Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (38 page)

For its part, the CIA felt unable to make any definitive predictions about the election’s outcome and had suspended all covert operations planning beyond March at the beginning of 1973.
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This did not signify inaction. To the contrary, during the five months leading up to the elections, the 40 Committee had committed $1,602,666 to help the opposition fight an “optimum campaign,” while the CIA station in Santiago led what was internally judged as having been an “effective” and “outstanding” effort to help it do so.
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Davis had also successfully argued against supporting unrealistic
golpista
plots that risked rallying voters around the UP.
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Yet how 800,000 newly enfranchised (eighteen- to twenty-one-year-old and illiterate) voters would position themselves was ultimately unclear.
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As the election neared, the CIA pessimistically saw “little prospect of a conclusive [election] outcome,” suggesting instead that the UP would probably win 38 percent.
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U.S. officials were therefore shocked and “disappointed” when the UP won 43.39 percent of the vote, picking up two seats in the Senate and six seats in the Chamber of Deputies.
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As foreign diplomats observed, this “psychological victory” enthused Allende with “a good quota of oxygen and legitimacy.”
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Contrary to predictions, Chilean opposition leaders and U.S. analysts also observed that ideological and class affiliations—
not
economic factors—had determined the outcome.
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Ex-president Frei bitterly reasoned that the “poor had not yet felt the full effects of Chile’s plight.” They “never did eat much meat,” he derided in private, “standing in lines was to some degree a ‘social occasion’ and not the frustration and annoyance it was for the middle class.”
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Ambassador Davis was a little more understanding. He wrote to Washington that the poorest half of the population was “materially better off” under the UP and “doubtless prepared to pay some economic price” for an “enhanced sense of dignity and satisfaction of putting down the upper classes.”
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As observers concluded, then, the UP’s campaign of encouraging voter loyalty along class lines and equating a vote for CODE with a vote for civil war had been effective. “This government is shit but it is mine” ran one UP slogan painted across Chile’s walls. And with newfound confidence after the results were announced, Altamirano demanded, “now more than ever, advance without
compromising.”
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The problem was that in the immediate aftermath of the elections it was still not clear exactly
how
and
where
Chile’s political future should or could advance to. Certainly, the divisions in Chilean society and the issues that political opponents fought over were ingrained as ever. Indeed, the Soviet Foreign Ministry described the outcome as merely prolonging an “unstable equilibrium.”
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In these circumstances, Washington’s enthusiasm for supporting Allende’s democratic opposition waned. There were various reasons for this. Primarily, because the country’s economic difficulties had brought seemingly limited political rewards, the Christian Democrat Party focused its subsequent campaign on wooing lower-income voters to undercut the UP’s traditional support base.
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As it did, U.S. intelligence officers warned of an inevitable leftward trend in Chilean politics and the implications this might have for Chile’s 1976 presidential elections. And by April the CIA station noted that Frei had “reached the conclusion that throughout the so-called Third World the traditionalist capitalist system is not capable of realizing development goals and aspirations. Frei has also been impressed over relative success and rapidity in which Allende … has dismantled previously existing bastions of economic power…. Frei recognizes that he cannot reverse much of what the UP has done.”
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Alongside the fear that the PDC might not be able to undo the socialization of Chile, Washington’s decision makers had growing doubts about the party as a reliable ally. U.S. intelligence analysts regarded “socialist communitarianism,” to which the majority of the PDC increasingly subscribed, as being “clear only in its rejection of free enterprise.” As one CIA memorandum put it, a hypothetical PDC government after 1976 would ask the United States for “massive financial and economic support” without necessarily offering anything substantial in return.
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However, U.S. policy makers also had serious doubts about the military’s ability to intervene against Allende and to stand as a viable alternative to the PDC. True, in the aftermath of the March elections, the CIA’s station in Santiago continued to urge superiors to “keep all options open … including a possible future coup.” As the station’s chief, Ray Warren, argued, this would not mean abandoning support for Chile’s political parties, private businesses, and the media but rather bringing these different elements together to create an “atmosphere of political unrest and controlled crisis” to “stimulate” military intervention. And, as far as he was concerned, the main obstacle to a successful coup lay within the military itself.
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One of the problems was that Chile’s armed forces were divided. Another was that
given the UP’s electoral success, U.S. ambassador Davis surmised that they were probably also preoccupied about the risks of the “large scale bloody action against elements of the civil population” that intervention in the political arena would entail.
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To alleviate these problems, Warren therefore advocated establishing “a secure and meaningful relationship with a serious military plotting group” as a means of persuading “as much of the military as possible … to take over and displace the Allende government.”
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However, Warren received a negative response from back home, where analysts were questioning “the risks involved in desperate remedies [i.e., supporting a coup].”
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In Langley, doubts centered on an “abortive coup or bloody civil war” and the “objective” situation at hand. However much sympathy decision makers in the United States had for an increasingly “desperate” Chilean private sector, they were therefore unwilling to give Warren the green light. They insisted that, “unless it becomes clear that such a coup would have the support of most of the Armed Forces as well as the CODE parties,” the station was to avoid backing a military coup and make this position clear to Chilean contacts.
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Overall, then, if the CIA regarded Chile’s democratic future as “bleak,” this was not, as one would assume, because the prospect of military intervention loomed ahead. Instead, CIA analysts warned danger lay in it
not
happening and the United States obtaining no “more than Pyrrhic victory” in 1976 if a PDC candidate won presidential elections.
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Faced with deciding what the United States’ role should be in this context, intelligence officials and members of the Nixon administration were keenly aware of Washington’s limitations and excessively nervous about Allende’s ability to resist his opponents. And there were obviously differences within the Nixon administration about how to ensure Allende’s failure. To be sure, while Washington’s leaders hesitated about taking the risks involved in accelerating coup plotting, the CIA continued collating information that might be valuable to military plotters in the event of a coup, such as arrest lists, intelligence of government installations, and the UP’s contingency plans to resist military intervention.
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But beyond this, the Nixon administration decided to wait and see how the situation in Chile evolved.

