Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (10 page)

In fact, far from a coherent recipe for “action” or “progress,” the Nixon administration’s initial attempt to deal with “rapidly intensifying change in the Americas” was a rather halfhearted acknowledgment of reality rather than any substantial redefinition of U.S. policy. Not only were Latin American affairs not at the top of the White House’s priority list, but the concept of a “mature partnership”—laudable as it sounded—was too ad hoc, too ill-defined, and too ephemeral to significantly reshape policy toward Latin America. In prescribing that U.S. policy makers deal with regional developments on a case-by-case basis, “Action for Progress” was also by nature a reactive policy. But just how the Nixon administration would react to future challenges in the hemisphere was not clearly thought through. In the period before late 1970, Rockefeller’s analysis was left hanging in the air, even if Nixon, for one, was predisposed to fearing the worst. As he had concluded back in 1967, the “battle of ideas” was still waiting to be won in Latin America and the region’s leaders were not yet mature enough to win it. Beyond the president, Kissinger was also likely to react to challenges in the hemisphere in the context of his general perception that the power of the United States was in dangerous decline. As he had written in 1968, “The essence of revolution is that it appears to contemporaries as a series of more or less unrelated upheavals. The temptation is great to treat each issue as an immediate isolated problem which once surmounted will permit the fundamental stability of the international order to reassert itself. But the crises … are symptoms of deep-seated structural problems … the age of the superpowers is nearing its end. The current international environment is in turmoil because its essential elements are in flux simultaneously.”
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Having neither decisively won nor lost the battle to influence inter-American affairs during the 1960s, both the United States and Cuba were surveying their past struggles against each other at the end of the decade to determine how best to turn new hemispheric dynamics to their advantage. This was by no means a straightforward process. For the Cubans, it meant completely reappraising the tactical cornerstones of their previous efforts to support revolutionary change in Latin America through armed struggle. And for the incoming Nixon administration, it involved a coordinated and concentrated effort to deal with the many challenges the United States faced, which had simply not materialized yet. At their core, U.S. and Cuban reappraisals—as evolutionary as they might have been at this stage—were nevertheless still essentially based on the same values and strategic aims that had guided their policies throughout the 1960s.

Allende, too, remained true to the ideals that had driven him into politics. To a large extent, Cuba’s revolutionary example, the inter-American Cold War struggle it had fought with the United States in the 1960s, and his previous presidential campaigns had radicalized him. Yet he also remained wedded to the prospect of peaceful democratic change within Chile and to his ambition to reach the country’s presidential palace, La Moneda. Remarkably, Allende also believed that because of his democratic methods for achieving power, he would be able to reason with the United States on an equal footing—something that it is very clear Nixon and his advisers were never predisposed to allow, given their attitudes toward Latin America and Washington’s previous Cold War policies in the Americas.

Meanwhile, within Chile, Allende’s three unsuccessful presidential campaigns meant that there were many who believed Allende would neither be selected as a candidate again nor be able to win power. Allende himself often joked that his gravestone would read: “Here lies Allende, future president of Chile.” And in the months before his nomination, he had had to expend considerable efforts to convince those within his own party—and particularly those on the left wing of the PS such as Carlos Altamirano—that he was the person best placed to stand for president and usher forth a revolutionary process in Chile.
¹²⁶
Finally, with the announcement that the UP coalition had chosen him as its presidential candidate, he had another shot at realizing that dream.

However, as presidential campaigns in Chile got under way at the beginning
of 1970, a lack of White House attention and the State Department’s new “low profile” approach to the hemisphere resulted in anti-Allende operations that were far less extensive than those employed by the CIA in 1964. As a later postmortem of U.S. policy toward Chile during the election concluded, “there was no systematic analysis or consideration at the policy-making level on questions of how great a threat an Allende Government would be to U.S. interests”; “attention paid to the Chilean election at the policy-making level was infrequent and late”; “an Allende victory was not considered probable”; “there were philosophical reservations [within the United States] about intervention in a democratic country”; and “there was concern about the risks of exposure if we provided substantial support.”
¹²⁷
In 1970 CIA officials did advise the U.S. multinational company International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation on the best means to channel $350,000 to the right-wing candidate, Jorge Alessandri (another group of U.S. businesses matched that amount). However, fearing that “any significant sum arriving from the U.S. would be as discreet as a moon launch,” as the U.S. ambassador in Santiago put it, the CIA itself channeled only $1 million—a third of what it had provided six years earlier—toward “spoiling” propaganda that aimed to discredit Allende by linking him to images of murderous Soviets and Cuban firing squads.
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In 1970 this propaganda was considered something of a joke by many Chileans, who saw it as too obvious, too alarmist, and too obviously linked to the CIA. True, the substance of the “new Castro” was still unclear and untested. But the idea of direct Cuban intervention or Soviet armies marching into Chile appeared somewhat ludicrous to even the staunchest Chilean anticommunists. Perhaps more important than this, both U.S. and Cuban analysts joined the majority of commentators in Chile and Latin America in predicting that Allende would probably lose the election. And, as such, no one thought too seriously about what would happen if he won.

An Election in Chile, September–November 1970

Fidel Castro was in the offices of Cuba’s official newspaper,
Granma
, when he heard that Salvador Allende had narrowly won Chile’s presidential election late at night on 4 September 1970. “The miracle has happened!” he exclaimed, when Luis Fernández Oña walked through the door. Oña then joined Fidel, Manuel Piñeiro, and others as they debated the election’s significance for Chile, for Latin America, for the cause of socialism worldwide, and for Cuba. Castro also instructed the next day’s edition of
Granma
to categorically proclaim the “Defeat of Imperialism in Chile.” Later, he signed a copy for Allende and, having been up most of the night, he called Santiago at dawn to congratulate his friend on what he considered to be the most important revolutionary triumph in Latin America since his own victory a decade before.
¹

Conversely, in Washington, President Nixon and Henry Kissinger were furious. Kissinger, who had dismissed the South as being “unimportant” only a year before, now went so far as to argue that Chilean events had a bearing not only on United States–Latin American relations but also on the developing world, on Western Europe, on the United States’ “own conception” of its world role, and on U.S.-Soviet relations.
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As Kissinger recalled years later, his reaction was one of “stunned surprise.”
³
The South, it seemed, had suddenly become
very
important.

