Allende's Chile and the Inter-American Cold War

Tanya Harmer

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780807869246
• Topic: Geschichte
• Subtopic: Lateinamerikanische & karibische Geschichte

Fidel Castro described Salvador Allende's democratic election as president of Chile in 1970 as the most important revolutionary triumph in Latin America after the Cuban revolution. Yet celebrations were short lived. In Washington, the Nixon administration vowed to destroy Allende's left-wing government while Chilean opposition forces mobilized against him. The result was a battle for Chile that ended in 1973 with a right-wing military coup and a brutal dictatorship lasting nearly twenty years. Tanya Harmer argues that this battle was part of a dynamic inter-American Cold War struggle to determine Latin America's future, shaped more by the contest between Cuba, Chile, the United States, and Brazil than by a conflict between Moscow and Washington. Drawing on firsthand interviews and recently declassified documents from archives in North America, Europe, and South America--including Chile's Foreign Ministry Archive--Harmer provides the most comprehensive account to date of Cuban involvement in Latin America in the early 1970s, Chilean foreign relations during Allende's presidency, Brazil's support for counterrevolution in the Southern Cone, and the Nixon administration's Latin American policies. The Cold War in the Americas, Harmer reveals, is best understood as a multidimensional struggle, involving peoples and ideas from across the hemisphere.

1 IDEALS

Castro, Allende, Nixon, and the Inter-American Cold War

“It is hard to imagine,” a Chilean Socialist Party militant mused as he looked back on the late 1960s more than forty years later. Back then, when you walked into any bookshop, there were lots of Marxist publications, and news of Latin American guerrilla struggles reached Chile all the time. Especially toward the end of the decade, Che Guevara’s ideas and Régis Debray’s books were also endlessly discussed within Chile’s different left-wing parties, and everyone was engaged in what seemed like a permanent ideological debate.¹

This ideological fervor in Chile resulted as much from internal as from external factors. International developments had profoundly influenced Chilean politics throughout the first half of the twentieth century despite it being the country furthest away from both superpowers, nestled between the Andes and the Pacific at the southernmost tip of the Americas. Whether affected by the result of the Great Depression of the 1930s or the Korean and Vietnam wars, Chile’s export-orientated economy fluctuated with global copper markets, the Santiago-based United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America expounded theories of dependency that were taken up by many others in the Third World, and new ideas from abroad fertilized those already present and growing within Chilean society. On the Left, divisions within the international communist movement over Stalin’s leadership or the Soviet invasions of Hungary and Czechoslovakia, for example, had had a profound impact on the character of and relations between Chile’s left-wing parties. And the United States–led “Alliance for Progress” had invigorated the country’s centrist Christian Democrat government in the mid-1960s, encouraging—and funding—President Eduardo Frei Montalva’s reformist program to bring about a “Revolution in Liberty.”

However, it was the Cuban revolution that had had the most pivotal external impact on Chilean political debates in the 1960s. For the Socialist Party, in particular, Cuba’s revolutionary example had a special resonance. As the Chilean scholar, diplomat, and politician Heraldo Muñoz explained, “the Cuban Revolution symbolized and synthesized the essential tenets of [Socialist] party thought on international affairs. In short, Cuba constituted a nationalist, anti-imperialist, popular, anticapitalist, and Latin-Americanist experience … with which Chile and Chilean Socialists could identify fully—that is, politically, culturally, geographically, historically, and economically; unlike the various nationalist-populist experiments in Latin America, Cuba was to build socialism from below and not as the imposition of foreign troops, within the Western hemisphere and merely ninety miles away from the United States.”²

Beyond Chile, the Cuban revolution had also fundamentally changed the narrative of inter-American affairs and politics. Before Fidel Castro entered Havana in January 1959, efforts to bring about revolutionary change in Latin America had suffered decisive setbacks, most notably in Guatemala, where the nationalist leader, Jacobo Arbenz, had been overthrown as a result of a CIA-backed invasion in 1954. After the Cuban revolution, however, the situation was reversed and everything seemed possible: left-wing parties in Latin America not only had evidence that revolution could succeed but also proof it could even do so in the United States’ immediate backyard. True, Fidel Castro’s strategy for gaining power may have been more violent than the one advocated by long-established communist parties throughout the region. But it also undoubtedly energized those who believed that socialism was the answer to Latin America.

