Harry Targ
The Allende Years and the US Coup
National
Security Archive
The
election of Socialist Salvador Allende in Chile in 1970 became the target of
sustained interest of the Nixon Administration. The United States had supported
the Christian Democrats in Chile with official assistance and CIA financing
since the 1950s. Eduardo Frei, Chile's president from 1964 to 1970, had been
its favorite Chilean politician. Frei had been opposed in presidential
elections by the Marxist Allende, who, leading a left coalition, finally won a
plurality of votes in 1970, despite much CIA money funneled into the coffers of
the Christian Democratic candidate. From the time of the election in October,
1970, until September, 1973, when a bloody military coup toppled Allende, the
United States did everything it could to destabilize the elected government.
From October to November, 1970, the United States pressured members of the
Chilean parliament to vote against certification of the election victory,
traditionally a routine exercise. After Allende had been confirmed as
president, energy and resources were used to damage the economy and make
contact with right-wing members of the Chilean military to plan a coup.
Allende
carried out many policies designed to improve the material conditions of the
lives of the workers and peasants in Chile. Land was redistributed, major
industries were nationalized (copper had been partially nationalized under
Frei), and 
diplomatic relations were established with the
Soviet Union, China, and Cuba. All these moves exacerbated tensions with the
United States, since investments in copper, iron, nitrates, iodine, and salt
were large.
The
Nixon administration formed a secret committee, headed by Kissinger and
enthusiastically endorsed by the International Telephone
and Telegraph Company, a major economic power in Chile, whose purpose was the
overthrow of Allende. The committee's preference was for an Allende defeat
resulting from public rejection, but, if all else failed, a military coup was
preferable to a continuation of his government. Among the policies utilized by
Washington were an informal economic blockade of Chile, termination of aid and
loans, IMF pressure on the government to carry out antiworker policies,
fomenting dissent in the military, and funding opposition groups and
newspapers, like the influential newspaper El Mercurio.
Allende's
economic policies were effective and generated much support from workers and
peasants during 1970 and 1971; but, after the economic squeeze on the
government increased, Allende had to grapple with inflation,
balance-of-payments problems, and the inability to get spare parts and capital
goods that had traditionally come from the United States. In trying to
forestall military intervention in the political process, Allende allowed the
"constitutionalist" officers to be replaced by avowed fascist generals.
U.S. contacts with these generals provided the organizational basis for the
impending coup. Excessive demands by more well paid workers and more secure
peasants, coupled with a truckers' strike and demonstrations of middle-class
housewives organized by the rightwing, added to the problems of the Allende
government in 1972 and 1973. Despite the increasing economic and political
problems being faced by Allende and the systematic efforts by the U.S.
government to create discord within Chile, the Allende-led left coalition
scored electoral victories in municipal elections throughout the country in
March, 1973.
Since
"making the economy scream" had not led to the rejection of Allende
at the ballot box, the Kissinger committee and the right-wing generals decided
to act. On September I l, 1973, the military carried out a coup that ousted the
Allende government, and Allende himself was assassinated in the presidential
palace. A junta headed by General Pinochet began a policy of extermination,
torture, and imprisonment on a massive scale. A year after the coup, Amnesty
International reported that some 6,000 to 10,000 prisoners had been taken. The
new regime also banned all political parties, abolished trade unions, and
continued its political repression both at home and abroad. In reference to the
latter, Orlando Letelier, foreign minister in the Allende government, was blown
up in a car in Washington, D.C., by Pinochet agents.
Socialist
Worker.org
The
spirit of the brutal U.S. policy in Chile was expressed by Kissinger in 1970:
"I don't see why we need to stand by and watch a country go communist due
to the irresponsibility of its own people" (James A. Nathan and James K.
Oliver, United States Foreign Policy and World Order, Little,
Brown, 1981, p.496) and by President Ford in his first press conference,
defending the coup as being in the "best interests of the people of Chile
and certainly in the best interests of the United States" (Nathan and
Oliver, p. 497). A somewhat more accurate assessment was made by historian
Alexander De Conde, who wrote that the United States “had a hand in the
destruction of a moderate left-wing government that allowed democratic freedoms
to its people and to its replacement by a friendly right-wing government that
crushed such freedoms with torture and other police-state repressions" (Alexander
DeConde, A History of American Foreign Policy, Volume ll Charles
Scribner, 1978, pp.388-389).
The Third World Demands a New International Economic Order
The
brutal overthrow of the Allende government in Chile was reminiscent of
traditional US. activities as world policeman. The impact of the coup on the
Chilean people in terms of economic justice and political freedom was negative
in the extreme. The bloody victory of counterrevolution in Chile, however, came
at a period in world history when the rise of Third World resistance to U.S.
imperialism would reduce the prospect of more Chiles in the future.
By the
1970s, the worldwide resistance to U.S. and international capitalism was
growing. The revolutionary manifestation of this resistance was occurring in
Southeast Asia, southern Africa, the Horn of Africa, the Middle East, and Central
America and the Caribbean. During the Nixon-Ford period, the United States and
its imperialist allies lost control of the Indochinese states, Angola,
Mozambique, and Guinea-Bissau. South Yemen, Nicaragua, Iran, and Grenada would
follow later in the decade.
