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LATIN AMERICA
Chile, to the Overthrow of Allende in 1973
Since 1932, Chile had been electing governments without political chaos. Chile had a reputation as more politically stable than its neighbors. Rather than a parliamentary system, it had a president -- elected for a six-year term -- a congress and a judiciary. And Chile had numerous political parties that were able to function freely.
Through the 1950s, Chile's cities were growing, and political power was moving away from the rural elite. In 1962 a rural reform law was passed that was contrary to the interests of owners of Chile's agricultural haciendas. The United States was encouraging reforms in Chile as part of the Alliance for Progress. Chile's conservatives spoke against the Alliance for Progress and were angry with the United States. A conservative Chilean senator spoke of the Alliance for Progress as containing a threat to the basic values of the Western and Christian world.
In 1964, a reformist political party called the Christian Democrats came to power -- an election in which women voted for the first time. The new president, Eduardo Frei, a devout Catholic, promised radical reforms. His slogan was "Revolution in Liberty." Chile's Christian Democratic Party -- largely Catholic -- was the first liberal religious party in Latin America. The Catholic Church in Chile, which had supported rural conservatism, had become reformist and was encouraged in this by the Second Ecumenical Council.
Frei had been the candidate that the Johnson administration in the U.S. wanted to win. Agents from the United States had gone to Chile with money to influence the election, and Frei had narrowly defeated Salvador Allende Gossens, a Marxist candidate with support from Chile's Communist Party -- said to be 100,000 strong.
Frei sponsored an urban home building program and the buying of fertile land from the wealthy for distribution at low interest rates. And Frei hoped to advance industrialization by attracting foreign investment. Foreign investors already owned much of Chile's copper industry -- copper remaining Chile's primary export. Under Frei, multinational corporations increased their participation in Chile, in such industries as electronics, pharmaceuticals and automobile assembly. Around forty of the top one hundred companies in Chile were controlled by foreign interests. Chile was mass producing cars, television sets and washing machines rather than having to buy these from abroad. But resentment was mounting on the Left -- the same kind of economic nationalism that was in Cuba during the Batista regime. And, like Cuba under Batista, Chile had strong labor unions, which were exerting pressure to increase wages. The Marxist Left had more support from Labor than did Frei, and the rising cost of labor was contributing to inflation - in other words to a rise in prices -- which brought more demand for higher wages and more inflation. And during the last half of the 1960s, radicalism was being adopted by youth in Chile as it was in other industrialized countries. Chilean youths were listening to rock and roll, letting their hair grow long, and they were protesting against the war in Vietnam.
The Overthrow of Allende
Presidents in Chile were prohibited from running for second terms. In the presidential elections of 1970, Allende ran again. The Communist party had its candidate, Pablo Neruda. -- a poet who was to win the Nobel Prize in literature the following year. Neruda withdrew at the last minute and supported Allende. Jorge Alessandri, who had been president from 1958 to 1964 (and was the son of another former president, Arturo Alessandri), ran for some Christian Democrats, and Radomiro Tomic ran for left leaning Christian Democrats. Again money to influence the elections came from U.S. agents, but U.S. influence was not as great as some have imagined it to be. It did not have enough influence to prevent an Allende victory.
Allende won with 36.3 percent of the votes, and the other leftist candidate, Tomic, received 27.8 percent of the vote. The Left had won a majority of the votes, but for Allende in particular 36.3 percent was not much of a mandate. The question remained as to how fast or how hard did political realities allow him to push for social change. During his campaign, Allende had pledged himself to the building of a republic for the working class. He had denounced capitalism for having created social and economic inequities. And in his inauguration speech he spoke of work and sacrifice needed for the construction of socialism. Some joyous Allende supporters were equating Allende's victory with revolution. But Chile in 1970, some have pointed out, was not Russia in 1917.
A few on the Left who advocated revolution expected a counter-revolution - similar to the Kornilov affair in Russia in August and September, 1917 -- and this, they believed, would rally the forces on the Left and be a forerunner to all out revolution.
On September 15, a few days after the elections, at a meeting in the oval office, President Nixon said that he wanted to prevent Allende from taking office - which could be accomplished only by Chile's armed forces. Henry Kissinger, then Nixon's national security advisor, was there but in the habit of ignoring such outbursts from Nixon. Christopher Hitchens, in his book The Trial of Henry Kissinger, charges that Kissinger took seriously Nixon's outburst. [note] The head of the Central Intelligence Agency, Richard Helms was also present at the thirteen-minute meeting, and he is said to have taken Nixon's statement seriously. The CIA began action on what was called Track II against Allende. As Kissinger describes it, the U.S. effort to prevent Allende from becoming President was "belated and confused" and "called off" and the "Chilean component bungled." [note] Allende took office as President of Chile on November 3.