As a Chilean Socialist Party senator, Salvador Allende was one of many left-wing politicians in Latin America who flocked to Havana after 1959 to see what the revolution was like and who left Cuba impressed. In the era of Che Guevara’s internationalist missions to Africa and Bolivia during the mid-1960s, the island then became home to an impatient younger generation of radicalized Latin American volunteers who aspired to follow in Guevara’s footsteps. One such Chilean later described how he went to Cuba looking for his own Sierra Maestra. “The only thing that tormented me was a sense of urgency,” he recalled, “if I did not hurry up, this world was not going to wait for me to change and perhaps I would not have time to get to my mountain.”³

Of course, the task of bringing about socialist revolution throughout Latin America was far more complex than a question of enthusiastic young revolutionaries heading off into the mountains. By the end of the 1960s, even Havana’s leaders had begun to acknowledge this and, as a result, were already reviewing their earlier insistence that armed struggle and the guerrilla foco was the road to revolution. Their examination of the alternatives available for bringing about progressive, if not yet socialist, change responded to the scars of the new intensified inter-American Cold War that had emerged after 1959. Cuban support for armed revolution in Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Venezuela, Guatemala, and Bolivia had failed.⁴ The reformist government of João Goulart had also been toppled and replaced by a military dictatorship in Brazil in 1964; U.S. forces had invaded the Dominican Republic in 1965; a highly politicized military elite had emerged in the region that believed it had a role to play in the region’s future; and, devastatingly, Che Guevara had been killed trying to spark a revolution in Bolivia in late 1967. At the same time, the continent’s left-wing movement—the heterogeneous Chilean Left included—had become deeply divided over Castro’s call to arms. As some went in search of their own Sierra Maestras, others berated the idea of the guerrilla foco and continued to advocate forging broad alliances as a means of gaining political power.

Meanwhile, many on the right and center of Latin American politics shared left-wing frustrations about the region’s lack of economic progress during the United Nations’ “development decade” of the 1960s. Not only did it seem that Latin America had failed to keep up with a rapidly changing world, but President John F. Kennedy’s $20 billion Alliance for Progress had failed to “immunize” the hemisphere from revolutionary currents and had clearly fallen far short of its illustrious goals. Even President Frei in Chile suggested that the alliance had “lost its way” and demanded new answers to Latin America’s underdevelopment.⁵ After all, the region continued to face challenges of inequality, political instability, exploding population growth, economic dependency, and military interventions. Toward the end of the 1960s, it was also characterized by a surge of radical nationalism and growing resentment toward a world economic system that seemed destined to ignore its needs, so much so that many predicted that revolution (of one form or another) was “inevitable.”⁶

The incoming Nixon administration in Washington was not oblivious to this. As one internal U.S. study warned at the end of 1969, “rapidly intensifying change” was sweeping through Latin America.⁷ Nasser-style nationalist revolutionary military leaders had seized power in Peru, Panama, and Bolivia, adding a new dimension to inter-American relations that challenged U.S. influence in the hemisphere.⁸ And in Chile, one of Latin America’s few long-standing democratic countries, politics seemed to be moving left. Moreover, as Allende would later say, what happened in Chile was not “isolated or unique.”⁹ Years later, a senior member of Cuba’s Communist Party echoed this verdict, arguing that to understand Allende’s election and his presidency, one needed to understand what the Americas and the world looked like in the late 1960s and early 1970s.¹⁰

Castro’s Cold War

Combining ideas of social justice that had come to prominence during Cuba’s nineteenth-century struggle for independence with Marxism and anger at U.S. interventionism, Havana’s revolutionary leaders extolled defiant, radical nationalism and an internationalist commitment to accelerate Latin America’s “second independence.” As Castro proclaimed in his “Second Declaration of Havana” (1962), it was “the duty of every revolutionary to make revolution” and “not for revolutionaries to sit in the doorways of their houses waiting for the corpse of imperialism to pass by.”¹¹ This notion of revolutionary internationalism did not come from nowhere in 1959. Before this, Fidel Castro had not only called for Cuba to become the “bulwark of liberty” in the Americas but had also acknowledged that his “destiny” would be to wage a “much wider and bigger war” against the United States.¹²

Revolutionary Cuba’s foreign minister echoed this sentiment more than a decade later when he explained to Havana’s socialist bloc allies what the Cubans’ approach to Latin America was. In his words, they were “fighting for the freedom of Latin American nations” in an “emancipatory and revolutionary battle” reminiscent of “the Latin American people’s fight for liberation from Spanish colonial oppression in the first half of the nineteenth century” led by Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín.¹³ As Piero Gleijeses has written,“history, geography, culture, and language made Latin America the Cubans’ natural habitat, the place closest to Castro’s and his followers’ hearts.”¹⁴ And Manuel Piñeiro, who headed Cuba’s Latin America policy for three decades after the revolution, quite simply explained that the Cubans saw their country as an “inseparable part of Latin America.” “Our revolution is a part of the Latin American revolution,” he argued. “Each of our triumphs makes the fraternal countries stronger. Every Latin American victory strengthens our revolution. Our battle won’t have ended until all of the peoples of Our America have freed themselves of the neo-colonial yoke.”¹⁵