The
Progressive International
Along
with the rise of revolutionary victories and movements throughout the Third
World, a worldwide reformist movement began to take shape around demands for a
New International Economic Order (NIEO). Its predecessor, the. nonaligned
movement of the 1950s and 1960s, had been nurtured by leading anticolonial
figures such as Nasser of Egypt, Nkrumah of Ghana, and Nehru of India. Their
goal was to construct a bloc of Third World nations of all ideological hues
which could achieve political power and economic advantage by avoiding
alliances and political stances that might tie them to the United States or the
Soviet Union. The nonaligned movement saw the interests of member nations tied
to the resolution of "north-south" issues, which in their view were
of greater importance than "east-west" issues.
After
two decades of experience with political independence from formal colonialism,
revolutionaries who believed that economic exploitation resulted from the
structure of the international capitalist system were joined by Third World
leaders who saw the need to reform international capitalism. Consequently, a
movement emerged, largely within UN agencies, increasingly populated by Third
World nations and addressing itself to Third World poverty and
underdevelopment. This movement presupposed the possibility of reducing the
suffering of Third World peoples without necessarily bringing an end to
capitalism as the internationally dominant mode of production.
To
counter the declining Third World percentage of world trade, fluctuations in
prices of exported commodities, foreign corporate repatriation of profits
earned in Third World countries, technological dependence, growing
international debt, and deepening crises in the supply of food, Third World
leaders were forced by material conditions and revolutionary ferment to call
for reforms. The inspiration for a NIEO movement came also from the seeming
success of OPEC countries in gaining control of oil pricing and production
decisions from foreign corporations.
Two
special sessions of the General Assembly of the UN in 1974 and 1975 on the NIEO
"established the concept as a priority item of the international
community" (Ervin Laszlo, Robert Baker Jr., Elliott Eisenberg, Raman
Venkata, The Objectives of the New International Economic Order,
New York, Pergamon, 1978, pp. xvi). The NEIO became a short-hand reference for
a series of interrelated economic and political demands concerning issues that
required fundamental policy changes, particularly from wealthy nations. The
issue areas singled out for action included aid and assistance, international
trade and finance, industrialization, technology transfer, and business
practices.
Paradoxically,
while the NIEO demands were reformist in character and, if acted on, could
stave off revolutionary ferment (as did New Deal legislation in the United
States in the 1930s), the general position of the Nixon, Ford, and Carter
administrations on the NIEO were negative. European nations were more
responsive to selected demands, like stabilizing Third World commodity prices
and imports into Common Market countries, but the broad package of NIEO demands
continued to generate resistance from the wealthy nations, which benefited from
the current system. Nabudere correctly understands the interests of Third World
leaders in the NIEO when he wrote that:
“The
demands of the petty bourgeoisie of third world countries are not against
exploitation of the producing classes in their countries, but of the domination
of their class by monopoly. The demands therefore for reform—for more credit to
enable the petty bourgeois more room also to exploit their own labor and
extract a greater share of the surplus value. This is unachievable, for to do
so is to negate monopoly—which is an impossible task outside the class struggle”
(Wadada D. Nabudere, Essays on the Theory and Practice of Imperialism,
London: Onyx Press, 1979, p.179).
Therefore, the NEIO, commodity cartels like OPEC, and other schemes for marginal redistribution of the profits derived from the international economy would not have gone beyond increasing the shares which Third World ruling classes received from the ongoing economic system. Minimal benefits to workers and peasants would accrue. Third World successes against monopoly capital, however, served to weaken the hold the latter has on the international system.
Also, while
channeling Third World militancy in a reformist direction, the NIEO and
OPEC had the opposite effect of
generating a new militancy among masses of Third World peoples where it did not
exist before. Those workers, peasants, and intellectuals who gained consciousness
of their plight in global structural terms through their leaders' UN activities
came to realize that NIEO demands were not enough. They would come to realize
what Nabudere argued, namely that:
“in
order to succeed, the struggles cannot be relegated to demands for change at
international bodies, mere verbal protests and parliamentary debates, etc.
Therefore demands for a new economic order are made increasingly impossible
unless framed in the general context of a new democratic revolution; the role
of the working class and its allies is crucial to the achievement, in any
meaningful way, of a new international economic order” (180).
Conclusion
In a period of less than twenty-five years, the United
States had solidified a worldwide military alliance system, stimulated
integrated economic institutions based on monopoly capitalism, started the most
dangerous arms race in world history, and engaged in repeated acts of military,
political, and economic intervention in nations throughout the world.
Similarly, labor militancy was crushed at home. The U.S. public was mobilized
by rhetoric about "fighting communism," "liberating" Eastern
Europe, constructing a "new frontier," aiding in economic development, stopping "wars of national liberation," and 
'building peace with honor. "
Paradoxically,
in this same period many political forces were emerging to challenge the
economic, military, and political hegemony of the United States. Intervention
in Chile admittedly fit the pattern established in Iran and Guatemala in the
1950s and the Dominican Republic in the 1960s. Between Iran and Chile, however,
the United States had lost a major war to the Vietnamese people and was unable
to forestall Marxist victories in southern Africa. Even reform minded Third
World ruling classes were making demands on the United States and its allies
that impinged on the free workings of world capitalism.
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