Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (8 page)

This message of liberation was central to Allende’s objectives. For Chile, which had after all gained its political independence in the early nineteenth century, the issue of “liberation” centered on the quest for “second independence” through the eradication of U.S. economic penetration of the country. But instead of sugar, as in Cuba’s case, it was copper that
dominated Chilean trade with the United States. Copper, “the salary of Chile,” as Allende termed it, accounted for 80 percent of Chile’s foreign exchange earnings.
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From the 1920s until the late 1960s, four U.S. companies had also dominated 80–90 percent of Chile’s large-scale mining. After a period of intense foreign investment in Chile during the 1950s, President Frei had then begun the process of nationalization by buying out 51 percent of the country’s Gran Mineria.
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But by 1970, foreign investors still controlled a quarter of Chilean industry.
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Meanwhile, Chile had rising unemployment, inequality, and poverty. Explaining why a country rich in copper and mineral resources had “failed” to solve the “grave crisis” facing Chilean society, Allende, and the Unidad Popular coalition he represented in the election of 1970, pointed to Chile’s economically dependent status and charged “imperialist exploitation” of Chile’s riches. “By nationalizing copper, we shall cease to be poor,” a Communist Party slogan promised.
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Allende’s commitment to nationalizing Chile’s raw materials and reducing U.S. economic and political dominance in Latin America was long-standing. As a junior minister in Pedro Aguirre Cerda’s Popular Front government in the late 1930s, he had regarded himself as participating in a struggle to secure Chile’s economic independence.
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In the 1940s, he had condemned Washington’s tolerance and support for dictators in the region.
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In the 1950s, he was also one of the Chilean “Friends of Guatemala” who had denounced the United States’ intervention against President Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala.
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In Allende’s words, Arbenz had shown other nations in the Americas the way toward “progress and liberty.” When U.S. secretary of state John Foster Dulles called an emergency meeting of the OAS to address Arbenz’s supposed threat, Allende then described the meeting as “an instrument of the Cold War” and took off on a six-month tour of the Soviet Union, the People’s Republic of China, and Europe. In an article published in
Pravda
while he was in Moscow, he subsequently underlined his preoccupation with the struggle for independence: Chileans, he wrote, “want peace and do not want war; we want respect of our sovereignty, not forced dependence; we want social justice, not exploitation.”
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Later, throughout the 1960s, Allende was a vehement critic of the Alliance for Progress, on the grounds that it did not solve Latin America’s “basic problem”: its dependency.
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In this context, Castro’s struggle against the United States had radicalized Allende’s approach to inter-American affairs, for, as he later told Debray, Cuba’s experience had “indisputably” shown the lengths imperialism would use to defend its interests.
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In the early 1960s, he had therefore
recommended that Castro’s Second Declaration of Havana be the region’s “Magna Carta”; he had broken off his friendship with the Venezuelan leader Rómulo Betancourt because of differences regarding Cuba; and although he believed Chile’s particular circumstances made it unsuitable for armed struggle, he had established close ties with revolutionary movements throughout the hemisphere and financially and logistically aided those who adopted violent means of bringing about revolution in Latin America.
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Publicly, at least, he was not shy to proclaim that “militant[s] of the Latin American revolution” had “a legitimate duty and honor to lend … solidarity—human and ideological—to militant
compañeros
of the same revolution.”
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Allende’s personal relationship with Fidel Castro was cemented through his numerous visits to Cuba during the 1960s. In 1966 he participated in the Tricontinental Conference of African, Asian, and Latin American revolutionary and national liberation movements in Havana. Subsequently, he was one of those who proposed the formation of the Organization of Latin American Solidarity (OLAS), which came into being the following year. As it turned out, OLAS was largely ineffective as a functioning collective organization. But it was also highly symbolic and feared by an increasingly ideological anticommunist elite in Latin America, which regarded it as being far more powerful than it actually was. To this elite, OLAS embodied dangerous currents in continental affairs and, in the words of one right-wing Brazilian newspaper, was “responsible for all acts of terrorism” in Latin America.
