Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (9 page)

The trip had subsequently provoked a sudden new U.S. interest in Latin American affairs as a result of this perceived communist threat. When Nixon had listened to Latin American leaders repeatedly asking for more economic assistance during his tour, he had told them that the answer to prosperity lay in private investment rather than commodity agreements. However, in answer to the Brazilian and Colombian presidents’ appeal for a Marshall Plan for Latin America to the tune of $40 billion—“Operation Pan America” as Brazil’s President Juscelino Kubitschek called it—the administration had begun moving gradually toward a broader consideration of economic assistance, which foreshadowed the Alliance for Progress and included the creation of the Inter-American Development Bank worth $1 billion (of which the United States supplied 45 percent) and a $160 million military aid program. This new approach was nevertheless limited. Indeed, after a brief moment of soul-searching after Caracas, the Eisenhower administration essentially maintained the line that Nixon had personally delivered to Latin American leaders regarding the importance of private enterprise as a means of achieving accelerated development.
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By the end of the 1960s, Nixon viewed the prospect of upheaval and revolution
with even more concern than he had done a decade earlier but still resisted the idea that U.S. development or aid programs could solve the problem. The handwritten notes he made during a private trip to Peru, Chile, Argentina, and Mexico in 1967 are revealing in this respect. As far as he was concerned, the “battle of ideas” in Latin America had yet to be decided, whereas in Asia it had essentially been “won.” There, he noted, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand were showing the path to developmental progress while China, North Vietnam, North Korea, Indonesia, and Burma were proving “what did not work.” Unless Latin America wanted to “fall hopelessly behind” and become a “permanent depressed area,” Nixon wrote to himself, it needed “a new Revolution … Not of Arms but attitude.” Unlike the Japanese, he observed that the Latin Americans had not learned how to “copy” or “improve” on what the West had to offer. And, as yet, South America’s younger generation was seeking a “religion—a cause.” According to him, its nationalist reformist leaders, in Chile, for example, had no right-wing support and were not “exciting enough” to attract left-wing followers, while the New Left was “dissatisfied with [the] slow rate of progress” but had “no plan (Castro doesn’t work; Communists too conservative).” In obvious contrast to Allende’s and Castro’s prescriptions, Nixon’s answer to these challenges was not state-led redistribution and nationalization but rather private foreign investment, albeit in a way that did not “subsidize & perpetuate unsound institutions.” As he saw it, the Alliance for Progress had thrown good money away while the battle of ideas continued unabated; complaining about the Latin Americans he spoke to, he noted that “they
want
even
more
—[yet] are
less satisfied
!”
¹⁰⁴

During this 1967 trip, Nixon was also able to get a direct glimpse of domestic Chilean politics and made some telling observations along the way. Looking forward to the country’s presidential elections in 1970 and reflecting on the left wing’s appeal throughout the country, he concluded that Chilean politics were on a “razor’s edge … could go either way.” If Allende ran again and won, he mused that the United States might “have to let them [the Chileans] go through the wringer—stop aid.” When Frei warned him personally that, on the contrary, the country might turn to the “military right” if the center failed, Nixon privately noted that this seemed like a “Good prophecy.”
¹⁰⁵
Nixon had long since believed that the military was a “great stabilizing force” in South America, of “outstanding quality.” And while he had advocated preferential American support for democratic leaders in Latin America after his disastrous South American trip in 1958—“a
formal handshake for dictators; an
embraso
[
sic
] for leaders of freedom,” as he put it—he ultimately believed Latin Americans were “frighteningly” naive about international communism and in need of strong military leaders under U.S. influence.
¹⁰⁶