These reactions were as automatic and immediate as they were diametrically opposed. Primarily, Havana and Washington were motivated by their assessments of the impact that Allende’s election would have on the inter-American balance of power. As such, Chile became inextricably linked to their broader desire to win support and influence throughout Latin America. Havana therefore celebrated Allende’s election as the most potent example of a new regional revolutionary wave destined to undermine U.S. influence. And Washington viewed it as an instant “loss” in what it suddenly considered to be a significant area of a global zero-sum
game against communism. Indeed, the “rapidly intensifying change” in Latin America that Nixon’s National Security Council had discussed a year before now came into acute focus.
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Moreover, although it was not immediately clear how leaders across the Americas would respond to Chile’s news, Allende’s victory immediately epitomized the possibility of radical transformation. In view of these regional and global concerns, economic considerations were of secondary importance. Nixon, after all, believed that he was fighting “a mortal struggle to determine the shape of the future of the world” in which more than financial gain was at stake.
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Automatic as these responses may have been, the contours of the policies Havana and Washington would adopt were complicated by the anomalous nature of Allende’s victory and his so-called Chilean Road to Socialism. For the Cubans, who were used to assisting rural guerrilla insurgents, the question was how to boost a constitutional democrat’s chances without undermining his democratic credentials. And for policy makers in the United States, the challenge was to stop a democratically elected president from being inaugurated without too obviously forsaking the democratic ideals they purported to stand for. As Secretary of State William Rogers recognized, “After all we’ve said about elections, if the first time a Communist [
sic
] wins the U.S. tries to prevent the constitutional process from coming into play we will look very bad.”
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Indeed, as both Cuban and U.S. decision makers tried to define appropriate strategies to match these challenges, they were conscious that the “wrong” policy could have disastrous consequences for the new, more mature profiles they had been trying to promote within the inter-American system. In view of potential domestic and international criticism that interference in Chilean internal politics was likely to cause, they were thus both concerned that others (and each other) would perceive their policies as being “correct.” In the short term, this ironically led them to fall back on covertly pursuing not-so-correct policies as they developed longer-term public and private postures toward Allende’s Chile. As Kissinger would argue to Nixon, the way policies were “packaged” was important.
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Notwithstanding these concerns, the period between September and November 1970 was a time of rapid—if not always effective—reaction to fast-moving Chilean domestic developments in Havana and Washington. Because Allende had received only 36.4 percent in a three-way presidential race, he had to wait for a congressional vote on 24 October to confirm (or deny) his victory. In the intervening weeks, Havana agreed to protect the new president’s life, albeit cautiously, while the Nixon administration
simultaneously launched a series of covert operations against him later known as Track I. Mistrusting—and blaming—Washington’s bureaucracy for having allowed Allende to win in the first place, the president also instigated a second track that risked greater exposure of U.S. operations in Chile but that was to be carried out without the knowledge of the State Department and the U.S. Ambassador in Santiago. “Track II,” as it became known, had a more explicit and tightly focused remit than Track I, namely to provoke a coup that would bring a decisive halt to Chile’s constitutional process and at some unspecified date allow military leaders to call a new election in which Allende would somehow be prevented from standing or winning. However, Tracks I and II ultimately had the same aim: to stop Allende from assuming the presidency. While the former focused on working with—and manipulating—the outgoing Chilean president, Eduardo Frei Montalva, Chilean congressional leaders, senior military figures, and media outlets, the latter concentrated on fueling a violent putschist plot against Chile’s constitutionally minded commander in chief of the army, General René Schneider, to clear the way for a more interventionist role on the part of the country’s armed forces. Indeed, the story of Schneider’s subsequent murder and details of Tracks I and II are well known, thanks to the U.S. Senate’s Select Committee investigations in 1975.
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Rather than retracing this well-researched story, what follows contextualizes immediate reactions to Allende’s election within the broader dynamics of the inter-American Cold War. It thus looks at not only why Castro and the Nixon administration intervened in Chilean domestic politics in the way they did but also how this affected their broader approaches to Latin America. In doing so, it argues that when the Cubans and the Americans formulated their policies toward Chile, they were both responding to shifting hemispheric trends, lessons they had drawn from the 1960s, and their concerns about provoking regional hostility by intervening too obviously in Chilean affairs.

Castro would later tell Chilean crowds that Allende’s victory had demonstrated the power of Cuban ideals.
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Indeed, to Havana’s leaders, La Vía Chilena was instantly considered as a leap in the direction of socialism and Latin American emancipation. Despite Allende being one of revolutionary Cuba’s most loyal and intimate comrades, the Cubans nevertheless adjusted reactively to events as they unfolded rather than acting in
line with a fixed contingency plan or preset goals. In the first instance, Allende’s personal request for security assistance began a new phase of Cuban involvement in Chile. And although Castro responded favorably to this request, both the Cubans and the Chileans feared that exposed involvement would provoke Allende’s enemies, which in turn constrained Havana’s room to maneuver. Castro certainly did not want to endanger either his own revolution by undermining Havana’s new “maturity” in the hemisphere or Chile’s nascent revolutionary process through an association with its newly democratically elected president that was too close or visible.