Download Reimagining Chile`s Cold War Experience: From the Conflict`s

Reimagining Chile's Cold War Experience: From the Conflict's Origins to Salvador
Allende's Inauguration
by
James Lockhart
Copyright © James Lockhart 2016
A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the
DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements
For the Degree of
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
In the Graduate College
THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
2016
THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA
GRADUATE COLLEGE
As members of the dissertation committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by
James Lockhart, titled "Reimagining Chile's Cold War Experience: From the Conflict's Origins to
Salvador Allende's Inauguration" and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation
requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy.
Michael Schaller
Date:
Elizabeth Cobbs-Hoffman
Date:
Jadwiga Pieper-Mooney
Date:
Fabio Lanza
Date:
Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate's submission of the
final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College.
I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be
accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement.
Michael Schaller
Dissertation Director
Date:
2
STATEMENT BY AUTHOR
This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for an advanced degree at
the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers
under rules of the Library.
Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that an
accurate acknowledgement of the source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from
or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major
department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his or her judgment the proposed use of the
material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained
from the author.
SIGNED: James Lockhart
3
Acknowledgements
I thank Professors Michael Schaller, Elizabeth Cobbs, Jadwiga Pieper Mooney, and Fabio
Lanza for reading and commenting on my dissertation. Their knowledge, expertise, and insights were
invaluable, and I have responded to their questions and suggestions as best I could. Although all of
them read the dissertation, my choices in approach, interpretation, and conclusions remain my own.
Apart from Professor Pieper, who specializes in Chilean history, I have had the good fortune to
study US-Latin American relations and the Chilean past with Professors Brian Loveman and Thomas
Wright, and I have had some exchanges with Professor Frederick Nunn as well. Professor Alejandro
San Francisco was very collegial while I was in Santiago. Historian Matt Jacobs, my colleague at the
Embry-Riddle Department of Global Affairs and Intelligence Studies, read the entire dissertation as I
was writing it, and I very much appreciate our conversations, too.
All of the archivists and librarians I interacted with were consummate professionals. I will
always remember how the staff at the Harry Truman presidential library invited me to come into a back
area to see the giant-sized Mein Kampf that Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith acquired at the end
of the Second World War, and how the staff at the Lyndon Johnson library brought additional boxes out
to me after learning the scope of my project, offering information that I might otherwise have
overlooked. Both the British National Archives and the Chilean Nuclear Energy Commission's reading
room were friendly and highly-efficient research environments.
I received fellowships and grants from the George Marshall Foundation (the Marshall/Baruch
Fellowship), the Lyndon Johnson Foundation (the Harry Middleton Research Fellowship), the John
Kennedy Foundation (the Marjorie Kovler Research Fellowship), a research and travel grant from the
Harry Truman Foundation, a grant from the Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Institute at the
University of Arizona, and several supplementary grants from the Department of History as well
(Barbara Payne Robinson, Richard Cosgrove, and Edwin Turville fellowships). I could not have
researched this dissertation without these institutions' generous support, and I remain grateful for it.
Program Coordinator Noora Balooshi helped me get my dissertation defense through its final
administrative stages. She also helped set up a critical Skype connection in the department's conference
room. Lisa Munro assisted with the formatting.
4
Although Professor Richard Eaton, who studies South Asian and world history, was not on my
dissertation committee, he deeply influenced my thinking on global/comparative history, and in turn,
my desire to think about how the United States and Chile's Cold War experience has fit into and might
yet fit into new world-historical contexts. Also, I have never met historian Sally Marks. But her review
article, "The World According to Washington," has long influenced my thinking on the United States
and the world. It remains insufficient to study American foreign-policy formulation in region or nation
A, B, or C. We must also become thoroughly familiar with A, B, or C's history itself, and we must
recognize that the United States does not simply write other regions and nations' history however it
pleases -- indeed, some of these regions and nations have shaped and conditioned American history,
too. Only then can we begin to cultivate a sound understanding of the United States and the world in all
its complexity.1
I came to the Department of History after having written a master's thesis titled "CIASponsored Covert Action in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1953-1975," and I wanted to continue
researching some aspect of United States, Latin American, and Cold War history in my dissertation. As
I progressed in my doctoral studies, I felt more confident that historians and political scientists, from
Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali to Ariel Armony, Robert Pastor, and Piero Gleijeses, and
emerging historians such as Matt Jacobs at Ohio University and Aaron Coy Moulton at the University
of Arkansas, were already researching, writing, and/or dissertating about the United States, the
Caribbean, and the Cold War from the perspective I had in mind. But the Chilean case, with few
exceptions, seemed to remain mired in a discourse right out of the 1970s, which historian Tanya
Harmer has aptly called "a narrow historiography of blame." So I decided to attempt to reimagine the
United States and Chile's Cold War experience in order to transcend this.2
1
Sally Marks, "The World According to Washington," Diplomatic History (1987) 11: 265-282.
Tanya Harmer, Allende's Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2
2011), 7.
5
Table of Contents
Acknowledgements....................................................................................................................................4
Abstract......................................................................................................................................................8
I. Introduction.............................................................................................................................................9
II. The England of South America: Chile and the World into the Twentieth Century.............................33
III. Chilean Anticommunism before the Cold War..................................................................................55
IV. Chilean Politics and the Transatlantic Origins of the Cold War: The Rise and Fall of the Democratic
Alliance....................................................................................................................................................81
V. The Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy..........................................................................105
VI. Eduardo Frei and Nuclear Modernization........................................................................................131
VII. The Rise of General Viaux.............................................................................................................166
VIII. Reimagining Chile's Cold War Experience...................................................................................201
Bibliography...........................................................................................................................................213
6
Illustration Index
Illustration 1: General Augusto Pinochet posing before a portrait of Diego Portales..............................37
Illustration 2: Chile's nuclear-science community, circa 1965...............................................................136
Illustration 3: Brigadier General Roberto Viaux speaking to the press during the Tacnazo..................177
Illustration 4: Tacna Regiment, Parque Cousiño, 21 October 1969.......................................................178
Illustration 5: "People's Tanks.".............................................................................................................180
7
Abstract
My dissertation explores the history of America and the world, focusing on Chile and southern
South America during the Cold War. It reworks and reinterprets the United States and Chile's Cold War
experience through multiarchival, international Cold War history in an Atlantic, rather than interAmerican, global-historical context. Eight, overlapping, chronologically-organized chapters reconstruct
the two countries' relationship from the conflict's origins to Salvador Allende's inauguration in
November 1970.
I locate United States and Chilean history within the international community of nations and the
Atlantic world rather than the narrower, United States-centered inter-American one, and I recognize
Chile as a free and sovereign power and a nation among nations, rather than a subject of United States
imperialism, formal or informal. The Cold War began in Chile when the Chilean labor movement arose
responsive to globalization trends in the late-nineteenth century, and when communists and
anticommunists appeared on the ground there in the 1920s, rather than with the American interventions
that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. I thus offer an alternative, reimagined interpretation of the United
States and Chile's Cold War experience.
I argue that the United States and Chile's Cold War history was not primarily an expression of
American influence in Chile, but rather Chileans' complex, contested, and often highly unstable
transition from colony to nation in the fluid and evolving world-historical frameworks of the Atlantic
revolutions and independence, the industrial revolution, the world wars, the Russian Revolution, the
Great Depression, the Cold War, and the Cuban Revolution. This enables historians to gain new insight
into the already well-studied rise and fall of the Allende administration and the coup and dictatorship
that followed it in the 1970s. It also reinterprets Chilean-American relations and, through this, supports
those who challenge the characterization of the United States as an empire or otherwise the prime
mover in recent global history.
I conducted research in the National Archives in College Park, and Harry Truman, John
Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon's presidential libraries, and I reviewed documents in the
British National Archives in Kew Gardens, the Chilean National Library in Santiago, and the Chilean
Nuclear Energy Commission's reading room in La Reina as well. I also relied on published primary
sources, including the Department of State's Foreign Relations of the United States series, the Chile
Declassification Project, and historian Olga Ulianova's Russian-to-Spanish translations of Soviet papers
pertaining to the Chilean Communist Party.
8
I. Introduction
Chileans elected Salvador Allende (1970-1973) to the presidency in September 1970. Allende
headed Unidad Popular (UP), a Marxist-Leninist coalition. This coalition attempted to lead a
transformative socialist revolution through legal, parliamentary means rather than civil war and
violence, "to turn the parliament from an agency of bourgeois democracy to an instrument of genuinely
popular will," as the Soviet Union's Secretary General Nikita Khrushchev (1953-1964) had phrased it
when acknowledging that the peaceful road to socialism was permissible in 1956.3
According to Allende, his election represented the people's "defeating the arrogance of money,
pressure, threat, twisted information, the campaign of terror, of plotting and of evil." He now planned
"to overthrow once and for all imperialist exploitation, to put an end to monopolies, to carry out a
serious and profound agrarian reform, to control the import and export trade, and to nationalize credit."
He pledged to replace Chile's bicameral legislature with a unicameral people's assembly and to
subordinate the judiciary to it, and then, later in his term, to gain control over elementary and secondary
education as well.4
Allende did not command the congressional majority Khrushchev had mentioned when
outlining the peaceful road, and his politics and rhetoric polarized an already unstable Chilean society
between 1970 and 1973. Women from all classes began demonstrating against the president in
December 1971. Commercial truck drivers launched a crippling strike in October 1972. Nationalists,
Christian Democrats, and others in an increasingly united opposition -- calling itself the Confederación
de la Democracia (CODE) -- confirmed their dominating position in Congress after midterm elections
in March 1973. But they lacked the two-thirds majority they needed to impeach Allende. So several of
their leaders asked the armed forces to intervene that August. The navy was already mutinous,
supporting rather than suppressing the still-growing strikes against the president. So were many army
3
Nikita Khrushchev, "Report of the Central Committee to the Twentieth Party Congress," February 1956. Reprinted
in Robert Daniels, ed., A Documentary History of Communism and the World: From Revolution to Collapse (Hanover:
University Press of New England, 1994), 163. For the connection between Khrushchev's speech and the Unidad Popular
coalition's strategy of the peaceful road, see Olga Ulianova, "La Unidad Popular y el golpe militar en Chile: Percepciones y
analisis soviéticos," Estudios Públicos 79 (2000): 83-171; and Carmelo Furci, The Chilean Communist Party and the Road
to Socialism (London: Zed, 1984), 56-114.
4
Salvador Allende, "Victory Speech to the People of Santiago," 5 September 1970. Reprinted in James Cockcroft,
ed., Salvador Allende Reader: Chile's Voice of Democracy (Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press, 2000), 48-49. Also see
Allende's platform, "El programa básico de gobierno de la Unidad Popular," 17 December 1969. Reprinted in Luis
Corvalán, El gobierno de Salvador Allende (Santiago de Chile: LOM Ediciones, 2003), 275-302.
9
officers, including Lieutenant Colonel Roberto Souper, who mobilized an armored regiment and tried
to seize La Moneda, the presidential palace, in June 1973. General Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) and
his colleagues took power in this anarchic environment on 11 September. Pinochet's brutally
anticommunist dictatorship, one of several that arose in southern South America in the 1970s,
followed.5
Allende captivated contemporary observers, and he continues to enthrall historians today. Many
still hail him as "Chile's voice of democracy." As political scientist Brian Loveman found, "Never has
more been written about Chile than appeared after 1970 with regard to the Popular Unity coalition and
the subsequent military coup. The published literature is truly massive."6
Questions concerning the nature and extent of American opposition to Allende have dominated
press coverage and legislative and judicial proceedings in several countries ever since. Historians, too,
have closely focused their attention on the United States, particularly President Richard Nixon (19691974) and National Security Advisor, later Secretary of State, Henry Kissinger, who had pledged "to
make the Chilean economy scream" and "to get" Allende in September 1970. One oft-quoted cable
from the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) instructed its case officers in Santiago that it remained
"firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup." This has profoundly conditioned
the production of historical knowledge on the United States and Chile's Cold War experience for more
than four decades.7
The Consensus Interpretation
A consensus interpretation emerged before the dust had even settled in Santiago. This
interpretation remains entrenched in the literature, its adversarial vocabulary and tone immediately
5
See Margaret Power, Right-Wing Women in Chile: Feminine Power and the Struggle against Allende, 1964-1973
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002); Nathaniel Davis, The Last Two Years of Salvador Allende
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985); and Paul Sigmund, The Overthrow of Allende and the Politics of Chile, 1964-1976
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977).
6
Brian Loveman, Chile: The Legacy of Hispanic Capitalism [1979] 3d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press,
2001), 402.
7
CIA to Santiago Station, 16 October 1970. Cited and reprinted in Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A
Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (New York: The New Press, 2003), 1-2, 26, and Ch. 1, documents 1 and
12.
10
recognizable. Political scientist Paul Sigmund, for example, felt it necessary to clarify that Allende was
not "an innocent social democrat overthrown by fascist thugs and the CIA" before offering his history.
Historians Simon Collier, William Sater, and Tanya Harmer, to cite merely three others, have found
much of this literature "axe-grinding in nature" and "a narrow historiography of blame."8
I would have preferred to acknowledge this interpretation and then move on to the alternative
one I have in mind. But I have found that those who neither submit to it nor confront it will find
themselves pressed by its partisans. When Harmer presented her findings on Cuban activities in Chile,
"a concerned scholar" asked her "whether my researching the details of Cuba's role in Chile meant that
I thought the United States was justified in destabilizing Chilean democracy." I have encountered
similar responses. Thus I have learned the necessity of clarifying why the consensus interpretation fails
to sufficiently explain the United States and Chile's Cold War history before proceeding. Nearly all of
its claims remain groundless, undocumented accusations, and its broader conclusions misleading. It has
essentially derived from Allende's allegations and a movie script, not empirical evidence.9
Allende charged, in his final radio broadcast, that "foreign capital and imperialism united with
reactionary elements, created the climate for the armed forces to break with their tradition," and then
overthrew his government. That is, Nixon and Kissinger, representing American-based transnational
corporations with investments in Chile, albeit with some Chilean support, engineered the Allende
administration's difficulties. Then they politicized the army and used it to perpetrate the coup.10
A celebrated Nobel laureate from Colombia, a New York attorney, and a Greek filmmaker
transformed Allende's accusations into a cause célèbre over the following decade. Novelist Gabriel
García Márquez published first. He alleged that three American generals and five high-ranking Chilean
officers of planning the coup one night while dining in Washington, DC.
On the North American side, the organization set in motion was the Defense Intelligence
Agency [DIA] of the Pentagon, but the one in actual charge was the Naval Intelligence
Agency [NIA], under the higher political direction of the CIA, and the National Security
Council [NSC]. It was quite the normal thing to put the Navy and not the Army in charge of
the project, for the Chilean coup was to coincide with Operation Unitas, which was the name
given to the joint maneuvers of American and Chilean naval units in the Pacific. Those
8
Tanya Harmer, Allende's Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2011), 7; Simon Collier and William Sater, A History of Chile, 1808-2002 [1996], 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 2004), 426; and Sigmund, Overthrow of Allende, xiii.
9
Harmer, Allende's Chile, 255.
10
Salvador Allende, "Last Words Transmitted by Radio Magallanes," 11 September 1973. Reprinted in Cockcroft,
Allende Reader, 240.
11
maneuvers were held at the end of each September, the same month as elections, and the
appearance on land and in the skies of Chile of all manner of war equipment and men well
trained in the arts and sciences of death was natural…
Clandestine sources in Chile tell us that the bombing of Moneda Palace -- the technical
precision of which startled the experts -- was actually carried out by a team of American aerial
acrobats who had entered the country under the screen of Operation Unitas to perform in a
flying circus on the coming September 18, National Independence Day…
According to the story of a witness who asked me not to give his name, the President died in
an exchange of shots with that gang [the officers and soldiers who stormed La Moneda]. Then
all the other officers, in a caste-bound ritual, fired on the body. Finally, a noncommissioned
officer smashed in his face with the butt of his rifle.11
García Márquez's account gained adherents after the United States Senate began investigating
charges of CIA wrongdoing in Chile and elsewhere in the developing world in 1975. Although the
Senate found "no hard evidence of direct U.S. assistance to the coup, despite frequent allegations of
such aid," staffer Diane LaVoy continued speculating that "a line of orders occurring not so much
through the CIA, perhaps originating at the White House, being implemented in large measure through
military channels" must explain it. She passed her suspicions on to lawyer Thomas Hauser, who
restated and embellished them.12
Hauser accused the Pentagon of using Milgroup, its military mission in Chile, particularly
Captain Ray Davis (USN), the naval attaché, to perpetrate the coup. According to Hauser, Davis
ordered Vice Admiral José Toribio Merino to mobilize the Chilean armed forces. Toribio complied,
initiating the coup on 11 September. Pinochet and his colleagues in the high command fell in line with
11
Gabriel García Márquez, "The Death of Salvador Allende," trans. by Gregory Rabassa, Harper's (March 1974):
46-53. For an even earlier sketch of this story, see Fernando Alegria, "The Fall of Santiago," Ramparts 12 (December 1973):
32-37.
12
Cited in Thomas Hauser, The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice (New York: Harcourt Brace
Jovanovich, 1978), 247. For the Church Committee, see United States Senate, Staff Report of the Select Committee to
Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign
Leaders (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975); and United States Senate, Staff Report of the Select
Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975). For the initial allegations in the press that helped lead to these
congressional investigations, see Jack Anderson, "Memos Bare ITT Try for Chile Coup," Washington Post, 21 March 1972;
Jack Anderson, "ITT Pledged Millions to Stop Allende," Washington Post, 22 March 1972; Jack Anderson, "CIA Papers
Show Anti-Allende View," Washington Post, 30 March 1972; Jack Anderson, "No Direct U.S. Role Seen in Chile Coup,"
Washington Post, 22 September 1973; Jack Anderson, "The Economic War against Allende," Washington Post, 3 November
1974; Seymour Hersh, "CIA Chief Admits Nixon Staff OKd $8 Million to Upset Allende in Chile," Chicago Tribune, 8
September 1974; Seymour Hersh, "CIA Is Linked to Strikes in Chile That Beset Allende," New York Times, 20 September
1974; and Seymour Hersh, "Huge CIA Operation Reported in U.S. against Anti-War Forces, Other Dissidents," New York
Times, 22 December 1974. Anderson's crusade against corruption, his deep, personal hostility to Nixon, and his publishing
leaked International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT) documents resulted in the earliest senatorial interest in Chile. Also see
Mark Feldstein, Poisoning the Press: Richard Nixon, Jack Anderson, and the Rise of Washington's Scandal Culture (New
York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010); and Jack Anderson, The Anderson Papers (New York: Ballantine Books, 1974).
12
Toribio, formed a junta, and then murdered Allende.13
Meanwhile, Hauser continued, American citizen Charles Horman and his friend Terry Simon
were visiting Viña del Mar, a resort town near Valparaíso. The junta had declared a state of emergency
and imposed a curfew, stranding them at their hotel. They met Arthur Creter there. Creter was a naval
contractor employed to inspect fire extinguishers and related support systems on Chilean warships. He
bragged that "We came down to do a job and it's done." And this convinced them that he was really a
naval covert operator, secretly detailed to the coup.14
Creter's words shocked, saddened, and then angered Horman and Simon, who sought
confirmation. They met Davis and his subordinate, Lieutenant Colonel Patrick Ryan (USMC), "a
bloodthirsty anticommunist" out for revenge after three frustrating tours in Vietnam, also in Viña. Davis
and Ryan recognized them as Americans and began briefing them in, which Simon recorded in her
notebook. Then Horman and Simon went to the British consulate in Valparaíso, demanding that the
consul tell them all he knew. He reaffirmed that "the Americans are the people to talk with. I'm told that
they even had prior knowledge of the coup."15
Davis drove Horman and Simon back to Santiago after this. But he had become closed and
suspicious, Simon recalled. She later complained that he had expressed sexual interest in her, which
frightened her and helped convince her she should flee Chile. Horman remained in Santiago, however,
searching for his wife. The junta raided his apartment, seized him, and then interrogated, tortured, and
executed him at the national stadium several days later.
Neither Horman's family nor Hauser believed that the junta could possibly have known of
Horman, let alone dared to detain or kill him, without express instructions from, or at least tacit
understandings with, the American embassy or Davis's command. Rafael González, a former Chilean
Air Force intelligence officer who was seeking asylum, offered to confirm this during interviews with
journalists at the Italian embassy in 1976. González said that his Chilean superiors had directed him to
translate Horman's interrogation, which a CIA case officer was personally supervising. This American
13
See Admiral José Toribio Merino's note to Generals Augusto Pinochet and Gustavo Leigh, who commanded the
Chilean army and air force, respectively, asking them to support the coup on 9 September 1973. Reprinted in José Merino
Toribio, Bitácora de un almirante: memorias (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Andrés Bello, 1998), 230-231. Toribio, Pinochet,
and Leigh maintained that they acted on their own and for their own reasons.
14
Cited in Hauser, Execution of Horman, 65. Hauser's emphasis.
15
Cited in Ibid., 68, 71. For Patrick Ryan's denial, see Patrick Ryan, "Allende's Chile: 1000 Bungled Days" (New
York: American-Chilean Council, 1976).
13
official subsequently ordered the Chileans there to murder Horman, "because he knew too much."
González emphasized that "this was done between the CIA and the local authorities." Thus, in Hauser's
estimation, "Our own Embassy was responsible for Charles's death. His life was sacrificed to cover up
American actions in Chile" -- and this illuminated United States involvement in the coup.16
Konstantinos Gavras ("Costa Gavras") dramatized Hauser's book in Missing, a Hollywood film
starring Jack Lemon and Sissy Spacek, in 1982. This movie transformed García Márquez and Hauser's
narratives into what has become the final draft of the consensus interpretation on the United States and
Chile's Cold War experience. Countless historians, journalists, and other writers have been reifying it
through repetition ever since.17
As Sigmund observed twenty years after the coup, "Ask an educated American what he or she
knows about Chile, and you are likely to get a response that alludes to the U.S.'s role in overthrowing a
Marxist regime in 1973 and in 'propping up' a brutal dictatorship that followed. If that person has seen
the film Missing, you may even get a reference to the murder of Charles Horman 'because he knew too
much' about that role." Indeed, this story of how, "With American blessings and CIA help, Allende was
overthrown and murdered in 1973," remains one of the first things undergraduates, some of them on
their way to graduate school, hear and read about the United States, Chile, and the Cold War today.18
The Long 1970s
Many historians of the United States and the world, and most Latin Americanists as well,
continue to approach the United States and Chile's Cold War experience through this consensus
interpretation. The interpretation serves as their basic cognitive map when forming research questions
and then selecting and sifting through the evidence for confirmation. It informs them when evaluating
others' historical accounts, too. Cambridge historian Jonathan Haslam, currently George Kennan
Professor at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, for example, citing García Márquez, Hauser,
and "the disturbing scenes in Costa Gavras's film Missing," recently recounted how
16
Cited in Ibid., 221, 224. Hauser's emphasis.
Costa Gavras, Missing (Universal Pictures, 1982).
18
Paul Sigmund, The United States and Democracy in Chile (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), xi; and Peter
von Sivers, et al., Patterns of World History [2011], Vol. 2, 2d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), S30-11.
17
14
Nixon decided [to] go one step further than a golpe seco or golpe blando -- which would just
ensure a full military majority in cabinet. He moved instead directly towards a full military
coup, the 'Brazilian' option of 1964 -- golpe negro. As in that instance, the United States
would prepare the ground and do everything short of seizing power themselves. The coup
would be effected from the Pentagon, using DIA and naval intelligence working with and
through the Chilean armed forces…the US government was the architect of the coup.19
As Marc Becker has explained, historians tend to regard Haslam as among "the best of this
literature." Indeed, Stephen Rabe and Mark Atwood Lawrence, among others, have closely followed
Haslam when writing on US-Latin American relations in the 1970s. According to Lawrence, "the
Nixon administration bears primary responsibility for fomenting the coup that brought Pinochet to
power and led to Allende's death, probably by his own hand."20
Dissenting historians and political scientists such as Sigmund, Collier and Sater, and Harmer,
reject much more than the consensus interpretation's accusatory politics and word choices. As historian
Frederick Nunn has observed, some of those who have produced this literature tend to become
"unsteady" when venturing too far back into the Chilean past. This partly derives from their sharp focus
on declassified American documents having to do with Chile rather than their ability to explore Chilean
history itself. Indeed, many of them have only approached the Chilean past through myths of Chilean
exceptionalism -- one of which historian Jody Pavilack recently defined as "the idea that prior to
September 11, 1973, Chile was historically exempt from the volatility and autocratic violence
experienced by most of its continental counterparts," and that "some kind of genteel Chilean
democracy" prevailed until the United States destabilized it. But it mainly results from their accepting
the interpretation's undocumented allegations as fact and then proceeding from them.21
19
Jonathan Haslam, The Nixon Administration and the Death of Allende's Chile: A Case of Assisted Suicide
(London: Verso, 2005), xiii, 169, 230. For additional examples, see Lubna Qureshi, Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende: U.S.
Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile [2009] (Lanham: Lexington, 2010); and Kornbluh, Pinochet File.
20
Stephen Rabe, The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2012), 114-143; and Mark Atwood Lawrence, "History from Below: The United States and Latin America
in the Nixon Years," in Fredrik Logevall and Andrew Preston, eds., Nixon and the World: American Foreign Relations,
1969-1977 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 278; Marc Becker, review of Kristian Gustafson, Hostile Intent:
U.S. Covert Operations in Chile, 1964-1974 (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2007). H-Peace, H-Net Reviews. April,
2008. In addition to Haslam, Death of Allende's Chile, Becker praised Kornbluh, Pinochet File, and John Dinges, The
Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents [2004] (New York: The New Press,
2005). Gustafson's book and Becker's critique of it represent an extension of an earlier exchange in Foreign Affairs that
resulted in one editor's accusing Kissinger of personally intervening and suppressing his voice before he resigned in protest.
See Kenneth Maxwell, "The Other 9/11: The United States and Chile, 1973," Foreign Affairs 82 (2003): 147-151; William
Rogers and Kenneth Maxwell, "Fleeing the Chilean Coup: The Debate over U.S. Complicity," Foreign Affairs 83 (2004):
160-165; and David Glenn, "'Foreign Affairs' Loses a Longtime Editor and His Replacement in Row over Editorial
Independence," Chronicle of Higher Education (25 June 2004), available at http://www.chronicle.com.
21
Frederick Nunn, review of Haslam, Death of Allende's Chile. Pacific Historical Review 75 (2006), 691; Jodi
Pavilack, Mining for the Nation: The Politics of Chile's Coal Communities from the Popular Front to the Cold War
15
Three examples illustrate how these charges, upon which so much else follows, all too often
prove false. First, most of those few historians interested in the United States, Chile, and the Cold War
who go back to President Gabriel González Videla's (1946-1952) Law for the Permanent Defense of
Democracy remain certain that, as Lubna Qureshi wrote, González passed this law "to please his
patrons in Washington." As Harmer understood, and as this dissertation more fully explains, this
exaggerates and mischaracterizes American influence in Chile and it altogether ignores Chilean
politics. It creates the impression that there were no communists or anticommunists on the ground in
Chile in the late-1940s. There were, however, and González suppressed communists, real and
suspected, for his own reasons. These reasons derived from older, Chilean problems which had
intersected with the unfolding Cold War -- and not because the Truman administration (1945-1953) had
forced, pressed, or even asked him to do so.22
Second, Rabe repeated Haslam's accusation that Deputy Director of Central Intelligence
Lieutenant General Vernon Walters "set up shop in offices behind the Hotel Carrera and near La
Moneda in the days before the golpe" and personally supervised the operation from there. Walters, he
continued, used "Pentagon facilities and secure communication lines in the naval port of Valparaiso to
communicate with plotters." This both results from and supports those journalists and historians, from
Seymour Hersh to Qureshi, who have called this event "an American coup carried out by Chileans" and
insisted that "Washington directed this sordid drama" since García Márquez, Hauser, and Costa
Gavras's allegations first appeared.23
As Walters's calendars, diaries, and memoirs, and Nixon's White House diary all confirm,
however, the general was in San Clemente, California; Palm Beach, Florida; Morocco; and Palm Beach
again before travelling to New York City and then returning to Washington on business unrelated to
Chile from 30 August through 15 September 1973. Most importantly, he was in Miami, dining with
friends -- not issuing orders to Toribio and his colleagues in Santiago on 11 September.24
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 338, 348.
22
Quershi, Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende, 22. Tanya Harmer, review of Qureshi, Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende. HDiplo, H-Net Reviews. October, 2011.
23
Rabe, Killing Zone, 136; Qureshi, Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende, 101; Haslam, Death of Allende's Chile, 169170, 182, 211, 218-219; and Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York: Summit
Books, 1983), 276.
24
See James Lockhart, "He Rode a Tank, Held a General's Rank, but Did He Direct Latin America's Coups?" War
on the Rocks, 12 September 2014, at http://www.warontherocks.com, for Walters's calendars and diaries from late-August
through mid-September 1973, courtesy of Denise Campbell at the National Intelligence University's John Hughes Library.
Also see Joint Military Intelligence College, "Vernon Walters: Pathfinder of the Intelligence Profession: Conference
Proceedings," 3 June 2004, at http://www.ni-u.edu; Vernon Walters, The Mighty and the Meek: Dispatches from the Front
16
Third, many continue to charge the Pentagon and the CIA with murdering or assassinating
Allende. One United States Congressman recently demanded that the agency disclose "All activities of
officers, covert agents, and employees of all elements of the Intelligence Community with respect to
the assassination of President Salvador Allende in September 1973." Although some historians have
conceded that Allende may not have been killed per se, they nevertheless continue to believe that
Washington remains ultimately responsible for the president's death, which they have often presented
as "a point of controversy."25
In fact, no controversy surrounds Allende's suicide. It has remained as clear and unequivocal as
anything historians study can be since the junta first announced it and François Mitterrand, a French
socialist leader who knew the president, remarked that "That doesn't surprise me," in September 1973.
Two subsequent autopsies -- in 1990 and 2011 -- have confirmed and reconfirmed this.26
The Chilean government assembled an international team of forensic experts, including a
physical anthropologist, a ballistics expert from Scotland Yard, and several medical examiners, to
perform the latest exhumation and autopsy in 2011. Doctor Patricio Bustos, who directed Chile's
Ministry of Justice's Servicio Médico Legal, reported that these experts found, beyond any doubt and
with "no contradictions," that the junta's initial autopsy remained valid. Moreover, they could find no
evidence to support any other party's involvement in Allende's suicide, and they found no wounds
besides a self-inflicted gunshot wound, either. Chile's Supreme Court rejected appeals to reopen the
investigation into this after reviewing the evidence yet again, finally closing the case in January 2014.27
Line of Diplomacy (London: St Ermin's Press, 2001), 265-273; and Vernon Walters, Silent Missions (New York: Doubleday
and Company, 1978), 584-611. See Richard Nixon's Daily Diary covering August and September 1973, courtesy of the
Richard Nixon Library, Yorba Linda, California (RN). For additional confirmation, see "Nixon Quips about Press Leaks as
New CIA Chief Is Sworn," Los Angeles Times, 4 September 1973; Henry Kissinger, Years of Upheaval [1982] (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 2011), 624-629, 1036-1037; and William Colby, Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA (New York:
Simon and Schuster, 1978), 344.
25
CIA, "CIA Activities in Chile," 18 September 2000, available at https://cia.gov. Also known as the Hinchey
Report, for Congressman Maurice Hinchey (D-NY), who wrote the interrogatories; and Qureshi, Nixon, Kissinger, and
Allende, 131-132.
26
"Socialist Says Allende Once Spoke of Suicide," New York Times, 12 September 1973.
27
"Allende: director del SML dice que informe ratifica autopsia de 1973," La Nacíon, 19 Julio 2011, at
www.lanacion.cl. This includes a photograph of Allende's skull and links to all expert reports in pdf.; and "Chile: Court
Closes Probe into Ex-President Allende's Death," BBC, 7 January 2014, available at http://www.bbc.com. For an early
example of the partisan allegations against the junta, see Alegria, "Fall of Santiago." Alergia wrote that "If the junta is using
the word 'suicide' metaphorically to describe the fact that Allende was alone facing an entire army, then I can accept the
official communique although I find their use of metaphors deplorable."
17
An Alternative Approach
Multiple and recurring factual inaccuracies such as these notwithstanding, the consensus
interpretation remains entrenched in the literature treating the United States, Chile, and the Cold War. It
confirms many historians' preexisting attitudes and belief structures concerning the United States and
the world, particularly the nature of inter-American relations. Indeed, most historians tend to consider
the matter settled: The Nixon administration directed, engineered, or was otherwise actively involved in
the fall of Allende and the destruction of Chilean democracy. This remains the central narrative of the
United States and Chile's Cold War experience. Thus Chile has become, in the National Security
Archive's Peter Kornbluh's estimation, "the ultimate case study of morality -- or the lack of it -- in the
making of U.S. foreign policy."28
Historians, however, need not accept the consensus interpretation as the final word on the
United States, Chile, and the Cold War. They can approach this problem afresh, taking many different
tracks, exploring it through broader, deeper, and more current perspectives. Cold War historians such as
Aleksandr Fusenko and Timothy Naftali, Piero Gleijeses, and Olga Ulianova, for instance, have been
exploiting increased access to declassified American documents and partial admission to the former
Soviet Union (USSR) and others' archives in Eastern Europe since the 1990s. They have gained very
limited success with the Cuban governments' papers as well. And they have laid the foundations for a
multiarchival, international Cold War history in Latin America that reorients the conflict away from the
strictly Washington-centered one that still predominates the literature. They have begun acknowledging
regional and local actors and issues, and have consequently produced more complex and multisided
analyses and narratives than have existed thus far.29
Historians Melvyn Leffler and David Painter have explained that "To portray the Cold War in
all its complexity scholars now realize that they must analyze the interconnections between the rivalry
of the United States and the Soviet Union and the unfolding of internal developments elsewhere. To do
this effectively they have to integrate the geopolitical, strategic, and ideological competition of the
28
Kornbluh, Pinochet File, xv.
See, for example, Olga Ulianova and Alfredo Riquelme Segovia, eds., Chile en los archivos soviéticos, 19221991 I: Komintern y Chile, 1922-1931 (Santiago de Chile: Dirección de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos/LOM Ediciones,
2005); Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2002); and Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali. "One Hell of a Gamble": The Secret History of the
Cuban Missile Crisis [1997] (New York. W.W. Norton and Company, 1998).
29
18
great powers with local and regional socioeconomic trends and political struggles." They highlighted
Vesselin Dimitrov's research into the Bulgarian communist party's (BRP[k]) seizure of power as an
illustration.30
According to Dimitrov, historians have characterized the fall of Bulgaria's multiparty, "people's
democracy" and the BRP(k)'s rise to dictatorship as expressions of Joseph Stalin's (1924-1953)
imposition of the Iron Curtain in the late-1940s. He demonstrated, first, that Stalin actually had no
unified policy in Eastern Europe at that time, and then, that "the flow of people's democracy ideas [in
Sofia] proceeded from Stalin, and their realization was blocked by [the] BRP(k)'s narrow-minded drive
for maximum power." While the BRP(k), benefitting from increasing Soviet-American tensions in 1946
and early-1947, won Moscow's support by late-1947, they nevertheless created their own communist
dictatorship on their own initiative to suit their own purposes.31
Stalin would have preferred to maintain cordial relations with Britain and the United States in
the postwar world. He thus sought an outcome where the BRP(k) remained the controlling interest in a
more plural and flexible political system in Bulgaria. But even he had to accept his influence's
limitations -- even in relation to communist parties in Eastern Europe.
Leffler and Painter urged historians to apply this approach to Latin America. Yet older attitudes
and worldviews still limit historical writing on the region and indeed the entire developing world's Cold
War history. These attitudes and worldviews tend to characterize the United States as an expansionist
empire, driven by cultural arrogance and a crusading spirit, and which has imposed its version of
modernity onto all others. They also typically quarantine Latin America in a narrow, US-controlled,
inter-American sphere in global history.
Most on the Latin American left, historians William Appleman Williams, Walter LaFeber, and
Richard Immerman, among many others, have cultivated this in their research, writing, and teaching
since the 1970s. In their estimation, capitalism, industrialization, and most recently, American
imperialism, represent the most salient features of the last three to five hundred years. This imposed
revolutionary social change in world affairs -- including a global division of labor that enabled some
nations to amass great wealth and power by dominating and exploiting others, forcing them into
poverty, backwardness, and misery. Thus modern Latin America has remained subject to a particular
30
Melvyn Leffler and David Painter, eds., Origins of the Cold War: An International History [1994] (New York:
Routledge, 2005).11.
31
Vesselin Dimitrov, "Communism in Bulgaria," in Ibid., 192.
19
historiographical mindset, where imperialism, albeit in new, more indirect forms under United States
leadership, transformed the region into one of several "underdeveloped" areas in the world.32
Some historians indeed regard this discourse on American imperialism as fact and not merely
interpretation. As Ian Tyrell and Jay Sexton have explained, "an avalanche of scholarship [has] made
clear the centrality of imperialism in American history…all that remain[s] of the old view that the
United States had not been an empire was smoldering rubble." As one graduate student recently
restated it, "The existence of the American Empire is an undeniable fact."33
Historian Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman has challenged this, suggesting that "one of the most
commonly held assumptions of our day -- that the United States is a kind of empire -- is not simply
improbable but false." Cobbs Hoffman has argued that the international community of nations
gradually replaced empires after the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. This community, which came to
include the United States, Chile, and the rest of Latin America, promoted access to opportunity,
arbitration of disputes, and transparency in government. This represented the most prominent worldhistorical trend of the last three centuries, but it remains a work in progress. It has gained as much
support as it has, and it continues growing to include many formerly colonized countries since
independence, because it represents a growing consciousness and shared idealism that has achieved
widespread acceptance and legitimacy, and because it transcends any single nation or its interests. The
United States, a leading voice within the community since the world wars, has functioned as an umpire,
or an honest broker, rather than an empire in global history.34
Historian Frank Ninkovich shares many of Cobbs Hoffman's premises and perceptions.
Ninkovich has recognized a transition in world affairs where legal and commercial cooperation
replaced older patterns of military pressure and lesser forms of coercion. He argued that an
32
For dependency and world-systems theory, revisionist historiography, and an introduction to the literature on
American imperialism, see Richard Immerman, Empire for Liberty: A History of American Imperialism from Benjamin
Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010); Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern WorldSystem, 3 vols. [1974-1989] (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011); Fernando Henrique Cardoso
and Enzo Faletto, trans. by Marjory Mattingly Urquidi, Dependency and Development in Latin America [1971] (Berkeley
and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979); Andre Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin
America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967); Walter LaFeber, The New
Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898 [1963], 35th anniversary ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1998); and William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy [1959], 50th anniversary ed. (New
York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2009).
33
Ian Tyrrell and Jay Sexton, Empire's Twin: U.S. Anti-Imperialism from the Founding Era to the Age of Terrorism
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2014), 3, 232; and Gregg French, review of Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, American Umpire
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013). H-Empire, H-Net Reviews. July, 2015.
34
Cobbs Hoffman, American Umpire, 5.
20
international society emerged from this. This international society has shaped global history for the last
two or three centuries. Americans committed themselves to this society's wellbeing, rescued it from
collapse during the Second World War, and have served as its bulwark since the Cold War. Thus
Washington policymakers aligned and constantly readjusted the United States' position in international
relations to an evolving globalization. Americans' unprogrammed, contingent responses to this
globalization, rather than cultural arrogance, exceptionalism, expansionism, imperialism, or crusading,
missionary zeal, best explain the history of the United States and the world.35
Although compelling interpretations such as Cobbs Hoffman and Ninkovich's exist, and even
though some historians have begun "retiring the puppets and brining Latin Americans back in," the
older attitudes and worldviews remain virtual dogma today, particularly with respect to the United
States and Chile's Cold War experience. According to historian Odd Arne Westad, Washington and, to a
lesser extent, Moscow's interventions in Latin America, Africa, and Asia during the Cold War
represented "a continuation of colonialism through slightly different means." Americans' heavy-handed
impositions of their version of modernity devastated the peoples and cultures on these three continents,
which were emerging from colonial rule in the 1960s and 1970s. This worsened in Central America,
East Africa, and Central Asia during the 1980s. And it left a legacy of seething resentments and
retaliatory violence that explains most problems in global affairs today, from Venezuela's President
Hugo Chavez's (1999-2013) virulent anti-Americanism to the ongoing war on terror. Thus the United
States created "the Third World."36
Rabe elaborated Westad's narrative in Latin America in The Killing Zone: The United States
Wages Cold War in Latin America, which historians have praised as among the most influential works
on the United States, Latin America, and the Cold War. Rabe conceded that Americans never colonized
the region. But they did create a sphere of influence there in the nineteenth century. The Monroe
doctrine (1823) and President Theodore Roosevelt's (1901-1909) corollary to that doctrine affirmed and
reaffirmed this. "The anti-Communist crusade that the United States pursued in Latin America during
35
Frank Ninkovich, The Global Republic: America's Inadvertent Rise to World Power (Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2014).
36
Odd Arne Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times [2005]
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 396, 403; and Max Paul Friedman, "Retiring the Puppets, Bringing Latin
America Back in: Recent Scholarship on United States-Latin American Relations," Diplomatic History 27 (2003): 621-636.
Although the Soviet Union appeared in Westad's narrative, he assigned greater importance to the United States, explaining
that "Karl Marx was right in foreseeing the United States becoming the main revolutionary power of the twentieth century."
21
the Cold War was rooted in that tradition."37
Still others, such as historians Gilbert Joseph and Daniela Spenser, have started illuminating
Latin America's Cold War history through cultural lenses. But they, too, have reconfirmed the region's
subordination to the United States while reinforcing its isolation from the rest of the world. As Mark
Gilderhus and Dustin Walcher have observed, most, perhaps the majority, of historians still remain
focused on this strictly US-controlled inter-American sphere, and their writing tends to "emphasize the
disparities and divergences of national aims and aspirations" between Americans and their southern
neighbors.38
Chilean scholars are already leaning toward new contexts, however, particularly toward the
Atlantic world, an oceanic-centered grouping of European, African, and North and South American
nations, peoples, and cultures whose shared historical experiences and unity in communications, trade,
and immigration, reach back to the early-modern era. Political scientist Carlos Huneeus, for example,
read the British embassy's cables on Chilean affairs during the González administration to explore
other-than-United States reporting on Chilean politics and foreign relations. And historian Joaquín
Fermandois, while studying French President Charles de Gaulle's (1958-1969) influence in Latin
America, recommended this transatlantic framework as "a new approach that would not only explain
other dimensions of the nexus between America and Europe, but also clarify aspects of inter-American
relations, which should not be seen in isolation."39
This dissertation follows Cobbs Hoffman and Ninkovich's interpretations of the United States
and the world, Leffler and Painter's advice on international Cold War history, and Fermandois's
suggestion that Latin American history occurred within a broadly transatlantic rather than narrowly
inter-American context as well. It begins with Chilean communists and anticommunists on the ground
in Chile in the 1920s, and not with American intervention in the 1960s and 1970s. It enfolds the United
States and Chile into the whole Cold War. Thus it broadens and deepens the United States and Chile's
Cold War experience.
37
Rabe, Killing Zone, 1.
H-Diplo Roundtable Review of Hal Brands, Latin America's Cold War (Cambridge: Harvard University Press,
2010), H-Diplo Roundtable Reviews XII (2011), available at http://www.h-net.org; and Gilbert Joseph and Daniela Spenser,
eds., In from the Cold: Latin America's New Encounter with the Cold War (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
39
Joaquín Fermandois, "The Hero on the Latin American Scene," in Christian Nuenlist, et al., Globalizing de
Gaulle: International Perspectives on French Foreign Policies, 1958-1969 [2010] (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011),
271; and Carlos Huneeus, La guerra fría chilena: Gabriel González Videla y la ley maldita (Santiago de Chile: Random
House Mondadori, 2008). For an introduction to the Atlantic paradigm, see Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and
Contours (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005).
38
22
The dissertation argues that the United States and Chile's Cold War history was not primarily an
expression of American influence in Chile, but rather Chileans' complex, contested, and often highly
unstable transition from colony to nation in the fluid and evolving global frameworks of the Atlantic
revolutions and independence, the industrial revolution, the world wars, the Russian Revolution, the
Great Depression, the Cold War, and the Cuban Revolution. This enables historians to gain new insight
into the already well-studied rise and fall of the Allende administration and the coup and dictatorship
that followed it in the 1970s. It also reinterprets Chilean-American relations and, through this, supports
those who challenge the characterization of the United States as an empire and the prime mover in
recent world history.
The dissertation cites declassified United States documents from the Truman, Kennedy (19611963), Johnson (1963-1968), and Nixon administrations, the Chile Declassification Project, the
National Archives CIA Records Search Tool (CREST), the American embassy's reporting from
Santiago, and the Department of State's Foreign Relations of the United States series. It explores the
British Foreign Office's files on Chilean affairs, it refers to materials from Chile's National Library and
the annual reports and internal histories located within the Chilean Nuclear Energy Commission's
(CChEN) Centro Nacional de Estudios Nucleares, La Reina (CNEN). It uses memoirs and other
published sources in English and Spanish as well -- including Ulianova's Russian-to-Spanish
translations of the USSR and Comintern's papers on the Chilean Communist Party (PCCh).
The Dissertation's Organization
Chile has remained a sovereign republic within the international community of nations since
Chileans declared independence from Spanish rule in September 1810. Chileans have acted as
influential members of this evolving society that the Peace of Westphalia (1648), the Enlightenment,
and the Atlantic revolutions (from 1775 to 1825) had created, as the second and third chapters, "The
England of South America: Chile and the World into the Twentieth Century" and "Chilean
Anticommunism before the Cold War" argue. This recognition of Chilean power in southern South
America, and this departure from United States imperialism and Chilean victimhood in modern and
contemporary world history remain this dissertation's cornerstone.
23
Chileans began recognizing and responding to multiple globalization trends, starting with the
industrial revolution and "the social question" it engendered, as it applied to their own circumstances in
the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Several emerging national actors vied to impose their
views and their solutions in Chilean politics and society at this time. These emerging actors included
the nascent mining and other industrial interests that identified with the established, landowning
aristocracy, the growing Chilean labor movement, the PCCh and Socialist Party (PS), and the
professional officer corps. And they all grew within and further strengthened Chile's longstanding
transatlantic relationships.
As Leffler has argued, the Cold War did not begin until the United States and Western
Europeans perceived the Soviet Union as a political and military danger and vice versa, which
gradually occurred between 1945 and 1950. This started in postwar Europe and spread into East Asia
and then the developing world through the Chinese Revolution and the Korean War, Vietnam's
independence wars, the Cuban Revolution, and African decolonization from the late-1940s into the
1960s. It attracted Soviet and American intervention in regional and local conflicts from Southeast Asia
to sub-Saharan Africa, East Africa, Central America, and Central Asia from the 1960s through the
1980s, ending when communism in Eastern Europe and then the USSR itself collapsed between 1989
and 1991.40
The fourth and fifth chapters, "Chilean Politics and the Transatlantic Origins of the Cold War:
The Rise and Fall of the Democratic Alliance" and "The Law for the Permanent Defense of
Democracy," explain how Chilean anticommunists first entered this fray. They did so not because
crusading Americans had instructed or even encouraged them to, but rather because they and the PCCh,
certain -- and in this they were both mistaken -- that Washington and Moscow were controlling each
other as proxies, turned against themselves in 1947 and 1948. Chilean anticommunists attempted, and
failed, to internationalize this conflict. They encountered resistance within the inter-American
community, specifically from the United States. Chileans' fighting did not remain confined to their
country, however. As these chapters illustrate, their struggles partly derived from and even influenced
events across the Atlantic in Europe. This remains a poorly researched and dimly understood part of the
United States and Chile's Cold War experience.41
40
See Melvyn Leffler, For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War [2007]
(New York: Hill and Wang, 2008); and Melvyn Leffler, The Specter of Communism: The United States and the Origins of
the Cold War, 1917-1953 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1994).
41
The two major histories of the González administration and the early Cold War have only appeared within the last
five to seven years. See Pavilack, Mining for the Nation; and Huneeus, Guerra fría chilena.
24
Meanwhile, Chileans created a multiparty, liberal-democratic political system and society,
which became functional and increasingly stronger after 1932. Some, including women, peasants, and
illiterates, remained excluded, although they gradually achieved political rights as citizens in the
following decades. The PCCh did not operate legally and openly in Chilean elections until 1947, either
-- and then only briefly, running in one municipal election, before the González administration banned
the party in 1948. Chileans overturned this prohibition ten years later, in 1958. This enabled
communists to return to above-ground politics and elections just as the Cuban Revolution was
quickening Chile, Latin America, and the developing world's Cold War.
The United States became increasingly involved in Chilean affairs in the 1960s, supporting the
Christian Democratic Party's President Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964-1970). Historians have long
exaggerated the nature and significance of this support, however. They have misunderstood Christian
Democrats' victory and, underlying it, Chilean politics during this decade. Frei, like González before
him, was no American puppet. As Fermandois has explained, Frei "represented a political culture with
strong roots in Chilean history." Further, Frei's philosophy and politics were "more oriented to Western
Europe" than the United States, and he articulated and promoted his own modernization program.42
The sixth chapter, "Eduardo Frei and Nuclear Modernization," explores this while underscoring
the United States and Chile's transatlantic history. It reveals an unappreciated Anglo-Chilean, nuclear
dimension as well. This changes Chile and southern South America's profile in the Cold War. Latin
America remains mostly known for Caribbean-style dictatorships, backed by feudal-like landowners,
for low-technology guerrilla warfare, and Pentagon-, Agency for International Development (AID)-,
and Peace Corps-sponsored agrarian-reform, modernization, and counterinsurgency programs in the
1960s. Yet Atlantic politics and high-technology modernization programs also influenced the United
States and Chile's Cold War history that decade.
Britain, whose presence and interests in southern South America had not receded as much as
some still believe, also extended credits and sold arms, including warships and Hawker-Siddeley's
Hunter aircraft, to Chileans in the 1960s. This supported Britons' strategy of exporting advanced
technology and weapons abroad to slow their decline and preserve their influence in the postwar world.
This failed, however, to satisfy the Chilean officer corps' growing frustrations with the limitations of
American aid, which supported civilians and their agricultural, educational, and public health programs
while, in these officers' views, dangerously neglecting their profession and, through it, Chile's
42
Fermandois, "Hero on the Latin American Scene," 278.
25
longstanding and continuing national-security problems with its immediate neighbors.
The seventh chapter, "The Rise of General Viaux," turns to these officers' frustrations. It shows
how the Alliance for Progress and the Frei administration's Revolution in Liberty inadvertently
destabilized Chilean civil-military relations and helped prepare the ground for Brigadier General
Roberto Viaux's movement, which appeared in 1969. Viaux's movement became the single most
important factor that contributed to the energy that coalesced in favor of military ascendancy in Chilean
politics, which occurred four years later, in 1973.
Viaux's activism showed Chileans' continuing anticommunist politics and the army's renewed
interventionist mood, which the general and his associates made manifest a year before Nixon ordered
Track II, the CIA's crash operation that failed to stop Allende's inauguration in September and October
1970. Viaux attempted to use agency support not only to preempt Allende's election but to seize power
himself. This failed. But the general's movement expanded to include the civilian Frente Nacionalista
Patria y Libertad (Nationalist Front for Fatherland and Liberty), an ultranationalist group that
continued pressing the armed forces to depose Allende thereafter.
The eighth and concluding chapter, "Reimagining Chile's Cold War Experience," reevaluates
the United States and Chile's Cold War history as part of the whole Cold War rather than the much
more limited, US-centered, inter-American version of it. The United States and Chile's Cold War
experience was not primarily an expression of American influence in Chile, but rather an expression of
Chileans' complex, contested, and often highly unstable transition from colony to nation in the fluid
and evolving frameworks of the Atlantic revolutions and independence, the industrial revolution, the
world wars, the Great Depression, and the Cold War in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It does
not suffice to learn what cultural attitudes and biases informed Nixon and Kissinger's policies toward
Chile, what they said, or how much money they and their predecessors spent attempting to control or
influence Chilean politics in the 1960s and eary-1970s. There is much more to know about the United
States, Chile, and the Cold War than this.
The Dissertation's Choices
Some who attended my defense asked why American copper interests and US-based
transnational corporations like International Telephone and Telegraph (ITT), executives such as Harold
26
Geneen and John McCone, and behind them, international capitalism, have not appeared as centrally in
this dissertation as they have in the consensus interpretation. And why have I recognized international
organizations, from the United Nations (UN) and the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to
the Organization of American States (OAS), nations, and governments as actors and, in the case of
governments, sovereigns, in world history, and not dismissed them as epiphenomenal, imagined
communities or mere committees that manage the bourgeoisie's affairs? As I explained in my response,
these remain choices authors make when they approach, interpret, and write history. I will elaborate
this explanation in three points here.
First, a clarification: I do not ignore the industrial revolution and the rise of international
capitalism, transnational corporations, and related social and economic issues. They do figure in the
chapters that follow, just not centrally, since I do not believe that political-economics, even in its most
elegant expression, can fully explain world history. Nations and governments have partly occurred
within but have also stood apart from the industrial-capitalist political-economic order.
As Sigmund found in his comparative study of transnational corporations and the politics of
nationalization in Latin America, strong nations and governments developed their own information
capabilities and technical expertise. Chileans created the Corporación de Fomento de la Producción
(CORFO), the Empresa Nacional de Electricidad (ENDESA), and CChEN, for example. This allowed
Chilean leaders and others, from Mexico to Cuba, Peru, and Argentina, to assert their authority and
bargaining power vis-à-vis foreign investors and corporations as the century unfolded.43
This transition to a bargaining relationship was not always smooth; it was more turbulent in
some cases than others. But it nevertheless occurred throughout Latin America and indeed elsewhere in
the developing world in the twentieth century. Although the United States government, especially
Congress, which had always insisted on prompt, adequate, and effective compensation, intervened in
cases where leftist-nationalist governments in Guatemala in the early-1950s, Cuba since 1959, and
Chile between 1970 and 1973 nationalized American property and investments without paying such
compensation, Washington also accepted the transition, and its presence in the bargaining process
steadily diminished over time. The dissertation's sixth chapter -- involving the Frei administration,
CChEN, the British and French governments, and Britain's Fairey Engineering and France's Socia -best illustrates this bargaining paradigm in Chile.
43
Paul Sigmund, Multinationals in Latin America: The Politics of Nationalization (Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1980).