In fact, a prevailing, condescending view in the United States was that North Americans not only were wiser and more capable of governance but had a duty to save reckless, vulnerable Latin Americans. In 1950, Louis Halle, a State Department official writing under the pseudonym “Y,” had published an article in
Foreign Affairs
that laid out these views explicitly. Democratic rule, this article argued, was “not an absolute condition to be assumed by a people as one puts on an overcoat.”
¹⁰⁷
The State Department’s George Kennan had also drawn scathing conclusions after a trip to Latin America earlier that year. Where “concepts and traditions of popular government are too weak to absorb successfully the intensity of a communist attack,” he advised Secretary of State Dean Acheson, “we must concede that harsh governmental measures of repression may be the only answer; that these measures may have to proceed from regimes whose origins and methods would not stand the test of American concepts of democratic procedure.” In Kennan’s view, it was “unlikely that there could be any other region of the earth in which nature and human behavior could have combined to produce a more unhappy and hopeless background for the conduct of human life”; he saw the region as an unfortunate blend of Indian civilization, Spanish conquerors, and “Negro slave elements,” all of which proved to be “handicaps to human progress” and contributed to “exaggerated self centeredness and egotism—in a pathetic urge to create the illusion of desperate courage, supreme cleverness, and a limitless virility where the more constructive virtues are so conspicuously lacking.”
¹⁰⁸
These types of views were by no means new or fleeting. More than a century before, Thomas Jefferson had lamented that independent South American nations were not ready for “free government.” “Their people are immersed in the darkest ignorance and brutalized by bigotry & superstition,” he wrote.
¹⁰⁹
And nearly two hundred years later, Nixon and many of his closest advisers still maintained that democracy was simply “a very subtle and difficult problem” for “Latins” as a whole, be they South American, French, or Italian.
¹¹⁰
As Nixon—hardly the pillar of open democratic governance himself—privately remarked, they “governed in a miserable way” and had to be saved from themselves.
¹¹¹

These views were neither aberrations within Washington’s policy-making establishment nor the preserve of Nixon’s Republican Party. As a telephone
call between Henry Kissinger and his predecessor as secretary of state during the Kennedy and Johnson eras shows, U.S. policy makers were generally rather arrogant and dismissive when it came to what was necessary to sustain a positive U.S.–Latin American relationship:

[Dean] R[usk]: … We should do something about the feeling of neglect they [Latin American countries] seem to have fallen into. I think you ought to get Latin American Ambassadors and Ambassadors from the OAS to take them on a boat ride, give them some drinks and just make them feel …

K[issinger]: Well, I am giving a lunch on Friday in New York for Latin American representatives at the UN. I know that’s not exactly it, what you are suggesting, but …

R: That’s right, that kind of courtesy, flattery if you like. It is greatlsy [
sic
] appreciated by the Latinos, who respond to that sort of thing more so than people from other parts of the world…. On the second day of President Johnson’s administration he called in all the Latin American Ambassadors to the White House as one of the first acts of the administration. They were so flattered that it was one of the first things he did and it made a big difference for quite a while.

K: Excellent idea.

R: It doesn’t have to be aimed at a particular subject, or anything. It is just one of those cour[t]esies they will appreciate.

K: I think you’re right.

R: Just give them a chance, its [
sic
] important to these Ambassadors, to send a telegram back hom[e] saying I was on the river with the Secretary of State, and I said to him and so forth, sort of build themselves up back home, you see.

K: I may do it next week.

R: Before the weather closes in …
¹¹²

Despite suggesting such superficial remedies for the underlying causes of Latin Americans’ “feeling of neglect,” Rusk nevertheless highlighted a real problem for the United States: the regional sense of disenchantment with U.S. policies. Moreover, compared to Castro, who was eagerly embracing such disenchantment at the end of the 1960s, the Nixon administration seemed to be moving lethargically to address the situation when it assumed power in 1969.

Partly as a means of introducing a new type of U.S. policy toward the region, Latin American foreign ministers attended a conference in Viña
del Mar, Chile, in May 1969 to establish a common position vis-à-vis the new Nixon administration. The conference called for decisive change in U.S.–Latin American relations and the inter-American system. It also formalized Latin American frustrations with progress toward previous development goals and disdain for inequality in the Western Hemisphere that conference delegates saw as being largely the United States’ responsibility. Subscribing to popular notions of Dependency Theory and led by Chile’s foreign minister, Gabriel Valdés, participants posited that Latin America was underdeveloped precisely because it was financing U.S. economic growth. They also reemphasized the principle of nonintervention as a guiding principle for inter-American relations and argued U.S. aid should no longer be tied to purchasing U.S. goods or issued on the grounds that the recipient adopted “one determined political, social and economic model.”
¹¹³
It was the struggle against economic dependency and under-development—as opposed to interstate conflict—that had become central to questions of national security for many of those present at Viña, delegates argued.
¹¹⁴
In sum, although Latin Americans may have been asking for help from Washington—thereby demonstrating their ongoing dependency on the United States—they were also trying to fundamentally remold the way they received it.

