Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (28 page)

This emerging role for Brazil notwithstanding, President Médici’s comments to Nixon in December 1971 illustrate that the battle for control of South America was far from won. The revolutionary tide may have been paused, but Fidel Castro’s visit to Chile had equally been a major step toward Cuba’s formal reintegration into continental affairs that proved Washington’s efforts to isolate the island had failed. In mid-December, Peru (backed by Chile) officially proposed that the OAS reassess its policy toward Castro. Pointing to changing Latin American dynamics, they argued that ostracizing Cuba was becoming increasingly senseless, something that Brazil and the United States stood poised to resist.
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Although the Peruvian initiative failed on this occasion, friends and foes considered Cuba’s return to the inter-American “family” only a matter of time—Cuba’s isolation in the hemisphere was “crumbling,” as one sympathetic observer noted.
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Crucially, however, the precise character of the inter-American family and who controlled its destiny were increasingly being fought over. And although multiple actors were involved, Chile more than ever seemed to be an indicator of what the future would hold.

Détente Unmasked, January–October 1972

A year after Allende’s presidency began, he spoke enthusiastically about signs that the world was undergoing some sort of profound transformation. “The American empire is showing signs of crisis,” he proclaimed. “The dollar has become nonconvertible. Apparently, the definitive victory of the Vietnamese people is drawing near.” More important, “The countries of Latin America [were] speaking the same language and using the same words to defend their rights.”
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Yet the transformative trends in international affairs in the early 1970s were obviously far more complicated than Allende suggested.

In many ways, the world was changing dramatically but not necessarily in the manner in which he implied. In Latin America, Allende’s notion of “one” voice that seemingly excluded Brazil and Bolivia and unsatisfactorily lumped the immensely different economic and political nations of Chile, Peru, Colombia, Argentina, and Cuba together was a discordant one at best. President Médici had noted Brazil’s own peculiar position in Latin America when he met Nixon in Washington. Suggesting that Brazil and the United States were in the same boat when it came to being non-Spanish speakers in the Americas, he admitted that he had problems “dealing with and understanding the Spanish-American mentality.”
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Beyond questions of unity and language, it was also not just the United States that was in crisis. In 1970, Fidel Castro had had to acknowledge publicly that the pace of socialist revolution in Cuba would be slower than first thought, and Havana’s leaders had henceforth been undergoing a decisive transition toward a Soviet-style institutional and economic reform as a means of shoring up past failures. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union’s own economic strains led it to eagerly embrace superpower détente. Indeed, despite Washington’s financial difficulties and the United States’ role in Vietnam, Moscow was actually looking to improve trade with the West as a viable solution for its own shortages.

So where did Chile’s revolutionary process fit within this picture? Could it avoid ideological differences from determining U.S.-Chilean relations? Did détente and global economic upheavals in the early 1970s offer Santiago the opportunity that Allende and many of his closest foreign policy advisers hoped? The short answer to these latter two questions is no. It was in 1972—the very year that Nixon visited Moscow and Beijing—that the Chileans came to realize this and to acknowledge that détente actually closed doors instead of opening them. Pivotally, the Soviet Union was increasingly reluctant to let a Latin American revolutionary process spoil its new understanding with the United States, especially given indications of the UP’s growing economic and political difficulties at home. And where the United States was concerned, there remained little chance of any meaningful compromise with the Chileans or the Cubans. Indeed, on his return from Beijing, Nixon sent Secretary of the Treasury John Connally to Latin America for private “post-summit consultations” with six of the region’s presidents in which he explicitly delivered the message that détente with Beijing and Moscow would
not
extend to Havana.
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When it came to publicly affirming that Latin America was an exception to the new rules of the game, however, Washington officials appeared more reticent. While the United States’ ambassador to the OAS, Joseph Jova, succinctly explained that “Cuba is not China,” State Department officials obfuscated when answering broader questions about the double standards Nixon was applying to Mao or Brezhnev and Castro. According to the State Department’s Robert Hurwitch, “consistency” was “a simplistic basis for addressing this complex question.”
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Of course, a more accurate answer would have been to admit that beyond superpower relations and Nixon’s opening to China, the inter-American Cold War—and the ideological battle at the heart of it—was still very much alive. As Allende’s ambassador in Beijing noted at the beginning of the year, détente “arbitrarily de-ideologized” the language of international politics but did not fundamentally change the substance of world affairs.
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Although détente would take years to unravel at a superpower level, its failures as a framework for solving a global ideological struggle between communism and capitalism—or even pausing it—were also already unmasked in Latin America when Nixon was touching down in China. As Letelier would acknowledge in mid-1972, the so-called “end of the Cold War” that he himself had championed only a few months before did not seem to apply to Chile; it merely changed the way U.S. interventionism occurred.
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Letelier was right in the sense that the Nixon administration adopted flexible tactics to destabilize Allende’s presidency in an effort to avoid criticism for doing so. Yet, in 1972, this flexibility continued to be tested as the costs of its interference against Allende mounted. Key to Washington’s worries was the Chilean president’s growing prestige within a Third World chorus that demanded changes to the global economy and assurances that the United States would not intervene in other countries’ internal affairs. As Chile and the United States assumed diametrically opposed positions in the North-South battles of the early 1970s, Allende told thousands of delegates who gathered in Santiago for UNCTAD III in April and May that the Chileans were not only supporting the quest for restructuring the international economic and political order but practicing it with “deep conviction.”
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And, in this respect, the increasingly obvious battle against private U.S. companies and Washington over questions central to the North-South debate, such as economic sovereignty and its external debt burden, was tarnishing the United States’ already beleaguered Third World reputation.