Allende inherited economic recession, inflation and unemployment that was 8.4 percent of the work force. He moved to put more wealth in the hands of common folk by raising wages, freezing prices and creating public works. He initiated a program that gave free milk to children. Common people and small business were offered tax relief, and pensions were raised for the elderly.
Allende nationalized the copper industry, without compensating its owners. He nationalized other foreign owned businesses and some Chilean-owned businesses considered monopolies. State run businesses came to control 60 percent of Chile's Gross National Product. Workers in business that remained privately owned clamored for nationalization of their industry, hoping for the better pay and working conditions they believed were accruing to public-sector employees. Some industrial workers in privately owned companies took over their factories.
After Allende's first year in office, unemployment fell to 4.8 percent. But the copper industry suffered. Allende pleaded for restraint from labor, but workers remained determined to advance their earnings, and in 1971 and '72, miners struck eighty-five times. Chile's copper industry was hurt also by a fall in world copper prices, and with copper as Chile's major export, earnings from foreign trade suffered.
Worker discipline and productivity in other industries fell. Government owned industries were suffering from political appointments rather than appointments based on expertise. Bad weather and social turmoil was diminishing food production. Allende was pursuing more agrarian reform, and impatient peasants, encouraged by the call for equality and for revolutionary change, were seizing land illegally.
Allende's attempt to control inflation by freezing prices did not work. More money chasing few goods contributed to more inflation, as did the continuing demand from labor for higher wages. The money supply had doubled. The continual rise in prices was hurting people. The Nixon administration had stopped aid to Chile, and investment in Chile from abroad had dried -- as was to be expected given the nationalizations and hostilities toward foreign capital within Chile. To the Left it seemed that Allende's Chile was under attack from hostile forces. There had also been withdrawals from bank deposits and an exodus of capital from Chile.
Hostility toward Allende increased among those who did not believe in social revolution. They hardly needed influence from the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency, but the CIA was there, sponsoring anti-Allende propaganda in Chile's media and supporting anti-Allende politicians.
People opposed to Allende marched in the streets. Denunciations abounded. A threat to massacre communists was declared. Incidents of violence by the Right and by the Left increased. Armed anti-Leftists vigilante defense groups appeared in middleclass suburbs. Landowners were defending themselves violently against attempted seizures of their land. The toleration needed for democracy to work was disappearing.
Chile's independent truckers did not care for threats to create socialist trucking. On July 26, 1973, the truckers began another of their strikes, crippling commerce. Allende was not moving to appease centrists, and, in August, Congress moved against him, declaring that the Allende's government was in fundamental violation of Chile's constitution. Chile's judiciary joined in and asked the military to step in and put an end to infringements on the nation's constitution and laws. The military responded, believing that they were saving Chile. The military stormed the presidential palace, and Allende died with his machine gun in his hands.
Here is a CIA comment that appears in the CIA Factbook in 2009:
Awareness of Coup Plotting in 1973. Although CIA did not instigate the coup that ended Allende’s government on 11 September 1973, it was aware of coup-plotting by the military, had ongoing intelligence collection relationships with some plotters, and—because CIA did not discourage the takeover and had sought to instigate a coup in 1970—probably appeared to condone it. There was no way that anyone, including CIA, could have known that Allende would refuse the putchists’ offer of safe passage out of the country and that instead—with La Monedam Palace under bombardment from tanks and airplanes and in flames—would take his own life.
The Republican administration in Washington was happy to see Allende overthrown, but apparently it had not been the Nixon administration that had been calling the shots in Chile. Chile's military and all those who supported the overthrow of Allende saw themselves as other than under orders from abroad. Henry Kissinger, then in the Nixon administration, was to defend himself by describing the coup against Allende as indigenous and denying his or the Nixon administration's involvement. At a meeting, Kissinger had asked, "I don't see why we have to let a country go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible." [note]
In 1975, a Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, headed by Senator Frank Church of Idaho, a Democrat and hostile toward the Nixon administration's foreign policy and interventions in foreign countries. His committee investigated the coup against Allende and came to no conclusion about U.S. complicity in the coup. Hitchens in his book, The Trial of Henry Kissinger, did otherwise. Hitchens discusses Kissinger's involvement in what turned into the murder of a Chilean general, René Schneider, who was opposed to and stood in the way of a military coup. [note]
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Copyright © 2002 by Frank E. Smitha. All rights reserved.