Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (50 page)

For all Fidel Castro’s public condemnation of U.S. imperialism’s responsibility for Allende’s overthrow and “murder,” this is also partly what the Cubans concluded. In private, Piñeiro certainly touched on other lessons that the Cubans should learn from the past beyond what the United States’ role had been (something which the Cubans knew lots about anyway and did not need to be persuaded of). Progress could not be “erased by torture or other crimes,” he promised his officers in the DGLN, but equally it was now clearer than ever that socialism would not triumph with “reformist formulas, such as ‘bloodless revolutions.’” To the contrary, quoting Castro,
he argued that “revolution and social change require[d] a revolutionary dictatorship.” Indeed, as seen from Cuba, Allende’s overthrow proved that the rules of revolution involved discipline, intolerance of opposition, and military fortitude. In April 1974, therefore, Piñeiro instructed that more than ever there was a need to “channel any doubts … through the party; and declare an open war on liberalism, using the Marxist-Leninist principle of criticism and self-criticism to cleanse our ranks.”
³⁶

Although Allende would have strenuously disagreed with these conclusions—at least when applied to Chile—they pointed to the underlying reasons why he failed to bring about the peaceful democratic revolution in Chile. Allende had a fundamental belief in the expansion of democracy, the promises of socialist revolution “at no social cost,” and the birth of a new, fairer, equal, world order. But his vision was compromised by fundamental weaknesses within Chile itself that lessened his ability to confront the challenges of resisting a domestic opposition and a formidable economic crisis.

The first of these was that he did not lead a united government. The various elements of the left wing in Chile were fractious and increasingly divided to such an extent that it is unlikely that Salvador Allende, even if he had taken a more decisive path to the Left or Right, could not have married its disparate constituencies together. He had tried to neutralize the MIR during his presidential campaign by bribing its leaders to stop its urban guerrilla campaign, but this had not been enough for it to give up its increasingly radical criticism of the UP’s commitment to “bourgeois constitutionalism.” Meanwhile, within the UP, the PCCh complained to foreign representatives from the socialist bloc about its “extremist” coalition partners, and the Socialists—Allende’s own party—increasingly attacked the shape and pace of La Vía Chilena. Allende therefore ended up as a president without a party, and an increasingly isolated one at that. Many inside and outside of his country agreed that he was the only possible figure who could lead the diffuse Left in Chile. Yet uniting his supporters behind him proved impossible. Tied to these divisions, and Allende’s ability to overcome them, was also the fact that he lacked a definitive end goal and a precise means of how to get there. At home and abroad, he trod a middle, and increasingly improvised, ground that shrank progressively over three years in government. And if coalition members were unable to convince each other of the right path ahead, the UP’s chances of persuading its enemies of the merits of the government’s cause were nonexistent.

These political weaknesses were pivotal when considering the obstacles
that La Vía Chilena was up against. With a small mandate and a powerful—externally funded—and increasingly united opposition, Allende’s government was even more vulnerable divided than it might otherwise have been united. To be sure, his government held up exceptionally well given the circumstances as evidenced by the separate UP parties actually increasing their percentage of the national vote in municipal and congressional elections. And in this respect, as U.S. commentators wistfully observed, the economic crisis that befell Chile during the early 1970s—in part manipulated from abroad in the shape of restricted credits, a refusal to sell spare parts to Chile’s industrial sector, and a sizable fall in the price of copper—was not nearly as decisive as the opposition had hoped it would be. But the fact that the government fragmented when faced by this economic crisis combined with a spiraling opposition movement, multiple strikes, and military plotting meant that its ability to survive its full term was significantly compromised.

Within this context, the failure to arrive at a comprehensive and coordinated plan for the defense of the government in the event of a coup was devastating. Not only did Allende and the PCCh stand mistakenly by their belief that Chile’s armed forces—or enough of them at least—were professional bystanders of the political system and loyal to the government, but those who began planning for what might happen if the military was not severely overestimated their own strength within a hugely unequal national balance of power. Moreover, the far Left’s loud pronouncements about its military might raised fears of subversion and internal maneuvers within the armed forces to such an extent that the leaders who launched the coup of 11 September 1973 were terrified, despite the size of their own forces. Believing the right wing’s propaganda about the Left and multiplying the evidence of armaments they found before September when they imagined what they might confront, the coup plotters preempted a supposed resistance that never materialized by launching a violent war on the Left in all its various forms.

