Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (46 page)

The embrace U.S. officials gave Pinochet was nevertheless predetermined even before Washington became acquainted with him personally. Predicting a violent confrontation between coup leaders and UP supporters, the United States had wanted to ensure that any military leaders who seized power succeeded in defeating their opponents. On 1 August, CIA analysts had therefore noted, “repressive measures would be necessary” to quell “strikes, demonstrations, and other forms of protest.” A “favorable” scenario they listed was one in which, “after some, perhaps considerable, bloodletting, Chile could eventually achieve a greater measure of political and social stability.”
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On 8 September, the U.S. Ad Hoc Interagency Working Group on Chile had subsequently concluded that “a united military could control violent resistance” but warned that this would not be assured if thousands of armed workers seized factories and marched downtown. It had therefore suggested that the United States be willing (even if at this late stage it was still not completely ready) to step in by providing riot control equipment, supplying Chile by means of military airlifts from Panama, and providing food and other “minimum essential” assistance. This working group had also urged that items already requested by the Chilean military under Foreign Military Sales credits be delivered rapidly. To lessen charges of supporting coup leaders, varied and complex scenarios had also simultaneously been explored to see how the United States could respond positively to expected requests for foodstuffs and financial assistance. Overall, the working group had calculated that the new government could not “possibly succeed without very substantial external help” and recommended that Washington be “prepared … through special congressional action if necessary, to provide substantial additional resources.”
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As predicted, after 11 September, Chile’s new regime asked for help. Davis concluded that the Chilean military ascribed to a National Security Doctrine that prioritized economic stability and a “healthy social structure” as essential pillars of defense. The ambassador observed that “under the broader interpretation, most recently enunciated by former army CINC general Carlos Prats, officers [had] looked on in anger as they saw the Allende government plunge Chile into economic disaster and increased foreign dependency, and watched the UP parties and extreme left elements actively seek to undermine traditional military precepts of discipline and chain of command.”
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After Allende’s overthrow, military leaders were explicit about what they needed to create this “healthy” society: at the top of their list was equipment—one thousand flares, a thousand steel helmets, portable housing—to put down resistance to the
coup, equip draftees, and deal with the large numbers of prisoners they detained. The Chilean air force also asked the United States to send medical supplies and, in sharp contrast to his worries about precipitating a coup before it took place, Davis now advised Washington to accommodate requests, albeit as “discreetly as possible.”
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Meanwhile, Orlando Saenz, a Chilean businessman who had led strikes against Allende and had considerable influence in the new regime, approached a U.S. official in Nairobi. He spelled out that Chile needed $500 million before the end of 1973 ($200 million for imports, $300 million for debt payments) and indicated that the new government was also seeking credits from U.S. banks and, through “very” confidential talks, from U.S. copper companies.
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Henceforth, Washington delivered as much assistance as it deemed possible without attracting undue attention and condemnation. On 21 September, Foreign Minister Admiral Ismael Huerta expressed his “deep appreciation” when Washington agreed to send an airlift of supplies worth $100,000.
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Kissinger then privately conveyed his support for the junta and expressed his “best wishes … for the success of the Chilean government” to Huerta when the latter visited the UN in October 1973. In separate meetings, U.S. policy makers also underlined their intention to be as “helpful as possible” in arranging meetings with New York banks.
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Indeed, when Kubisch met Huerta on 12 October, he promised the Chilean government the “widest collaboration.”
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Huerta also recorded Kissinger as stating “emphatically that U.S. policy would not be modified by mistaken information in the press,” which condemned the military regime’s brutality.
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And when Pinochet approached Davis in Santiago on the same day, emphasizing that Chile was “broke” and needed “help getting on its feet,” the ambassador “reiterated assurances.”
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By the end of October 1973, Washington had given Pinochet a loan of $24 million for wheat purchases (eight times the total commodity credit offered to Allende’s government). In 1974 Chile—which accounted for 3 percent of Latin America’s population—also received 48 percent of U.S. “Food for Peace” (PL480) grants to the region.
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In the three years that followed, Chile assumed a preferential status in Latin America, as the recipient of 88 percent of U.S. AID’s housing guarantees and $237.8 million from the Inter-American Development Bank. Pinochet’s government also became the fifth-largest purchaser of U.S. military equipment until U.S. congressional leaders put a stop to this in subsequent years on account of Chilean human rights abuses.
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Simultaneously, the CIA established close ties with the military regime’s
new security and intelligence services. In early 1974 General Walters, by then deputy director of the CIA, invited Manuel Contreras, the head of Chile’s new secret policy agency (the DINA) to Washington, where Contreras, in his own words, learned about “how to do national intelligence.”
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As the former
Washington Post
correspondent John Dinges concludes in his book,
The Condor Years
, the United States also had “amazingly complete and intimate details” about the regional counterrevolutionary network that Pinochet formally established in late 1975 under the name “Operation Condor.”
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After all, immediately after the coup, U.S. policy makers had reemphasized their preference for encouraging coordination between the new Chilean government and its regional neighbors, noting that “for financial and technical as well as political reasons,” the United States should lead “part of a larger effort of various international and other sources of assistance.”
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Surveying other Latin American countries that might be “disposed” to help, analysts predictably noted that Brazil would be “particularly important because of its likely ideological identification with the new GOC and its substantial and growing economic strength.” It is therefore unsurprising that when Davis conveyed Washington’s desires to assist the new Chilean regime with countering “urban terrorism,” he also insisted “Chile’s Latin American friends” had “considerable experience … in this area” that the junta could draw on.
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Similarly, Huerta recorded Kissinger as insinuating to him that Chileans should acquire military equipment in Brazil if it was needed “urgently.”
