As Santiago’s policy makers gradually began realizing that the era of peaceful coexistence did not offer Allende the space to implement his peaceful road to socialism, or the opportunities for the global South to assert itself on the international stage, the United States began implementing new more flexible, and relaxed, tactics for winning back influence in Latin America. In chapter 6, we see that, although Allende faced growing difficulties abroad in late 1972 and early 1973, the UP’s parties did surprisingly well in Chile’s congressional elections in March 1973 precisely at the moment that his allies abroad began dissecting the reasons for his likely defeat. Finally, chapter 7 examines the cataclysmic end to La Vía Chilena. By detailing the interaction between international actors and Chilean politics in the months immediately before and after Allende’s overthrow, it demonstrates the final impact that the inter-American Cold War had on Chile and vice versa. On the one hand, details of the Cubans’ experience during the coup and the coup leaders’ ferocity against Havana’s embassy in Santiago on the day of the coup underscore the military’s concerns about that country’s role in the country. On the other hand, when the Cubans fled Chile, Washington sprang into action to help Chile’s new military regime and encouraged it to coordinate with others in South America to battle against the Left in all its various guises.

As it turned out, the United States did not have to do much coordinating. Three years after Allende’s inauguration celebrations, Chile’s national stadium once again became a focal point of Chilean politics. This time, however, it was a detention and torture center for seven thousand prisoners rounded up by a military junta that seized power on 11 September 1973. Within its walls, Brazilian intelligence officials were to be found, assisting the representatives of Chile’s new military dictatorship in their repression of the Left while rooting out Brazilian exiles who had previously found sanctuary in the country. Allende was dead, and within three months another twelve hundred were murdered by the military junta’s new regime.
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Back in Havana, Cuban leaders also concluded that the prospects of revolution in South America were minimal, leading them to focus on nonideological diplomatic and economic ties in the region while simultaneously shifting their revolutionary hopes to Africa. Indeed, rather than having been the harbinger of a red tide, Chile’s “road to socialism” had actually been a moment of profound transition in the other direction, spanning a period of decisive defeat for left-wing forces in South America.

Of course, for those that had gathered to hear Allende speak at the national stadium back on a warm spring day in November 1970, what lay ahead was still unimaginable. And difficult as it may be, we must cast our minds back to that moment of uncertainty when hope and dread shaped the way in which peoples and leaders throughout the Americas conceptualized the prospect of revolutionary change. This is, after all, the only way to understand why and how history unraveled the way it did. It is also where an international history of Allende’s Chile and the inter-American Cold War in the early 1970s must begin.

Castro, Allende, Nixon, and the Inter-American Cold War

“It is hard to imagine,” a Chilean Socialist Party militant mused as he looked back on the late 1960s more than forty years later. Back then, when you walked into any bookshop, there were lots of Marxist publications, and news of Latin American guerrilla struggles reached Chile all the time. Especially toward the end of the decade, Che Guevara’s ideas and Régis Debray’s books were also endlessly discussed within Chile’s different left-wing parties, and everyone was engaged in what seemed like a permanent ideological debate.
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This ideological fervor in Chile resulted as much from internal as from external factors. International developments had profoundly influenced Chilean politics throughout the first half of the twentieth century despite it being the country furthest away from both superpowers, nestled between the Andes and the Pacific at the southernmost tip of the Americas. Whether affected by the result of the Great Depression of the 1930s or the Korean and Vietnam wars, Chile’s export-orientated economy fluctuated with global copper markets, the Santiago-based United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America expounded theories of dependency that were taken up by many others in the Third World, and new ideas from abroad fertilized those already present and growing within Chilean society. On the Left, divisions within the international communist movement over Stalin’s leadership or the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, for example, had had a profound impact on the character of and relations between Chile’s left-wing parties. And the United States–led “Alliance for Progress” had invigorated the country’s centrist Christian Democrat government in the mid-1960s, encouraging—and funding—President Eduardo Frei Montalva’s reformist program to bring about a “Revolution in Liberty.”

However, it was the Cuban revolution that had had the most pivotal external impact on Chilean political debates in the 1960s. For the Socialist
Party, in particular, Cuba’s revolutionary example had a special resonance. As the Chilean scholar, diplomat, and politician Heraldo Muñoz explained, “the Cuban Revolution symbolized and synthesized the essential tenets of [Socialist] party thought on international affairs. In short, Cuba constituted a nationalist, anti-imperialist, popular, anticapitalist, and Latin-Americanist experience … with which Chile and Chilean Socialists could identify fully—that is, politically, culturally, geographically, historically, and economically; unlike the various nationalist-populist experiments in Latin America, Cuba was to build socialism from below and not as the imposition of foreign troops, within the Western hemisphere and merely ninety miles away from the United States.”
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Beyond Chile, the Cuban revolution had also fundamentally changed the narrative of inter-American affairs and politics. Before Fidel Castro entered Havana in January 1959, efforts to bring about revolutionary change in Latin America had suffered decisive setbacks, most notably in Guatemala, where the nationalist leader, Jacobo Arbenz, had been overthrown as a result of a CIA-backed invasion in 1954. After the Cuban revolution, however, the situation was reversed and everything seemed possible: left-wing parties in Latin America not only had evidence that revolution could
succeed
but also proof it could even do so in the United States’ immediate backyard. True, Fidel Castro’s strategy for gaining power may have been more violent than the one advocated by long-established communist parties throughout the region. But it also undoubtedly energized those who believed that socialism was the answer to Latin America.

