Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (20 page)

Overall, these efforts to attract Washington’s attention would be highly effective. Yet in the short term they actually had a somewhat negative
impact on Brazil’s standing in the region. Immediately after Allende’s election, Brazilian military leaders had made obvious attempts to work with their traditional regional rivals, the Argentines, to combat leftist threats in the Southern Cone.
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Yet in the months that followed, Argentina’s leaders had increasingly become more worried about Brasilia than Santiago and were highly suspicious that, by reaching out to the United States, Brazil was seeking to bolster its position vis-à-vis its southern neighbor.
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Ultimately, Chile benefited. At first, Argentina’s right-wing military leaders had been concerned about Allende’s election due to their fears about left-wing insurgency at home. In view of potential hostility with the Argentines, Allende and the Chilean Foreign Ministry had consequently placed special emphasis on improving Chile’s relations with Buenos Aires.
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Indeed, in a battle against isolation, Chile’s long vulnerable border with Argentina and an annual trading relationship worth $200 million made establishing amicable relations with Argentina’s military leaders a key priority.
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After making contacts with leaders of the PCCh and diplomats from the Soviet bloc, the Polish Embassy in Santiago also reported home to Warsaw in May 1971 that there was a real possibility of Argentine intervention in Chilean affairs.
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And as Chile’s ambassador in Buenos Aires, Ramon Huidobro, later recalled, the Chileans were worried that Washington could exacerbate outstanding border disputes to provoke conflict.
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The Chilean Foreign Ministry therefore expended considerable effort to persuade Argentina that the new Chilean government posed no threat and that it wanted good relations with its neighbor. As Almeyda privately explained to leaders from the socialist bloc in May 1971, the Chileans were also exploring the idea of exchanges between certain sectors of both countries’ military forces in the hope of isolating the pro-American right-wing members of Argentina’s armed forces. Moreover, Almeyda noted that the Chileans were underlining to the Argentines that Chile was “not a rival and would not be a rival.” Brazil was the rival that Buenos Aires had to look out for, the Chileans stressed.
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Allende’s visit to Argentina in July 1971 and, before that, Buenos Aires’s support for Santiago’s candidacy to host UNCTAD III, were thus the combined outcome of Argentine fears regarding Brazil and intense Chilean diplomacy (Brazil and the United States had backed Santiago’s rival Mexico City to host the conference).
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However, there is reason to suggest that the Argentines had been inclined to tactically appease Allende early on.
As Argentina’s ambassador in Washington had told State Department officials back in December 1970, Allende should not “automatically [be] presumed to be a total loss. His attitude toward other Latin American states and the United States will depend in part on how we act toward him. Closing all doors will surely drive him to other more hospitable arms.”
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Subsequently, when Argentina’s foreign minister, Pablo Pardo, had met with Allende in June, it seems that he had warmed to the president and passed on his approval to President Alejandro Lanusse Gelly.
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Then, when Lanusse and Allende met at Salta on 24 July, they declared their agreement to principles of nonintervention, peaceful resolution of bilateral disputes, and the importance of “friendship and co-operation.”
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As the
Washington Post
noted, the meeting was an “important blow to Latin Americans who [sought] to quarantine newly socializing states.”
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Chile therefore avoided isolation. But as Brazil stepped up its diplomatic offensive, the Nixon administration was also getting up to speed on developments in the Southern Cone. In particular, with Brazil’s prodding, Washington began to focus on the unstable situation in Bolivia and Uruguay. And it was this multisided combination of actors and fluid developments in the Southern Cone that would shape the inter-American Cold War struggle ahead. The Chileans understood that these regional dynamics made it imperative to win over friends. The suggestion that the Nixon administration was lacking a clear regional policy or that it had been contained in South America, as Chilean Embassy staff in Washington concluded, was also quite perceptive. However, the idea put forward by Chilean diplomats in Washington that economic difficulties or problems dealing with Peru, Bolivia, Chile, and Vietnam had forced the United States toward a position of “wisdom and maturity” in the hemisphere was wrong insofar as this meant lessening levels of U.S. intervention in the hemisphere.
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This error reflected a more general misplaced understanding of the inter-American balance of forces. In July 1971 Fidel Castro proclaimed that the United States was “a lot more fragile, and … much more limited, in its possibilities for intervention in and crushing of revolutionary Latin American processes.”
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Yet this analysis was clearly premature and overly simplistic. As later events proved, counterrevolutionary forces within Chile, the Southern Cone, and Latin America stood ready to resist radical transformation with or without the United States and were just as ideologically driven in their motives as Castro or Allende.

