Harry Targ
National
Security Archive
The
United States government always interfered in the politics of Chile. That began
to increase in 1970 when the Chilean people elected Marxist Salvador Allende as
its president. 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, was the favorite Chilean politician of the
United States. He 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. First, 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 rightwing 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, The 40 Committee,* headed by Henry Kissinger and enthusiastically endorsed by the International Telephone and Telegraph Company (ITT) a major economic power in Chile, whose purpose was the overthrow of Allende. The Kissinger 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.
But 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 11,
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.
Peoples
World
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" (Nathan and Oliver 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 497).
A more
accurate assessment was made by historian Alexander De Conde, who writes 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"
(De Conde 388—89).
The Chilean affair suggests that, despite rhetoric about the Nixon Administration’s, “a structure of
peace" and theory derived from the tradition of Henry Kissinger’s brand of
political realism, not much had changed in terms of U.S. foreign policy.
Détente was a policy designed to use the Sino-Soviet split in ways that would
mitigate the declining hegemonial power of the United States in the world.
Kissinger tried to play China off against the Soviet Union, and when that did
not work in regions like the Middle East, nuclear alert and threats of
holocaust were resumed. Vietnamization and U.S. withdrawal really meant a
murderous policy of bombing all of Indochina, giving sympathy if not outright
support to the destruction of Kampuchean society, and in the postwar period
reneging on promises made at Paris to aid in the reconstruction of Vietnam.
Interventionism 
the old ways—continued unabated in
Angola and Chile. Imperial strategies abroad were supported by an
institutionalized pattern of harassment, subversion, and murder at home, of
which the Watergate scandal was only the tip of the iceberg. And Henry
Kissinger, National Security Advisor and Secretary of State, played a major
role in these policies.
Alexander
de Conde, A History of American Foreign Policy, 1978.
James A.
Nathan and James K. Oliver, United States Foreign Policy and World Order,
1976.