Unsurprisingly, Nixon was unsympathetic and affronted when Valdés delivered the “Consensus of Viña del Mar” to him in person in June 1969.
¹¹⁵
But there was a sense within Washington that something—as yet undefined—had to be done to improve U.S.–Latin American relations. In July, an interagency study concluded that Washington had to try to reinvigorate a “Special Relationship” with the region.
¹¹⁶
As policy analysts noted, nationalism posed “a significant threat to U.S. interests, particularly when taken in conjunction with a Soviet presence and a Soviet willingness—partial or hypothetical—to offer itself as an alternative to Latin dependence on the U.S.” They also underscored that the United States could benefit from pursuing “enlightened self-interest and humanitarian concern for economic and social development.”
¹¹⁷

Around this time, Nixon also received a rather more alarmist report on regional affairs from his special envoy to the region, Governor Nelson Rockefeller. Pointing to the deteriorating state of U.S.–Latin American relations, Rockefeller warned that “the moral and spiritual strength of the United States in the world, the political credibility of our leadership, the security of our nation, the future of our social and economic lives” were at
stake in Latin America. If the “anti-U.S. trend” continued in the region, he underlined, the United States would be “politically and morally isolated from part or much of the Western Hemisphere.” And because the United States’ relationship with Latin America had a vital “political and psychological value” beyond traditional strategic interests, “failure to maintain that special relationship would imply a failure of [the United States’] capacity and responsibility as a great power.”
¹¹⁸

Kissinger would have surely agreed with his former boss’s conclusions had he taken more time to concentrate on Latin American affairs. As he had noted in 1968, the “deepest problems of equilibrium [were] not physical but psychological or moral. The shape of the future will depend ultimately on convictions which far transcend the physical balance of power.”
¹¹⁹
Yet, for now, he and the president pushed Rockefeller’s alarmist conclusions to one side. And with little serious input or interest in Latin American affairs from the White House, the State Department’s Bureau of Inter-American Affairs (ARA) was therefore free to draft a new public policy toward the region, which was finally unveiled by Nixon at a meeting of the Inter-American Press Association on 31 October 1969. As one of those who helped put together the president’s speech for this occasion argued, the Rockefeller Report exaggerated the threat of growing communist subversion in Latin America and lapsed into a paternalistic tone that Latin Americans would find difficult to swallow.
¹²⁰
By contrast, the ARA’s policy was a clear recognition of the United States’ difficult predicament in Latin America and an apparent promise to intervene less and listen more. In a clear swipe at Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress, it also heralded the beginning of inter-American “Action for Progress” and a “mature partnership” with the region. “If our partnership is to thrive, or even to survive,” Nixon promised when he announced the policy, “we must recognize that the nations of Latin America must go forward in their own way, under their own leadership.”
¹²¹

The way in which this approach would work in practice was nevertheless unclear. On the one hand, the ARA’s director, Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs Charles Meyer, declared before a U.S. congressional committee, “Dissent among friends is not a disaster, and tolerance of differences is no tragedy.”
¹²²
After a National Security Council meeting in mid-October, the president also agreed to untie aid to countries in the region from previous conditions. On the other hand, Nixon held firm to his belief that private enterprise and foreign investment were the answer
to development, launched limited economic sanctions against Bolivia and Peru when they nationalized U.S. companies, and insisted that Washington should continue assisting Latin American military leaders (albeit more discreetly).
¹²³
Many were therefore unconvinced by the suggestion either that the “mature partnership” signaled anything new or that the Nixon administration had devised an adequate response to nationalist trends in South America. While Latin Americans (including Allende himself) decried evidence of U.S. intervention in Peru, private businesses in the United States complained about what they perceived to be an excessively soft, “apologetic” approach to a region where U.S. investments totaled $12 billion.
¹²⁴
Yet, for now, Nixon and Kissinger were not sufficiently concerned or interested to do anything about any of this.