27
Second, I remain well aware that many of those who have constructed and reaffirmed the
consensus interpretation, from Allende to Hersh and Qureshi, to cite but three, have emphasized the
centrality of American copper interests and ITT, and that they have particularly stressed McCone's
work history in the intelligence community and many other supposed cases of conflict-of-interest
and/or corruption, while explaining the United States and Chile's Cold War experience. As Qureshi
argued, Nixon and Kissinger "possess[ed] a ruthlessly imperial disdain for Latin America, [and] they
also felt the pressure of U.S. business interests." Qureshi was merely following what has long seemed
like common sense to large numbers of historians. She cited Margaret Power, for example, who had
written that "Following World War I, the United States had greatly expanded its economic interests in
and political control over Latin America." This dissertation's explicit purpose, however, was to break
with this interpretative pattern while exploring and illuminating an alternative analysis and narrative
from the ground up, which necessarily entailed rethinking all of this.44
I did not make these choices arbitrarily or simply because Cobbs Hoffman, Ninkovich, and
Sigmund's interpretations of the United States, Latin America, and the world appealed to me. I
reviewed the evidence for examples of pressure and corruption, and I found none. Once I moved
beyond the autocratic Geneen's blatantly improper behavior and his frustrated initiatives to block
Allende's election, I encountered proper and uncontroversial business practices between the United
States, Britain, and Chile. I also confirmed that Washington and Wall Street's perceptions and interests,
while sometimes overlapping, remained separate and distinct.
Henry Ford II, chairman and CEO of Ford Motor Company, for example, tried to call Kissinger
to discuss the company's Chilean operations in early December 1970, but he was unable to get through.
The company was bidding for an additional plant in Chile, and its Chilean dealers were asking the
chairman to travel to Santiago in order to meet Allende "and express the fact that Ford has been in
Chile for some years, that we would like to stay friends." Ed Molina, one of Ford's vice presidents,
finally got the national security advisor on the telephone on 10 December. The chairman, he explained,
was concerned that Allende might somehow exploit this visit for political or propagandistic purposes,
and he worried that this might embarrass the American government, which he did not want to do. Thus
he sought Nixon and Kissinger's advice.45
44
Qureshi, Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende, xiii; and Power, Right-Wing Women, 38.
Ed Molina and Kissinger, Telcon, 10 December 1970, 5:40pm. Henry Kissinger telephone conversation
transcripts (TELCONS), Box 7, "8-12 December 1970." RN.
45
28
Kissinger consulted Nixon and then called Molina back nine days later. The national security
advisor told him that "we don't think it is a good idea for the Chairman to go down there. From a
political point of view we would like to give them as little opportunity as possible." Perhaps, he
suggested, lower-level executives could make a less conspicuous trip and accomplish the same
objectives without risking embarrassment. "They will either make a deal with you on its merits or they
won't. We have no opposition for you to continue to operate and, privately, that is your business."
Molina thanked Kissinger, explaining "That is the kind of information the Chairman wanted because he
will not go if it is contrary to our government."46
Not only should this conversation have gone the other way around, with Molina calling
Kissinger to give him policy advice. But Ford and Molina should have cared only, or mostly, about
their business's narrow perceptions and interests and not the government's wider national-security
strategy in Chile -- and they should have pressed Kissinger to act on behalf of those interests. It did not
go the other way around because Washington's policies in Chile reflected more than simply Wall
Street's thinking.
Third, it was not just Chile. These differences between Washington and Wall Street appeared
even in the case of the United Fruit Company and Guatemala in the Caribbean. The Guatemalan coup
represents perhaps the quintessential example of a transnational corporation's purportedly influencing
the American government to overthrow another. Until recently, many repeated the narrative of how
Secretary of State John Foster Dulles and his brother, Director of Central Intelligence Allen Dulles -who had both worked as attorneys at the firm of Sullivan and Cromwell, which represented United
Fruit -- manipulated President Dwight Eisenhower (1953-1961) into believing that President Jacobo
Arbenz (1950-1954) was a Moscow-controlled communist who planned to establish a Soviet
beachhead in Central America. But Arbenz, so the story went, was merely a democratic national leader
who wanted to reestablish Guatemalan sovereignty over the country's own land. This had put him into
conflict with the company, which counted on the Dulles brothers and many other powerful friends in
the capital -- and this sealed his fate.47
Historians have tended to turn away from this narrative since the early-1990s. They have gained
access to Ann Whitman's -- Eisenhower's personal secretary -- files and concluded that the president
46
Kissinger and Molina, Telcon, 19 December 1970, 3:45pm. Henry Kissinger, telephone conversation transcripts
(TELCONS), Box 8, "16-21 December 1970." RN.
47
See Stephen Schlesinger and Stephen Kinzer, Bitter Fruit: The Story of the American Coup in Guatemala [1982],
Rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press/David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, 2005).
29
and not the Dulles brothers directed his administration's foreign policy. Further, as Gleijeses, who
researched not only the American but the Guatemalan side of this history, found, Arbenz and the
Guatemalan Workers' Party (PGT) were indeed communists, even if Moscow had never heard of them.
Gleijeses and others have also shown that Washington's anticommunism, combined with its
longstanding concern for favorable trade relations and prompt, adequate, and effective compensation in
the event of nationalization, rather than submission to any particular corporation's private interests, best
explained Eisenhower's overthrowing Arbenz. Even the PGT's José Manuel Fortuny acknowledged that
"They would have overthrown us even if we had grown no bananas."48
Further, as some historians have conceded, but not yet fully studied, the Eisenhower
administration was prosecuting United Fruit for monopolistic business practices at the same time it was
moving against Arbenz. Indeed, American presidents had been taking such action against large
corporations since the Progressive era. The company attempted to stop this to no avail. Eisenhower
convened the NSC to ask if anyone, including the Dulles brothers, thought that the Department of
Justice should abort or perhaps delay this litigation while the Guatemalan operation remained in play,
and no one voice any objection.49
United Fruit's lobbyist, Thomas Corcoran, met the CIA's director of Latin American operations
J. Caldwell King -- no one else in Washington would receive him -- to complain about this suit. King
explained that neither he nor the agency knew anything about it, and had neither turned it on nor could
turn it off. If Corcoran wished to discuss Central American affairs, he continued, he should go to the
Department of State. With respect to United Fruit's relations with the new Guatemalan government,
however, King mentioned "a recent cartoon (and described the one of 10 days ago) about second
chances," and he suggested that the company change its behavior. Frank Wisner, King's superior at the
CIA, had already warned it in more specific language that the new government, headed by Lieutenant
Colonel Carlos Castillo Armas (1954-1957), would not "put up with UFCO if it persists reactionary
outmoded tactics and unsatisfactory labor relations."50
48
Cited in Piero Gleijeses, Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-1954
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 4. Also see Stephen Streeter, "Interpreting the 1954 U.S. Intervention in
Guatemala: Realist, Revisionist, and Postrevisionist Perspectives," The History Teacher 34 (2000): 61-74.
49
Editorial Note, n.d., Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States 1952-1954: Guatemala
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2003), document 196.
50
J. Caldwell King to Frank Wisner, "Memorandum of Conversation with Mr. Joe Montgomery and Mr. Thomas
Corcoran of the United Fruit Company," 22 July 1954. Reprinted in Ibid., document 279; and CIA to LINCOLN Station, 27
June 1954. Reprinted in Ibid., document 240.
30
Other historians and political scientists, including Harold Blakemore, Steve Stern, and Robert
Pastor, have also departed from, and in come cases expressly challenged, the Marxist, dependista, and
world-system interpretations of the United States, Britain, Latin America, and the world. They have
criticized these interpretations as reductionist and simplistic, and for failing to account for regional and
local conditions and politics. This discussion, however, could go on indefinitely. I would not likely
convince any Marxist, dependista, world-system thinker, or someone impressed by, say, journalist
Naomi Klein's political-economic interpretation, any more than Stern persuaded sociologist Immanuel
Wallerstein during their exchange within the pages of the American Historical Review. To paraphrase
architect Maya Lin, who also once waded into a controversial subject treating the United States and the
world, one writer, possessing a strong clear vision, ultimately makes his or her choices and then writes.
Others will read and respond to it as they please.51
The Dissertation's Limitations
Of all Cold War actors in Latin America, Fidel Castro's Cuba was the one who seized and held
the initiative after 1959. Havana remains the prime mover every other actor, including the United
States, was responding to in from the 1960s to the 1980s. As Gleijeses has found, Cubans were also
deeply involved in African affairs in these two to three decades. And they were involved in southern
South America and Chile, too. According to Harmer, "it was Chilean military leaders who launched the
coup with the help of sympathetic Brazilian friends, not the United States. And our effort to understand
why they did inevitably leads us back to Cuban involvement in Chile and Latin America."52
The full details of Havana's policies and interventions in Chile and elsewhere in Latin America
remain in the shadows, however. Harmer and historian Cristián Pérez have begun documenting Cuban
involvement in Allende's Chile through interviews with the Cuban diplomats and intelligence officers
51
See Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism [2007] (New York: Picador, 2008);
Robert Pastor, Exiting the Whirlpool: U.S. Foreign Policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean [1992], Rev. ed.
(Boulder: Westview Press, 2001); Steve Stern, "Feudalism, Capitalism, and the World-System in the Perspective of Latin
America and the Caribbean," American Historical Review 93 (1988): 829-897; Harold Blakemore, British Nitrates and
Chilean Politics, 1886-1896: Balmaceda and North (London: Athlone Press for the Institute of Latin American Studies,
1974); and Harold Blakemore, "The Chilean Revolution of 1891 and Its Historiography," Hispanic American Historical
Review 45 (1965): 393-421.
52
Harmer, Allende's Chile, 17; and Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions.
31
who served there, and with the Chileans who knew them as well. But historians have only just begun to
appreciate Cuban-Latin American relations, particularly with respect to intelligence, military, and
paramilitary affairs.53
Havana's continuing refusal to declassify or publish its papers relating to Cuban-Latin American
relations, according to Gleijeses, "cripples" historians and renders their understanding of the entire
region's Cold War history "provisional." These limitations notwithstanding, we can learn much about
the United States and Chile's Cold War experience from American, British, and Chilean records and
publications. Indeed, as this dissertation will demonstrate, the United States and Chile's Cold War
history began long before Castro, Che Guevara, and their comrades ever dreamed of waging a guerrilla
campaign in the Sierra Maestra.54
53
Harmer, Allende's Chile; and Cristián Pérez, "Salvador Allende, Apuntes sobre su dispositivo de seguridad: el
grupo de amigos personales (GAP)," Estudios Públicos 79 (2000): 31-81.
54
Piero Gleijeses, The Cuban Drumbeat: Castro's Worldview: Cuban Foreign Policy in a Hostile World (London,
New York, and Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2009), 92; and Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 22, n. 44. Cuban authorities granted
Gleijeses access to select papers documenting Cuban-African relations but denied him access to those relating to CubanLatin American relations. In Gleijeses's estimation, this "absence of documentation has made all studies of the guerrilla wars
in Latin America in the 1960s and particularly of the Cuban role in them provisional."
32
II. The England of South America: Chile and the World into the Twentieth Century
The consensus interpretation of the United States and Chile's Cold War experience proceeds
from the assumption that Latin America has remained under some form of external control since
Hernán Cortés conquered Mexico and then the bourgeoisie and industrial capitalism arose in world
history. The appearance of an expansionist United States reconfirmed this, especially after American
leaders announced the Monroe doctrine (1823) and the Roosevelt corollary (1904), confining the region
to a US-dominated, inter-American sphere of influence by the turn of the century.
Thus, according to many, Latin Americans never achieved independence. In historian Walter
LaFeber's estimation, "Latin America…escaped Spanish rule only to face the danger of being
victimized by expansionists from the north and empire-builders from the east." As Los Prisioneros, a
popular Chilean musical group, has sung, "Latinoamerica es un pueblo al sur de Estados Unidos."55
The Latin American left, from democratic reformers to Marxist revolutionaries and fidelistas,
has cultivated these perceptions throughout the region since the early-twentieth century. Dependista,
and world-systems thought have reinforced this, influencing regional and local poets, popular writers,
and public opinion at large. These worldviews remain plainly visible in Chilean politics, from President
Gabriel González Videla (1946-1952), who told President Harry Truman (1945-1953) that he intended
"to transform the semicolonial economy in which we were living into a highly industrialized one," to
President Salvador Allende (1970-1973), who often spoke as if he had simply opened novelist Eduardo
Galeano's Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent and begun reading
aloud.56
Allende insisted that Chileans had never represented anything but the exploited in global
history. "We were colonies in the agrarian-mercantile civilization. We are barely neocolonial nations in
the urban-industrial civilization, and, in the new civilization which threatens to continue our
dependency, we have been the exploited peoples -- those who existed not for themselves, but rather to
55
Walter LaFeber, The Panama Canal: The Crisis in Historical Perspective [1978], 2d ed. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1989), 6; and Los Prisioneros, "Latinoamerica es un pueblo al sur de Estados Unidos," La voz de los '80
(EMI/Capital Records, 1984).
56
Gabriel González Videla, Memorias, 2 vols. (Santiago de Chile: Editora Nacional Gabriela Mistral, 1975) I: 520;
and Eduardo Galeano, Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent [1971], 25th anniversary
ed. (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997).
33
contribute to the prosperity of others." He even characterized Chilean history as "a past of slavery."57
Yet, a more confident and influential Chile, thriving within a broader global context, remains
possible in world history. Chileans, like Americans, arose not only within the era of the industrial
revolution but also within an emerging international community that articulated and practiced
principles that respected the sovereignty and juridical equality of all nations, and that preferred to settle
its problems through arbitration, negotiation, and persuasion rather than coercion, intervention, and
war. The inter-American community, from the liberator Simón Bolívar to President Franklin Roosevelt
(1933-1945) and his successors, was also concerned with common defense against European, and later,
potential Soviet threats.
This represented an ideal and a process or a trend that has been evolving in the Atlantic world
since the Peace of Westphalia, not a finished reality, not even today. Chileans and most others within
the inter-American community have sometimes disregarded these principles. But like a fleet of ships
that may lose its way now and then, because a tyrannical captain might seize temporary control of one
or more of the vessels, or because storms can suddenly descend and disorient them all, these nations
have always returned to their original course heading, and thus this trend has continued to unfold.
This chapter approaches Chile as an active and indeed leading member of this international
society rather than a subject of capitalist exploitation, foreign influence, and imperialism in modern and
contemporary world history. It illustrates how Chile emerged within this global community of nations,
and it shows the nature and extent of Chileans' power and influence in southern South America and
beyond. It introduces Chile as "the England of South America," and it clarifies the nature of the United
States-Chilean relationship as well.
Chilean history, before, during, and after the Cold War, was not primarily an expression of
capitalist, imperialist, or American influence, but rather Chileans' complex, contested, and often highly
unstable transition from colony to nation-state in the fluid, evolving, and interconnected frameworks of
the Atlantic revolutions and independence, the industrial revolution, the world wars, the Great
Depression, the Cold War, and the Cuban Revolution. This broadens and deepens the United States and
Chile's Cold War experience, which remains this dissertation's primary purpose. This chapter
particularly supports and further elaborates historian Tanya Harmer's insight that "Chileans were the
57
Salvador Allende, "Inaugural Address in the National Stadium," 5 November 1970. Reprinted in James
Cockcroft, ed., Salvador Allende Reader: Chile's Voice of Democracy (Melbourne and New York: Ocean Press, 2000), 53;
Salvador Allende, "First Annual Message to the National Congress," 21 May 1971. Reprinted in Ibid., 93.
34
key determiners of their country's foreign relations and its future rather than being passive bystanders
viewing -- and being affected by -- the actions of outsiders," an observation which cannot be
overstated. This represents the dissertation's cornerstone, establishing the world-historical context for
all that follows in subsequent chapters.58
The Autocratic Republic (1833-1891)
While Chileans would eventually embrace liberal-democratic government, in the 1930s, they
chose autocracy in the 1830s. They had achieved independence by then, but they remained mired in
anarchy and caudillo warfare. Diego Portales, an influential merchant, settled this when he imposed an
authoritarian and pragmatic, socially conservative, and economically liberal political order following
the brief civil war that ended in April 1830.59
Portales's constitution concentrated power in the central government, particularly the executive
branch, after Chileans enacted it in 1833. Presidents appointed provincial governors and other officials
throughout the nation. These appointees functioned as the presidents' agents, allowing presidents to
control elections. Presidents selected their own successors and generally ensured the legislative
branch's compliance to 1891, although legislators, some representing Chileans' nascent liberaldemocratic tendencies, began limiting presidential power by the 1870s.
Presidents possessed immense power and used it to suppress disorder and silence dissent,
particularly during minor civil wars in 1851 and 1859, and the much more serious one that occurred in
1891. Unless congress was in session, which only occurred three months each year, presidents could
declare states of emergency or states of siege whenever they deemed it necessary. This enabled them to
suspend the constitution and all civil liberties, including freedom of speech within the emergency
zones. They subjected those accused of threatening national security to military courts-martial. They
used "relegación," or transference to internal exile. They constructed penal colonies such as Más
58
Tanya Harmer, Allende's Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2011), 6.
59
On Chilean independence and the 1820s, see Brian Loveman, Chile: The Legacy of Hispanic Capitalism [1979],
3d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 98-118; Bernardino Bravo, De Portales a Pinochet: Gobierno y régimen
de gobierno en Chile (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Jurídica de Chile/Editorial Andrés Bello, 1985), 2-3; Frederick Nunn,
The Military in Chilean History: Essays on Civil-Military Relations, 1810-1973 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico
Press, 1976), 20-37; Alberto Edwards Vives and Eduardo Frei Montalva, Historia de los partidos politicos chilenos
(Santiago de Chile: Editorial del Pacifico, 1949), 16-32; and Alberto Edwards Vives, La fronda aristocrática: Historia
política de Chile [1928] (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Nacional, 1945), 7-49.
35
Afuera in the Juan Fernández Islands, Punta Arenas in the Magellan Straits, and, later, they established
internment camps like Pisagua in the Atacama. Portales wanted practical, disciplined government and
strict law and order, through intimidation, if necessary, and not liberal constitutions. Civil liberties, he
believed, weakened government and invited unrest, and thus remained expendable. As he explained,
"this lady called Constitution must be violated when the circumstances are extreme."60
Portales subordinated the army to the presidency and declared the armed forces essentially
obedient and nondeliberative. He also created a militia, which outnumbered the army, as a counter
force. These achievements and the stability that followed were unique in nineteenth-century Latin
America. But this did not signal the beginning of a constitutional or democratic tradition in the Chilean
military. On the contrary, Portales barely tolerated constitutions, and he rejected democracy as well:
"Democracy, which self-deceived men proclaim so much, is an absurdity in countries like those of
America."61
Portales's constitution created the foundations for, and established the tradition and actual
practice of, repressive, dictatorial government in Chile. It would reappear during crises throughout the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries and continue well into the 1970s. As some Chilean political
scientists have recognized, the armed forces' coup against the Allende administration partly represented
the continuing influence of Portalian political practices, in that it responded to what many in the
professional officer corps regarded as irresponsible civilian government and anarchy. General Augusto
Pinochet (1973-1990), who consolidated an authoritarian dictatorship in the mid-1970s, acknowledged
this every time he invoked Portales's name, which he did often that decade. "In a word," Pinochet once
confirmed, "Portales wanted a strong central government whose men were models of prudence, dignity,
and firmness, uncompromising men who repressed abuse and disorder."62
60
Cited in Brian Loveman, The Constitution of Tyranny: Regimes of Exception in Spanish America (Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993), 335. On the autocratic republic and Portales's constitution, see Simon Collier and
William Sater, A History of Chile, 1808-2002 [1996] 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 51-146;
Loveman, Chile, 98-161; Loveman, Constitution of Tyranny, 330-353; Bravo, De Portales a Pinochet, 15-46; Edwards and
Frei, Historia de los partidos políticos chilenos, 26-99; and Edwards, La fronda aristocrática, 50-195.
61
Cited in Loveman, Chile, 101. On Portales and the army, see Nunn, Military in Chilean History, 38-46.
62
Cited in Bravo, De Portales a Pinochet, 101-102. On characterizing the autocratic republic and its constitution as
Portales's achievement, I do understand that thirty-six prominent Chileans, including attorney Mariano Egaña, but not
Portales himself, who remained in the background, met throughout 1831 and 1832, ostensibly to revise the decentralized,
liberal constitution of 1828, but actually to write a new, centralized one. Portales's distance from this notwithstanding,
Edwards and other Chilean historians have long recognized him as the constitution's true author, the indispensable man who
provided the leadership and supplied the philosophy of government that the delegates put down on paper. Edwards and Frei,
Historia de los partidos políticos chilenos, 32.
36
Illustration 1: General Augusto Pinochet posing before a portrait of Diego Portales.
Source: Paul Sigmund, The Overthrow of Allende and the Politics of Chile, 1964-1976 (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1977), 271.
Chilean Expansionism
Portales's autocratic republic confronted the basic problem that most other Latin American
nations did in the nineteenth century: national security, especially with respect to the region's illdefined borders, which retired Chilean Ambassador Juan José Fernández diplomatically referred to as
"the complex legacy Spain left us with respect to territorial limits." First, these emerging nations
gauged their influence. Then they expanded into new lands wherever they could, often at the expense
of others.63
63
Juan José Fernández Valdés, Chile y Perú: Historia de sus relaciones diplomáticas entre 1879-1929 (Santiago de
Chile: RIL editores: Asociación de Funcionarios Diplomáticos de Carrera del Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, 2004),
219.
37
Brazil and the United Provinces of Buenos Aires continued Portugal and Spain's older rivalries
in what became Uruguay, and later, in Misiones province as well. Mexico City and Lima, Spain's two
most powerful viceroyalties, lost control over the vast imperial territories they had administered since
the late-fifteenth century. New Granada/Gran Colombia disintegrated into three smaller nations:
Ecuador, Colombia, and Venezuela. Several wars ensued -- the Mexican-American war (1846-1848),
the Paraguayan war (1864-1870), and the War of the Pacific (1879-1883) representing the largest three.
Chileans expanded into southern South America within the context of these wars. Portales, an
Anglophile, had imagined Chile as "the England of the Pacific," not necessarily a great power in world
affairs, but certainly a formidable regional one. Chileans began projecting their strength along South
America's Pacific coast within three years of their consolidating the autocratic republic.64
This began in Bolivia. Chilean-Bolivian relations ruptured following Bolivian General Andrés
Santa Cruz's seizure of Peru in 1836. Santa Cruz intended to reassert Lima's imperial preeminence in
the Andes and beyond. The general began forging a Peruvian-Bolivian confederation. He planned to
restore Peruvian control of the continent's Pacific coast trade. He supported a group of Chilean exiles -dissidents opposed to Portales -- who were plotting to overthrow President Joaquín Prieto (1831-1841).
Some of these exiles defected to Santiago, however, passing documents that showed his involvement.
The Prieto administration regarded this as an act of war. But Portales had already decided
Chileans could not tolerate Santa Cruz's confederation. He feared it would eventually threaten his
country's independence. As the administration instructed the envoy it dispatched to Peru with an
ultimatum backed by five warships, "We do not care whether General Santa Cruz rules in Bolivia or in
Peru; what we do care about is the separation of the two nations…If Austria or France seized Spain or
Italy…to form a single political body…would the other nations be indifferent?"65
Chileans' first expedition failed. But the second one, which General Manuel Bulnes
commanded, succeeded in defeating Santa Cruz's armies, restoring Peruvian sovereignty, and forcing
64
While Collier and Sater have attributed "the England of the Pacific" to Portales, William Edmundson, former
director of the Chilean-British Cultural Institute in Concepción, attributes it to Chilean historian Benjamín Vicuña
Mackenna. See Collier and Sater, History of Chile, 64; and William Edmundson, A History of the British Presence in Chile:
From Bloody Mary to Charles Darwin and the Decline of British Influence (New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009), 5-6.
Also see Portales's quip that he would have loaned Chile to Britain for several years to transform and properly educate
Chileans. Cited in Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, D. Diego Portales [1863], 3d ed. (Santiago de Chile: Editorial del Pacífico,
1974), 199.
65
Cited in Robert Burr, By Reason or Force: Chile and the Balancing of Power in South America, 1830-1905
[1965] (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974), 40.
38
the general into exile in Ecuador. Chileans' confidence and nationalist pride soared after this.
According to the eminent Chilean jurist Andrés Bello, this victory conferred "the title of champions of
the American equilibrium and of the rights of peoples" upon Chileans. Thus Chileans became interested
in preserving a status quo that favored their emerging primacy in southern South America.66
Chile remained a small nation, confined to the central valley surrounding Santiago, at this time.
Chilean territory extended no further north than Copiapó and no further south than the Rio Bío Bío,
which had long demarcated the Indian frontier, leading into lands Chileans called Araucania. Chilean
agricultural production and exports began surging, partly responding to temporary increases in demand
in California and Australia, which were experiencing gold rushes, and partly serving a growing
European market, in the late-1840s. Chilean wheat and flour exports to California alone rose from
6,000 quintals in 1848 to 500,000 in 1850. This booming economy soon included silver, copper, iron,
and nitrate mining in the north, and coal mining in the south.67
These rapidly growing agricultural and mining activities created pressures and inducements to
expand into Araucania. Chileans employed justifications for this that historians well versed in the
literature on American expansionism will immediately recognize -- beginning with their rationale for
enlarging their navy decades before Rear Admiral Alfred Thayer Mahan (USN) wrote The Influence of
Sea Power upon History. The Chilean navy's senior commander linked a powerful navy and merchant
marine to national greatness, explaining that "if you cast a glance over the rest of the world and observe
that the two most free and industrious nations are precisely those that possess the greatest naval forces,
you will be tempted perhaps to study the intimate relationship between war and merchant fleets, and
between merchant fleets and the greatness of a people."68
The Bulnes administration (1841-1851) concurred, and Chileans seized two naval positions in
the Magellan Straits -- Punta Arenas and Fort Bulnes -- in the 1840s. This ensured Chileans'
independent access to the Atlantic and, through it, European trade. Thus the Chilean navy became one
66
Ibid., 55, 113-114. For Chile's "second war for independence," see Harold Eugene Davis, et al., Latin American
Diplomatic History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 91-92; Nunn, Military in Chilean History, 4648; and Burr, By Reason or Force, 12-57.
67
See Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, "Trabajadores y empresarios en la industria del carbon: Lota y Coronel (18541995)," n.d., available at http://www.memoriachilena.cl; Collier and Sater, History of Chile, 73-103; Loveman, Chile, 119144; and Burr, By Reason or Force, 107-116.
68
Cited in Burr, By Reason or Force, 72. See Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Influence of Sea Power upon History,
1660-1783 (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1898); and Alfred Thayer Mahan, The Interest of America in Sea Power,
Past and Present (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1911).
39
of South America's largest by the end of the nineteenth century.
Chileans conquered the Mapuche, who had resisted Incan and Spanish rule for centuries,
between the 1840s and 1880s. This opened vast tracts of land to settlement. Bello and his
contemporaries considered this territory "either completely deserted or transiently occupied by savage
tribes." The Montt administration (1851-1861) appointed Vicente Pérez Rosales its colonization agent
in Valdivia and Llanquihue in the early-1850s. Then it appointed him consul in Hamburg, where he
recruited German and other European immigrants to populate the area. Modest numbers of Germans
began arriving in Chile later that decade.69
Chileans did not stop in Araucania. They spilled over the Andes, too, to the east, into today's
Argentine Patagonia, in the 1850s. Argentines, whose country remained in disarray, objected to this, to
little effect. Pérez and his contemporaries saw things differently. When Pérez described Chile and its
geography to Europeans at the time, he argued that his nation encompassed both "cisandine" and
"transandine" lands. He also referred to his country's "acción civilizadora" -- its civilizing mission -when justifying Chilean expansionism.
The Republic's maritime boundaries extend no further east than its Patagonian coast, from the
mouth of the Río Negro to the Magellan Straits, and to the Pacific Ocean in the west, from
Cape Horn to Mejillones [then a port in Bolivian Antofagasta]…Our Constitution has
contributed to the erroneous belief that Chile remains confined to the American continent west
of the Andes, between the Atacama and Cape Horn. This delineation, made during the
independence war, certainly did not mean Chile had renounced all the territory that had
belonged to the Captaincy-General of Chile. The Republic was limited to that which it could
realistically defend against Spanish forces at the time, but this did not alienate Chile from
lands which rightfully belonged to it. Thus, when peaceful conditions returned, and when
Chile's population, power, and wealth permitted it to extend its civilizing mission into
Patagonia, it founded a colony in the Magellan Straits as its principal base of operations
there.70
Back in Santiago, Chileans began contemplating the future of their nation's not-quite-yetpacified Indian tribes. Some advised treating the Mapuche harshly. One newspaper's editors, for
example, disdained them as "savages…this stupid race…odious and prejudicial guests in Chile," and
69
Andrés Bello, "An American Congress," El Araucano, November 1844. Reprinted in Robert Burr and Roland
Hussey, eds., Documents on Inter-American Cooperation I: 1810-1881 (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press,
1955), 85. See Vicente Pérez Rosales, Times Gone By: Memoirs of a Man of Action, trans. by John Polt, introduction by
Brian Loveman (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), xvii-xxxii and 295-396.
70
Vicente Pérez Rosales, Ensayo sobre Chile [Hamburg: F.H. Nestler and Melle, 1857], Introduction and
annotations by Rolando Mellafe Rojas (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones de la Universidad de Chile, 1986), 47.
40
called for "prompt and extreme measures" to deal with them.71
The Indian wars that followed were remarkably similar to the ones Americans and Argentines
waged in support of their own expansionism in the nineteenth century. In all of these wars, Europeandescended settlers, now commanding national armies with modern weapons, decimated the remaining,
and greatly weakened, Indian tribes. Thus Chileans conquered the Mapuche and settled the Chilean
south from Valdivia to Puerto Montt.
Meanwhile, Chilean mining operations expanded into the Atacama, all the way into Peru's
Tarapacá province. Chileans had invested approximately 20 million pesos and imported over 10,000
miners -- Chilean peasants from the central valley who were seeking higher wages and a better life in
the northern mines -- there by the 1870s. Chileans, Bolivians, and Peruvians recognized these
previously neglected wastelands' importance when they discovered large deposits of guano -mountains of bird droppings that had accumulated on several islands and some coastal lands for
centuries and which agricultural nations prized as high-grade fertilizer -- in the mid-nineteenth century.
These discoveries created new conflicts as all three nations maneuvered to secure the Atacama, its
guano, and its other natural resources as well.72
Chileans and Bolivians began clashing in the 1860s. President José Joaquín Perez (1861-1871)
negotiated an agreement with the Bolivian government that fixed the Chilean-Bolivian border at the
24th parallel in 1866. Santiago and La Paz would jointly administer and tax the guano exported, and
"the minerals extracted," from the territory between the 23d and 25th parallels, which they held in
condominium.73
Although Chileans and Bolivians agreed that La Paz would operate a customs office at
Mejillones, Santiago's customs agents would be present, observing operations there, and ensuring that
Chilean imports and exports passed through it duty free. As Bolivians had little or no interest in
anything south of the 24th parallel, this agreement, which amounted to shared sovereignty between the
24th and 23th parallels, favored the Chilean government and Chilean mining interests. Unsurprisingly,
71
Cited in Loveman, Chile, 135.
Burr, By Reason or Force, 131-132.
73
"Tratado de límites entre Chile y Bolivia," 10 August 1866. Reprinted in A. Bascuñan Montes, Recopilación de
tratados y convenciones celebrados entre la República de Chile y las potencias extranjeras, edición autorizada por el
supremo gobierno y revisada por el Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores II: 1863-1893 (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta
Cervantes, 1894), 22-28. Also see Jorge Basadre, Chile, Perú y Bolivia independientes (Barcelona and Buenos Aires: Salvat
Editores, 1948), 454.
72
41
this soon became a disputed area.
Chileans and Bolivians returned to the negotiating table less than a decade later, after Chilean
prospector José Díaz Gana discovered the Caracoles silver mine in the disputed area. Caracoles yielded
approximately 1,000 metric tons of silver over the next 10 years. This, among other things, caused
Bolivians to begin fearing that Chileans were becoming too influential and exploiting too many natural
resources in their distant province, and they hoped, belatedly, to reassert national control there. They
argued that the existing treaty limited Chilean activities to guano. Chileans, intending to secure their
interests in what was rapidly becoming their colony, interpreted it much more broadly, countering that
the treaty stipulated "the minerals extracted" from there, which allowed a more general and open-ended
interpretation.74
Santiago and La Paz attempted to resolve this dispute by replacing the existing treaty with a
new one in 1874. This new agreement reaffirmed that the Chilean-Bolivian border remained at the 24th
parallel. Chilean President Federico Errázuriz (1871-1876) renounced his country's claims to
condominium between the 24th and 23d parallels in exchange for Bolivians' pledging to continue
sharing half the guano revenues there and not to raise taxes on Chileans' exporting whatever minerals
they extracted for the next 25 years. Meanwhile, Chileans would continue to enjoy duty-free imports to
the 23d parallel, and the two governments agreed to submit any dispute which might arise to
arbitration.75
The underlying issues remained unresolved, however, and all three nations began preparing for
war. The Peruvian and Bolivian governments had already signed a secret defensive pact to protect each
other's territorial integrity against further Chilean encroachments, while the Chilean navy received two
modern, British-built warships. These tensions reached their breaking point when Bolivian General
Hilarión Daza Groselle (1876-1879), determined to restore Bolivian sovereignty over the Atacama and
its natural resources, seized power in La Paz in May 1876.76
The Daza dictatorship's efforts to impose a unilateral solution, particularly Daza's using the
Bolivian legislature to target the Antofagasta Nitrate and Railroad Company (Compañía de Salitres y
74
Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, "Mineral de Caracoles," n.d., available at http://www.memoriachilena.cl; Collier
and Sater, History of Chile, 77.
75
"Tratado de límites entre Chile y Bolivia," 6 August 1874. Reprinted in Bascuñan, Recopilación de tratados y
convenciones II, 101-107. Also see Basadre, Chile, Perú y Bolivia independientes, 457-458.
76
Fernández, Chile y Perú, 22; Burr, By Reason or Force, 124; and Basadre, Chile, Perú y Bolivia independientes,
455-456.
42
Ferrocarril de Antofagasta), a Chilean corporation operating between the 24th and 23d parallels,
triggered the war that followed. La Paz raised the company's taxes and instructed it to pay this higher
rate retroactively, covering the entire preceding year, in December 1878. Chilean President Aníbal
Pinto (1876-1881) argued that this violated the two nations' agreement. The president demanded that
Daza submit the issue to arbitration. The dictator declined and began seizing the company's assets to
cover the taxes he said it owed his government. Pinto dispatched Chilean warships and ground forces to
occupy the Atacama in February 1879. Daza declared war against Chile that March. Pinto turned to the
Peruvian government, asking it to abrogate the secret pact -- it had been an open secret -- and Lima
refused. Thus Santiago declared war against both Peru and Bolivia in April 1879. And so began the War
of the Pacific.77
Chileans promptly defeated their enemies. The Pinto administration stated its peace terms
during an American-sponsored conference meant to bring an early settlement aboard the USS
Lackawanna off Arica in October 1880: Peruvians and Bolivians must acknowledge responsibility for
the war. The Peruvian government must pay the Chilean government $20 million pesos in reparations
and recognize Chilean administrative rights in Tacna and Arica until it had paid these reparations in
full. Peru must cede all of Tarapacá to Chile. And Bolivia must cede its entire coast.78
These demands shocked both the Peruvian and Bolivian governments, who rejected all of them
as anti-Chilean sentiment swept South America. Chileans nevertheless continued prosecuting the war,
occupying Lima in January 1881. The Peruvian government withdrew from the city and an insurgency
arose in the countryside and highlands. Chileans waged a counterinsurgency campaign there for the
next two years, until they created a pliant government that would accept their terms.
Meanwhile, Chileans turned to Argentina. Argentines had unified their nation and imposed
internal order in 1862, emerged victorious in the Paraguayan war in 1870, and then embarked upon
their own conquest of and expansion into what became their northwest. The Argentine government had
considered joining Peru and Bolivia in an international effort to contain Chilean expansionism before
77
Chileans tend to blame Peru and Bolivia's defensive alliance against them and Bolivia's violating the treaty of
1874; and Peruvians and Bolivians tend to cite Chilean expansionism when explaining the war's causes and origins. On the
War of the Pacific's beginnings, see Fernández, Chile y Perú, 17-30; Collier and Sater, History of Chile, 125-131; Burr, By
Reason or Force, 117-139; and Basadre, Chile, Perú y Bolivia independientes, 458.
78
Fernández, Chile y Perú, 41-45; and Burr, By Reason or Force, 152-153. For the military course of the war from
American, Chilean, and Peruvian perspectives, see William Sater, Andean Tragedy: Fighting the War of the Pacific, 18791884 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007); Gonzalo Bulnes, Guerra del Pacífico, 3 vols. (Valparaíso: Sociedad
Imprenta y Litografía Universo, 1911-1919); and Basadre, Chile, Perú y Bolivia independientes, 458-498.
43
the War of the Pacific began. Having defeated Bolivia and occupied Lima, but encountered difficulties
making peace, Chileans now wished to settle their territorial disputes with Argentina. And Argentines,
having witnessed Chileans' easy victories over Peru and Bolivia, were similarly inclined. Thus the two
governments negotiated an agreement in July 1881.79
President Domingo Santa María (1881-1886) and his Argentine counterpart agreed that the
Andes, "running from the highest summits that divide the waters and passing between the slopes that
fall to one side or the other," would mark the Chilean-Argentine border to the 52d parallel, just north of
the Magellan Straits, which they neutralized. The two governments drew a north-south line from Cabo
del Espíritu Santo, at the Atlantic entrance to the straits, to the Beagle Channel, specifying that Chilean
territory fell to the west of this line, and Argentine to the east. Further, Chile would possess "all islands
south of the channel to Cape Horn and all to the west of Tierra del Fuego." Both governments would
appoint a joint team of experts to mark this border, and would submit any disputes which might arise to
arbitration.80
Having reduced Chilean-Argentine tensions, at least for the moment, Chileans returned to Peru,
negotiating the Treaty of Ancón (1883). Lima ceded Tarapacá, "unconditionally and in perpetuity," to
Chile. The treaty further stipulated that Chileans would administer Peru's Tacna and Arica provinces for
ten years after the treaty's ratification, from 1884 until 1894. When this expired, the two governments
would supervise a plebiscite that would allow the residents there to decide the provinces' future.81
Meanwhile, Chileans would continue occupying Lima and Las Islas de Lobos, which contained
rich guano deposits, until the Peruvian government ratified the treaty. Peruvians would cede 50 percent
of the island's guano revenues to Chileans and also pay them $300,000 pesos in cash each month to
offset the Chilean army's costs. The Tacna-Arica issue, however, like the Chilean-Bolivian war, would
remain unresolved for decades.
Enter the United States
Chileans encountered the United States during the War of the Pacific. As historian Frederick
79
"Tratado de límites chileno-argentino," 23 July 1881. Reprinted in Bascuñan, Recopilación de tratados y
convenciones II, 120-125. Also see Burr, By Reason or Force, 124-135.
80
"Tratado de límites chileno-argentino."
81
"Chile-Peru tratado de amistad," 20 October 1883. Reprinted in Bascuñan, Recopilación de tratados y
convenciones II, 158-166. Also see Basadre, Chile, Perú y Bolivia independientes, 497-498.
44
Pike has explained, this marked the beginning of Chilean-American relations. Although the two nations
had had contact with each other since the independence era, their governments had not come into
sustained, working contact while grappling with common international problems until the Lackawanna
conference.82
American officials entered an ongoing conversation at this conference. This conversation had
begun with Bolívar's convening the Panama Congress in 1826, where he had invited representatives
from Mexico, Guatemala, Colombia, Argentina, Chile, and Brazil "to serve as advisors in moments of
great conflict, as facilitators of communication in the face of common dangers, as faithful interpreters
in public negotiations in difficult times, and lastly as mediators of our differences." Bolívar's idea failed
to materialize. But Bello, perhaps the leading Spanish-American authority in international law of his
time, among other Latin Americans, continued arguing the merits of an inter-American congress. "A
congress of plenipotentiaries," Bello wrote, "does the same thing that ten or twelve men do who have
contemplated businesses in which their interests conflict: they sign a contract to prevent, as far as
prudence reaches, occasions for dispute…and, with anticipation, to establish rules for settling them in
what appears the fairest manner."83
Some also wanted to organize a common defense. Peruvian, Chilean, and several other nations'
representatives proposed a regional military alliance against Spain at the Congress of Lima in 1865, for
example. Chileans attempted to make it operational when Spanish Admiral José Manuel Pareja began
raiding the Peruvian and Chilean coasts in the late-1860s. But Brazilians, Argentines, and Uruguayans
were distracted, fighting a war against Paraguay. And Peruvians, Chileans, and Bolivians were
becoming increasingly suspicious of each other in those years. Thus this idea failed to materialize,
too.84
These conversations nevertheless persisted. The Colombian government offered to draft a
regional arbitration agreement "with the aim of eliminating international wars forever from the
82
Frederick Pike, Chile and the United States, 1880-1962: The Emergence of Chile's Social Crisis and the
Challenge to United States Diplomacy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963).
83
Simón Bolívar, "Invitation to the Governments of Colombia, Mexico, Río de la Plata, Chile, and Guatemala to
Hold a Congress in Panama [7 December 1824]." Reprinted in David Bushnell, ed., Frederick Fornoff, trans., El Libertador:
Writings of Simón Bolívar (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 159. Bolívar's invitation also appears in James Scott,
ed., The International Conferences of American States, 1889-1928 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1931), xix-xx; and
Bello, "American Congress," 87.
84
Congress of Lima, "Treaty of Defensive Alliance and Union among Bolivia, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, El
Salvador, Venezuela," 23 January 1865. Reprinted in Burr and Hussey, Documents on Inter-American Cooperation I, 159161. Also see Davis, Latin American Diplomatic History, 121-124; and Burr, By Reason or Force, 90-96.
45
American Continent" at Panama City, just as American negotiators were hosting Chilean, Peruvian, and
Bolivian representatives on Lackawanna in October 1880. Bogotá's efforts collapsed. Many remained
at war or involved in lesser disputes throughout the region. This rendered them, as Bello put it, "less
disposed to listen to the advice of reason and justice" at the moment.85
Following the Lackawanna conference's failure, the Garfield administration's (1881) Secretary
of State James Blaine learned this for himself. Blaine, fearing European intervention in the conflict,
attempted to breathe new life into a now United States-led, inter-American conference in 1881. He
hoped to convene a regional meeting in Washington, to mediate the ongoing war and also to discuss
broader issues of political and commercial cooperation, in November 1882. Blaine encountered
resistance, however, and he resigned following President James Garfield's assassination only 200 days
into his presidency.86
Garfield's successor, President Chester Arthur (1881-1885), and Secretary of State Frederick
Frelinghuysen, who were more cautious than their predecessors, decided to postpone this conference,
explaining "[the] peaceful condition of the South American Republics, which was contemplated as
essential to a profitable and harmonious assembling of the Congress, does not exist." Frelinghuysen
still offered to mediate the war through "the consistent policy of equal and unprejudiced friendship
towards [the] three sovereign republican states," however.87
Blaine and Frelinghuysen's efforts, even though they came to naught, alarmed Santiago.
Chileans were in no mood for outside intervention in matters they believed involved their national
security and economic interests. They remained just as committed to their expansion as Americans had
been to theirs, and they viewed Blaine and Frelinghuysen's invitations and suggestions as unsolicited
and unwanted meddling between victors and vanquished.88
85
Colombian Secretary of Foreign Relations Eustancio Santa María to Governments of Spanish America, 11
October 1880. Reprinted in in Burr and Hussey, Documents on Inter-American Cooperation I, 168-170; and Bello,
"American Congress," 87.
86
James Blaine to Diplomatic Representatives of the United States in the Capitals of Latin America, 29 November
1881. Reprinted in Scott, International Conferences of American States, 1889-1928, 447-448. Also see Davis, Latin
American Diplomatic History, 166-172.
87
Frederick Frelinghuysen to Diplomatic Representatives of the United States in the Capitals of Latin America, 9
August 1882. Reprinted in Scott, International Conferences of American States, 1889-1928, 449. Frelinghuysen to
Cornelius Logan, 30 July 1883. United States Department of State, Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United
States, transmitted to Congress, with the annual message of the President, 4 December 1883 (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 1884), 118.
88
Fernández, Chile y Perú, 51-112; and Pike, Chile and the United States, 47-62.
46
But Chilean-American relations did not reach their nadir until a decade later, after Chileans
descended into civil war. The Chilean Congress and Captain Jorge Montt Álvarez of the navy, initially
commanding six mutinous warships, formed the Junta Revolucionaria de Iquique, and revolted against
President José Manuel Balmaceda (1886-1891) in January 1891. The junta sailed north to Iquique and
secured its nitrate fields as its base of operations against Balmaceda, who retained most of the army's
loyalty. Thus the Chilean armed forces divided and fought on opposing sides during the civil war. The
specter that this might recur, leaving Chile weakened and vulnerable to external attack, would remain a
central factor in coup plotting in the 1920s, late-1960s, and early-1970s.89
Meanwhile, as American ambassador Patrick Egan, who sympathized with the Balmaceda
administration, reported, this dispute represented an executive-legislative power struggle over the form
the Chilean government should take. Egan highlighted "the contention on the part of the President for a
popular representative status similar to that occupied by the President of the United States, with the
additional power to appoint and remove his ministers at pleasure, which right is given him under the
constitution, while the opposition battles for a strictly parliamentary system and the removal of
ministers whenever they cease to have the support of a majority in Congress." The junta won the war
and Montt, now an admiral, returned to Santiago as interim president, in September 1891. Balmaceda's
suicide that month marked the end of Chile's autocratic republic.90
Meanwhile, the victorious junta formed a provisional government and began criminalizing and
persecuting the late president's surviving supporters. The junta intended to imprison or execute some of
them. Many had sought asylum in the American embassy, which the new government began harassing
through aggressive police surveillance.91
89
For reports of the civil war's outbreak, see Patrick Egan to Blaine, 12 January 1891; Egan to Blaine, 12 January
1891; and Egan to Blaine, 17 January 1891. United States Department of State, The executive documents of the House of
Representatives for the first session of the fifty-second Congress, 1891-1892 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office,
1892), 91-93. See Balmaceda's explanation, attached to Egan to Blaine, 19 January 1891. Ibid., 94-104. For the two Chilean
factions' correspondence with the Department of State through the Chilean embassy in Washington from the beginning of
the war through its end, see Ibid., 313-324. Also see Blakemore, British Nitrates and Chilean Politics.
90
Egan to Blaine, 12 January 1891. Leading historians of this conflict have tended to concur with Egan's
assessment, although Marxists tend to interpret it as evidence of imperial control over Chilean politics and society. See
Harold Blakemore, "The Chilean Revolution of 1891 and Its Historiography," Hispanic American Historical Review 45
(1965): 393-421; Hernán Ramírez Necochea, Historia del imperialism en Chile (Santiago de Chile: Austral, 1960); and
Hernán Ramírez Necochea, Balmaceda y la contrarrevolución de 1891 (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria, 1958).
Edwards interpreted it as a wider struggle between the Chilean aristocracy and those central authorities who opposed them,
beginning with Supreme Director Bernardo O'Higgins's ouster in 1823. See Edwards, La fronda aristocrática. For
Balmaceda's resignation and suicide, see Egan to Blaine, 21 September 1891, with Balmaceda's suicide note enclosed.
Department of State, Executive documents for fifty-second Congress, 1891-1892, 165-166.
91
See, for example, Egan to Blaine, 7 September 1891; Egan to Blaine, 24 September 1891; Egan to Blaine, 29
47
This tense environment became combative after Chileans clashed with approximately 120
United States sailors on liberty from the USS Baltimore in Valparaíso that October. Baltimore had
sheltered and transported some of the balmacedistas and their families to Peru, where they were living
in exile. One American died from gunshot wounds, five suffered injuries, and one died from these
injuries later. More than 30 went to jail. Since this involved a United States warship and uniformed
American sailors, it brought Washington and the provisional government into open confrontation.92
The Harrison administration (1889-1893), which had declined to recognize the junta during the
war and denied its purchasing agents arms as well, interpreted this as deliberate and retaliatory. It
pressed the provisional government to submit the matter to arbitration. According to the Department of
State's information, "our sailors were unarmed and gave no provocation…the assaults upon them were
by armed men, greatly superior in numbers, and as we must conclude, animated in their bloody work
by hostility to these men as sailors of the United States." Further, "the public police, or some of them,
took part in the attack."93
The junta's foreign minister, Manuel Antonio Matta, dismissed the incident as "a fight between
some drunken sailors." Matta also waved off the American government's position as "erroneous and
deliberately incorrect" just before leaving office. Meanwhile, Chileans elected Montt to the presidency,
reestablishing constitutional government in December. The Montt administration (1891-1896)
withdrew the surveillance from the United States embassy. Montt also consented to the remaining
refugees' leaving the country that month. But the Baltimore affair remained unresolved, and Matta's
words still hung in the air.94
The Harrison administration responded the following month. Blaine stated the president's
position: Chileans had attacked "the uniform of the U.S. Navy, having its origin and motive in a feeling
of hostility to this Government, and not in any act of the sailors," and "the public authorities…
flagrantly failed their duty to protect our men, and that some of the police and of the Chilean soldiers
September 1891; Egan to Blaine, 30 September 1891. Ibid., 161-162; 166; 168-171.
92
Egan to Blaine, 18 October 1891; Egan to Blaine, 19 October 1891, which includes the Baltimore's commanding
officer's protests to Chilean authorities; and United States Consul William McCreery to Blaine, 8 November 1891. Ibid.,
194-195; and 220-221.
93
Assistant Secretary of State William Wharton to Egan, 23 October 1891. Ibid., 196-197. See the Baltimore's
reports and Egan and the junta's foreign minister's exchange enclosed in Egan to Blaine, 28 October 1891. Ibid., 204-210.
94
See the junta's foreign minister's response in Egan to Blaine, 3 November 1891. Ibid., 211-217; See Foreign
Minister Manuel Antonio Matta to Ambassador Pedro Montt, 11 December 1891, read in the Chilean Senate, published in
Chilean newspapers, and distributed to the American press in Washington the following day, enclosed in Egan to Blaine, 12
December 1891. Ibid., 267-269; and Egan to Blaine, 12 January 1892. Ibid., 285.
48
and sailors were themselves guilty of unprovoked assaults upon our sailors before and after arrest." "No
self-respecting government," the secretary of state concluded, "can consent that persons in its service,
whether civil or military, shall be beaten and killed in a foreign territory in resentment of acts done by
or imputed to their government without exacting reparation." He would "terminate diplomatic relations
with the Government of Chile" unless it offered "a suitable apology" and "some adequate reparation."95
The Montt administration's foreign minister, Luis Pereira, expressed his government's regret
over the Baltimore affair seventy-two hours later. The foreign minister suggested that the US Supreme
Court arbitrate the matter. The United States and Chile promptly resumed normal relations, and the
Chilean government eventually paid reparations to the families of the dead. But Washington and
Santiago's relations would remain embittered while the anti-Balmaceda, "parliamentary" regime
governed Chile from the 1890s into the 1920s.96
Settling the War of the Pacific
Chilean attitudes toward the world changed in the 1890s. They stopped looking outward and
expanding, and they adopted the inward-looking defensiveness toward their territorial gains that has
informed their relations with others in southern South America, and their basic national-security
posture, ever since. Most historians have related this "slackening of Chilean power" to the outcome of
the civil war of 1891, where an aristocratic Congress began dominating the country's politics and what
had been a dynamic presidency lost the initiative in all governmental matters.97
Meanwhile, Chileans began the long process of settling the War of the Pacific. These ongoing
problems, particularly the Tacna-Arica question, as historians have recognized, would continue "to
hang like a dark cloud over the inter-American movement" into the 1920s. Thus, while Chilean
delegates attended the first two Pan-American conferences -- in Washington (1889-1890) and Mexico
City (1901-1902) -- they did so filled with cynical misgivings. As Pike explained, Chileans took "an
extremely jaundiced view" of these gatherings.98
95
Blaine to Egan, 21 January 1892. Ibid., 307-308.
See Egan to Blaine, 25 January 1892, with Pereira's apology enclosed. Ibid., 309-312; and see Blaine's
correspondence with the Chilean ambassador in Washington on this subject. Ibid., 347-352. Also see Collier and Sater,
History of Chile, 186-187; and Pike, Chile and the United States, 73-85.
97
See, for example, Burr, By Reason or Force, 197-198.
98
Davis, Latin American Diplomatic History, 185; and Pike, Chile and the United States, 126.
96
49
The compulsory and retroactive arbitration agreements that the Argentine, Peruvian, and
Bolivian representatives were proposing at Mexico City particularly aroused Chileans' suspicions. They
worried that these agreements might deprive them of both Tacna and Arica, and would limit their
options concerning their pending settlement with Bolivians as well. The tensions and disagreements
this produced led to Chilean officials' threatening to walk out of Mexico City several times. They
nevertheless recognized that it served their interests to remain at these conferences, where they
declined to sign the compulsory arbitration agreements others had produced, thus weakening them, as
intended.99
Chileans recognized that the Mexican and United States governments were attempting to
construct a more disinterested regional arbitration system patterned after the Permanent Court of
Arbitration at The Hague that an international gathering on peace and disarmament had established in
1899, and that they were not using this as a pretext to support one group of nations' legalistic
maneuverings against others. As Fernández explained,
On one side were Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru, favoring the broadest possible compulsory and
retroactive arbitration agreement. Paraguay and Uruguay supported them, as did Guatemala
and the Dominican Republic, which had ongoing conflicts with Mexico and Haiti. On the
other side, Chile and Ecuador pressed the conference to adhere to The Hague's voluntary
arbitration convention (1899). Mexico and the United States shared a position similar to the
Chilean one, but the others were urging them to find a compromise formula that might save
the Congress.
The American representatives there also assured their Chilean counterparts that the United
States would not offer to mediate the Tacna-Arica dispute unless both Peruvians and Chileans requested
it.100
This left both Peruvians and Bolivians subject to Chilean power, and Chileans exploited the
opportunity it presented, moving vigorously to settle these issues. Indeed, Chileans returned to Bolivia
as Romans among Gauls. Successive Bolivian governments had resisted signing any peace treaty that
would permanently deprive their country of sovereign access to the sea, which, in Chileans' view, was
unrealistic and needlessly prolonging the negotiations. Santiago finally lost patience with this in August
99
See Washington and Mexico City's plans of arbitration, which some delegates signed, but no governments
ratified. First International Conference of American States, "Plan of Arbitration," 24 April 1890. Reprinted in Scott,
International Conferences of American States, 1889-1928, 40-44; and Second International Conference of American States,
"Treaty on Compulsory Arbitration," 29 January 1902. Reprinted in Ibid., 100-104.
100
Fernández, Chile y Perú, 266-267. Also see, Burr, By Reason or Force, 240-244. For background on the
conference at The Hague, see Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, American Umpire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013),
185-191.
