Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (34 page)

In contrast to the Chileans, the U.S. administration was in a highly advantageous position. Washington did not need the negotiations in the same way as the Chileans did, instead regarding them as being a useful alternative to confrontation—a way of tying Chilean officials into a drawn-out process with no promises of concessions. In September and October, as Letelier had predicted, U.S. officials presented themselves as being highly amenable to starting talks, albeit under their own terms and conditions and safe in the knowledge that their interlocutors needed them more than the United States needed Chile.

Discussions about how to even begin negotiations were slow and tense. In early October, Chile’s Foreign Ministry responded to a U.S. note that insisted compensation be a prerequisite for opening bilateral talks by delivering an angry reply filled with frustration and recrimination, more characteristic of Altamirano’s stance than Letelier’s proposals. Specifically, it underlined Allende’s strict adherence to constitutional procedures, rejected any prospect of overturning Allende’s “excess profits” ruling (and hence Chilean diplomatic procedures), and accused the Nixon administration explicitly of “economic aggression” and “incomprehension and hostility.”
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Indeed, Davis was so worried that the note’s language could lead to open confrontation, he secretly (and successfully) begged UP representatives to consider rewording it.
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Ultimately, both Allende and the Nixon administration wanted to avoid open conflict.
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On the U.S. side, this meant lessening the prospect of angering domestic audiences on the eve of an election or alienating international public opinion and Allende’s Latin American and Third World sympathizers at the very moment that Washington was trying to extricate itself from the Vietnam War. On the Chilean side, it was about the very survival of La Vía Chilena as both an economic and political project. And despite intense opposition to even the prospect of sitting down and opening discussions with the Americans, not to mention growing fears of U.S. intervention in Chile, Allende had fewer and fewer alternatives.

At home, the Chilean government was urgently struggling to retain control of La Vía Chilena as a three-week truckers’ strike in October paralyzed the country. Although the UP blamed U.S. imperialism for fueling the strike, Washington does not seem to have directed the campaign, which was heterogeneous and, at least initially, not led by the parties the CIA was
funding.
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However, the financial support it offered to the private sector (to give it “confidence”)
was
undoubtedly channeled to strikers. Certainly, Santiago became flooded with dollars, and the 40 Committee acknowledged that its assistance to the private sector was helping to “dramatize” Allende’s challenges.
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The strike aside, U.S. diplomats were particularly keen to “reduce friction” between the UP’s two leading opposition parties, the National Party and Christian Democrat Party, with a view to improving their chances in Chile’s forthcoming congressional elections scheduled for March 1973.
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In this respect, they received promising signs of an evolving two-sided antigovernment front; as one CIA official called it, Chile faced a “good-guys-versus-bad-guys” battle.
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Washington also kept an eye on the military balance of power and escalating violence in the country, although it by no means controlled it. As a member of the Nationalist Party confided to a CIA officer, although it—and, by association and funds, the United States—had “financed and created” the right-wing Patria y Libertad, the paramilitary group had gotten “too big for its britches” and was out of control.
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Meanwhile, as far as the armed forces were concerned, the CIA continued to monitor plotters and had penetrated a group of them but refrained from pushing it toward any action.
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But it was not just the United States that was monitoring the escalating probability of some sort of violent confrontation in the country. In September, the PCCh’s leader, Luis Corvalán, had warned the Soviet ambassador in Santiago that a coup was a “real danger.”
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In fact, leaders of all political persuasions had been warning of civil war or a military coup for months.
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Speaking to university students at the end of August 1972, Allende had described himself as “horrified” by both prospects. “Although we would win … and we would have to win” a civil war, he ambiguously proclaimed, the president warned that “generations” would be scarred and Chile’s “economy, human coexistence and human respect” would be destroyed.
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Yet students, women, and paramilitary groups had continued to mobilize while sabotage attacks on the country’s infrastructure had multiplied.
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Then, during the October strike, factory workers formed what became known as
cordones industriales
(industrial belts) around cities to maintain Chile’s industrial output, to secure control of state-owned properties, and, crucially, to organize their military defense.

Overall, the October strike demonstrated very well how intertwined the UP’s economic, political, and military challenges were becoming, even if
Allende refused to accept the prospect of armed struggle. The battle to secure international economic assistance, which Letelier was so preoccupied with as a result of his vantage point in Washington, was also only one of two key factors that would determine Chile’s future. And with respect to the second—the ability to resist a violent confrontation with counterrevolutionary forces—the UP was even more divided as to what to do. The Cubans were particularly frustrated with the ill-defined nature of preparations for what they considered to be an inevitable armed confrontation. In a handwritten letter to Allende in September 1972, Castro underscored Cuba’s disposition to increase its assistance and its “willingness to help in any way.” “Though we are conscious of the current difficulties faced by Chile’s revolutionary process,” he wrote, “we are confident you will find the way to overcome these…. You can rely on our full cooperation.” Trying to evoke the image of Allende as a military commander, Castro signed off by sending the Chilean president a “fraternal and revolutionary salute.”
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When Allende ended the truckers’ strike by bringing the armed forces into government, he also took a huge risk in politicizing military leaders and making their cooperation central to La Vía Chilena’s survival. As the general secretary of the PCCh would later tell East Germany’s leader, Erich Honecker, the decision was first and foremost Allende’s although the Communist Party had to help him resist strong criticism of such a move from the PS. As a result of the move, however, Corvalán recounted Allende as being “optimistic” about the future and the prospect that the UP’s parties would do well in the March 1973 elections.
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In many respects, this move nevertheless ended the Chilean road to socialism and began the road to militarism.
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By this stage, those within the PS’s military apparatus had appreciated that coup-minded military leaders—
golpistas
—were influenced and inspired by their contemporaries in Brazil.
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To be sure, the
golpistas
increasingly believed the military had a vital role to play in defending Chile against Marxism and that political parties could ultimately only slow down the installation of a Marxist dictatorship, whereas the military could stop it altogether. Certainly, the leader of coup plotting in mid-1972, General Alfredo Canales, also subscribed to this idea, which was enshrined in the National Security Doctrine that Brazil’s military leaders adhered to. However, left-wing Chileans later admitted that the UP as a whole did not spend time studying the nature of thinking within military circles or the Chileanization of inter-American trends.
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Moreover, far Left groups of Chileans and the Cubans, both of which were closely monitoring the growing
threat of a possible coup, seem to have failed to grasp the extent—or even the relevance—of Brazil’s direct interest in, symbolism for, or relations with Chile’s armed forces.
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Chile, after all, was different, with the majority of the armed forces still considered to be constitutionally minded defenders of Chilean democracy.

