Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (35 page)

The current administration has been characterized by the practical thaw regarding certain socialist nations. This could be interpreted as a favorable signal for Chile, if the White House’s policies toward Yugoslavia or Romania were applicable to Latin America. However, the result of the election in Chile in September 1970 notably displeased Nixon. Dr Kissinger’s declarations about the “domino theory” for Latin America (September 1970), the absence of a protocol greeting to President Allende and the president’s own declarations that the new Chilean government “was not to his liking” but that “he accepted it” as a matter of respect for the Chilean people’s will, reveal serious and profoundly different reservations from what can be found with other socialist nations located outside the continent.
¹⁶²

Although the Nixon administration was caught up in the high-level diplomacy of détente during 1972, this did not mean Washington ignored the hemisphere. The U.S. president was star-struck by his summit meetings with Mao and Brezhnev and, as we now know from the Nixon White House tapes, condescending toward Latin America’s “importance” in this context.
¹⁶³
Yet, he remained preoccupied with fighting the Cold War in the region, and U.S. policy makers continued to be concerned about how events south of their borders affected the United States’ credibility as a superpower and the strength of its ideological convictions. As Connally had reported to Médici, Nixon “was hopeful that a long period of peace could be achieved as long as the United States remained strong and had the support of the countries of the free world such as Brazil.”
¹⁶⁴
Indeed, global politics may have been shifting away from the certainties of an earlier
bipolar Cold War era, but this did not mean Nixon and Kissinger were willing to relinquish control. Thus, when Nixon urged the Mexican president to let his message triumph above Castro’s in Latin America, he hoped not only that this would help ward off the “poison” of Chilean and Cuban influence but that his counterpart would contribute to spreading U.S. ideals of capitalist economic progress and its prescriptions of order in the hemisphere.

In return, Echeverría urged the U.S. president “for a whole new shaping or recasting of American policy vis-à-vis Latin America.”
¹⁶⁵
President Misael Pastrana of Colombia also urged the United States to “pay greater attention to [the] underdeveloped world and demonstrate less apathy toward Latin America” when he had met Connally in June.
¹⁶⁶
In fact, beyond Allende and Castro, others clearly worried about the drift in the United States’ commitment to regional development. What is more, by the late 1960s and early 1970s economic nationalists on the left and right viewed security not only in terms of external strategic threats but also increasingly in terms of economic stability. In this respect, many of the hemisphere’s armed forces increasingly regarded themselves as needing to play a key role in politics because, for them, defending their countries was a geo-economic as well as a traditionally geostrategic question.
¹⁶⁷
Within Chile, this was also the case, especially as there was an obvious contradiction between the claims of a government that purported to be bringing independence and sovereignty and the reality of growing indications that the UP was leading Chile to precarious dependency on external sources of funding.

Although Allende’s message had inspired other nations in the global South, the UP’s unique socialist democratic experiment therefore found itself increasingly out on a limb in late 1972. As UNCTAD’s former secretary Gamani Corea noted, the organization’s Third World members were ultimately more concerned with links to industrial nations in the East and West than with global bodies as a means of accelerating their countries’ development.
¹⁶⁸
And while other nationalists defaulted to traditional vertical patterns of trade and aid, reaping the benefits of the United States’ growing efforts to work out bilateral solutions with key countries, this denied Allende the commonality of purpose and solidarity he sought in pursuit of his revolutionary aims.

Meanwhile, Chilean boldness in 1972 reaffirmed the Nixon administration’s belief that Allende was anti-American, economically dangerous, and ideologically repellent. For Washington, then, bilateral U.S.-Chilean negotiations were purely pragmatic. Fighting for victory meant employing
tactical retreat, and by this point Washington—as well as Santiago—was clear that it did not want a painful divorce that would undercut its ultimate objectives. For now, Allende stood at a crossroads of success, survival, failure, and disaster, and the UP had yet to prove that La Vía Chilena was a viable revolutionary process or adjust Chile’s position more effectively to global realities.