The coincidence of Chile’s rising position in the Third World and the United States’ Cold War ideological antipathy toward Allende’s government led Washington to speed up its reappraisal of its position in Latin America. By early 1972, the United States and Brazil were making considerable headway in their new offensive in the Southern Cone and, as a result, the inter-American Cold War was now increasingly being channeled into Chile as counterrevolutionary trends gained on neighboring states. But as far as the Nixon administration was concerned, this still left the prospect that regional powers outside the Southern Cone such as Peru and Mexico could be tempted toward a Chilean model. Signs that the Cubans—and to a lesser extent, the Soviets—were interested in working with these non-Marxist nationalist states also pushed U.S. policy makers toward efforts to win them back. As Nixon had said in November 1970, he wanted to “save” Latin America and, in the end, it was agreed that to do this, it did not matter that Mexico or Peru traded with Moscow or befriended Castro and were vociferous
tercermundistas
. As long as they were not Marxist, could be divided from Chile, ultimately depended economically on the United States, and were open to capitalist investment, Washington would try to win back its influence and improve bilateral relations with them. In Nixon’s language, this was what it meant to act “properly.” It was also the type of “attitude” that he had advocated back in 1967 when he visited South American countries. Five years later, his administration now saw its task
as being to segregate the global South and inoculate nationalists against the temptation of adopting “improper” revolutionary solutions to their development needs.

In reality, the Nixon administration had little to worry about when it came to the prospect that Allende’s efforts to build a Latin American or Third World coalition would challenge the United States’ influence and power. Aside from Latin America’s discordant voices, ninety-six nations within the G77 continued to disagree about how to approach developed countries and what they wanted to achieve. For most of them—including Chile—the absence of obvious alternatives to dependency on the United States still made American credits and developmental assistance ultimately necessary and desirable. However, as 1972 began, and as the UP continued to explore means of diversifying Chile’s economy, Allende had not yet reconciled himself to this fact. Indeed, at least at the very beginning of the year, the shape of détente and what it meant for Latin America were still mysterious, and the global economy’s durability looked shaky enough to suggest it could be reformed to give the Third World a more representative position within it.

In the wake of Fidel Castro’s visit to Chile and the state of emergency Allende had been forced to call in December 1971, the UP found it increasingly difficult to reconcile its election promises of a better future with evidence of a mounting economic crisis and growing political chaos. In early 1972, East German diplomats in Havana reported back to Berlin with information that the Cubans had decided to refrain from too much open discussion about Castro’s Chilean trip because of their “reservations and doubts” about Chile’s revolutionary process. According to these reports, the Cuban leadership was especially concerned about three specific issues: the extent to which strategic goals could be accomplished by democratic means alone, the appropriateness and relative success of Allende’s tactics for dealing with the growing power of the extreme Right, and the prospect that Chile’s armed forces might end up being referees in a future conflict between the UP and its opposition.
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Indeed, the news of the Cubans’ “great anxiety” when it came to Chile appears to have filtered through the socialist bloc—as Polish Foreign Ministry analysts noted in early 1972, their Cuban comrades were giving all the help and support to the Chileans they could, but they had also begun to criticize the Allende government’s indecision.
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On the other side of the political spectrum, ex-president Eduardo Frei was describing Chilean democracy as walking along a “razor’s edge.” As he told the U.S. ambassador in Santiago, he not only doubted that Allende desired to govern democratically but also now believed the president would be unable to do so.
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The far Left’s growing calls to overthrow constitutional restraints and right-wing paramilitary violence certainly threatened the very concept of a peaceful transition to socialism, and throughout 1972 the UP’s political opponents also blocked government proposals in Congress, impeached government ministers, and launched vigorous media campaigns to denounce Allende’s growing economic failings.
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True, these financial difficulties were partly the result of the UP’s policies. But Allende now also faced what Ambassador Orlando Letelier regarded as a “true economic war” with Washington.
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Time to carry out La Vía Chilena did not seem to be on Allende’s side.

As the UP’s leaders argued over what to do, Allende had to cast a deciding vote. In some areas, such as his approach to the MIR’s provocative stance outside the government and Cuba’s increasingly controversial role in Chile, he took a firmer line. But when it came to dealing with the United States, he failed to impose a clear direction to solve the inner wrangling within his government, preferring instead to wait and see what Chile could achieve through international forums. At least at the beginning of 1972, policy makers still generally had the impression that the global correlation of forces was relatively favorable and that this offered opportunities for promoting worldwide systemic change as a means of neutralizing the United States’ threat. It was in this context that the president placed his hopes on what might be achieved at UNCTAD III, which met in Santiago in April and May 1972. However, Allende’s depiction of his domestic battles as a reflection of a broader international Third World struggle for emancipation did not hide the fact that the foundations he needed to propel both his foreign and domestic goals forward were steadily eroding.

In February 1972, government leaders had met for the Unidad Popular’s national convention in El Arrayán. There, they called for unity and what the Communist Party termed “intensified political and ideological warfare against the enemy.”
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Essentially, however, the Arrayán declaration failed to solve underlying differences that had emerged within the coalition about how to explain or overcome mounting opposition. On the one hand, the PCCh blamed “ultra leftist … excesses” for provoking the enemy, by implication pointing to the PS and the MIR.
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On the other hand, the PS increasingly regarded the immediate overthrow of Chile’s bourgeois capitalist
system as being the only way to construct socialism.
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It therefore fell to Allende to decide between the two, and he tended to side with the Communists rather than his own party. Indeed, at the PS’s National Plenum at the beachside resort of Algarrobo the same month, Allende insisted that “the shortest road to qualitative transformations” did not involve “the destruction of constitutionality” but rather an effort to work though it to convince Chile’s majority that socialism was desirable, in his words, “through revolutionary action, example, effectiveness.”
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