In many respects, Allende’s first nine months as president were characterized by relative hope and optimism. Among the reasons that Santiago’s leaders had to be cheerful were the resounding successes of Allende’s visit to Argentina, the UP’s impressive showing in Chile’s municipal elections, and repeated U.S. reassurances that the United States wanted to avoid conflict. As Chilean foreign policy analysts surmised, their diplomatic campaigns had already strengthened Chile’s position in the United States by improving the way the U.S. public viewed Allende, ensuring continued flows of military equipment, and nurturing bilateral relations with key Latin American states.

Indeed, Chile’s international standing had risen dramatically, and the UP’s nationalization projects, Santiago’s appeal to ideological pluralism in international affairs, and Allende’s message of wealth distribution and emancipation resonated especially well in the Third World. For the time being, in fact, La Vía Chilena seemed to epitomize the possibility that an era of Cold War confrontation and hostility was over and that the global South was in ascendance. President Houari Boumedienne of Algeria was one of those to express his sincere support for both Chile’s nationalization project and its proposal to hold UNCTAD III in Santiago.
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Chilean diplomats also increasingly found common cause with Peru’s president, Juan Velasco Alvarado, when the latter publicly attacked the way international financial institutions were used to put pressure on countries that pursued nationalization. As the Chilean ambassador in Lima noted, Velasco Alvarado’s anti-imperialism was “poorly defined,” but it was “useful and positive” for Chile.
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The Cubans were also hopeful. As CIA analysts observed, “Chile, Peru, Uruguay, Bolivia and Guatemala, in that order” were now “the most important Latin American countries in Havana’s foreign policy scheme…. Fidel Castro has issued instructions to maintain complete cooperation with Chile at all costs.”
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In a handwritten letter to Allende at the end of May, Fidel Castro summed up his own exuberant optimism. “We’re amazed at your extraordinary efforts and the limitless energies you’ve poured into maintaining and consolidating your victory,” he wrote. “Here, we can appreciate that the people are gaining ground, in spite of the difficult and complex mission they shoulder…. The April 4 elections were a splendid and encouraging victory…. Your courage and resolve, your mental and physical energy and ability to carry the revolutionary process
forward, have been of the essence…. Great and different challenges are surely in store for you, and you must face these in conditions which are not precisely ideal, but a just policy, with the support of the people and applied with determination, cannot be defeated.”
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And yet, as Castro’s letter implied, Chile’s position had been readjusted rather than redefined. In conversation with his Polish counterpart during an official visit to Warsaw in June 1971, Cuba’s foreign minister, Raúl Roa, similarly described Allende as “intelligent … experienced and measured” but stressed that the president’s position was “extremely difficult.” As Roa told his hosts, Chile’s left-wing parties had assumed the government, but they did not yet hold power.
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Meanwhile, Allende emphasized that persuasion could still be used as a tool for transforming Chile’s foreign relations. Looking ahead, the Chilean Foreign Ministry acknowledged that in the next phase of Chile’s nationalization process, “the reactions of the forces of imperialism” would be “more aggressive.” The ministry therefore underlined the imperative of a carefully coordinated international strategy, something that would prove increasingly difficult as Chile’s external pressures escalated.
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Indeed, Allende’s first nine months would turn out to be the calm before the storm. Although reason—rather than force—had worked for Allende when it came to gaining power, it would not be enough to achieve his goals and persuade Washington of the legitimacy of his cause. Partly, of course, this is because U.S. officials were simply not predisposed to sustain warm relations with dissenting Latin American leaders; Nixon did not believe he should have to negotiate his foreign policy with “ungrateful” “Latins.” And Allende was not just any Latin American leader. Inescapably, Chile was first and foremost an ideological Cold War problem for the United States despite hopeful Chilean readings of world affairs, and skeptics in Washington (and Brasilia) viewed the UP’s “healthy realism” with incredulity and fear.

