El gobierno de Allende y la Guerra Fría interamericana

New Cold War History

by Tanya Harmer

La vía chilena al socialismo, que comenzó con el triunfo electoral de Salvador Allende el 4 de septiembre de 1970, no sólo marcó un destino difícil, completamente nuevo, para este país del Cono Sur: también se convirtió en un camino admirado y detestado dentro de las altas esferas de la política internacional, e hizo de Chile uno de los escenarios más singulares de la Guerra Fría que recién comenzaba a aflojar sus feroces tensiones. Este libro –premio Luciano Tomassini 2013 a la mejor publicación sobre relaciones internacionales de América Latina– no sólo revela la relación del gobierno de Allende con Estados Unidos y la Unión Soviética, además del apoyo crucial de Cuba, sino también el insospechado papel del gobierno militar de Brasil, así como el peso de las gestiones y acuerdos con Perú, Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, México, con el Movimiento de Países No Alineados y otras instancias multilaterales. Producto de una investigación larga y cuidadosa, que incluye documentos recién desclasificados y entrevistas exclusivas con protagonistas de varios países, El gobierno de Allende y la Guerra Fría interamericana es una obra ejemplar de historia internacional que ilumina un momento complejo y hasta ahora opaco del pasado de Chile y el mundo.

“Una investigación minuciosa, creativa, muy original, bien armada y bien escrita, una visión bien pensada de cómo la historia de Chile se introduce en la historia global e interamericana de la Guerra Fría. De los cientos de libros que tengo sobre Chile, éste es fundamental. Ningún estudiante serio del gobierno de la Unidad Popular en Chile puede dejar de leerlo”.
Brian Loveman, American Historical Review

Genres: History, Politics, Nonfiction, Latin American History, War, The Americas

382 pages, Paperback

First published October 10, 2011

Reviews

[Justin Michael James Dell · Rating 3 out of 5]

This text is a corrective to the historiography of the Chilean coup of September 11th, 1973 and thus it is probably best left to persons with some kind of expertise or familiarity with the subject. I would not recommend this text to someone who can draw on little previous knowledge of the topic. It would appear that most academic discussions of the coup from a foreign policy/relations standpoint have revolved around the supposed triangular interconnection between Washington, Moscow and Santiago, with the third synecdoche being the 'arena', as it were, in which the two superpower capitals 'duked it out' over their respective geo-strategic interests in Chile. This explanatory framework necessarily privileges the Cold War as the macro-historical context in which this match played out. Historians have engaged in an attendant 'whodunit?' debate about what interest, represented by which power, was behind Salvador Allende's overthrow and replacement by the Pinochet regime. Harmer intervenes in this dispute by calling into question the suitability of the aforementioned triangular relationship as a workable template for explaining the origins of the coup. She does this by educing the far more complicated network of regional South American intra-contanental relationships and competing interests appertaining to the overthrow of Allende. Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, and perhaps most especially, Cuba - all these had very important vested interests at stake in what Allende would do in Chile, or in what he would not be allowed to do. Harmer's emphasis on regional powers serves to temper the bipolar Cold War framework that is the norm for discussions of the Chilean coup, replacing it with something more nuanced - and more complicated.

Harmer begins her analysis by taking stock of the worldwide geo-strategic Cold War situation as it stood in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Globally, the United States and the Soviet Union were moving toward rapprochement. In Latin America, Fidel Castro had consolidated power in Cuba, but the island remained isolated, no only from the United States, but also from other Latin American countries. Castro faced a strategic dilemma. On the one hand, his Marxist-Leninism and personal experience as a guerrilla and a revolutionary compelled him to promote the exportation of Cuba's revolution to the rest of Latin America. On the other hand, the tide of revolutionary change in the Americas appeared to be shifting by the late 1960s. Che Guevara's death in Bolivia and the failure of revolution in that country was a major blow to leftist revolutionary morale. Moreover, the bulk of Latin American countries remained under some form of right-wing military dictatorship, as was the case in Brazil and Argentina. Furthermore, the USSR, Cuba's primary benefactor, began to distance itself from Castro's "adventurism" as it sought to close the deal of Detente with the United States and focus on badly-needed reform within its own borders. For the Soviet Union, involvement in the Americas was simply risky business. All of this prompted Cuba to adopt a more "mature" posture in the Western Hemisphere - a more measured approach to foreign relations, in other words - all the while attempting to self-restrain its own deep-seated revolutionary impulses, embodied in Castro.