Looking to the year ahead, Chile’s population would have the chance to deliver its verdict on the government in congressional elections scheduled for March. If the UP’s parties were going to do well, they had to improve the country’s economic situation, but this was a tall order given the rapid nature of Chile’s economic decline. In November it was expected that Chile’s deficit would reach $430 million by the end of the year. And, by Letelier’s calculations, if the economy was to function relatively normally, the UP needed to raise at least $100 million by January and a further $400 million or more during the course of 1973.
¹⁶⁹
Would bilateral negotiations with the United States be enough? Clearly, Allende thought not. Indeed, in a dramatic gesture, he was preparing to leave Chile in search of an international cure for his beleaguered presidency.

Incomprehension and Dead Ends, November 1972–July 1973

In late November 1972 Salvador Allende set off on an international tour that took him from Mexico City to Havana via New York, Algiers, and Moscow. In many respects, the trip was a gamble—a somewhat uncoordinated effort both to improve Chile’s position before its representatives sat down to bilateral negotiations with the United States in December and to boost the UP parties’ chances in Chile’s forthcoming congressional elections. The journey also encapsulated the different strands of Chilean foreign policy, which since 1970 had aimed to protect La Vía Chilena and to promote systemic change on behalf of the global South. During his trip, Allende simultaneously appealed to Latin Americans, the Third World, the UN, the Soviet Union, Cuban revolutionaries, and, at least indirectly, the Nixon administration. His country’s experience, he told the United Nations General Assembly, was the epitome of a justified battle against imperialism for “social liberation, the struggle for well-being and intellectual progress, and the defense of national identity and dignity.”
¹

The problem was that Allende was now clearly losing this battle. Nixon’s anticipated and triumphant reelection as president of the United States offered no relief to U.S. pressure against his government. Two years after his inauguration, Chile also appeared to be an example of ineluctable dependency and an unworkable road to socialism rather than an alternative road to development or a shining beacon of independence and peaceful revolution. Given this predicament, the Chilean president was not running rings around Uncle Sam as depicted in a Cuban cartoon at the time; he and his divided government were struggling to prevent a net closing in on his presidency by acting on several different fronts at the same time. Chile’s foreign policy, it seemed, was now increasingly subsumed in a struggle to acquire financial assistance.

The key questions were how, from whom, and how much. On the eve
of Allende’s international tour, the Chilean ambassador at the United Nations tried to warn his U.S. counterpart that the whole of Latin America was expectantly watching the evolution of relations between Washington and Santiago as a test of whether Nixon would work out a relationship with the region comparable to the “excellent” ones it now had with the Soviet Union, China, and Western Europe.
²
As far as the Nixon administration was concerned, however, Allende no longer posed the threat he had once appeared to. Since 1970, the revolutionary tide that had seemed poised to wash over the Southern Cone had ebbed and, with it, Chile’s potential impact on the inter-American balance of power had diminished. Furthermore, Washington’s intelligence analysts were relatively relaxed about Allende’s trip in late 1972, believing that the Soviets were now rather unlikely to bail the UP out of its deteriorating economic predicament and that the Chilean president was unlikely to achieve any miracle cures for the economic and political crisis facing the UP.
³

At least some within the UP nevertheless still held out hope that Moscow
would
substantially help solve their economic woes. And in an effort to try and persuade the Soviets to rethink their reticence to help Chile, Allende’s tone changed. Acknowledging that efforts to avoid Cold War categorizations had failed to obtain more support from the superpowers in an age of détente, Santiago now tried a bit of reverse psychology: it tried to
play
a Cold War game at a global level to induce the Soviet bloc to help. In Washington Chilean diplomats therefore tried to suggest that Allende was on the verge of being pushed to the East, whereas in Moscow Allende explicitly depicted Chile’s experience as a new Cold War battlefield. Indeed, borrowing Pablo Neruda’s phrase at the time, he called his country a “silent Vietnam.”
⁴
Yet his rhetoric did not fit the times. By the end of 1972, the Soviets’ priority was reducing tensions with the United States as the Vietnam War drew to a close, not beginning another similar international conflict. Moscow’s own economic problems and increasing financial commitment to Cuba after mid-1972 meant that it was also not prepared (or able) to bankroll the Chilean economy. Moreover, for at least six months, the USSR’s leaders had increasingly been viewing La Vía Chilena as a lesson of what could go wrong in a revolutionary process rather than a good investment in a global battle against capitalism. In the end, Allende thus returned to Chile disappointed, becoming ever more reliant on negotiation with the United States as a means of solving his economic ills.

