Allende's Chile and the Inter-American Cold War

Abstract

What Harmer calls the Inter- American Cold War followed its own, distinctive course. [...]if Allende's early foreign policies banked on détente to provide a window of opportunity for his government to pursue radical reforms without incurring serious reprisals by the United States, he was to be bitterly disappointed. [...]while not denying the destabilizing impact of the US credit squeeze and other intrusions, Harmer points to a fundamental dilemma that haunted the Unidad Popular: The reform processes it set into motion increased, rather than decreased, dependence on large-scale assistance from abroad and in the absence of alternative sources of support, their success ultimately relied on the understanding and cooperation of the United States. A comprehensive analysis of the destabilizing forces that came down on the Allende government would have to go beyond the political actors and include an assessment of the damage done by private entities, including US multinationals that engaged in a wide variety of activities in order to make life difficult for the Unidad Popular.

- Allende's Chile and the Inter-American Cold War, by Tanya Harmer. University of North Carolina Press, 2011.

For those of us who teach inter-American relations at the upper-division and graduate levels, this is a welcome addition to the literature on the Allende years. Tanya Harmer provides not just a history of Chile's foreign relations between 1970 and 1973, but a systematic effort to analyse the rise and fall of the Allende government in an inter-American and wider Cold War context.

In Latin America, the Cold War was neither cold nor was it simply a reflection of the larger struggle between the two superpowers. What Harmer calls the Inter- American Cold War followed its own, distinctive course. Thus, if Allende's early foreign policies banked on détente to provide a window of opportunity for his government to pursue radical reforms without incurring serious reprisals by the United States, he was to be bitterly disappointed. Not only was there no détente in inter- American relations, but the US-Soviet rapprochement seems to have further diminished the Allende government's already limited options and chances for survival: In Washington, the Nixon administration was united in its objective to bring down Allende, although there was disagreement about the most appropriate way to achieve this; in Moscow, the Kremlin was loath to jeopardize détente with the United States and thus unwilling to provide the kind of large-scale material assistance Chile needed to avoid economic collapse.

Indeed, the main foreign power to support Allende was not the USSR but Fidel Castro's Cuba. Harmer provides a detailed account of the Cuban involvement that went well beyond token gestures. Yet Cuba's influence never went so far as to change the direction of the Chilean government. Allende continued to insist on a peaceful and constitutionalist approach to politics, la via chilena, instead of following Castro's advice to crack down on the right-wing opposition and prepare for a prolonged armed struggle. Cuba's involvement, however, was blown out of proportion by CIA-sponsored intelligence and oppositional press reports. For Harmer, the very fear of a Cuban-sponsored and well-armed subversion led the Chilean military into an extremely violent form of repression during and after the September 1973 coup.

It was not so much US-Soviet competition that was driving the Inter-American Cold War, Harmer argues, but tensions emanating from within the region itself and from the fault lines that pitted the global South against the North. Chile's Unidad Popular promoted its reform policies as part and parcel of a larger struggle against imperialist exploitation and underdevelopment while engaging in a concerted effort to build bridges across the global South. It thereby radicalized contemporary debates on the New International Economic Order. Together with the 'Allende Doctrine' that affirmed Chile's right to expropriate without compensation those foreign firms which had reaped 'excess profits' in the past, the Unidad Popular's activism in Third World forums and elsewhere did not fail to increase tensions with Washington while it did little to counterbalance the Chilean economy's traditional dependence on the United States. However, such activism raised la vía chilena's international profile and thereby served to restrain the Nixon administration. Aware of the possible international fallout of overt interventions, Harmer argues, Nixon responded with 'tactical caution' (p. 120). Although relations with Chile continued to deteriorate over the compensation issue, he sided against hardliners in his administration who advocated open confrontation.

Of course, 'tactical caution' did not mean passivity. As is well known, Washington continued to covertly lend a helping hand to Chile's oppositional forces and to undermine Chile's economy. It also sought closer relations with right-wing military dictatorships in South America, particularly in Brazil, and it recalibrated its relations with nationalist, but non-Marxist governments, so as to isolate Chile. Allende's defiance and the US response thereby reverberated throughout the inter- American system.

At the same time, Harmer ultimately agrees with Henry Kissinger who suggested that Washington has been given 'too much credit' for the coup that overthrew Allende (p. 253). In line with much of the recent scholarship on inter-American relations she proposes (to use a fashionable, if opaque terminology) decentering, that is, a research agenda that takes stock of a fuller range of actors, their objectives, perceptions, and strategic interactions, in order to explain a given outcome. The governments of Cuba and Brazil, as she shows in some detail, were certainly no pawns of the superpowers: They were pursuing their own interests and acted on their own impulse when intervening in Chilean affairs. And in the months leading up to the Chilean coup, she suggests, it was the Brazilian military rather than the CIA or the Pentagon that provided reassurance and tangible assistance to the plotting officers. More important still, and as various researchers have done in the past, she points to the increasingly bitter divide that split Chilean politics into mutually hostile camps and to the deepening crises that engulfed the Allende government. As a growing number of both military and civilian opponents came to contemplate a coup as a legitimate political option, Allende was unable to rein in his own coalition forces and provide a coherent strategy to address the challenges ahead. This was a downward spiral that was reinforced by, but hardly the product of, foreign interventions. Thus, while not denying the destabilizing impact of the US credit squeeze and other intrusions, Harmer points to a fundamental dilemma that haunted the Unidad Popular: The reform processes it set into motion increased, rather than decreased, dependence on large-scale assistance from abroad and in the absence of alternative sources of support, their success ultimately relied on the understanding and cooperation of the United States.

The author's call to move beyond the 'blame game' (p. 256), however, seems somewhat misplaced in a study that in its concluding chapter summons the major political actors in the inter-American Cold War in order to discuss their part in the events that led to the Chilean September 11. By contrast, her call to go beyond US archives and the study of Nixon's every move in the bilateral standoffwith Allende in order to construct a more complex and interactive explanatory framework is borne out well in this study. Based on archival research in seven countries and a host of first-hand interviews, this study brings to life the struggle over Chile as waged by the Chilean and other governments alike. Those readers who ascribe more of the 'blame' to the United States, however, will most likely remain unconvinced. While few historians (as opposed to political activists) view the Chilean coup as an event produced by remote control in Washington, many do ascribe more causal relevance to the Colossus of the North and to the sheer weight it commands in the inter-American system. A comprehensive analysis of the destabilizing forces that came down on the Allende government would have to go beyond the political actors and include an assessment of the damage done by private entities, including US multinationals that engaged in a wide variety of activities in order to make life difficult for the Unidad Popular. Such an assessment, however, is beyond the scope of Harmer's research agenda. She concentrates on the interactions of governments in the inter-American Cold War and this she does well.