Salvador Allende's 1970 democratic election in Chile on a socialist platform was a destabilizing event that heralded a new period of political flux in the Western Hemisphere. The Nixon Administration, bogged down in Vietnam and attempting to solidify Detente, was taken completely by surprise. Harmer notes that while the United States had heretofore neglected Latin America as an insignificant quarter of America's sphere of influence, the shock of Allende's election provoked a panicked response from Washington. Harmer stresses that while American business interests in Chile and their attendant lobbyists in Washington stoked some of the fire under Nixon and Kissenger's behinds, these two men's concerns were primarily ideological. Nixon was haunted by the thought that Chile might "be lost" the way Cuba had allegedly "been lost" under the watch of his arch-nemesis, John F. Kennedy. There was the fear that a 'crimson' Chile and a thoroughly Marxist Cuba might squeeze the rest of the South American continent "between a red sandwich", as Nixon phrased it. Washington immediately let loose its attack dogs of disinformation, psychological warfare and industrial sabotage against Chile.

Meanwhile, Castro was exuberant about the election of Allende in Chile, heralding it as a great victory for the Left in South America. Harmer discloses some pretty controversial information about Cuba's subsequent involvement in Chilean affairs, particularly the role played by Cuban intelligence agents in attempting to protect Allende and his regime from a reactionary coup which they knew would almost certainly come (and it did!). Nevertheless, Allende was his own man, and his insistence of a democratic, nonviolent transition to socialism put him at odds with the more pugnacious Castro. Allende's commitment to this course was perhaps his own undoing. His highly transitory movements toward a planned economy failed to noticeably improve the material conditions of the Chilean people in the long term, and alienated many of Allende's allies on the Left, both nationally and internationally, who doubted whether Allende was really one of 'them'. At the same time, Allende was no push-over, and his measures to nationalize American-owned copper mines and subtraction of "excess profits" from financial compensation for expropriated American corporate property meant that his (apparently sincere) desire to form an amicable relationship with the United States was doomed to fail. Chile remained, even under Allende, totally dependent on the United States for trade, technology and equipment, and thus the ability of Allende to adopt an overtly anti-American posture was constricted. It is perhaps Allende's attempt to walk a very fine line along a razor's edge - at once leftist but non-violent, at once against American imperialism and yet eager for good relations with the U.S. - that made his regime so vulnerable to overthrow.

Allende's government also made a critical error in judgment. They assumed that because America was still bogged down in Vietnam, because there was a robust anti-war movement in the United States, and because the Soviet Union and the United States were moving toward Detente, that the United States would lack the resolve to intervene in Chile. They guessed wrong. Ultimately, the Nixon administration considered Dente to be a matter rather immediate to the USA and the USSR. In other words, from the White House's standpoint, the Cold War with the Soviet Union may have been winding down, the the Cold War with communism - especially in America's own back yard - was still very much 'on'. This made the US ideological commitment to Allende's ouster a foregone conclusion. Moreover, far from helping Allende, Detente actually worked against Allende by isolating him; despite pretensions of workers' "solidarity", Moscow was not willing to risk destabilizing relatively good relations with the United States at the time simply to help a beleaguered left-wing republic on the other side of the globe.

However, as I have tried to emphasize in this review, there were more parties to the decision-making process related to the expulsion of Allende than simply Washington and Moscow. I will not go into detail about this here, for the information is too labyrinthine, and the reader would be better off simply consulting Harmer's text. However, countries like Brazil on the one hand and even the GDR (East Germany) and Poland had tremendous 'pull' with their respective Great Power backers (the United States and the Soviet Union, respectively) when it came to deliberations about what to do about Allende's regime, and some even proved they were capable of their own independent action.

Regardless of Allende's contradictory policies or the hatreds he engendered among his neighbours, he represented a kind of 'Third Worldism', a rising movement of nations from the Global South who felt that the international system, dominated as it was by the American hegemony, kept them in permanent dependency on the North and doomed to predetermined perpetual servitude. Allende's loud excoriation of what he considered an unjust international system resonated with a Developing World that was still in the throes of decolonization. Herein most likely lay the greatest threat Allende posed to 'the System'.

The text ends with an examination of the actually Chilean Coup itself and Allende's apparent suicide.

One of the irritating insufficiencies of this text, in my opinion, is that it is very weak on 'personality'. "Allende" is really just a ubiquitous name that floats around the pages of this text; one never really gets a sense of the man behind the name. Harmer jumps off into her argument rather abruptly, using Allende's 1970 election as her starting point. We are given minimal information about what 'makes him tick', his worldview, or his background. Although one might argue that this information is unnecessary in an international relations text that privileges states as the primary units of analysis, I do not consider 'colouring in' key personalities completely dispensable to that effect, especially considering this book is titled "Allende's Chile".