50
1900. The Chilean minister in La Paz, Abraham König, gave the cold, hard facts to the Bolivian foreign
minister that month.
König reminded Bolivians that the Chilean government was demanding that they cede their
whole coast to Chile, unconditionally and in perpetuity. Santiago, as a matter of courtesy, would
assume Bolivian debts in that territory, would offer free ports there, and would also construct a railroad
from one or more of those ports into Bolivia, as Chileans deemed necessary in the future. Santiago
understood that Bolivians considered this territory far more valuable than that which it was offering in
compensation. But König brushed all of this aside. First, Chileans were not negotiating any of these
points. Second, he continued, "This coast is rich and worth many millions. We already knew this, and
we are keeping it because of this. If it were not valuable, no one would be interested in it."101
Bolivians wrongly assumed that this was a discussion between equals in possession of
inalienable rights with respect to national territory. In fact, they were in no position to make any
demands and they had no such rights. Strength was the only right that mattered. "Chile has occupied
the coast and taken possession of it by the same right that Germany annexed Alsace-Lorrain, and by the
same right that the United States has taken Puerto Rico. Our rights are born of victory, the supreme law
among nations."102
Even if Chileans were inclined to grant Bolivians a port, König told them, they neither needed
nor could defend it. If Santiago and La Paz fought another war, "Chilean forces would seize this port
with the same ease that they occupied the entire Bolivian coast in 1879. This is no idle boast. As
everyone knows, my country's offensive power has increased a hundredfold over the last twenty years."
Bolivians, who learned that Argentines had clarified that they would not involve themselves in these
negotiations or Pacific affairs in general in 1904, finally submitted. They signed the peace treaty that
October.103
Meanwhile, Chileans continued occupying Tacna and Arica. They knew that, their sustained
public-relations efforts there notwithstanding, residents continued to identify as Peruvians and would
101
Abraham König to His Excellency the Minister of Foreign Relations of Bolivia Eliodoro Villazón, 13 August
1900. Reprinted in Abraham König, Memorias íntimas, políticas y diplomáticas de Don Abraham König, compiled and
annotated by Fano Velasco (Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Cervantes, 1927), 83.
102
Ibid.
103
Ibid., 82; "Tratado de paz, Amistad y comercio celebrado entre Chile y Bolivia," 20 October 1904. Reprinted in
Bernardino Toro C., Recopilación de tratados, convenciones, protocolos y otros actos internacionales celebrados por la
República de Chile IV: 1902-1911, Edición oficial (Santiago de Chile: Sociedad Imprenta y Litografía Universo, 1913),
147-167; and Basadre, Chile, Perú y Bolivia independientes, 600-602.
51
vote accordingly in any plebiscite. Further complicated matters, Chileans now regarded Tacna and
Arica as important to their national security. "In wartime," Fernández explained, these provinces
became "strategic points in the defense of Tarapacá." So Santiago disregarded the Treaty of Ancón's
requirements on this point after the deadline passed in 1894. Peruvians rejected all Chilean offers to
purchase the two provinces from then into the 1910s, creating an impasse.104
A break occurred in the 1920s. United States-Chilean relations became closer that decade.
American and Chilean officials began exchanging views in confidence and speaking frankly with each
other from then to Allende's election in 1970. President Arturo Alessandri Palma (1920-1924, 1925, and
1932-1938), "the Lion of Tarapacá," represented the beginning of the end of the parliamentary regime
and the inauguration of a new constitution that featured multiparty, democratic politics. He was the son
of an Italian immigrant and came from outside the entrenched, anti-Balmaceda aristocracy. He did not
share their bitter history with, and ongoing resentments toward, Washington from the civil war and the
Baltimore affair. Thus unencumbered, he sought a rapprochement with the United States, and through
it, Americans' arbitration of the Tacna-Arica dispute. And so Chilean and United States interests began
to coincide during the Alessandri administration.
As Fernández elaborated, Alessandri was interested in "a policy based on international law and
hemispheric cooperation in order to return the republic to the first rank in the concert of nations in
Latin America." Alessandri saw the United States as a rising great power after the First World War, and
he wished to cultivate close relations with it. Washington, too, was changing, under the Harding
administration (1921-1923). Chileans had found President Woodrow Wilson's (1913-1921) foreign
policy too utopian for their tastes. Warren Harding and his successors offered a more businesslike and
practical relationship. Spanish-speaking American ambassadors charmed Santiago and further
smoothed United States-Chilean relations during these years. "Mutual economic and trade interests,"
Fernández concluded, "did the rest."105
This new closeness notwithstanding, Americans had little or no influence in the ongoing TacnaArica matter, which remained an intractable one until Peruvians and Chileans finally decided to settle it
in June 1929. Lima and Santiago both agreed to invite Harding to arbitrate the question in January
1922, submitting their respective positions to President Calvin Coolidge (1923-1929) the following
year. Coolidge ruled that Chileans and Peruvians must hold the plebiscite they had bound themselves to
104
Fernández, Chile y Perú, 94.
Ibid., 355, 358.
105
52
in the Treaty of Ancón. Now, however, following over forty years of Chilean administration and
control, where Chileans had gradually swayed the Tacna and Arica's residents' views of their national
identity in their favor, Peruvians feared they would lose these provinces. So it was they who refused to
consent to the plebiscite this time. The Coolidge administration reluctantly acknowledged this,
suspending its efforts in 1926.
Coolidge and President Herbert Hoover (1929-1933) proposed two solutions after this. First,
Coolidge recommended that both Peru and Chile cede Tacna and Arica to Bolivia. Lima and Santiago
flatly rejected this. Then Hoover suggested Tacna go to Peru, Arica to Chile, and Santiago pay Lima $6
million dollars in May 1929. The two accepted this the following month, ending the Chilean
occupation. Both governments duly marked their border, at eighty specific points, between the two
provinces. This settlement, combined with the incoming Roosevelt administration's Good Neighbor
policy, reduced longstanding tensions in the hemisphere and opened the way for a functional interAmerican community of nations, beginning with the multilateral agreements to arbitrate international
disputes and to cooperate in hemispheric defense during the Second World War. This culminated in the
Organization of American States' (OAS) charter in 1948.106
Conclusion
Thus Chile arose as "the England of South America." Chileans made their own history and
foreign relations pursuant to the national interests that they themselves defined. They shaped and
conditioned others' histories as well, particularly in southern South America, while largely drawing the
region's modern map to suit their own evolving position in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Chile and other Latin American nations, although mostly mired in anarchy, power struggles,
and, in some cases war, gradually created the inter-American community of nations. This community
became, over time, the OAS -- the consolidation and extension of the system of arbitration, negotiation,
and consultation and international law that has continuing stabilizing and growing stronger ever since.
The community emerged within an even larger world-historical trend that followed the Peace of
Westphalia and the Atlantic revolutions. When the Colombian, Mexican, and United States
106
On the negotiations leading to the Tacna-Arica settlement, see Fernández, Chile y Perú, 355-616; Davis, Latin
American Diplomatic History, 184-190; and United States Department of State, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Office
of the Geographer, "International Boundary Study No. 65: Chile-Peru Boundary," 28 February 1966, available at
http://www.law.fsu.edu.
53
governments, for example, began proposing a regional arbitration agreement, they were aware of and
intended it to support the European conferences that were producing the Permanent Court of
Arbitration at The Hague at the turn of the century.
This chapter has also clarified the nature of US-Chilean relations from their beginnings in the
late-nineteenth century into the twentieth. Historians of inter-American relations have tended to
concentrate their research on American policy while telling the story of what the United States did to
Latin America from the Monroe doctrine and Roosevelt corollary forward. With few exceptions, such
as Robert Burr, who wrote in an earlier era, they have failed to appreciate that the United States was not
the only expansionist power in the hemisphere, and that intra-Latin American relations also influenced
inter-American history, especially in southern South America, which did not experience the same
history that the Caribbean did.
The United States, moreover, approached Chile as one nation to another and not an empire to a
subject or client. The Baltimore affair, as unpleasant as it was for all involved, did not compare to
Britain and its unequal treaties in China after the Opium Wars or the United States' colonizing the
Philippines, Guantánamo Bay in Cuba, and the Canal Zone in Panama, even though the parliamentary
regime that had overthrown Balmaceda brooded over it for the next three decades. Those who have
characterized the Baltimore affair as an example of the United States' "paternalistic hegemony," or an
illustration of "the shift toward the aggressive global posture that portended America's emergence as an
overseas empire," have apparently chosen to disregard the specific historical context underlying the
event, and they have chosen to ignore the fact that it was ultimately about arbitration and not
submission to supposed imperial power as well.107
The Chilean-American relationship matured after this parliamentary period ended in the 1920s.
The two governments enjoyed close relations from then into the late-1960s, when they began
experiencing Cold War-related tensions. These tensions, which the following chapters evaluate,
emerged between the 1890s and 1920s. They resulted in an anticommunist dictatorship in 1927.
107
Richard Immerman, Empire for Liberty: A History of American Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to Paul
Wolfowitz (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), 135-136; and Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History
of U.S. Policy toward Latin America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1998), 99.
54
III. Chilean Anticommunism before the Cold War
The consensus interpretation on the United States and Chile's Cold War experience tends to
blame the American government for exporting the conflict, particularly anticommunist politics, to an
otherwise innocent and uninvolved Chile. Indeed, this remains true for most writing on the United
States, Latin America, and the Cold War. Crusading Americans, affected with McCarthyist paranoia,
exaggerated the communist threat and misinterpreted or ignored legitimate, nationalist sentiment there,
where United States business interests also, and not coincidentally, had longstanding investments. As
political scientist Lars Schoultz has phrased it, "the Red Scare first came to Latin America not because
of obvious communist subversion, but because of what was occurring in Europe and as a product of the
paramount issue of domestic U.S. politics, anticommunism." This, and Americans' attitudes of cultural
and racial superiority, led them to suppress the democracy movements that were flourishing throughout
the region in the early Cold War.108
These interpretive tendencies partly derive from the Latin American left's worldviews and
politics, which have downplayed indigenous communists and their activities while characterizing the
region's anticommunists as American marionettes for decades. When, for example, Chilean President
Gabriel González Videla (1946-1952) passed an anticommunist law in 1948, Chilean communists
faulted the Truman administration (1945-1953) for it. Thus the celebrated communist poet Pablo
Neruda wrote of "something behind the gnawing traitors and rats" and "[the] empire that sets the table "
when explaining it.109
Yet Chilean communists and anticommunists had appeared and begun asserting themselves
decades before the Cold War commenced and long before González's ley maldita, or accursed law. And
both were insisting that either Yankee imperialism or the Soviet Union's (USSR) machinations
explained the other side's politics and movements. Indeed, Chilean communists and anticommunists
had anticipated and were already fighting something approximating the Cold War by the time Soviet108
Lars Schoultz, Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy toward Latin America (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1998), 334. Also see Daniela Spenser, "Standing Conventional Cold War History on Its Head," in Gilbert
Joseph and Daniela Spenser, eds., In from the Cold: Latin America's New Encounter with the Cold War (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2008), 382; and Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough, "The Impact of the Cold War on Latin America," in
Melvyn Leffler and David Painter, eds., Origins of the Cold War: An International History [1994], 2d ed. (New York:
Routledge, 2005), 311.
109
Pablo Neruda, "They Receive Orders against Chile," in Pablo Neruda, Canto General [1950], trans. by Jack
Schmitt (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011), 332.
55
American relations broke down in the late-1940s.
This chapter reconstructs the emergence of Chilean communism and anticommunism, and
Chileans' initial moves and countermoves, including their attempts to enlist Soviet and American
backing, from the late-nineteenth century through the depression era. This further broadens and
deepens Chile's Cold War experience, particularly historian Margaret Power's findings on Chilean
anticommunism. Power studied those women who marched against the Allende administration (19701973) and called for the coup that deposed him. Many historians, journalists, and other commentators
have tended to dismiss these women as puppets of the Chilean right and, behind them, the United
States. She found, however, that, "far from being dupes manipulated by right-wing men and parties,
large numbers of women willingly embraced right-wing ideas and joined rightist organizations" in the
1960s and 1970s. These women's ideologies and politics derived from traditional notions of gender,
motherhood, and patriotism, which they had partly inherited from their conservative Catholic faith. But
their "efforts, skills, determination, and insights" remained their own. This remains true for Chilean
communists and anticommunists generally.110
The United States and Chile's Cold War experience began gradually, in stages, and in a broadly
transatlantic, rather than narrowly inter-American, context. It started when Chilean communists and
anticommunists' clashes intersected with the rising international labor movement at the turn of the
century, the Russian Revolution and the Third International, or the Communist International (the
Comintern), in the 1920s, and then the Great Depression in the 1930s. These intersections contributed
to and exacerbated Chile's political and social problems. But they did not cause them. So neither
Moscow nor Washington created or controlled Chilean communists and anticommunists. Indeed, as this
chapter explains, Chilean anticommunists emerged and functioned not only independently of American
anticommunism, but the former remained more aggressive than the latter -- and this occurred while
Harry Truman was still learning the ropes as a judge in Jackson County, Missouri and Joseph McCarthy
was still just a kid working his way through college in Wisconsin.
110
Margaret Power, Right-Wing Women in Chile: Feminine Power and the Struggle against Allende, 1964-1973
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 3-4. For a discussion on the politics of motherhood in Chile,
see Jadwiga Pieper Mooney, The Politics of Motherhood: Maternity and Women's Rights in Twentieth-Century Chile
(Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).
56
The Rise of the Chilean Communist Party
Chileans derived much profit from their victory over Peru and Bolivia in the War of the Pacific
(1879-1883). Congress's victory over President José Manuel Balmaceda (1886-1891) in the civil war of
1891, the revised interpretation of Chile's political system that legislators imposed in its aftermath, and
the industrialization and modernization that followed it, particularly around Chile's mining industries,
all cultivated an increasingly militant labor movement. These outcomes set the social forces in motion
that would create the Chilean Communist Party (PCCh).
Pursuant to Chileans' desires, they and British investors exploited the northern nitrate fields
together, in what became an export enclave. As historians Simon Collier and William Sater have
explained, the Chilean government inherited state ownership of Tarapacá's nitrate works after seizing
that Peruvian province during the war -- Lima had nationalized these works in 1875. State ownership,
however, remained anathema to Chileans' laissez-faire philosophy in the late-nineteenth century. Two
legislative committees studied the issue and then privatized the mines in 1881. Both Chilean and
British investors quickly bought them, and the Chilean government remained content to tax their
exports thereafter. This was just as President Domingo Santa María (1881-1886) and his successors
wanted it: "Let the gringos work the nitrate freely," Santa María said. "I shall be waiting for them at the
door."111
The same pattern accounted for increased American investment in Chilean copper mining,
beginning in 1904. Chilean mine owners had exhausted the copper deposits most easily accessible to
human labor by the 1880s. Copper production declined over the next twenty years. Then United States
entrepreneur William Braden, founder of the Braden Copper Company and father of future statesman
Spruille Braden, began investing in these mines. Braden introduced the managerial expertise,
technology, and equipment that enabled Chilean copper mining to prosper under American ownership
well into the twentieth century.112
The Chilean government's income derived mostly from these mines. This income, which had
not existed before the War of the Pacific, rapidly increased following the war, leading to conflict
between the executive and legislative branches. Chileans' civil war partly represented disagreements
111
Cited in Simon Collier and William Sater, A History of Chile, 1808-2002 [1996] 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004), 144. Also see Harold Blakemore, British Nitrates and Chilean Politics, 1886-1896: Balmaceda and
North (London: Athlone Press for the Institute of Latin American Studies, 1974).
112
Ibid., 160-161.
57
over how the government should spend it, with Balmaceda favoring investment in national
infrastructure and government employment, including military and naval modernization and sustained
public works, while Congress preferred small government and a strictly free-market approach to
business and the economy at large.
Congress won the civil war of 1891. These legislators, primarily landowners, dominated the
presidency and all national politics during Chile's so-called parliamentary era until it collapsed in the
1920s. They jealously controlled the government's budget and constantly removed cabinet members via
"interpellation," a procedure they had learned while observing Western European politics. But they
merely created "a shallow, grossly inefficient copy of the British parliamentary system," according to
historian Frederick Nunn and most other informed observers.113
Senator and future president Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964-1970) characterized the
parliamentary era's politicians as "inútiles," or useless, in a history he coauthored in 1949. He explained
that they had wasted their time mindlessly combating the executive and miring themselves in trivial
debates. These debates mostly revolved around parliamentary procedure, as they understood it, and
government appointments -- and sometimes the clerical-anticlerical issues that had divided some
Chilean elites since independence -- but little else.114
Parliamentary-era politicians constantly maneuvered for position in a fluid environment of
rapidly shifting alliances and coalitions, backroom deals among gentlemen in the Club de la Unión, and
rampant vote buying on the street. Meanwhile, they ignored the social conflicts that were engulfing the
nation. As President Ramón Barros Luco (1910-1915), perhaps best known for the sandwich which
bears his name, once explained, "There are two kinds of problems: those that solve themselves, and
those that have no solution."115
The presidency remained immobilized as an institution of government during the parliamentary
era. So presidents like Barros could not have effectively engaged these problems even if they had been
inclined to do so. By historian Frederick Pike's count, approximately 120 ministers of interior, the chief
cabinet officer, came and went, and countless other cabinet officials passed through the revolving door
113
Frederick Nunn, Chilean Politics, 1920-1931: The Honorable Mission of the Armed Forces (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1970), 10.
114
Alberto Edwards and Eduardo Frei, Historia de los partidos politicos chilenos (Santiago de Chile: Editorial del
Pacífico, 1949), 191.
115
Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, "Ramón Barros Luco (1835-1919)," n.d., available at
http://www.memoriachilena.cl.
58
that the executive branch had become throughout this 35-year period.116
Outside of politics, landowners, who ruled Chile as an aristocratic class, remained primarily
focused on themselves in their quest to recreate European high society in Santiago. They spent vast
sums on luxury imports, including all the latest fashions from Paris, which they wore to the theater, to
the races at Club Hípico, and to see and be seen while strolling the Alameda in downtown Santiago.
They led charming lives.
Meanwhile, nitrate mining companies required a larger, more specialized labor force to support
their expanding operations in the north. Coal mining attracted Chilean entrepreneurs such as Matías
Cousiño, Jorge Rojas, and Federico Schwager, who recruited laborers in the south, particularly to the
mines they owned, developed, and operated in Lota and Coronel. Chileans also improved ports and
built trains. This, too, required labor. Chilean cities, from Iquique to Valparaíso and Concepción,
modernized rapidly as well. This required still more labor to construct and service new buildings,
horse-drawn trolleys, and streets with electric lighting.117
Chileans did not import immigrant labor as Americans did. They recruited peasants and Indians
from the central valley and southern regions. These workers found insecure, low-wage employment in
the mines, which ultimately depended on unpredictable external markets. Wealthy and middle-class
Chileans employed some of these peasants and Indians in the informal domestic-services sector, mostly
as housekeepers and babysitters. The rest, the majority, remained tied to the nation's quasi-feudal
haciendas as inquilinos, or tenants. Others, called rotos, drifted from hacienda to hacienda for seasonal
work. They led less than charming lives.
Miners served a particularly unstable, boom-and-bust market that often left them laid off or
worse. They lived in poor and unsanitary housing, had no insurance, and remained subject to company
scrip, company stores, and company bars. Their earliest leaders demanded nothing more ambitious than
that management might cover the open pits that processed nitrate ores at scalding temperatures. Some
116
Frederick Pike, Chile and the United States: The Emergence of Chile's Social Crisis and the Challenge to United
States Diplomacy (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963), 86. On Chile's parliamentary era, see Collier and
Sater, History of Chile, 147-214; Brian Loveman, Chile: The Legacy of Hispanic Capitalism [1979] 3d ed. (New York:
Oxford University Press, 2001), 162-195; and Edwards and Frei, Historia de los partidos politicos chilenos, 100-191.
117
On Chilean coal mining, see Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, "Trabajadores y empresarios en la industria del
carbón: Lota y Coronel (1854-1995)," n.d., available at http://www.memoriachilena.cl; and Jody Pavilack, Mining for the
Nation: The Politics of Chile's Coal Communities from the Popular Front to the Cold War (University Park: Pennsylvania
State University Press, 2011), 29-66.
59
had fallen into these pits and burned to death. Those who survived were so badly disfigured that they
could never work again or even leave the area. They generally could not have returned to the haciendas
in any case -- landowners did not want anyone who had had contact with even minimally-organized
labor on their property. So they had to struggle for subsistence, often resorting to begging, in Iquique
and other mining cities in what remained of their lives.118
The Chilean labor movement arose in these mines. It began as a collection of looselynetworked, locally-oriented, mutual-aid groups and information providers spanning Chile from Iquique
to Punta Arenas. Workers, although initially responding to the conditions they faced in Chile, soon
came into contact with the anarchist, socialist, and Marxist literature that had been crossing the Atlantic
since as early as the 1850s. The PCCh's official history counted Henri de Saint-Simon, Pierre-Joseph
Proudhon, and Karl Marx among the authors whose works were circulating in Chilean bookstores that
decade. This literature helped the labor movement's leaders develop their worldview and vocabulary.119
European anarchists and socialists began arriving in Chile in the late-nineteenth century as well.
The PCCh's official history recounted that "many, who, in their countries of origin (Germany, France,
Spain, or Italy), had been militants in workers' organizations and adhered to socialist doctrines. So, for
example, some 300 French nationals arrived in Punta Arenas in the 1870s. They had been exiled from
their country for their participation in the Paris Commune." Chilean authorities relegated these
immigrants to other locations throughout the nation.120
The PCCh's official history praised the Old World's projecting these ideas and sending these
people across the Atlantic. The Chilean labor movement found its voice and matured while nurturing
these connections within the evolving international labor movement, which remained centered in
industrial Europe. Thus Chilean labor leaders gradually came to believe that their problems derived
from an oppressive, global political-economic system, and not merely local Chilean troubles.
The Chilean labor movement doubled at the turn of the century. According to the PCCh's
official history, Chilean workers increased from approximately 150,000 in 1890 to 300,000 in 1910.
They became confrontational. Political scientist Brian Loveman cited 10 strikes involving nearly 5,000
118
For labor conditions in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, see Loveman, Chile, 119-144, 162-195;
Carmelo Furci, The Chilean Communist Party and the Road to Socialism (London: Zed, 1984), 8-27; Pike, Chile and the
United States, 103-111; and Hernán Ramírez Necochea, Origen y formación del Partido Comunista de Chile (Santiago de
Chile: Editora Austral, 1965), 19-62.
119
Ramírez, Origen y formación del Partido Comunista, 26-28.
120
Ibid., 28.
60
workers in 1911. This rose to 105 strikes with some 50,000 workers in 1920.121
Dramatic, Marxist-inspired calls to action began appearing in the movement's press in the
1890s. A La Serena paper, for example, announced the following:
Chilean workers! Today is the day that the naked, hungry people energetically protest against
the existing order, against bourgeois society…This cry of protest launched by the oppressed
who work and have nothing is universal. It recognizes neither borders nor races, and wherever
the exploited and exploiters, victims and their cruel oppressors, are found, the formidable
struggle for economic equality against tyranny, the struggle for social liberty against the
luxurious lives of the nobility, the struggle for brotherhood and the sovereignty of the people
against the selfishness of the privileged classes, will be found. We do not want to be beasts of
burden whipped by the overseer's lash…Let our brothers in Europe and the Americas know
that here, too…we stand ready to defend our sovereignty and our natural rights. Let the
exploited and oppressed stand up! Let all the hungry victims stand up!122
This led to bloody suppression. One of the worst examples occurred in Iquique in December
1907. Miners and sympathetic workers had begun gathering there in January that year, protesting the
inflationary hardships they were experiencing as prices rose and the peso's value decreased. They
demanded pay raises, the introduction of new businesses that would compete with company stores
inside their towns and camps, and iron bars to cover the nitrate pits. Approximately 1,000 began
marching in what coalesced into a larger strike. They pledged to maintain the shutdown until their
employers met their demands.
Somewhere between 15,000 and 23,000 strikers arrived in Iquique before Minster of the
Interior Rafael Sotomayor declared a state of siege, dispatched warships to seize the port, and ordered
workers to leave the city on 21 December. Some complied and left. Others defied the order and sought
refuge with their families in the Santa María schoolhouse. General Roberto Silva Renard's soldiers
fired upon them, killing approximately 200 and wounding some 300, with another 90 dying from their
wounds later.123
The PCCh's founders arose within this environment. Conservatives represented Chileans'
centralized, authoritarian tendencies as manifested in the constitution of 1833. Liberals wanted to
reform this constitution and create a more decentralized, secular order. But they remained socially and
121
Loveman, Chile, Table 7.2, 171; and Ramírez, Origen y formación del Partido Comunista, 35.
El Obrero, La Serena, 29 April 1893. Cited in Ramírez, Origen y formación del Partido Comunista, 37-38.
123
See Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, "Masacre de la Escuela Santa María de Iquique," n.d., available at
http://www.memoriachilena.cl; and Edwards and Frei, Historia de los partidos politicos chilenos, 153-155.
122
61
economically conservative apart from these issues. The Radical Party, representing the emerging
middle class and featuring even more pronounced anticlerical interests, had broken away from Liberals
in the 1860s. The Democratic Party represented artisans and some workers' interests. Its members had
splintered from the Radicals in 1887.
One of the Democrats, Luis Emilio Recabarren, led a small, dissatisfied faction that joined the
Second International in 1908. Recabarren convened a meeting of approximately 20 miners and
shoemakers in Iquique several years later, on 6 June 1912. He asked them to break from the
Democratic Party because it did not advocate the kind of social change he believed necessary.
Recabarren proposed they create the Socialist Workers' Party (POS), which would unify and educate
laborers under one banner while working to abolish private property. Recabarren's motion passed 15 to
5, and several sections soon arose from the Atacama to the Magellan Straits. He was an indefatigable
internationalist. He crafted the Chilean Labor Federation (FOCH) in 1916, and he became actively
involved in creating what would become the Argentine Communist Party as well.124
Recabarren and his colleagues closely followed the First World War and the Russian
Revolution. When Vladimir Lenin's Bolsheviks seized power in November 1917 and then formed the
Comintern, "to unite the efforts of all truly revolutionary parties of the world's proletariat, thus
facilitating and hastening the victory of the communistic revolution throughout the world," in March
1919, Recabarren proposed the POS join it. The party assembled for its final congress in Valparaíso in
1920, where it resolved to transform itself into "an authentic communist party, integrated in the
international communist movement." It changed its name to the PCCh, purged "reformers" and
"counterrevolutionaries" -- that is, anarchists, noncommunist socialists, and anyone whose political
sympathies remained closer to the Second International than the Comintern -- from its ranks, and it
submitted to Moscow's twenty-one requirements for membership.125
The PCCh's leadership forwarded these resolutions to its sections throughout the country for
debate in 1921. These sections' decisions to join the Comintern followed the reasoning that appeared in
124
Julio Faúndez, Marxism and Democracy in Chile: From 1932 to the Fall of Allende (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1988), 20-23; Furci, Chilean Communist Party, 24-27; Ramírez, Origen y formación del Partido
Comunista, 45-46, 51-62.
125
Leon Trotsky, "Manifesto of the Communist International to the Proletarians of the World," March 1919.
Reprinted in Robert Daniels, ed., A Documentary History of Communism and the World: From Revolution to Collapse
(Hanover: University Press of New England, 1994), 25; and Ramírez, Origen y formación del Partido Comunista, 123-127.
For the Comintern's twenty-one conditions, see Second Comintern Congress, "Conditions of Admission to the Communist
International," August 1920. Reprinted in Daniels, Documentary History of Communism, 32-34.
62
one Antofagasta paper that March: "There is no middle ground...There are only two paths to follow:
Either we go with our Russian brothers and social revolution or not…Those who go against the Russian
proletariat necessarily stand with capitalist society, with our oppressors." The party reconvened for its
first congress in Rancagua in January 1922, where it proclaimed that it "constitutes the Chilean Section
of the Communist International, accepts its thesis and fights for its cause, the cause of the
proletariat."126
The Comintern's representative in Buenos Aires, M.A. Komin-Alexandrovski, responsible for
all southern South America, reported favorably on the PCCh and its counterparts in Brazil, Uruguay,
and Argentina that month. He urged Moscow to take the region seriously: "In reality, these South
American republics are nothing more than British and American colonies. We must give them serious
attention." Thus Soviets gave them serious attention. As Yuri Pavlov, the former director of the Soviet
Foreign Ministry's Latin American division, explained after the Cold War, "it was Lenin's idea that
what was later to be called 3d world countries should be and will be the reservoir of revolutionary
activities and support for the proletarians of Russia and other countries in Europe…he was thinking in
terms of the millions and millions of masses and colonialist and semi-colonial countries…Latin
America in that sense was termed as a semi-colonial area under the domination of the US, [and] would
join in the struggle against imperialism. So that was the general direction of the policy[,] and the
Comintern, acting for the local communist parties[,] was trying to foster revolutionary movements in
Latin America."127
Recabarren travelled to the Soviet Union in December 1922. He reported on Chilean conditions
and the PCCh's organization and strength. He requested Comintern funds several months later. Soviet
officials explained that they were very interested in Latin America, but they could not send any money
to Chilean communists at the time, explaining that they were presently concentrating their resources in
Germany. They advised Recabarren to begin making contacts with neighboring communists, and they
started training him in secure-communications tradecraft.128
126
El Socialista, Antofagasta, 21 March 1921. Cited in Ramírez, Origen y formación del Partido Comunista, 126;
PCCh, "Declaración de principios," First Party Congress in Rancagua, January 1922. Reprinted in Ibid., 134-135.
127
Interview with Yuri Pavlov, Roll 10842, n.d. CNN, Cold War (1998). Transcript courtesy of the National Security
Archive, available at http://www.nsarchive.gwu.edu; and M.A. Komin-Alexandrovski to Comintern, 18 January 1922.
Reprinted in Olga Ulianova and Alfredo Riquelme Segovia, eds., Chile en los archivos soviéticos, 1922-1991 I: Komintern
y Chile, 1922-1931 (Santiago de Chile: Dirección de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos/LOM Ediciones, 2005), 111-112.
128
Luis Emilio Recabarren, "Chile 1922," presented to Profintern, Moscow, 1922. Reprinted in Ulianova and
Segovia, Chile en los archivos soviéticos: Komintern y Chile, 116-122; and Profintern to Recabarren, 20 November 1923.
Reprinted in Ibid., 123-125.
63
The Comintern developed a comprehensive Latin American strategy the following year, in
1924. "In those Latin American countries where sections of our party exist, these sections' oral and
written propaganda should demonstrate the advance of imperialism…The Argentine, Uruguayan, and
Chilean parties should denounce all manifestations of imperialism in neighboring countries such as
Bolivia, Peru, Paraguay, and even Ecuador and Colombia, to influence worker and peasant opinion
there." This propaganda should unite Latin Americans against the United States, and it should extend
not only into the region's labor movements, but into its communities of liberal reformers as well.
Moscow created the South American Bureau, headquartered in Buenos Aires, to better coordinate this,
in February 1925.129
The PCCh closely followed these Soviet directives. The party narrowly focused Chilean
communists' attention on American -- and to an increasingly lesser extent, British -- imperialism as the
prime mover when explaining Chile's political, social, and economic problems from independence
forward. Chilean elites, including landowners, faded and began appearing as British or Yankee
imperialism's personnel -- or at best their co-conspirators and accomplices. As Neruda put it, Chilean
generals were now seen as so-called Chileans. And the party's political and historical analyses,
campaigns, and slogans duly repeated this line henceforward.130
Moscow regarded the PCCh very favorably in turn, cultivating what historian Olga Ulianova
has characterized as "a privileged relationship." As historian María Soledad Gomez showed, this partly
accounted for the party's changing structure and evolving strategies and tactics for the remainder of the
twentieth century. The PCCh's relationship with the Comintern also partly explained the rise of a
fervent Chilean anticommunism.131
129
Comintern to communist parties in Mexico, Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina, and Chile, September 1924. Reprinted
in Ibid., 125-126; and Comintern to communist parties in South America (Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Uruguay, Bolivia, Peru,
Paraguay, and Colombia), 18 February 1925. Reprinted in Ibid., 130-131.
130
Neruda, "They Receive Orders." Also see, for example, Hernán Ramírez Necochea, Historia del imperialism en
Chile (Santiago de Chile: Austral, 1960); and Hernán Ramírez Necochea, Balmaceda y la contrarrevolución de 1891
(Santiago de Chile: Editorial Universitaria, 1958).
131
Olga Ulianova, "La Unidad Popular y el golpe military en Chile: percepciones y análisis soviéticos," Estudios
Públicos 79 (2000), 88; and María Soledad Gómez, "Factores nacionales e internacionales de la política interna del partido
communista de Chile (1922-1952), in Augusto Varas, compilador, El partido comunista en Chile: Estudio multidisciplinario
(Santiago de Chile: Centro de Estudios Sociales/FLACSO, 1988), 65-139.
64
The Chilean Professional Officer Corps
The Chilean professional officer corps arose after the Santa María and Balmaceda
administrations began investing in military modernization in the late-nineteenth century. This created a
new class of officers with their own corporate identity and their own politics. These politics would alter
the fundamental nature of the conflict between the conservative Chilean establishment and the labor
movement. The Chilean officer corps, which perceived itself as the nation's truest guardian and last line
of defense, added an explicit and vigorous anticommunist politics to Chileans' political and social
discourse.
Santa María's government contracted Germany's Captain Emil Körner to command a military
mission in Chile in the mid-1880s. It established the Academia de Guerra, the War College, as well, in
September 1886. The War College offered a two- to three-year postgraduate course that trained select,
early-career officers in what were essentially Prussian concepts of military professionalism. This
included seminars in Western military history and geography, war games and tactics, weapons and
ballistics, fortifications, and physics and inorganic chemistry. Cavalry and infantry officers learned
world history and German while engineers and artillerymen studied advanced mathematics. Those who
remained for a third year specialized in Chilean military history, with particular attention to the
country's ongoing territorial disputes with its neighbors in southern South America, and an introduction
to command and staff planning based on these problems as well. They also completed some
coursework in international law.132
As historian Enrique Brahm García has explained, no other major foreign influence -- not
British, French, or American -- would imprint the Chilean army as profoundly as the German
professional officer corps did. This Prussianization deeply transformed the Chilean army well beyond
the technical training and new thinking, uniforms, and arms Körner and his colleagues offered. It
fostered an elite military identity and distinctly antipolitical outlook which taught Chilean officers, like
their German counterparts at the time, to see themselves as the fatherland's ultimate protectors, not only
against foreign threats but also domestic ones, including civilians, particularly "politics," which they
viewed as irredeemably corrupt. While Peruvians, Argentines, and Brazilians, among others, also
contracted European military missions, "Nowhere," according to Loveman, "did European military
132
Domingo Santa María and Carlos Antúnez, "Fundación de la Academia de Guerra," decree dated 9 September
1886. Reprinted in Alejandro San Francisco, ed., La Academia de Guerra del Ejército de Chile, 1886-2006: Ciento veinte
años de historia (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Centro de Estudios Bicentenario, 2006), 211-219.
65
missions more thoroughly penetrate a Latin American army than Chile, and nowhere did a supposedly
apolitical professional army become more imbued with doctrine that made its officers contemptuous of
civilian politics and politicians."133
These officers' intimate involvement in the parliamentary regime's strike-breaking activities
immersed them in national politics in the early-twentieth century. War College graduates began
deliberating these problems in the very early 1920s, and the entire officer corps would do so
institutionally in the middle of that decade. They did this because the regime had alienated them.
Politicians' paralysis and pettiness, Chile's growing social instability, which many officers' perceived as
an unchecked, rising specter of Bolshevism, worsened this and contributed a sense of urgency. These
officers' discontent became manifest in several minor conspiracies against civilian governments
through 1924.134
Then Arturo Alessandri Palma, "the Lion of Tarapacá," (1920-1924, 1925, and 1932-1938) won
the presidency. He directly challenged the parliamentary regime, promising to strengthen the executive
branch, and, among other things, to pass labor legislation that would protect workers' rights to organize
and strike, and to pass other badly needed social reforms as well. He came from outside the landowning
aristocracy and he approached politics and society through direct, emotional appeals to the masses, who
responded with large-scale popular demonstrations in support of him. He had the old regime on the
run.135
Alessandri encountered an obstructionist, business-as-usual Congress after his inauguration,
however. Even senators and deputies from the president's own coalition either failed to support him or
opposed him. As Collier and Sater explained, "The euphoria of 1920 gradually shifted into a mood of
disappointment and frustration. The Parliamentary Republic had not, after all, been broken. Who would
133
Enrique Brahm García, "La impronta prusiana de la Acadamia de Guerra del Ejército (1885-1914)," in San
Francisco, Academia de Guerra, 3-25; and Brian Loveman, For la Patria: Politics and the Armed Forces in Latin America
(Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1999), 81. Also see Frederick Nunn, Yesterday's Soldiers: European Military
Professionalism in South America, 1890-1940 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983). For an alternative
interpretation that minimizes Prussian influence, see William Sater and Holger Herwig, The Grand Illusion: The
Prussianization of the Chilean Army (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999). For an introduction to antipolitics, see
Brian Loveman and Thomas Davies, eds., The Politics of Antipolitics: The Military in Latin America [1978], 3d ed.
(Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1997).
134
See Frederick Nunn, The Military in Chilean History: Essays on Civil-Military Relations, 1810-1973
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976), 119-127; and Nunn, Chilean Politics, 10-12, 17-18, and 50-52.
135
See Collier and Sater, History of Chile, 202-209; Nunn, Chilean Politics, 19-27; and Edwards and Frei, Historia
de los partidos politicos chilenos, 183-191.
66
cut the Gordian knot?"136
Junior and field-grade officers began fingering their swords as the instrument to cut this knot
when approximately 20 to 50 of them attended Senate hearings on congressional salaries the first week
of September 1924. They were exasperated by congressmen's ignoring the country's social problems
and the armed forces' material needs while voting themselves a remuneration package. Their presence
represented its own message. They made a show of applauding those lawmakers who spoke against the
salary bill for those who had not got that message.
Senators demanded the minister of war instruct these officers to leave when they appeared in
the gallery a second day. The minister ran into unexpected defiance. He ordered a captain to record the
names of all officers present, and the captain retorted that he was not a stenographer. The minister fell
back on persuasion and the officers agreed to retire to the Club Militar, the Army Club, ominously
rattling their sabers as they filed out.137
When the army's high command, which consisted of an older, pre-War College generation that
remained connected to landowners and the parliamentary regime through kinship and other social
networks, declined to discipline the younger officers lest it lose control of them, it only emboldened the
latter, who continued pressing forward. These younger officers formed the Junta Militar y Naval, the
Army-Navy Committee, and rallied around Major Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, a cavalryman who
emerged as their spokesman on Friday, 5 September. Ibáñez's junta demanded that Congress reject the
salary proposal, enact the labor code that Alessandri had been putting forward, pass an income-tax law,
and improve army pay and conditions. Alessandri received Ibáñez in La Moneda, the presidential
palace, and forwarded the junta's demands to Congress the same day. Lawmakers submitted to these
demands within hours.138
Alessandri was surprised to learn that the junta was not only not his instrument, but rather that
its members intended that he be theirs, when Ibáñez also instructed the president dismiss the minister of
war and two other cabinet ministers the same day. Alessandri declined, ordering the major to disband
the junta. Ibáñez refused, creating a constitutional crisis. The three ministers resigned to save the
president further embarrassment. But the major's junta remained committed to intervention, its
members being in no mood to suffer civilian politicians anymore. One officer confirmed this in a note
136
Collier and Sater, History of Chile, 207.
Nunn, Chilean Politics, 55-56; and Edwards and Frei, Historia de los partidos politicos chilenos, 192-193.
138
See Nunn, Chilean Politics, 47-66.
137
67
he sent to a cabinet officer whose virtues he seems to have meant to praise:
Even though you, at this time and place, represent for us the most disgusting element in our
country -- politicians -- that is, all that is corrupt, the dismal factional disputes, depravities and
immoralities, in other words, the causes of our national degeneration, we recognize that you,
despite the fact that you must defend sinecures, hand out public posts, and support avaricious
ambitions, that you are one of the few honest politicians.139
Alessandri, seeing this hostility and even sensing personal danger, dissolved Congress within
days. The president and his family sought asylum in the American embassy in the middle of the night
between Tuesday and Wednesday, 8-9 September 1924. He explained that he was moving into exile in
Rome.
Ambassador William Collier, who, at Alessandri's request, accompanied the president as far as
Mendoza, reported that he had offered his resignation twice before the junta finally granted him six
months' leave. Alessandri resigned a third time from Buenos Aires, explaining to Collier that "he
believes it to be inconsistent with his self-respect and dignity to remain in office when he is not
permitted by the military junta to perform the duties of his office," and telling the press that "there is no
constitutional government in Chile." Two days later, on Friday, 11 September, a military government
composed of General Luis Altamirano, Admiral Francisco Nef, and General Juan Bennett assumed
power.140
Ibáñez's faction deposed Altamirano's government, who, to their frustration, merely continued
the parliamentary regime's politics, four months later, on Friday, 23 January 1925. They deployed two
regiments to seize and occupy La Moneda, declaring that their movement had been for reform, not
reaction. As Collier related to Washington, they detained Altamirano, Nef, and Bennet, and some
civilian members of the cabinet as well, for several hours that Friday afternoon, "while young Army
officer with loaded revolver walked up and down the room holding them virtual prisoners and lecturing
them as to the purpose of military movement and as to its having been betrayed by late junta and its
ministry."141
139
Cited in Loveman, Chile, 162.
William Collier to Department of State, 9 September 1924; and 10 September 1924. Reprinted in Department of
State, Foreign Relations of the United States 1924 I (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1939), 357, 358-359;
and Charles Evan Hughes to Collier, 13 September 1924. Reprinted in Ibid., 359.
141
Collier to Department of State, 24 January 1925. Reprinted in Department of State, Foreign Relations of the
United States 1925 I (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1940), 581; and Collier to Department of State, 25
January 1925. Reprinted in Ibid., 581-582.
140
68
The Ibáñez Dictatorship
Ibáñez's faction and the armed forces' senior officers agreed to form an Army-Navy
administration, led by a general, an admiral, and a professional foreign service officer -- and with
Lieutenant Colonel Ibáñez as minister of war -- days after the coup in January 1925. They
acknowledged that Alessandri remained president, invited him to return to Chile, and began drafting a
new constitution. They acted purposefully, believing time was running out. The Chilean labor
movement remained agitated and the PCCh had been increasing its activities as well. As Collier was
reporting, "Country is seething with social unrest."142
Ibáñez's constitutional convention completed its work and Chileans approved the new
constitution in August. It became effective in September 1925, and Chileans subsequently elected a
new Congress. This constitution strengthened the presidency, separated Church and state, and created
the multiparty, democratic system that governed Chile until September 1973. Meanwhile, Ibáñez
refused to leave the cabinet. He planned to remain in office until Chilean politics became as stable and
secure as he wanted, not only on paper, but in actual practice. This renewed the tension in what became
a bitter, personal rivalry between Alessandri and Ibáñez -- and it led to the president's resigning yet
again in October 1925.
Emiliano Figeroa Larrain (1925-1927) became president that month. But both he and the newlyelected Congress soon returned to parliamentary-era habits, much to Ibáñez's dismay. Colonel Ibáñez
assumed the strategic position of minister of interior in February 1927, and he began governing
unilaterally, commencing with his removing judges and appointing ones committed to the new
constitution. An increasingly powerless Figeroa resigned, leaving Ibáñez, now constitutionally vice
president and acting president, in sole control. The colonel formalized his de facto presidency through
an election that May. So began the Ibáñez dictatorship (1927-1931).143
As Nunn explained, Ibáñez "meant to purge Chilean politics of what he considered its
undesirable elements." Much fell within this category, including professional politicians in general. But
Ibáñez also expressly and systematically targeted the PCCh and, behind it, the Soviet Union, as he had
142
Collier to Department of State, 27 January 1925. Reprinted in Ibid., 585-586; and Collier to Department of State,
12 February 1925. Reprinted in Ibid., 586. Alessandri returned to La Moneda on 20 March.
143
Ibáñez ran unopposed and won 98% of the vote in 1927. See Ricardo Cruz-Coke, Historia electoral de Chile,
1925-1973 (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Juridica de Chile, 1984), 94-97. Also see Nunn, Chilean Politics, 58-133. Chile has
no vice president. The minister of interior becomes vice president and acting president in the event the president leaves the
country, becomes impeached, incapacitated, or dies.
69
openly signaled when he became minister of interior.
The times through which the Country now passes are not the times for words but for
immediate and energetic action.
The final hour -- the hour for settling accounts -- has arrived. The malevolent propaganda of a
few professional politicians and the disunifying propaganda of an audacious few who oppose
all authority is not acceptable. It is necessary to apply cauterization from top to bottom…
I am certain that the overwhelming majority of citizens only wish peace and work. This
majority cannot be trampled under foot by the actions of a minority which represents no
positive values, and which, through its written and spoken word, is undermining our
institutions and destroying the virtues of the race. We have reached deplorable extremes: a
Chamber of Deputies that pays homage to the Communists who trample under foot the right to
work and who incite the workers to the subversion of public order…The moment has come to
break forcefully the red ties of Moscow.144
Thus Ibáñez outlawed the PCCh and began persecuting communists in 1927. He arrested and
relegated 89 political prisoners, the majority of them communists, to Más Afuera. These communists
remained undefeated and openly defiant. Their first act upon arriving was to form the PCCh's Más
Afuera section. Others fled the country. Some were murdered. Ibáñez's "national-fascist government,"
"evidently an agent of Yankee imperialism," according to the South American Bureau, destroyed the
Chilean communist party's leadership and national organization within two years.145
President Ibáñez, now a general, directed an activist government between 1927 and 1931. He
invested nearly $1 billion pesos in Chile's infrastructure. His dictatorship represented the first of several
administrations to attempt to stimulate local manufacturing and industrial development in the midtwentieth century. He also created the Chilean air force, transformed the Carabinero Regiment into the
Carabineros de Chile, perhaps Latin America's finest police force ever since, and finally passed and
enacted Chile's labor code, among many other accomplishments. This required constant government
spending, and the president borrowed heavily from foreign banks -- primarily American, British, and
Swiss -- to pay for it. The Chilean government owed £62 million to these banks by 1930.
Ibáñez relied on nitrate and other export revenues to support this spending, maintain the Chilean
government's relatively high credit rating, and service the foreign debt. But Chilean nitrate production
144
Nunn, Chilean Politics, 182; and Colonel Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, Declaration, 9 February 1927. Reprinted in
Ibid., 183-184.
145
Unlisted author in Cominform's papers in Soviet archives, "Informe de los camaradas comunistas que estuvieron
en la Isla Más Afuera," December 1928. Reprinted in Ulianova and Riquelme, Chile en los archivos soviéticos: Komintern y
Chile, 377-379; South American Bureau to PCCh's Santiago Committee and all members of the PCCh, August 1929.
Reprinted in Ibid., 405-409; and Provisional Central Committee of the PCCh to South American Bureau, "Informe al
Secretariado Sudamericano de la Internacional Comunista," 15 November 1929. Reprinted in Ibid., 416-435.
70
had slowed a great deal in the years since the First World War, when German chemists created synthetic
nitrates to compensate for Germany's inability to import these and other Chilean products through
Britain's blockade. Chilean nitrate production never recovered. The Great Depression destroyed what
was left. As nitrate and other exports collapsed, and as foreign loans fell from $682 million in 1930 to
$22 million in 1932, the Ibáñez dictatorship met its end.146
Ibáñez could neither maintain spending not service the debt by the end of 1930. So he cut
spending, suspended repayments, and raised import taxes to compensate. His hasty austerity program
led to his laying off large numbers of public employees and reducing the salaries of those who
remained in government service. But this failed to halt the depression's effects in Chile. Massive public
disapproval, including a wave of strikes against him, forced him to resign on 26 July 1931. He fled to
Buenos Aires the following day. An acting government appeared, announcing it would hold elections
soon.147
Chile's Battleship Potemkin
Chilean politics and society descended into anarchy after the Ibáñez dictatorship collapsed, and
this exacerbated Chilean anticommunists' continuing and growing fears of the PCCh and its
international ties. On 1 September 1931, as Ambassador William Culbertson related to Washington,
sailors in Coquimbo "locked officers in their rooms, and took command of all ships including the
Almirante Latorre," the Chilean navy's flagship. Sailors in Valparaíso and Talcahuano joined them in a
mutiny that rapidly spread throughout the fleet. The interim government declared a state of emergency
and granted General Carlos Vergara full powers to suppress the uprising. Foreign Minister Luis
Izquierdo told Culbertson that "rebels in control of the sea and inspired by agitators who advocate an
independent communistic republic." He asked him how long it would take the United States to deploy
warships from the Canal Zone to Chilean waters.148
Vergara expanded this request for American military assistance the following day. He explained
146
Faúndez, Marxism and Democracy, 14-16.
On the Ibáñez dictatorship and its fall, see Collier and Sater, History of Chile, 214-221; Loveman, Chile, 183188; Nunn, Chilean Politics, 117-159; William Culbertson to Department of State, 26 July 1931. Reprinted in Department
of State, Foreign Relations of the United States 1931 I (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1946), 905; and
Culbertson to Department of State, 27 July 1931. Reprinted in Ibid., 907.
148
Culbertson to Department of State, 2 September 1931. Reprinted in Department of State, FRUS 1931 I, 909; and
Culbertson to Department of State, 5 September 1931. Reprinted in Ibid., 911-912.
147
71
"that Chile felt no shame over what had happened in its Navy since he believed it was a result of an
international movement against social order...The General, who has just returned from Europe where he
had an opportunity to observe communistic activities, spoke of imminent danger of social war and
describing Chile's problem as continental rather than local, stated that he desired support from the
United States." Vergara requested "bombs and tear gas" and "the purchase and…immediate delivery of
two or more submarine boats," since the Chilean navy had lost contact with its own submarines. He
stressed that he wanted this as a show of American moral support to help him restore law and order.149
The Hoover administration's (1929-1933) acting Secretary of State James Rogers responded the
next day. The United States government presently had no tear gas in its possession. Vergara should seek
commercial suppliers. The administration, while sympathizing with the Chilean government's
difficulties, could not sell or transfer submarines to it, either. "The sale or transfer of submarines owned
by this Government is forbidden by Article 18 of the treaty on the limitation of Naval Armament."150
Vergara suppressed the mutiny without American support days later. Chilean aircraft attacked
the fleet on 6 and 7 September. Only three warships, including Almirante Latorre, remained outside the
Chilean government's control after this, but Vergara was confident he would soon subdue them as well.
The sailors who occupied them indeed surrendered two days later. So Vergara thanked Culberston for
forwarding his request for war material to Washington, but he dropped it, since, as the ambassador
reported, "the situation has changed fundamentally in favor of the Government."151
This did not represent the end of this Chilean-American dialog. Both Izquierdo and Vergara met
Culberston again on 7 September, late in the afternoon, expressing "the intention of the Government to
make a thorough investigation of the communistic activities which they believe resulted in the mutiny.
They are arresting about four leaders. They wish to investigate not only the activities of these men in
Chile but also their contacts and sources of money abroad." They solicited "technical assistance…they
desire the service of a specialist in communistic propaganda and activities in order to assist in ferreting
out the ramifications and origins of the movement in Chile."152
149
Culbertson to Department of State, 6 September 1931. Reprinted in Ibid., 912-913.
James Rogers to Culbertson, 6 September 1931. Reprinted in Ibid., 914-915. For the Washington Naval Treaty,
see "Treaty between the United States of America, the British Empire, France, Italy, and Japan, Signed at Washington,
February 6, 1922." Reprinted in Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States 1922 I (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1938), 247-270.
151
Culbertson to Department of State, 7 September 1931. Reprinted in Ibid., 915.
152
Culbertson to Department of State, 7 September 1931. Reprinted in Ibid., 916.
150
72
The Hoover administration did not share Chileans' interpretation of the mutiny. Culbertson had
been following sailors' "demands of a communistic nature such as special loans to the Government by
the rich and the subdivision of large rural properties," while offering his views that "Apparently
movement has no organized political backing" since it began. As Nunn found, after reviewing the
revolt several decades later, "That Marxist thought, socialism, and extremist solutions should have
found their way into the navy should not seem strange…crewmen were recruited from lower sectors of
society, and they did not lose touch with the civilian lower classes." This mutiny, then, although
communist-influenced, was not South American Bureau- or PCCh-directed. Commanders'
announcement to their crews that the government was further reducing public employees' salaries, and
not party instructions, had incited it on Monday evening, 31 August.153
Secretary of State Henry Stimson, responding to Culbertson five days later, queried the Chilean
government for more specific information "with respect to the basis for statements frequently made that
alleged communist activities in Latin American countries are directed and controlled from Moscow."
Stimson further explained that even if the Hoover administration were inclined to assist Chilean
anticommunists, "there is no Federal agency especially charged with responsibility for investigating
and studying communist activities in the United States…there is not available in Government service a
specialist whose services it could offer…[and] it is not in a position to suggest the name of a specialist
in private life to undertake the work in question," either. The secretary would offer the Chilean
ambassador in Washington a copy of a congressional report on communist activities in the United
States, if he wished. But the administration had nothing else to contribute. Izquierdo and Vergara did
not press this further, and, in any case, their government was in no condition to launch such an inquiry.
As Frei entitled his narration of the following months, "el derecho no sirve" -- law and order broke
down.154
Chileans' descent into anarchy continued after the naval mutiny. The PCCh gradually reemerged
in Chilean politics after Ibáñez's fall, but more at the grassroots than the leadership level at first. As
Pavilack recognized "the advance of the Communist Party took place through conversations and small
actions, not only in the mines but also on the beaches and soccer fields and in neighborhood bars of the
coal mining region." Thus those communist militants who attacked an army barracks in Copiapó and
153
Culbertson to Department of State, 2 September 1931; Nunn, Military in Chilean History, 199-202.
Henry Stimson to Culbertson, 12 September 1931. Reprinted in Reprinted in Department of State, FRUS 1931 I,
917; and Edwards and Frei, Historia de los partidos politicos chilenos, 207, 213-218.
154
73
triggered a firefight with the Carabineros in October 1931, were probably acting on their own. The
Carabineros dynamited communist headquarters there, then snatched several communists from their
homes and shot them in retaliation.155
Moreover, those few members of the PCCh's central committee who had survived Ibáñez's
dragnet were fighting each other in an internal struggle that had been raging since Lenin died and
Joseph Stalin (1924-1953) had directed all Latin American communist parties "to Bolshevize" their
organizations -- that is, to submit to his authority and to his revised strategy and tactics, which
accounted for "the slowing down of world revolution" in the mid-1920s. Two tendencies emerged, each
contesting how Chilean communists should reconstruct the party and which policies it should follow.
Elías Laferrte and Carlos Contreras Labarca led the Stalinists, or those who remained loyal to the South
American Bureau, and Manuel Hidalgo the Trotskyists -- or so Laferrte and Contreras's faction, and
behind them, the bureau, labelled him and his followers.156
The South American Bureau intervened in the PCCh's affairs in January 1933. As Ulianova
observed, the bureau's criticism was "extremely harsh." The party was not acting as a communist party,
but rather as a liberal or social-democratic one. It was obsessed with Santiago and its politics and
rumors, and it was consequently ignoring more important areas, such as the mining regions, where it
followed, rather than created, events. There was no discernable chain of command connecting the
central committees and the cells. Some of the latter were self-directing. In short, "The [post-Ibáñez]
Central Committee is two years old and it is not functioning. It does not comprehend the problem…Our
Party has failed to understand that its task is to organize the revolution through mass struggle."157
The South American Bureau instructed the PCCh to convene a national party congress, which it
did, in June 1933. The bureau cited Recabarren's continuing impact on the party, and it compared this
to German and Polish communists' failure to transcend Rosa Luxemburg's influence in their countries.
It faulted Recabarren for Hidaldo and others' deviationism, and it required Laferrte and Contreras to
155
Pavilack, Mining for the Nation, 64; and Collier and Sater, History of Chile, 223.
Gómez, "Factores nacionales e internacionales," 67-68; Furci, Chilean Communist Party, 28-32; Ramírez,
Origen y formación del Partido Comunista, 187-205; and Executive Committee of the Communist International, "Theses on
the Bolshevization of Communist Parties," April 1925. Reprinted in Daniels, Documentary History of Communism, 45-48.
157
Olga Ulianova, "República socialista y soviets en Chile: Seguimiento y evaluacíon de una occasion
revolucionaria perdida," in Olga Ulianova and Alfredo Riquelme Segovia, eds., Chile en los archivos soviéticos, 1922-1991
II: Komintern en Chile, 1931-1935: Crisis e ilusión revolucionaria (Santiago de Chile: Dirección de Bibliotecas, Archivos y
Museos/LOM Ediciones, 2009), 173-206; South American Bureau meeting with PCCh, "Sesión del BP de Chile 1," 1 June
1933. Reprinted in Ibid., 288-294; and Paulino González Alberdi, South American Bureau, "Discusión de la situación
chilena," March 1934. Reprinted in Ibid., 372-380. Also see Faúndez, Marxism and Democracy, 24-26.
156
74
denounce the former at the congress.
As Ulianova has explained, this was standard Stalinist politics at the time. "The Stalinist
Comintern did not want leaders with their own personalities, capable of making their own decisions. It
wanted unconditional loyalty. It was no accident that the historical founders of practically every
Western communist party were expelled from the very organizations they had created."158
Thus Laferrte and Contreras, against their judgment and wishes, submitted to the South
American Bureau's orders. They distanced themselves from "recabarrenismo." And they committed
themselves to "the real task of making revolution."
His democratic illusion, his faith in universal suffrage, his bourgeois patriotism, his
conception of the party as a party of social reformism, with a structure and form as a
federation of organizations with purely electoral ends, his ignorance and absolute lack of
understanding of the worker-peasant revolution as a necessary stage imposed by development,
his abstract idea of the "social revolution," and finally his collaboration with the bourgeois
excused away as a "realistic policy" had prevented the party from getting on with its real task
of making revolution.159
Thus the South American Bureau Bolshevized the PCCh, and the party began to rebuild and
reemerge in Chilean politics after 1933. It had become, as historian Carmelo Furci explained, "a strict
Leninist party organization…based on Stalin's version of Leninism." But it was weaker than before and
it was slow to reconstitute itself. Several factors explain this, the most important being that the PCCh
was no longer the only Marxist party striving to control and represent the labor movement in the
Chilean revolution.160
The Socialist Republic
Colonel Marmaduke Grove, who commanded the air force, led a leftist coup, commencing with
an air attack against La Moneda, on 4 June 1932. A junta led by General Alberto Puga, Carlos Dávila,
and Eugenio Matte, and with Grove as minister of war, seized power and announced it was creating
"the Socialist Republic of Chile." The junta explained it had taken "the entire public power" into its
hands. It dissolved Congress and began ruling by decree. It nationalized banking, credit, and many
158
Ulianova, "República socialista y soviets en Chile," 196; and Fritz Glaufbauf, also known as "Diego," South
American Bureau, "Discusión chilena," March 1934. Reprinted in Ibid., 358-372.
159
PCCh, Resolution of the National Congress, July 1933. Cited in Furci, Chilean Communist Party, 32. Also see
Gómez, "Factores nacionales e internacionales," 68-75.
160
Ibid.
75
other industries, and it moved to reorganize the armed forces so that they might protect the socialist
republic it was creating from the country's conservative and propertied classes. The junta also planned
to draft a new constitution. Meanwhile, it would respect the existing constitution "insofar as it may be
compatible with the new order of things."161
Communists took to the streets as well, prompting Grove to warn them that "the Government
would deal severely with Communists seeking to overthrow the Government" on Friday evening, 10
June. The army had already begun moving against the junta by then, however. As Culbertson explained
to Washington, the situation had worsened over the weekend.
On the one had are the extremists, the Communists, under the leadership of Laferrte. They
have burrowed into the Government and into the armed forces. The extent of their influence
and power cannot be measured. They hold meetings in the main avenue and their orators
demand arms for the masses and threaten to burn and kill…The emotions of the poor classes
are being aroused and mob violence is a possibility…
The Junta has played with mob desires too much and even the speech of Grove, referred to in
a recent telegram, which the leaders of the Army insisted that he deliver, has not checked the
tide of subversive propaganda. The city is covered with posters proclaiming communism and
four or five irresponsible newspapers are pouring violence into the ears of the unemployed.162
Army units forced Grove's junta to flee La Moneda several days later. Officers relegated Grove
to Easter Island and expressed their desire to return to the barracks and leave politics to Dávila and
other civilian leaders, but only "under the condition that communism be outlawed."163 The army further
explained that "it could not remain impassive in the face of the actions of a group of adventurers
without a country who while exploiting the socialistic ideals outraged the flag and ignored right." As
Culbertson reported, the new junta massed approximately 6,000 Carabineros in Santiago "to insure
order and to repress communist disturbances." It also deployed army units to protect train service
throughout the nation the following day.164
At this point, Culbertson lost track of Chilean politics. "On the shifting scene of Chilean
161
Culbertson to Department of State, 4 June 1932. Reprinted in Department of State, Foreign Relations of the
United States 1932 V: The American Republics (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1948), 430; Culbertson to
Department of State, 4 June 1932. Reprinted in Ibid., 430-431; and Culbertson to Department of State, 5 June 1932.
Reprinted in Ibid., 431-432. See the junta's declarations, included in Culbertson to Department of State, 5 June 1932; and
Culbertson to Department of State, 5 June 1932. Reprinted in Ibid., 432-433.
162
Grove cited in Culbertson to Department of State, 11 June 1932. Reprinted in Ibid., 440; and Culbertson to
Department of State, 13 June 1932. Reprinted in Ibid., 440-441.
163
Culbertson to Department of State, 16 June 1932. Reprinted in Ibid., 449-450; and Culbertson to Department of
State, 17 June 1932. Reprinted in Ibid., 450-451.
164
Army proclamation cited in Culbertson to Department of State, 17 June 1932; and Culbertson to Department of
State, 18 June 1932. Reprinted in Ibid., 452.
76
politics," he reported, "dominated by personalities who change and even traffic their loyalties
overnight, it is frankly impossible to make any prophesies concerning political stability." None of the
contending factions recognized any of the others' legitimacy. Conservatives remained wholly defensive,
"nurs[ing] their respectability behind the barred doors of the Union Club. The hope of intervention by
the United States is often expressed in their conversations."165
Stimson had asked Culbertson to assess Chilean stability because the juntas that rapidly came
and went began pressing the United States government to recognize them that July. The Hoover
administration, as had it predecessors as far back as the Jefferson administration (1801-1809), would
recognize any government that effectively ruled the nation, did not face serious internal opposition or
disorder, and respected its treaty and other international obligations. None of these juntas met these
conditions. As Culbertson explained to Washington, a civil war-like state had engulfed Chile:
"Confusion and uncertainty continue. The show is not over. Even my southeasterly colleagues are
beginning to think that Chile is overdoing political instability."166
Assistant Secretary of State for Latin American affairs Francis White received Chilean
Ambassador Miguel Cruchaga in Washington the following week. As the successive juntas seized
power and then fled, with no elections, and with no Congress or Supreme Court, either, and while
voiding whatever their predecessors had decreed, a provisional government eventually formed around
Abraham Oyandel, an attorney who one of the juntas had appointed to the Supreme Court and then
named minister of the interior, from which he had inherited the presidency when the last junta fell.
Culbertson deemed Oyandel's constitutional legitimacy "a fiction," but he recognized that it had
enabled all of the warring factions to return to Ibáñez's constitution and to begin planning national
elections later that month. As Cruchaga explained to White, "the people of the country are tired of
revolutions and military movements and they are unanimously behind the present Government, and that
the army and navy are also solidly supporting it. All want to get back to a civilian, constitutional
Government."167
The Hoover administration had already accepted Culbertson's advice that "To recognize the
present transitory regime without guarantees from it would be to waste our prestige whereas to
165
Culbertson to Department of State, 14 July 1932. Reprinted in Ibid., 460-462; and Culbertson to Department of
State, 13 June 1932.
166
Culbertson to Department of State, 2 October 1932. Reprinted in Ibid., 491-492.
167
Francis White to Culbertson, 12 October 1932. Reprinted in Ibid., 495-499.
77
withhold recognition for the present and then to grant it after passing over a series of de facto
governments including the present one will give added prestige to a properly elected President as well
as to ourselves." Thus, as White explained to Cruchaga, the United States declined to recognize
Oyandel's provisional government.
I pointed out that from the time [President Juan Esteban] Montero was overthrown on June 4
to the taking over of the Government by the present regime on October 4, that is to say in a
period of four months, there had been five Governments in Chile. This does not speak well for
the stability of conditions in Chile…The Ambassador said that recent regimes in Chile had
come in as a result of coup d'état. The first Dávila junta came in through a coup d'état; the
Grove junta came in through a coup d'état; the second Dávila regime came in through a coup
d'état, and the [General Bartolomé] Blanche regime also came in through a coup d'état. I
observed that the Blanche regime also went out by a coup d'état to which Señor Cruchaga at
once assented. I said that if the Blanche regime went out by a coup d'état it seemed
incontestable that the present regime came in by coup d'état. The Ambassador was somewhat
taken back by this and after a moment's hesitation smiled and said yes, he supposed the
present regime did come in by a coup d'état but that it was necessary to throw out the usurping
unconstitutional Government by a coup d'état in order to bring in a constitutional
Government.168
White's decision to postpone recognition did not set back Chilean progress, however.
Cruchaga's predictions proved accurate. Chileans discarded the Socialist Republic and reelected a far
less demagogic Alessandri to the presidency, and they elected a new Congress as well, returning to
civilian-led, constitutional government that October. Alessandri completed his six year term in 1938.
He stabilized Chilean politics and society, and approximately forty years of peaceful transitions of
power and democratic expansion followed.169
The Rise of Chilean Democracy
This rising Chilean democracy included multiple political parties within its umbrella. These
parties represented a widening spectrum of worldviews and interests from the left to the right. Chileans
also recognized women's suffrage in 1949. Chilean politics became increasingly pluralistic in these
decades, although landowners would continue to control rural labor into the early-1960s.
Several voices emerged in the Chilean labor movement and the far left during these years.
Grove, Salvador Allende, and others founded the Chilean Socialist Party (PS) in 1933. Some from
168
Culbertson to Department of State, 6 October 1932. Reprinted in Ibid., 493; and White to Culbertson, 12 October
1932.
169
See Cruz-Coke, HIstoria electoral, 97-99.
78
Hidalgo's faction, expelled from the Chilean Communist Party, joined them, as did others from the
middle and working classes. Grove's party remained an eclectic grouping of Marxists and other leftists
who were committed to social revolution, but who operated independently of Moscow, and on their
own terms. As Allende later explained, "we analysed the situation in Chile, and we believed that there
was a place for a Party which, while holding similar views in terms of philosophy and doctrine -- a
Marxist approach to the interpretation of history -- would be a Party free of ties of an international
nature. However, this did not mean that we would disavow proletarian internationalism."170
Socialists' strategies and tactics did not derive directly from Moscow and the Comintern's orders
as the PCCh's did. Socialists were more locally-oriented. But their basic worldview and objectives did
derive from a shared philosophy and the same ultimate sources -- just as Martin Luther's rejecting the
Catholic hierarchy did not mean that he stopped reading and believing in the Christian Bible in an
earlier era of ideological dispute. When a journalist asked Allende, decades later, to talk about when
and why he had joined the anti-imperialist cause, he cited the Marxist-Leninist literature he had begun
avidly consuming as a student.
I think that when one has read Lenin, particularly Imperialism, the Highest Stage of
Capitalism, one has a grasp of the theory. The issue of imperialism has a great deal of meaning
in under-developed countries, particularly in Latin America. We Socialists have proclaimed
that imperialism is our number one enemy, and we therefore gave and still give first priority to
national liberation.
As political scientist Julio Faúndez has observed, "With regard to the ultimate objectives of the two
parties, the position of the Socialist Party does not greatly differ from that of the Communist Party." 171
Although Chilean communists and socialists may have shared the same worldview and thought
alike in many ways, they nevertheless opposed each other for decades. Socialists tended to denounce
communists as representing Stalinist tyranny, and communists dismissed socialists as infantile
adventurers who lacked discipline and sound ideological grounding, and, as Furci phrased it, remained
"subject to political fashions such as Titoism, Maoism, Castroism." Socialists received more votes in
national elections while communists remained stronger in the labor movement, particularly in mining,
although they no longer exclusively controlled those workers, either. Thus the two parties remained in
170
Cited in Régis Debray, The Chilean Revolution: Conversations with Allende (New York: Pantheon Books, 1971),
62. On the rise of the Socialist Party, also see Faúndez, Marxism and Democracy, 26-29.
171
Cited in Debray, Chilean Revolution, 69-70. My italics, for style consistency; and Faúndez, Marxism and
Democracy, 27.
79
bitter, often violent, conflict until they set aside enough of their differences to begin collaborating in
coalitions in the late-1950s.172
Although Chilean conservatives lost influence -- Radical-led coalitions, representing the center
and center-left, would dominate the presidency from 1938 to 1952 -- Chilean anticommunism would
remain a force in Chilean politics for the rest of the twentieth century. As this chapter has shown, this
was an indigenous force, not an American creation, not even partly so. Indeed, United States officials
such as Stimson, White, and Culbertson never agreed with Chilean anticommunists' analyses and
policies. Chile's "Red Scare," then, arose locally, as a response to the Chilean labor movement's
increasing militancy and the rise of the Chilean Communist Party, which had enlisted in the Comintern
in the 1920s. While the Chilean professional officer corps' contact with its German counterparts and,
through them, Germany's welfare state, partly influenced Chilean anticommunism in the beginning,
Germans neither fabricated nor imported it, either. Thus the initial sparks of communist-anticommunist
fighting in Chile occurred on the ground in southern South America.
172
Furci, Chilean Communist Party, 33.
80
IV. Chilean Politics and the Transatlantic Origins of the Cold War: The Rise and Fall of the
Democratic Alliance
When Michael Stewart, then a young member of parliament, traveled across the Atlantic to
Chile in mid-1947, he was surprised to encounter the Cold War there. An agitated President Gabriel
González Videla (1946-1952) "asked me to give his best respects to [Prime Minister Clement Atlee
(1945-1951)] and to convey to him the message, 'Distrust the Communists.'" The left-leaning González,
leading the Radical Party, had won the presidency through a plurality, with strong Chilean Communist
Party (PCCh) support -- indeed, they were coalition partners in "the Democratic Alliance" in 1946.
González welcomed three PCCh ministers into his cabinet -- unprecedented in Latin American politics
-- when he was inaugurated that November.173
But González's leftist leanings notwithstanding, his relationship with the PCCh rapidly
deteriorated after the inauguration. The president formed a second cabinet without them less than six
months later, in April 1947. As Stewart would learn, and as the Department of State would phrase it,
González "declared war on communism" that year.174
Historians, long inclined to center their analyses on American power and influence in a narrow,
US-dominated, inter-American world when accounting for Latin American politics, have tended to
explain González's anticommunism as an expression of Washington and Wall Street's interests in the
region. Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough, for example, have long held that the United States'
"Behind-the-scenes pressure was a factor in moves against Communist parties, certainly in Chile,
possibly in Brazil, Cuba, Bolivia, and elsewhere" in the late-1940s. Jody Pavilack, too, wrote how
González turned against Chilean communists and the working class partly because "the United States
was stepping up its pressure on governments around the world to adopt anti-Communist positions."
Historians have thus faulted the Truman administration (1945-1953) for suppressing Latin Americans'
democratic spring while having González recite Cold War rhetoric to make it appear justified.175
173
Michael Stewart, Life and Labour (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1980), 60.
Robert Woodward to Norman Armour, 8 October 1947. Reprinted in Department of State, Foreign Relations of
the United States 1947 VIII: The American Republics (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1972), 501-503.
175
Jody Pavilack, Mining for the Nation: The Politics of Chile's Coal Communities from the Popular Front to the
Cold War (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 250; and Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough, "The
Impact of the Cold War on Latin America," in Melvyn Leffler and David Painter, eds., Origins of the Cold War: An
International History [1994], 2d ed. (New York: Routledge, 2005), 311. Also see Daniela Spenser, "Standing Conventional
Cold War History on Its Head," in Gilbert Joseph and Daniela Spenser, eds., In from the Cold: Latin America's New
Encounter with the Cold War (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 382; Brian Loveman, Chile: The Legacy of Hispanic
174
81
This chapter offers an alternative interpretation of the origins of the Cold War in Chile and
southern South America. It reconstructs the rise and fall of González and the PCCh's Democratic
Alliance from the Second World War through September 1947. It supports and further elaborates
Chilean political scientist Carlos Huneeus's conclusions that "Chilean politics and not U.S. pressure"
account for González's anticommunism, and it illustrates those politics. Further, as this and the
following chapter, which continues this discussion from September 1947 to September 1948, will
demonstrate, neither Truman nor any of his advisors regarded Latin America as a Cold War zone, and
they did not intervene in Chile or elsewhere in the region.176
Although Chilean politics explain González's anticommunism, Chilean communists and
anticommunists' ongoing clashes occurred within the larger context of the early Cold War, as it was
unfolding across the Atlantic in Europe, and they were all conscious of this. That is, Chileans'
perceptions of their conflicts, and thus the conflicts themselves, partly derived from it. González
compared Chilean and French communists' attitudes toward their respective governments in 1947 and
found that "the situations and events were so alike…it was as if they were being directed by the same
baton." And as the PCCh's Senator Pablo Neruda warned his communist friends and supporters, "They
want to do with you what they're doing to Greece."177
This should not come as a surprise. Historians such as David Reynolds have been transcending
strictly superpower-centered historical reconstructions of the early Cold War since the 1990s. Reynolds
has identified "a process of action and reaction in which the catalysts came from within Europe" when
illuminating the Soviet-American conflict's "European dimension." The Chilean case shows that these
European events actually occurred within a larger, Atlantic-wide process of action and reaction, and
that this transatlantic dimension remains useful in more fully explaining what Reynolds called "the
decisive crisis of 1947." This leads to a more comprehensive and integrated history of the origins of the
whole Cold War, which occurred not only in Europe and East Asia but also across the Atlantic in
southern South America.178
Capitalism [1979] 3d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 218-221; and Julio Faúndez, Marxism and
Democracy in Chile: From 1932 to the Fall of Allende (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 71-76.
176
Carlos Huneeus, La guerra fría chilena: Gabriel González Videla y la ley maldita (Santiago de Chile: Random
House Mondadori, 2008), 117, 357.
177
Gabriel González Videla, Memorias, 2 vols. (Santiago de Chile: Editora Nacional Gabriela Mistral, 1975) I: 700;
and Pablo Neruda, "They Receive Orders against Chile," in Pablo Neruda, Canto general [1950], trans. by Jack Schmitt
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2011), 332.
178
David Reynolds, "The European Dimension of the Cold War," in Leffler and Painter, Origins of the Cold War,
173.
82
This discussion broadens and deepens the United States and Chile's Cold War experience,
which remains this dissertation's primary purpose. The United States and Chile's Cold War history
continued evolving in stages into the late-1940s. As the preceding chapter showed, it had begun when
Chilean laborers, communists, and anticommunists, all with transatlantic relationships and interests,
appeared and started asserting themselves from the 1890s into the 1920s. This continued into the
depression era in the early-1930s, then subsided in late-1932, when civilian-led, multiparty democracy
emerged in Chile. But it returned with a vengeance after the Second World War.
Southern South America and the Second World War
Southern South Americans were much more involved in the Second World War than the first.
Although the three major countries there -- Brazil, Argentina, and Chile -- experienced it very
differently, they and indeed all Latin America generally emerged from these experiences more united as
an inter-American community of nations than before. The United States had been attempting to lead
this community since the 1890s, and Washington continued making major contributions to it into the
1940s.
The Roosevelt administration (1933-1945) organized a hemispheric defense centered on the
Caribbean and the Brazilian northeast, which represented the closest point of contact between the
Americas and North Africa. The administration feared that Nazi Germany might eventually use this
point of contact to establish a beachhead in the western hemisphere. German submarines, as if on cue,
began menacing Atlantic shipping after German dictator Adolf Hitler's (1933-1945) forces defeated
France and gained control of French North Africa -- Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia -- in spring 1940.
The inter-American community's foreign ministers convened in Rio de Janeiro in January 1942,
the month after Japan attacked the United States at Pearl Harbor. They recognized and expressed their
gratification that President Franklin Roosevelt had incorporated principles the community held dear
into the Atlantic Charter. Concerning the common defense, they agreed to regard an attack against any
one of them as an attack against all, and they agreed to cooperate in hemispheric security. But they
were not all so quick to consent to Washington's request that their governments break relations with
Germany, Japan, and Italy, or the Axis. The Argentine, Chilean, and Peruvian representatives objected
to a resolution mandating this break, and they pressed Undersecretary of State Sumner Welles to accept
83
their pledge to consider doing so, according to their particular situations and in conformity with their
own institutions and laws. Welles yielded to this, which angered Secretary of State Cordell Hull. But
Welles was negotiating with peers and there was little else he could have done.179
The Brazilian government broke relations with the Axis just after this gathering. Brazilians very
actively supported the United States during the war. They hosted Allied air transport and supply bases
at Natal and Recife that helped supply the Soviet Union and that would also support the AngloAmerican invasion of French North Africa in November 1942. They deployed an expeditionary force to
fight in Italy, too, in July 1944. Brazilians called this force "the smoking cobras" because it was
rumored that Hitler, whose submarines were devastating their coastal shipping, had sneered that they
would only enter the war when their snakes learned to smoke.
Argentina retained strong trade connections to Britain, but was more closely tied to Germany
through immigration and military and trade missions. Argentines did not want to burn any bridges with
their German friends, who seemed likely to win the war at the time. Moreover, they felt little sympathy
for the United States. Buenos Aires and Washington's relations had sharply deteriorated since President
Theodore Roosevelt (1901-1909) and Argentine Foreign Minister Luis María Drago had disagreed over
the Venezuelan debt crisis at the turn of the century, presaging two decades of unilateral American
intervention in the Caribbean. Argentines finally broke relations with the Axis, but very resentfully, in
January 1944 -- after the Department of State threatened to reveal the Argentine government's
involvement in the Bolivian coup that had occurred the previous month. Buenos Aires eventually
declared war against Germany, still unenthusiastically, in March 1945.180
Chileans broke relations with the Axis in January 1943 and declared war in February 1945. The
Roosevelt administration understood that Chileans were hesitating because they feared possible
Japanese reprisals, especially in early-1942. Indeed, Chileans' fears partly explain why Santiago had
taken the lead in convening the meeting in Rio, where Brazilians helped explain to Americans how
179
Governments of the American Republics, "Final Act of the Third Meeting of the Ministers of Foreign Affairs of
the American Republics," Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, 15 to 28 January 1942, available at http://www.oas.org; and Sumner Welles
to Department of State, 22 January 1942. Reprinted in Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States,
Diplomatic Papers 1942 V: The American Republics (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1962), 32-33. For an
example of the kind of language the Roosevelt administration would have preferred, see Cordell Hull to William Dawson, 1
January 1942. Reprinted in Ibid., 9-11.
180
For Brazil and Argentina and the Second World War, see Vernon Walters, The Mighty and the Meek: Dispatches
from the Front Line of Diplomacy (London: St Ermin's Press, 2001), 176-187; Vernon Walters, Silent Missions (New York:
Doubleday and Company, 1978), 70-89, 115-139; Harold Eugene Davis, et al., Latin American Diplomatic History (Baton
Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977), 222-242; and Frank McCann, Jr., The Brazilian-American Alliance, 19371945 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973).
84
their Chilean friends were "much worried over newspaper reports from [the United States'] Pacific
coast regarding blackouts and alleged plans for evacuation." Indeed, Chileans virtually demanded that
the United States provide military guarantees and material assistance while at Rio.181
There was more to Chileans' fears than panicky press reports from California. The Japanese
government was bullying them. American Ambassador to Chile Claude Bowers informed Washington
that "Chile's Minister in Tokyo is practically a prisoner and held incommunicado as are all [Latin]
American diplomats" there. Bowers further reported that the Japanese ambassador to Santiago, Keyoshi
Yamagata, had sent his attaché, a junior lieutenant from the Japanese navy, to address the Chilean
minister of defense and the entire high command. This lieutenant "asserted that the United States Navy
was now vastly inferior…He promised destruction of the Panama Canal and sinking of all ships
carrying contraband by the Japanese submarines…He also stressed strategic importance of Easter
Island." Yamagata later asked Foreign Minister Juan Rossetti how Chileans would respond if Japanese
warships attacked Panama, sank Peruvian merchant ships, or seized Peru's Talara oilfields. He also
claimed that Japanese submarines were already operating in the southeastern Pacific.182
Many in Washington nevertheless remained impatient with Santiago. Welles instructed Bowers
to tell Rossetti that "the statement that Japanese submarines are operating in Western Hemisphere
waters south of the Panama Canal was an absolute falsehood. The assertions…are typically boastful
Japanese allegations which I believe will be fully disproved in a relatively short time."183
Further, the Roosevelt administration knew that German espionage networks were operating in
Chile and the rest of southern South America. These networks counted a small fishing fleet that was
cruising Chilean waters, and at least one clandestine radio set, among their assets in Chile. They were
reporting to the German embassy in Buenos Aires and transmitting information to recipients stationed
in Cuba as well. This information -- mostly pertaining to the ships that were passing through Chilean
ports -- was reaching German submarine commanders, who were using it to devastate Anglo-American
communication and supply lines in the Atlantic. Chileans could help stop this by breaking relations
181
Jefferson Caffery to Department of State, 5 January 1942. Reprinted in Department of State, FRUS, Diplomatic
Papers 1942 V: The American Republics, 15-16; Welles to Hull, 25 January 1942. Reprinted in Ibid., 39-40; and Hull to
Welles, 26 January 1942. Reprinted in Ibid., 41-42.
182
Bowers to Department of State, 30 December 1941. Reprinted in Ibid., 7-8; Bowers to Department of State, 15
January 1942. Reprinted in Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers 1942 VI: The
American Republics (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1963), 1; Bowers to Department of State, 14 February
1942. Reprinted in Ibid., 14-15; and Claude Bowers, Chile through Embassy Windows, 1939-1953 [1958] (Westport:
Greenwood Press, 1977), 107.
183
Welles to Bowers, 15 February 1942. Reprinted in Ibid., 15.
85
with the Axis and expelling German and Japanese diplomats and military missions from their
country.184
Bowers shared Washington's concerns about German intelligence, as did, of course, the Chilean
government. But the ambassador's superiors' impatience with Santiago frustrated him. He explained
that Chile -- unlike the Nicaraguan or Dominican dictatorships that had promptly broken relations with
and even declared war against the Axis just days after Pearl Harbor -- remained a sovereign republic
with its own institutions and laws, and that Chilean leaders had to take public opinion into account as
well. And just as the Roosevelt administration had had to tread carefully with respect to Germany and
Japan from the mid-1930s through December 1941, Chileans also had to watch their step in 1942.185
The Chilean government, moreover, was dealing with an unexpected presidential succession.
President Pedro Aguierre Cerda (1938-1941) had died of tuberculosis in November 1941. Minister of
Interior Gerónimo Méndez had become vice president and acting president until new elections could be
held, per constitutional procedures. President Juan Antonio Ríos (1942-1946) won these elections in
February 1942, but he did not assume office until April. This left several months of transition in
Santiago.186
The Ríos administration duly gathered evidence against the German intelligence networks in
Chile after assuming office, and the government made arrests and seized radio transmitters in late1942. The administration, working with Congress, also resolved to break relations with the Axis that
December, which it formally did the following month. Minister of Interior Raúl Morales Beltrami
traveled to Washington, where he and Ambassador Rodolfo Michels personally told Roosevelt, who
warmly responded that "he was very glad indeed to receive this information." The president, sensitive
to Chileans' concerns with the Japanese threat, explained the Allies' Germany-first strategy to them.187
Meanwhile, Santiago's break with the Axis qualified Chile for Lend-Lease assistance, which
184
For German intelligence in Chile, see "Efforts to Counteract the Work of Axis Espionage Agents," Department of
State, FRUS, Diplomatic Papers 1942 V: The American Republics, 186-261; and Bowers, Chile through Embassy Windows,
97-116.
185
Bowers to Department of State, 21 January 1942. Reprinted in Department of State, FRUS, Diplomatic Papers
1942 V: The American Republics, 32; Bowers to Department of State, 23 January 1942. Reprinted in Ibid., 34; Bowers to
Welles, 4 February 1942. Reprinted in Ibid., 43-44; and Bowers, Chile through Embassy Windows, 97-130.
186
Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, "Pedro Aguirre Cerda (1879-1941)," n.d., available at
http://www.memoriachilena.cl; and Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, "Juan Antonio Ríos (1888-1946)," n.d., available at
http://www.memoriachilena.cl.
187
Sumner Welles, Memorandum of conversation, 17 December 1942. Reprinted in Department of State, FRUS,
Diplomatic Papers 1942 VI: The American Republics, 41-42.
86
included fighter and patrol aircraft, antiaircraft batteries, and ammunition. Chilean forces desperately
needed this assistance. Chilean officials had disclosed to Bowers that "the Army had ammunition for
about 15 minutes of fighting and no planes or anti-aircraft guns" that January.188
Thus Chile and most of southern South America -- excepting a brooding Argentina -- entered
and then emerged from the Second World War within a more tightly-networked inter-American
community of nations. Hemispheric security remained central to this community's interests, especially
in southern South America, where Brazilians and Chileans particularly valued it. The community had
begun institutionalizing cooperative defensive measures at the Rio conference, when it chartered the
Inter-American Defense Board (IADB), a consultative group located in Washington, DC. The IADB
had gradually evolved from inter-American conversations that dated back to Simón Bolívar's Panama
Congress in 1826. And it would continue evolving through the Organization of American States (OAS)
during and after the Cold War.189
The Return of the Soviet Union
Southern South Americans began reestablishing relations with the Soviet Union, which had
allied with the United States and Britain against Germany and Japan, during the Second World War.
Their governments had angrily broken relations with Moscow in the 1920s and 1930s, after regional
anticommunists linked local communist parties and communist-influenced labor movements and their
activities to the Comintern, which had regional offices in Buenos Aires. This partly accounts for the
rise of the Ibáñez dictatorship (1927-1931) in Chile, as the previous chapter discussed, and for Getúlio
Vargas's (1930-1945) consolidating power in Brazil as well.190
Although the Soviet Union would enter Eastern Europe in force during and after the war,
Moscow returned to southern South America through normal, diplomatic channels. The USSR viewed
Latin American communist parties differently in the late-1940s. According to Yuri Pavlov, former
director of the Soviet Foreign Ministry's Latin American division, Soviet policymakers had recognized
that the USSR lacked the resources it needed to support the Latin American left, which remained too
weak to lead revolutions in the region. Moscow returned to Latin America primarily for trade and
188
Bowers to Department of State, 20 January 1942. Reprinted in, Ibid., 1-2.
Inter-American Defense Board, "Historical Overview," n.d., available at http://iadb.jid.org.
190
For the Brazilian case, see John W.F. Dulles, Brazilian Communism, 1935-1945: Repression during World
Upheaval (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1983).
189
87
economic reasons after the war. "I would say at time became predominant of Latin America regard it as
useful source of some raw materials and food products…And also a market for Soviet machinery and
equipment."191
The Uruguayan government made the first overture in March 1942. Uruguayans' sympathy for
the Soviet Union had increased following Germany's invading it in June 1941, which Russians were
resisting at great cost. The Uruguayan labor movement was particularly pressing Montevideo to
recognize Moscow. According to Foreign Minister Alberto Guani, leftist political parties were
exploiting this for "vote-catching motives," and the current government did not wish to lose the
initiative to them. Guani's "misgivings on the score of communism and some apprehension as to
Russia's role after the war" notwithstanding, he asked the American ambassador in his country, William
Dawson, whether the Roosevelt administration would act as his government's intermediary in the event
it decided to pursue this.192
Welles responded favorably, emphasizing that Washington considered this issue one of farreaching importance. The administration hoped that if it cultivated "continuing and more intimate
contacts" between the Soviet Union and other governments in the international community of nations,
Moscow may abandon "its former policies" and, it might even join and cooperate with this community
during and after the war. Welles also warned Guani to arrive at "a clearcut and explicit understanding
with the Soviet Government regarding nonintervention in the domestic affairs of other nations," as the
Roosevelt administration had when it recognized the USSR in 1933.193
Welles asked Soviet Ambassador Maxim Litvinov for his views on this several months later.
Litvinov expressed his interest in it, but he was concerned that the circumstances and style of the
Uruguayan government's earlier break with the Soviet Union would complicate matters. He consulted
Moscow, however, and learned that the Kremlin wished to proceed. Thus Litvinov and Montevideo's
ambassador to the United States reestablished Soviet-Uruguayan relations via Washington in January
1943. Brazil, Argentina, and Chile followed over the next three years.194
Meanwhile, the Chilean Communist Party, whose influence also grew during the war, never
191
Interview with Yuri Pavlov, Roll 10842, n.d. CNN, Cold War (1998). Transcript courtesy of the National Security
Archive, available at http://www.nsarchive.gwu.edu.
192
Dawson to Department of State, 23 June 1942. Reprinted in Department of State, FRUS, Diplomatic Papers
1942 V: The American Republics, 262-264.
193
Welles to Dawson, 25 June 1942. Reprinted in Ibid., 264
194
Sumner Welles, Memorandum of conversation, 26 October 1942. Reprinted in Ibid., 266-267.
88
stopped advancing the Soviet Union's changing wartime positions and slogans, to the letter, in the
1930s and 1940s. The PCCh pressed Bulgarian communist Georgi Dimitrov's broadly antifascist,
Popular Front strategy in Chile after Dimitrov announced it at the Comintern's seventh congress in
August 1935. The Comintern urged all communist parties to do everything they could to stop fascism,
which included forming temporary political alliances with liberal-democratic parties.195
Next, the PCCh supported the Nazi-Soviet Pact from September 1939 to June 1941, declaring
that since "the War interests only the oligarchy and imperialism," Chile should remain neutral. And
then it enthusiastically joined the Allied cause and promoted cross-class national unity after June 1941.
This included staunch support for the PCCh's new friends in Washington. As Secretary General Carlos
Contreras Labarca explained, "our country's highest priority remains to seek broad military, financial,
and economic cooperation with the United States. It represents the only major, anti-Hitler power in the
western hemisphere capable of providing such assistance."196
While the PCCh's changing positions supported Soviet foreign policy and the USSR's security
needs in Europe, these positions had little or nothing to do with Chile's actual situation on the ground at
the time. As historian Carmelo Furci observed, Chilean communists simply adopted these positions
because Moscow had told them to do so. Jorge González von Marées's Chilean nazis -- the Movimiento
Nacional Socialista de Chile -- never represented more than a fringe minority in Chilean politics. They
elected two deputies but no senators at their zenith in September 1938.197
Von Marées's nazis sealed their own fate when they attempted a putsch they hoped would install
former dictator Carlos Ibáñez, who they believed represented them, in La Moneda, the presidential
palace, just before the September elections. Chilean conservatives and the armed forces, however,
rallied around President Arturo Alessandri (1932-1938), who responded in heavy-handed style. After an
army artillery unit subdued the nazi uprising, Carabineros shot and killed over sixty of the party's
youths who had seized the Workers' Compensation offices (Caja de Seguro Obrero), which faced La
Moneda. The surviving nazis, angry with Chilean conservatives and the armed forces, became the only
195
Resolution of the Seventh World Congress of the Communist International, "The Offensive of Fascism and the
Tasks of the Communist International in the Fight for the Unity of the Working Class against Fascism," August 1935.
Reprinted in Robert Daniels, ed., A Documentary History of Communism and the World: From Revolution to Collapse
(Hanover: University Press of New England, 1994), 74-75.
196
Cited in Carmelo Furci, The Chilean Communist Party and the Road to Socialism (London: Zed Books, 1984),
35; and María Soledad Gómez, "Factores nacionales e internacionales de la política interna del partido communista de Chile
(1922-1952), in Augusto Varas, compilador, El partido comunista en Chile: Estudio multidisciplinario (Santiago de Chile:
Centro de Estudios Sociales/FLACSO, 1988), 77. Also see Faúndez, Marxism and Democracy, 59-68.
197
Furci, Chilean Communist Party, 37.
89
fascists in the Atlantic world to join the Popular Front. So much for Chilean nazism.198
This and other acts of repression led to the Radicals' ascendancy in Chilean politics. The
Radical Party had splintered from the Liberal Party in the 1860s. It represented a mix of secular
interests, more or less in the center of Chile's political spectrum, with some members, like Ríos, leaning
toward the right, while others, such as González, sympathized with the left. As Alessandri's presidency
became friendlier with the Chilean right, particularly the Liberals, a center-left bloc emerged under
Radical leadership in the mid-1930s. Radicals consequently counted on communist and socialist
support, but only on-again, off-again, since the two Marxist parties continued to oppose each other well
into the 1950s.
Gabriel González's Election
Gabriel González won the presidency during this convergence of US-Soviet wartime interests
and the PCCh's cross-class collaboration that it had helped to produce in Chile. But the president's leftleaning politics corresponded more closely with Roosevelt and Truman's Democratic Party and Western
Europeans' noncommunist left than with Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin's (1922-1953) Communist Party
and those in the international communist movement. Thus it should come as no surprise that González's
relations with the PCCh would deteriorate as new international realities emerged in the late-1940s.
González had entered politics as a deputy in the Ibáñez dictatorship's last year. He served as
Chilean ambassador to France (1938-1942) and Brazil (1942-1946) before returning to Santiago and
running for president. Ríos had contracted cancer, retired from office, and then lost his life to this
disease earlier in 1946. This led to a new round of elections. González's diplomatic postings had
introduced him to -- indeed, placed him near the center of -- international affairs during the Second
World War, where he formed collegial relationships with many, including Fleet Admiral William Leahy
(USN). Leahy had represented the United States in Vichy France before returning to Washington as
chief of staff to Roosevelt in his capacity as commander-in-chief of the armed forces, a position which
198
Ibáñez received 112 of the nearly 450,000 votes cast in 1938. Simon Collier and William Sater, A History of
Chile, 1808-2002 [1996] 2d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 233-234; Loveman, Chile, 209-211;
Ricardo Cruz-Coke, Historia electoral de Chile, 1925-1973 (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Juridica de Chile, 1984), 100-101;
Furci, Chilean Communist Party, 36-37; Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, "Jorge González von Marées," n.d., available at
http://www.memoriachilena.cl; Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, "Movimiento Nacional Socialista de Chile," n.d., available at
http://www.memoriachilena.cl; and Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, "Matanza del Seguro Obrero," n.d., available at
http://www.memoriachilena.cl.
90
became formalized as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in 1947.199
González and his party closely partnered with the PCCh for the election in September 1946.
Conservatives, Liberals, and Socialists each ran their own candidates. The Radical-PCCh alliance was a
natural and sincere one at the time. González represented the Radicals' left-wing, which had much in
common with the PCCh, especially concerning developmental politics, and indeed he and communist
leaders believed not only that their politics coincided, but each regarded the other as family. As
González would explain to Leahy at his inauguration, "Chilean communism, like French communism,
was following a democratic line and promoting national union internally and peaceful coexistence
internationally." The PCCh, in turn, called González one of its own, "a brother, a loyal brother," as
Neruda phrased it in "The People Call Him Gabriel," the poem he composed as the president's
campaign manager.200
This Radical-PCCh coalition, calling itself the Democratic Alliance, agreed on an election
program at its convention in July. Communist leaders believed that González and the Radicals had
committed themselves to what would become a communist-led bourgeois revolution. They planned to
thoroughly restructure political, social, and economic life in Chile, and their program went directly to
the heart of the matter in the feudal-like Chilean countryside: land reform and the organization of rural
labor.
The PCCh expected González to apply the labor code to the peasantry and to facilitate the
party's entrance into the countryside. Chilean landowners, whose political influence rested on their use
of rural labor as "voting cattle," had used their position in Congress to block the labor code's
application to their large estates ever since Ibáñez had created it in the late-1920s and Alessandri had
enacted it in the early-1930s. The alliance's program, if successful, would empower peasants to freely
organize -- that is, the PCCh hoped, to join the party or at least a communist-controlled union -- and
vote, which would in turn undermine conservative power and profoundly alter Chilean politics.
The alliance's program also pledged to nationalize Chilean industry. The PCCh was also
particularly excited about its promise to expand Soviet-Chilean relations while "defend[ing] the nation
from imperialism, especially American." Chilean communists even dreamed of establishing a
199
Ríos died in June 1946. Huneeus, Guerra fría chilena, 51-54; González, Memorias I: 223-437; and Biblioteca
Nacional de Chile, "Gabriel González Videla (1898-1980)," n.d., available at http://www.memoriachilena.cl.
200
González, Memorias I: 519; and Pablo Neruda, "El pueblo lo llama Gabriel." Reprinted in Ibid., 759.
91
steamship service that would connect Valparaíso to Vladivostok.201
PCCh leaders regarded this program as if it were written in stone. Senator Elías Laferrte
indicated this when he addressed the convention. "You can be certain that we communists will be the
most combative force during the campaign. But you should also know that we will be the most
inflexible fighters when demanding -- without vacillating, without relenting, without accepting
setbacks -- the completion of this program that the people have elaborated." The party organized
massive rallies in the mining regions, and it mobilized the working-class vote across the country.
Huneeus assigned "extraordinary importance" to this communist support when explaining González's
victory.202
Communists' valuable support notwithstanding, González won the election by a narrow
plurality, garnering approximately 40 percent of the vote in September. Eduardo Cruz-Coke, the
Conservative candidate, took nearly 30 percent; Fernando Alessandri, the Liberal, over 25 percent; and
Bernardo Ibáñez, the Socialist, just less than 3 percent. Cruz-Coke declined to concede González's
victory. This referred the election, per constitutional procedure, to Congress, which would decide the
matter in a run-off vote.203
Differences between González, the politician, and the PCCh, the devoted revolutionaries,
appeared when González appealed to Liberals for their votes in September and October. Although
Liberals, who represented socially and economically conservative interests, including Chilean
landowners, had more in common with Conservatives than any party in the Democratic Alliance, they
recognized that González could nevertheless serve their interests. That is, Liberals realized that they
had the leverage not merely to join the alliance, but to redefine it.
Thus Liberals told González that they would support him in the congressional run-off if he
would appoint three from their party to counter the three communists he had already invited into his
cabinet -- and if he suspended his pledge to apply the labor code to the peasantry while reforming land
ownership. González agreed, apparently without consulting or fully informing his PCCh partners, who
he apparently assumed would follow his lead as president. He won the run-off with 134 votes to Cruz201
Gómez, "Factores nacionales e internacionales," 97-98; Partido Comunista de Chile, Ricardo Fonseca,
combatiente ejemplar (Santiago de Chile: Talleres Gráficos Lautaro, 1952), 164-166; and "El programa que dará la
victoria," El Siglo, 22 July 1946. Also see Huneeus, Guerra fría chilena, 73-76; and González, Memorias I: 470.
202
"González Videla ungido candidato unico," El Siglo, 22 July 1946. Reprinted in Huneeus, Guerra fría chilena,
75; and Huneeus, Guerra fría chilena, 77-80. Also see Pavilack, Mining for the Nation, 245-249.
203
Cruz-Coke, Historia electoral, 101-103.
92
Coke's 46 in October.204
González's first cabinet, then, represented an unrealistic combination of ministers. This reflected
poor leadership. As Huneeus has observed, González may have possessed an excellent grasp of global
affairs and foreign relations, but his political experience had been limited to campaigns and his brief
service in the Chamber of Deputies. He had never dealt with national politics from a position of
responsibility or held even junior ministerial rank. Both this and, as historians Simon Collier and
William Sater have put it, "his barely concealed lust for power," explain his promising all things to all
people, without realizing, or perhaps without caring, that he was creating a divided government, where
two thirds of its cabinet members were set against each other.205
González and the PCCh's Estrangement
González began expressing his reservations about the PCCh to the American and British
ambassadors just after his inauguration. And indeed the president's first cabinet collapsed within six
months' of his forming it. He began suppressing the party, as described above, in July 1947. This
occurred within the context of several intense, rapidly-moving months in Chile and abroad -particularly in Europe, where the Soviet-American wartime alliance was also falling apart.206
Stalin had been maximizing his wartime gains in Europe and the Near East following the Allies'
victory over Nazi Germany in 1945. Many historians concur with Vesselin Dimitrov, who wrote that
Stalin had no grand strategy and was not following a coherent policy in the war's immediate aftermath.
But he seemed generally committed to securing the USSR against a potentially recrudescent Germany
and renewed world war, which he believed imminent. He hoped to establish pro-Soviet "people's
democracies" as far into Europe as possible, which meant communist-dominated, multiparty
governments in Eastern Europe and at least some communist participation throughout Western Europe.
He pressed the Turkish government to grant him naval bases and maritime rights in the eastern
Mediterranean, and he supported a separatist movement in northern Iran. He had not renounced
communist revolution, but he had disbanded the Comintern during the war, and he did not resurrect it
204
Huneeus, Guerra fría chilena, 86-91; Cruz-Coke, Historia electoral, 101-103; Faúndez, Marxism and
Democracy, 72-73; and González, Memorias I: 482-504.
205
Huneeus, Guerra fría chilena, 51-54; and Collier and Sater, History of Chile, 247.
206
Huneeus, Guerra fría chilena, 95-96; and Bowers, Chile through Embassy Windows, 161-162.
93
in 1946 or early-1947.207
Both American and Soviet governments began forming dark interpretations of the other's
motives and actions at this time, and each one grew more suspicions of the other. Stalin spoke at the
Bolshoi Theater in February 1946. Historian John Lewis Gaddis has compared the dictator's speech to
the first shots fired at Fort Sumter.208
Stalin reviewed the two world wars in strictly Marxist-Leninist terms, calling these wars the
inevitable products of the contradictions and crises inherent in monopoly capitalism. "It would be
wrong to think that the Second World War was a casual occurrence," he said. Fascism and reaction,
moreover, although defeated in Germany and Japan at the moment, still existed within the bourgeois
democracies, whose governments were continuing their earlier policies of hostile encirclement. Soviet
citizens, therefore, had to work even harder than they had during the last war. They had to enhance
Soviet military readiness and increase economic production to prepare for the inevitable resumption of
fighting.209
Foreign service officer George Kennan was serving in the American embassy in Moscow when
Stalin offered these remarks. Kennan's superiors in Washington invited him to interpret the speech, and
his famous "long telegram" followed. According to Kennan, the United States could not presently
cultivate constructive relations with the Soviet Union. This would remain so into the foreseeable future
for two reasons. First, the Soviets remained fanatically devoted to Marxist-Leninist ideology, which
postulated an innate, class-based antagonism deriving from their version of global history, and they
simply could not see beyond this worldview. As Kennan later told a Soviet official, "You see our
country as in a dream."210
Second, the Soviets merely represented the latest in a long line of brutally paranoid Russian
rulers who had all gained and held power only by seizing it violently from their opponents. They,
207
Vesselin Dimitrov, "Communism in Bulgaria," in Melvyn Leffler and David Painter, eds., Origins of the Cold
War: An International History [1994] (New York: Routledge, 2005), 190-204. For the Soviets in Turkey and Iran, see
Rashid Khalidi, Sowing Crisis: The Cold War and American Dominance in the Middle East (Boston: Beacon Press, 2009),
40-69.
208
John Lewis Gaddis, George F. Kennan: An American Life (New York: Penguin, 2011), 216-219.
209
Joseph Stalin, Pre-election speech, 9 February 1946. Reprinted in Daniels, Documentary History of Communism,
101-103. Also see George Kennan to Department of State, 12 February 1946. Reprinted in Department of State, Foreign
Relations of the United States 1946 VI: Eastern Europe; The Soviet Union (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office,
1969), 694-696.
210
Cited in Nicholas Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold
War (New York: Henry Holt and Company/Picador, 2009), 130.
94
particularly Stalin, had constructed a one-party dictatorship and police state that relied on a nearly
omnipotent security establishment that they used to crush their rivals and impose their will, first within
their borders, and then internationally, as far as they could reach. Stalin was using the specter of
"capitalist encirclement" to justify all of this. Americans, Kennan argued, must recognize that this
complicated US-Soviet relations. The wartime alliance was over.211
Kennan and his colleagues in Washington perceived a Soviet escalation in Southern Europe
later in 1946. Yugoslav, Italian, and Greek communists had resisted Nazi occupation throughout the
Second World War, and they -- especially Yugoslavia's Marshal Josip Broz Tito (1945-1980) -- were
aggressively constructing a Yugoslav-led Balkan confederation, and reaching for sole power in the
region, against Stalin's desires and advice. Tito had already moved beyond Yugoslavia's borders and
claimed Trieste. Now he was encouraging Italian and Greek communists to wage guerrilla campaigns
against their governments and their British backers. The Greek Communist Party raised an army of
approximately 15,000-20,000 that began fighting in September 1946.212
Although Stalin was not behind these events, his position was hardening toward the United
States. Soviet Ambassador to Washington Nikolai Novikov had reported to Moscow that a reactionary
ruling class, including Republicans and conservative Democrats, had consolidated power in America
and was planning to dominate the world through an expanded military, naval, and air capability
buttressed by hundreds of bases far from the United States. This ruling class was making preparations
to revive German imperialism for use in a future war against the USSR. And all of this represented "a
serious danger to the cause of peace."213
None of these speeches or cables directly touched on Chilean or southern South American
affairs. But the Cold War nevertheless began breaking out in Santiago that October when the PCCh's
Central Committee relieved Contreras as the party's secretary general and replaced him with Ricardo
Fonseca, who had arisen from the communist youth as an uncompromising militant. This conformed to
the Soviet Union and the international communist movement's new hardline positions -- particularly
communists' rejection of "Browderism," from which communist leaders had been distancing
211
Kennan to Department of State, 22 February 1946. Reprinted in Department of State, FRUS 1946 VI: Eastern
Europe; The Soviet Union, 696-709.
212
See Silvio Pons, "Stalin and the Italian Communists," in Leffler and Painter, Origins of the Cold War, 205-220;
and Thanasis Sfikas, "The Greek Civil War," in Ibid., 134-152.
213
Nikolai Novikov to the Kremlin, 27 September 1946. Trans. into English and available at
http://www.digitalarchive.wilsoncenter.org.
95
themselves since 1945.
Earl Browder, Secretary General of the American Communist Party, had proposed a
conciliatory, class-collaborationist approach between the communist parties and their respective
bourgeois societies during the war that he hoped would guide their relations in the postwar period. The
French Communist Party's Jacques Duclos criticized this. Duclos faulted Browder for his "false
concept…that at Teheran [December 1943] capitalism and socialism had begun to find the means of
peaceful co-existence and collaboration in the framework of one and the same world." Browder's
proposal derived from "erroneous conclusions," and they would only lead to communist parties'
dissolution and the working class's loss of independence within a bourgeois society. All of those
communist leaders who had accepted and advocated Browder's line, including Contreras, fell into
disgrace after this.214
This signaled, as historian Robert Daniels observed, "the revival of militance throughout the
international Communist movement" in mid-1945. The PCCh's Central Committee particularly praised
Fonseca for "his unshakable faith in the forces of peace, democracy, and socialism that the Great Soviet
Union leads," and for his correct, combative opposition to, as the committee now saw it, Browder's
deviationism, from the moment it first appeared. González, too, sensed this about Fonseca and he
disliked the new communist leader for it. The president described him as "cryptic, ill-tempered, and
stubborn," in his memoirs, and recalled feeling "an intuitive mistrust" of him. "I saw that Fonseca's
replacing Contreras was going to cause me problems from the moment we met."215
These problems commenced within fifteen days of the González administration's assuming
office. The president complained that "I found it impossible to change the communists' totalitarian
mentality, to get them to stop persecuting those Socialists in the labor movement who were refusing to
submit to their directives." This totalitarian mentality first manifested when, as González recounted it,
"Two outstanding socialist leaders, Pedro Arbulú…and Evaristo Ortiz, were shot dead by the 'checa' at
the exit of the Office of Work on 7 December 1946" in Lota. The PCCh denied these allegations, but
González was not the only one pointing his finger at them. Socialist Senator Salvador Allende also
denounced this "violent aggression on behalf of elements of the Communist Party" in Congress. This
represented but one example of what González called the wave of terror that the PCCh was unleashing
214
Jacques Duclos, "On the Dissolution of the Communist Party of the United States," Daily Worker, 24 May 1945.
Reprinted in Daniels, Documentary History of Communism, 99-101. Also see Pavilack, Mining for the Nation, 186-187,
210, 250-21; Gómez, "Factores nacionales e internacionales," 87-90; and Furci, Chilean Communist Party, 39-40.
215
Partido Comunista de Chile, Ricardo Fonseca, 11; and González, Memorias I: 524-525.
96
against its opponents within the labor movement.216
The PCCh pursued a multipronged strategy into the early months of 1947. Communists began
acting unilaterally, or as Huneeus characterized it, "as if they were the opposition and not part of the
government." In historian María Soledad Gómez's estimation, they started using "insurrectional
tactics."217
Thus, while González was hoping to focus on foreign relations and Chilean industrial
development, PCCh Minister of Agriculture Miguel Concha continued advancing the Democratic
Alliance's pre-election program in the countryside. This led to several escalations in rural Chile, where
Communists were vigorously attempting to preempt any Socialist gains there, and where hundreds of
PCCh-inspired peasant complaints and open conflicts were alarming landowners -- many of whom
began complaining to their Liberal representatives who, in turn, pressed González to rein in their
Communist colleagues. Minister of Hacienda and Economy Roberto Wachholtz, the only independent
in the cabinet, resigned on 11 January, reflecting the emerging polarization.218
González and the PCCh's estrangement worsened as each began viewing the other as one of the
superpowers' proxies. The president started comparing the Chilean communists' actions to the French
Communist Party's efforts to consolidate its sole control over the French labor movement across the
Atlantic. And he concluded that the Soviet Union must have been directing both of them.219
The PCCh, in turn, saw González and many other Chileans' growing anticommunism as
evidence that Truman's moves against communists, especially after he declared that "it must be the
policy of the United States to support free peoples who are resisting attempted subjugation by armed
minorities or by outside pressures" that March, were not limited to Greece and the eastern
Mediterranean. Thus Chilean communists proclaimed that their problems with the González
administration in southern South America derived from American imperialist pressure in collusion with
Chilean oligarchs and reactionaries. They were certain that this derived from Washington's larger quest
for world domination.220
216
González, Memorias I: 521, 587-588, 592. Also see Huneeus, Guerra fría chilena, 97; and Gómez, "Factores
nacionales e internacionales," 91-92.
217
Huneeus, Guerra fría chilena, 101-107; and Gómez, "Factores nacionales e internacionales," 133.
218
Huneeus, Guerra fría chilena, 101-108; Brian Loveman, Struggle in the Countryside: Politics and Rural Labor
in Chile, 1919-1973 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1976), 130, Table 4; and González, Memorias I: 521-527.
219
Huneeus, Guerra fría chilena, 101, 125-126; and González, Memoiras I: 700.
220
Harry Truman Address to Joint Session of Congress, "Recommendation for Assistance to Greece and Turkey," 12
March 1947. Available at http://www.trumanlibrary.org; González, Memorias I: 546; and "Intromisión extranjera para
97
Breaking Point: From the Municipal Elections to the Rio Pact
These mounting problems notwithstanding, the PCCh very successfully leveraged its
association with González and the Radical Party through the municipal elections in April 1947.
Communists had already elected three senators, including Laferrte and Neruda, in congressional
elections in March 1945. The party tripled its presence in mayoralties and city councils throughout
Chile between 1944 and 1947. But this new strength also frightened Socialists, Liberals, and
Conservatives. Thus a broadly anticommunist wave began to loosely unite most Chilean
noncommunists behind González as the president and the PCCh's relations became increasingly
warlike.
PCCh candidates had never run under their own party affiliation in Chilean elections. The
Ibáñez dictatorship banned the party only two years after it joined the Comintern, and it never returned
to fully legal politics. Chilean communists had created front parties, such as "the National Democratic
Party" during the Popular Front period, and "the National Progressive Party" during the Second World
War. PCCh leaders now argued that the party's participation in government had rendered it legal, in
practice, and that Chile's registrar, who had barred the party's open participation in elections since the
late-1920s, should reconsider this and allow communists to run under the PCCh's own name in the
municipal elections. They succeeded.221
Socialists had worked themselves into a shrill hysteria by the time these elections occurred.
Socialists and communists were already violently confronting each other in the coal-mining regions
and elsewhere. The former were concerned that the latter was unfairly exploiting its advantage from its
position within the government to achieve exclusive control of the labor movement. González
summarized what became "a socialist offensive" in his memoirs. Secretary General Raúl Ampuero
alleged that the PCCh had "no desire to further develop our mining industry. They believe a third world
war inevitable, and thus they are attempting to destroy our extractive industries in order to keep them
out of the hands of the enemies of Soviet Russia." Many headlines that denounced the coming Stalinist
tyranny repeated Ampuero's fears in the socialist press.222
The PCCh, in comparison with its showing in 1944, increased its share of the nationwide
entregar el poder a la reacción, denuncia el PC," El Siglo, 13 April 1947.
221
Huneeus, Guerra fría chilena, 79-80.
222
Cited in González, Memorias I: 530.
98
municipal vote from approximately 6 to 17 percent in 1947. Communists explained that they had
refrained from running in some regions out of respect for their Radical allies, whose candidates they
chose to support. Thus they could potentially have made an even stronger showing, and they very
ambitiously interpreted this as the Chilean people's repudiating anticommunism.223
According to the registrar's projections, the PCCh was now positioned to become a major
national party in the congressional elections scheduled for March 1949. González's cabinet
disintegrated after this. Liberals, concerned that some of their voters would turn to the Conservative
Party, informed the president that they could not risk losing their congressional seats through
continuing affiliation with communists. And they resigned their government positions the week after
the municipal elections.224
PCCh cabinet ministers, believing this favored them, resigned their positions the following day
while advising González to form a new, leftist government. As the president later recalled, "They
informed me that President Truman, with the complicity of the reactionary and Trotskyist parties, was
directing this crisis. Truman and his allies intended not only to destroy the ministry but to overthrow
me as president of the republic. The Communist Party was the only party sustaining my power, and
thus Truman and his allies were attempting to remove it from my side."225
González never felt more vulnerable than he did that April. The president attempted to salvage a
broader, coalition government. He sent feelers to Conservatives, Liberals, and other, minor parties. But
Conservatives would only enter his administration if he expelled all communists, not only from the
cabinet, but from the entire public administration. And Liberals flatly refused, as did the others. Thus
González consulted his own party and decided to form a provisional, all-Radical government. It
functioned for approximately two months.226
González and the PCCh's relations continued to deteriorate within the larger context of the
expanding Cold War after April 1947. The Truman administration began intervening in the Greek civil
war as the British Empire rapidly collapsed from the eastern Mediterranean to South Asia. The Second
World War had shattered Britain and all Europe's politics and economy down to the level of Europeans'
223
Huneeus, Guerra fría chilena, 108-116; and Cruz-Coke, Historia electoral, 78-81; "Comunistas no aumentaron
sus regidores a expensas de sus aliados radicales," El Siglo, 9 April 1947; and "Grandioso triunfo del PC constituye un
franco repudio al anticommunismo," Ibid.
224
Huneeus, Guerra fría chilena, 112-113.
225
González, Memorias I: 541.
226
Huneeus, Guerra fría chilena, 115-116; and González, Memorias I: 540-546
99
basic infrastructure and their ability to feed themselves. An extremely harsh winter exacerbated this in
the early months of 1947. Europeans would not recover from this on their own. Moreover, as Kennan
and other Americans started eyeing the Soviet Union warily, they also became concerned that Moscow
and its Western European allies, such as the French and Italian communist parties, would exploit these
desperate times to extend communist rule to Rome, Paris, and Brussels.
Secretary of State General George Marshall, building on the Truman administration's
commitment to support anticommunists in the eastern Mediterranean, introduced the European
Recovery Plan, or the Marshall Plan, at Harvard University's commencement in June. The United
States government would contribute more than $13 billion toward European reconstruction over the
next five years. Americans and Western Europeans began meeting in London and Paris immediately to
plan how exactly to proceed. Soviet Foreign Minister Vyacheslav Molotov denounced this as an
expression of United States imperialism and a device to lure Eastern Europeans away from the Soviet
Union, and he walked out of these meetings. Increased Soviet-American tensions followed.227
Increased US-Latin American tensions followed, too. The inter-American community of nations
had been discussing wartime and postwar economic cooperation since the Rio conference in January
1942. Many Latin American leaders expected the United States to invest in their development, and talk
of major American spending in Europe disappointed them. Truman traveled to Rio to explain the
Marshall Plan to them in September 1947.
Truman explained that Americans' resources remained finite. "We have been obliged," he
continued, "to differentiate between the urgent need for rehabilitation of war-shattered areas and the
problems of development elsewhere…Our own troubles -- and we have many -- are small in contrast
with the struggle for life itself that engrosses the peoples of Europe." Thus the president asked his Latin
American counterparts to stand with the United States, not only by joining the Inter-American Treaty of
Reciprocal Assistance, the primary item under discussion at Rio, but by supporting the Marshall Plan,
which meant postponing their own plans for American-financed development.228
The Marshall Plan and the Rio conference further agitated Chilean communists, who remained
dogmatically pro-Soviet in their foreign-policy outlook. This remained unchanged even after Soviets'
227
See "The Marshall Plan Speech," 5 June 1947, available at http://www.marshallfoundation.org, with audio, text,
and commentary.
228
Harry Truman, "Address before the Rio de Janeiro Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of
Continental Peace and Security," 2 September 1947, available at http://www.trumanlibrary.org; and "Inter-American Treaty
of Reciprocal Assistance," 2 September 1947, available at http://www.oas.org. Also known as "the Rio Pact."
100
had reassessed the potential for revolution in Latin America and backed away from the region in the
postwar years. Santiago's bus drivers initiated a violent strike on 12 June. Carabineros put it down
quickly, leaving four dead and twenty wounded. But it infuriated González, who addressed the nation
two days later. The president blamed the PCCh for the strike. "The Communist Party's leadership is
wrong if it believes [I] will be its instrument." "[M]y patience and tolerance," he wrote later, "had
ended." Then he declared a state of emergency in the capital. This represented the first skirmish in the
small war that González and the PCCh would soon wage against each other.229
The PCCh's Central Committee, Neruda, and Fonseca denied involvement in the strike and
blamed González, the Chilean armed forces, and the United States for it. But no noncommunists
believed them. As Bowers reported to Washington, "All papers except Communist El Siglo fix
responsibility on Communists." The Socialist-controlled Chilean Labor Confederation (CTCh) blamed
René Frías, the communist governor of Santiago province, and behind him, the PCCh. Socialists further
urged González to purge communists from the entire public administration.230
González formed his third cabinet in June. The president called it "an administrative
government," and he directed it "to confront and defeat communist subversion, directed from abroad."
González's new cabinet began preparing to respond to an anticipated communist-managed general
strike that month.231
González's administrative cabinet included the armed forces in two of the three most important
positions: Rear Admiral Inmanuel Holger, the navy's chief of staff, became minister of interior; Germán
Vergara Donoso, a professional foreign service officer, directed the ministry of foreign relations; and
General Guillermo Barrios Tirado, commander-in-chief of the army, served as minister of defense.
When the president presented this ministry to the nation, he explained that his problems with some of
the country's political parties notwithstanding, he remained charged with the responsibility to govern,
and "I will do it backed by sane public opinion and with the unconditional support of the Armed
Forces."232
229
Gabriel González Videla, press release, 15 June 1947. Reprinted in González, Memorias I: 573-577. González's
emphasis. Also see Bowers to Department of State, 13 June 1947. Reprinted in Department of State, FRUS 1947 VIII: The
American Republics, 497-498; and Huneeus, Guerra fría chilena, 121-124.
230
Bowers to Department of State, 13 June 1947; Bowers to Department of State, 15 June 1947. Reprinted in
Department of State, FRUS 1947 VIII: The American Republics, 498; and González, Memorias I: 573, 577-578.
231
González, Memorias I: 603.
232
Ibid., 601.
101
Fonseca and his colleague, Cipriano Pontigo, came to the president and confronted him in La
Moneda just after this. According to González, Fonseca and Pontigo instructed him to reorient Chilean
foreign policy toward Moscow's positions in world affairs. They told him to reject Truman's position in
Greece and Turkey, the Marshall Plan, and the Rio Pact, which they claimed was actually a United
States plot to colonize Latin America. This made him "red with ire and indignation."
I told Fonseca in categorical terms that I was in absolute and total disagreement with such an
international position. I believed it not only absurd and crazy, but it also threatened Chilean
sovereignty and Chilean interests…Aligning ourselves with Russia would leave us isolated
and alone in America. Although we presently remain surrounded by friends, this could change.
Internal upheavals, which frequently occur, could dig up old, revanchist policies [in Peru,
Bolivia, or Argentina], which could jeopardize our territorial integrity.233
González, who said he pounded his fist on the table to emphasize his feelings, told them that he
was instructing Vergara to vote for the Rio Pact at the Brazilian conference. The president would even
support calls for creating a regional armed forces under a unified command. He hoped "this would help
put an end to the arms race which has weighed heavily on progress and wellbeing" in Latin America.
Fonseca and Pontigo stormed out.234
According to the PCCh, González had betrayed the Democratic Alliance's electoral program
and then unreasonably expected the party to follow his leadership after this. Fonseca told the president
that Chilean communists only gave their unconditional loyalty "to the people, to the program we have
sworn to complete," and not to anyone else. "President González Videla did not want to fight the right,
and he did not want to face either the landowning oligarchy or imperialism, either. He did not want to
complete the program." The president had, moreover, sabotaged communists' work. The PCCh's "only
'crime' had been its struggle to duly complete its program."235
This crisis derived from González's poor leadership, the PCCh's zealous and intransigent
commitment to the Democratic Alliance's program, its renewed, post-Browder militancy toward
bourgeois society, and the larger mutual misunderstanding and mistrust that affected many within the
global context of the unfolding Cold War. The president's leftist leanings notwithstanding, he remained
a mercurial power-seeker who kept his options open. He treated any alliances, coalitions, or campaign
promises he entered into not only as flexible and revisable but, if necessary, expendable. Thus he
bargained away key parts of the alliance's program without even looking back because this enabled him
233
Ibid., 603-605.
Ibid.
235
PCCh, Fonseca, 151-153.
234
102
to gain the Liberal support he required to win the presidency, his true objective. He failed to understand
that Chilean communists were not enlisting in his campaign inasmuch as they believed that he was
submitting to their program, and this -- rather than any foreign intervention -- explains the origin of the
problems that plagued their relations beginning in December 1946.
Further, the PCCh misread not only González but the entire situation as well. Communist
leaders did this because they were only willing and able to interpret world affairs and Chilean realities
through Moscow's party line and Marxist-Leninist dogma. González discarded the Democratic
Alliance's promise to reform the countryside because Liberals, and not the United States government or
American business interests, had pressed him to do so. Liberals represented Chilean landowners' own
deeply-entrenched interests, which long predated the Cold War, and they deftly exploited the
opportunity González's electoral weakness presented them to protect these interests in September and
October 1946.
The Truman administration barely noticed González and the PCCh in 1946 and most of 1947 -and when it did, it offered encouragement, not pressure. The first contact between the two governments
occurred when Truman sent Leahy to Santiago to attend González's inauguration. González brought up
the issue of communist participation in his cabinet, because Leahy had said nothing about it, and the
president wanted to clear the air. When González finished explaining how he expected the PCCh to
support his government just as the French Communist Party was supporting its government across the
Atlantic, the admiral replied that "President Truman asked me to represent him at your inauguration
because he knows of our friendship, and he thought that it would be agreeable for you to hear directly
from me his wishes for the success of your government and his sincere and disinterested offer to
cooperate in the task in which you have engaged to achieve the prosperity of Chile."236
González and Leahy continued this conversation after the admiral returned to Washington.
González wrote that he intended "to transform the semicolonial economy in which we were living into
a highly industrialized one." And Leahy told him that Truman had said that he found this "realistic and
just."237
The Truman administration's foreign policy did become increasingly anti-Soviet and
anticommunist, first in the Mediterranean and then in Western Europe after March 1947. The United
236
Cited in González, Memorias I: 519-520.
Cited in Ibid.
237
103
States intervened in Greece and Turkey and began promoting the Marshall Plan. But Washington was
only starting to fight the Cold War in 1946 and 1947. The American government did not pass the
National Security Act, creating the National Security Council (NSC), the Department of Defense
(DOD), and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) until September 1947 -- and these departments and
agencies would remain disorganized and in a state of bureaucratic turf wars for several years to come.
Truman intervene in European politics, but only on a hasty, improvised basis, beginning in Italy in
December 1947. He did not start systematically intervening in France, Italy, and Eastern Europe until
after the Czechoslovakian coup in spring 1948 -- and even this remained small-scale until the Korean
War commenced in summer 1950.
Thus the Truman administration did not intervene in Chilean affairs from the end of the Second
World War through September 1947; the president's attention was riveted on other events, elsewhere.
The United States was never the only, or the most fervent, source of anticommunism in the western
hemisphere -- any more than the Soviet Union represented the only or the most intense communist
voice in Europe during the Cold War. As Huneeus found and as this chapter has reconfirmed, then,
Chilean politics and not American policy accounts for the rise and fall of the Democratic Alliance, and
Chilean politics explains González's anticommunism as well.
These Chilean problems, moreover, did not occur within an inter-American vacuum. Both
González and the PCCh were aware of, and, as the following chapter will show, increasingly entangled
within, the Atlantic world and its conflicts. And these transatlantic politics would become even more
interrelated, and they would indeed worsen, between September 1947 and September 1948.
104
V. The Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy
The Chilean and Brazilian governments banned communism, broke relations with the Soviet
Union (USSR), and joined the Cold War in 1947 and 1948. Chilean President Gabriel González Videla
(1946-1952) attempted to convince the entire inter-American community of nations to follow his lead
in this. But, failing to persuade most of the other governments, he settled instead for an anticommunist
resolution at the inter-American conference in Bogota in April 1948.
The Soviets, Eastern European communists, and the Latin American left, including the Chilean
Communist Party (PCCh), alleged that the United States remained responsible for all of this, to which
Santiago and Rio objected. Chilean Foreign Minister Germán Vergara Donoso, for example,
"energetically rejected" these charges. His government had acted "in absolute independence."238
Historians have long overruled Vergara and his colleagues' objections. Most Latin Americanists
continue to contextualize the Chilean and Brazilian governments' anticommunism within a strictly
inter-American framework, where the United States government, and behind it, Wall Street, suppressed
Latin Americans' democratic spring to ensure its political and economic dominance there in the late1940s. According to Carmelo Furci, González, "under pressure from US imperialism, was in reality
only waiting for an occasion to crush the PCCh." In Margaret Power's estimation, "The 1948 outlawing
of the Chilean Communist Party provides one example of how the U.S. government used its economic
power to influence internal Chilean politics." Lubna Qureshi wrote that the president turned against the
PCCh "to please his patrons in Washington."239
Jody Pavilack, to cite another example, recently published a path-breaking history of Chilean
miners from the Popular Front period to the early Cold War. This dissertation supports and elaborates
some of Pavilack's arguments, especially her insight that "the myth of smooth, peaceful Chilean
238
Germán Vergara Donoso, "Discurso del ministro de relaciones exteriores," 28 October 1947. Reprinted in
Gabriel González Videla, Memorias 2 vols. (Santiago de Chile: Editora Nacional Gabriela Mistral, 1975) II: 1428.
239
Carmelo Furci, The Chilean Communist Party and the Road to Socialism (London: Zed Books, 1984), 63;
Margaret Power, Right-Wing Women in Chile: Feminine Power and the Struggle against Allende, 1964-1973 (University
Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 39; and Lubna Qureshi, Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende: U.S. Involvement
in the 1973 Coup in Chile [2009] (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2010), 22. For the United States' suppressing Latin
America's democratic spring, see Daniela Spenser, "Standing Conventional Cold War History on Its Head," in Gilbert
Joseph and Daniela Spenser, eds., In from the Cold: Latin America's New Encounter with the Cold War (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2008), 382; and Leslie Bethell and Ian Roxborough, "The Impact of the Cold War on Latin America," in
Melvyn Leffler and David Painter, eds., Origins of the Cold War: An International History [1994], 2d ed. (New York:
Routledge, 2005), 299-316.
105
democracy up to 1973" was wrong. As she found, "the real story…was far more jagged." But Pavilack,
echoing the others, above, also wrote that González's alliance with the PCCh "provoked strong
opposition" in the United States in 1946, and that "the Chilean government acquiesced to U.S.
pressure" when it turned against the party and the labor movement in 1947 and 1948.240
The Truman administration (1945-1953), however, did not intervene in Chilean politics, and it
did not oppose González or subject him to any pressure, either. As Tanya Harmer has suggested,
historians will find no more than part of the explanation in American foreign policy, in any event. They
must investigate the relations between the left and right on the ground in Chile, too.241
González and the Liberal party, not the Truman administration, had undermined the PCCh's
hopes to achieve a bourgeois revolution through their backroom dealings during the period that
preceded the congressional run-off election in September and October 1946. Chilean landowners'
entrenched interests in the countryside, combined with the president's overriding ambition to win high
office, accounted for what Chilean communists interpreted as González's treachery. The president and
the PCCh's relations deteriorated further as it became clear that each was choosing a different side in
the emerging Cold War. This turned into open conflict after communists launched bus strikes against
the government in June 1947. González formed his third cabinet in response, instructing it to confront
and defeat what he referred to as the Soviet Union and PCCh's subversive activities in Chile that July
and August.
This chapter reconstructs González and the PCCh's estrangement, between September 1947 and
the president's Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy, which proscribed communism, in
September 1948 -- and it does this within an Atlantic rather than inter-American framework. As the
chapter will show, neither the Truman administration's National Security Council (NSC) nor the
Department of State's Policy Planning Staff or the department's Latin American affairs division -- the
United States government's three principal authors of Latin American policy after 1947 -- agreed with
González that Soviets, Yugoslavs, or others from the still-nascent Eastern Bloc were intervening in
Chile or elsewhere in southern South America. Indeed, neither Truman nor any of his advisors regarded
Latin America as a Cold War zone, and they remained particularly wary of the region's more virulent
anticommunists until they left office.
240
Jody Pavilack, Mining for the Nation: The Politics of Chile's Coal Communities from the Popular Front to the
Cold War (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011), 24, 254, 339, 348.
241
See Tanya Harmer, review of Qureshi, Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende. H-Diplo, H-Net Reviews. October, 2011.
106
This chapter broadens and deepens the United States and Chile's Cold War experience, which
remains this dissertation's primary purpose. This history remains part of a single, transatlantic, worldhistorical pattern in the late-1940s. Chilean and European events -- for example, Chilean miners' strikes
in October 1947, the Czechoslovakian coup in February 1948, and González's anticommunist law -- all
occurred within this interrelated, Atlantic-wide process of action and reaction that created and
cultivated the whole Cold War.
The Superpower Conflict and Chile in September 1947
Soviet-American and European tensions had dramatically increased in the months before
September 1947. Secretary of State General George Marshall created the Policy Planning Staff to
introduce long-term, strategic thinking in the Department of State, and the secretary named George
Kennan its first director that May. Kennan, while settling into his new position, published "The Sources
of Soviet Conduct" in Foreign Affairs. It reflected a further hardening of the American position vis-àvis the Soviet Union.
According to Kennan, the Soviet government had constructed oppressive military and internal
security institutions at the expense of developing social and economic life inside the USSR. Its citizens
not only lacked basic freedoms and human rights, but also sufficient housing, transportation, and
consumer goods. This, combined with the Second World War, had left the Soviet people physically
exhausted and psychologically demoralized. Kennan believed that the Kremlin, having sown the seeds
of its own destruction at home, was compelled to focus its efforts abroad, lest the revolution lose its
momentum and collapse from within.
Kennan thus advised the Truman administration to contain the Soviet Union, "by the adroit and
vigilant application of counter-force at a series of constantly shifting geographical and political points,
corresponding to the shifts and manoeuvres of Soviet policy" until Moscow's ideological fervor
mellowed and the Kremlin adopted a more reasonable foreign policy. He believed this mellowing was
inevitable, and that it would occur within the next ten to fifteen years. Soviets had overextended
themselves in Eastern Europe, where they continued to garrison large numbers of forces, and this
would only strengthen Eastern Europeans' resentments against the USSR as time passed.242
242
X [George Kennan], "The Sources of Soviet Conduct," Foreign Affairs 25 (1947), 576.
107
Dictator Joseph Stalin's (1924-1953) position hardened, too, during these months. He was
fuming over the Marshall Plan when he reassembled the Comintern, now called the Communist
Information Bureau, or "Cominform," in September 1947. He headquartered it in Belgrade, Yugoslavia.
The Cominform's purpose remained the same as its predecessor's: to subordinate European and other
communist parties to Moscow, which would coordinate their policies and activities. One of Stalin's
deputies, Andrei Zhdanov, best reflected the USSR's emerging hardline position at the Cominform's
founding meeting. He divided the world into "two camps." The reactionary United States and its allies
in Western Europe represented imperialism and the continuation of fascism while the Soviet Union and
Eastern Europe stood for democracy.243
The French and Italian governments had ejected communists from their ranks in May, in an
early skirmish between these two camps. The communist parties there had acted too aggressively on
their own, precipitating the conflicts that led to these expulsions. Stalin had wanted them to remain on
the inside, but this was no longer possible. Zhdanov thus urged French and Italian communists, now on
the outside, to challenge their country's bourgeois power structures. Communist-directed agitation and
labor unrest ensued in both countries.
Stalin's problems also extended into the Balkans, where Yugoslavia's Marshal Josip Broz Tito
(1945-1980) was constructing a Yugoslav-led confederation. Tito had already reached beyond
Yugoslavia's borders and claimed Trieste, in Italy. He wanted Albania as well. He began encouraging
Greek communists to fight a guerrilla war against the British-backed government in Athens, too. Stalin
feared this fighting in Greece would needlessly antagonize Britain and the United States, and it led to
sharp disagreements between Moscow and Belgrade. Stalin eventually expelled Tito from the
Cominform and the international communist movement, accusing him of counterrevolutionary
Trotskyism and nationalism, in June 1948.244
Meanwhile, González addressed the Rotary Club in Santiago the same month Zhdanov spoke
before the Cominform. The president, like Stalin's deputy, saw the world dividing into two parts, but he
243
Andrei Zhdanov, "Report on the International Situation," September 1947. Reprinted in Robert Daniels, ed., A
Documentary History of Communism and the World: From Revolution to Collapse (Hanover: University Press of New
England, 1994), 107-110.
244
Communist Information Bureau, "Concerning the Situation in the Communist Party of Yugoslavia," 28 June
1948. Reprinted in Daniels, Documentary History of Communism, 114-116; and the Central Committee of the Communist
Party of Yugoslavia's reply, dated 29 June 1948. Reprinted in Ibid., 116-117. Also see Silvio Pons, "Stalin and the Italian
Communists," in Leffler and Painter, Origins of the Cold War, 205-220; Thanasis Sfikas, "The Greek Civil War," in Ibid.,
134-152; John Lewis Gaddis, We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 4043, 46-49.
108
used different terms to describe it: "Asiatic Russia" was denying human and personal liberties, and
"Anglo-Saxons" were protecting them. González remained determined that Chileans should align
themselves with the latter. The president lamented that although the PCCh had helped him win office
the previous year, and that he had consequently felt honor-bound to invite them into his cabinet,
communists had chosen the Asiatic-Russian side, and because of this choice he was finished with them.
He became even more certain of this the following month.245
The Coal Strikes
González expected that his government would face further PCCh-directed labor confrontations
after the bus strikes in June 1947. Chilean communists commanded particularly strong positions in the
coal mining region -- especially in Lota and Coronel, which Chilean entrepreneurs had discovered,
developed, owned, and operated since the mid-nineteenth century -- and the president realized they
could use this to paralyze the country's economy. He started rationing coal, since his administration
possessed very little reserves in those winter months. González also asked for additional coal shipments
from the United States. But his requests received little attention in Washington until approximately
18,000 miners closed the mines and the president declared a state of emergency on 4 October.246
González, most noncommunist parties in Chile, the Chilean armed forces, and American
Ambassador Claude Bowers remained convinced that the Soviet Union and the PCCh's politics, and not
Chilean miners' grievances concerning pay and benefits, explained these strikes. The president
perceived them as "part of a larger Soviet plan to be simultaneously applied in France, Czechoslovakia,
and several Latin American nations," commencing in Chile. And he insisted that their continuance,
even after he had negotiated wage increases over and above union demands, proved this.247
Bowers concurred with González's views in his cables to Washington. "Issue raised in Chile by
Communist coal strike," he reported, "is now on purely political ground and should be so considered.
Our war with Communists is on two fronts, Europe and South America."248
245
Claude Bowers to Department of State, 17 September 1947. Reprinted in Department of State, Foreign Relations
of the United States 1947 VIII: The American Republics (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1972), 499-500.
246
Bowers to Department of State, 11 June 1947. Reprinted in Department of State, FRUS 1947 VIII: The American
Republics, 497.
247
González, Memorias I: 707.
248
Bowers to Department of State, 9 October 1947. Reprinted in Department of State, FRUS 1947 VIII: The
American Republics, 504-505. Also see Claude Bowers, Chile through Embassy Windows, 1939-1953 [1958] (Westport:
109
The PCCh rejected this, insisting that González's response to the strikes represented an
expression of American imperialism and class warfare. Pavilack, who studied these strikes from the
miners' perspective, has further elaborated this interpretation. She argued that these work stoppages
were economically rather than politically motivated. She cited PCCh Councilwoman Eusebia Torres
Cerna, from Coronel, who said that they had originated with "pressing bread-and-butter issues,
especially the high price of basic goods," and a breakdown in management-labor relations that had
worsened for several weeks before the crisis. González, submitting to American pressure, had chosen to
mischaracterize the strikes as threats to national security to make his decision to dispatch the armed
forces to quell them appear justified.249
These conflicting narratives evolved into angry exchanges in the Chilean Congress the week
after the strikes began. The left, including not only PCCh Secretary General Ricardo Fonseca and
Senators Carlos Contreras Labarca and Pablo Neruda, but Socialist Senator Marmaduke Grove, too,
questioned González's motives and assailed the United States. Fonseca, communists' spokesman in the
Chamber of Deputies, fired the first barrage.
The cause of these attacks remains the brutal and ill-tempered expansive character of
imperialist capital in the United States, which mocks the freedom of the press, which deprives
more than ten million blacks of their rights, which shamelessly practices racial discrimination
and lynch law, which organizes the slavery of the labor movement through the Taft-Hartley
Act, which brutally exploits the colonial and semi-colonial countries, and which now, with an
arms industry enriched through war, is seeking world domination and the subjugation of all
countries to the needs of its industries, businesses, and banks...It is unleashing a new world
war.250
Grove, in the much calmer Senate, asked why González could not have settled this dispute
without resorting to military force. Why, the senator asked, had he and his colleagues only just learned
that the president had secured pay raises from the companies? Neruda seconded him: No one had
known about any of this until it was too late.251
This prompted Conservative Senator Manuel Muñoz Cornejo to retort that he accepted the
Greenwood Press, 1977), 166-167.
249
Pavilack, Mining for the Nation, 270. No one has characterized the strikes as expressions of nationalist
resentment against foreign-controlled mining activities. Chilean entrepreneurs -- men such as Matías Cousiño, Jorge Rojas,
and Federico Schwager -- and not American-based transnational corporations had discovered, developed, owned, and
operated the coal mines in Lota and Coronel since the mid-nineteenth century.
250
Cited in Partido Comunista de Chile, Ricardo Fonseca, combatiente ejemplar (Santiago de Chile: Talleres
Gráficos Lautaro, 1952), 160.
251
Cited in Leonidas Aguirre Silva, ed., Discursos parlamentarios de Pablo Neruda (1945-1948) [1996] (Santiago
de Chile: Editorial Antártica, 1997), 188-189.
110
González administration's explanations. He suggested that miners' rejection of the pay raises revealed
the international communist movement's strength in Chile. Chilean communists, like their French and
Brazilian counterparts, were showing, once again, that whenever a conflict between "their own
country's government and the Soviet Union occurred, they would side with Moscow." Contreras parried
this: "The traitors, Mr. Senator -- they who have sold the country's riches -- are found in other parties."
And he reminded him that "[Nazi collaborator Pierre] Laval was no communist."252
The strikes and these differing interpretations of them intensified the following week, on 21
October -- and so did González's response. The president had formed his third cabinet that June. As the
previous chapter explained, he invited Rear Admiral Inmanuel Holger and General Guillermo Barrios
Tirado from the high command to serve as ministers of interior and defense, respectively. González's
declaring and then expanding the state of emergency in the mining region had given Holger and Barrios
the legal authority to suspend the constitution and all civil liberties there. This derived from Chile's
autocratic traditions and constitutional practices dating back to the Portalian era in the nineteenth
century.
Thus Holger and Barrios, acting well within these traditions, which had evolved to include the
professional officer corps' institutional anticommunism, too, deployed warships and positioned soldiers
to impose martial law in Lota and Coronel. The army recalled those miners who remained subject to
reserve duty and ordered them to return to work or face court-martial. The army also recruited Indians
and peasants from the south to work in the mines. All went according to plan until 2,000-3,000 workers
on the night shift seized the mines and barricaded themselves in, using explosive charges to repel all
attempts to regain control, early in the morning on 21 October.
The army commander at the mines sent a squad of soldiers to parley with the entrenched
workers. This squad reported that approximately 200 armed communists were employing force to keep
the others inside. The commander used tear gas to get them out and then retake the mines. Thus the
army put down what seems in retrospect to have represented the PCCh's desperate, last-ditch effort in
the mines, but González, Holger, and Barrios were only just beginning.253
The González administration preemptively declared Iquique, another major mining area, this
252
Cited in Ibid.
Pavilack, Mining for the Nation, 293-294; González, Memorias I: 669-675; and Bowers to Department of State,
21 October 1947. Reprinted in Department of State, FRUS 1947 VIII: The American Republics, 511-512. For two examples
of miners' families who complained that the PCCh had employed threats and violence to force their men to strike and
remain inside the mines, see Pavilack, Mining for the Nation, 322, 330.
253
111
one in northern Chile, under martial law as well. When the government alerted the army garrison there
to prepare for action late in the evening on 23 October, Captain Augusto Pinochet, a young officer
stationed there, was among those who responded to the call. Pinochet's unit raided the nitrate towns at
approximately 3:00 the following morning. They arrested communists and suspected communists, and
transported them to detention centers, including Pisagua, an internment camp in the Atacama.254
Next, the González administration aggressively suppressed the PCCh nationwide. The
government began arresting communist leaders, beginning with the central committees inside the areas
under martial law. The government relegated hundreds of them to Pisagua. The president insisted that
he was not turning against Chilean workers. Rather, he was liberating them and the entire country from
the Soviet-controlled PCCh's grip. As he explained to the residents of Lota in the first week of
November, "The Chilean worker is deceived and is serving a foreign power. The communists who work
for this power will be treated as traitors to the fatherland. These communists neither ask for nor will be
given quarter."255
Chile's Cicero
The PCCh did not take this quietly. Neruda, an internationally-acclaimed poet, published "an
intimate letter to millions" in a newspaper in Caracas that November. According to the senator, the
Second World War's horrors were repeating themselves in Chile. He alleged that American imperialists,
including businessmen, the Department of State, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) had
taken control of his country via González. Washington "saturated the country with new FBI agents,
assigning them specifically to direct repressions against the mine workers." And this represented
merely the first step in a larger plan that would eventually lead to "the brutal domination of our
continent." The United States' Latin American quislings would reveal the full extent of this at the
upcoming inter-American conference.256
In Bogotá, these puppets will recount how they have carried out their respective assignments.
254
Augusto Pinochet, Camino recorrido: Biografía de un soldado (Santiago de Chile: Telleres Gráficos del Instituto
Geográfico Militar de Chile, 1990) I: 114-123; and Augusto Pinochet, El día decisivo: 11 de Septiembre de 1973 (Santiago
de Chile: Editorial Andrés Bello, 1979), 23-29.
255
Cited in González, Memorias I: 667-668.
256
Pablo Neruda, "Carta íntima para millones de hombres," El Nacional, 27 November 1947. Reprinted in Matilde
Neruda and Miguel Otero Silva, eds., Passions and Impressions [1978], trans. by Margaret Sayers Peden (New York: Farrar,
Straus, and Giroux, 1983), 276, 281.
112
They will draw the dark net of slavery more closely around our countries. And each of these
dancing dolls will hold as his Bible the Reader's Digest and a police code of torture,
imprisonment, and exile.257
González, Neruda continued, had surrendered "our military defense secrets…to the North
American Military Staff." Then the president had ordered the Chilean armed forces to occupy the
country. The army had in turn imprisoned workers in "concentration camps" surrounded by "Nazi-style
barbed wire," and was perpetrating "genocide" against the Chilean people.258
González petitioned the Supreme Court to impeach Neruda for defaming the office of the
president after he read the senator's letter. Neruda responded in Congress on 6 January. The senator's
speech, "I Accuse," was more similar to Cicero's Philippicae than the Émile Zola letter after which he
had titled it. Neruda reviewed a short history of tyrants and those who had opposed them in nineteenthcentury France, Argentina, and Chile, naming Victor Hugo, Domingo Sarmiento, and Francisco Bilbao.
The senator accused González, by analogy, of tyranny. Then, but without directly saying so, he
portrayed him as a fascist sympathizer and a traitor.259
Neruda went into hiding and then fled into exile after this. He lived clandestinely in Chile for a
year and a half before crossing into Argentina, eventually making his way from there to Paris.
European friends and admirers, including the renowned artist Pablo Picasso, helped him get his affairs
in order there. After Neruda obtained a new Chilean passport, he spent the next several years travelling
in the Soviet Union, India, and the People's Republic of China before returning to Europe. He reentered
Chile in August 1952, where the president, on his way out of office, had pardoned him.260
But before Neruda returned home, he completed and published Canto general, a poetic history
of Latin America from the pre-Columbian era to the mid-twentieth century that he had been writing
since the 1930s. As one literary critic has observed, "The Canto does have a recognizable plot, which
leads from the prehistoric to a finale that pays homage to the Soviet Union and the Communist party,
which appear as the restorers of broken promises."261
Neruda reserved a special place for González, the "Judas" and "miserable mixture of monkey
257
Ibid., 281.
Ibid., 269, 274, 277.
259
Pablo Neruda, "I Accuse," 6 January 1948. Reprinted in Neruda and Otero, Passions and Impressions, 284-307.
260
See Pablo Neruda, Memoirs [1974], trans. by Hardie St. Martin (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Girous, 1977),
258
171-220.
261
Pablo Neruda, Canto general [1950], trans. by Jack Schmitt, introduction by Roberto González Echevarría
(Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1991, 1993, and 2000), 7.
113
and rat, whose tail is combed with a gold pomade on Wall Street" who had broken those promises, in
the Canto.
Gabriel González Videla. Here I leave your name,
so that when time has erased
ignominy, when my country cleans
its face illuminated by wheat and snow,
those who later seek here the heritage
that I leave in these lines like a hot green coal
will also find the name of the traitor who brought
the glass of agony that my people refused.262
González, for his part, later claimed that he had allowed Neruda's flight into exile, explaining
that he had instructed the police "to look for but not to find him." The president wrote that he had not
taken anything that the senator had said personally. Although he respected him as an intellectual, he
found him little more than the Soviet Union's mouthpiece with respect to his politics. González offered
two illustrations of this in his memoirs. First, Neruda had admired and even adored, Stalin until
Secretary General Nikita Khrushchev (1958-1964) denounced him and his cult of personality -- then he
criticized him as "this cruel man who suppresses life and gives orders from atop his statues." Second,
although Neruda initially praised Russian novelist Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, he dismissed it after
Khrushchev and the Politburo expressed their unhappiness with it. Thus González regarded Neruda's
opinions on political and even some cultural matters as simply reflections of Moscow's official views at
any given time. And indeed it remains difficult to find examples showing that Neruda ever diverged
from the Soviet line on politics and international relations.263
González versus the International Communist Movement
González remained not so much preoccupied with "Neruda and his diatribes," as he referred to
it in his memoirs, as with the Cominform, which he saw as the prime mover behind Chile's instability
in late-1947. The president broke relations with Yugoslavia and brusquely sent Belgrade's chargé
d'affaires, Andres Cunja, and several other Yugoslav officials to the Argentine border late in the
evening on 8 October. He explained that these Yugoslavs, working through the Czechoslovakian
chargé, Strantise Cejka, and a Slavic cultural front called the Comité Coordinador Intereslavo en Chile,
262
Pablo Neruda, "González Videla, Chile's Traitor," in Neruda, Canto general, 200-201.
González, Memorias I: 758-765.
263
114
had directed the PCCh to launch the strikes as a test of the Cominform's strength in southern South
America preliminary to establishing a Soviet beachhead there.264
The Cominform's Slavic-based strength in southern South America figured prominently in
Belgrade's planning, Holger reported to Congress. The Slavic community in the region totaled
approximately 140,000 people. This included "an appreciable minority of Polacks, Ukrainians, and
Russian Jews" in Argentina alone.265
Further, Chilean authorities believed that Dalibor Jakasa, a member of the Yugoslav delegation
in Buenos Aires, had traveled to Santiago to instruct Cunja to order the PCCh "to (a) intensify the
campaign against the US and the western democracies, (b) to attack the policy of continental defense,
(c) to carry out sabotage of production through slowing down production or through strikes." Thus
González severed Chile's relations with Yugoslavia just days after the strikes commenced.266
Cavendish Wells Cannon, the American ambassador in Belgrade, cabled that the Yugoslavian
government denied the Chilean government's accusations three days later. Belgrade countered that
Chileans had subjected its officials to "most fantastic abuses." Further, according to the Yugoslavian
Communist Party's newspaper, Borba, "[the] expansionist policy [of] certain powers who are assuming
ever increasing role in [the] direction of Chilean domestic and foreign policy" -- that is, the United
States -- explained these problems. Cannon added, however, that the Chilean government's allegations
supplemented a growing list of complaints the embassy was receiving from other missions in Belgrade,
and they had the ring of truth to them. So Cannon believed it likely that Yugoslavs were using the
Cominform to run a far-reaching network of subversive agents abroad, possibly even in southern South
America.267
The González administration, after some hesitation and internal debate -- Vergara, a
professional foreign service officer and not a politician, was urging the furious president to slow down
264
Robert Woodward to Norman Armour, 8 October 1947. Reprinted in Department of State, FRUS 1947 VIII: The
American Republics, 501-503; and González, Memorias I: 676-687.
265
Inmanuel Holger, "Exposición del ministro del interior," 28 October 1947. Reprinted in González, Memorias II:
1435. CIA analysts also believed that "the USSR has placed particular emphasis on winning over the persons of Slavic
descent now resident in Latin America. The Slavic colony in the River Plate area is unusually large and has been the target
of extensive organization under Soviet direction." CIA, Office of Reports and Estimates, ORE 16/1, "Soviet Objectives in
Latin America," 1 November 1947. Papers of Harry Truman, President's Secretary's Files, Research File: Containment in
Latin America, Box 1, Folder 1. Harry Truman Library, Independence, Missouri.
266
Bowers to Department of State, 8 October 1947. Reprinted in Department of State, FRUS 1947 VIII: The
American Republics, 503-504.
267
Cavendish Wells Cannon to Department of State, 11 October 1947. Reprinted in Ibid., 512-513.
115
-- broke relations with the Soviet Union next, when the strikes escalated on 21 October. The
administration also severed relations with Czechoslovakia. Director General of Investigaciones Luis
Brun D'Avoglio, Chile's bureau of investigation, had been reporting his "clear and inescapable
conclusion" that Cejka had functioned as the Yugoslavian and Soviet embassies' cutout to the PCCh
since September.268
Vergara briefed the press that Friday, 24 October. The Chilean government had broken relations
"with those nations which are the center of Communist international influence." This included
Czechoslovakia because it was "no longer a silver bridge between occidental democracies and Soviet
Russia." Further, if Santiago had had relations with Poland, Romania, or Bulgaria, whose governments
were also implicated, the administration would have severed them, too.269
González sent his cabinet to defend these actions before Congress the following week, on 28
October. Vergara constructed Chilean anticommunists' first comprehensive narrative of the origins of
the Cold War, as it related to his own country's experiences, from the 1920s to 1947. The Comintern,
the foreign minister began, had appeared as a challenge to the international community of nations after
the First World War and the Russian Revolution. Its primary objective remained unifying and leading
the transnational working class to further its global objectives. It neither recognized nor respected
national sovereignty.
According to Vergara, although the Comintern had stopped assaulting the international
community during the Popular Front period and the Second World War, this was misleading. The
international communist movement's alliance with the Western democracies against Nazi Germany,
under the slogan "National Union against Nazifascism," was never more than "a transitory
collaboration." Communists' ideological differences with the international community remained
irreconcilable, he said.270
Vergara reviewed the most prominent recent events that had signaled the international
communist movement's resurgence: the invention of nuclear weapons, problems in Greece, Turkey, and
268
Luis Brun D'Avoglio to González, 22 September, 20 October, 20 October, and 27 October 1947. Reprinted in
González, Memorias II: 1407-1412. Vergara attached the Ministry of Foreign Relations' note to the Soviet ambassador in
Santiago in his speech that explained this to Congress on 28 October. See Vergara, "Discurso del ministro de relaciones
exteriores," 1415-1429.
269
Bowers to Department of State, 21 October 1947. Reprinted in Ibid., 511-512; and Bowers to Department of
State, 24 October 1947. Reprinted in Ibid., 513-514.
270
Vergara, "Discurso del ministro de relaciones exteriores," 1417-1419.
116
Iran, and the Balkans' instability, especially Yugoslav demands for Italian territory. The press of these
events and the division of the world that had followed them remained more than even "the great
President [Franklin] Roosevelt [1933-1945]" could have managed had he survived. Thus "two well
defined groups" emerged after 1945: "the Western democracies and international communism." These
groups followed "different ideologies and opposing political tendencies," and they had "absolutely
disparate ends in mind." This explained, he concluded, why the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia had
created the Cominform and intervened in Chile.271
This Soviet and Yugoslav intervention, Vergara continued, had obliged Chileans to choose
sides. And the González administration had decided that "the Chilean government, following its
traditions, its principles, its blood relations, and its geographic situation, sides with its sister republics
in the Americas and the powers that represent Western civilization and Christianity." The administration
would continue to support inter-American cooperation in hemispheric defense, as most recently
articulated in the Rio Pact, as well.272
The González administration's anticommunist foreign policy -- combined with the Brazilian
government's banning the Brazilian Communist Party and breaking relations with the Soviet Union,
too, which also occurred in October 1947 -- exacerbated the problems then wracking Europe,
particularly inside the precariously balanced democratic and communist Czechoslovakian government.
United States Ambassador Lawrence Steinhardt warned Washington not to underestimate the impact
that González's severing relations with Prague would have on this fragile government. Prime Minister
Klement Gottwald and Vice Minister of Foreign Affairs Vladimir Clementis, both communists, "were
stunned. They have made no effort to conceal their extreme anxiety lest Brazil and Argentina follow
suit."273
González's break also energized Czechoslovakian anticommunists, including Foreign Minister
Jan Masaryk. "Communists in Cabinet," Steinhardt elaborated, "are for the first time in many months
on the defensive. At Cabinet meeting last night anti-Communist leaders made a severe attack on
Communist leaders. They accused them of having sent only Communist diplomatic representatives to
271
Ibid., 1418.
Ibid., 1422, 1428.
273
Lawrence Steinhardt to Department of State, 31 October 1947. Reprinted in Department of State, FRUS 1947
VIII: The American Republics, 514-515. For the Brazilian government's severing relations with the Soviet Union, see "The
Position of the United States with Respect to the Breach in Relations between Brazil and the Soviet Union," in Ibid., 391406.
272
117
South America and insisted that rupture by Chile and what they described as 'probable' rupture by
Brazil and Argentina should be ascribed primarily to these appointments."274
Gottwald, Clements, and other Czechoslovakian communists regained the initiative and seized
power with Soviet support less than four months later, in February 1948. Masaryk either jumped or was
pushed from a window to his death. This worsened Soviet-American relations and hastened the Truman
administration's decision to create a covert operations capability. It contributed to the growing sense of
urgency that led to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) as well.
The Czechoslovakian coup also strengthened González's resolve in Chile. Not only had
Czechoslovakian communists chosen the Soviet Union over their own country, the president observed,
but the Czechoslovakian Communist Party, once it had consolidated its position, "declared itself the
sole party -- no others had the right to exist. Masaryk was murdered and President [Edvard Beneš
(1945-1948)] overthrown by the acts of his own Marxist-Leninist ministers." In González's estimation,
this reaffirmed Moscow's intention to use the PCCh and the Chilean labor movement to transform his
country into a southern South American Czechoslovakia, and it revalidated the president's mistrust of
Chilean communists. He transmitted these very firm attitudes to his colleagues in the inter-American
community via the delegates he sent to Bogotá the following month.275
The Truman Administration's Position
Before turning to Bogotá, it remains necessary to clarify the Truman administration's position
on the Chilean coal strikes and Santiago's break with the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. Moscow
and its allies, including the PCCh, alleged that Truman had directed or at least pressed González to do
everything he had done, both before and after the strikes. Pavilack and other historians have supported
this, but only very weakly, citing Bowers's cables and other reporting from the American embassy in
Santiago, including a memorandum that recorded that a representative from Braden Copper Company
told González that his employer would be pleased to help him request a shipment of coal from the
United States if he would fight Chilean communists in July 1947 -- several months after the president
had already turned against the PCCh. Further, these historians point out that the Truman administration
did arrange to sell more coal than it had originally planned to Chile that October and November. This
274
Ibid.
González, Memorias I: 707. González's emphasis.
275
118
coal must have made powerful leverage, they have reasoned.276
The complete evidentiary record, however, includes the Truman administration's analysis and
actions in Washington, and it leads to a far less sinister interpretation of this coal shipment. First,
Bowers's cables do not reveal that Truman was pressing González about Chilean communism, but
rather that Bowers was pressing the Department of State on Santiago's behalf for coal. This should
hardy surprise historians familiar with the ambassador. He closely identified with the three Chilean
governments to which he was accredited for over ten years. Bowers had been defending Chilean
presidents' views, actions, and/or inactions, and expressing his own frustration with his superiors'
responses to them, since as early as Secretary of State Cordell Hull and others showed their impatience
with Chileans' reluctance to break relations with the Axis powers in January 1942, as described in the
previous chapter.
González began asking Bowers for coal in June 1947. The president escalated his requests,
seeking 100,000 tons of coal each month, beginning in October and continuing through January 1948.
The ambassador's requests became urgent, even frantic, after the strikes commenced, since the Truman
administration was nonresponsive until October. He warned that if the United States failed "to supply
as much coal as possible…[it] will inevitably create the impression here we are indifferent to struggle
now in decisive state…[and] will have serious repercussions, discourage our friends and have bad
effect on armed forces." He also forwarded Vergara's direct appeal for coal, pleading that without
American support, "[the foreign minister] confesses does not know where it will end." Bowers
beseeched his superiors to understand that "The issue is clear as crystal -- Communism or democracy."
But this reflected González and Bowers's thinking in Santiago -- and not Truman or his advisors' views
in Washington.277
Next, although the Truman administration did indeed send the coal, Washington had to
overcome several problems unrelated to Chilean communism before sending it. As Undersecretary of
State Robert Lovett explained to Bowers on 7 October, "possibility obtaining anywhere near 100,000
tons next month extremely remote." The Department of State remained primarily focused on meeting
Europeans' coal needs through the winter, and this had led to reductions in all coal allocations
elsewhere. The undersecretary never mentioned the PCCh ministers and lower-level officials who had
276
Pavilack, Mining for the Nation, 257-258. Pavilack was largely following Brian Loveman, Chile: The Legacy of
Hispanic Capitalism [1979], 3d ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 217-221.
277
Bowers to Department of State, 9 October 1947; and Bowers to Department of State, 13 October 1947. Reprinted
in Department of State, FRUS 1947 VIII: The American Republics, 505-506.
119
already come and gone in González's government. He did promise to take Santiago's coal problem to
"the highest level," however, and he instructed Bowers to send more detailed information on the strikes,
which he knew little about, in the meantime.278
Bowers complied and the Truman administration moved very quickly after this. Senior officials
in the Department of State's Latin American affairs division recommended that the secretary of state
assure González that Washington would find the coal he needed for November and then reassess the
situation in the coming months. Lovett met the Chilean ambassador to the United States, Félix Nieto
del Río, and told him that he believed the administration could find about 90,000 tons. Assistant
Secretary of State for Latin American affairs Norman Armour reported to Marshall that the department
had improved this, arranging to ship approximately 108,000 tons, three days later. The González
administration would still have to pay for the coal, but as Armour explained, the department had
convinced the Export-Import Bank to advance Santiago up to US$4 million on a separate loan strictly
meant to support construction of a new steel mill to help make ends meet in Chile.279
The American intelligence community, moreover, did not perceive actual, manifest Soviet
threats in Latin America at the time. According to the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) first estimate
on the Soviet Union's capabilities and intentions in the region, the USSR remained positioned to use
local communist parties to complicate or disrupt the flow of strategic materials, such as Chilean copper,
to the United States during wartime, should war occur. And most Latin American governments would
not be able to stop this.
This notwithstanding, the CIA continued, the Soviet Union's current influence in Latin America,
as measured by its diminishing diplomatic presence in the region, was generally declining. Moscow
was also investing far less effort and funds in the region than in the past. Local communist parties
would support the USSR's overall objectives, especially in propaganda, but would not likely attempt to
seize power in the foreseeable future because they lacked the strength to do it. The agency cited the
González administration's response to the coal strikes when illustrating this point. The CIA's analysts
disagreed with González, who was characterizing these strikes as an east-west-style show-down against
his government. The agency did not see it that way at all.280
278
Robert Lovett to Bowers, 7 October 1947. Reprinted in Ibid., 501.
Woodward to Norman Armour, 8 October 1947; Lovett to Bowers, 14 October 1947. Department of State, FRUS
1947 VIII: The American Republics, 508-509; and Armour to Marshall, 17 October 1947. Reprinted in Ibid., 509.
280
The CIA, unfortunately, did not further elaborate this. CIA, "Soviet Objectives in Latin America."
279
120
Although the Army and Air Force's intelligence branches essentially agreed with the CIA, both
the Department of State and the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) found the agency's opinions on the
Soviet threat "exaggerated." Naval Intelligence, for example, conceded that "Soviet objectives in Latin
America are to deny strategic materials to the US in time of war." But its analysts believed "that the
realization of this objective is remote if not impossible," and it faulted the CIA for failing to
acknowledge this.281
So Truman was not receiving alarming reports about the Soviets in Chile or about Chilean
communism, either, and neither Lovett nor Armour was instructing Bowers to press González to turn
against Chilean communists and the labor movement. Both González and Bowers vigorously denied
the Soviet Union and the PCCh's allegations to the contrary in their memoirs. Political scientist Carlos
Huneeus has supported these denials in his history of the González administration's anticommunism as
well. The Truman administration and González's different interpretations of the Soviet threat in Latin
America became even clearer in Bogotá.282
Bogotá
Truman and González's differing agendas at the inter-American conference in Bogotá
demonstrate that Chilean and other Latin American anticommunists were much more concerned, and
assertive, than the United States with respect to communism in the western hemisphere in the late1940s. The Truman administration remained primarily focused on further reifying the international
system that the Roosevelt administration had committed the United States to in the Atlantic Charter in
1941. He reaffirmed this at the international conference that created the United Nations (UN) in San
Francisco in 1945, at the Bretton Woods conferences on global finance through 1947, and again in
281
"Dissent of the Office of Naval Intelligence, Navy Department," attached to Ibid. The American intelligence
community remained divided and engaged in bitter turf wars until Truman appointed Lieutenant General Walter Bedell
Smith director of central intelligence after the Korean War began in 1950. Bedell Smith created the national intelligence
system, and the community finally spoke in a unified voice when summarizing world affairs to the president, but not until
February 1951. Bedell Smith sent Truman a current intelligence report that month, and the president praised the director for
"hitting the jackpot." See Walter Bedell Smith to Harry Truman, 28 February 1951. Reprinted in Department of State,
Foreign Relations of the United States 1950-1955: The Intelligence Community, 1950-1955 (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 2007), document 53; and Truman to Bedell Smith, 8 March 1951. Reprinted in Ibid., document 55. For a
fuller discussion, see Ludwell Lee Montague, General Walter Bedell Smith as Director of Central Intelligence, October
1950-February 1953 [1971] (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1992); and Arthur Darling, Central
Intelligence Agency: An Instrument for Government to 1950 [1953] (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press,
1990).