As a Chilean Socialist Party senator, Salvador Allende was one of many left-wing politicians in Latin America who flocked to Havana after 1959 to see what the revolution was like and who left Cuba impressed. In the era of Che Guevara’s internationalist missions to Africa and Bolivia during the mid-1960s, the island then became home to an impatient younger generation of radicalized Latin American volunteers who aspired to follow in Guevara’s footsteps. One such Chilean later described how he went to Cuba looking for his own Sierra Maestra. “The only thing that tormented me was a sense of urgency,” he recalled, “if I did not hurry up, this world was not going to wait for me to change and perhaps I would not have time to get to my mountain.”
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Of course, the task of bringing about socialist revolution throughout Latin America was far more complex than a question of enthusiastic young revolutionaries heading off into the mountains. By the end of the 1960s, even Havana’s leaders had begun to acknowledge this and, as a
result, were already reviewing their earlier insistence that armed struggle and the guerrilla
foco
was
the
road to revolution. Their examination of the alternatives available for bringing about progressive, if not yet socialist, change responded to the scars of the new intensified inter-American Cold War that had emerged after 1959. Cuban support for armed revolution in Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Venezuela, Guatemala, and Bolivia had failed.
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The reformist government of João Goulart had also been toppled and replaced by a military dictatorship in Brazil in 1964; U.S. forces had invaded the Dominican Republic in 1965; a highly politicized military elite had emerged in the region that believed it had a role to play in the region’s future; and, devastatingly, Che Guevara had been killed trying to spark a revolution in Bolivia in late 1967. At the same time, the continent’s left-wing movement—the heterogeneous Chilean Left included—had become deeply divided over Castro’s call to arms. As some went in search of their own Sierra Maestras, others berated the idea of the guerrilla foco and continued to advocate forging broad alliances as a means of gaining political power.

Meanwhile, many on the right and center of Latin American politics shared left-wing frustrations about the region’s lack of economic progress during the United Nations’ “development decade” of the 1960s. Not only did it seem that Latin America had failed to keep up with a rapidly changing world, but President John F. Kennedy’s $20 billion Alliance for Progress had failed to “immunize” the hemisphere from revolutionary currents and had clearly fallen far short of its illustrious goals. Even President Frei in Chile suggested that the alliance had “lost its way” and demanded new answers to Latin America’s underdevelopment.
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After all, the region continued to face challenges of inequality, political instability, exploding population growth, economic dependency, and military interventions. Toward the end of the 1960s, it was also characterized by a surge of radical nationalism and growing resentment toward a world economic system that seemed destined to ignore its needs, so much so that many predicted that revolution (of one form or another) was “inevitable.”
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The incoming Nixon administration in Washington was not oblivious to this. As one internal U.S. study warned at the end of 1969, “rapidly intensifying change” was sweeping through Latin America.
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Nasser-style nationalist revolutionary military leaders had seized power in Peru, Panama, and Bolivia, adding a new dimension to inter-American relations that challenged U.S. influence in the hemisphere.
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And in Chile, one of Latin America’s few long-standing democratic countries, politics seemed to be moving
left. Moreover, as Allende would later say, what happened in Chile was not “isolated or unique.”
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Years later, a senior member of Cuba’s Communist Party echoed this verdict, arguing that to understand Allende’s election and his presidency, one needed to understand what the Americas and the world looked like in the late 1960s and early 1970s.
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Combining ideas of social justice that had come to prominence during Cuba’s nineteenth-century struggle for independence with Marxism and anger at U.S. interventionism, Havana’s revolutionary leaders extolled defiant, radical nationalism and an internationalist commitment to accelerate Latin America’s “second independence.” As Castro proclaimed in his “Second Declaration of Havana” (1962), it was “the duty of every revolutionary to make revolution” and “not for revolutionaries to sit in the doorways of their houses waiting for the corpse of imperialism to pass by.”
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This notion of revolutionary internationalism did not come from nowhere in 1959. Before this, Fidel Castro had not only called for Cuba to become the “bulwark of liberty” in the Americas but had also acknowledged that his “destiny” would be to wage a “much wider and bigger war” against the United States.
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Revolutionary Cuba’s foreign minister echoed this sentiment more than a decade later when he explained to Havana’s socialist bloc allies what the Cubans’ approach to Latin America was. In his words, they were “fighting for the freedom of Latin American nations” in an “emancipatory and revolutionary battle” reminiscent of “the Latin American people’s fight for liberation from Spanish colonial oppression in the first half of the nineteenth century” led by Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín.
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As Piero Gleijeses has written,“history, geography, culture, and language made Latin America the Cubans’ natural habitat, the place closest to Castro’s and his followers’ hearts.”
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And Manuel Piñeiro, who headed Cuba’s Latin America policy for three decades after the revolution, quite simply explained that the Cubans saw their country as an “inseparable part of Latin America.” “Our revolution is a part of the Latin American revolution,” he argued. “Each of our triumphs makes the fraternal countries stronger. Every Latin American victory strengthens our revolution. Our battle won’t have ended until all of the peoples of Our America have freed themselves of the neo-colonial yoke.”
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