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Fortunately for the Nixon administration, the United States’ efforts to organize such a multilateral support effort appear to have been well received. As Davis observed in late October, “in regard to third country channeling of aid,” Pinochet was “showing considerable understadint [
sic
].”
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The Brazilians were also obviously inclined to help. Not only had they been given prior information about coup plotting, but Pinochet later recalled that the Brazilian ambassador in Santiago personally extended recognition to the junta early on 11 September. “We won!” he reportedly exclaimed.
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Brasilia then offered the Chilean junta immediate help with suppression, working as advisers to the new regime, as well as directly interrogating and torturing prisoners in Chile’s National Stadium.
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As Contreras would recall three decades later, Chilean intelligence services quickly established exchange and training programs with Brasilia.
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Meanwhile, the Brazilian regime conducted an immediate review of how to extend lines of credit, reportedly offering the junta “significant economic
assistance in the near future … $50 million or more” days after the coup.
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Other right-wing regimes in the Southern Cone also supported the Chilean junta on account of the implications that it had for their own internal Cold War battles against the Left. On the one hand, Bolivian newspapers cheerfully reported the expulsion of 315 Bolivian “leftists” from Chile.
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And on the other hand, U.S. diplomats reported that with more than 300 Uruguayans in Chile, a group of hard-line military leaders in Montevideo were hoping the Chileans would “take care” of the Tupamaros.
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Indeed, without any apparent U.S. coordination, planes from Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Uruguay, and Ecuador had arrived with provisions for the new regime days after the coup.
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Chile’s neighbors, alongside Washington, did their best to bolster the incoming regime’s international standing. When Huerta appeared at the United Nations in October 1973, Brazil’s permanent representative at the organization helped draft his speech.
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Acknowledging the role of public relations, the State Department had also sent instructions to Santiago days after the coup, emphasizing that Chile would need to defend itself eloquently in international forums.
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Subsequently, a Chilean Foreign Ministry spokesman told Davis that the new regime was “deeply appreciative” for advice on this matter, and in the months that followed, the United States helped launch a propaganda offensive justifying the junta’s actions.
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According to Davis, Pinochet also showed “sensitivity to the need for both U.S. and GOC caution in development of overly close public identifications.” The dictator informed the U.S. ambassador that he would send Chilean civilian leaders to the United States to alleviate “Chile’s public image problem.”
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As Chile’s new ambassador in Washington surmised, the American public’s hostility toward the new regime was not just about the junta but rather the result of ongoing battles between Congress and the Executive in the context of Watergate and Vietnam.
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Nixon and Kissinger were equally frustrated by the reaction to the coup in the United States. The president dismissed press speculation that the United States was involved as “crap,” and Kissinger commented on the “filthy hypocrisy” of those that condemned the new military regime: “In Eisenhower’s day it would have been celebrated!”
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It was an “absurd situation where we have to apologize for the overthrow of … a government hostile to us,” he privately complained.
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Even so, Kissinger acknowledged he had to be cautious about what he said. “To get in to this [Chile], even in executive session,” his assistant, William Jorden, counseled, “will open a
Pandora’s box … once a precedent of discussing CIA activities before the Foreign Relations Committee is established, no programs in other countries will be immune.”
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What followed in 1974 and 1975—the publication of two congressional reports,
Covert Operation in Chile, 1963–73
and
Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders
—confirmed his fears. Indeed, one scholar has since argued that U.S. foreign policy subsequently suffered from a “‘Chile syndrome’—supplementing the Vietnam syndrome of national reticence to U.S. military intervention in distant lands” when it came to covert operations abroad.
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The coup also dramatically altered Chile’s place in the world as well as Cuban and U.S. positions in Latin America. In the Southern Cone, Allende’s hopes of redesigning the inter-American system had backfired even before he was overthrown. And now that he had been, growing ranks of counterrevolutionary forces emerged from the ruins of the left-wing tide of the 1960s and the early 1970s to create a new antirevolutionary order. Without a doubt, this shifting regional balance of power was directly related—though by no means exclusively—to Allende’s election, presidency, and demise. And it was also helped by U.S. policymakers, who got what they had wanted from the start of Allende’s presidency, even if they had not masterminded precisely how this occurred. Certainly, the mortal struggle to determine Chile’s future had been won, and Latin America was back within the United States’ sphere of influence. As Davis noted a month after the coup had taken place, “
grosso modo
Chile has been shunted out of the column of left-leaning Third World admirers of the Soviet Union.
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The international history of Allende’s overthrow is a far more complex story than a simple case of “who did it?” To appreciate its significance, we need to ask why foreigners got involved in the battle for Chile between 1970 and 1973 and with what consequences for that country, the hemisphere, and beyond. A confluence of different local and international actors driven apart in a battle between socialism and capitalism determined what happened on 11 September 1973. And although neither the victors nor the vanquished in Chile were manipulated from abroad, the decisions they made were in part the result of their belief that an international battle was taking place within their country and region. Indeed, both the Left and the Right conceptualized themselves as nationalists who were fighting against foreign enemies. Thus, while Allende pictured himself as freeing Chile from
U.S. capitalist exploitation, Pinochet justified outlawing left-wing parties by blaming the “foreign doctrine of Marxism” for having driven Chile to chaos.
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In this context, the opposition media’s skillful manipulation of Cuba’s role in Chile, helped by funds and intelligence feeds from the CIA (both true and false), was highly effective in drumming up fear among an already highly charged and divided population. There is another international dimension to the coup that also needs underlining and which has received little attention to date: instead of being
the
decisive turning point in the defeat of revolution in the Southern Cone, which it is often depicted as being, the Chilean coup of 1973 was one pivotal moment in a much larger counterrevolutionary wave that had begun in the mid-1960s and had gathered pace in the three years following Allende’s election, isolating Chile in the process.