However, Chile’s uniqueness was becoming increasingly blurred. Just as Chilean events had intensified the inter-American Cold War in the Southern Cone in 1970, regional developments were now spilling over into Chile. The UP’s relationship with revolutionary movements beyond its borders was, on at least one occasion, diplomatically unhelpful. On 15 August 1972, Argentine political prisoners belonging to the Ejército Revolucionario del Pueblo (Revolutionary Army of the People, or ERP) broke out of the “Rawson” jail in Chubut, Argentina’s southern province. Having made it to Trelew airport, they commandeered an Austral BAC 111 flight that had landed from Buenos Aires with ninety-two passengers on board and demanded that it fly them to Chile, where they then requested asylum.
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This provided the UP’s opposition with evidence of links to “foreign extremism” and, in addition, temporarily damaged Allende’s working relationship with Argentina when he resolved the crisis by sending the prisoners to Cuba.
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More broadly, as the last remaining safe haven for the Left in the Southern Cone, Chile was increasingly becoming a destination of curiosity, refuge, and solidarity for revolutionaries around the region. Reliable evidence also suggests that, in some cases, Latin American revolutionaries received armed training in Chilean camps.
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By the end of 1972, there were Uruguayan Tupamaros and approximately one thousand Brazilian left-wing exiles in Chile.
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In late 1972, the MIR’s leader, Miguel Enríquez, convened an ultrasecret meeting in southern Chile of the MIR, the Chilean branch of the ELN, the ERP, and the Tupamaros to discuss working together toward mutual revolutionary objectives. Primarily, the group, which would become known as the Junta Coordinadora Revolucionaria a year later, focused on how to respond to the counterrevolutionary offensive it faced so as to conserve forces for a future offensive of its own.
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It is unclear whether Allende had any knowledge of this, and from what we know of his relationship with the MIR by this point, he certainly would not have approved of its role in acting outside the UP in this way. Yet he
did
personally know and meet Latin American revolutionary leaders while serving as president, including Tupamaro leaders who joined his intimate Chilean and Cuban friends for weekends at “El Cañaveral,” La Paya’s weekend home.
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Indeed, however exaggerated it might have been, the opposition’s mantra that accused Allende of letting foreign revolutionaries into the country was not without some basis. Chile was increasingly becoming a theater of the inter-American Cold War on whose stage a whole cast of actors from the Southern Cone, the United States, Cuba, the Soviet Union (though far less so), and Europe (both East and West) assumed positions against each other and as sponsors of their divided Chilean allies. On one level, Frei warned the U.S. ambassador in Santiago about the “growth and arming of Socialist, Communist and Left extremist paramilitary brigades” and claimed that “Bolivian exiles, Cubans, Eastern Europeans and other leftist foreigners” were working for Chile’s intelligence services.
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On another level, the Cubans insisted that Allende had to take greater stock of the military balance of power within the country (and admit the necessity of bringing the militarily more prepared MIR on board to defend Allende’s presidency) to counteract a foreign-backed plot to overthrow him.

Ultimately, as the Chilean documentary maker Patricio Guzmán noted in his film of the same name, the October strike was the start of a decisive “Battle for Chile” that would end on 11 September 1973. The international dimensions of that battle, to date not fully understood, helped determine how it would develop, complementing, sponsoring, or inspiring the Chileans at the center of the story. As the United States funneled covert support to Allende’s opposition parties, Brazil’s military regime provided a model for
golpistas
within the armed forces, the Soviet Union stood on the sidelines reluctant to help the Communist Party solve Chile’s economic woes, and Havana continued to urge Allende to contemplate how he would militarily defend his government in the event of a coup. As he listened to this conflicting advice, Allende managed to regain control of the country by resolving the strike and relying on the military’s institutional support. Yet, as his former economics minister Pedro Vuskovic remarked, “the problem of power” remained “unresolved.”
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This was not merely a question of the government’s “power” vis-à-vis the opposition but rather of who was ultimately going to be in control of Chile’s revolutionary process. And as the government’s painstaking deliberations about how to approach the United States demonstrate, the UP coalition that had brought Allende to the presidency was unraveling. Given these circumstances, the president decided it was time for him to take matters into his own hands.

The international environment that Allende encountered two years after he assumed the presidency was unhelpful. By this point, the Chilean government acknowledged that détente did not apply to Latin America and that the United States still had ideological prejudices when it came to dealing with the region. As Letelier wrote to Almeyda, “It is … not a mystery that the White House’s preferences lie with the governments that favor private investment and attack any ‘Marxist’ shoot. The cases of Brazil and Mexico … do not need more commentary.” When asked for an analysis of the approach to Latin America that a second Nixon administration might take, Letelier concluded: