Allende was different, not merely an economic nuisance or a political critic but a geopolitical challenge. Chile bordered Peru, Argentina, and Bolivia, all plagued by radical movements. As a continental country, a militant Chile had a capacity to undermine other nations and support radical insurgency that was far greater than Cuba’s, and Cuba has managed to do damage enough. If Chile had followed the Cuban pattern, Communist ideology would in time have been supported by Soviet forces and Soviet arms in the southern cone of the South American continent. Our apprehensions had been heightened by the discovery, in the same month as Allende’s election, of a Soviet attempt to build a nuclear submarine base in the Cuban port of Cienfuegos.4
Two Democratic administrations preceding Nixon’s had made the same judgment that a victory for Allende would imperil our interests in the Western Hemisphere. They had given substantial sums of money to the Christian Democratic Party to block Allende in the Presidential elections of 1964 and his coalition in the Congressional elections of 1968. No one ever felt happy about these activities; successive Presidents of both parties recognized them as essential. There is a gray area between military intervention and formal diplomacy where our democracy is forced to compete against groups inimical to it.
Many developing countries provide a fertile ground for the network of political parties, front groups, pseudo-press agencies and so-called research institutes by which Communist and radical forces seek to dominate. Small, disciplined groups can have a disproportionate impact; control of the media will not be balanced by the checks and balances of a pluralistic society. If we cede a monopoly of support to organizations financed, disciplined, and trained by our adversaries, many of them with direct links with the Soviet Union, only one of two outcomes will be possible: Either radical, anti-Western groups will intimidate and suppress moderate alternatives; or else extreme conservative elements will preempt this evolution and govern by repressive methods, alienating themselves from our support despite our security interests.
In Chile, a relatively advanced society with a long democratic tradition, we agreed with our Democratic predecessors that groups standing for democratic values needed our help against those who openly threatened them. Our support for democratic forces in Chile was conceived as being justified only by special circumstances because important interests were truly engaged and all else had failed. The Soviet Union had no doubts that international issues were involved. The importance it attached to its adherents in Chile was demonstrated by an extraordinary event toward the end of 1976. For the first time the Soviet Union traded a Soviet citizen it had jailed (the dissident Vladimir Bukovsky) and it did so in exchange for a non-Soviet Communist — the Chilean Communist leader Luis Corvalán, together with other Party colleagues arrested after the overthrow of Allende.I
I have described in White House Years the belated and confused efforts made by the Nixon Administration to prevent Allende’s accession to the Presidency. First was a vain attempt to persuade the Chilean Congress to select another candidate. Then came a haphazard and amateurish exploration of a military coup, designed to bring about not military rule but a new electoral contest between Allende and the leading democratic candidate so that the Chilean people could make a clear-cut choice between democratic and totalitarian alternatives. These efforts were called off before they could produce any result. (More precisely, the American part was called off; the Chilean component was bungled.)5
Allende was inaugurated as President on November 3, 1970. There was no American involvement in coup plotting afterward.
Allende in Office
THE mythology that the United States relentlessly assaulted Allende after he was installed is the opposite of the truth. We had not changed our original judgment but we were prepared to make an effort at coexistence. So many other problems were clamoring for our attention that Chile kept sliding on our list of priorities except when some provocation by Allende forced us to react. But these started as soon as Allende was inaugurated.
Allende showed at once, practically and symbolically, that he was not interested in either a democratic process in Chile or an accommodation with the United States. His inaugural speeches made clear that he had not the slightest intention of changing the anti-American convictions of a lifetime; the new government’s ideological orientation was reaffirmed early in a series of gestures. He invited the leaders of the Puerto Rican independence party to his inauguration and unveiled a statue of Ché Guevara a few days later. Within nine days of being sworn in, he established diplomatic relations with Cuba, in contravention of the 1964 resolution of the Organization of American States (OAS) ostracizing Cuba within the inter-American system. He moved rapidly toward relations with North Korea and took up contact with North Vietnam, with whom we were at war. More ominously, within a month Allende amnestied hundreds of jailed members of the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR), a Chilean terrorist organization dedicated to the seizure by violence of total power. Over the next months, between 10,000 and 15,000 visa-less foreigners entered Chile; their mission was never published; it was widely reported and never denied that they were supporters of militant movements in neighboring countries and formed the nucleus of a paramilitary force inside Chile.
The Administration decided its basic strategy toward Chile in the period immediately before and after Allende’s inauguration. A series of meetings in late October and November 1970 considered three policy alternatives: accommodation with Allende; open confrontation; and a cool but correct posture that left it to Allende to set the tone and pace of the subsequent relationship.
There was less to these choices than met the eye. They were, in fact, the classic troika of bureaucratic options: the one possible course surrounded by two fictitious ones. Both Nixon and Allende were sure to reject accommodation. Nixon had not railed against the coddling of Fidel Castro for a decade to head now for the conciliation of a Latin leader he considered a crypto-Communist. Allende showed no receptivity to such a course; his supporters would not have tolerated it.
Confrontation was a slogan, not a policy. We would not want to make Allende a martyr in Latin America or give him a pretext for accelerating his pace toward his stated objective of absolute control.
At a National Security Council meeting on November 6, 1970, Nixon therefore chose, more or less by default, the “cool and correct” option favored by all elements of the bureaucracy. I issued a directive on November 9 elaborating his decision and defining the limits between which our policy was to navigate: (a) “to avoid giving the Allende government a basis on which to rally domestic and international support for consolidation of the regime”; and (b) “to prevent the consolidation of a communist state in Chile hostile to the interests of the United States and other hemisphere nations.” The two goals were not easy to reconcile. To prevent the consolidation of a Communist regime required that we should not go out of our way to help Allende; hence no new bilateral economic aid commitments were to be undertaken. At the same time, to keep open the possibility of improving relations (should Allende decide, against our expectations, to moderate his course), humanitarian programs were continued, and the pipeline of existing aid commitments was maintained.
The President’s decision not to approve new aid projects was not as drastic as it sounded. Grant aid to Chile had been terminated by President Johnson in 1968. Loans of $40 million in 1969 and $70 million in 1970 had been approved; disbursements of funds under these commitments were continued. The ban on new aid appropriations would not take effect before the fall of 1971 — nearly a year away — leaving enough time to reverse ourselves should Allende’s policies prove more restrained than the evidence indicated.
In late November 1970, the State Department issued a formal policy statement, approved by the Senior Review GroupII of the National Security Council, which left the future of US–Chilean relations up to the new Chilean government:
The new President has taken office in accordance with Chilean constitutional procedures. We have no
wish to prejudge the state of our relations with Chile but naturally they will depend on the actions which the Chilean government takes toward the U.S. and the inter-American system. We will be watching the situation carefully and be in close consultations with other members of the OAS.
The door might as well never have been left open. Allende himself slammed it shut. He began to move against American property on November 20, 1970, in a manner that gave us no choice except to resist. He ordered the takeover of two firms controlled by American companies, charging that they had deprived Chileans of their jobs. Six days later he announced, to a meeting of the Communist Party leadership, a program of large-scale nationalization of basic industry, beginning with foreign interests but not confined to them. Allende’s Finance Minister, in explaining these decisions to a committee of the Chilean Congress, placed the blame for Chile’s economic problems on the “capitalist system” and on foreign, especially American, investors.
On December 21, Allende proposed a constitutional amendment expropriating all foreign copper mines. This decision affected American interests almost exclusively and abrogated the earlier takeover agreement negotiated between the government and the copper companies with our encouragement. Even after these unfriendly acts, President Nixon declared on January 4, 1971, in a televised interview:
[W]hat happened in Chile is not something that we welcomed, although . . . that was the decision of the people of Chile. . . . What we were interested in was their policy toward us in the foreign policy field.
So, I haven’t given up on Chile or on the Chilean people, and we are going to keep our contact with them.
In January the United States made another gesture; we supported two loans from the Inter-American Development Bank amounting to $11.5 million to aid two Chilean universities.
On March 23 our Ambassador in Santiago, Edward Korry, was instructed to offer his good offices to help the companies and the government achieve a negotiated solution of the expropriation problem. Korry’s involvement continued after the companies’ own efforts toward direct negotiations were rebuffed. Our objective was to assure fair compensation as required by international law and our domestic legislation. Whatever prospects existed for an equitable settlement were negated by a constitutional amendment put forward by Allende, providing for the retroactive application of “excess profits taxes,” which had the potential for offsetting any compensation that might be agreed upon. The amendment was signed into law by Allende on July 15, 1971, and applied in a manner that indeed in all but one case — a new mine where no excess profits determination was possible — left the copper companies owing money to the government in addition to losing their property. Then, on November 9, 1971, Allende took on other foreign creditors. He proclaimed a moratorium on Chile’s foreign debt payments and three days later Chile began to default on most debts to major international creditors, including the United States government and American financial institutions. This led the United States Export-Import Bank to halt further disbursement on its loans a month later, in keeping with standard banking practices, though it continued its loan guarantees until February 1972.
I have traced this sequence of events because it gives the lie to the charges that the United States, without provocation, initiated economic warfare against Chile. A country defaulting on its foreign debts is scarcely creditworthy whatever its form of government. It was not American pressure but Allende’s doctrinaire radicalism that dried up the flow of funds from Western lending institutions.
