Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (48 page)

Meanwhile, Chile was consumed by the bitter regional—inter-American—manifestation of the global Cold War that abided by its own internal logic, chronology, dimensions, and cast of characters. Indeed, the United States’ reasons for opposing Allende become clearer if we look at them in the context of the Nixon administration’s broader approach to Latin America.
The separate concerted efforts it made to boost right-wing forces and curtail left-wing advances in the region during the early 1970s were part of a bigger strategy that was renewed as a result of Allende’s election, but which governed Washington’s policy toward Latin America throughout the Cold War era—and détente. At the core of this strategy was a belief that the United States had a “vital interest” in regaining political influence in its traditional sphere, recovering lost prestige among potential anticommunist allies, and ensuring that the “battle of ideas” between different modes of social and economic development was won by those essentially rooted in capitalism. By virtue of the instincts instilled by the Monroe Doctrine, which sought to exclude other world powers from the region, officials in Washington feared Latin American countries’ voluntary separation from the United States as threatening its own political, economic, and security interests by undermining its position as a superpower. As George Kennan had written in 1950, “If the countries of Latin America should come to be generally dominated by an outlook which views our country as the root of all evil and sees salvation only in the destruction of our national power, I doubt very much whether our general political program in other parts of the non-communist world could be successful.”
⁸
For a superpower with global aspirations, Latin America’s position was therefore pivotal. And in spite of superpower détente, U.S. policy makers’ frames of reference vis-à-vis Latin America consequently remained wedded to the concept of a “mortal struggle” against communism and regional examples set by the likes of Castro and Allende.

Nixon in particular seems to have seen history running along two parallel tracks for structuring society, economics, and politics. On one side lay capitalism, which could appear in the guise of liberal democracy or authoritarian dictatorship. On the other side lay communism of whatever stripe, be it a dictatorship of the proletariat or, as in the case of Allende, a pluralistic liberal democracy. As far as Nixon was concerned, there was little possibility of altering the pattern of logical progression along either track, which would ultimately lead Latin America (once “mature” enough) either toward the United States or toward Cuba and then the Soviet Union. Vernon Walters, whom Nixon admired, trusted, and listened to, later explained that “authoritarian rightist regimes always disappear eventually. They have never been able to perpetrate themselves. Communist regimes, once they seize power, never let it go.”
⁹
While the Nixon administration resigned itself to the fact that it could not turn back the clock when it came to the USSR and the PRC on the global stage and thus engaged in negotiations
with both powers, it was determined to try to help roll it back in Latin America, where it had more influence and could prevent the consolidation or the spread of communist control—“save Chile!” as Nixon put it.

Of course, the mistake the Nixon administration made in Chile was to disregard Allende’s unbending commitment to constitutional government and the anomaly of La Vía Chilena. However, it would be an error to suggest, as others have done, that the Nixon administration’s obsessive anticommunism led it to misinterpret Allende’s Chile completely. Unlike other right-wing coups in Latin America before 1973, the Chilean coup actually overturned a socialist revolutionary process in train rather than a reformist government. Chilean foreign policy
was
explicitly anti-imperialist (in the sense of being anti-American) to the extent that a Chilean Foreign Ministry report in April 1973 concluded that “the very existence and actions of the Chilean government are damaging to U.S. national interests in Chile, and … its example can have great influence on power relations in Latin America and on the Third World in general…. Chile succeeds Vietnam … in reinforcing and extending anti-imperialist action around the world.”
¹⁰
Moreover, those who led Chile in the years between 1970 and 1973 were part of a radicalized generation of Third World leaders who believed in not only the struggle for full political and economic independence but also the overhaul of world capitalism and world revolution. Allende was not hoodwinked by Castro or subverted by Cuban revolutionary and far left forces operating in Chile. Although he was a committed democrat stubbornly wedded to Chile’s proud constitutional history, he was deeply impressed by Che Guevara, invited Tupamaros and Cuban revolutionaries to his weekend home, and carried the rifle Fidel gave him to La Moneda on the day of the coup. The relations between Castro and Allende were a logical expression of both leaders’ ideals and the manifestation of more than a decade of intimate ties. Both shared a commitment to socialism and were also bound by the belief that the United States had exploited the region’s resources, thereby undermining development and independence.