In fact, all the while that Allende was touring foreign capitals, the Chilean Foreign Ministry had been preparing for bilateral talks with the United
States, which began in December and dragged on without any decisive end in sight. And, as such, Washington was becoming far more central to Chile than Allende had ever hoped it would be. While the Nixon administration refused to countenance any financial settlement with Santiago to ease its balance-of-payments deficit, it also continued to exacerbate the UP’s challenges back home, actively subverting the democratic process, encouraging Allende’s parliamentary opposition, and sympathizing with military plotters.

Although in this respect, U.S.-Chilean bilateral negotiations seem to have been rather hopeless endeavors, they are intriguing insofar as they provided space for both sides to articulate the reasons why they opposed each other. As negotiators ostensibly fenced over questions of compensation and debt, the underlying obstacles to mutual understanding and progress surfaced. The Chilean government and the Nixon administration quite simply disagreed about the merits of capitalism and the world economic system. While U.S. officials plainly told Santiago’s representatives that they had developed the best political and economic system worldwide, the Chileans told them that although they were committed democrats, they had this wrong. Consequently, although U.S. and Soviet or Chinese leaders had agreed to disagree across the Pacific, the Americans and the Chileans were still trying to explain their differences to each other.

In the weeks before Allende left Chile, his forthcoming venture had divided his already splintered government. Exactly what the trip would achieve appeared uncertain. Chilean diplomats argued about the effect it could have on relations with the United States, where Nixon had now been emboldened by his recent reelection; they questioned which visits would reap the maximum benefit, East to West or West to East; and they debated what, if any, impact the trip would have on Chilean domestic politics. To a large degree, the answers to these questions depended on differing assessments of how Allende would get on in Moscow. There were some within the UP who clearly believed the president’s mere presence in the USSR would cause the Soviets to leap into action and relieve Santiago of its dependency on resolving its problems with the United States. Yet Orlando Letelier, who unsurprisingly remained focused on the pivotal nature of Chile’s relationship with the United States, was more skeptical. Even if the USSR suddenly offered Chile substantial assistance, he warned
Foreign Minister Almeyda, this would not be enough to cover the country’s balance-of-payments deficits.

He also had good reason to doubt the Soviets’ receptiveness to old-fashioned Cold War arguments. Writing to Foreign Minister Almeyda just over two weeks before Allende left Chile, the ambassador relayed an interesting two-hour conversation he had just had with his Soviet counterpart in Washington, Anatoly Dobrynin. The latter, it seems, had requested the meeting and then “insistently” conveyed the USSR’s desire to avoid a confrontation with the United States in what was a “new era of international relations.” As Letelier surmised, the message had not been “accidental,” occurring as it did in the midst of Allende’s preparations to visit Moscow.
⁵

This was just one of the key issues that arose in a flurry of diplomatic correspondence between Santiago and the Chilean Embassy in Washington during early November. Indeed, the frantic arrangements and disagreements between Allende’s advisers on the eve of his trip underlined the UP’s ongoing lack of coordinated thinking on foreign policy matters (as well as the lack of presidential direction). As Letelier lamented, he simply did not understand the “philosophy” behind the president’s trip and was unsure what purpose it would serve in terms of both Chile’s foreign relations and its domestic political context. To be sure, he thought the UN would make a very good “tribunal,” which could be used to put pressure on the United States. Yet without any firm consensus in Santiago about whether the UP wanted to confront the United States or negotiate with it, or, indeed, any indication of what the Soviets might offer, it was hard to decide what message Allende should convey. Would it not be easier for the president to go to the Soviet Union first, Letelier asked, so that he would then be able to “calibrate” his UN speech accordingly?