Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (42 page)

The army’s position was, however, about to change. In late August, the opposition media, right-wing politicians, and army wives launched a vicious campaign against its commander in chief, General Prats, finally encircling his house, brandishing white feathers, and labeling him a “chicken” for not supporting military intervention.
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When he finally resigned in response to this campaign on 23 August, U.S. analysts nonetheless held out little hope that his replacement would join the plotters. Certainly, no one in Washington had any guarantees that this man, General Augusto Pinochet, would back a coup, or assume the position he later did. As late as 24 August 1973, a day after Pinochet assumed control of Chile’s armed forces, the DIA described him as lacking in “prestige and influence” and “unlikely to wield … authority and control.”
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Washington’s decision makers also still disagreed about whether to offer assistance to strikers and right-wing paramilitary forces on top of the $6.5 million the United States had already delivered to Chile’s opposition parties in its effort to destablize Allende’s government.
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On one side, Ambassador Davis strongly opposed such a course. Chilean left-wing accusations of CIA intervention had risen in July and August, thereby increasing the risks of counterproductive exposure, and in early August Davis had advised that “even more than previously” the United States had to “avoid giving the Allende regime possible pretexts for open confrontation.”
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On the other side, Kissinger had personally challenged the idea that the risks were “unacceptable” and asked for a cost estimate of increased support to the private sector. And it was only when Assistant Secretary Kubisch threatened to resign over the issue that Kissinger had backed down.
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Then, on 20 August, an apparent compromise had been reached whereby the 40 Committee allocated an additional $1 million for Chile on the condition that Davis approved its precise allocation to different groups. In the end, however, no part of this fund was actually delivered despite the CIA’s best efforts to circumvent such restrictions.
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By contrast, investors in Brazil, Argentina, and Bolivia actively supported Chile’s private sector and Patria y Libertad in the months before September.
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What turned out to be three weeks before the coup, UP officials also denounced suspicious military movements on the Bolivian border.
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Since Hugo Banzer’s coup in August 1971, the country had been effectively used
by the Right to channel arms into Chile, and General Arturo Marshall, who had plotted against René Schneider in 1970, resided in Bolivia.
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In mid-1973, Patria y Libertad’s leader, Roberto Thieme, had also returned to Chile after having traveled to Bolivia, Paraguay, and Argentina in search of support. Once back home he had then vowed to initiate an urban guerrilla war against the government.
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Military leaders throughout the Southern Cone were also believed to be actively conspiring with coup plotters, which is highly probable given what we now know about Brazil’s interest in exchanging information with Chilean military leaders. The Brazilian ambassador in Santiago certainly made no secret of his antipathy for Allende. At a dinner party he hosted for Latin American diplomats in 1973, he very quickly took to criticizing Allende and making crude jokes about the president’s wife in such a way that ten minutes after the Mexican ambassador and his wife had arrived, they broke protocol and left the party, shocked by the tone of the conversation and refusing to take any part in it.
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The Brazilian ambassador also propositioned Davis about “cooperative planning, interembassy coordination, and joint efforts” to overthrow Allende. As the U.S. ambassador later concluded, he had “no real doubt” the Brazilians supported and coached Chilean coup plotters.
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Although there is no specific evidence to suggest the United States accepted the Brazilians’ offer or encouraged them at this stage, there is also no indication that Washington was critical either. On the contrary, U.S. policy makers increasingly emphasized the potential benefits of Brazilian assistance to a future military government. Pivotally, the Nixon administration’s Interagency Group on Chile was concerned that there did not seem to be an “indication of any widespread sense of ‘mission’ among the Chilean military to take over and run the country.” To instill such a “mission” and to ensure that future Chilean leaders received the necessary equipment to carry it out, interagency contingency plans show that Washington wanted to encourage future collaboration with Brazil. This was also envisaged as a way to reduce future pressures on—and exposure of—U.S. assistance to any regime that succeeded Allende’s. Three days before the coup actually took place, for example, U.S. policy makers were suggesting that if successful coup leaders asked for “easily identifiable U.S. equipment—i.e. helicopters etc.,” Washington “would first seek to encourage support from other Latin American countries—Brazil.”