Indeed, the real challenge to the United States’ regional—and, by extension, its global—influence came from the likes of Allende and Castro in the early 1970s, not the USSR. With the exception of Soviet-Cuban relations, the ideological component of Moscow’s lukewarm support for Chile during the Allende years stood in stark contrast to the USSR’s burgeoning economic ties with right-wing dictatorships and non-Marxist nationalists in the Americas. (By the late 1970s, for example, Argentina and Brazil were the first and second recipients of all Council of Mutual Economic Assistance
aid to the Third World.)
¹¹
More than a struggle against the Soviet Union—temporarily on hold in the age of superpower détente—the Nixon administration’s intervention in Chile was a result of an inter-American struggle against Latin Americans who themselves challenged that agenda. Like other revolutionary leaders, Allende went to Havana far more frequently and enthusiastically than he did to Moscow to seek support, recognition, and inspiration, joining a collection of democrats and dictators, civilians and military leaders, nationalists, revolutionaries, Soviet-style communists, and extremist guerrillas. Although the lessons these leaders took away from Cuba were as diverse as the nature of their goals to begin with, they all went to marvel at the only Latin American country to have wrestled with the United States and survived.

Meanwhile, three years after Allende’s election had awoken left-wing leaders to the hope of a different type of revolution—a benign version of the Soviet Union or indeed the Cuban reality, itself romanticized for its radical aspirations—Chile became an emblematic example of the failure of that possibility. As it did, its experience was bitterly debated and fought over. “Distant and small though it is,” one of Kissinger’s advisers told him in 1974, “Chile has long been viewed universally as a demonstration area for economic and social experimentation. Now it is in a sense in the front line of world ideological conflict.”
¹²

Given Chile’s size and the short period Allende was in office, the widespread impact that La Vía Chilena’s failure had around the world is surprising. I would argue that any explanation of why should include reference to the ambitious scope of Chilean foreign policy in the 1970s. Chile’s international relations during the Allende years were not merely imposed from outside but rather reflected Chilean government officials’ own world-views, their own efforts to reorient Santiago’s international standing, and the country’s extensive diplomatic outreach over the course of only three years in power. To a lesser extent, the same could also be said of the Chilean opposition’s simultaneous search for support in the United States and the Southern Cone and the way in which this galvanized those who were already predisposed to fear Allende and help overthrow him.

Quite simply, the three years of Allende’s presidency increased Chile’s visibility around the globe. While his government embraced the concept of “ideological pluralism,” it enthusiastically invited outsiders to look at Chile both as an example of socialism being attained by peaceful democratic means and as a model for what the global South could achieve by way of shaking off the shackles of dependency. Consequently, the UP put
Santiago forward to host UNCTAD III, Chile’s embassy in Washington ran press campaigns to raise awareness of the UP’s aims, and Allende called for Latin Americans to speak with “one voice” as a means of spurring others on to challenge the logic of regional political and economic relations. Later, the Chilean government asked for concrete assistance from Latin America, the Third World, and the Soviet bloc so as to survive what Chilean spokesmen conceptualized as a frontline battle in a worldwide struggle for social justice, equality, and liberty in the global South. In these instances, Chilean foreign policy was profoundly linked to La Vía Chilena’s progress at home, but rather than being a purely defensive strategy, it also contained essential offensive characteristics that drew attention to what was happening in Chile during the UP years. Indeed, like Castro before him, albeit through international forums rather than guerrilla struggles, Allende sought to safeguard his own revolution by changing the world as opposed to sacrificing his cause.

