Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (3 page)

BEFORE EMBARKING
on an examination of the evolution of the Chilean chapter of the inter-American Cold War, it is perhaps worth pausing to explain why an alternative perspective on Allende’s presidency and the Cold War is necessary. First and foremost, the issue is one of “decentering” the story and viewing it from different perspectives and then weaving these together in one integrated narrative. As Hal Brands has argued, what he sees as “Latin America’s Cold War” consisted of “a series of overlapping conflicts” that “drew together local, regional, and global conflicts.”
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Moreover, as Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough have urged, rather than “forcing the rich diversity of Latin American politics into a Cold War template,” we need to “use that diversity to provide a framework helpful in understanding the indigenous origins of the Latin American Cold War.”
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While I would argue that the United States’ place within this diverse tapestry in the Americas has to be included on account of its highly consequential relationship with the region, this is an important observation. In the past, formulaic research centering on U.S. interventions in various Latin American countries has not only tended to retrospectively give the United States the power to dominate Latin America’s history but has also resulted in a rather sporadic crisis-driven narrative of inter-American affairs.
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Or as one historian recently noted, for far too long a Latin American event seemed to
count among Cold War scholars only when “high-level American government policymakers participated in its planning and execution.”
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The attention that the rise and fall of La Vía Chilena has received is no exception. As far as there is an existing
international
history of Allende’s presidency, it has been taken over by a crowded field of studies that began appearing in the 1970s regarding Nixon and Kissinger’s intervention in Chile first to prevent Allende’s inauguration and then to bring down his government—what has become a cliché of U.S. interventionism during the Cold War. While there is now a broad consensus that the United States cannot be held exclusively responsible for Allende’s failings and subsequent overthrow (or death), the extensive declassification of U.S. documents from the late 1990s onward led historians to eagerly reexamine the details of Washington’s covert operations in Chile in the hope of finding evidence either to support or to reject this conclusion.
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Overall, however, a narrow historiography of blame for Allende’s downfall has shaped discussion with particular emphasis on (re)exposing Henry Kissinger’s individual role and his desire to subvert democracy.
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Two of the most recent works in this regard are Jonathan Haslam’s
The Nixon Administration and the Death of Allende’s Chile: A Case of Assisted Suicide
(2005) and Kristian Gustafson’s
Hostile Intent: U.S. Covert Operations in Chile, 1964–1974
(2007). Reflecting the longevity of a polarized debate, they actually reach different conclusions about U.S. responsibility for the Chilean coup, with the former arguing Nixon and Kissinger were individually responsible for masterminding it (albeit within a conducive atmosphere created by Allende’s “suicidal” economic and political policies) and the latter exaggerating the extent to which they were not. Haslam’s suggestion that in mid-1973 Nixon and Kissinger sidestepped the CIA and used the Pentagon’s contacts with the Chilean military to embark on an ultrasecret operation to kill off Allende’s ailing government is perhaps the most original new contribution to the “who did it?” debate.
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Nevertheless, the details of his argument—drawn from anonymous interviews—are questionable and unpersuasive. For example, Haslam suggests that Nixon’s confidant, the U.S. defense attaché in Paris and soon to be deputy director of the CIA, General Vernon Walters, was in Chile on the day of the coup, personally helping the Chilean armed forces to mount it from his hotel room in Santiago. Yet Walters’s personal diaries show that he was not in Santiago at the time.
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More important, it seems to me that focusing on Nixon and Kissinger’s skullduggery or CIA machinations in Chile tells us only one part of one
side of a far more interesting and complex story. Decentering even the United States’ side of the story alone reveals much more, particularly when it comes to explaining motivations for U.S. policy, the process by which it occurred, and its consequences. As the historian Jussi Hanhimäki has asserted, the key is to draw on the growing wealth of declassified documentary material to place Kissinger’s role, in particular, in context. He thus argues that “the important story” is “why certain policy options prevailed over others, how the implementation of policy functioned, and why it produced positive or negative (long- and short-term) results.”