282
Carlos Huneeus, La guerra fría chilena: Gabriel González Videla y la ley maldita (Santiago de Chile: Random
House Mondadori, 2008), 117; Bowers, Chile through Embassy Windows, 158-175; and González, Memorias I: 461-765.
121
Bogotá in 1948.
Lovett summarized the inter-American system's history, from the first Pan-American
conference in 1889 to Bogota, when he submitted the Organization of American States' (OAS) charter
to the president who, in turn, transmitted it to the Senate for ratification, in December 1948. The interAmerican community of nations had convened several times since that first meeting, where it had
created a commercial bureau and then formed many other cooperative relationships treating such issues
as extradition, fishing rights, and international mail. This had continued evolving in the decades since.
But this remained a loose collection of individual resolutions and treaties with different combinations
of signatories and ratifications.
Bogotá represented not only a culmination of this history but a reorganizing and streamlining of
these resolutions and treaties into a single system, centralized in the OAS. The new organization's
charter provided, Lovett told Truman, "a framework, on a treaty basis, for cooperation among the
American states in practically all their relations with each other, and in their relationship as a group
with the United Nations." The Atlantic Charter and the founding of the UN had helped motivate the
inter-American community to do this. The community had held multilateral discussions in Washington,
Mexico City, and Rio during and immediately after the war to prepare for it.283
Bogotá had deep roots, going back to the liberator Simón Bolívar's dreams of a Latin American
confederation and continuing through the nineteenth century, as the second chapter illustrated. As that
chapter also showed, the inter-American community of nations had even deeper roots than this,
reaching back through the Atlantic revolutions and the Enlightenment to the international system that
had gradually arisen since the Peace of Westphalia in the mid-seventeenth century. The Cold War's
emergence, however, like other global conflicts before it, from the Napoleonic wars to the Second
World War, complicated this. The Soviet Union, following a Marxist worldview, rejected it as a
bourgeois-imperialist front, which it intended to overthrow and supplant with its Marxist-Leninist
version of a more just world order and society.
283
Lovett to Truman, 31 December 1948. Reprinted in Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States
1948 IX: The Western Hemisphere (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1972), 71. For the OAS charter, see
Ninth International Conference of American States, "Charter of the Organization of American States." Reprinted in
Department of State, Department of State Bulletin 18 (23 May 1948): 666-673. On the Chapultepec and Rio agreements, see
Inter-American Conference on Problems of War and Peace, "Act of Chapultepec," 6 March 1945. Reprinted Robert Burr
and Roland Hussey, eds., Documents on Inter-American Cooperation II: 1881-1948 (Philadelphia: University of
Philadelphia Press, 1955), 158-161; and Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of Continental Peace and Security,
"Inter-American Treaty of Reciprocal Assistance," 2 September 1947. Reprinted in Burr and Hussey, eds., Documents on
Inter-American Cooperation II, 171-176.
122
Truman had described Washington's frustration with this to his Latin American colleagues at
Rio in September 1947. "The people of the United States engaged in the recent war in the deep faith
that we were opening the way to a free world, and that out of the terrible suffering caused by the war
something better would emerge than the world had known before. The postwar era, however, has
brought us bitter disappointment." The president explained the United States' increasing involvement in
Europe, especially the Marshall Plan, to an understanding audience that nevertheless felt let down.
Washington's resources remained limited, he reported, and further conversations on American
investment in Latin America would have to wait.284
This discussion on regional development, the economy, and trade represented one of "four
major tasks" that Marshall, who led the United States delegation to Bogotá, studied before attending the
conference. These four tasks included the inter-American system's organization, financial cooperation,
regional arbitration, and several other sub-regional issues. These sub-regional issues ranged from the
status of the remaining European colonies in the Caribbean to questions Guatemalans had posed
whether the inter-American community should deny recognition to dictatorial regimes.285
The first two tasks -- the inter-American system's reorganization and Latin American
development -- remained at the top of Marshall's agenda. The OAS charter enjoyed broad support
within the inter-American community and passed. The second task, as the secretary recognized,
represented the major disagreement between the United States and the Latin American republics.
The Truman administration, increasingly bogged down in Europe, and soon in East Asia as
well, advised Latin Americans to cultivate an environment that would attract private investment in their
economies, and suggested that they use those investments to develop their countries. Washington was
willing to increase multilateral lending, mostly to purchase imports. But it preferred to approach each
nation's issues bilaterally rather than the region as a whole.
Latin Americans wanted the United States to recognize that postwar developmental and
reconstruction aid represented the same thing. They sought large-scale American financial and
technical assistance in the region's industrialization and at least some restructuring of US-Latin
American trade relations as a whole, too. These differences would continue to plague inter-American
284
Harry Truman, "Address before the Rio de Janeiro Inter-American Conference for the Maintenance of
Continental Peace and Security," 2 September 1947, available at http://www.trumanlibrary.org.
285
George Marshall to US ambassadors in Latin America, 9 March 1948. Reprinted in Department of State, FRUS
1948 IX: The Western Hemisphere, 11-16.
123
relations in the coming decades.286
The third task, regional arbitration, had been building momentum since the 1880s and 1900s,
when the United States, Colombian, and Mexican governments started proposing it, as outlined in
previous chapters. And the fourth, miscellaneous, task included several sub-regional and local problems
that some governments had brought to the conference. The Ecuadoran government, for example, had
proposed that the inter-American community agree to eliminate de facto recognition, and the
Guatemalan government wanted it to go further and deny recognition to "anti-democratic" regimes,
such as Rafael Leonidas Trujillo's (1930-1961) dictatorship in the Dominican Republic and the Somoza
dynasty (1933-1979) in Nicaragua.
Kennan clarified Washington's recognition policy worldwide. He recommended that the United
States should continue de facto recognition practices in general, but it should also reserve the right to
withhold recognition if the circumstances warranted it in certain specific cases. Most Latin American
governments reached similar conclusions, and Quito and Guatemala City's proposals gained little
backing in Bogotá.287
Kennan also considered how Marshall should respond to Latin Americans' proposed
anticommunist measures, which was not in the secretary's agenda. Multiple Latin American
governments -- the Dominican Republic, Argentina, and Chile, for example -- suggested adding
anticommunism to the agenda in the weeks before the conference and again in the gathering's first
days. US Ambassador Willard Beaulac reported that Chilean delegates were "taking lead for strong
action" in private discussions, attempting to cultivate other governments' support.288
Marshall acknowledged this at the preliminary session in Bogotá. The secretary asked "whether
present agenda permits discussion problems foreign-inspired subversive activities directed against
institutions and peace and security American republics stating he was told that this was subject of
considerable concern to countries represented." All voted in favor of placing anticommunism on the
conference's agenda, and thus it appeared on the agenda. Marshall had to defend this, clarifying that it
was not true, as some had already begun alleging in the press, "that US energetically soliciting support
286
See Ibid.; Marshall to US ambassadors in Latin America, 26 November 1948. Reprinted in Ibid., 73-74; and
Marshall to US ambassadors in Latin America. Reprinted in Ibid., 74-75. Also see Stephen Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin
America: The Foreign Policy of Anticommunism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 6-25, 64-99.
287
Policy Planning Staff, PPS/24, "To Establish the Policy of the Department Regarding the Recognition of New
Governments," 15 March 1948. Reprinted in Ibid., 17-21.
288
Willard Beaulac to Department of State, 4 April 1948. Reprinted in Ibid., 31-32.
124
predetermined plan for strong anti-Communist action."289
This exploded before the discussions had gone much further. An anonymous assassin murdered
Colombian Liberal leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, who some expected to become the next president, in the
afternoon on 9 April. People in the streets shouted "¡Mataron a Gaitán!" -- They have killed Gaitán!
This meant that they blamed Conservative President Mariano Ospina Pérez (1946-1950) and his party.
They rose in anger, killed the assassin, stripped his corpse, dragged it to the presidential palace, and
hanged it there within minutes. Others seized Bogotá's radio stations and called for a major uprising,
initiating violent riots all over the city that night. This incident -- called the bogotazo -- derived from
Conservatives and Liberals' older rivalries, and it inaugurated more than a decade of bloody civil war
known as "la violencia." It claimed approximately 200,000 lives before it receded.290
Meanwhile, the bogotazo threatened to disrupt the inter-American meeting. The Colombian
army imposed martial law the evening the riots commenced. But the rioting and residual urban fighting
swept through Bogotá like a war. As Major Vernon Walters (USA), who was translating for Marshall,
recalled, "The damage and vandalism in the city were beyond belief. Bogotá looked as if it had been
through a major air raid." All delegations withdrew to Marco Antonio Batres's residence -- he was the
acting presiding officer -- and decided to remain in Colombia.291
Many agreed with Marshall, who interpreted the bogotazo as a pre-planned Soviet move "to
sabotage conference and affect ERP [the Marshall Plan] and Italian election and that Colombian
Government has suffered as consequence." Rioters had seized all of Bogotá's radio stations too quickly,
and begun broadcasting calls for revolution that were too well coordinated, to have been a simple,
spontaneous response to Gaitán's murder, some reasoned. Lovett, back in Washington, told Marshall
289
Marshall to Department of State, 30 March 1948. Reprinted in Ibid., 23-24; and Beaulac to Department of State,
4 April 1948.
290
Beaulac to Department of State, 9 April 1948. Reprinted in Ibid., 39. Also see Herbert Braun, The Assassination
of Gaitán: Public Life and Urban Violence in Colombia (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 132-199; and
Vernon Walters, Silent Missions (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1978), 150-169. Gaitán, as a man of the people,
trekked the streets of Bogotá every day in a routine apparently everyone knew. He walked to his law offices, arriving at
approximately 8:30 a.m., remaining there until just after noon. He lunched between 1:00 and 1:30 p.m., either in one of the
city's restaurants or at home, before returning to his offices no later than 3:00 p.m., where he worked into the evening before
walking home again. His murderer appears in the historical record as a man with a handgun in control of himself, but with
hatred in his eyes, who told the police minutes after shooting Gaitán, and minutes before being killed himself by an angry
crowd, that "powerful things that I can't tell you, oh, Virgin of Carmen, save me!" explained why he had done this. Cited in
Braun, Assassination of Gaitán, 135. Walters recalled learning after the conference that "Gaitán had been assassinated by a
mentally deficient individual not acting from any particular political or economic motivation." Walters, Silent Missions, 168.
291
Marshall to Department of State, 10 April 1948. Reprinted in Ibid., 39-40; and Beaulac to Department of State,
11 April 1948. Reprinted in Ibid., 42.
125
that Congressional pressure was building that the meeting should break. The delegates should return to
their home countries and then "do something about it." The secretary rejected this and remained in
Bogotá.292
No one wanted to do something about the bogotazo, or "The communist 'putsch' in Bogotá,"
more than González. The president had already instructed the Chilean delegation "to reveal to the
people of America the Communist Party's betrayal of my government." He was convinced that the
Soviets -- with whom the Colombian government now broke relations -- had directed Colombian
communists to upset the conference and prevent its passing hemispheric anticommunist measures in
solidarity with Chile, which remained, in his view, the meeting's most important objective.293
Thus Americans and Chileans reversed roles in Bogotá. The United States had pressed the interAmerican community to sever relations with the Axis powers, but encountered Argentine- and Chileanled resistance, in January 1942. The Roosevelt administration had to settle for a non-binding resolution.
Now, the González administration was pressing the community to pass a tough anticommunist
agreement, but was finding American resistance. Not only was the Truman administration not breaking
relations with the Soviet or Eastern European governments, or proposing that any other nation do so,
but Kennan was recommending that Marshall "should not enter into anti-Communist agreements with
the other American Republics, and should oppose a multilateral inter-American anti-Communist
agreement," too.294
Kennan had opined that Latin American communism remained "a potential danger, but that,
with a few possible exceptions, it is not seriously dangerous at the present time." This assessment could
change, should communists gain power in France or Italy. This might enable the international
communist movement to exert much influence in the region, where poverty, ignorance, and reactionary
forces -- large landowners and the armed forces -- tended to alienate large segments of the population.
These reactionary forces' anticommunism often targeted "all political opposition…with the inevitable
result of driving leftist elements into the hands of the Communist organization." Kennan hoped that a
new middle class and noncommunist left might emerge and stabilize this in the near future. Meanwhile,
292
Beaulac to Department of State, 12 April 1948. Reprinted in Ibid., 42-43; Lovett to Marshall, 19 April 1948.
Reprinted in Ibid., 49; and Marshall to Lovett, 20 April 1948. Reprinted in Ibid., 53. Also see Walters, Silent Missions, 156.
293
González, Memorias I: 723-726.
294
Policy Planning Staff, PPS-26, "To Establish U.S. Policy Regarding Anti-Communist Measures Which Could Be
Planned and Carried out within the Inter-American System," 22 March 1949. Reprinted in Department of State, FRUS 1948
IX: The Western Hemisphere, 194-201.
126
the United States should decline to enter any anticommunist agreements in Latin America. Marshall
endorsed Kennan's paper and forwarded it to all American ambassadors in the region.295
Marshall, with Brazilian help, redirected Chilean and other Latin American anticommunists'
energies into an anticommunist resolution in Bogotá. This resolution declared communism
"incompatible with the concept of American freedom, which rests upon…the dignity of man as an
individual and the sovereignty of the nation as a state." The inter-American community pledged,
through the resolution, to pass measures within their own countries, responsive to their own situations,
to protect their governments, if and when required. And the community also promised "a full exchange
of information."296
Marshall had to clarify the limits of this full exchange of information several months later.
González wished to establish special liaison relationships within the inter-American community to
collect and share information on communists and their movements within the region and inside each
nation, including information on possible communist-controlled governments in Latin America. The
secretary advised him to remain within "usual diplomatic channels" and he also warned his
ambassadors in the region that "Dept assumes Chile does not contemplate any action which might be
considered unfriendly by other American republics" or might violate the OAS charter. Thus González's
anticommunism remained confined to Chile in 1948.297
González's Law and the United States and Chile's Cold War Experience
The Cold War continued escalating in Europe after Bogotá. Kennan created the Office of Policy
Coordination (OPC), a new covert action capability under joint Department of State-CIA direction, that
May. Kennan personally authorized the OPC's earliest operations, to disrupt communist control over
the French and Italian labor movements, beginning that October. The OPC also surreptitiously
supported the noncommunist left and the Christian Democratic Party in the upcoming Italian elections
while constructing what would become a vast anticommunist propaganda network in Europe.298
295
Marshall to US ambassadors in Latin America, 21 June 1948. Reprinted in Ibid., 193-194; and Policy Planning
Staff, "Policy Regarding Anti-Communist Measures."
296
Final Act of Bogotá, Resolution XXXII, "The Preservation and Defense of Democracy in America." Attached to
Marshall to US ambassadors, 21 June 1948.
297
Marshall to US ambassadors in Latin America, 7 December 1948. Reprinted in Department of State, FRUS 1948
IX: The Western Hemisphere, 204.
298
See George Kennan, "The Inauguration of Organized Political Warfare," 4 May 1948. Reprinted in Department
127
Stalin initiated the Berlin blockade in June 1948. He maintained it for a year. The Soviet Union
test-detonated a nuclear weapon in August 1949, the year Mao Zedong's Chinese Communist Party
seized power in Beijing and the chairman began negotiating a Soviet-Chinese alliance in Moscow. Both
Stalin and Mao supported North Korea's invading South Korea the following year, in June 1950, and a
growing American military intervention in East Asia followed.299
Meanwhile, González aggressively moved "to negate the Chilean section of international
communism…to pry the sheep's clothing off 'the red wolf' and declaw it" after Bogotá. He could not
maintain a state of emergency indefinitely. So he proposed and passed the Law for the Permanent
Defense of Democracy, which became effective in September 1948. It remained the law for the
following decade.300
This law, which Chilean communists have called "la ley maldita," or the accursed law, ever
since, aggressively banned the PCCh's leaders, rank-and-file members, and anyone who may have
supported any of the party's candidates in the past from holding public office and from voting. It forced
communists out of representative and administrative positions within the labor movement, and it
dismissed communist teachers from schools. It denied foreigners who preached communist doctrines
entry into Chile, and it authorized officials to deport those already in the nation as well. It forced the
PCCh underground for the second time in the party's history. It exceeded anything Truman, Marshall,
or Kennan ever had in mind. Indeed, Kennan expressed his concern that "some of the measures
proposed at the Bogotá Conference by other American Republics might be so drastic in nature that they
would, if accepted by the United States, increase international tension, give dictatorial governments in
other countries a means of attacking all opposition, and might even infringe constitutional civil liberties
of State, Foreign Relations of the United States 1945-1950: Emergence of the Intelligence Establishment (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1996), document 269; George Kennan, "Largo," 12 October 1948, Department of State, CIA
Creation Documents, available at http://www.state.gov; George Kennan, "Pikestaff," 14 October 1948, Department of State,
CIA Creation Documents, available at http://www.state.gov; and Unlisted author, "Office of Policy Coordination, 19481952," n.d., available at http://www.foia.cia.gov. Also see Hugh Wilford, The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA Played
America (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); and Evan Thomas, The Very Best Men: The Darling Early Years of
the CIA [1995] (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2006).
299
See Policy Planning Staff, NSC 68, 7 April 1950. Reprinted in Department of State, Foreign Relations of the
United States 1950 I: National Security Affairs; Foreign Economic Policy (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office,
1977), 234-292; Nicholas Thompson, The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the Cold
War (New York: Henry Holt and Company/Picador, 2009), 1-130; Chen Jian, Mao's China and the Cold War (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2001); and Sergei Goncharov, John Lewis, and Xue Litai, Uncertain Partners: Stalin,
Mao, and the Korean War (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993).
300
González, Memorias I: 710. Also see Pavilack, Mining for the Nation, 301-336; Huneeus, Guerra fría chilena,
197-353.
128
in the United States."301
Thus the Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy derived from Chilean anticommunism's
deep, organic roots, not the United States' anticommunism, in the late-1940s. This law wholly belonged
to González and those who voted for it in the Chilean Congress. Neither Truman nor Kennan could or
ever did claim even part authorship or ownership of it. González, very aware of European affairs across
the Atlantic at the time, believed he was inoculating his country from the international communist
movement. He lamented his successors' repealing his law, and he said so when he reemerged from
retirement in opposition to the Allende administration (1970-1973) and in support of the truck drivers
and other gremialistas, and the large numbers of Chilean women as well, who were protesting against
the government the year before the armed forces overthrew it.
González addressed Chileans via Channel 13, the Universidad Católica's station, on 23 October
1972. He urged President Salvador Allende to solve the crisis that was then engulfing the country. The
president, and only the president, he reminded him, had the obligation "to maintain and strengthen the
continuity of our democratic regime and its republican institutions." González also reminded Chileans
that he had contained a similar communist aggression, also directed from abroad, from "those who
believed our democratic organization was weak," while in office more than twenty years earlier -- and
communists "are just as wrong today as they were yesterday!"302
González was not the only Chilean anticommunist who applied the lessons he had learned in the
late-1940s to the problems Chileans would face in the late-1960s and early-1970s. Huneeus concluded
that the president's policies in 1947 and 1948 cultivated a potent anticommunist climate that would
continue to resonate long after he left office, assigning him "an enormous responsibility in the failure of
Chilean democracy in 1973." He found that this climate had particularly resonated within the
professional officer corps. Pinochet, for example, had participated in the nighttime raid in Iquique,
commanded the internment camp at Pisagua, and then served in the emergency zone in Lota and
Coronel. So did most of the officers who held high rank during the early years of Pinochet's
dictatorship (1973-1990) nearly three decades later. These officers had learned, as Pinochet phrased it,
that the PCCh and Chile's other Marxist parties were not merely political parties, but threats to national
301
Minsterio del Interior, "Ley de Defensa Permanente de la Democracia," 30 September 1948, available at
http://www.memoriachilena.cl; and Policy Planning Staff, "Policy Regarding Anti-Communist Measures," 195.
302
González, Memorias II: 1245, 1250.
129
security.303
303
Huneeus, Guerra fría chilena, 15-16, 355-371; Pinochet, Camino recorrido I: 114-123; and Pinochet, Día
decisivo, 23-29.
130
VI. Eduardo Frei and Nuclear Modernization
On Saturday, 21 December1968, the Chilean ambassador to London, Victor Santa Cruz,
announced his government's decision to buy a British-made nuclear research reactor, advancing an
Anglo-Chilean agreement to share nonmilitary nuclear science and technology the two governments
had negotiated the previous month. Santa Cruz explained that this would "allow the country to be fully
incorporated into nuclear science and technology, and to be placed among the best equipped countries
of this Continent in this matter." Chileans were constructing a national nuclear center that would
centralize research, publish information, and train engineers. They intended to explore nuclear science's
potential to further develop and modernize their country.304
Britons, for their part, were cultivating a commercial relationship with Chileans that they hoped
would lead to lucrative contracts throughout Latin America as more in the region embraced nuclear
technology in the 1970s. They were very optimistic. As The Guardian reported, "Chile thus will found
its peaceful nuclear programme on British technology and -- though there is no immediate promise of
orders -- on British hardware." This supported Prime Minister Harold Wilson's (1964-1970) larger
strategy of buttressing Britain's declining influence in world affairs through advanced-technology
exports and arms sales.305
The consensus interpretation has missed these transatlantic, nuclear aspects of President
Eduardo Frei's Montalva's (1964-1970) agenda within Chile's Cold War experience. Those who follow
the consensus tend to begin with Frei's election in September 1964, which they have typically treated as
at least partly an expression of American influence, particularly the Alliance for Progress's needs and
the Central Intelligence Agency's (CIA) covert operations. Historians Stephen Rabe and Lubna
Qureshi, for example, started by explaining how "The Kennedy administration [1961-1963] hoped to
make Chile a 'showcase' for the Alliance for Progress." But Frei's predecessor, President Jorge
Alessandri Rodríguez (1958-1964), had not sufficiently served the United States' interests. So Kennedy
turned to Frei and the Christian Democratic Party (PDC). Frei "was more willing to work within a
304
Chilean embassy press release, attached to Santa Cruz to Foreign Office, 20 December 1968, FCO 55/311;
Foreign and Commonwealth Office Chile No. 53, "Exchange of Notes concerning a Development Loan towards the cost of
a Nuclear Research Reactor (United Kingdom/Chile Loan 1969)," Santiago, 3 and 11 March 1969, FO 93; and Foreign
Office Ratification No. 2523, "Ratification by Chile of the Agreement on Co-Operation in Peaceful Uses of Atomic Energy
of 18 November 1968," London, 22 October 1969, FO 94. British National Archives (BNA).
305
Ian Breach, "British reactor bought by Chile," The Guardian, 23 December 1968.
131
system dominated by Washington," and he "pledged to carry out the type of land and social reform"
Kennedy had envisioned when he inaugurated the Alliance. According to the National Security
Archive's Peter Kornbluh, "Kennedy arranged for Frei, and another centrist leader, [PDC Senator]
Radomiro Tomic, to have a secret backdoor visit to the White House in early 1962…to evaluate these
new Chilean leaders personally."306
It remains well known that the Kennedy and Johnson administrations (1963-1969) used the CIA
to covertly support Frei's campaign. The agency supplied approximately half of his costs -- around $2.6
million in direct campaign contributions alone. The CIA also intervened against Socialist Senator
Salvador Allende, spending another $3 million. This included a vast, negative propaganda effort to
discredit Allende's coalition. Cuban dictator Fidel Castro's (1959-2008, -2011) sister, Juana, for
example, directly appealed to Chilean women in a series of radio broadcasts that detailed the horrors of
communism. Frei defeated Allende, garnering 55.6 percent of the vote to his opponent's 38.6 percent.307
Historians have often reduced Frei's victory to this supposedly rigged election. Kornbluh and
Rabe have insisted that Frei was a witting recipient of the agency's money and implied that the
president personally benefitted from it. Rabe has maintained that Frei's joshing with American embassy
officials, particularly his "expressing 'unusual optimism' concerning his electoral prospects -- although
he jokingly observed that his selfish interests should lead him paint a bleaker picture to US authorities
for obvious reasons," proves this. Thus, in Rabe's estimation, Frei won the presidency because Allende
"had been badly outspent by the Christian Democrats, the U.S. embassy, and the CIA."308
306
Stephen Rabe, The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2012), 123-124; Lubna Qureshi, Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende: U.S. Involvement in the 1973 Coup in
Chile [2009] (Lanham: Lexington, 2010), 24; and Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity
and Accountability (New York: The New Press, 2003), 3. Also see Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the
Nixon White House (New York: Summit Books, 1983), 259-261. Frei and Tomic visited the United States "to attend a forum
at [Georgetown] University that would deal with certain basic topics, chiefly, 'Christian Democracy in Chile and Latin
America,' and 'What is the opinion of the Christian Democrats on the Alliance for Progress?'" They also discussed this at
Columbia University in New York, and they gave several interviews on television and radio as well. The Senate Foreign
Relations Committee hosted them for lunch, and they also met White House aide Ralph Dungan, before returning to Chile,
in April 1962. See Frei to Dungan, 17 April 1962, with press clippings attached. Papers of President Kennedy, National
Security Files, Countries, Box 20A, "Chile: General: 1/62-6/62." John Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts (JFK).
307
Fidel Castro seized power in Havana in 1959. He retired from the presidency in 2008 and from the Cuban
Communist Party in 2011. His brother, Raúl Castro, has succeeded him in these positions. For the election's results, see
Ricardo Cruz-Coke, Historia electoral de Chile, 1925-1973 (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Juridica de Chile, 1984), 107-110.
For the CIA's intervention in the election, see United States Senate, Staff Report of the Select Committee to Study
Governmental Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973 (Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1975).
308
Cited in Rabe, Killing Zone, 124-125. Also see Peter Kornbluh, "Chile 1964: CIA Covert Support in Frei
Election Detailed: Operational and Policy Records Released for the First Time," 27 September 2004, available at
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu.
132
Not all historians follow this consensus when approaching Frei. Some, such as Joaquín
Fermandois, have recognized that the president's election and behavior in office represented an
expression of "a political culture with strong roots in Chilean history." They have also recognized that
Frei's self-identification, agenda, and policies were "more oriented to Western Europe" than the United
States.309
This chapter expands upon Fermandois's insights in three ways. First, Frei and his constituents
arose in Chilean politics and society far earlier than, and independently of, the Alliance for Progress.
Second, Frei and his predecessors had also committed themselves to modernization and
democratization long before the Alliance. And third, although Frei's political agenda, which he called
the Revolution in Liberty, shared much in common with the Alliance, and he was indeed committed to
the Alliance, his agenda remained a distinctly Chilean one.
Frei approached Chilean development more broadly than the Alliance for Progress. The
Alliance remained limited to low-technology, Latin American problems from "the agrarian question" to
Pentagon- and Agency for International Development (AID)-sponsored police and counterinsurgency
programs, "civic action," and/or the Peace Corps and its projects. Frei was very interested in advanced
science and technology, including nuclear modernization, or the use of nonmilitary nuclear science and
technology to further his country's social and economic development, from the start.310
This chapter articulates these three points by reconstructing Chile's early nuclear history, which,
although largely unexplored, represented an integral part of Chile's Cold War experience. Chileans
came into contact with the international nuclear-science community, centered in the International
Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna, Austria, in the mid-1950s. This community includes 168
member states today, the vast majority representing countries from the developing world. Their
histories -- both collectively, as a community, and individually, as nations -- remain untold.311
309
Joaquín Fermandois, "The Hero on the Latin American Scene," in Christian Nuenlist, et al., eds., Globalizing de
Gaulle: International Perspectives on French Foreign Policies, 1958-1969 [2010] (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011),
278.
310
Almost all histories of Latin America and the Cold War in the 1960s exclusively study American power and
influence in the region as a whole, US officials' modernization theories and policies, and counterinsurgency. See, for
example, Rabe, Killing Zone; Jeffrey Taffet, Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy: The Alliance for Progress in Latin America
(New York: Routledge, 2007); and Stephen Rabe, The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts
Communist Revolution in Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999).
311
IAEA, "Member States of IAEA," February 2016, available at http://www.iaea.org/about/memberstates. The
Wilson Center's Nuclear Proliferation International History Project (NPIHP) is currently mapping the global nuclear
landscape from the perspective of nuclear-weapons and nonproliferation, but not from the point of view of nonmilitary and
peaceful nuclear science and technology.
133
The International Nuclear-Science Community and Chile
The international nuclear-science community emerged within the context of the Eisenhower
administration's (1953-1961) Atoms for Peace plan. Dwight Eisenhower became president of the
United States just as thermonuclear weapons were appearing in the Cold War. Americans had used
atomic weapons to end the Second World War and continued researching, improving, and stockpiling
them thereafter. Indeed, Eisenhower's massive-retaliation doctrine became an enduring feature of the
United States' strategy against the Soviet Union (USSR). The USSR and Britain had developed their
own nuclear weapons by the early-1950s. France and the People's Republic of China would soon
produce them as well -- and Israel, India, and Pakistan would, too, decades later. The future seemed
dismal, even apocalyptic, to many.
Eisenhower agreed. The president wanted to get on top of this problem and turn it around early.
He addressed the United Nations (UN) in December 1953. He hoped "to shake off the inertia imposed
by fear, and…make positive progress toward peace." He proposed that the international community
restructure the nuclear field to serve humanity's constructive interests rather than warfare. He believed
that nonmilitary and peaceful nuclear science and technology could become "a great boon, for the
benefit of all mankind." He recommended that the nuclear powers share this science and technology
with the world. These powers should also cooperate in arms control, first containing nuclear weapons'
proliferation, then reducing, and ultimately eliminating, their own growing arsenals.312
The UN created the IAEA three years later. The agency remained committed "to accelerate and
enlarge the contribution of atomic energy to peace, health and prosperity throughout the world." It also
shared Eisenhower's special interest in emerging nations.313
Some criticized Eisenhower's plan, fearing it would distribute dangerous knowledge and
materials indiscriminately, enabling unfriendly governments to produce nuclear weapons under cover
of civilian research -- as North Korea eventually did. Others asked what good a nonproliferation treaty
could do when some, such as Israel, Pakistan, and India, simply declined to sign it. Still others have
complained that although the United States was insisting that everyone else renounce nuclear weapons,
Americans themselves refused to disarm. Washington institutionalized its own nuclear superiority and
312
Dwight Eisenhower to United Nations General Assembly, "Atomic Power for Peace," 8 December 1953.
Reprinted in, Joseph Pilat, ed., Atoms for Peace: A Future after Fifty Years? (Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson Center
Press, 2007), 239-246.
313
IAEA, "Statute of the International Atomic Energy Agency," 23 October 1956. Reprinted in Ibid., 247-267.
134
through it, global dominance, while cynically calling it a peace campaign. As leaders from all over the
world have acknowledged, Atoms for Peace remains a contested, largely unrealized ideal. But, as the
IAEA's 168 members can attest, not everyone has always looked at it so negatively.
Chile's Doctor Eduardo Cruz-Coke, a Conservative senator and former presidential candidate,
was one of those who did not. Cruz-Coke interpreted Eisenhower's proposal as honest and wellintentioned, and he believed it served his country's interests, particularly in the field of public health.
He suggested Chileans create a national nuclear energy authority and join the IAEA in 1955. Frei, then
a senator, supported this, too, comparing nuclear energy to steel production and, before that, textile
factories, from earlier eras. An interdisciplinary group of researchers centered in the University of
Chile's Department of Mathematics and Physics had already created a nuclear physics laboratory,
where they installed a linear accelerator the preceding year. They began working with imported
radioactive isotopes (radioisotopes), which offered applications in medicine and nutrition, in the early
1960s.314
The Alessandri administration led Chile into the IAEA in 1960, creating CChEN by decree in
1964. Congress formalized this through legislation that directed the commission "to increase scientific
and technical knowledge in the peaceful applications of nuclear energy," especially those advancing the
nation's political, social, and economic development, which remained its primary purpose. It would
liaise with the IAEA and serve as the government's advisory body in nuclear affairs. It would also
coordinate "all problems related to the production, acquisition, transference, transport, and peaceful
uses of nuclear energy and productive, fissionable, and radioactive materials" inside Chile. Frei, who
succeeded Alessandri, named Cruz-Coke CChEN's first president. It commenced operations in May
1966. But Latin America had become a contested Cold War zone, complicating such projects, by
then.315
314
CChEN, "Comisión Chilena de Energía Nuclear, 1964-1989" (Santiago: CChEN, 1989), 5, 8-10. Centro
Nacional de Estudios Nucleares, La Reina (CNEN); and Eduardo Frei Montalva, Pensamiento y acción (Santiago de Chile:
Editorial de Paćifico, 1956). Excerpted in Paul Sigmund, ed., The Ideologies of the Developing Nations [1963], 2d rev. ed.
(New York: Praeger, 1972), 454-460.
315
Ibid., 8; and CChEN, Memoria anual 1966: La energía nuclear en Chile (Santiago: CChEN, 1967), 7. CNEN.
135
Illustration 2: Chile's nuclear-science community, circa 1965.
Source: CChEN, "Comisión Chilena de Energía Nuclear, 1964-1989."
The United States, Latin America, and the World in the Era of the Cuban Revolution
The Caribbean, and through it, all Latin America, began appearing as an emerging Cold War
zone as early as May 1958. Vice President Richard Nixon spent several days touring South America
that month. He encountered deep hostility in Peru and Venezuela. Crowds spat all over him and his
wife in both countries, and protesters attacked his car with pipes and rocks, apparently determined to
get their hands on him, in Caracas. Venezuelans had only rid themselves of dictator Marco Pérez
Jiménez (1952-1958), with whom Eisenhower had been friendly, that January, less than five months
earlier. Pérez and his hated chief of security, moreover, had fled to Miami via the Dominican Republic,
which only exacerbated some Venezuelans' resentment of the United States.316
The provisional government's embarrassed foreign minister, Oscar García Velatini, attempted to
explain what had happened to Nixon while they were still in the car. "The Venezuelan people have been
without freedom so long that they tend now to express themselves more vigorously perhaps than they
should," he said. The vice president rejected this. "Those mobs were communists led by Communists,
and they had no devotion to freedom at all." He reported this to Eisenhower, adding that "Latin
316
Eisenhower to Nixon, 9 May 1958. Reprinted in Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States
1958-1960 V: American Republics (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1991), document 45; and Roy Rubottom,
Memorandum of telephone conversation, 13 May 1958. Reprinted in Ibid., document 46.
136
Americans much prefer to be friends of the United States rather than Russia and that the great problem
was how we could best cultivate this friendship." He suggested that the American government should
broaden both official and unofficial contacts with people in the region to include more than traditional
elites, and that "we must be dedicated to raising the standard of living of the masses."317
While Eisenhower did not interpret this as evidence of an increased Soviet threat in Latin
America, the president nevertheless awakened to the list of more or less region-wide grievances Rabe
summarized: "the Eisenhower administration had supported repressive regimes, had denied Latin
America economic assistance, and was now imposing tariff barriers against Latin American exports."
Washington remained committed to de facto recognition, which meant that it still considered it correct
to deal with dictators like Pérez. But Eisenhower began to understand that his overthrowing President
Jacobo Arbenz (1950-1954) in Guatemala, his pinning the Legion of Merit on Pérez's chest, and his
sending Nixon to embrace Dominican dictator Rafael Leonidas Trujillo (1930-1961) had sent the
wrong message, signaling not merely recognition but approval to many.318
Eisenhower had perceived these dictators who called themselves anticommunists through a
bipolar worldview, and he had been oblivious to their internal policies until Nixon's trip. But he might
have known better. President Harry Truman (1945-1953) detested them, especially Trujillo, and kept
them at arm's length through his last days in office.319
Eisenhower, in any case, introduced fundamental, but limited, changes to the United States'
position concerning Latin American commerce and development after 1958. The president did not go
as far as Brazilian President Juscelino Kubitschek (1956-1961), who was proposing that Americans
create "Operation Pan-America," Latin Americans' long-desired Marshall Plan. But he did modify
Washington's policies on trade, allowing for commodity agreements with Latin American exporters. He
also created the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Undersecretary of State C. Douglas Dillon
317
Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1978), 190, 192; Vernon
Walters, Silent Missions (New York: Doubleday and Company, 1978), 313-337; and Cabinet meeting minutes, White House,
16 May 1958. Reprinted in Department of State, FRUS 1958-1960 V: American Republics, document 55. Nixon was
articulating insights from a wider critique of American foreign relations and the developing world that was attracting much
attention in Washington in the late-1950s. See William Lederer and Eugene Burdick, The Ugly American (New York: W.W.
Norton and Company, 1958).
318
Stephen Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anticommunism (Chapel Hill: University
of North Carolina Press, 1988), 102.
319
For Truman and Eisenhower's contrasting attitudes toward Trujillo, see Dean Acheson to Truman, 23 December
1952. Reprinted in Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States 1952-1954 IV: The American Republics
(Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1983), document 358; and Chief of Protocol, Department of State, "Call on
the President by Generalissimo Rafael L. Trujillo," 6 March 1953. Reprinted in Ibid., document 359.
137
publicly committed the United States to this at an OAS meeting in Bogotá in September 1960.320
Then Castro seized the initiative in the Caribbean. He overthrew Fulgencio Batista's
dictatorship (1952-1959) in Cuba in January 1959. He inaugurated not only the Cuban Revolution but
also a new era of revolution and reaction throughout Latin America, quickening the Cold War there.
Castro channeled the same anti-American energy that Peruvians and Venezuelans had marshalled
against Nixon, presenting himself as a heroic David against the United States' villainous Goliath. He
did not limit his struggle to Latin America. He intervened in decolonizing Africa, too. His image and
rhetoric resonated with many in the developing world.321
The Eisenhower administration initially attempted to moderate Castro's politics through
traditional economic pressure. When Castro passed an agrarian reform law that enabled Havana to
begin expropriating American-owned property without compensation in May 1959, Eisenhower
suspended the United States' agreement to purchase Cuban sugar. Castro brushed this aside and
continued undeterred. When US-owned oil refineries in Cuba refused to process Soviet-imported oil,
he simply nationalized them. Castro seized all American property and Eisenhower implemented a
comprehensive embargo against Cuba before the end of 1960.322
The Eisenhower administration applied political pressure, too. Eisenhower broke relations with
Havana after Castro alleged that the American embassy was little more than a spy center and demanded
that Washington reduce its presence in the embassy to an impossible eleven people or less -- adding
that if every US official left Cuba, it would be "perfectly all right with us." Neither the Eisenhower nor
Kennedy administrations persuaded any Latin American government to follow them over the next two
years, however.323
320
See Rabe, Eisenhower and Latin America, 134-152; Department of State, "Promoting Economic and Social
Advancement in the Americas," Department of State Bulletin 43 (3 October 1960): 533-541; and Department of State,
"President Pledges U.S. Cooperation to Promote Social Progress and Economic Growth in the Americas," Department of
State Bulletin 43 (1 August 1960): 166-170.
321
For an overview, see Piero Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976 (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Thomas Wright, Latin America in the Era of the Cuban Revolution [1991],
Rev. ed. (Westport: Praeger, 2001); and Jorge Domínguez, To Make a World Safe for Revolution: Cuba's Foreign Policy
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989).
322
See Wright, Latin America in the Era of the Cuban Revolution, 57-61.
323
For Eisenhower's breaking relations with Castro's Cuba, see Livingston Merchant, Memorandum of
conversation, 29 December 1960. Reprinted in Department of State, Foreign Relations of the United States 1958-1960 VI:
Cuba (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1991), document 627; Carlos Olivares to Daniel Braddock, 3 January
1961, enclosed in Braddock to Department of State, 3 January 1961. Reprinted in Department of State, Foreign Relations of
the United States 1961-1963 X: Cuba, January 1961-September 1962 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office,
1997), document 1; and Christopher Herter to Cuban chargé d'affaires in Washington, 3 January 1961, enclosed in
Department of State to Braddock, 3 January 1961. Reprinted in Ibid., document 7. Also see Wayne Smith, The Closest of
138
President John Kennedy continued and expanded the CIA-sponsored covert operations against
Castro that his predecessor had started in 1960. These operations, failing to foment a Cuban resistance
movement, became the Bay of Pigs debacle in April 1961. They also included multiple efforts to
assassinate or at least humiliate Castro. He survived all of them unscathed.324
Castro used such slogans as "¡Cuba sí, Yanqui no!" to consolidate his dictatorship, soon under
the Soviet Union's protection, to unite Cubans behind it, and to electrify many within the Latin
American left, especially the younger generation. He defined the issues that all others in the region
responded to in the 1960s. These issues included not only broadly attacking American power and
influence, but challenging the region's existing socioeconomic order at the national and local levels,
particularly its landowners and their large, feudal-like estates, or latifundia.
Castro and his comrade-in-arms, Ernesto "Che" Guevara, issued a plain directive:
revolutionaries must make revolution today rather than discuss or plan for it tomorrow. And they
offered a simple method: rural guerrilla warfare. A foco -- a small band of visionaries -- should take to
the countryside and highlands, win the peasants' hearts and minds through daring political and military
action against Latin America's Caribbean-style dictatorships, and through this, create the subjective
conditions the people needed to rise up and liberate their countries from imperialism and oppression.325
This also represented a grand strategy against the United States, "the great enemy of mankind."
Guevara hoped to create "two, three or many Vietnams." This would force Americans to disperse their
forces to put out endless brushfires, weakening imperialism and hastening global revolution. He led by
example, first in the Congo, then in the Bolivian highlands, where he met his death in October 1967.326
Guevara's treatise on guerrilla warfare hardly offered anything new in the field of small-war
strategy and tactics. Indeed, parts of it -- such as his advice that guerrillas cover hammocks with a
nylon roof and carry good-quality backpacks that contain a plate, fork, and knife -- read like advice
Enemies: A Personal and Diplomatic History of the Castro Years (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1987), 42-67.
324
For CIA-sponsored covert operations in Cuba, see Peter Kornbluh, ed., Bay of Pigs Declassified (New York: The
New Press, 1998); Peter Wyden, Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979); Bradley Earl Ayers,
The War That Never Was: An Insider's Account of CIA Covert Operations against Cuba (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,
1976); and United States Senate, Staff Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to
Intelligence Activities, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders (Washington, DC: Government Printing
Office, 1975), 71-180.
325
Che Guevara, Guerrilla Warfare [1960]. Reprinted in Brian Loveman and Thomas Davies, eds., Guerrilla
Warfare [1985], 3d ed. (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1997), 41-145.
326
Che Guevara, "Message to the Tricontinental," 16 April 1967. Reprinted in Loveman and Davies, Guerrilla
Warfare, 164-176. For Guevara's death in Bolivia, see Ibid., 311-334.
139
from the Boy Scouts' handbook. China's Mao Zedong and Vietnam's Ho Chi Minh and General Vo
Nguyen Giap remain the foremost authorities on the subject. But Castro and Guevara's politics and
image contributed something intangible, a feeling that revolutionaries could succeed and that anyone
could do it. And this inspired many, from the Guatemalan highlands to the Argentine pampas and
beyond. Guevara's influence even reached as far away as the Middle East, where a small handful of
leftist guerrillas in Iran, partly following his advice, began assaulting Shah Mohammad Reza Pahlavi's
regime (1953-1978) in the early-1960s. According to one historian, they made major contributions to
his overthrow in 1978.327
Thus all eyes turned to Latin America in the 1960s. This included Soviet eyes. Moscow, which
had pursued peaceful coexistence in the 1950s, had seen only a single, American-dominated continent
in the western hemisphere, with Latin America as a relative backwater with a generally weak left,
before the Cuban Revolution. As former Deputy Director of the Committee for State Security (KGB)
General Nikolai Leonov explained, Castro and Guevara changed this perception. The Soviet
government now separated the United States and Latin America in policy and analysis. Both the
Ministry of Foreign Relations and the KGB established divisions that specialized in Latin American
affairs. This went beyond governmental operations. The Academy of Sciences created the Latin
American Institute and founded a journal, Latin America, and Latin American area studies courses
began appearing in Moscow State University as well.328
Castro's brother, Raúl, and Guevara, both communists, began promoting closer Soviet-Cuban
relations early in 1959. They wanted not only to improve trade relations, particularly securing the
USSR's agreement to buy Cuban sugar, but also to forge a politico-military alliance with Moscow.
Secretary General Nikita Khrushchev (1953-1964) seized the opportunity. Khrushchev saw Cuba as a
327
These Iranian guerrillas also read Mao, Frantz Fanon, and Carlos Marighella, Brazil's urban-guerrilla warfare
theorist. They remain less well-known than other revolutionaries in the developing world in the 1960s and 1970s because
both Savak, the Shah's security service, and then the Khomeini dictatorship (1979-present) decimated them. See Nikkie
Keddie, Modern Iran: Roots and Results of Revolution [1981], Updated ed. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006), 219222, 238-239; and Ervand Abrahamian, "The Guerrilla Movement in Iran, 1963-1977," Middle East Research and
Information Project Reports 86 (March-April, 1980): 3-15.
328
Nikolai Leonov, "La inteligencia soviética en América Latina durante la guerra fría," Estudios Públicos 73
(1999), 50. For peaceful coexistence, see Nikita Khrushchev, Speech in Belgrade, 26 May 1955. Reprinted in Robert
Daniels, ed., A Documentary History of Communism and the World: From Revolution to Collapse (Hanover: University
Press of New England, 1994), 159-160; Khrushchev, "Report of the Central Committee to the Twentieth Party Congress,"
February 1956. Reprinted in Ibid., 160-163; and "Declaration of the Conference of Representatives of Communist and
Workers' Parties of Socialist Countries," Moscow, November 1957. Reprinted in Ibid., 179-180. Also see Interview with
Yuri Pavlov, Roll 10842, n.d. CNN, Cold War (1998). Transcript courtesy of the National Security Archive, available at
http://www.nsarchive.gwu.edu.
140
Soviet beachhead in the western hemisphere and "a catalyst for revolutionary power" in Latin America.
The Soviet Union had maintained diplomatic missions in Mexico City, Montevideo, and Buenos Aires
through the 1950s. Now it began preparing naval and air bases in Cuba.329
This was a complex gesture in what had become a multi-faceted and much tenser Cold War. The
Soviet Union was finding itself increasingly on the defensive in the developing world as Mao's China
began challenging the USSR to lead the international communist movement, particularly the so-called
wars of national liberation that were appearing in Southeast Asia and sub-Saharan Africa. So
Khrushchev was, partly, attempting to burnish Moscow's revolutionary credentials by associating with
Cuba.
Khrushchev was also angry after Soviet forces downed an American reconnaissance aircraft
over his country' airspace in May 1960. He had become impatient with the still-unresolved issue of
Berlin as well. He was generally tired of the United States' strategic superiority, too. He wished to alter
the balance of power, even if only slightly. Let Washington feel the pressure of an enemy position
armed with nuclear weapons near its border for a change, he reasoned. As historians Aleksandr
Fursenko and Timothy Naftali have argued, "Khrushchev sensed the value of making a grand gesture to
embrace the Cubans, while at the same time compelling the Americans and Chinese to respect him."330
Had all gone as planned, Khrushchev would have deployed more than 50,000 Soviet military
personnel to Cuba, and based two cruisers, four missile-capable destroyers, twelve Komar-class missile
boats, and eleven ballistic-missile submarines there, in addition to the forty intermediate-range nuclear
missiles that caught the CIA's attention in October 1962. But all did not go as planned. Kennedy
confronted Khrushchev and forced him to remove these missiles before Soviet officers and technicians
had fully assembled them.331
Kennedy pledged not to invade Cuba and also to eventually withdraw the United States' Jupiter329
Cited in Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali, "One Hell of a Gamble": The Secret History of the Cuban
Missile Crisis [1997] (New York. W.W. Norton and Company, 1998), 325.
330
Ibid., 52. The Chinese presence in Latin America was minimal in the 1960s. Most Latin American communist
parties, including the Chilean Communist Party, remained closely tied to the Soviet Communist Party, as they had been
since the 1920s. None but a few individuals broke with Moscow and sided with Beijing in the Sino-Soviet split, which
seems to have represented the Chinese government's central objective in the region at the time. See CIA Directorate of
Intelligence, Memorandum No. 1110/65, "Chinese Communist Activities in Latin America," 30 April 1965. Papers of
Lyndon Johnson, National Security Files, Country Files: Latin America, Box 2a, "Latin America Volume 3: 1/65-6/65."
Lyndon Johnson Library, Austin, Texas (LBJ).
331
For the Soviet military's plan to deploy these forces to Cuba, see Fursenko and Naftali, Hell of a Gamble, 188189.
141
class intermediate-range missiles from Turkey in exchange. But this did not save Khrushchev from the
criticism and loss of prestige that followed this crisis. Rising Central Committee member Dmitri
Polyansky, for example, reproached the secretary general's adventurism and brinksmanship in Cuba.
"Ask any one of our marshals or generals, and they will tell you that [Khrushchev's] plans for the
military 'penetration' of South America were gibberish, fraught with the enormous danger of war."
Fursenko and Naftali listed the missile crisis among the several factors -- the full story remained
classified -- that explained the Politburo's decision to depose Khrushchev two years later, in October
1964.332
This crisis marked, as historian Piero Gleijeses has phrased it, "the abrupt end" of the SovietCuban honeymoon. Castro's reckless suggestion that Moscow should launch a preemptive nuclear
strike against the United States at the height of the dispute rattled Khrushchev and others in the
Kremlin. Likewise, the Soviets' decision to negotiate a solution with Kennedy without consulting
Havana irritated Castro, who felt that Moscow was sacrificing Cuban security to save itself.333
Soviets intended to use Castro's Cuba as an example of socialism in the developing world. They
learned that this would prove costly in the years after the crisis. Moscow, for example, bought Cuban
sugar at "3, 4, 5 times as much as the sugar price was on the world market and thus enabled Cubans to
import in exchange for one ton of sugar up to 7 or 8 tons of oil," Yuri Pavlov, the former director of the
Soviet Foreign Ministry's Latin American division later explained. "All the military equipment
including uniforms," moreover, "came from the Soviets," who also helped Havana construct
Kalashnikov plants to produce its own rifles and ammunition.334
Soviet-Cuban differences in Latin America and the developing world became more apparent
than they had been before, too. Leonov, while clarifying that Moscow never controlled Havana as a
satellite, insisted that "Cuba always maintained an independent policy. Cubans never sought Soviet
approval in Latin America. They saw it as their area: the same language, the same religion, the same
history, the same worldview." Guevara's operations in Bolivia, for example, "was the Cubans' thing…
We did not know anything about it." These differences ran deep. "The Soviet leadership," he continued,
"did not share the famous slogan of creating 100 Vietnams…100 Vietnams would cost too much in
332
Cited in Ibid., 353-354.
Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 18; Fursenko and Naftali, Hell of a Gamble, 272-273.
334
Interview with Yuri Pavlov.
333
142
human and material resources. Thus Soviet and Cuban policies diverged."335
The Soviet Communist Party continued to modestly fund regional communist parties, as it had
for decades, but the party took a long view of this and did not expect Latin American communists to
participate in or otherwise support Castro's guerrilla wars. Regional communist parties, such as the
Chilean Communist Party (PCCh), had not only become relatively kinder and gentler than they had
been before, but they began to appear as moderate voices when juxtaposed against Castro, Guevara,
and their sympathizers in the late-1950s and 1960s. The KBG maintained a low profile in Latin
America for the remainder of the Cold War as well. It approached the region as a hunting ground where
it might recruit agents to gather information against the United States and its allies and work toward
weakening American influence there rather than targeting Latin American governments themselves.336
This conservative, risk-averse strategy defined the Soviet Union's Latin American policy until
the USSR collapsed in December 1991. Moscow's extensive investment in Cuba, and to a lesser extent,
in General Juan Velasco's Peru (1968-1975) and Sandinista Nicaragua (1979-1990) represent the
exceptions that prove this rule. Leonov encountered this, to his frustration, when he and his KGB
colleagues proposed a seaborne raid using cargo ships, assault helicopters, special-operations forces,
and a submarine to rescue PCCh Secretary General Luis Corvalán from Dawson Island, where the
Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) was holding him and others in the mid-1970s. The Politburo,
Leonov later recalled, "looked at us as if we were half-crazy, and all our efforts to persuade them to [at
least] study the plan proved fruitless."337
Meanwhile, Castro's commitment to igniting wars of national liberation in Latin America
produced one failure after another in the 1960s. This culminated in Guevara's defeat in Bolivia in 1967.
The Venezuelan case best illustrates these failures and their consequences.
Rómulo Betancourt (1959-1964) led Venezuela's democratic left after a general strike had
335
Leonov, "La inteligencia soviética en América Latina," 35, 51. Also see Interview with Yuri Pavlov.
For Soviet support of the PCCh from the 1950s into the mid-1970s, see Olga Ulianova and Eugenia Fediakova,
"Algunos aspectos de la ayuda finaciera del Partido Comunista del URSS al comunismo chileno durante la guerra fría,"
Esutdios Públicos 72 (1998): 113-130.
337
Ibid., 61-63. The United States government later brokered Corvalán's exchange for Soviet dissident Vladimir
Bukovsky. See Olga Ulianova, "Corvalán for Bukovsky: A Real Exchange of Prisoners during an Imaginary War: The
Chilean Dictatorship, the Soviet Union, and U.S. Mediation, 1973-1976," Cold War History 14 (2014): 315-336. For SovietLatin American relations, see Nicola Miller, Soviet Relations with Latin America, 1959-1987 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1989), which emphasizes the Soviet Union's relations with Mexico, Venezuela, Brazil, and Argentina,
rather than Cuba, Peru, or Nicaragua, when characterizing Soviet-Latin American relations as whole. For Juan Velasco's
Peru and Sandinista Nicaragua, see Wright, Latin America in the Era of the Cuban Revolution, 111-127, 165-185; and
Loveman and Davies, Guerrilla Warfare, 268-310, 335-383.