Allende’s challenge was not limited to the economic field. In November and December 1971, Fidel Castro spent nearly a month in Chile, concluding his visit with a joint communiqué that hailed the “common struggle” and “common outlook of both governments and peoples in analyzing the world situation.” Allende and Castro joined in condemning America’s “imperialist intervention” in Vietnam, hailing “the crisis of the capitalist monetary system” and “the gradual, substantial increase of the economic, political, social and technological power of the socialist camp.”
Simultaneously, Allende launched his assault on Chile’s constitutional system. On November 11, 1971, he sent Congress a constitutional “reform” bill that would broaden Presidential powers, reduce the independence of the Supreme Court, and replace Chile’s Senate and Chamber of Deputies with a unicameral Popular Assembly elected coterminously with the President — an attempt to destroy the checks and balances of Chilean democracy. The bill had to be withdrawn in response to vociferous and widespread objection.
Allende next turned to stifling his domestic opponents. Our new Ambassador in Santiago, Nathaniel DavisIII — not one of my more uncritical admirers — called Allende’s strategy a deliberate effort to “starve out the opposition.”6 A prime goal was to suppress all media opposed to the government. Allende seized control of the supply of newsprint, and he used the regulatory powers of the government to hold down the prices that opposition media could charge — a move certain to be economically devastating in a period of rampant inflation. While progressive nationalization was shrinking the resources available from the private sector, the government systematically withdrew official and institutional advertising. Ambassador Davis has described other pressures used against opposition media and political parties:
[S]piraling inflation produced officially-decreed wage and salary hikes every month. Bills for back taxes were presented under new interpretations of the law. Fire code and other violations were found against opposition newspapers and radios. When leftists seized and illegally operated the University of Chile’s TV station, the authorities turned a blind eye. Import licenses and foreign exchange permits to import radio and television tubes and printing equipment were denied. Smaller radios and newspapers did go under — and were bought up by the parties of the government.
As for the parties, their expenses were in large part the costs of their media — newspapers, radios and publications — plus posters, campaign expenses, and of course salaries. They were vulnerable in the same ways the media were.
While opposition was being systematically throttled, the entire state apparatus was put at the disposal of Allende’s party and its coalition partners. They received a subsidy in the form of a percentage of all foreign trade operations. Government transport, communications equipment, supplies of paper and printing facilities were made available to the ruling coalition — including the Communists — on a large scale and on generous terms. There was substantial assistance to the official parties from Cuba and other Communist countries.
Such were the ominous developments in Chile in the first year of Allende’s term that led us to reexamine our covert action program. No effort to promote a coup was considered. What we sought was to help the democratic parties and groups to resist Allende’s systematic efforts to suppress them. Our aim was to keep the opposition groups alive so that they might compete in the various elections provided by the Chilean Constitution and ultimately in the next Presidential election in 1976.
To that end, the 40 CommitteeIV unanimously approved financial support for political parties or media threatened with extinction: $3.88 million was authorized in 1971; $2.54 million in 1972. (Actual expenditures were somewhat less.) A cynic might list this as a form of economic aid for Allende, since most of the funds wound up in the Chilean treasury in the form of confiscatory taxes and other exactions on the media we were helping. A small portion of the aid was earmarked for the “private sector,” such as shopkeepers and labor unions, subject to the approval of Ambassador Davis. He decided against disbursement.
In the mania of investigation that followed Watergate, these actions have entered the folklore as a campaign to “destabilize” Chile — a word ascribed to CIA Director William Colby. The phrase was in fact the invention of Congressman Michael J. Harrington; neither Colby nor any other US official ever used such a term.7 Indeed, it is wildly inaccurate. We believed then — I am convinced, correctly — that democratic institutions in Chile would have been destroye
d without our assistance. We sought to maintain the possibility of another election. As Ambassador Davis has written:
In looking back on the experience of the opposition parties and media, some US commentators have engaged in circular argument. They have noted that, by and large, the newspapers, TV and radio of the opposition survived; and have concluded that we therefore need not have helped them. The real question is whether they could have survived without our help. I believe not. And institutional democracy could not have long survived their extinction.8
Chilean democracy was “destabilized” not by our actions but by Chile’s constitutional President.
1972: The Accelerating Polarization of Chilean Politics
BEYOND the policy of helping Chile’s democratic parties to survive the assaults on them, the United States government did nothing. We were confident that Chile’s democratic tradition and processes would prevail if we could keep Allende from stifling them. And there was little continuing high-level attention to Chilean problems. No further NSC meetings were held on the subject. I was not deeply engaged in Chilean matters. The Senior Review Group, which I chaired, handled such issues as arose, mainly in response to the economic chaos and intensifying polarization of Chilean politics that Allende’s policies were fomenting.
Years of Upheaval Page 57