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Highly exaggerated as these allegations against OLAS were, Allende received extensive criticism for his association with the organization back in Chile. According to those who attacked him, he was antipatriotic and had sold out to Fidel. Or as Allende wrote at the time, he felt as if he had been subjected to his “own Vietnam and personal Bay of Pigs” as a result.
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The most important meeting between Allende and Castro occurred during one weekend in late October 1967 at a rural farmhouse in Manzanillo at the foothills of the Sierra Maestra. Luis Fernández Oña, who had been assigned to Chilean affairs since 1964 and who went by the name of “Demid” at the time, accompanied his boss, Manuel Piñeiro, and Fidel at this meeting, where he would also first get to know his future wife, Allende’s daughter, Beatriz. As Oña recalled more than thirty years later, it was on this occasion that Allende and Castro’s friendship grew, as they played ping-pong and talked about ideology and the future long into the night.
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Salvador Allende (wearing hat) in Cuba, 1969. Luis Fernández Oña is at the far left. Courtesy of Luis Fernández Oña private collection.

Shortly after this, a small group of Chilean Socialist Party militants had also become involved in Cuba’s internationalist mission in Bolivia. As noted already, following Che Guevara’s death at the end of 1967, the Ejército de Liberación Nacional (National Liberation Army, or ELN) had begun exploring the prospects of a second guerrilla operation in Bolivia. And directly as a result of her trip to Cuba in 1967, Beatriz had become one of the leaders of a Chilean branch of the ELN working toward this end with the tacit support of her father.
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Then, in February 1968, Allende inspired Havana’s unswerving gratitude when he accompanied the three Cuban survivors of Che’s guerrilla column in Bolivia out of Chile to safety after their escape into that country. By coincidence, Oña had been in Santiago clandestinely when the survivors escaped to Chile and recalled that Allende, as president of the Chilean Senate, immediately ensured the survivors were treated correctly and freed from police custody. Allende then focused on how the survivors would leave Chile. The Cubans had a small plane, a pilot, and a tank of fuel but not enough to go far. Moreover, Allende agreed with Oña that if they flew out of Chile, the Cubans would be vulnerable and could easily be shot down, perhaps by the CIA. As a result,
Oña later remembered studying maps with Allende to discuss the best possible route the survivors could take before finally reaching the decision to have Allende publicly accompany the survivors on a flight to Tahiti, where the Cuban ambassador to Paris collected them.
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In contrast to this obvious—and politically risky—display of support for Cuba’s revolutionary mission in Latin America, Castro’s ability to support Allende’s presidential campaigns was oblique. Because Allende refused to countenance the prospect of violence as a means of furthering revolution in Chile, it was somewhat difficult for a generation of Cuban leaders trained in guerrilla insurgency to support him. During Chile’s 1964 and 1970 presidential elections, the CIA had also launched propaganda equating an Allende victory with a Castroite dictatorship as part of a broader “terror campaign” against him. Despite this scaremongering, Allende’s enemies actually had little evidence of Cuban involvement in the country. (It was only after Allende’s election that the CIA estimated Cuba had given $350,000 to Allende’s 1970 campaign, a figure that has been widely circulated as fact ever since but never corroborated.)
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Although there is much that is still unclear about Castro’s support for Allende during the election, Cuba’s Chilean operations had also clearly become increasingly difficult after 1964. With no diplomatic relationship with Chile and therefore no continuous presence on the ground, the Cubans had had to rely on separate clandestine missions, covert radio signaling, and information from Chileans who visited Havana in circuitous journeys via Prague or Paris.
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This situation improved slightly in February 1970, when Frei reopened commercial relations with Havana in a move to placate the Chilean Left (the agreement was worth $11 million for that year alone). But Castro appears to have refused to accept Santiago’s overtures later that year to reestablish diplomatic relations on the grounds that this would give the Christian Democrats a useful issue with which to attract left-wing support in Chile’s forthcoming election.