As much as those who ascribe all wrongdoing in Latin America to puppet masters in Washington would like to place the blame for this repression on the United States, the United States cannot be held entirely responsible. Yes, the Nixon administration initially condoned the junta’s brutality and had been poised to help any military successor regime to Allende’s government that so many—in the United States, Cuba, and Chile—expected to be on the horizon. The Nixon administration also did its best to stop Allende from assuming office, albeit in an initially desperate,
disorganized, and chaotic way. Then, having pulled itself together, the administration worked systematically, overtly and covertly, not only to ensure that La Vía Chilena failed but also to contain Allende’s influence in Latin America and roll back left-wing advances wherever possible elsewhere in the region. On the one hand, U.S. funding for opposition groups and their media outlets in Chile bolstered the challenge they were able to pose to Allende’s presidency. The CIA’s propaganda and black operations campaigns fueled doubts concerning the UP’s democratic credentials and the far Left’s relationship with Allende. And the Nixon administration’s credit freezes, together with private companies’ lawsuits against Santiago, forced the Allende government into a defensive scramble for economic support abroad. On the other hand, Washington’s approach to diplomacy was calculating, remarkably flexible, and effective in lessening the benefits that Allende might have accrued from facing an all-out confrontation with the United States. Nor was this confined to Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger, although the president’s role, in particular, was pivotal in framing the administration’s overall approach to Latin America from late 1970 onward. After Allende’s election, even the more moderate Bureau of Inter-American Affairs reverted to anticommunist stereotypes for Allende. True, the year before Allende was elected, Assistant Secretary for Latin American Affairs Charles Meyer had stated that in Latin America “dissent among friends is not a disaster.” But Allende’s key problem was that he was never considered a friend by
anyone
in the administration, and it was by no means only Kissinger, Nixon, and the CIA that wanted Allende overthrown or increasingly believed the “solution” to his democratic government lay in the military. Furthermore, the United States did not manipulate or force its Chilean contacts to do anything that they did not want to. As the U.S. ambassador in Santiago wrote back to Washington a month after Allende’s overthrow, “the military men who now rule Chile are nationalistic as is evidenced in their extreme pride that they managed their own coup without the assistance of the USG or other nations.”
³⁷
In short, the coup did not take place merely because “Nixon ordered [it] to happen,” as I recently heard one of Allende’s aides explain to an unquestioning and sympathetic audience in London.
³⁸

Instead, the picture is more complicated when it comes to the balance between domestic and international factors. There is no doubt, for example, that right-wing Chileans internationalized their own political disputes, reacted to international factors, and sought help from outsiders in a number of specific instances where they felt that they needed it. However,
more than the United States’ influence, it was the coup plotters’ immediate external environment and the role of other Latin American actors on the Chilean national stage that seems to have shaped the way in which they conceived of the threats and opportunities in front of them. The Chilean navy’s effort to gain assurance that there would be no Peruvian intervention in Chile in the event of a coup—a key concern for a navy schooled on the lessons of Chile’s nineteenth-century War of the Pacific with its northern neighbor and fearful of Lima’s recent arms deal with the USSR—is a case in point. The fact that the coup leaders went to the Brazilian intelligence services—and not the CIA—to get this assurance is also telling of the independent and autonomous links between both countries, irrespective of U.S. matchmaking (the Brazilians also seem to have informed U.S. officials about their contacts with the Chileans rather than being asked to establish them). What is more, the military regime in Brasilia offered a useful model of what those in the Chilean armed forces who were plotting to overthrow Allende’s democratically elected government aspired to (the junta certainly did not pattern its future government on the United States’ liberal democracy). And yet, just as many on the left in Chile neglected to look seriously at Brazil’s significance as a direct sponsor and supporter of coup plotters—the MIR and Cuban intelligence agents included—historians have previously, and mistakenly, tended to assign Brasilia the role of a passive, ineffectual appendage to the United States.