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In this respect, a couple of things stand out immediately. First, consensus turns out to have been more frequent in the Nixon administration when it came to Chile and Latin America than has previously been acknowledged. Although they disagreed on priorities and tactics at various points between 1970 and 1973, the president, Kissinger, Secretary of State William Rogers, the U.S. State Department’s Bureau of Inter-American Affairs, the Defense Department, and the Treasury Department
all
opposed Allende and wanted him removed from office. In an attempt to find Kissinger guilty, Nixon’s role as the principal guiding force behind the United States’ renewed Cold War Latin American policies in late 1970 has also been underplayed. Meanwhile, the State Department’s contribution to the formulation and execution of policy has been misrepresented as the moderate and moral wing of U.S. foreign policy making. As the declassified record demonstrates, Secretary Rogers showed no sympathy or tolerance for Allende or La Vía Chilena. And as chapter 7 details, interagency contingency planning for a successor regime over a month before the Chilean coup took place reveals much about who led policy as well as what lay at the heart of the protagonists’ “hostile intent.” Rather than merely opposing Allende by 1973, the Nixon administration as a whole—State Department officials, CIA operatives, Kissinger and Nixon included—had developed a clear idea of what it wanted to happen in Chile: it
wanted
authoritarian rule patterned on Brazil’s dictatorship and a war against the “Left” as the only remedy to reverse the damage done by Allende’s presidency. Even more striking are decision makers’ fears that Chilean military leaders were not Brazilian enough, either in terms of their readiness for repressing the Left or in their ideological sense of a mission. Not only does this demonstrate with clarity exactly what they wanted to achieve, but it also shows how ignorant they were of those whom they were pinning their hopes on—who turned out to be far more ideological and violent than they could have dreamed of. Partly as a result of these misguided notions, there
was also broad agreement in Washington about the need to encourage Chilean military leaders who eventually toppled Allende’s government to seek help from other regional dictatorships and to cooperate with them to impose a new counterrevolutionary order in the Southern Cone.

This broader regional dimension was the second factor to leap off the page when I began my research into the U.S. side of Chile’s international relations during the Allende years. To date, the story of U.S. intervention against Allende has been treated as
the
case study of the Nixon administration’s Latin American policy. In fact, it is generally agreed that Nixon and Kissinger were “indifferent” to the region and that they did not regard it as “important” beyond their general preference for military leaders and disdain for expropriation.
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Yet a mountain of newly available documentation shows that this was simply not the case. True, Washington officials’ animosity toward Allende was based on general calculations about the impact he could have on the global balance of power, but Allende was more than an isolated threat in a geostrategic superpower contest.
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He was viewed in a regional context to such an extent that after September 1970 Chile directly shaped a new phase of the United States’ Cold War agenda in Latin America. At one point, Kissinger’s chief aide on Latin American affairs even went so far as to warn that the region was a potentially greater test of the Nixon administration’s foreign policy than Southeast Asia.
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Latin America’s location was the key to this concern. After all, this was the United States’ backyard and an area that was commonly perceived as underpinning its superpower status. It was also an area where Washington’s prestige and political influence were particularly weak in 1970. And it was precisely because Chile had magnified the United States’ deteriorating regional position that Allende’s election was treated with such alarm. Protecting corporate economic interests was not the main issue at stake here—the Nixon administration did not even properly address this problem vis-à-vis Allende’s election until early 1971. The Soviet Union was also not believed to be on the verge of imminently taking over the United States’ sphere of influence. Instead, it was internal developments within Latin America and Chile’s importance for them that were considered ominous. Allende’s election starkly showed that those within the United States’ traditional sphere of influence were rejecting Washington’s prescriptions of economic and political development and opting for socialism, albeit “irresponsibly,” as Kissinger put it.
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More important, considering the climate of upheaval in the inter-American system, their actions and anti-imperialist
agenda threatened to be particularly catching. U.S. policies therefore focused on stemming the tide and on winning back political influence throughout the hemisphere. To argue that the Nixon administration subsequently developed a sophisticated or comprehensive strategy toward Latin America would be an exaggeration. But not to examine U.S. policy toward Chile in the context of its reenergized approach to regional affairs after Allende’s election is to fail to get to the core of its intervention in Chile.

