Fleeing the Chilean Coup: The Debate Over U.S. Complicity

MYTHMAKING AND FOREIGN POLICY

The myth that the United States toppled President Salvador Allende of Chile in 1973 lives. In 1975, a Senate subcommittee headed by Frank Church -- a stalwart Democrat and no friend of the Nixon administration -- determined that there was "no real evidence" of U.S. support for the military coup or for an earlier botched kidnapping by Chileans that ended in the death of Army Chief of Staff Rene Schneider. A more recent CIA study confirmed these conclusions. No evidence to the contrary emerged from the 24,000 Chile-related documents declassified by the Clinton administration.

There is, in short, no smoking gun. Yet the myth persists. It is lovingly nurtured by the Latin American left and refreshed from time to time by contributions to the literature like Peter Kornbluh's The Pinochet File and Kenneth Maxwell's review of that book, "The Other 9/11" (November/December 2003).

Both Kornbluh and Maxwell recognize that it was the Chilean military that stormed Allende's presidential palace on that September 11 three decades ago; neither alleges direct U.S. participation in the coup. Still, although they do not go as far as the excitable critics who fire off wild charges of international criminal intent, both purport to make what Maxwell calls "The Case Against Kissinger."

Kornbluh and Maxwell echo the traditional claim that the United States "destabilized" Chile. Kornbluh says that the United States created a "coup climate." Maxwell asserts that Washington "engineered" the overthrow; as "for the coup itself," he writes, "there is no doubt that the United States did all that it could" to bring Allende down.

Hardly. It was no secret that President Richard Nixon opposed Allende and was unenthusiastic about the prospect of another Marxist regime in the region -- not surprising given that this was during the Cold War. But to claim that the Nixon administration "did all it could" to topple Allende is an injustice to regime-changers in the U.S. government, past and present. A cursory review of history suggests that had Washington done "all it could" in Chile, it would have attempted an assassination (Castro and Qaddafi: unsuccessful; Lumumba and Diem: successful), an invasion (Panama and Grenada), an armed attack by mercenaries (Iran and Guatemala), or an attack by the U.S. military (Iraq). Nothing close to such measures was deployed against Allende.

Even in the more gentlemanly arena of economic pressures, the U.S. effort against Chile pales in comparison with its no-holds-barred sanctions against Cuba, Iran, Iraq, and Libya. What the United States did in Chile, from Allende's inauguration in 1970 until his violent downfall at the hands of the Chilean military three years later, was a pinprick by comparison. Washington funneled $6 million in secret subsidies to the opposition press and parties (which Allende was trying to shut down). Washington tried -- and failed -- to block the restructuring of Chile's foreign debt. Washington reduced bilateral aid (although Allende found relief by unilaterally shutting down debt-service payments and opening lines of credit with other, friendlier nations). And it counseled international financial institutions to reduce their lending (although the World Bank needed no persuading: Chile was bankrupt). That was it.

If $6 million in support for the opposition and a reduction of bilateral aid brought Allende down, while other, far more robust attempts at regime change have failed, one might conclude that Allende's was a remarkably fragile regime. And indeed it was: Allende made it so. Kornbluh, Maxwell, and others inflate his martyrdom by saying he was democratically elected. This is a stretch. Allende won with a less-than-resounding 36 percent of the popular vote in 1970; nearly two-thirds of those who went to the polls voted against him. By 1973, he had frittered away even this flimsy base of support. What is even clearer, though, is that he was no democrat once in office. Indeed, Allende set out to destroy his country's democratic tradition. His government was set on "the Leninist demolition of the 'bourgeois' state," as the former Chilean Communist Roberto Ampuero put it recently in The Washington Post. "[Allende] cast aside our democratic system in order to try to replace it with a system ... that had already failed in Eastern Europe, Asia, and in Fidel Castro's Cuba."

Allende ruined the Chilean economy as well. His term opened in 1970 with crowd-pleasing, budget-busting welfare payouts. He nationalized the foreign-owned copper industry, ordered sharp wage increases, and imposed price controls. These measures triggered a consumption binge, and within months Chile had eaten its seed corn of capital. Inflation took over. Imports and consumption collapsed. Unemployment, destitution, and anger followed. By 1973, the economy was "screaming," as Nixon had hoped it would, but not because of Nixon, Henry Kissinger, or the CIA.

Such was the reality in Chile. Nathaniel Davis, the U.S. ambassador in Santiago at the time, later said that thanks to Allende's madcap economics, there was "progressively less Chilean institutional viability to 'destabilize.'" Nor was it the United States that did the "destabilizing," "undermining," or "engineering." According to a document of undoubted authenticity appended to his memoirs, Kissinger made clear to Davis days before the 1973 coup that "we are not to involve ourselves in any way. ... Our biggest problem is to keep from getting caught in the middle."