When it came to those they opposed, Chile’s military plotters were also deeply worried about the arrival of revolutionaries from the Southern Cone, Cuba’s influence in Chile, and how these foreigners interacted with Chilean developments. They did not take orders from Washington to attack the Cuban Embassy on the day of the coup (the declassified record available shows that the U.S. ambassador in Santiago heard of it only after the event via his Israeli and Mexican counterparts). Rather, Cuba’s revolutionary credentials, the belief of others in those credentials, and Allende’s association with Havana ironically undermined La Vía Chilena’s chances by fueling right-wing fears of Cuban guerrilla tactics and subversion within Chile—fears that the coup plotters had at the front of their minds when they seized power.

On the Left, the relationship between domestic and international actors appears fluid and interactive as well. There is, of course, no doubt that Castro believed that the UP’s political program would have to be accompanied by determined force to defend the revolutionary process and push it forward, especially after he saw Allende running into difficulty during his
visit to Chile in 1971. And yet, when Castro argued that Allende’s road to socialism was unlikely to succeed if the president did not learn the right lessons from history—and in particular, Cuba’s history—Allende refused Castro’s advice to expand preparations (covertly or overtly) for a forthcoming armed struggle. Indeed, when it came to Chile, Castro and Allende stood poles apart on the methodology of revolution: on questions of winning power, retaining it, and converting it into progressive systems of government. Crucially, however, Castro refused to go behind Allende’s back despite the Cubans’ different views on what was needed. All of which suggests once again that we need to look at bilateral relationships such as the Chilean-Cuban one as two-sided affairs. As the Cuban Ulises Estrada explained to me, “revolutionaries fight to live. We are not afraid of death and this is why we do not die.”
³⁹
But in Chile, on 11 September, it was Allende who determined he did not want the Cubans to make the ultimate sacrifice in defending the so-called
Chilean
road to socialism.

The ones who paid the price were more than three thousand Chileans who were murdered and tens of thousands more who were tortured or forced into exile during the Pinochet years. And it was, in the end, other Chileans who let this happen. Right-wing Chileans themselves had worked hard to undermine General Prats as the key obstacle to military intervention after he led loyal units against plotters during the Tanquetazo; they then supported his successor, General Augusto Pinochet, as he acted decisively to overthrow Allende and destroy all remnants of the UP years in Chile; the Chilean navy’s high command had vehemently condemned left-wing Chileans who had tried to infiltrate its ranks (with the Cubans’ and Soviet bloc’s disapproval); Chilean military officers freely exchanged information with their Brazilian counterparts and invited them into the National Stadium to help when it came to practicing torture after the coup; Chilean truckers and miners had staged strikes in the hope of bringing their country to a standstill, with funding from outside but with a will of their own nevertheless; Chile’s ex-president, Eduardo Frei, sought help from the U.S. ambassador in Santiago, and his Christian Democrat Party directly requested CIA dollars to help with its political campaigns; Chile’s civilian opposition movement increasingly chose to block UP government programs in Congress and ultimately sided with the armed forces in the mistaken belief that the military would soon return Chile to democracy, in which it could play a major role; and the central Chilean in this story, Salvador Allende, worked hard to achieve his own lifelong goal of bringing
peaceful democratic revolution to his country before he ultimately failed alongside the members of his Chilean left-wing coalition.

In the last few days of his life, it was also Allende who resigned himself to this failure and decided to take his own life when a coup struck. Turning to those who accompanied him as the aerial bombardment of La Moneda started on the day of the coup, Allende had proclaimed this was “how the first page of history is written. My people and Latin America will write the rest.”
⁴⁰
His belief in history’s predetermined path spurred him on to believe that the failure of a peaceful democratic road to socialism in Chile would be only a temporary setback on the inevitable road to revolution. “Sooner rather than later,” he promised, “the great avenues through which free men walk to build a better society will open.”
⁴¹
In the end, however, the future was quite plainly not for Allende to decide.