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Commentators also continued to insist on the parallels between an impending showdown in Chile and the Brazilian coup of 1964, pointing to private-sector-funded opposition parties, paramilitaries, women’s groups aggravating antigovernment
tension, and the specter of foreign subversion that was being vociferously played up.
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Chile’s politicians were also receptive to Brazil’s example. As Washington’s ambassador in Rio de Janeiro at the time of the 1964 coup later recalled, Chile’s ex-president, Eduardo Frei, confided in him that Chile now needed “a Brazilian solution.”
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As all these developments were gathering pace, Nixon was embroiled in the growing Watergate scandal, and Kissinger was busy concentrating on his new appointment as secretary of state. On 6 September, Kissinger called Ambassador Davis to the United States to offer him a new position in the State Department. Given reports from Chile suggesting a coup was imminent, Davis remembered being desperate to get back to Santiago but that Kissinger actually kept him waiting two days. “So there’s going to be a coup in Chile!” the future secretary exclaimed when they finally met. Yet, despite expecting and welcoming such a development, both agreed only that obvious U.S. involvement should be avoided.
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Overall, the Nixon administration’s imprecision and hesitancy to speed up the very goal it had sought for three years in these months is curious. It is conceivable that Davis was called back to Washington to remove him and the obstacles he placed on U.S. assistance to coup plotters, although the obvious results of this move, if indeed it was a sneaky move, are unclear. Instead, the administration seems to have held back amid fears U.S. government involvement could cause further damage to Nixon’s domestic standing, speculation that the military might never move, and the chances of failure if it did.

The increasing politicization of Chile’s armed forces and the growing pressure on its leaders to overthrow Allende nevertheless grew rapidly toward the end of August. Certainly, General Pinochet, who would be the key to the coup’s success when it was eventually launched on 11 September, received pleas to take action days after he assumed the position of commander in chief of the army. Pointing to divisions within the UP, and between opposition leaders, members of the armed forces who urged him to take action lamented that the “political party had become more important than the country,” that “respect for human life” had been lost, and that “the number of foreign extremists active in Chile” had reached “an unsupportable limit.” As they insisted, the armed forces were “ideologically … antagonistic” to Marxism by their very nature, and it was now up to Pinochet to decide on Chile’s fate.
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Their message was increasingly echoed by a multitude of voices within the Navy. “Marxism intends to implant itself in Chile,” a group of eighty-five lieutenants wrote to Admiral
Merino, “as citizens and Officials, we see the threat of Marxism closing in around our families, [a] threat, which as history demonstrates is not only intellectual but also physical.” The solution, they insisted, was action to “eradicate Marxism in Chile, as the only way to return normality to our country.”
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As Chile lurched toward confrontation, the ambitious domestic and international goals Allende had championed three years earlier dissolved. True, Chile continued to receive support and attention worldwide, but now, as Kissinger’s assistant for Latin American affairs noted, “other governments that, at one time, were inclined to look on the Chilean experience as a likely model” were “disillusioned.”
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Among those deeply frustrated with the progress of La Vía Chilena were the Cubans. Although they continued to act as intimate advisers to Allende and Chile’s left-wing parties, they had also now become prime targets of antigovernmental opposition themselves, which limited their scope of action. Moreover, Cuban strategies for defending Chile’s revolutionary process were frustrated by Allende’s guidelines, by the far Left’s provocative actions, and, pivotally, by their failure to detect the coup until it was already under way.

The Cubans were not the only ones disillusioned. As far as Allende was concerned, the failure of the Tanquetazo had been a victory for institutionalism.
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However, to the USSR’s Foreign Ministry, it had shown both that an “open armed battle” was a serious possibility and that the UP had no united policy toward Chile’s armed forces.