After all, Allende’s lifelong campaign against U.S. “imperialism” and the UP’s manifesto pledge to rid Chile of capitalist exploitation, not to mention the new president’s identification with Cuba, did not disappear overnight when Allende took office. Keeping Cuba at a distance or denouncing left-wing movements in Latin America would also have involved betraying his ideology and abandoning the past. Consequently, like the United States and Cuba, the UP tried to downplay its real intentions while members of the coalition and the MIR unhelpfully refused to be tied to prescriptions of “caution” in their support for armed revolutionaries. And, meanwhile,
there were many who continued to think that Chile would ultimately come under Cuba’s influence, especially when Allende invited Cubans to assist in matters of intelligence and security, thereby exacerbating these fears in the process.

For their part, Nixon and Kissinger hoped that regional allies could help defend against these threats and make up for self-perceived U.S. weakness. However, in mid-1971 the application of the “Nixon Doctrine” in Latin America was not yet fully developed. True, the United States had found a willing and impatient ally in Brazil, but at this stage Washington neither delegated responsibility to Brasilia nor informed it of its own aggressive covert operations and psychological warfare against Allende. To the contrary, it neglected to share information with Brazil to such an extent that in July 1971 U.S. diplomats had to reassure the Brazilians that the United States was in no way poised to accommodate Allende.
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Copper,
Compañeros
, and Counterrevolution, July–December 1971

On 17 November 1971 Fidel Castro visited the southern Chilean city of Concepción and told crowds that a brilliant revolutionary future lay ahead. “The road that revolutionaries propose for humanity is rose colored!” he proclaimed. Yet, he also urged his audience to be realistic about the present. “In a revolution not everything is rose colored,” he warned. “We revolutionaries cannot speak of any rose-colored present … we revolutionaries can speak of a present of self-denial, a present of work, a heroic, sacrificial and glorious present.”
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Castro’s visit to Concepción was just one stop on a gargantuan tour that took him from Chile’s arid deserts in the north to its frozen glaciers in the south. However, this twenty-five-day visit was monumental not only in its duration and diversity; it also coincided with—and contributed toward—mounting political tension in Chile. As Castro observed for himself, the optimism that had characterized Salvador Allende’s first months as president was disappearing as nationalization disputes, complex political alliances, and counterrevolutionary forces began impeding his progress.

The stakes at play in implementing La Vía Chilena had been rising long before Castro’s plane touched down in Santiago in November 1971. In June, the murder of Chile’s former interior minister, Edmundo Pérez Zujovic, by a small extremist group had intensified fear of radicalism in the country, leading more than one foreign observer to warn that “sharp conflict” was on the horizon.
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Meanwhile, as the Unidad Popular pushed ahead with redistributing Chile’s wealth and nationalizing the country’s copper industry, it ran up against domestic and international hostility. At home, parliamentary opposition, paramilitary violence, rumors about military intervention in politics, and divisions within Allende’s own cabinet considerably undermined the chances of a peaceful democratic road to socialism.
Abroad, Santiago’s relations with Washington also deteriorated, and left-wing hopes for revolutionary change in Latin America were eclipsed by right-wing counterrevolutionary victories in the Southern Cone.

Overall, in fact, it seemed as if Allende’s domestic and international fortunes were increasingly intertwined. On the one hand, Allende’s external relations had a significant bearing on internal politics, most obviously in the shape of Fidel Castro’s extended visit to Chile and Washington’s reaction to the expropriation of private U.S. copper companies. On the other hand, domestic developments affected Chile’s international standing and foreign policy priorities more and more. Pivotally, by late 1971, the UP was keenly looking abroad to solve mounting economic difficulties. With dwindling foreign exchange reserves and a crippling external debt, Santiago’s leaders publicized their objectives and challenges worldwide in the hope of changing their enemies’ behavior and expanding their own trade relations. Privately, this meant reaching out—rather unsuccessfully—to the socialist bloc. Publicly, Chilean leaders sought moral support in the global South, arguing that what was occurring in their country was relevant to all Third World nations seeking independence and development, either by reflecting their aspirations or as a direct example. To this end, Allende personally traveled to Ecuador, Colombia, and Peru in August and September 1971, while his foreign minister, Clodomiro Almeyda, spoke at the United Nations General Assembly and a G77 summit in Lima, visited European capitals from East to West, and journeyed to Washington, Moscow, Algiers, and Havana.