Although Allende was wildly optimistic about what he could achieve, his failure resonated loudly in the global South, where his government had previously attracted interest and sympathy. Indeed, one African editorial—itself testimony to Chilean foreign policy’s reach by 1973—described Allende’s overthrow as “a slap in the face of the third world.”
¹³
True, the Third World as a whole faced a large collection of different challenges—a few months earlier, in June 1973, for example, Chilean Foreign Ministry analysts had cataloged serious divisions over the Provisional Government of South Vietnam’s entry into the Non-Aligned Movement and a growing “crisis” within the G77 as a result of its heterogeneity and its members’ inability to overcome their own interests as just two difficult issues undermining harmonious relations between Third World countries.
¹⁴
However, Allende’s overthrow only a few days after the Non-Aligned Movement’s conference in Algeria appeared to spell out these wider Third World problems with clarity. Not only had the Chilean coup demonstrated the ongoing nature of the Cold War conflict in the global South, but Allende’s struggle to assert Chile’s economic independence through nationalization of Chile’s raw materials and the failure of the UP’s broader international agenda also underscored the obstacles involved in promoting systemic change at a national and international level.

With the majority of the former colonial areas of the world nominally independent by the 1970s and with Cold War tensions apparently diminishing, the Third World—to which Allende very much saw himself as belonging—had focused increasingly on guaranteeing economic security
and independence for its member states as a means to definitive political power. Within this context, Chile had contributed to the radicalization of the Non-Aligned Movement and the divisions within the G77 during the UP years. It had also played a key role in laying the groundwork for what would, after the Algiers conference in 1973, be the global South’s demand for a New International Economic Order (NIEO) in 1974. And yet, by the 1980s, the NIEO had collapsed amid divisions in the Third World, the intransigence of developed industrial nations, and a staggering debt crisis—echoing many of the difficulties that Chile had faced a decade before. Indeed, Allende’s own efforts to assert independence and bring about revolutionary change—in Chile and abroad—reflected some of the Third World’s essential dilemmas. Aside from the resistance to serious renegotiation of the basic principles and structure of international economic and political relations in the global North, it had to cope with differences within the global South itself.

Moreover, Santiago’s perspective during the 1970s exemplifies a central contradiction that underlay much of the Third Worldist project with which Allende identified, namely the simultaneous demand for independence and the request for developmental assistance. In
The Wretched of the Earth
, Frantz Fanon heralded the moment when colonial states asserted independence and demanded that past exploitation be compensated: “Colonialism and imperialism have not paid their score when they withdrew their flags and their police forces from our territories,” he wrote; “when we hear the head of a European state declare with his hand on his heart that he must come to the help of the poor underdeveloped peoples, we do not tremble with gratitude. Quite the contrary; we say to ourselves: ‘It’s a just reparation which will be paid to us.’ … The Third World does not mean to organize a great crusade of hunger against the whole of Europe. What it expects from those who for centuries have kept it in slavery is that they will help it to rehabilitate mankind, and make man victorious everywhere, once and for all.”
¹⁵
A decade after Fanon wrote from the vantage point of Algeria’s struggle for independence, Allende demanded that Chile be accorded the right to claim back excessive profits, but in the absence of ready alternatives, he needed Washington to secure an easy passage toward revolution by granting credits and approval. As he put it, his rebellion was reasonable and just, and Chile was owed compensation for past exploitation, but he continually appealed for understanding that was simply not there. Moreover, his last-minute trip to Moscow and stalemated bilateral negotiations with Washington in the last year of his presidency
demonstrated that, despite efforts to rejuggle Chile’s international relations, Santiago was ultimately still dependent on the vertical North-South relationships that the UP had hoped to set to one side in favor of South-South ties and ideological pluralism. Even if Washington had extended détente to the global South (rather than merely attempting to limit the USSR’s involvement in the Third World) and even if the Soviet Union had not backed away from risking its relations with the United States to help sustain a revolutionary process it increasingly believed would fail, this essential dilemma would not have been solved.