336
143
forced Pérez to flee and then Venezuelans elected Betancourt to the presidency. Castro rejected this
outcome as insufficient, but the president nevertheless represented the majority of his countrymen.
Castro's sympathizers in Venezuela formed groups such as the Armed Forces of National Liberation
(FALN) and the Movement of the Revolutionary Left (MIR) and began attacking US-owned facilities,
sabotaging government installations, and robbing banks and kidnapping the wealthy to finance their
operations.
Castro's anti-Betancourt vitriol and his, reportedly, contributing as much as $600,000 to the
MIR, aroused nationalist sentiment in favor of the president and in opposition to the guerrillas.
Venezuelans overwhelmingly supported Betancourt and the democratic left when more than 90 percent
of the electorate voted, and Betancourt's successor, Raúl Leoni (1964-1969), won the presidency in
December 1963. Betancourt peacefully transferred power to him several months later.338
Castro's activities in Venezuela attracted international condemnation after Betancourt captured a
covert Cuban weapons shipment in November 1963, which was intended to support the guerrillas'
terror campaign against the country's elections the following month. The president cited this as armed
intervention in Venezuela's internal affairs, invoked the Rio treaty, and called for the inter-American
community of nations' foreign ministers to consult. This, together with broader concerns about the
missile crisis the year before, led to the OAS's passing resolutions that excluded the Castro regime from
the inter-American community. All governments but Mexico City severed relations with Havana in July
1964.339
This isolation complicated Castro's ability to continue supporting insurgencies in Latin
America. This became even more difficult after Havana hosted a regional communist conference in
November 1964. Nearly all Latin American communists viewed Castro, Guevara, and guerrilla warfare
through the Soviet Union's eyes: it was amateurish and infantile, and more importantly, it went against
Moscow's general policy of peaceful coexistence, to which it returned after the Politburo deposed
Khrushchev. Indeed, this partly accounted for Secretary General Mario Monje Molina and the Bolivian
Communist Party's virtually turning their backs on Guevara in the Andes several years later. Thus
Castro concentrated his efforts in Africa from the 1960s through the 1980s. As the East German
338
See Loveman and Davies, Guerrilla Warfare, 209-231.
See Stephen Rabe, "The Caribbean Triangle: Betancourt, Castro, and Trujillo and U.S. Foreign Policy, 19581963," in Peter Hahn and Mary Ann Heiss, eds., Empire and Revolution (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2001), 4870; and Harold Eugene Davis, et al., Latin American Diplomatic History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press,
1977), 248-250.
339
144
embassy in Havana reported after the conference, "Since the Latin American party conference, Cuba
has kept some distance from the Latin American liberation struggle…for now it seems as if Cuba will
try to compensate for this through a strong focus on Africa (including Asia)."340
The Kennedy administration's answer to all of this remained just one part of the United States'
evolving response to the Cold War in the developing world in the early-1960s. Eisenhower's massiveretaliation doctrine had proved insufficient to counter crises in Matsu and Quemoy, in the Congo, and
in Southeast Asia. And as Nixon and others in Washington had noted, Americans were losing the battle
for hearts and minds in these regions as well.
Kennedy's flexible-response doctrine emerged as a solution to these problems. The president
began emphasizing counterinsurgency in foreign military aid and training programs, and he also
deployed Green Berets to countries like Vietnam, Laos, and Bolivia, where they coached local specialforces units in unconventional warfare -- including the Bolivians who defeated Guevara. The AID
oversaw developmental aid, and it trained police departments in investigations, interrogations, and riotcontrol. And the Peace Corps recruited enthusiastic, young college graduates and placed them in newlyindependent nations such as Ghana to assist in education and the construction of basic infrastructure,
and, most importantly, to foster grassroots relations between everyday Americans and local people
throughout the developing world.341
This response manifested as the Alliance for Progress in Latin America. The Alliance was, as
historian Thomas Wright summarized it, "an inter-American agreement based on U.S. funding of a
major part of a minimum of $20 billion in development aid needed over the next decade and on the
commitment of the Latin American countries to undertake reforms and invest more of their own
resources in social and economic development." Kennedy, speaking more dramatically, called it "a vast
cooperative effort, unparalleled in magnitude and nobility of purpose, to satisfy the basic needs of the
American people for homes, work and land, health and schools -- techo, trabajo y tierra, salud y
escuela." The president promised that "if the countries of Latin America are ready to do their part -- and
I am sure they are -- then I believe the United States, for its part, should help provide resources of a
scope and magnitude sufficient to make this bold development plan a success, just as we helped to
provide, against nearly equal odds, the resources adequate to help rebuild the economies of Western
340
Cited in Gleijeses, Conflicting Missions, 29.
See Elizabeth Cobbs Hoffman, All You Need Is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s [1998]
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000).
341
145
Europe."342
Johnson assumed the presidency following Kennedy's death in November 1963 and then won
election himself the following year. The president remained even more committed to the Alliance for
Progress than his predecessor. The project was personal to him, stemming from his experience as a
middle-school teacher in Cotulla, an impoverished Mexican-American community in southern Texas.
As historian Waldo Heinrich wrote, Cotulla represented "his gateway to empathy for the poor countries
of the world. His Mexican-American experience led to an interest in Mexico, and that to a special claim
on Latin American policy and advocacy of an American mission to the Third World."343
Johnson signaled his commitment to the Alliance for Progress when he merged the Department
of State and AID's Latin American operations and granted sweeping authority to the assistant
secretaries of state for the region to plan and oversee policy there. These officials -- Thomas Mann
(1963-1965), Lincoln Gordon (1965-1967), and Covey Oliver (1967-1969) -- enjoyed unprecedented
access to the president, and they expanded the Alliance's objectives and scope as well. The Alliance
remained broadly dedicated to social and economic development, especially land reform and public
health, but it became more specific in certain other areas, such as economic integration and educational
reform, the latter field leading Johnson, Gordon, and Oliver to realize that they had neglected science
and technology, which they only began rectifying during the administration's final year.344
The Johnson administration had been slow to recognize science and technology because the
president, like his predecessor, and indeed like many historians since, was largely reacting to Castro
and his sympathizers' worldview, politics, and agenda in the 1960s. They called nearly everyone's
attention to land reform, imperialism and underdevelopment, and guerrilla warfare. The administration
belatedly shifted its focus to include science and technology partly because other Latin Americans,
including Frei, had brought it up.
342
Wright, Latin America in the Era of the Cuban Revolution, 66; and John Kennedy, Address to the Latin
American diplomatic corps at the White House, 13 March 1961. Reprinted in Department of State, Department of State
Bulletin 44 (3 April 1961), 472.
343
Walter Heinrichs, "Lyndon B. Johnson: Change and Continuity," in Warren Cohen and Nancy Tucker, eds.,
Lyndon Johnson Confronts the World: American Foreign Policy, 1963-1968 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1994), 27. Also see Thomas Mann oral history, 4 November 1968, 4-5. LBJ.
344
Department of State, "The Department of State during the Administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson,
November 1963-January 1969" I: Administrative History, Chapter 6, Inter-American Relations, Section B: The Alliance for
Progress. LBJ.
146
Frei's Revolution in Liberty and Nuclear Modernization
Frei and his Christian Democratic colleagues agreed with and committed themselves to the
Alliance for Progress, but they had anticipated it by decades. They splintered from the Conservative
Party and created the Falange Nacional in 1938. They were interested in Catholic-based social action,
including land reform and organizing the rural labor movement. This interest had alienated many
conservatives. But Frei and his friends eventually attracted likeminded members from the party's older
generation, including Cruz-Coke, who joined them in forming the much larger PDC in 1957.345
Christian Democratic ideology did not derive from the United States' Cold War politics and
modernization theories but rather from the Vatican's criticism of capitalist society, which had first
appeared in papal encyclicals in the late-nineteenth century and the depression era, and from those
progressive Catholics in Western Europe, such as philosopher Jacques Maritain, who continued
elaborating and applying this criticism in France, West Germany, and Italy as the twentieth century
unfolded. Frei's falangistas applied this to Chile. They gained credibility as sincere reformers when
they led a peasant protest in Molina, in the province of Curicó, in October 1953. They continued
growing as a party and gaining support into the early-1960s.346
The Chilean electorate and the balance of forces in national politics had experienced dramatic
change by then, which contributed to the PDC's emergence as a major national party by the time the
Alliance for Progress was first appearing. Radicals, Socialists, Christian Democrats, and other minor
parties, eventually including the PCCh, had worked together in Congress to reform Chile's electoral
laws between 1958 and 1962. They did this primarily to expand the electorate in order to prevent
conservatives and landowners' continuing privileged access to and de facto veto power over the
country's political system. Liberals, for example, had used their congressional position to derail
President Gabriel González's (1946-1952) plan to reform land tenure and organize peasants before he
was even inaugurated. These non-conservative parties also repealed González's Law for the Permanent
Defense of Democracy and passed legislation enabling peasants to freely organize and vote outside of
landowner surveillance and reprisals for the first time in Chilean history.347
345
See Collier and Sater, History of Chile, 305-308; Loveman, Chile, 230-237; and Biblioteca Nacional de Chile,
"La Falange Nacional (1891-1957)," n.d., available at http://www.memoriachilena.cl.
346
See David Mutchler, The Church as a Political Factor in Latin America: With Particular Reference to Colombia
and Chile (New York: Praeger, 1971); Pius XI, "Quadragesimo Anno," 15 May 1931; and Leo XIII, "Rerum Novarum," 15
May 1891, available at http://w2.vatican.va.
347
See Faúndez, Marxism and Democracy, 116-132.
147
The PCCh emerged from its ten-year underground period weaker but now following the
strategy of the peaceful road to power, and not only collaborating with Socialists in the post-González
labor confederation, the Central Única de Trabajadores (CUT), but working with them in an allMarxist electoral coalition, the Frente de Acción Popular (FRAP). FRAP nominated Allende for
president in 1958. He attracted approximately 29 percent of the vote, a major showing by Chilean
standards. Alessandri, who won the election, did so with just over 31 percent, garnering only
approximately 35,000 more votes. This convinced Chile's Marxists that they did not need to work with
non-Marxist parties to gain power through cross-class alliances anymore.348
Chilean communists were following this strategy because the Soviet Union had decided that
peaceful roads to socialism were permissible in 1956. As Khrushchev explained at the Twentieth Party
Congress in Moscow that year, "the forms of social revolution vary. And it is not true that we regard
violence and civil war as the only way to remake society…the working class…has an opportunity…to
win a firm majority in parliament and to turn the parliament from an agency of bourgeois democracy to
an instrument of genuinely popular will."349
The PCCh's Secretary General Galo González repeated this almost word for word, telling his
comrades that revolution "is not necessarily always followed in every circumstance by political action
involving civil war, armed insurrection and violent and extreme change. In our country there are
examples that encourage us to think of the possibility of transforming the actual regime by peaceful
means, i.e. by parliamentary action." This would remain Chilean communists' strategy into the 1970s.
Socialists, on the other hand, increasingly influenced by Castro's politics, accepted the peaceful road as
one possible strategy but also insisted on keeping violent revolution on the agenda.350
Meanwhile, Christian Democrats, who had already secured a strong base among progressiveminded Catholics, aggressively challenged the FRAP coalition for the working-class, urban-poor, and
peasants' votes in the early-1960s -- the electorate had trebled from approximately one million to three
since 1952, and there were many new voters among them. Frei presented his party as an alternative to
traditional conservatives, or "reactionaries with no conscience," on the one hand, and communists and
348
See Cruz-Coke, Historia electoral, 106-108.
Khrushchev, "Report of the Central Committee to the Twentieth Party Congress," 163.
350
González cited in Carmelo Furci, The Chilean Communist Party and the Road to Socialism (London: Zed, 1984),
56. For a discussion on the connection between Khrushchev's speech and FRAP and the Unidad Popular coalitions' strategy
of the peaceful road, see Olga Ulianova, "La Unidad Popular y el golpe militar en Chile: Percepciones y analisis soviéticos,"
Estudios Públicos 79 (2000): 83-171; and Furci, Chilean Communist Party, 56-114.
349
148
socialists, whom he described as "revolutionaries with no brains," on the other. He promised substantial
structural reform, including "Chileanization" of the copper mines, or 51 percent state ownership rather
than Cuban-style expropriation, land redistribution, massive government investment in housing and
education, and "promoción popular," the inclusion and empowerment of marginalized people, from
women to shantytown dwellers and the peasantry, into national politics. Frei premised this, which he
called the Revolution in Liberty, on his belief that the PDC would outcompete FRAP and permanently
gain these voters' loyalty.351
Frei also represented continuity. He was but the latest in a line of Chilean leaders interested in
state-directed development and modernization, beginning with the Ibáñez dictatorship (1927-1931),
which attempted to stimulate industrialization and production, and the Cerda administration (19381941), which inaugurated the Corporación de Fomento de la Producción (CORFO), Chile's national
development corporation, in 1939. These presidents and their successors created Chile's modern
infrastructure, and they sought out new energy sources and technologies, too. CORFO founded the
Empresa Nacional de Electricidad (ENDESA) to construct the national grid and to start tapping into
hydroelectric power in 1943. Chileans also discovered oil reserves in Magallanes and began refining
petroleum the same decade. These fossil fuels not only satisfied some of the country's growing energy
requirements, but they also enabled Chileans to export petroleum byproducts, such as propane. Frei
was determined to expand upon this through nuclear modernization.352
From Curicó to London
A special congressional election in Chile's central valley clarified the country's radically altered
politics and panicked conservatives, which facilitated, more than any other contributing factors, Frei's
ascension to the presidency in 1964. When Curicó province's Socialist Deputy Oscar Naranjo Jara died
in office on 18 December 1963, Chileans interpreted the special election called to select his
replacement as a preview of the upcoming presidential contest, which had become a three-way race.
351
Cited in Collier and Sater, History of Chile, 308. Also see Jadwiga Pieper Mooney, The Politics of Motherhood:
Maternity and Women's Rights in Twentieth-Century Chile (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009), 71-101;
Wright, Latin America in the Era of the Cuban Revolution, 130-134; and Faúndez, Marxism and Democracy in Chile, 133158.
352
For Chilean development and modernization from the late-1920s into the 1960s, see Collier and Sater, History of
Chile, 226-302; Loveman, Chile, 196-229; and Faúndez, Marxism and Democracy in Chile, 42-50. ENDESA remained a
state-owned corporation until the Pinochet dictatorship privatized it in 1989.
149
The Conservative and Liberal parties had united with Radicals to form "the Democratic Front" in
response to the rising Christian Democratic and FRAP challenges two years earlier. The Democratic
Front controlled, theoretically, a combined total of approximately 50 percent of the vote, and it was
confident its candidate, Rodolfo Ramírez, would prevail against the FRAP's nominee, Oscar Naranjo
Arias, the deceased deputy's son. But Naranjo won the election, with 39 percent of the vote to the
Democratic Front's 33 percent.353
Curicó produced a fundamental realignment in Chilean politics. Conservatives and Liberals
desperately threw their weight -- about 30 percent of the vote -- behind Frei and the PDC, which had
become the largest single party in the country following the municipal elections in 1963, where it took
22 percent of the vote, as the lesser evil. They attempted to influence Frei's platform, but he refused to
grant them any concessions. This unconditional conservative backing transformed the presidential
election into a two-way race. It was much more valuable to the PDC than any CIA support, and it
carried Frei into office. Indeed, it was decisive. Not even approximately $1 billion in Alliance for
Progress aid to Chile for the remainder of the 1960s could keep Christian Democrats in the presidency
after these conservatives merged into the new National Party in 1967 and backed away from Frei and
the PDC in 1969 and 1970.354
Meanwhile, Frei began implementing his agenda immediately. The president traveled to
Western Europe in July 1965, determined to attract European aid. As Chilean officials told their British
counterparts, and as Fermandois confirmed, Frei planned to use this European support "to diversify
external (financial) aid. Economic aid should not come exclusively from the U.S. or from international
organizations where the U.S. vote was decisive." While in Europe, the president met British officials at
the Atomic Energy Authority (AEA) in London on 15 July, where he sought and received detailed
briefings on nuclear science and technology.355
353
Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional de Chile, Reseña Biográfica Parlamentaria, "Oscar Alfredo Naranjo Jara," n.d.,
available at http://historiapolitica.bcn.cl; and Biblioteca del Congreso Nacional de Chile, Reseña Biográfica Parlamentaria, "
Oscar Gastón Naranjo Arias," n.d., available at http://historiapolitica.bcn.cl. Also see Collier and Sater, History of Chile,
261-263; Margaret Power, Right-Wing Women in Chile: Feminine Power and the Struggle against Allende, 1964-1973
(University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 73-74; Cruz-Coke, Historia electoral, 109; Paul Sigmund,
The Overthrow of Allende and the Politics of Chile, 1964-1976 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), 29-30;
and Unlisted author from CIA's Directorate of Intelligence, Latin American division to Director of Office of National
Estimates Sherman Kent, "An Old Fear Revived," 17 March 1964. CIA Records Search Tool (CREST), National Archives,
College Park, MD (NA).
354
Cruz-Coke, Historia electoral, 86, 107-113; and United States Senate, Covert Action in Chile.
355
Fermandois, "Hero on the Latin American Scene," 283; and D.E.N. Peirson, AEA, to J. McAdam Clark, Foreign
Office, 11 August 1965, FO 371 183314. BNA.
150
The Foreign Office was already following developments in both Peru and Chile by the mid1960s. Both of these countries were inquiring whether dual-use nuclear technology could help them
desalinate seawater in the Atacama, where the arid, southern Peruvian coast and the mineral-rich
Chilean north met. And both had sought the IAEA's advice on this.356
Two CChEN engineers, Efraín Friedman, who would serve as the commission's executive
director from 1966 to 1970, and Sergio Alvarado, who would briefly succeed him, presented a paper at
a desalinization conference in New York in the mid-1960s, too. And this further attracted British
interest. Friedman and Alvarado argued that Chilean water requirements in the north were rapidly
outpacing the country's capacity to supply it. It would cost too much to import water, either from the
well-watered southern provinces or from across the Andes -- and so would solar-powered
desalinization. They preferred nuclear desalination because it also offered electricity and could kill two
birds with one stone.357
The IAEA dispatched a mission to Chile in March 1966. Its team suggested that Chileans
develop either fossil-fueled or nuclear-powered desalinization plants, that it seek new water sources on
or below the surface, and that it expand existing pipelines to the north. It also advised the Chilean
government to commission a more thorough study. The Frei administration contracted Ewbank and
Partners, a London consultancy, to conduct it. The British government paid 80 percent of Ewbank's
costs.358
The Wilson government subsidized Ewbank because it perceived this as a chance to showcase
British nuclear expertise in Chile and southern South America. Santa Cruz had also worked with
Edmund de Rothschild, a British merchant banker from a family long involved in Anglo-Chilean
finance, behind the scenes in London to ensure that Wilson and his cabinet saw this chance. Rothschild
met several mid-level officials at the Ministry of Overseas Development (ODM) in December 1965,
months before the IAEA team arrived in Chile. He advised them that Mexico and Israel would soon test
nuclear-powered desalinization plants and that, if successful, Chile and Iran would likely follow. "If
Britain were to stand a reasonable chance of exporting desalinization plant to these last named states in
356
Enrique Monge Gordillo, Junta de Control de Energía Atómica del Perú to A.H. Spire, British embassy Lima, 26
May 1965, FO 371 183322; and British embassy Santiago, "Nuclear Power in Northern Chile," 31 August 1965, FO 371
183314. BNA.
357
British embassy Santiago summarized this paper in British embassy Santiago to Foreign Office, 7 April 1966,
FO 371 189469. BNA.
358
"Resumé of Statement of Sr. Ole Pedersen, Head of the scientific mission that visited the North," 25 March 1966,
attached to Ibid.; and ODM to Ewbank and Partners, Ltd., 19 November 1966, FO 371 189469. BNA.
151
the 1970s," he suggested, "then a start in preparing the ground must be made now."359
In the United States, the Johnson administration was also asking Britons and West Germans "to
pay more attention to Latin America" by the mid-1960s. Although Washington and its Western
European allies had clashed in the Caribbean, particularly where Britons, French, Spaniards, and others
were trading with Cuba against Johnson's protests, the situation was different in southern South
America. Thus Johnson sent Gordon to London and Bonn to urge these governments to become more
involved in the region.360
Britons found all the right doors open in Chile. Several companies from many countries had bid
on the Ewbank study, but Chileans clearly preferred Britain. They had made special efforts to invite
them to submit an offer. This affinity came from more than Santa Cruz and Rothschild's endeavors in
London; it derived from nearly 150 years of Anglo-Chilean relations, which had cultivated much more
than mere goodwill. Indeed, Chileans identified with Britain so closely that they called themselves the
English of South America, and Britons knew this. One can hardly blame them for failing to see French
President Charles de Gaulle (1958-1969), their primary competition in Chile, coming.361
Enter Charles de Gaulle
Chile's transatlantic relationships included de Gaulle's France in the 1960s. The French
president had begun strengthening Franco-Chilean relations, and indeed relations with others in Pacific
South America as far north of Chile as Colombia, early that decade. This followed his decision to start
testing nuclear weapons in the South Pacific, which concerned these countries. It was part of his overall
effort to restore French greatness through an independent foreign policy and military capability. De
Gaulle's initiatives coincided with CChEN's expansion, and he had already deftly exploited this
opening by the time Britons contemplated getting involved.362
359
"Record of a conversation between the Parliamentary Secretary and Mr. Edmund de Rothschild," 1 December
1965, FO 371 183314. BNA.
360
Lincoln Gordon oral history, 10 July 1969, 69; Department of State, Administrative History of the Johnson
Administration, Chapter 6 (Inter-American Relations): Section B: The Alliance for Progress; and Ibid., Section C: Western
Hemisphere Security. LBJ. For the Anglo-American clash in Cuba, see Christopher Hull, "'Going to War in Buses': The
Anglo-American Clash over Leyland Sales to Cuba, 1963-1964," Diplomatic History 34 (2010): 793-822.
361
British embassy Santiago to Foreign Office, 6 June 1966, FO 371 189469. BNA.
362
The French lost their initial testing ground in the Sahara when they withdrew from Algeria. They moved into the
South Pacific from there, where they tested nuclear weapons for thirty years, from 1966 to 1996. See Jean-Marc Regnault,
"France's Search for Nuclear Test Sites, 1957-1963," Journal of Military History 67 (2003): 1223-1248; and "France Ending
Nuclear Tests That Caused Broad Protests," New York Times, 30 January 1996, at http://www.nytimes.com.
152
The Frei administration increased CChEN's budget from approximately 80,000 escudos in 1965
to 500,000 escudos and $120,000 in foreign aid, mainly from the IAEA and France, in 1966. This rose
to 1,500,000 escudos and $40,000 in 1968. Then it soared to 5,000,000 escudos and $200,000, now
primarily from the IAEA and Britain. The commission controlled assets valued at 7,000,000 escudos by
1969.363
CChEN's engineers and scientists, moreover, became more visible in the international nuclearscience community in the mid-1960s. They attended conferences in Buenos Aires, Lima, Mexico City,
Washington, DC, and Vienna, and meetings in Norway, France, Austria, and Czechoslovakia in 1966
alone. CChEN negotiated partnerships with its counterparts in Argentina, France, and Israel as well.
But the commission lacked the physical structure it envisioned. It needed a national center and research
reactor, trained engineers to operate it, and highly-enriched uranium to fuel it to continue growing.
De Gaulle offered to meet many of these needs between 1966 and 1968. Chilean officials and
scientists at the National Health Service, the University of Chile, and the Federico Santa María
Technical University created and began operating a network of monitoring stations that spanned the
nation and reached out into the South Pacific via Easter Island. De Gaulle's representatives assisted
them as they evaluated the air, water, and food, especially milk, vegetables, and fish, for gamma
radiation that the fallout from France's tests were producing. De Gaulle also started training Chilean
engineers in France and sending French and Belgian engineers to Chile. Socia, a French firm, was
offering to provide a research reactor on very favorable terms, through a three million-franc grant and a
seven million-franc loan via the French government, or £420,000 by British reckoning, repayable over
20 years at three-and-a-half percent.364
Fairey Engineering, a British firm, was also negotiating with CChEN, but the company's costs,
with no government support, remained more than twice as high as Socia's, and it could not compete.
Fairey could sell a reactor to the commission for £800,000. Fairey offered CChEN a private loan which
Chileans could repay over five years at five-and-a-half percent, which was the best it could do. The
Board of Trade's Export Credits Guarantee Department (ECGD) had ruled that existing policies did not
363
CChEN, Memoria anual 1966; CChEN, Memoria anual 1967: Centro Nacional de Estudios Nucleares
(Santiago: CChEN, 1968); CChEN, Memoria anual 1968 (Santiago: CChEN, 1969); and CChEN, Memoria anual 1969
(Santiago: CChEN, 1970). CNEN.
364
Jeffery Ling, "Visit of the Chilean Ambassador on 23 October," 22 October 1968, FCO 55/310; Graham, Foreign
Office, to Hawkins, Treasury, 28 October 1968, FCO 55/310; and Drucker, Foreign Office, to Hawkins, Treasury, 31
October 1968, FCO 55/310. BNA.
153
permit it to subsidize Fairey without ministerial intervention. So CChEN was inclined to accept the
French offer and was poised to formally recommend this to the Frei administration by October 1968.
But Frei still preferred Britain. Thus Santa Cruz asked to see Foreign Secretary Michael Stewart in
London to discuss "what could be done in the United Kingdom on this matter, especially on the
financial side."365
De Gaulle as Leverage
Santa Cruz confirmed that the Frei administration wanted European support in the nuclear field
because "It would not be a good thing, he thought, for Chile to become dependent on the U.S. in this
field and the Chilean authorities had in fact decided to turn to Europe instead." Frei expressly sought
British support because Britons had experience installing research reactors abroad, and the French did
not; Britons were offering more long-term support and spare parts than the French; and, perhaps most
importantly, Santiago feared that accepting the French offer would tie its hands concerning its
objections to France's nuclear testing in the future. Stewart concurred that de Gaulle might have been
attempting to influence Chilean policy through generous aid and technical support.366
Stewart explained that the Wilson government could improve Fairey's offer if the circumstances
warranted it. Santa Cruz seized this opening. He tantalized Stewart, comparing the mutual benefits of
investing in nuclear science and technology to railroad construction a century earlier. He proposed that
the AEA and CChEN negotiate an agreement to cooperate in these matters. He further suggested that
the Frei administration might sign such an agreement and announce its decision to buy British during
the queen's state visit the following month. Stewart drafted an agreement and began pressing the
bureaucracy in London to reevaluate the situation.367
Queen Elizabeth II visited Chile in November 1968. Lord Chalfont (Alun Gwynne-Jones), a
minister who specialized in defense policy, accompanied her. Chalfont's briefing papers reveal Britain's
broader, ongoing interests in Chile and southern South America at the time. These interests included
cultural and economic issues, such as Britain and Chile's agreeing to recognize the other's academic
365
Santa Cruz to Stewart, 11 October 1968, FCO 55/310; and Dennis Allen, "Atomic Reactor for Chile," 19
November 1968, FCO 55/310. BNA.
366
"Record of a Conversation between the Foreign Secretary and the Chilean Ambassador Held at the Foreign and
Commonwealth Office on Thursday, 24 October, 1968, at 4.30 p.m.," attached to Ling to Diggines, 24 October 1968, FCO
55/310. BNA.
367
Ibid.
154
and professional qualifications, educational exchanges and scholarships supporting Chileans who
wished to study in England, and Britons in Chile as well, and the Wilson government's commitment to
a £4 million line of credit that Baring Brothers, Rothschilds, and the Bank of London had offered the
Frei administration the previous month.368
These broader interests notwithstanding, Chalfont was there to negotiate a nuclear deal. The
Foreign Office had advised him that "we should do our utmost to obtain this order for the U.K., not
only because in itself it represents a sizeable piece of business but also because a nuclear centre in
Chile containing a British research reactor and equipment together with the Cooperation that would
flow from such an arrangement would give the U.K. an excellent lead when the Chileans decide to
build their first nuclear power station." Chalfont and Ambassador Frederick Cecil Mason met Chilean
Foreign Minister Gabriel Valdés, Santa Cruz, and Friedman to discuss this during the queen's visit.369
Chalfont soon discovered that the Frei administration had its own plans. Frei intended to
acquire a British and not a French reactor, on Chilean and not British terms, and to inaugurate a
national center before the presidential elections two years hence. Frei's negotiators pursued this
aggressively. As the British embassy came to understand, "there has been a lot of political steam put
behind this project...the Christian Democrats are anxious to have something to show for themselves in
this field before September [1970], i.e. they would like some part of the project to have reached a stage
where there could be some opening ceremony and attendant publicity."370
Chalfont began the negotiations, arguing that the British reactor suited Chilean needs better than
the French one. An Anglo-Chilean partnership, moreover, offered long-term technical advantages -such as superior fueling techniques -- that outweighed any short-term financial gains Chileans might
realize from the French offer. Valdés had explained earlier that the Frei administration would consider
Chile's overall trading position with potential sellers when reaching its decision. Chalfont reminded
him of "the balance of our bilateral trade, which was in the ratio of 3:1 against us." Mason added "that
we had also provided a total of about £60 million in credits over the last couple of years."371
368
"State Visit to Chile: November 1968: Supplementary Brief for Lord Chalfont," undated, FO 73/71. Also see
"State Visit to Brazil: November, 1968: Supplementary Brief for Lord Chalfont," undated, FO 73/71. BNA; and Alun
Chalfont, The Shadow of My Hand: A Memoir (London: Weidenfelt & Nicolson, 2000), 141-146.
369
Jeffrey Ling, "Background Brief for Lord Chalfont's Visit Accompanying the Queen to South America: Sale of
Nuclear Reactor to Chile," undated, FCO 55/310. BNA.
370
British embassy Santiago to Foreign Office, 9 January 1970, FCO 55/556. BNA.
371
Mason to Foreign Office, Telegram 395, 17 November 1968, FCO 55/310; and British embassy Santiago,
"Record of a Meeting at the Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs between Señor Valdés, Minister of Foreign Affairs, and
155
Freidman conceded that Britain was nominally ahead in such areas as fueling techniques. This
notwithstanding, the French reactor better suited CChEN's needs. Further, the technical differences
between Britain and France in such areas as reactor construction and radioisotope production remained
negligible. "Señor Friedman," the British embassy reported, "concluded that the Commission's
assessment at the moment was that they would recommend to the Chilean government that they should
purchase the French reactor." Valdés, positioning himself to play good cop to Friedman's bad cop,
remained silent as Friedman, who sincerely preferred the French offer, pressed these points.372
These discussions discouraged Chalfont, who warned Stewart that the Frei administration
would likely announce its decision to buy French within days. He explained that French engineers had
been advising Chileans for more than a year in this field and Socia had consequently gained advantages
that Fairey simply could not match. The Foreign Office, to avoid embarrassment, should not sign the
agreement that Stewart had drafted for Santa Cruz until a decent interval had elapsed.373
But the situation was not as it seemed. Valdés found Chalfont the next day and suggested they
sign the agreement immediately. He assured him that the Frei administration would either buy British
or delay buying French until after the New Year, sparing Britons embarrassment. Meanwhile, Fairey
should send representatives to Santiago to persuade CChEN, and the Wilson government ought to
continue improving the company's offer as well. An encouraged Chalfont promptly signed the
agreement, explaining that the administration's position "had changed markedly in our favour" since the
previous day.374
Valdés confirmed that his government was distancing itself from the French offer two days
later. The foreign minister told Mason that he had informed the French ambassador that the British
government was making an attractive offer, and his government was presently considering it. The
French ambassador protested, citing existing Franco-Chilean understandings. Valdés retorted that "the
French Government could hardly expect special treatment in view of the embarrassment and difficulties
caused to Chile by such French actions as the sale of supersonic aircraft and armaments [that is, Mirage
fighters] to Peru and Argentina. This indicated a purely commercial approach to Latin American
problems ignoring the interests of Chile." "There seems no doubt whatsoever," Mason further reported,
Lord Chalfont," 18 November 1968, FCO 55/311. BNA.
372
British embassy Santiago, "Record of a Meeting at the Chilean Ministry of Foreign Affairs."
373
Chalfont to Foreign Office, Telegram 399, 18 November 1968, FCO 55/310. BNA.
374
Mason to Foreign Office, Telegram 395, 17 November 1968; and Chalfont to Stewart, Telegram 401, 19
November 1968, FCO 55/310. BNA.
156
"that the Chilean Government are now resolved to buy from us if we can go some way to meet their
requirements." Fairey responded swiftly. Its representatives planned to depart for Santiago in the
second week of December.375
Meanwhile, Stewart's intervention had caused the bureaucratic wheels to begin turning in
London. The ODM prepared to offer the Chilean government a special loan to purchase the Fairey
reactor: up to £100,000 to cover the down payment, repayable over 15 years with a five-year grace
period ending in 1974, at seven-and-three-quarters percent. The ECGD pledged to guarantee Fairey's
remaining costs for 10 years at five-and-a-half percent.376
The Frei administration continued using France to press the Wilson government to do even
more. Santa Cruz told Chalfont, who had returned to London, that CChEN was advising the
administration to accept the French offer. He explained that if the administration accepted this, it would
exclude Britain from Chile's nuclear future. The commission would still welcome Fairey's
representatives in Santiago, "but naturally with no commitments." He suggested that the Wilson
government might improve the company's chances it if granted Chile £100,000 in equipment in
addition to ODM's special loan, and then permitted Chileans to repay that loan over twenty years, and
the ECGD's loans over 15 years, both at five-and-a-half percent. Rothschild called Chalfont's office and
reconfirmed these terms later that day.377
The Foreign Office deemed the Frei administration's new terms "really somewhat unreasonable"
and rejected them. Britons finally comprehended that Chileans were using France as leverage to force
them to improve their offer. As one Foreign Office official recognized, "if we improve our terms, this
may provide the Chileans with a lever to extract even better terms from the French Government," and
so on. Chalfont concurred. He told Santa Cruz that "the terms which we have already offered are
exceptionally favourable and it would be very difficult indeed for us to make any further
modifications."378
375
Mason to Foreign Office, Telegram 403, 21 November 1968, FCO 55/310; and Jeffery Ling, "Sale of a Nuclear
Reactor to Chile," 29 November 1968, FCO 55/311. BNA.
376
Rednall, ODM, to Blagden, Foreign Office, 5 December 1968, FCO 55/311; and "Dictated over the telephone by
Mr. Edmund de Rothschild on Thursday, 5 December 1968, at 2.30 p.m. at the termination of a meeting between the Chilean
Ambassador, Mr. Bray of Faireys and Sir Charles Cunningham, UKAEA," undated, FCO 55/311. BNA.
377
Santa Cruz to Chalfont, 5 December 1968, FCO 55/311; and "Dictated over the telephone by Mr. Edmund de
Rothschild on Thursday, 5 December 1968." BNA.
378
C.D. Wallace, "Atomic Reactor for Chile," 6 December 1968, FCO 55/311; and Chalfont to Santa Cruz, 6
December 1968, FCO 55/311. BNA.
157
CChEN received Fairey's representatives two days later. These harried representatives further
reduced the company's bid, promising to match any French offer. They satisfied the commission that
Fairey's reactor suited its technical requirements better than the French one. CChEN now advised the
Frei administration to buy British. Santa Cruz, as described above, announced this at the Chilean
embassy on 21 December. Thus Frei had adroitly negotiated the most favorable agreement possible
from the seller he had wanted to do business with from the start. But this merely represented a small
success within what was becoming a larger pattern of disappointment.
Things Fall Apart
The Alliance for Progress had become a disappointment to many by the late-1960s. Frei
lamented "the alliance that lost its way," for example, in Foreign Affairs in April 1967. The president
complained that the Alliance had lost its focus and idealism and consequently weakened over the
preceding six years. It was becoming just another United States foreign-aid program. He cited
conflicting worldviews and policy preferences on the ground in different Latin American countries,
which, as a group and as individual nations, all lacked "a clear ideological direction and
determination." Both the far right and far left not only opposed it, moreover, but they actively
sabotaged it when they could -- the right criticizing it as "utopian and unrealistic" and the left
dismissing it as "an instrument of imperialism." He was only speaking of inter-American affairs, but he
faced the same obstacles in his ongoing efforts to secure transatlantic cooperation while realizing his
nuclear modernization initiative, which collapsed in 1969 and 1970.379
The Frei administration signed the British promissory note for the reactor loan in March 1969,
and the two governments ratified the agreements they had negotiated several months later, that October.
But problems soon followed. Some derived from a French backlash; some from Fairey and CChEN's
difficulties, mostly resulting from their hasty negotiations, but also from cultural differences and even
personality clashes; and still others from the rising Chilean left, which opposed Frei's policies.
Although these problems did not prevent the commission's eventually completing its projects, Frei
would not see this as president.
The Wilson government solved the first problem, which occurred in Europe, almost effortlessly.
The French government expelled the Chilean engineers it was training when it learned that the Frei
379
Eduardo Frei Montalva, "The Alliance That Lost Its Way," Foreign Affairs 45 (1967), 441, 443.
158
administration had accepted the British offer. The Foreign Office simply moved these engineers to
Britain and continued their training there. The AEA helped enroll two Chilean military officers in a
two-year civilian program in nuclear engineering at Queen Mary College as well.380
Fairey and CChEN's relations presented a more serious problem. Indeed, the British embassy
was calling them "warlike" by December 1970. This originated with their governments' thrusting them
into poorly-prepared, high-pressure negotiations, and with Chileans' apparently conflating the British
government and Fairey. Thus the contract CChEN and the company had produced lacked the clear
meeting-of-the minds the Franco-Chilean one would likely have had. Fairey's directors interpreted it
very narrowly, exactly as it appeared on paper. But CChEN chose a more expansive interpretation,
premised on the Wilson government's eagerness and Fairey's last-minute promises to match the French
offer, promises which Chileans continued using to press Britons in 1969 and 1970.381
This first manifested when Valdés traveled to London to exchange ratification instruments in
October 1969. He also planned to sign what he expected were minor, ancillary agreements with Fairey
in a press conference at the Chilean embassy. CChEN had modified the reactor's design specifications
several times, and the project's costs had increased by £110,000. Fairey had provisionally agreed to
these changes, understanding that either the commission would pay the new costs directly, or that the
Wilson government would offer Chileans supplementary, low-interest loans to do so. But when Fairey's
representatives approached Valdés at the signing ceremony, laying an amended agreement before him,
explaining that expected additional modifications would incur even more costs as construction
continued, "Chileans exploded at this and the signature ceremony was cancelled."382
Valdés threatened to nullify all of the agreements unless the Wilson government resolved these
differences in CChEN's favor. He would go to Chalfont, Stewart, and even Elizabeth, if necessary. The
Foreign Office avoided direct involvement, proposing Fairey and Valdés sign the original contract and
set the company's amended agreement aside. If new costs had arisen, Fairey and CChEN should discuss
them elsewhere and later. This assuaged the situation that day, but Fairey and CChEN's relations only
worsened afterward.
380
British embassy Santiago to Foreign Office, 21 January 1969, FCO 55/311; British embassy Santiago to Foreign
Office, 7 February 1969, FCO 55/311; AEA to Foreign Office, 13 February 1969, FCO 55/311; ODM to Foreign Office, 24
February 1969, FCO 55/311; Ministry of Defense to Foreign Office, 31 March 1969, FCO 55/311; and British embassy
Santiago to Foreign Office, 2 July 1969, FCO 55/312. BNA.
381
British embassy Santiago to Foreign Office, 22 December 1970, FCO 55/556. BNA.
382
Wiggin to Graham, "Chilean Foreign Minister's Visit -- Nuclear Training Reactor," 21 October 1969, FCO
55/312; and C.C. Vinson, Chairman, Fairey, to Chilean embassy London, 20 October 1969, FCO 55/312. BNA.
159
Friedman presented the commission's complaints to the British embassy several months later.
CChEN expected the ODM to send more equipment to Chile than it was sending; the commission
requested that AEA waive approximately £20,000 in inspection costs it deemed unreasonable; it asked
the Foreign Office to extend its engineers' training programs, which would end in May, to September;
and it accused Fairey of delaying the project.383
Although most at the British embassy and many at the Foreign Office sympathized with
Friedman, others in London, particularly at the AEA, had grown wary of CChEN, and they objected to
Friedman's complaints. Dr. Fritz Hinzner, CChEN's senior engineer, had come earlier to London to
negotiate the inspection costs. AEA officials found him abrasive, and they characterized his continually
citing the French offer to get a better deal as "blackmail." "When Dr. Hinzner was in this country," one
protested, "he tried consistently to force us into additional offers of help by quoting what the French
had promised." With respect to the inspection costs, they tried to explain, they were not seeking profit
or charging Chileans unnecessarily; their charges derived from the actual costs they would incur from
the inspections. With respect to Friedman's allegation that Fairey was delaying the project, "This of
course is a matter for Faireys themselves."384
Fairey's board members perceived all of this as a personal dispute with Hinzner, and this dispute
became so bitter that the Foreign Office interceded in November 1970, when each side was openly
accusing the other of breaching the contract, and the company was threatening to walk away. Further
complicating this, and perhaps driving Hinzner's now desperate behavior, Allende had won the
presidential election in September. He was inaugurated the same month the Foreign Office attempted to
mediate this problem.
The incoming Allende administration had made it clear that it regarded imported technology
with suspicion and, in some cases, hostility. As Allende would explain in more detail when addressing
the UN's Conference on Trade and Development in April 1972, imperialism had long exploited and
impoverished the developing world through its self-serving use of technology. This had also robbed it
of its trained professionals and their creativity. "These conditions must be abolished," he declared. "We
must be able to select technology in relation to our own needs and our own development plans."385
383
Efraín Freidman, "Aid Memoire of Discussions Held the 6th of January 1970 between Mr. McQuade (British
Embassy), Mr. Lavercombe (British Embassy), Mr. Freidman (CCEN), Mr. Alvarado (CCEN), Dr. Hinzner (CCEN),"
attached to British embassy Santiago to Foreign Office, 9 January 1970. BNA.
384
B.D. MacLean, AEA, to P.J. Kelly, Ministry of Technology, 6 February 1970, FCO 55/556. BNA.
385
Salvador Allende, "Address to the Third UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD)," April 1972,
160
Both Frei and CChEN had seen Allende's challenge coming for several years. Many on the
Chilean left rejected not only Frei's approach to development, as the president acknowledged in his
Foreign Affairs piece, but the commission, too. Chileans, they argued, must devote their limited
resources to more pressing basic needs, from leading a revolution in their political system to
nationalizing their mineral wealth and financial system while combating poverty, especially in public
housing, public health, and the education system. They of course also wanted far more aggressive land
reform than they had seen thus far.
Dr. Benjamín Viel, CChEN's president from 1966 to 1968, disagreed. According to Viel,
scientific and technological innovation did not cap economic growth or social progress; rather, it
propelled them. When Europeans had first embraced the industrial era's new technologies and methods
they were less developed than Chile presently was. They had not modernized by investing their
resources in literacy campaigns. Rather, they progressed because they boldly invested in the cuttingedge science and technology of the time. Socioeconomic improvements, which enabled them to prevent
large numbers of needless deaths, solve multiple food-production problems, and improve education,
followed and did not precede this. "Transcending underdevelopment and incorporating Chile into the
community of nations that offers its citizens a just life requires stimulating scientific innovation," Viel
countered. Chileans should think imaginatively and act ambitiously. Now was not the time to think
small.386
But with Allende's election, and with Frei's vacating the presidential palace, Viel and his
colleagues at CChEN lost the argument. The Allende administration promptly suspended the
commission's projects. CChEN's board had resigned during the transition, as was customary in Chilean
politics, but the incoming government did not reappoint it, as was also customary. Friedman left his
position as executive director, and the country as well. Hinzner began acting as director, but apparently
on his own initiative and without legal authority -- and with no board behind him. This threw CChEN
into disarray and it worsened its problems with Fairey. This was what landed on the Foreign Office's
desks with an unwelcome thud that November.
According to Fairey's board, CChEN was failing to understand the relationship between its
modifications, the company's price increases, and the project's delays. And the commission was now
reprinted in James Cockcroft (ed.), Salvador Allende Reader: Chile's Voice of Democracy (New York: Ocean Press, 2000),
172.
386
Benjamín Viel, "Introducción," CChEN, Memoria anual 1966, 5-6.
161
refusing to pay as well. Hinzner, Fairey continued, could not place valid orders. But he was placing
orders anyway, insisting that Fairey accept his "letters of intent." The company's board members feared
that if they honored these letters, they would never receive payment. "FEL [Fairey Engineering,
Limited] are being forced to the conclusion that the Comision [sic] has no intention of honoring the
contract…FEL's best course will shortly be to recognize this and end the contract." Fairey asked the
Foreign Office to confirm Friedman's whereabouts, clarify Hinzner's legal position, and to sound out
the Allende administration's intentions.387
According to Hinzner, Fairey was arbitrarily and unfairly increasing costs on items already
quoted, it was declining to accept his orders, and it was demanding payments but refusing to submit
proper invoices. For example, he and Fairey had previously agreed to install an upgraded water makeup plant in the reactor. But the company, citing a revised estimate, had raised the price more than forty
percent since then. This and other unexplained and unjustified increases concerned him, and he asked
the Foreign Office to audit Fairey's pricing.388
Hinzner also wrote to Fairey's board directly. He discussed the water make-up plant and several
other items in detail. He alleged that the company was acting in bad faith, especially with respect to
pricing. Unless it justified itself to his satisfaction, he would bypass it and deal with its subcontractors
and even the subcontractors' suppliers instead.389
Fairey's board explained, in a deliberately condescending tone, that it was working diligently to
control costs. But each CChEN-ordered modification created new expenses, as reflected in the
subcontractors' revised estimates. However this may have been, the company did not have to justify its
prices or otherwise defend its integrity to Hinzner. It dismissed most of his complaints as false, and
rejected others as irrelevant. It announced that it was withdrawing all outstanding offers and quotations.
Both parties would have to renegotiate everything before proceeding, if they remained interested in
proceeding. It gave CChEN seven days to respond. If it failed to do so, Fairey would end its
relationship with the commission.390
By this time, the Foreign Office merely wished to salvage what it could. It, too, was serving a
387
Fairey Engineering, "Contract with the Government of Chile," undated summary, stamped 25 November 1970,
FCO 55/556, enclosure 1. BNA.
388
Hinzner to British embassy Santiago 5 November 1970, attached to British embassy Santiago to Foreign Office,
9 November 1970, FCO 55/556. BNA.
389
Hinzner to Whittaker, Fairey, 5 November 1970, FCO 55/556, enclosure 2. BNA.
390
Blackwood, Fairey, to Hinzner, 13 November 1970, FCO 55/556, enclosure 3. BNA.
162
new government. Prime Minister Edward Heath (1970-1974) had replaced Wilson in June 1970. The
Foreign Office no longer regarded Chile's nuclear project as optimistically as it had before. The original
project in Antofagasta, which had envisioned using nuclear-powered desalinization plants, and which
had been expected to lead to substantial orders in the 1970s, was becoming increasingly unlikely.
Chile's state electricity company now proposed to address the northern water problem with larger
reservoirs and through recycling. It would purchase and operate conventional electrical power stations
there as well -- unless nuclear technology proved cheaper, which did not seem likely. Several European
competitors were expressing their interest in supplying such technology, submitting initial estimates
and bids in 1970. British firms would probably not win any of these contracts. As the British embassy
recognized, "we shall not be helped by the fact that Fairey Engineering and the Comisión Nacional de
Energia Nuclear have still not entirely resolved their differences."391
The Foreign Office had calmly accepted Allende's victory, too, choosing a position one official
characterized as "wait and see." "Certainly we thought it far too early, and particularly where
commercial business with the public sector was concerned, to prophesy doom." Still, the FaireyCChEN conflict worried the embassy. "Clearly several people here have been very put out by FEL's
language. This is a difficult moment with the UP [Allende's coalition] stirring up feelings about
economic dependence, and arrogance and exploitation from developed countries. So far the UK has had
a good reputation but FEL's telex was in the worst US league." The Foreign Office believed it could
best deescalate the situation if both the company and the commission replaced their negotiators. It also
asked Fairey's board to revise its response to Hinzer.392
But it was too late. Fairey refused. The company clarified that its response had said exactly
what it intended to say, and it would not change one word. It sent all that CChEN had paid for, but it
withdrew from the contract and supplied nothing further.
CChEN continued to languish under the Allende administration, although the government
eventually appointed Alvarado executive director. He remained there for less than a year, however,
before leaving. Three presidents and two more executive directors came and went between early-1971
and late-1973, when the Chilean armed forces overthrew Allende. Meanwhile, the three-to-six-month
391
British embassy Santiago to Foreign Office, 15 June 1970, FCO 55/556. Also see British embassy Santiago to
Foreign Office, 9 March 1970, FCO 55/556; and "Antofagasta Nuclear Project," undated memorandum attached to British
embassy Santiago to Foreign Office, 18 June 1970, FCO 55/556. BNA.
392
C.D. Wiggin, FO, to British embassy Santiago, 6 December 1970, FCO 55/556; and British embassy Santiago to
Foreign Office, 18 December 1970, FCO 55/556. BNA.
163
delay Fairey and Hinzner had been haggling over in 1970 became a three-to-six-year delay in the first
years of that decade. CChEN stopped producing annual reports in 1970, and it did not produce them
again until 1976. When it reemerged as a functioning agency of the Chilean government, it did so under
military direction.
The Significance of Frei's Nuclear Agenda
This chapter has illustrated the Frei administration's independent commitment to Chilean
development and modernization in three points. Frei and the PDC arose in Chilean politics and society
long before the Kennedy and Johnson administrations began defining and promoting the Alliance for
Progress. Frei and his colleagues, and indeed several other political parties as well, had started to
democratize and modernize Chile several years before the Alliance. And Frei's Revolution in Liberty
remained a distinctly Chilean program, its overlap and compatibility with the Alliance notwithstanding.
In short, Frei was his own man.
Further, the US-centered, inter-American world-historical context within which historians tend
to interpret Chilean history cannot sufficiently explain the whole of the United States and Chile's Cold
War experience in the 1960s. Frei, like his predecessors, thought and acted in an Atlantic framework.
Indeed, the president skillfully used Chile's ongoing transatlantic relationships not only to diversify
foreign aid, but to play one European nation against the other when negotiating the deal he wanted.
Thus Frei approached development and modernization more broadly than the Alliance for Progress, not
only geographically, but also technologically.
This broad approach led Frei to continue supporting the Chilean nuclear-science community's
aspirations, which he had recognized as a vital part of his overall developmental and modernization
agenda when Cruz-Coke began promoting it in the mid-1950s. The president and CChEN lacked the
resources they needed to complete the reactor-equipped nuclear center they had planned. They and their
British partners also ran out of the time they required to resolve their differences. This was emblematic
of the larger failure of Chilean reform in the 1960s. As Frei observed in his Foreign Affairs piece,
Chileans remained divided at least three ways, between left, center, and right, with respect to political,
social, and economic change. This rendered such long-term projects as CChEN's problematic and
unstable. But this did not make these projects bad ideas.
164
These projects continued after both the Frei and Allende administrations had come and gone.
Chileans did not embrace large-scale nuclear power as Britons had hoped, mostly because they have
not yet solved the problem earthquakes pose to public safety. But this did not stop Chileans from
remaining involved with the international nuclear-science community. Indeed their involvement
transcends the Cold War period. The IAEA's research and applications have become, as one official
recently explained, "a constant factor in daily life…The Agency's focus…has increasingly been the use
of nuclear and isotopic techniques to address the daunting challenges in the developing world -disease, poverty, hunger, and a shortage of drinking water." Its projects include expanding radiotherapy
to treat cancer, cultivating radiation-induced mutations to improve rice production, and employing
discrete irradiation techniques to sterilize insect populations where conventional pesticides have failed,
resulting, for example, in the tsetse fly's eradication in Zanzibar. Chileans have actively contributed to
these research projects and applications from their beginnings. But historians' excessive focus on
American foreign policy, the agrarian issue, and guerrilla warfare and counterinsurgency, and their
tendency not to take Frei seriously as a sovereign, national leader in the 1960s, have long obscured
these beginnings.393
393
David Waller, "Atoms for Peace and the International Atomic Energy Agency," in Pilat, Atoms for Peace, 23.
165
VII. The Rise of General Viaux
On Thursday morning, 22 October 1970 at 8:15, General René Schneider left his residence in
Las Condes in his official Mercedes Benz for the Ministry of Defense in downtown Santiago. At
approximately 8:17, five to eight men in three or four cars crashed into the general's vehicle, forcing his
driver, an army corporal, to stop, get out, and investigate what had happened. Before the corporal could
fully exit the car, some of these men smashed its windows with a sledgehammer and attempted to
abduct the general. Schneider tried to resist, drawing his sidearm. But they were already upon him, and
they outgunned him. They shot him several times, and then fled. The corporal took the general to the
military hospital, where he died from his wounds three days later. He was the Chilean army's
commander-in-chief.394
A military court named retired Brigadier General Roberto Viaux the intellectual author of this
attack and sentenced him to 20 years in prison. The general's father-in-law and each of those assailants
who did not flee the country received less than 10 years. Viaux was working with several other highranking officers who were planning to form a military government in order to preempt Salvador
Allende's (1970-1973) election to the presidency. Allende represented the Marxist-Leninist Unidad
Popular coalition and was determined to lead a socialist revolution in Chile. This had attracted the
United States government's attention, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had made contact with
Viaux several times after 15 September. The agency's Project FUBELT, more commonly known as
Track II, had indeed meant to provoke such a coup. For this reason, historians have focused on the
Nixon administration (1969-1974) and the CIA when explaining Schneider's death.
Thus the consensus interpretation on the United States and Chile's Cold War experience has
long focused on President Richard Nixon, National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, and the CIA -about whom historians know a great deal -- at the expense of Viaux -- about whom they know very
little. The general fades into oblivion in some narratives. To cite one particularly dramatic example,
journalist Christopher Hitchens recently asked "What was the CIA going to do with the general
394
See United States Senate, Staff Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect
to Intelligence Activities, Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders (Washington, DC: Government Printing
Office, 1975), 225-254; CIA [probably David Atlee Philips], "Report on CIA Chilean Task Force Activities, 15 September
to 3 November 1970," 18 November 1970. Chile Declassification Project, available at http://www.state.gov; and Florencia
Varas, Conversaciones con Viaux (Santiago de Chile: Impresiones EIRE, 1972), 123-126. See Luis Gallardo's -- one of the
lead attackers -- account, written from prison, in Varas, Conversaciones con Viaux, 148-170.