Something else I think this book leaves to be desired is a more streamlined thesis. As I mentioned, Harmer does not so much 'break down' what I call the triangular analysis of the Chilean Coup as expand it into a web of interconnection involving regional powers. This necessarily complicates the subject. This is by no means a bad thing in and of itself; Harmer is very informative, especially as she expatiates upon regional vested interests in Chilean politics from pp. 149-219. However, there does not seem to be a very tangible argument unifying Harmer's wealth of information into one coherent whole. That the subject is complicated goes without saying, but it is always the academic's responsibility to offer answers, not just more questions.

[David Cook · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first became aware of Chile when I was 19, living in New York City, working among the Latino community. I met several Chileans who had left Chile because of the political upheaval in the early 70’s culminating with the September 11, 1973, “Golpe Miltar”. Then in 2013 my wife and I moved to Chile for 3 years. We labored among the poorer areas of Santiago where the strong arm of Agusto Pinocet was more prevalent with over 2000 political “dissidents” killed and another upwards of 20,000+ “disappeared”. We arrived just before the 40th Anniversary of the coup. Even today, after the release of damning documents on the US involvement in Chile there are considerable numbers of Chileans that hold favorable views of Pinocet and the US involvement.

President Salvador Allende broadcast his final address to the Chilean people. In it he blamed “foreign capital and imperialism, united with reactionary elements” for the coup that would end both his government and his life. Following his death, at the time ruled suicide (since debunked), General Pinochet, supported by Brazil and supplied with U.S. aid, embarked on a campaign to eradicate the Chilean Left in a reign of terror that lasted for 20 years. The author posits a theory that rather than a manifestation of the global contest between the US and Russia, Chile became a victim of an inter-American Cold War struggle waged by Chile, Cuba, the United States, and Brazil.

The author argues that although Nixon, Kissinger, and I would add David Rockefeller, certainly were misguided in US policy toward Chile and betrayed Chilean democracy, their consensus was that Allende had to be removed. The author also argues that Allende was neither a misunderstood reformist nor hoodwinked by Castro. Instead, she views Allende as a socialist revolutionary, committed to a constitutional democracy. The author believes that the relationship between Cuba and the Chile was more nuanced. Rather than working to subvert constitutional democracy, she demonstrates that Castro consistently supported Allende and deferred to his authority. In the end it was less outside influence and more the Chilean military, not Washington, that ultimately decided to act. Surprisingly, the most influential international participants in the Chilean drama proved to be the military regime in Brazil, which both offered a model for a post-Allende Chile and directly supported the coup.

The author shows that Santiago’s foreign policy proved largely unsuccessful, even as the balance of power in the Southern Cone shifted decisively to the Right, and Allende’s political coalition splintered under the stress of U.S. pressure. The Soviets also kept their distance, both due to détente with the US and because they were reluctant to back a project that had not yet proven itself to be viable. By 1972, Allende’s democratic revolution was imperiled by US economic pressure; splits in the Allende coalition; and Castro, who came for an official state visit and overstayed his welcome causing other nations to speculate about Allende’s intention’s.

Because Allende’s government seemed to be besieged, US officials were surprised with the electoral success of Allende allies in the 1973 congressional elections. It was at that point that a coup was the only chance to “redeem” Chile from the Marxist threat. Yet neither Washington nor Cuba had the capability to control events in Chile. Allende’s Cuban advisors were certain that a counterrevolution was imminent and urged the president to mobilize the population. But Allende refused. Meanwhile, the US viewed that a coup was unlikely to succeed and offered only financial assistance. The author argues that while the US imposed economic and diplomatic pressure, the Nixon Administration was ignorant of Pinochet’s intentions. The author believes that the United States cannot be held entirely responsible for the Golpe, nonetheless it is certainly not blameless for the events that followed. Once the military coup was underway, the Nixon administration took calculated steps to help a repressive military dictatorship survive and consolidate its hold over its citizens.

Although I found the book fascinating, I am left unsettled with some of the author's conclusions that seem to be splitting hairs. A horrible event took place on September 11, 1973, and perhaps as the author argues it was much more nuanced than some believe, I find the analysis gymnastics somewhat blind to the facts that (directly or indirectly) the US at best allowed atrocities to take place and at worst supported them financially and through its policy. In other words, no matter how ya wanna slice it there is blood on American diplomatic hands.