With these ideas in mind, Havana offered the most radical and consistent challenge to the United States’ influence in Latin America during the 1960s. While the Cubans sustained their regional battle against what they considered to be U.S. imperialism, the USSR tended to accept the region as Washington’s sphere of influence. Particularly after the Cuban Missile Crisis, this meant trying not to provoke the United States’ hostility by prioritizing nonideological economic ties over riskier support for socialist revolution. It also meant reasserting Moscow’s long-held view that Latin America was a place where revolution would progress gradually, through class alliances and constitutional means and in two stages (national bourgeois and then socialist). Indeed, in the postwar era as a whole, Moscow’s policies toward the region had mostly been reactive and focused on saving revolutionary processes rather than igniting them. When Nikita Khrushchev stressed the need for peaceful coexistence in the mid-1960s, this in turn led to a fierce rejection of what the Soviets—and Soviet-affiliated communist parties in Latin America—regarded as “adventurist” Cuban efforts to spark revolution through armed insurgency.¹⁶ The pro-Soviet Venezuelan Communist Party also denounced Fidel’s “role of judge over revolutionary activities in Latin America, the role of the super-revolutionary” and “his claim to be the only one who decides what is and is not revolutionary in Latin America.”¹⁷

Havana was meanwhile unrepentant about its radical brand of revolutionary activism. In March 1967 Castro publicly attacked Venezuelan Communists along with “shilly-shalliers and pseudo-revolutionaries” on account of their objection to guerrilla insurgency.¹⁸ And a month later, the Cubans published Che Guevara’s infamous call to fight decisive cumulative wars against the United States (“two, three, many Vietnams”).¹⁹ According to U.S. intelligence sources, the Cubans had already trained fifteen hundred to two thousand Latin Americans in guerrilla warfare between 1961 and 1964, a number that undoubtedly rose during the latter half of the decade.²⁰ One of those who underwent such training later remembered Cuba as a “fascinating … link between revolutionaries from diverse countries,” the place to meet “proven combatants,” left-wing intellectuals, and guerrilla leaders. In secret training camps in Cuba, Uruguayans, Venezuelans, Colombians, Peruvians, Argentines, Bolivians, Brazilians, and Chileans could be found within groups of about thirty to forty receiving classes on firearms, explosives, artillery, mines, urban struggle, and topography. The cost and commitment that the Cubans expended on such training was immense; on one training exercise, for example, participants were expected to fire two hundred bullets a day over the course of several weeks. However, as a graduate of the training camps remembered, this was “not the place to make friends” because everyone hid their real names and remained reluctant to share revealing information with each other. More ominously for the prospects of a continental-wide Latin American revolution, not all nationalities got on.²¹

Overall, however, Cuba’s offensive against U.S. influence in Latin America in the 1960s was far more restrained than was its offensive in Africa, a factor that Gleijeses ascribes to the perceived risks involved and problems of promoting insurgency as opposed to working with sovereign leaders.²² More important, Havana’s Latin American policies were also less successful. Guevara’s Bolivian adventure, which was Cuba’s biggest Latin American foreign policy venture before its involvement in Chile, had been quite literally the least-worst option for trying to spark a revolutionary insurgency in Latin America.²³ After his failed mission to the Congo, Che Guevara had been impatient to embark on another revolutionary campaign, preferably in Argentina but otherwise on its border. With limited prospects for starting a successful foco elsewhere, and Castro desperate to stop Che Guevara from going to Argentina, which was considered acutely dangerous, Bolivia had therefore been an unsatisfactory compromise. Even those closest to Che and the preparations for creating a foco in Bolivia later recalled that the Argentine was searching around for just about any location to create a “mother column” to power a continental revolution.²⁴

As the historians James G. Blight and Philip Brenner have argued, Fidel Castro then decided to “wait and hope for good news from Bolivia, even though the outlook was bleak…. If Che pulled off a miracle in Bolivia, many things might be possible.”²⁵ Although Guevara had regarded Bolivia as a suitable base for pursuing guerrilla operations in Argentina and Peru since 1963, there were multiple reasons why fermenting a Bolivian revolution—or a continental war from Bolivia as a result of internationalizing the foco—was impracticable. As Régis Debray later explained, a tree bearing revolutionary fruits needed a seed with roots, and the attempt to start a guerrilla struggle in Bolivia “had nothing in common with the horticulture.” Among other things, it had been hastily organized, undermined as a result of divisions between Che Guevara and the Bolivian Communist Party led by Mario Monje, and strangled by the lack of concrete support it received from Bolivia’s rural peasant population.²⁶

The “trauma” of Che’s death forced a drastic reevaluation of Cuba’s Latin American policies, which coincided with rising ferment and nationalist upheaval throughout the continent. “New dynamics,” as Cubans termed the rise of revolutionary nationalism, appeared to indicate that a new—albeit significantly different—phase of revolution was on the horizon. Like leading U.S. officials who had formulated policy toward Latin America in the early 1960s, the Cubans grew particularly interested in nationalist military elites after witnessing the growing roles they assumed in Peru, Panama, and Bolivia from 1968 onward.²⁷ Cuba was especially enthusiastic about Lima’s new military gove...