Latin American sources also now show that the United States did not act alone but worked with regional actors and was sometimes dragged into further involvement in inter-American affairs by them. Brazil’s military regime was the United States’ most obvious ally in this respect and was often far more concerned, zealous, and impatient about combating Castro and Allende than the Americans. Working alongside right-wing leaders in Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina, the Brazilians were key players in the increasingly “Latin Americanized” counterrevolutionary crusade that came to dominate the Cold War in the Southern Cone by the mid-1970s. Far from being pawns of the United States, these right-wing leaders that had once relied on U.S. funding and support to reach their objectives would increasingly take ownership of the Cold War in the era of realpolitik and détente, overtaking the United States’ own anticommunist mission and standing as powerful alternatives to Cuba’s revolutionary example.

So what of the other side of the story—the side that Washington so vehemently opposed, namely Castro’s Cuba and Allende’s Chile? In contrast to the detailed account provided in Piero Gleijeses’s groundbreaking history of U.S. and Cuban “conflicting missions” in Africa, the story of the intense competition between these two countries closer to home has not been adequately told.
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Although far more is known about bilateral U.S.-Cuban relations, we are “desperately lacking a study of Cuba’s role in Latin America,” as the Mexican-based historian Daniela Spenser recently lamented. This is partly due to the lack of archival sources in Havana, but oral history can help considerably to begin righting this situation. Fortunately, the Cubans who participated in Latin American events during these years were keen to step forward and tell their stories to me, conscious that because of their silence their roles were being distorted or ignored.
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Havana’s involvement in Chile during the Allende years clearly needs clarification. On one hand, the Cubans have been depicted as subverting
Chilean democracy and establishing a sinister base in Chile for supporting regional insurgency, a view that was propagated by Nixon, Kissinger, and the military junta that seized power on 11 September 1973.
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On the other hand, some left-wing Chileans have argued that the Cubans not only failed to offer enough arms to defend the revolution but also “abandoned” Allende to his fate.
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The best study of Cuba’s influence in Chile is Haslam’s
Assisted Suicide,
in which the author agrees with the former of these two interpretations. Examining Havana’s growing influence in Chile from the 1960s onward and its impact on the polarization of Chilean society as a reflection of global Cold War developments, Haslam draws on U.S. and East German intelligence sources to argue that Castro’s relationship with Allende was disrespectful, subversive, and tense. The Cubans in Chile, in Haslam’s words, were “ominously and somewhat impatiently in the wings, the perennial ghost at the feast.”
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I argue that the relationship was actually far more respectful and that the Cubans should not be regarded as having either “abandoned” Allende or “subverted” his presidency (the potency of the “subversion” idea clearly lies in Washington’s calculated efforts to “play up” Cuba’s role at the time of Allende’s presidency as a means of discrediting him).
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There
were
intense disagreements about revolutionary tactics between Allende and Castro, some of which are revealed for the first time in this book. However, the Cubans ultimately accepted that Allende was in charge. Chilean-Cuban ties were based on a close personal friendship between Castro and Allende forged over a decade before 1970 as well as the intimate relationships that the Cubans who were stationed in Chile during the Allende years had with their Chilean counterparts. Havana’s preparations to resist a coup, which its leaders increasingly believed was only a matter of time, also show that Cubans stationed in Santiago were ready to fight and die alongside Allende and Chilean left-wing forces in a prolonged struggle to defend the country’s revolutionary process. That they did not end up doing so was, in part, because Allende urged them not to on the basis that he did not want a battle between Chile’s armed forces and the Cubans on Chilean soil. The Chilean president was therefore far more in control of Cuba’s involvement in his country than previously thought.
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And, as it turned out, Allende’s unrelenting commitment to nonviolent revolution in Chile meant that he committed suicide in the wake of military intervention rather than retreating to the outskirts of Santiago to consolidate his forces and lead a future resistance struggle as the Cubans wanted him to do.