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Proposing weekly meetings with other socialist bloc countries stationed in Santiago, the Soviet ambassador privately told staff at the East German Embassy that the Chilean government’s problem had been to try and “implement a workable anti-imperialist democratic program in two years rather than waiting until 1976. Under pressure from reactionary elements, as well as petit bourgeois idealism, processes were accelerated and tasks were undertaken prematurely in conditions where the situation was not ripe. Instead of focusing efforts on consolidating and securing anti-imperial and democratic changes which were already under way … the ‘road to socialism’ was emphasized as the primary objective of the UP. Even our comrades from the Communist Party allowed themselves to be pulled in this direction. They now recognize the potential dangers.”
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The Chinese were also pessimistic. Earlier that year, Zhou Enlai had pointedly asked Foreign Minister
Clodomiro Almeyda about the military when the latter visited China, asking if Allende had a “back-up plan.” Almeyda had to admit that he did not.
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Meanwhile, within Chile, calls for expanding Poder Popular—“Popular Power,” a loosely defined network of worker and neighborhood grass-roots organizations—mounted. However, the relationship between the government and Poder Popular was still ill-defined. Speaking to an Italian Communist Party member, the secretary of the Chilean Communist Party (PCCh), Luis Corvalán, openly remarked that the UP had “destroyed a rotten system … which worked” but was not yet in control of a system to replace it.
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In this context, Havana fast-forwarded arrangements for an impending conflict. On 30 June 1973 Castro had written to Allende congratulating him on putting down the Tanquetazo and urging him to have faith in his ability to lead armed resistance against coup plotters. “We are still under the impact of the great revolutionary victory of the 29th and your brilliant, personal role in the events,” he wrote. “It is natural for many difficulties and obstacles to subsist [
sic
], but I am certain that this first trial, where you have come out successful, will encourage you and consolidate the people’s confidence in you…. With actions like those of the 29th, the Chilean revolution shall come out victorious of any test, no matter how hard. Again, Cuba is at your side and you can rely on your faithful friends of always.”
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Even so, after the Tanquetazo, all but a few Cuban women and children were evacuated from Chile.
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By this stage, as Luis Fernández Oña later remembered, Havana was “super convinced” the military would launch another coup.
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At the end of July, Manuel Piñeiro and Cuban deputy prime minister Carlos Rafael Rodríguez arrived in Chile to deliver another letter to Allende from Castro. Yet this one referred far more directly to the need for Allende to prepare for confrontation. Indeed, it is the beseeching tone of Castro’s advice that is most revealing. He implored Allende to face a confrontation head on as the leader of mass resistance. “Do not for a minute forget the formidable strength of the Chilean working class,” Castro insisted. He suggested that the workers could “paralyze” a coup, prevent vacillation and—if its actions were precise—decide Chile’s fate. Rather than apologize for the Left’s forces, Castro also argued that the enemy had to be made aware of its preparedness to fight a future confrontation. In this respect, Castro reminded Allende that his leadership was “above all … the key to the situation,” and he signed off asking how Havana could help.
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It was around this time that Allende asked Cubans to prepare plans for defending the presidential palace and his residence, Tomás Moro. Allende had been clear for two years that in the event of a military attack he would go to La Moneda.
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Yet Cuba’s immediate concern was the strategic vulnerability of this location. La Moneda was (and is) a particularly vulnerable low-level building surrounded by taller ones. “From a military point of view, it was a disaster!” and “indefensible,” Oña recalled.
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If Havana had been in charge of strategic decisions, he and Estrada later explained, it would have sent Allende to the outskirts of the city, where workers had begun organizing themselves to resist an attack.
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And from there the Cubans would have joined members of the Chilean Left in forming a defensive cordon around him to ensure he could survive, to consolidate his forces, and to begin preparing a counterattack.
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In sum, Castro seems to have been in no doubt that Allende would “fight to his last breath,” as he later told India’s prime minister, Indira Gandhi, during his visit to New Delhi.
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But he wanted the president’s final battle to be prolonged and effective, and for that he needed to survive an initial assault.