For Allende, the brief Indian summer of the election period immediately gave way to a difficult Chilean autumn and winter and, with them, the return of political infighting, looming confrontation, and ever-greater economic
crisis. Chilean military leaders who had joined Allende’s cabinet in October 1972 left government after the elections as planned but remained on the sidelines of Allende’s presidency. Questions about Chile’s future also continued to grow and political tensions in the country were increasingly tense precisely because the stakes involved were so high. By early 1973, people in Chile and abroad were talking openly about imminent choices between democracy and bloody civil war, between socialism and fascism, or between a Marxist dictatorship and a liberal constitutional democracy, always of course, depending on where they stood politically.

A key problem underlying Allende’s presidency and the UP’s ability to survive in government was the lack of an obvious end goal and an agreed route by which to achieve it. After the government’s electoral success, the PS received criticism for having lacked faith in the political-institutional road.
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However, Allende’s hopes of uniting his coalition behind the democratic process and reaching an alliance with the PDC, as the Communist Party in particular advocated, remained elusive. Differences on the left were so great that Chile’s commander in chief, General Prats, had written to the coalition parties after the election, warning them that their divisions aggravated their problems and favored the opposition.
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Similarly, at the end of March, Allende pleaded for “vertical discipline” to unite his government.
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The question of unity also concerned the UP’s international allies. From Moscow, the Soviet Foreign Ministry concluded that the UP’s future depended on it, together with progress in overcoming economic difficulties and attracting support from the widest sector of the population as possible.
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And in all respects,
Pravda
blamed “ultra leftists” and “adventurers” for existing weaknesses.
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Although the Cubans sympathized with the PS and MIR’s analysis of what needed to be done, they were also increasingly concerned that the far Left’s open attacks on Allende fundamentally undermined Chile’s revolutionary process. Looking back on the period two years later, Armando Hart, a leading figure in Cuba’s Communist Party, praised the MIR and acknowledged its links to Cuba but alluded to differences of opinion “regarding the ways in which it related with other forces on the Left” and the “methods, places, and moments” it had chosen to employ revolutionary violence.
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What concerned the Cubans was not the MIR’s call to arms but rather how to make this count in defending the government. Believing that Allende was absolutely pivotal to the task of uniting different strands of Chile’s revolutionary process, Havana’s
leaders ultimately stood by the president. Attending the PS’s fortieth anniversary celebrations in April 1973, Cuba’s deputy prime minister, Carlos Rafael Rodríguez, was very explicit about this, reasoning that “if Cuba was able to defeat the most powerful imperialism in history, this was because our revolutionary forces—within which the differences were not few and the tradition of honorable rivalries was not small—overcame these and established unified control, discipline and a common program…. there is no revolutionary alternative to the Popular Unity government and President Allende…. To postulate policies that divide the working and popular forces that Socialists and Communists guide together is not to open a path toward a deeper revolution, but to open breaches where the enemy can penetrate.”
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Privately, however, the Cubans continued to urge Allende to prepare more decisively for an armed confrontation. According to Carlos Chain, Cuba’s deputy foreign minister, Castro responded angrily to a group of Chilean women—among them Allende’s sister, Laura—who visited Havana around this time. When they spoke of being ready to fight until Santiago’s river Mapocho flowed with revolutionaries’ blood, the Cuban leader exploded—“this is not what we want!” he replied.
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As the Cubans tried to persuade Allende to lead and accelerate defensive preparations, the message the Cubans delivered to the far Left was therefore to wait, to unite behind the president, and to prepare effectively for the oncoming conflict.
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In the aftermath of the March elections, the prospect of some sort of confrontation clearly appeared more likely.
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Throughout the country, streets were barricaded, students clashed, Molotov cocktails were thrown, and smoke bombs were planted. Indeed, members of the president’s bodyguard, the GAP, recalled being on the alert for “every noise, every car that passed.”
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In April the struggle to determine Chile’s future was most obviously reflected in a struggle over the government’s proposal for a new Unified National School System (ENU). Although some within the government tried to argue that the proposition had little to do with ideology and more to do with addressing a long-recognized crisis in Chile’s educational system, its objectives were also explicitly ideological. Specifically, the ENU promised to replace an “authoritarian, competitive and traditionalist” education system with one dedicated to encouraging young Chileans to appreciate “the values of humanistic socialism” and fostering “skills, concepts, habits, opinions, attitudes and values favorable to collective labor.”
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Indeed, to the opposition—and, crucially, to outspoken military leaders who publicly heckled the UP’s education minister—the ENU epitomized the imposition of Marxist thought on a new generation of Chileans.
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Despite Allende’s continued message that socialism would ultimately pay off, it also showed no signs of doing so.
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In the first four months of 1973, inflation soared, the black market prospered, industrial production fell by more than 7 percent, car production was down 20 percent compared to the previous year, and, worse still, agricultural production had fallen by 25 percent. In April, striking miners then descended on Santiago to demand more pay, and commentators predicted that the cost of living in May would be considerably worse.
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