Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (47 page)

So what of the United States and its responsibility for toppling Allende’s Chile? As it turned out, U.S. intervention in the final months of Allende’s presidency was a messy reaction to events on the ground rather than a simplistic tale of the White House masterminding the Chilean coup. In a conversation at the end of 1973, Kissinger remarked to President Houari Boumedienne of Algeria that the world had given the United States “too much credit” for the coup that overthrew Allende.
²¹⁶
And contrary to the accusations that circulated after the coup, and much of the literature available since 11 September 1973, this assessment now seems to be reasonably accurate. The Nixon administration had certainly willed a coup to take place and had been frustrated by the slow progress of coordinating military action. However, question marks as to where the United States would fit into the equation of any successful military intervention had overshadowed policy formulation right up until the last minute. It is therefore not surprising that historians and commentators have agonized over the United States’ direct responsibility for the coup, considering the fragmented direction of U.S. policy at this crucial moment in Chilean politics.

However, as it turns out, what we know now about the United States’ involvement in Chile is even less palatable than a story of Nixon and Kissinger working alone to overthrow Allende. As we have seen, once a military coup or the fall of Allende’s government seemed a decided possibility, the whole Nixon administration took calculated decisions to help a future repressive military dictatorship survive and consolidate its hold over its citizens. Washington’s leaders also enthusiastically propounded a hemispheric support system between similar dictatorships, something that was eagerly taken up and encouraged by like-minded strongmen in the Southern
Cone. And more than any smoking gun that proves U.S. responsibility for the coup itself, contingency planning before it took place and the actions that followed tell a far more uncomfortable story of willing complicity throughout Washington’s foreign policy-making establishment in securing the junta’s subsequent dictatorship and encouraging the formation of a regional right-wing network.

The story of Cuba’s growing frustration, despair, and impotency in Chile before the coup took place is also complicated. As the Cubans who participated in the events suggested years later, had Havana been in charge in 1973 (or even earlier for that matter), it would have made different—implicitly, better—strategic decisions. In what Castro perceived to be a zero-sum game between revolution and reaction, Havana advocated a life-and-death struggle that, however costly, would have eventually led Chile and Latin America closer to socialism. While Allende preferred to symbolically sacrifice himself at La Moneda instead of mobilizing his supporters to regroup and then launch a resistance that would almost certainly have led to a bloody civil war, the Cubans were thus willing to risk the consequences of fighting back. It is impossible to tell what would have happened had Cubans been able to change the course of Chilean events. More effective resistance to the coup may well have delayed the counterrevolutionary onslaught as Havana hoped, and Allende alive may well have been more important to the resistance than dead, but the result of civil war would also have been scores of casualties and destruction—probably even more than the junta subsequently unleashed. As Merino’s message made clear on 9 September, those who prepared to crush Chile’s democracy believed the coup they launched would be a matter of life and death, and they were not prepared to take any chances.

Indeed, rather than dissuading the coup leaders from acting, the growing possibility of a left-wing combative force, the specter of Cuban involvement in preparing it, and the prospect of an impending showdown radicalized Chilean society and propelled the armed forces to act. To be sure, there were only 120 Cubans in Santiago on 11 September, not the thousands that the right-wing media had warned of. But the military’s targeting of the Cuban Embassy and all foreigners, factories, and poor neighborhoods, together with the ruthlessness with which it did so, clearly illustrates the power of wildly exaggerated fears regarding what the Cubans and left-wing revolutionaries from the Southern Cone could achieve.

A concerned scholar once asked me whether my researching the details of Cuba’s role in Chile meant that I thought the United States was justified in destabilizing Chilean democracy. Having spent decades uncovering the many wrongs of U.S. interventionism in the Third World, he wanted to know whether by writing about Cuban arms transfers and military training of the Left I was condoning U.S. covert operations, those who celebrated the bombing of La Moneda, and the violent repression in the years that followed. This question, together with fears expressed by some who shared their memories with me for the purpose of this book, has troubled me over the past few years. My immediate answer was (and is) a resounding no. However, beyond this, I answered him by saying that history should never be regarded as a zero-sum game—that understanding the role that one side played in the complex inter-American Cold War should not preclude investigation of another. Or to put it another way, to catalog one lot of wrongdoing should not automatically lead to us into the trap of thinking that the other side was passive and blameless or vice versa. Not only is this not what history is about—the past is mostly far more nuanced than a simple battle between good and evil—but to omit the role of the Cubans and the Chileans they worked with is actually to do an injustice to what they believed in and what both groups fought for. Just as many argue that the story of U.S. intervention in Chile should be “exposed,” therefore, the Cubans’ and the Chileans’ story—their “agency,” as academics like to call it—deserves rescuing, inconvenient as some of the details of Havana’s role in particular might be for those on the Left who would prefer now to pretend it had never taken place. Not making an effort to tell
all
sides of the story and how they related to each other makes it difficult to fully understand what happened. And inexcusable as the crimes committed by those who seized power on 11 September 1973 might be, examining all possible dimensions of the past is part and parcel of what history is all about.

As it turns out, there is enough responsibility for what happened in
Chile to be spread around—about which more in a moment. First and foremost, however, my interest in writing the international history of Allende’s Chile was not to add one more voice to the historiography of blame. Since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the New Cold War History has thankfully moved away from traditional narratives that focused on cyclical debates about whose
fault
the conflict was and has moved on to examining questions of why and how it took place.
¹
While scholarship on the Cold War in Latin America has so far tended to lag behind historiography of the ideological struggles that dominated other parts of the world in the latter part of the twentieth century, it has also begun to move beyond the blame game to explore other dimensions of the struggle.
²
This has a lot to do with growing generational distance from the events that took place, which means that historians approaching this topic now do not feel compelled to refight battles of the past. But it is also thanks to new sources that are available for scholars to consult, which allow for a multidimensional and comprehensive examination of the past.

For my part, I wanted to use these new sources to get to the heart of what shaped the intense struggles that consumed Chile, the Southern Cone, and the inter-American system in the early 1970s. Primarily, I was interested in understanding who the main protagonists of that conflict were, what they believed in and fought over, how the ideological struggles they engaged in evolved, and with what consequences. Yet, equally, I was keen to explore them with a view to examining broader questions, such as what détente meant to parts of the global South, how Third World revolutionary states dealt with the outside world during the Cold War years, and the extent to which this coincided with North-South divides in international politics.

Like so many other views from the Third World, the international history of Allende’s Chile that emerged is a rather depressing story. The Cold War in Latin America, as the historian Gilbert Joseph has argued, “was rarely cold.”
³
And Chile’s story ended up being no exception, despite what many Chileans—Allende among them—believed before 11 September 1973. Yet the internationalization of Chilean politics during the early 1970s provides a fascinating snapshot of the inter-American Cold War, those who shaped it, and the way in which allies and antagonists within it interacted with each other. As well as shedding light on diplomatic negotiations and covert arms deliveries, on the disputes
between
revolutionaries as much as the battles they fought with their adversaries, it also shows how actors in the South experienced Cold War ideological struggles at regional and
global levels. In this respect, as I suggested in the introduction, focusing on the intersection between bilateral relations and the multilateral arenas in which they were played out helps us to get to the bottom of the dynamic historical processes that unfolded.

In exploring these dimensions, this book examined two main issues: the impact that international actors had on Chile, and that country’s significance for what occurred beyond its borders. Beginning with the latter of these two issues, it is quite clear that the rise and fall of La Vía Chilena had a profound impact both in Latin America and much further afield as well. Alone, the sizable interest that Allende’s presidency and his overthrow sparked worldwide, not to mention the dynamic nature of Chile’s foreign relations during this period, makes it an interesting story to tell. But the apparent disconnect between it and the history of the relaxation of superpower tensions, the United States’ opening to China, and European détente during the same period make it all the more intriguing. When Chileans talk of the early 1970s, they speak of their county’s most “ideological years.” Yet this was precisely when ideological conflict was supposed to have been abandoned—or at least recalibrated and postponed—in favor of pragmatism and realpolitik.

So how do we make sense of this apparent contradiction? By the 1970s, there were different ideas around the globe about what the Cold War was and how it should be fought. As a result of the varied experiences of living—and for a whole new generation, growing up—with the Cold War for over two decades, the ideological conflict at its core between different varieties of communism and capitalism was far more diffuse, fragmented, and global. For one, developments had splintered the Cold War parameters of earlier decades, adding new ingredients along the way. These included—but were not confined to—decolonization and the emerging North-South divide, the Cuban revolution, the Sino-Soviet split, and divisions over Vietnam. Beyond these issues, the Cold conflict was also being fought by a far greater array of ideologically driven warriors than it had been in the immediate aftermath of World War II. When General Médici traveled to Washington in 1971, it was the Brazilian president more than Nixon who drove the conversation about the anticommunist agenda in the Southern Cone. And when Castro went to Poland shortly after Nixon’s visit in June 1972, he denounced détente and the very concept of peaceful coexistence with U.S. imperialism in no uncertain terms. So much so, in fact, that his hosts privately derided him as being “aggressive,” “demagogic,” and “primitive.” Castro simply did not understand the “significance” of East-West negotiations
or grasp what was at stake, they lamented—he believed “that everything is good and important if it directly contributes to the revolutionary struggle” and therefore failed to take “consequences and other perspectives” into account.
⁴

In a sense, Castro and his hosts were both right. For the Soviet bloc, there was a lot to be gained from détente in the shape of arms negotiations, security, trade, and a sense of legitimacy. And Castro’s commitment to revolutionary upheaval, his rejection of armistices, and his insistence on a fight to the death with imperialism
was
extreme. But Castro was also right to be worried about his island’s position within the game of détente and what this meant for his efforts to survive as a revolutionary leader only ninety miles away from the opposing camp’s superpower that his principal backers halfway across the globe now seemed so eager to placate.
⁵
Would the Cuban revolution’s future be negotiated over his head as it had been during the Cuban Missile Crisis? Would the Soviet bloc withdraw its support from its allies? What did this mean for the cause of revolutionary struggle in the Third World to which Castro’s regime was so inextricably tied? As Castro’s bewildered East European allies observed, “Cuba’s full strength is its attachment to principles: that it will not compromise … sometimes irritates even friends and allies.” If Cuba gave up this position it would have to give up what to its leaders and its population was most important, its role in Latin America and its global ambitions going beyond its size or the opportunities normally available to a small island. Havana could therefore not bargain for concessions from the United States in the same way that the Soviets and the PRC believed they could. As the U.S. representative to the OAS simply put it, “Cuba is not China.”
⁶

Neither was Chile. Allende’s hope of benefiting from détente by engaging in the policies and language of ideological pluralism fell on deaf ears in Washington. When Allende’s Chile then ended up trying to play the Cold War at a superpower level, the Soviets were not interested either. Indeed, Allende’s Chile seemed to be excluded at every turn—“East-West rapprochement had restricted peace to the prosperous countries of the world,” noted a commentator from India, another southern nation that was seemingly neglected within the context of détente.
⁷