Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (14 page)

Cuban DGLN officers at a school in Chile. Men in suits, left to right: Juan Carretero, Manuel Piñeiro, Luis Fernández Oña, and Ulises Estrada. Courtesy of Luis Fernández Oña private collection.

Kissinger “basically” ended up agreeing on the need to be publicly “correct” when it came to opposing Allende.
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As he advised Nixon, the United States had to “package” its approach “in a style that … [gave] the appearance of reacting to his moves.”
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In contrast to the State Department’s concern for heeding Mexican, Peruvian, and Venezuelan advice, however, Kissinger, Nixon, and the Pentagon were focused on other Latin American dynamics. Their primary preoccupation was to assure conservative regional forces that Washington was not lying back and accepting Allende’s government. “If [the] idea gets around in Brazil and Argentina that we
are playing along with All[ende] we will be in trouble,” Kissinger warned Nixon; the United States risked “appearing indifferent or impotent to the rest of the world.”
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Nixon’s strong endorsement of Vernon Walters’s memorandum a day before the NSC meeting is the clearest indication we have of the president’s own views on this question and, more broadly, on Latin American affairs as a whole at this point. By instructing Kissinger to implement Walters’s recommendations “in
every
respect,” Nixon accepted that the United States had to draw Latin Americans’ focus away from purely internal security concerns and provide them with “a sense of participation in the defense of freedom” worldwide. In his view, the United States also had to do a better job of demonstrating its dedication to help regional leaders reach their objectives, and “increase, not reduce” military sales, assistance, and friendly understanding toward Latin America. Finally, Walters stressed that the United States should “move actively (not necessarily openly) against … opponents.”
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When the NSC addressed Chile on 6 November, Nixon translated this advice and his own personal instincts into a call for reinvigorated attention to Latin America:

Let’s not think about what the really democratic countries in Latin America say—the game is in Brazil and Argentina…. I will never agree with the policy of downgrading the military in Latin America. They are power centers subject to our influence…. We want to give them some help. Brazil and Argentina particularly. Build them up with consultation. I want Defense to move on this. We’ll go for more in the budget if necessary…. Privately we must get the message to Allende and others that we oppose him…. Brazil has more people than France or England combined. If we let the potential leaders in South America think they can move like Chile … we will be in trouble…. We’ll be very cool and very correct, but doing those things which will be a real message to Allende and others. This is not the same as Europe—with Tito and Ceausescu—where we have to get along and no change is possible. Latin America is not gone, and we want to keep it.
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On 9 November Nixon’s rambling instructions were articulated in National Security Decision Memorandum 93 (NSDM 93), which ordered maximum pressure on Chile’s new government to “prevent its consolidation and limit its ability to implement policies contrary to the United States and
hemisphere interests.” Pivotally, it also outlined a framework for a new regional strategy to contain Allende’s Chile and build up U.S. influence in Latin America. “Vigorous efforts,” NSDM 93 instructed, should be undertaken “to assure that other governments in Latin America understand fully that the United States opposes consolidation of a communist state in Chile hostile to the interests of the United States and other hemisphere nations, and to … encourage them to adopt a similar posture.” Toward this end, the directive explicitly instructed the administration to collaborate and forge closer relations with military leaders in the Americas and to consult “key” Latin American governments in Brazil and Argentina.
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While Nixon was clarifying and imposing a new regional policy in the wake of Allende’s inauguration, he also articulated his views on nationalism and anti-Americanism in the hemisphere. The issue at stake was not the investments that the United States stood to lose, Nixon implied, but rather Washington’s credibility, prestige, and influence. What is more, Nixon reaffirmed the very conditional and paternalistic approach that the ARA’s “mature partnership” had dismissed only a year before: “No impression should be permitted in Latin America that they can get away with this, that it’s safe to go this way,” he instructed. “All over the world it’s too much the fashion to kick us around. We are not sensitive but our reaction must be coldly proper. We cannot fail to show our displeasure. We can’t put up with ‘Give the Americans hell but pray they don’t go away.’ There must be times when we should and must react, not because we want to hurt them but to show we can’t be kicked around. The new Latin politicians are a new breed. They use anti-Americanism to get power and then they try to cozy up. Maybe it would be different if they thought we wouldn’t be there.”
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Clearly, the United States would not be there for Allende, and Nixon personally outlined the kind of punishment he wished to see unleashed on Chile: economic “cold Turkey.”
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A Covert Action Program annexed to NSDM 93 also provided an overarching framework for intervening in Chilean domestic politics. Specifically, the program aimed to maintain and enlarge contacts with the Chilean military, support Allende’s non-Marxist opposition, assist the anti-Allende Chilean media outlets, launch black operations to divide and weaken the Unidad Popular coalition, and disseminate propaganda against Allende throughout Latin America, the United States, and Europe. Notably, this included instructions to “play up” Cuban and Soviet involvement in Chile.
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And, finally, given the haphazard response to Allende’s unexpected election, NSDM 93 also established a new decision-making structure to oversee policy toward Chile: the
SRG would meet monthly “or more frequently” and would monitor operations together with an Ad Hoc Interagency Working Group on Chile.
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As the tension of the election period diminished in Santiago, the internationalization of Chilean politics was therefore just beginning. On the one side, the Cubans proceeded with cautious enthusiasm, conscious that closer association could burden Allende with counterrevolutionary hostility. On the other side, the Nixon administration chose a delicate double-edged “cool but correct” policy to guard against provoking anti-Americanism in Latin America or bolstering Allende’s position in Chile. In this respect, Washington’s policies were not determined by the fact that Chile was one democracy in a Southern Cone dominated by military regimes. It did, however, have an impact on the means that the world’s self-proclaimed champion of “freedom and democracy” would use to undo Allende’s free and democratic victory.

When Allende challenged the foundations of the Cold War order in the hemisphere by reestablishing diplomatic relations with Castro’s Cuba, he reinforced the impression that his presidency signaled a watershed in Latin America. As he told Radio Habana Cuba, the Cuban revolution had taught him a lot, and the Chilean people were now ready to “begin to advance along their own path, different from that of Cuba, but with the same goal.”
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In fact, for Chile’s left wing—including the PCCh, which had been so opposed to Castro’s Latin American policies in the 1960s—the decision had been urgent, automatic, and nonnegotiable. As the Chilean Communist senator Volodia Teitelboim proclaimed, the UP’s victory was “absolutely inconceivable” without the Cuban revolution.
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For the political parties that now made up Chile’s coalition government, it was also a move destined to underline Chile’s independence in accordance with long-standing aims. For Havana, meanwhile, the new relationship exemplified broad possibilities for progressive (and possibly even revolutionary) change in the region. And for Washington—caught out by the speed of Allende’s decision despite his election promises—this was a further warning of how precarious U.S. influence in the hemisphere had become.

Although Latin America had been awash with bubbling nationalism before this moment, Allende’s victory brought a changing situation into focus, initiating a reinvigorated struggle for influence in the Southern Cone. To be sure, the Cubans did not consider Allende’s democratic road
to socialism as applicable to any other Latin American country, but Chile nevertheless became the best example of progressive change in the region and what Cuba’s foreign minister called “the strengthening of solidarity in Latin America.”
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It therefore promised to improve Cuba’s hemispheric position and to encourage regional social and economic transformation in the direction of socialism. Henceforth, when it came to Chile itself, Havana opted for a mature partnership with Allende rather than imposing its own agenda in the belief that this was the best way of helping him survive and succeed. Cuba’s own shift toward a slower, safer path to socialism at home also underpinned the advice that the Cubans delivered to Chile’s newly elected government. As Havana’s leaders were acknowledging, it was not as easy to skip stages of revolutionary progress as they had previously thought.

Beneath this new “maturity,” the Cubans nevertheless continued to ardently believe in the inevitability of revolution. What changed was their analysis of how and how fast this would occur, not that it would occur in the first place. Speaking privately to Polish leaders in Warsaw in June 1971, for example, Cuba’s foreign minister, Raúl Roa, would report that Latin America was on the verge of “erupting” and had all the “objective” conditions for revolution. In his view, what was missing for the moment were “subjective” factors such as a revolutionary awareness on the part of the masses.
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These temporary limitations notwithstanding, Castro expressed total certainty in public. As he later told a Chilean journalist, Latin America “has a child in its womb and its name is revolution; it’s on its way and it has to be born, inexorably, in accordance with biological law, social law, the laws of history. And it shall be born one way or the other. The birth shall be institutional, in a hospital, or it will be in a house; it will either be illustrious doctors or the midwife who will deliver the child. Whatever the case, there will be a birth.”
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Of course, the natural corollary of this rising nationalist and revolutionary wave in the Southern Cone was the growth of counterrevolutionary forces. As events were to prove, Allende did not signify the United States’ “defeat” but merely the beginning of its resurgent influence in the Southern Cone. For now, Washington’s “correct” tolerance of Allende’s new government masked the true sense of the alarm felt by the White House. But behind rhetoric about a new “mature partnership” and a “cool but correct” posture toward Chile, Washington was simultaneously embarking on a new mission in Latin America to “bring Allende down” and to redirect the region’s future.

In Pursuit of Radical Transformation, November 1970–July 1971

Salvador Allende embraced the idea that his election represented a turning point for inter-American affairs. On the night of his election victory, he had spoken elatedly to thousands of supporters in downtown Santiago and declared that countries around the world were looking at Chile.
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And they were, but not necessarily with the admiration that Allende implied. Beyond Cuba, and across the Americas, his election simultaneously sparked jubilation, terror, respect and apprehension. While the majority of Latin America’s leaders adopted moderate postures toward Chilean events, others were far more alarmist. Brazilian military leaders, in particular, began referring to Chile as “yet another country on the other side of the Iron Curtain,” only more dangerous because it was so close.
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Or, as one Brazilian Air Force general put it just over a month after Allende was elected, “the international communist offensive, planned a little more than two years ago in Cuba, through OLAS [the Organization of Latin American Solidarity], finds itself in marked development in this continent…. Taking advantage of the painful state of underdevelopment or disagreements from some and the most pure democratic idealism from others, international communism comes demonstrating its flexibility … in the conquest of power, using either violence and coup d’états, or legal electoral processes…. We will be, without doubt, overtaken by the ideological struggle that we face, [which is] now more present, more palpable and more aggressive.”
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Indeed, to seasoned Brazilian Cold Warriors—far more so even than their contemporaries in Washington—Allende’s victory was not merely a Chilean phenomenon but the embodiment of something more ominous and antagonistic. So much so, that the Brazilians even briefly considered breaking off diplomatic relations with Santiago before they decided this might offer Allende a convenient enemy around which he could rally support.
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As we have seen, the Nixon administration had similar concerns about boosting Allende’s chances through overt hostility. Although it could not completely hide its coolness toward Chile’s new government, from early 1971 onward the Nixon administration increasingly played a clever game when it came to hiding its hand. In this respect, the contrast with the period immediately after Allende’s election could not have been starker. From a frantic and chaotic series of failed efforts to try and prevent Allende assuming power, the United States’ policy toward Chile now assumed an aura of confidence. Reaching out to the Brazilians and focusing on what it—and they—could do to turn back the tide in the ideological struggle that engulfed the Southern Cone was one astute way to reassert influence in the region. And in Brazil, Washington found a useful and fanatically anti-Allende ally that was already pursuing its own regional strategy to uphold ideological frontiers against revolutionary influences.