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Beyond denying the PDC’s candidate, Radomiro Tomic, campaigning material, the Cubans generally feared that they could do more damage than good by intervening on Allende’s behalf, and, at least during the months leading up to the election, it therefore seems that the senior Cuban intelligence officers who would play the largest role in Allende’s Chile stayed away. As Oña later recalled, the Cubans “played so that Allende would win.” And in 1970, playing to win meant keeping a low profile.
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Certainly, the possibility that the United States could exploit Allende’s relationship with the Cubans to undermine his election campaign was
considered a very real one in Havana and Santiago. Yet, to some extent, both Castro and Allende drew strength from growing anti-Americanism in the hemisphere and the international challenges that the new Nixon administration faced, both in Southeast Asia and in Latin America. As Allende told a Canadian reporter on the day of his election, the United States had to “understand” that Latin Americans could not live indefinitely in “misery and poverty” while financing the “richest and most powerful country in the world.”
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More than two years later, he would still be insistent on this point, informing U.S. secretary of state William Rogers that “something must have happened for this welling up of feeling to have come about in Latin America”; there was “a definite, palpable feeling running in Latin America … that there must be change.”
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But of course the big question ahead was whether the new Nixon administration was predisposed to respond to such an appeal for understanding and how it would react to the prospect of an Allende presidency.

Richard Nixon was no stranger to Latin America when he assumed the U.S. presidency in January 1969, but, at least initially, he did not regard the region as a U.S. foreign policy priority. As Viron Peter (“Pete”) Vaky, Kissinger’s first assistant for Latin American affairs, recalled, the president’s “heart and soul” were far more focused on Vietnam, détente, and the opening to China.
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As such, Nixon stalled when it came to addressing Latin American concerns, and U.S. policy toward the region was somewhat adrift until late 1970. This also had something to do with Henry Kissinger’s views on the region. In contrast to Nixon’s previous engagement with Latin America, the new president’s national security adviser was neither particularly well informed about nor interested in inter-American affairs.
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In 1969, Kissinger even went so far as to tell Chile’s foreign minister, Gabriel Valdés, that what happened in the “South” was unimportant. “History has never been produced in the south,” he told the Chilean diplomat; “the axis of history starts in Moscow goes to Berlin, crosses over to Washington and then goes to Tokyo.”
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Meanwhile, those in Washington who did believe that the United States’ relations with Latin America were worth focusing on generally agreed that U.S. influence and prestige in the region were in serious decline. While policy suggestions varied, the general—if unenthusiastic—consensus among these officials was that a more wary, careful, “low profile” approach was called for as a means of rescuing Washington’s
standing in the Americas. And yet this tricky and untested concept clashed with certain prevailing attitudes within Washington regarding “irresponsible” “Latins” who were not equipped with the “maturity” to resist communist influences on their own.

Nixon’s own views on Latin America had primarily been shaped by his visits to the region and by his period in government as President Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president. In 1955 he had traveled to the Caribbean, where he embraced the Cuban dictator, Fulgencio Batista, and the Dominican Republic’s Rafael Trujillo. Then, in 1958, he had personally come face-to-face with widespread anti-American protests when he visited Uruguay, Peru, and Venezuela. Those who had gone out onto the streets to protest his presence—or, as in Caracas, to throw rocks at him—had been demonstrating for a variety of reasons, among them U.S. intervention against Arbenz, Washington’s support for dictatorships, its imposition of tariff barriers against Latin American goods, and a general lack of enthusiasm within the United States for addressing Latin American development needs.
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Yet Nixon shared the views of many others in Washington who immediately blamed an international communist conspiracy, dismissing demonstrators in Caracas publicly as a “mob” of tobacco chewing, spitting, irrational, and “bloodthirsty” youths manipulated and controlled by global communism.
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