[David Nanninga · Rating 5 out of 5]

A brilliantly written book-so complex and intricate, which makes what happened to Allende and Chile all the more tragic.

[Ron Earnest · Rating 5 out of 5]

I experienced the Allende experiment first hand, and was aware of the interference of the United States. But this book lays out in detail the efforts of the US to prevent the success of the "democratic socialist" project, and the many attempts of Allende and his supporters to counter American efforts.

Of course, the project was an impossible one and US efforts were fruitful because they exploited Chilean naivete and division.

[Chris · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book does a great job of placing Allende’s Chile in a broader regional context, exploring both the ‘internationalization’ of Chilean domestic politics and the regional and global significance of the Chilean road to socialism (and its tragic defeat). It also demonstrates that the Cold War looked very different depending on where in the world a country was located: while Allende hoped that detente would give Chilean socialism room to flourish, the relaxing of Cold War tensions among the superpowers and in Europe did not apply to Latin America. Ultimately, the book concludes that the United States did not simply order or mastermind the 1973 coup. However, this is certainly not apologia for US policies, and the American role in Allende’s Chile actually comes out looking even worse in many ways (indeed, reading this book caused my opinion of the Nixon administration to somehow sink even lower, something I didn’t even think was possible). But it highlights a broader range of actors in the Inter-American Cold War: in addition to Washington and Havana (Moscow was largely absent), Brazil’s military dictatorship played an immensely important role in the counterrevolutionary offensive that engulfed the Southern Cone in the early 1970s, and quickly became the Nixon administration’s closest ally in the region. The Chileans who played central roles in these years, and their dynamic and complex relationships with foreign actors, are also explored in detail. Reading this book, I was also struck by just how difficult (impossible, really) it was for Latin American countries to break out of their economic dependency on the United States, and the ways this limited possibilities for the region’s nationalist movements. This is an essential book for understanding this key moment in the histories of the Cold War and Latin America, and I’d recommend it highly.

[José Díaz-Bahamonde · Rating 4 out of 5]

Unable to solve his main dilemma of how to lessen Chilean economic dependency on the United States without losing U.S. financial credits, trade, and economic aid, Allende was also increasingly stuck between his goal of independence and Chile's greater dependency on foreign powers.
(...)
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.
(...)
mono-national research tends to produce mono-national explanations and to ignore the role of players from countries other than those whose words are examined

PROS
This book presents a compelling examination of foreign influence in Chile during the Unidad Popular (Popular Unity) government, spanning from 1971 to 1973. Its most significant contribution is the insight it provides into Cuban activities in Chile and its role in the country's socialist transformation process.
Based on a set of novel sources, the author makes several vital points. First, the complexity of the United States' involvement in the coup is more nuanced than previously understood. Second, she highlights the active role of the Brazilian government in opposing President Allende. And third, how the Cuban government provided military training to Chilean teams.

CONTRAS
Some sections of the book contain unnecessary repetitions.

FINAL
A must read for interested on contemporary Latin American history.

[David · Rating 3 out of 5]

An excellent account of the Allende administration's foreign policy and the various twists and turns Allende made with regards to his stances and conduct towards the United States, and vice-versa. Harmer posits that, instead of merely a theatre of the Cold War, the Latin-American Cold War took on an "inter-American" character where Latin American nations and social forces had much more control and agency than previously assumed—Harmer uses this framework to focus on intervention in Chile by Cuba on the left and Brazil and Bolivia on the right. While not providing excuses for American imperialism, Harmer emphasizes the role of both the Chilean Left and Right in bringing Allende to power as well as the coup that took him down.

More interesting parts of the book include the Soviet unwillingness to aid Allende, yet their insistence on taking up his symbolic mantle during the Pinochet years (as well as finally financing his opposition), the critiques maintained by Fidel against Allende's idealist vision of Chilean exceptionalism and the supposed necessity of constitutionalism in La Via Chileana, and the role of Non-Aligned Global South nations in Allende's vision for the future.

[James Yee · Rating 3 out of 5]

I was interested in this topic after seeing a TV program about the violent coup that brought down Allende. The book does a great job expanding on its premise that this was more then just a simple Cold War battle, and that while the US was very duplicitous with its diplomatic maneuverings, it was ultimately Brazil's neighboring dictatorship that prodded Pinochet's coup.

The politics leading to the coup are explained in great detail, but I was a bit disappointed that barely any details of the military actions are covered.

[Elly · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read for class.

[Paolo Ferrato · Rating 5 out of 5]

well that was dark

[Jud Gardner · Rating 4 out of 5]

american covert imperialism