166
[Schneider] once it had kidnapped him?" There remains no doubt that Nixon's attempt to create a coup
climate contributed to Schneider's death and to the military uprising that occurred three years later, as
the agency has acknowledged. But so did Viaux's movement and its actions.395
This chapter reconstructs the rise of Viaux and his movement, which included much of the
Chilean army and the right-wing paramilitary organization, the Frente Nacionalista Patria y Libertad
(Nationalist Front for Fatherland and Liberty). Viaux and those who followed him had their own
politics and agenda, and they operated on their own initiative, for their own motives, and on their own
schedule. They did not simply emerge as a CIA operation. Rather, they represented their own operation,
which dated back to 1968. Nixon, Kissinger, and the agency may have believed that they controlled or
influenced Viaux. But as the United States Senate's Church Committee found, "American officials had
exaggerated notions about their ability to control the actions of coup leaders…Events demonstrated
they had no such power."396
Viaux began contributing to Chile's Cold War history early, starting in the country's coal mines
in 1947 and 1948. He continued through the Tacnazo, or the Tacna affair -- his "quartering" with a
Santiago artillery regiment and his pronunciamiento against the Frei administration in October 1969.
He remained very active in Chilean politics into the Track II period in September and October 1970.
His movement, which continued to function even after the government had imprisoned him in June
1971, became the single most important factor that contributed to the energy that coalesced in favor a
coup and military ascendancy in Chilean politics, which finally came in September 1973.397
This chapter connects the Tacnazo, Track II, and the coup that occurred three years later into a
single movement and thus broadens and deepens Chile's Cold War experience. This enables historians
to see the well-researched 1970s in a fuller light, which remains this dissertation's primary purpose. It
also answers Hitchens's question, above, which remains a good one, even if the journalist -- like many
who have researched this, from the Church Committee's staff to the National Security Archive's Peter
Kornbluh and historian Jonathan Haslam -- have approached it from the wrong direction with respect to
395
Christopher Hitchens, The Trial of Henry Kissinger (London: Verso, 2001), 73. The CIA has acknowledged that
"Although CIA did not instigate the coup that ended Allende's government on 11 September 1973, it was aware of coupplotting 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." Central Intelligence
Agency, "CIA Activities in Chile," 18 September 2000, available at https://cia.gov.
396
United States Senate, Alleged Assassination Plots, 256-257.
397
Viaux used "quartering" and "pronunciamiento," a military declaration and species of coup d'état from Iberian
history, when characterizing and explaining the Tacnazo. See Varas, Conversaciones con Viaux, 75.
167
time and place, and ignored Chileans and pertinent Spanish-language sources of information as well.398
Journalist Eugenio Lira witnessed the Tacnazo and interviewed ministers and officers, including
Viaux, on all sides as it unfolded. His chronicle, ¡Ahora le toca al golpe!, combined with the
documents and testimony in journalist Florencia Varas's Conversaciones con Viaux offer insights into
the Chilean army that Lira and only a few others have understood. As the journalist warned his
countrymen, "this notion that the armed forces remain essentially obedient and cannot deliberate is
more unfashionable than men with short hair or women in dresses. Soldiers have deliberated since the
independence era. They are deliberating now, and they will continue deliberating into the future." This
notion, at least in the form it has taken in the consensus interpretation, of the supposedly apolitical,
constitutional, and democratic Chilean army, first appeared as the Frei and Allende administrations'
strategy to convince the professional officer corps it was so, not empirical evidence.399
Viaux and most of his colleagues in the professional officer corps simply brushed this strategy
aside. The general dismissed it as "a sustained press campaign…to convince the armed forces that they
cannot deliberate, that they can only concern themselves with military matters in their barracks and
nothing else" when Varas raised the issue with him in 1972. Schneider and, even more so, his deputy,
General Carlos Prats, may have agreed with Frei and Allende. But they were exceptional. This became
apparent after field-grade and junior officers and their wives forced Prats out of the service in August
1973, and then the Pinochet dictatorship (1973-1990) assassinated him in Buenos Aires in September
1974. Viaux, then, not Schneider, best exemplified the Chilean army's politics and traditions. Frei and
especially Allende misunderstood this and miscalculated, which proved fatal in the latter's case.
Viaux's Career to the Tacnazo
Viaux, the son of an army officer, earned his commission as a 20-year-old lieutenant in the
artillery in 1937. He followed a conventional-forces career path that led to command. He completed
specialized training in his field and then served as an instructor in the Escuela Militar in the 1940s. He
398
See Jonathan Haslam, The Nixon Administration and the Death of Allende's Chile: A Case of Assisted Suicide
(London: Verso, 2005); and Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (New
York: The New Press, 2003), xi-78.
399
Eugenio Lira Massi, ¡Ahora le toca al golpe! (Santiago de Chile: Abumohor Impresores, 1969), 138; and Varas,
Conversaciones con Viaux. The Chile Declassification Project, the Church Committee's reports, and the American embassy
in Santiago's reporting -- Record Group 84, Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State: Chile/U.S. Embassy Santiago,
Box 30, "POL 23-9 Rebellion Coups 1969." National Archives, College Park, MD (NA) -- corroborate and expand upon
Lira and Varas's information.
168
was promoted to captain in 1947.
Captain Viaux reported to Lota as part of the González administration's (1946-1952) response to
the coal miners' strikes in October 1947. He was there as "a military intervenor," and had complete
authority over the area's civilians through 1948. He "pacified" this area, where he occupied, from his
perspective, a neutral position between the coal company and the workers. He supervised new union
elections from which communists and suspected communists were excluded, and he negotiated
"significant improvements" in pay and benefits for the miners there.400
Viaux learned two lessons from his experiences in Lota. First, the occupation reconfirmed his
understanding that the army's primary missions remained defending national sovereignty,
independence, and honor, on the one hand, and guaranteeing internal order during moments of national
emergency, on the other. And second, he also learned applied anticommunist politics. He, like Captain
Augusto Pinochet, saw the Chilean Communist Party (PCCh) and Chile's other Marxist-Leninist parties
as "under the control of a foreign power -- Soviet power" from then forward. His thinking and
vocabulary on these issues represented, at least partly, a continuation of President Gabriel González's
anticommunist discourse.401
Viaux was not the only one to learn these lessons. Many within the professional officer corps
did. As political scientist Carlos Huneeus concluded, González created a potent anticommunist climate
in Chilean politics that endured for ten years and then produced a legacy that lasted even longer. This
legacy partly shaped and conditioned officers' worldviews and politics well into the 1970s. Huneeus
found that most of those ranked colonel or above who served the Pinochet dictatorship in its early years
had participated in the repression in Lota and Coronel -- or they had, like Pinochet, guarded internees
in Pisagua.402
Viaux attended the Chilean army's Academia de Guerra, or War College, from 1951 to 1953.
He was promoted to major when he graduated. He came back as an instructor in 1957 and 1958,
teaching courses in joint operations in land warfare. Viaux served on the army's general staff as a
lieutenant colonel, and then at the Ministry of Defense's National Defense Council in 1960 and 1963,
respectively. The army promoted him to full colonel and sent him to Bogotá as military attaché from
400
See Viaux's service record, summarized in Varas, Conversaciones con Viaux, 11-13.
Cited in Ibid., 48.
402
Carlos Huneeus, La guerra fría chilena: Gabriel González Videla y la ley maldita (Santiago de Chile: Random
House Mondadori, 2008), 15-16, 355-371.
401
169
1966 to 1968. When he returned, he was promoted to brigadier general and placed in command of the
First Division in Antofagasta, with jurisdiction over all military affairs in the Antofagasta and Atacama
provinces, in February 1969. He was fifty-two years old and deeply dissatisfied with the course his
country had taken.
Prelude to the Tacnazo
Viaux began complaining of the army's deteriorating conditions and morale when he assumed
command of the First Division. The Alliance for Progress and the Frei administration's Revolution in
Liberty had reduced the service to a poor state of readiness and virtual irrelevance. This undermined the
army's capability to perform its primary mission and thus threatened national security.403
Viaux's dissatisfaction partly derived from the United States' changing security perceptions and
posture in Latin America. Washington had helped coordinate and lead conventional hemispheric
defense since the Second World War. American interests in regional military cooperation responded to
three new problems in the late-1940s and early-1950s: it prepared the inter-American community to
meet a possible Soviet threat should a third world war occur, which would free United States warships
and coastal-defense forces for deployment elsewhere; it protected the hemisphere's sea lines of
communication; and it secured the region's strategic raw materials, such as copper and vanadium,
which Washington depended on. Thus the American government passed the Mutual Security Act in
1951, following the Truman administration's (1945-1953) enacting NSC 68 the year before. It granted
Latin American governments more than $38 million the first year, adding nearly $52 million in 1952.404
United States military assistance remained conventional in nature and scope through the 1950s.
Washington sent military and naval missions to several Latin American countries. It granted equipment
to some of them. And it sold surplus warships and other weapons systems necessary for regional
defense to them as well. Brazil, Argentina, and Chile, for example, bought two light cruisers each, and
Peru and Uruguay several destroyers, in 1951. The Cuban Revolution changed all of this after 1959.405
Cuban dictator Fidel Castro's (1959-2008, -2011) calls to revolution inaugurated a new era with
403
See Varas, Conversaciones con Viaux, 53-109.
Department of State, "Military Assistance to Latin America," Department of State Bulletin 28 (30 March 1953):
404
463-467.
405
Ibid.
170
its own security problems in the 1960s. American advisory groups gave increased attention to Latin
American special forces and tactical police units, such as the Carabineros' Grupo Móvil in Chile, to
combat guerrilla insurgencies. They assigned civilian-oriented "civic-action" tasks to the region's
armies to help develop their countries while inoculating them against revolution, too. This meant that
they gave much less attention to conventional forces, especially the heavy infantry, artillery, and armor
units that many Latin American officers believed represented their institutions' primary purpose. This
seemed degrading to some, and it offended them. Viaux summarized the civic-action tasks his soldiers
typically were instructed to perform as "taking out civilians' trash, caring for hospitals, preparing meals
for the sick and then cleaning their chamber pots, burying the dead in cemeteries, etc., etc."406
The Kennedy (1961-1963) and Johnson administrations (1963-1969) were aware that tensions
deriving from the War of the Pacific (1879-1883) and the nineteenth century's other border wars and
lesser territorial conflicts, particularly those involving Peruvians, Bolivians, Chileans, and Argentines,
continued to plague intra-Latin American relations. But the United States' security posture, concerned
with countering first European and then later possible Soviet intervention from the 1820s into the
1950s, had never taken this into account, and this did not change in the 1960s. American officials did,
however, wish to avoid provoking a costly arms race that would divert investment from the Alliance for
Progress's social and economic development initiatives. So although Chileans received approximately
$1 billion in Alliance aid, they got only about $93 million in military aid, just more than 9 percent of
the total, through the decade.407
This was fine with the Frei administration. The administration's military spending consumed no
more than approximately 10 percent of the national budget (2 to 2.5 percent of Gross National Product
[GNP]) through 1966. Peruvians and Argentines, however, were spending more -- averaging about 15
to 20 percent of the national budget (2 to 4 percent of GNP). These disparities worsened after the
406
Cited in Varas, Conversaciones con Viaux, 77.
For examples of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations' awareness of this, see CIA Directorate of
Intelligence, Weekly Summary Special Report No. 0320/66A, "Assessment of Latin American Military and Arms Needs,"
23 December 1966; CIA Directorate of Intelligence, Office of Current Intelligence No. 0285/63D, "The Bolivian-Chilean
Dispute," 21 June 1963. CIA Records Search Tool (CREST), National Archives, College Park, MD (NA); and White House
memorandum of conversation between John Kennedy and Jorge Alessandri, "US Military Assistance Programs, and Chilean
Relations with Bolivia," 11 December 1962. Papers of President Kennedy, National Security Files, Countries, Box 20A,
"Chile: General: 1/63-6/63." John Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts (JFK). For Alliance funds and military aid to
Chile, see United States Senate, Staff Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to
Intelligence Activities, Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1975); and
Department of State, "The Department of State during the Administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson, November 1963January 1969" I: Administrative History, Chapter 6, Inter-American Relations, Section B: The Alliance for Progress, and
Section C: Hemispheric Security. Lyndon Johnson Library, Austin, Texas (LBJ).
407
171
French government, seeking to expand its influence in southern South America and the South Pacific,
began offering to sell Mirage aircraft to Peru and Argentina that year. This marked supersonic fighters'
first appearance in the region, and the mere suggestion of it heightened tensions there.408
The Frei administration turned to Britain when responding to these Mirages in the late-1960s.
London remained not only an important power in southern South America, but a trusted arms dealer in
the region. As political scientist Mark Phythian has shown, the countries there represented an important
market to British defense contractors such as the Hawker Siddeley group. Brazilians, Argentines, and
Chileans purchased several British-made aircraft carriers, destroyers, frigates, minesweepers, oilers and
salvage ships, bombers and fighters, helicopters, missiles, and spare parts well into the 1980s.409
Queen Elizabeth II was directly involved in southern South American political and military
affairs, too. She arbitrated Chileans and Argentines' longstanding border conflict in the Beagle Channel
in the 1960s and 1970s, for example. The queen traveled to Brazil and Chile on a state visit in
November 1968. Lord Chalfont (Alun Gwynne-Jones), a minister who specialized in defense policy,
accompanied her. Chalfont discussed Hawker Hunters -- advanced, subsonic, British-made fighters -with his Chilean counterparts while in Santiago. Chileans had purchased 21 of them in 1966. They
pressed him to convince Hawker Siddeley to sell them at least nine additional Hunters, to form three
complete squadrons, as soon as possible. Chalfont explained that many clients were awaiting Hunters,
and they were backordered at the moment. Chileans would have to wait until September 1973 to
receive the full complement of Hunters they wanted.410
Frei, never a defense enthusiast, continued trying to turn this around until he left office. The
president conceded the need for some military spending on counterinsurgency and internal security
programs, but "the assertion that to stop subversion we must purchase fifty-ton tanks, supersonic
aircraft and battleships defies belief." He called on the inter-American community "to establish a
quantitative limitation on arms purchases." Regional governments' defense budgets, at their current,
increasing levels, encouraged nationalism and mistrust and thus undermined the Alliance for Progress's
plans for Latin American integration. It also diverted "important resources which should be utilized to
408
CIA Directorate of Intelligence, "Assessment of Latin American Military and Arms Needs."
Mark Phythian, The Politics of British Arms Sales since 1964 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000),
409
105-145.
410
"State Visit to Chile: November 1968: Supplementary Brief for Lord Chalfont," undated, FO 73/71. Also see
"State Visit to Brazil: November, 1968: Supplementary Brief for Lord Chalfont," undated, FO 73/71. BNA; and Alun
Chalfont, The Shadow of My Hand: A Memoir (London: Weidenfelt & Nicolson, 2000), 141-146. The last Hunters arrived in
Chile just days after the coup that overthrew Allende, creating controversy in Britain, especially within the British left.
172
satisfy the urgent need for economic and social development." He was thinking in grand terms, and he
wanted to keep conventional military spending to the absolute minimum everywhere in the region. But,
as Frei learned, he would have to take Chile's own armed services' interests into account whether he
wished to or not.411
Chilean politics and society became increasingly divided, unstable, and even ungovernable in
the late-1960s. Chileans were experiencing the same crescendo of grassroots dissidence that historian
Jeremi Suri has identified in the northern hemisphere. As political scientist Brian Loveman has
observed, Chile's political system -- which had seen landowners gradually lose their privileged access
to power and influence while millions from the urban poor and peasantry gained the vote -- had
become "no longer viable without substantial modifications" by 1970. Chile's increasingly collegeeducated middle class also grew, creating an entirely different country between the 1930s and late1960s. But as Nixon arose on a platform of law and order in the United States, as Americans and
Soviets embraced arms control and détente and restructured the Cold War, and as West Germans
explored Ostpolitik and Chinese normalized their relations with Washington while joining the
international community of nations, Chileans suffered worsening confrontation, polarization, and,
ultimately, chaos.412
The left remained essentially together in the Frente de Acción Popular (FRAP) coalition and the
Central Única de Trabajadores (CUT) labor confederation. But differences emerged. Although the
PCCh still followed the peaceful road it had embarked upon in the late-1950s, rising leaders within the
Socialist Party (PS), such as Senator Carlos Altamirano, believed they could only succeed through
armed revolution, which they declared inevitable, and they became increasingly vocal about it. Further,
a group of Cuban-inspired militants and university students, following Miguel Enríquez at the
Universidad de Concepción, broke with the PS and created the Movement of the Revolutionary Left
(MIR), an urban guerrilla movement that declared itself Chile's true Marxist-Leninist vanguard in
August 1965. It pledged to overthrow the capitalist system through violent means.413
411
Eduardo Frei Montalva, "The Alliance That Lost Its Way," Foreign Affairs 45 (1967), 446.
Jeremi Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente [2003] (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2005); and Brian Loveman, Chile: The Legacy of Hispanic Capitalism [1979], 3d ed. (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2001), 248.
413
Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, "El Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria (MIR, 1965-1990)," n.d., available at
http://www.memoriachilena.cl; Julio Faúndez, Marxism and Democracy in Chile: From 1932 to the Fall of Allende (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), 159-176; and Carmelo Furci, The Chilean Communist Party and the Road to
Socialism (London: Zed, 1984), 82-104.
412
173
Christian Democrats splintered into left, right, and center factions (rebeldes, oficialistas, and
terceristas, respectively), and the PDC also lost much of its overall electoral backing. Frei had won
power with Conservative and Liberal support in 1964. But the president's politics and programs fell to
the left of these parties, with whom he had refused to compromise from the beginning. They united into
the National Party (PN) in 1966. They ran their own candidates in the congressional elections in 1969,
earning 20 percent of the vote (and 33 deputies). They believed that they could regain a significant
voice in Congress and even retake the presidency on their own in 1970.414
Meanwhile, students seized the Universidad Católica and demanded policy and curriculum
changes. Socialist Party-supported, armed peasant uprisings began occurring in the countryside. And
the MIR unleashed a campaign of assaults, bank "expropriations," and airline hijackings. A fifteen- and
eighteen-year-old pair of miristas perpetrated one these hijackings. They seized a LAN Chile domestic
flight from Santiago to Punta Arenas and attempted to reroute it to Havana. The flight crew
apprehended the two boys in midair and then returned to the capital, where authorities arrested them.
Another attempt resulted in a firefight at the airport that left one dead and several wounded. These were
but a few examples of the activism and violence that was appearing in the late-1960s.415
This crescendo of grassroots dissidence also appeared within the army's ranks, badly shaking
the Frei administration during its last two years in office. The War College and noncommissioned
officers school's instructors resigned in protest of the army's low pay and lack of adequate housing and
medical services in May 1968. Many other officers from units throughout the country joined them. The
administration relieved the minister of defense and commander-in-chief of the army and replaced them
with retired General Tulio Marambio and General Sergio Castillo Aránguiz. Marambio and Castillo
persuaded the agitated officers to withdraw their resignations and return to their posts, promising to
redress the army's problems within nine months. These nine months and then one year passed, and
nothing happened.416
414
Ricardo Cruz-Coke, Historia electoral de Chile, 1925-1973 (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Juridica de Chile,
1984), 85-87.
415
See Alejandro San Francisco, La toma de la Universidad Católica de Chile (Agosto de 1967) (Santiago de Chile:
Globo Editores, 2007); Cristián Pérez, "Guerrilla rural en Chile: La batalla del Fundo San Miguel (1968)," Estudios
Públicos 78 (2000): 181-208; "56 minutos permanenció en Pudahuel avión argentino desviado a Cuba," La Nación (9
October 1969); "Otro avión desviado a Cuba estuvo 2 horas en Pudahuel," La Nación (5 November 1969); and "La
tripulación del avión LAN Chile, desviado a Cuba, apreso a los asaltantes en pleno vuelo," La Nación (13 November 1969).
Also see "Boeing 'LAN' secuestrado en vuelo y conducido a la Havana," La Nación (20 December 1969); and "Fracasó
secuestro de avión LAN," La Nación (7 February 1970).
416
Varas, Conversaciones con Viaux, 86; and Lira, Ahora le toca, 10-11.
174
Officers throughout the army began forming a movement around Viaux. The general made it
clear that he sided with the service and its soldiers, not the government or high command. He thus
emerged as something like a Chilean Julius Caesar.
Viaux attempted to convey his growing movement's concerns to Castillo several times. Castillo
promised to address his concerns, but then he ignored them. When Viaux proposed constructing a
military hospital in the north, the commander-in-chief denied it. Consequently, the general explained,
the professional officer corps lost its respect for the high command, "which they accuse of having
become an inept bureaucracy."417
Viaux's movement first actively expressed its dissent against the Frei administration, rather than
limiting itself to the high command, when Major Arturo Marshall, who led a battalion of men in the
Yungay Regiment -- one of the Chilean army's elite units, consisting of infantry, airborne, and special
forces companies -- kept Frei waiting at an independence celebration, where the president was to
review the troops, in September 1969. Marshall later told journalists "that it was not his fault, that it
just had not been his day." But all understood that the major had meant to express his contempt for Frei,
and the president and the high command interpreted as such. His superiors retired him immediately.
Many took notice, however, including the Chilean press, which began wondering whether this had not
represented an attempted coup.418
Castillo waited for two weeks after this before recalling Viaux to Santiago. The army's generals
were gathering to conduct an annual review, where they rated the officer corps from colonel to
lieutenant, that October. So it was routine, on its surface. But the government placed Viaux under close
police surveillance while he was in the capital. Castillo denied knowing anything about it when he
asked for an explanation.419
Viaux's efforts over the following two to three weeks in Santiago represented the general's final
attempt to resolve his movement's grievances through normal channels. The Chilean army, like other
armies, allowed any officer to bring an issue up the chain of command all the way to the minister of
defense and even the president through what Chileans called "el conducto regular militar
reglamentario," although it rarely went that far. Viaux, however, took it that far. Castillo told him that
417
Viaux to Frei, 2 October 1969. Reprinted in Varas, Conversaciones con Viaux, 64.
Paul Sigmund, The Overthrow of Allende and the Politics of Chile, 1964-1976 (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1977), 85; and Lira, Ahora le toca, 10-11.
419
Varas, Conversaciones con Viaux, 88-94.
418
175
the high command was studying the issues. Marambio received him and heard him out, promising to
respond in the future. But Frei refused to see him. And in the end, nothing resulted.
But Viaux persisted. The general met several senators, explaining his movement's grievances to
them. He asked them to bring him to Frei. This failed, too. Viaux wrote a letter to the president,
complaining that the Chilean government's military assistance agreements with the United States and
the administration's defense policies were creating "a criminal crisis of war material" in the army. The
service's Table of Organization and Equipment (TOE), and more importantly, its personnel, had
dramatically shrunk since 1961. This was overloading the remaining officers and noncommissioned
officers with work just to keep the army minimally functional.420
Officers and noncommissioned officers, Viaux continued, earned the lowest salaries in public
service. The Chilean economy continued to suffer from chronic inflation, and these men's salaries had
steadily lost purchasing power, which had reduced them and their families to poverty. Many were
working second jobs to make ends meet. Conscripts serving their mandatory one-year enlistments,
moreover, required family support just to eat regularly. Some contracted debts that followed them after
their service. This caught up with many of them when they retired and had to spend their old age living
in a callampa, or shantytown. The army's morale -- and the service itself -- was collapsing.
Viaux said that he was not merely speaking for himself or even the First Division "but for the
vast majority of soldiers in the army." Frei must redress these problems. The president must change his
administration's defense policies, and he must increase servicemen's pay and benefits. Finally, he must
replace Marambio and Castillo. No one in the army had confidence in them. Frei ignored this letter.421
Meanwhile, Castillo concluded the army's annual review and suddenly announced Viaux's
retirement on 16 October. The commander-in-chief afforded the general one day to return to
Antofagasta, relinquish command to his successor, and then return to Santiago to muster out of the
service. This provoked the Tacnazo.422
420
Viaux to Frei, 2 October 1969, 57.
Ibid., 65.
422
See Sigmund, Overthrow of Allende, 86; and Varas, Conversaciones con Viaux, 94-98.
421
176
The Tacnazo
Viaux explained what had happened while saying an emotional farewell to the First Division the
weekend of 18 and 19 October. Then the general departed for Santiago, where he arrived, as Lira
reported it, "in the style of a field marshal" on Monday afternoon. The press, aware that something was
up, met him at the airport. He told them that he did not recognize the high command's authority to retire
or relive him, and that he did not recognize his relief in Antofagasta, either. He also referred to an open
letter all of his former officers had signed days before, urging Frei to reinstate him. But the president
only used Chile's internal security laws to move against La Segunda, the newspaper that had published
the officers' letter.423
Illustration 3: Brigadier General Roberto Viaux speaking to the press during the Tacnazo.
Source: Florencia Varas, Conversaciones con Viaux (Santiago de Chile: Impresiones EIRE, 1972), 83.
Viaux took command of the Tacna Artillery Regiment, headquartered on the northern rim of
Parque Cousiño -- now Parque O'Higgins -- late that night. The general secured his position there
before the sun rose on Tuesday, 21 October. All three classes from the War College, instructors and men
from the noncommissioned officers' school, the school of infantry, and the special forces school, tanks
from the Second Armored Regiment, and the guard unit at the Ministry of Defense suited up and joined
423
Sigmund, Overthrow of Allende, 86; and Lira, Ahora le toca, 20.
177
him between 6:00 and 8:00. He claimed that the First Division had also communicated its support, and
that some air force and Carabineros officers were with him as well.424
Marshall apparently attempted to mobilize the Yungay Regiment, too. But Frei declared a state
of siege and, exercising broad emergency powers, arrested the retired major before he could get to his
former unit later that morning. Marshall, undeterred, warned the policemen assigned to him that they
were failing to understand what was happening. "You are following orders from the minister of interior,
right? Who says that, come tomorrow, General Viaux will not find himself installed in La Moneda [the
presidential palace] with me as his minister of interior? What would you say then?" So even if Viaux
denied that he intended to seize power as the morning unfolded, at least some in his movement wanted
and expected him to.425
Illustration 4: Tacna Regiment, Parque Cousiño, 21 October 1969.
Source: Varas, Conversaciones con Viaux, 99.
Meanwhile, Castillo ordered Brigadier General Alfredo Mahn, who commanded the Santiago
garrison, to deploy forces to Parque Cousiño and put down Viaux's movement. But many of the
officers and men under the garrison commander's authority refused to follow his orders. When those
424
Varas, Conversaciones con Viaux, 98-101.
Cited in Lira, Ahora le toca, 114. Viaux's repeatedly insisting that his movement was apolitical and that he never
wished to seize La Moneda notwithstanding, he acknowledged hearing "multiple suggestions" that he do so before, during,
and after the Tacnazo. See Varas, Conversaciones con Viaux, 115.
425
178
troops who did respond positioned themselves in front of the Tacna regiment's headquarters building, it
was unclear whether they remained loyal to the government or were standing with the general. As the
American embassy's Deputy Chief of Mission Harry Shlaudeman reported, "considerable fraternization
between the two sides" ensued, and no action occurred.426
Frei began to realize that Viaux, who claimed that "85 percent of the army is with us," was not
likely exaggerating. The president cut the electricity, water, and telephone lines at the Tacna building.
But the general and his men possessed sufficient provisions to last at least several days, and they had
their own communications equipment. Frei's spirits rose when the cabinet received a report that six
trucks filled with soldiers from another province were arriving in Santiago. Then Marambio asked
"¿Vienen a favor o en contra?" -- Where do they stand? And no one knew. Panic followed.427
Frei decided to mobilize popular support against Viaux and the army. The president did not
apparently know what else to do. Christian Democratic Senator Benjamín Prado appeared in the Plaza
de la Constitución, in front of La Moneda, where journalists and others were gathering. The senator
urged Chileans to come out into the streets. "Chileans! Paralyze the country! Paralyze industry and its
factories! Paralyze transportation! Paralyze the mines! Come out to protest, to defend freedom! …We
must save the country."428
426
Harry Shlaudeman to Department of State, 21 October 1969. RG 84, Foreign Service Posts of the Department of
State: Chile/U.S. Embassy Santiago, Box 30, "POL 23-9 Rebellion Coups 1969." NA.
427
Cited in Lira, Ahora le toca, 66, 77.
428
Cited in Ibid., 29.
179
Illustration 5: "People's Tanks."
Source: Varas, Conversaciones con Viaux, 103.
The Unidad Popular coalition and the CUT's leaders responded, promising to mobilize a
general strike. But the Tacnazo ended before they could set this in motion and test its effectiveness.
Meanwhile, Frei received several municipal garbage trucks, which the president and his supporters
christened "people's tanks." Lira ridiculed this as "Operation Trash." A crowd of student protesters
came, too, for what it was worth.429
Frei sent Mahn to tell Viaux that the president would arm the population to defend the
government if the general did not capitulate. This puzzled him. He pointed out that he had secured the
armory and its ammunition, and they were already under his control. He later told Varas that "I knew
that he was counting on the garbage trucks -- but do you really believe that this would have stopped the
army?"430
These people's tanks and student protesters, and the Tacna men's response to them, first
provided the day's comic relief, but then led to several injuries. A column of garbage trucks appeared at
Parque Cousiño in the afternoon, its drivers chanting "¡Frei sí, gorilas no!" The officer in charge there
429
Ibid., 33-42.
Varas, Conversaciones con Viaux, 104-105.
430
180
invited the lead garbage man to come into the regimental headquarters to meet Viaux, as the general
wanted to clarify the apolitical nature of his movement to all who would listen. The garbage man
declined, explaining that he did not talk to gorilas. So the officer instructed him to turn his trucks
around and leave. He refused. Then the officer ordered the tanks to reposition themselves to attack the
garbage trucks, and the trucks promptly returned to the La Moneda.
The students arrived next, blocking the Tacna building so that no one could enter or leave it.
The officer in charge ordered the tanks to intimidate the students. The first tank lurched forward. But
the second one sputtered and then caught fire. The excited soldiers inside abandoned it, shouting that its
ammunition was going to cook off, causing an explosion. Senior officers on the scene commented that
this validated Viaux's complaints that the army was neglected and in poor condition. But others there,
including Lira, just laughed at the soldiers while they scrambled to put the fire out. This broke the
tension, and everyone backed down for the moment.431
Both Frei and Viaux held several press conferences as the day wore on. The defiant president
affirmed he had already been working on the army's pay issues and would continue to do so. The
general and his movement had nothing to do with it. He also insisted that he had always honored the
service as one of the nation's pillars. He referred to the army's "democratic traditions" several times
throughout the day, too. But this only created the impression, as Shlaudemen remarked, "that president
not entirely sure of his ground." And the fact that garbage trucks and students were the only ones who
came to defend La Moneda had sharpened the American embassy's perception that Viaux indeed had
the service with him, just as he was claiming.432
Frei agreed to Vaiux's demands late that evening, after what looked like a firefight had erupted
in Parque Cousiño. The students had remained near the soldiers in the park, taunting them as night fell.
They reportedly began throwing rocks, prompting a soldier to fire his weapon at them in reprisal.
Others opened fire in the confusion. The officers there, including Mahn and Viaux, ordered their men to
cease fire, and quickly regained control. But the incident left 14 civilians wounded.433
Mahn and Viaux announced that they had reached an understanding, and the former took
431
Lira, Ahora le toca, 104-107.
Shlaudeman to Department of State, 21 October 1969; and Shlaudeman to Department of State, 25 October
1969. RG 84, Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State: Chile/U.S. Embassy Santiago, Box 30, "POL 23-9
Rebellion Coups 1969." NA. For one of Viaux's press releases, see Lira, Ahora le toca, 47.
433
Lira, Ahora le toca, 119-123; and Shlaudeman to Department of State, 22 October 1969. RG 84, Foreign Service
Posts of the Department of State: Chile/U.S. Embassy Santiago, Box 30, "POL 23-9 Rebellion Coups 1969." NA.
432
181
custody of the latter and his forces on Wednesday morning, 22 October, between 3:30 and 5:00. Frei
had already retired Marambio, to show good faith to the general, and he promised to replace the high
command and sponsor special legislation to get a pay raise for all servicemen right away. Vaiux would
submit to military justice. Mahn, who Viaux expected to become the next commander-in-chief, would
ensure that no officer who had participated in the Tacnazo would suffer any form of retaliation. Both
Frei and Viaux confirmed this through their own communiques. Then the general checked in to the
military hospital, where he remained for several days.434
Sweeping changes followed. As Lira wrote, "There is a saying that goes 'After the battle,
everyone is a general.' But in the Tacnazo's case, we should say 'a retired general.'" Frei retired Castillo,
the entire high command, and even the army attaché in Washington. But the president also retired
Mahn and named Schneider, who commanded the Fifth Division in Punta Arenas, the new commanderin-chief, to both Mahn and Viaux's surprise. Prats became his deputy, and Brigadier General Camilo
Valenzuela the garrison commander in Santiago.435
Schneider declared that while he sympathized with Viaux and his movement's complaints, he
disagreed with the way they had expressed them. He also said that he had not been a party to any
agreement Mahn and Viaux may have negotiated. So the gap between the government and high
command, on the one hand, and Viaux's movement, on the other, remained, Frei's rapid but meager
action on the pay issue notwithstanding. As the Department of State's Director of Intelligence and
Research Ray Cline predicted, the president's measures "should not be expected to effect any
fundamental change in the sources of Army discontent." And, further enflaming this, many officers
became subject to disciplinary proceedings.436
Viaux's wife, Delia Igualt de Viaux, and other military wives entered the fray just after this.
Mrs. Viaux was answering Castillo's bitter attack against her husband in the press, to which the general
could not respond because he remained in the military hospital, where the Frei administration was
keeping him incommunicado. She did not confine her remarks to the former commander-in-chief,
434
Roberto Viaux and Sub-Secretary of Health Patricio Silva, "Acta," 21 October 1969. Reprinted in Varas,
Conversaciones con Viaux, 107-108. Also see Lira, Ahora le toca, 123; and Shlaudeman to Department of State, 22 October
1969.
435
Sigmund, Overthrow of Allende, 87; Lira, Ahora le toca, 127-130; and Shlaudeman to Department of State, 25
October 1969. RG 84, Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State: Chile/U.S. Embassy Santiago, Box 30, "POL 23-9
Rebellion Coups 1969." NA.
436
Ray Cline to William Rogers, "Chile: Causes of Army Discontent Seem Likely to Persist," 4 November 1969.
Chile Declassification Project. Also see Varas, Conversaciones con Viaux, 110-115.
182
however. She also dismissed her husband's pending court-martial -- he was ultimately convicted of
sedition, but given a suspended, one-year sentence -- and expressed her ongoing contempt for the high
command, who she called "cowards who now want to show that they are men by subjecting to trial one
of their companions who has given everything for the army and the nation." She rejected the
administration's forthcoming economic package, too. "Are they going to come and tell me or any wife
of a soldier, sailor, aviator or Carabinero that we can maintain our homes, educate our children and
dress them on a hunger salary?"437
From the Tacnazo to Salvador Allende's Election
Viaux entered the political arena before the dust had even settled at Parque Cousiño. A larger
movement, consisting of Chile's far right in addition to the active and retired army officers already with
him, coalesced around him, pressing him to run for president. As Cline reported, "an aura of
achievement" now surrounded Viaux, and the service had grown conscious of its political power. Cline
estimated the army would continue exerting pressure against civilian government in Chile into the
future.438
Meanwhile, Viaux canvassed the country, from the Atacama to Chiloé, hearing what people had
to say and making his own views clear. Both Jorge Alessandri Rodríguez (1958-1964) -- who had come
out of retirement -- and Allende's campaigns courted the general's support as well. When Viaux spoke
at a banquet in his honor on 7 February, he reminded his audience of the misgovernment and chaos that
had preceded the Ibáñez dictatorship (1927-1931). Then the general called for the reestablishment of a
strong, apolitical government that would promulgate a new constitution. More than 500 active and
retired officers and their wives attended this banquet. Many others sent cables and letters to show their
support.439
Viaux's possible candidacy was less threatening to Christian Democrats than the deepening rift
that had been dividing the PDC and the PN since 1966. The Frei administration and many in his party
had blamed conservatives, who were critical of the administration and had sympathized with the army's
437
Cited in Shlaudeman to Department of State, 24 October 1969. RG 84, Foreign Service Posts of the Department
of State: Chile/U.S. Embassy Santiago, Box 30, "POL 23-9 Rebellion Coups 1969." NA. Also see Lira, Ahora le toca, 130132.
438
Cline to Rogers, "Chile: Causes of Army Discontent."
439
See Sigmund, Overthrow of Allende, 93-94.
183
pay and benefits problems, for the Tacnazo. This manifested as violence at the grassroots level during
the uprising and hard feelings for all involved afterward.
When Frei had called for Chileans' support against Viaux on 21 October, Nationals responded,
as did all other political parties. Sergio Onofre Jarpa led the PN's delegation to La Moneda. They
encountered public hostility while walking in. Women, reportedly representing pro-PDC Centros de
Madres, sneered at them, calling them "mummies," a pejorative used against conservatives. They also
threw coins at them, prompting one in the delegation to remark that "at least we still have hard
currency." When Julio Subercaseaux asked one of the women to calm down, she responded "¡Cállate
momio huevón!" -- politely translated as "Shut up, you damn mummy!" Others attacked the
conservatives' Club de la Unión and threatened several newspaper offices, prompting the Carabineros
to station guards there.440
Thus a three-way presidential race emerged after the Tacnazo: Allende, on the left, Tomic
representing the noncommunist left, and Alessandri what little there remained of the center and the
right. Viaux, now on the far right, disliked all of these candidates. But he found a possible Allende
presidency intolerable. Allende "was supported by the communist party, which posed a grave danger to
a free country like Chile," the general told Varas. Both the PCCh and the Socialist Party, moreover,
would "divide the country and tear it apart to achieve power, and then deliver it into the arms of Soviet
imperialism." This was the Viaux who the CIA's Santiago Station stumbled across that September.441
The Nixon Administration and Chile to the Election
Neither Nixon nor Kissinger was prepared to understand Chilean affairs, and they barely
followed the election until it became apparent that Allende might win it. They both entered the White
House with much less interest in Latin America than their predecessors. They remained strictly
Eurocentric thinkers, although they had become interested in East Asia through China and Vietnam in
the 1960s. Latin America remained far from the center of their world, and they showed this on several
occasions.442
440
Cited in Lira, Ahora le toca, 30-32. Also see Shlaudeman to Department of State, 21 October 1969. RG 84,
Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State: Chile/U.S. Embassy Santiago, Box 30, "POL 23-9 Rebellion Coups
1969." NA.
441
Cited in Varas, Conversaciones con Viaux, 119.
442
For Richard Nixon's interest in East Asian affairs in the 1960s, see, for example, Richard Nixon, "Asia after Viet
Nam," Foreign Affairs 46 (1967): 111-125.
184
The CIA briefed Kissinger in his office at the Pierre Hotel in New York during the transition in
December 1968 and January 1969. Deputy Director for Intelligence Russell Jack Smith, who gave
these briefings, recalled that the national security advisor-designee stopped him before he could
complete his review of Panamanian affairs. Kissinger asked why Smith was spending time on Latin
America, explaining that "if anything happens there, I would simply turn it over to an assistant
secretary of state. Our attention, the attention of Mr. Nixon and myself, is going to be centered on the
Soviet Union and Western Europe." Nixon reconfirmed this when giving career advice to Donald
Rumsfeld, a young staffer, two years later. The president warned him not to specialize in Latin
American affairs. "The only things that matter in the world are Japan and China, Russia and Europe.
Latin America doesn't matter. Long as we've been in it, people don't give one damn about Latin
America, Don."443
Nixon's relationship with Latin America, however, was a little more complicated than this. The
president had bad memories of the region, beginning with the protesters who had attacked him and his
wife in Peru and Venezuela in 1958. He continued to nurse resentments about the CIA, which he
believed had given President John Kennedy information to use against him on national security and
Cuba in the 1960 election. And both Nixon and Kissinger fell out with the Frei administration during
their first year in office. These bad memories notwithstanding, the president craved Latin Americans'
approval, which he sought in a speech that addressed the inter-American community in October 1969.
While Nixon traveled to Western Europe and East Asia, seeking to reassure the United States'
allies of his continuing commitment to work with them, and to show that he was a well-informed,
capable, and realistic statesman, the president sent Governor Nelson Rockefeller (NY) to tour Latin
America on several trips through spring and summer 1969. He instructed him to report on the region's
situation. He asked him to seek Latin Americans' input and to spread the word that the administration
wanted to hear their views, too.444
Thus Brazilians organized "the Latin American Special Coordinating Commission" (CECLA) in
response to Nixon's invitations. The CECLA group gathered in Viña del Mar, producing "the
Consensus of Viña," which complained about the structure of US-Latin American trade relations.
443
Cited in James Mann, Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet (New York: Penguin, 2004), 16;
and Russell Jack Smith, The Unknown CIA: My Three Decades with the Agency (Washington: Pergamon-Brassey's
International Defense Publishers, 1989), 203.
444
See Nelson Rockefeller, The Rockefeller Report on the Americas, New York Times ed. (Chicago: Quadrangle
Books, 1969).
185
Rockefeller had met the group and read their report, recommending it to the White House as "a good
paper." Nixon and Kissinger were less enthusiastic. The president commented that he did not think this
was the way to improve US-Latin American relations. So Rockefeller suggested that he remain cool
and correct, "receive the report and thank them period." Nixon's staff thus briefed him to expect a 20 to
30-minute meeting where the Chilean foreign minister, Gabriel Valdés, who chaired the CECLA group,
would present the paper and then the president would simply thank him before returning to his office.445
Thus a wary Nixon received Valdés and the CECLA group in the cabinet room on 11 June, not
only because of the politics and contents of their report, but also because Rockefeller had warned him
of the foreign minister's possibly confrontational intentions. The governor explained that "there was to
be no further effort [from the other members of the group], but the Chileans would like to carry this
on." Valdés took the seat directly across from the president. Chilean Counselor Armando Uribe
accompanied him, as did every Latin American ambassador to Washington, when they met Nixon,
Secretary of State William Rogers, and Assistant Secretary of State Charles Meyer for what became an
uncomfortable, nearly hour-long meeting.446
According to Uribe, Valdés and the CECLA group were there because Latin Americans had
decided "to adopt a common stand before the United States regarding commercial and financial
matters" under Chilean leadership. Nixon had not wanted to see the foreign minister. But Valdés
persisted, and "by June he could no longer put him off." When the group arrived in the cabinet room,
they "encircled" the president and spoke to him in a style that Uribe compared to "the day he was
bombarded with tomatoes in Caracas."447
"Valdés," Uribe continued, "did not present the document with a few words of routine
introduction. He spoke of the impossibility of dealing with the United States." That is, the foreign
minister went off script, and he railed against American aid programs, trade policies, and
underdevelopment in Latin America. In Uribe's estimation, "no president of the United States had ever
looked so affronted." Nixon lowered his eyelids, withdrew, and seemed impenetrable. Then the
president, Uribe alleged, simply ignored Valdés and the group. "For the Nixon administration this
445
Richard Nixon's Daily Diary, 11 June 1969; Henry Kissinger and Rockefeller, Telcon, 10 June 1969, 9:35pm;
and Kissinger and Rockefeller, Telcon, 3 June 1969, 2:50pm. Henry Kissinger telephone conversation transcripts
(TELCONS), Box 2, "2-18 June 1969." Richard Nixon Library, Yorba Linda, California (RN).
446
Kissinger and Rockefeller, Telcon, 10 June 1969. Nixon's White House diary confirms that Uribe attended this
meeting.
447
Armando Uribe, The Black Book of American Intervention in Chile [1974], trans. by Jonathan Casart (Boston:
Beacon, 1975), 30.
186
historic event simply had not occurred." This was not quite so.448
Kissinger went to see Valdés in the Chilean embassy the following day. "Mr. Minister," he said,
"you made a strange speech. You come here speaking of Latin America, but this is not important.
Nothing important can come from the South. History has never been produced in the South. The axis of
history starts in Moscow, goes to Bonn, crosses over to Washington, and then goes to Tokyo. What
happens in the South is of no importance. You're wasting your time." Valdés retorted that Kissinger
knew nothing of the southern hemisphere, and the national security advisor told him that he was right.
"I am not interested in, nor do I know anything about, the southern portion of the world from the
Pyrenees on down."449
Nixon attempted to put all of this behind him and lead US-Latin American relations in a new
direction in his speech on 31 October. The president singled out his "old friend," El Mercurio publisher
Agustín Edwards and his wife, who were there from Chile, before commencing. He suggested that the
way forward was to base United States policy and inter-American relations on realistic action rather
than "grandiose promises" -- a not-so-subtle critique of Kennedy and Johnson's Alliance for Progress,
its rhetoric, and the expectations it had engendered. He thanked Rockefeller and the CECLA group for
their views as well.450
Then Nixon got into specifics. The president remained committed to the Organization of
American States (OAS) and the inter-American community of nations, and he was also interested in
Latin American development. But regional governments should seek private, rather than public
investment in the 1970s. If Latin Americans cultivated welcoming environments for private interests,
they would see impressive results. Meanwhile, Nixon hoped he could persuade others in the
industrialized world to reevaluate existing tariff preferences that systematically discriminated against
Latin American exports. Eliminating or at least reducing these tariffs would encourage manufacturing
and industrialization in the region. The president was already restructuring "tied loans," or US
government loans that required Latin American recipients to buy only United States exports, so that
they could buy from anywhere within the region, too.451
448
Ibid.
Cited in Ibid., 33; and Seymour Hersh, The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House (New York:
Summit Books, 1983), 263. Also see Robert Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power (New York: HarperCollins,
2007), 228-229.
450
Richard Nixon, "Action for Progress for the Americas," 31 October 1969. Reprinted in Department of State,
Department of State Bulletin 61 (17 November 1969): 409-414.
451
Ibid., 413.
449
187
Nixon hungered for Latin Americans' approval of his speech. He wanted "the Latins approving
this thing." The president was involved in each draft as his staff wrote and revised it. He also instructed
Kissinger to distribute advance drafts of the final version to all American ambassadors in Latin
America so that they could get them to the chiefs of state to which they were accredited as soon as
possible.452
Nixon's speech, however, did not create the kind of enthusiasm Kennedy had when he
introduced the Alliance for Progress in 1961. Apart from possibly wounding the president's pride, this
did not much matter. He had wanted to put US-Latin American relations on a new, more realistic
footing, and he would have preferred they praised him for it. Either way, he still would have returned to
the foreign-policy issues that attracted his attention and interest: Europe and the North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO), the Soviet Union (USSR) and arms control, and the war in Vietnam. He
expected Latin America to fade away into quiet efficiency. So he more or less shrugged his shoulders
and returned to what he considered his more important work after the speech. This changed when
Allende won the presidency in Chile the following year.
The Nixon administration spent approximately $1 million on a spoiler campaign that pointed to,
among other things, Soviet tanks in Prague, when trying to persuade Chileans that they should not vote
for Allende that September. The USSR gave the PCCh about $400,000 that year, and the CIA estimated
that the Cuban government contributed $350,000 or so to Allende's campaign. None of these
contributions changed very much on the ground in Chile.453
The three-way race between Nationals, the increasingly left-leaning Christian Democrats, and
the Unidad Popular coalition accurately reflected the indigenous differences that had divided the
Chilean electorate since the late-1950s. One could have predicted the result based on the special
election in Curicó, where Marxists prevailed by several percentage points, conservatives took second,
and the PDC a distant third, in March 1964. Frei had won office that year not because the Kennedy and
Johnson administrations had contributed to his campaign, but primarily because conservatives panicked
and rushed to support him as the lesser evil. This conservative-PDC partnership, if it ever was that, fell
apart as the two sides drifted away from each other from the mid-1960s through the Tacnazo, after
452
Nixon and Kissinger, Telcon, 24 October 1969, 7:45pm. Henry Kissinger telephone conversation transcripts
(TELCONS), Box 2, "23-31 October 1969." RN.
453
See Helms, Look Over My Shoulder, 398; Olga Ulianova and Eugenia Fediakova, "Algunos aspectos de la ayuda
finaciera del Partido Comunista del URSS al comunismo chileno durante la guerra fría," Esutdios Públicos 72 (1998): 113130; and United States Senate, Covert Action in Chile.
188
which there was no chance they would collaborate in 1970.454
This was how Allende won a plurality of 36.6 percent of the vote on 4 September. Alessandri,
who represented Nationals and independents, earned 34.9 percent, and the PDC's Radomiro Tomic
garnered 27.8 percent. Per constitutional procedure, since Alessandri refused to concede, Congress
would decide the issue in a run-off election, scheduled for 24 October. And per tradition, Congress
would select the candidate with the most votes -- that is, Allende.455
The National Security Council's (NSC) staff and the CIA's intelligence directorate were
surprised, since most polls had predicted an Alessandri victory, but unperturbed. They believed that the
United States had "no vital interests within Chile…The world military balance of power would not be
significantly altered by an Allende government." They conceded that Allende's election "would
represent a definite psychological set-back to the U.S. and a definite psychological advance for the
Marxist idea…There would [also] be tangible economic losses." But Allende did not threaten national
security. As the NSC's Latin American specialist, Viron Vaky, phrased it: "Is Allende a mortal threat to
the U.S.? It is hard to argue this." This advice notwithstanding, Kissinger wanted to explore the
administration's options with his staff, and he chaired several discussions the first two weeks of
September.456
Nixon, however, exploded. The president, flanked by Kissinger and Attorney General John
Mitchell, called Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms to the White House on 15 September.
He instructed him to have the Chilean armed forces seize power before the congressional run-off. He
ordered him to disregard the risks such a crash operation entailed, to put his best men in charge of it, to
make the Chilean economy scream, to keep the American embassy in Santiago in the dark, and to begin
within 48 hours. He promised to make $10 million or more available, as needed.457
What had set Nixon off? Those historians who subscribe to the consensus interpretation on the
United States and Chile's Cold War experience have cited approximately $1 billion in American
investments in Chile, reasoning that the president, responding to International Telephone and Telegraph
454
Cruz-Coke, Historia electoral, 109.
Ibid., 109-113.
456
Viron Vaky, "Chile -- 40 Committee Meeting, Monday -- September 14," 14 September 1970; and CIA,
"Situation Following the Chilean Presidential Election," 7 September 1970, attached to Viron Vaky, "40 Committee
Meeting, September 8 -- Chile," 7 September 1970. Chile Declassification Project.
457
See Helms's hand-written notes, 15 September 1970. Reprinted in United States Senate, Alleged Assassination
Plots, 227.
455
189
(ITT) and other United States-based corporations, intervened to protect them. According to historian
Lubna Qureshi, for example, "Not only did Nixon and Kissinger possess a ruthlessly imperial disdain
for Latin America, they also felt the pressure of U.S. business interests." She was following a long line
of historians and journalists who have been arguing this since the coup.458
Historian Michael Grow has suggested an alternative explanation. Nixon, like most of his
predecessors and successors in the White House, felt it imperative to maintain credibility on several
levels: first, as a statesman who understood the importance of the United States' ability to maintain its
image as a capable and reliable superpower, especially in Latin America; and second, personally, as a
leader committed to opposing communism in order to resist the domestic pressures American
presidents had faced since the McCarthyist era. Indeed, Nixon had helped cultivate these pressures
earlier in his career and was finely attuned to them. Grow also argued that Latin American elites -- in
this case, Edwards, who travelled to Washington, met the president's staff, and told them something
about Chile off the record on 14 and 15 September -- skillfully and repeatedly intervened in American
politics to enlist the White House, Congress, and/or the media in their internal struggles throughout the
Cold War.459
Historian Robert Dallek has also offered an often overlooked angle: Nixon was an emotionally
unstable, erratic president. Track II represented just one of Nixon's temper tantrums, and there may not
be a wholly rational explanation for it. This particular one emerged as an immediate and panicked
response to whatever it was that Edwards had said. When the president's temper tantrum subsided, the
operation ended, just like that. Nixon's chief of staff, H.R. Haldeman, and Kissinger have both
supported this. As the national security advisor later wrote, Nixon's meeting with Helms did not
represent a considered executive decision on a pre-planned covert operation, but rather "a passionate
desire, unfocused and born of frustration, to do 'something.'"460
458
Lubna Qureshi, Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende: U.S. Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile [2009]. Lanham:
Lexington, 2010), xiii. Also see Margaret Power, Right-Wing Women in Chile: Feminine Power and the Struggle against
Allende, 1964-1973 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002), 41-43; and Hersh, Price of Power, 258296, 332-333.
459
See Michael Grow, U.S. Presidents and Latin American Interventions: Pursuing Regime Change in the Cold War
(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008). Nixon later related how "an Italian businessman" warned him that "If
[Salvador] Allende should win, and with [Fidel] Castro in Cuba, you will have in Latin America a red sandwich," and the
entire region would soon become communist. Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset and
Dunlap, 1978), 490. Edwards and others from the Chilean right, including the National Party's Sergio Onofre Jarpa,
continued traveling to Washington to make their case. See, for example, Kissinger and Donald Kendall, Telcon, 3 December
1970, 5:50pm. Henry Kissinger telephone conversation transcripts (TELCONS), Box 7, "1-7 December 1970." RN.
460
Robert Dallek, Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power (New York: HarperCollins, 2007); and Henry Kissinger,
White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1979), 673.
190
Haldeman and Kissinger had learned to delay or disregard such instructions as the ones Nixon
gave to Helms that day, at least long enough for the president to calm down and reconsider what he had
said. As Kissinger recalled, "Nixon was given to grandiloquent statements…The fear that unwary
visitors would take the President literally was, indeed, one of the reasons why Haldeman controlled
access to him so solicitously." Haldeman confirmed this in his diaries, where he wrote of "a challenge I
faced frequently…whether or not to follow a specific Presidential order. I sometimes decided not to, on
the basis that it was not an order that was really intended to be carried out, but rather a letting off of
steam, or that it was clearly not in the P's interest that it be carried out." Haldeman further explained
that Nixon learned very early how to get around this, to bypass him and other obstacles, such as the
NSC or Department of State, and go directly to officials like Helms, who lacked the rank to delay or
disregard such orders.461
Thus Helms created Track II. The operation had a task force of one -- David Atlee Philips, who
worked and slept in Deputy Director for Plans Thomas Karamessines's offices because there were no
other offices available. It lasted from 15 September to 15 October 1970. Kissinger's staff subjected
Karamessines and Philips to "just constant, constant…Just continual pressure" that month. The CIA's
Santiago Station, whose case officers had found the hastily improvised mission an impossible one from
the start, desperately combed the professional officer corps to find high-ranking officers willing to
overthrow the government nevertheless. This operation, from the Nixon administration and the
agency's perspective, remains well studied and reported in the literature.462
Plan Alfa: Track II from Viaux's Perspective
Viaux remained active before, during, and after Track II, which the general's movement called
"Plan Alfa." Viaux and Valenzuela sounded each other out on their own initiative immediately after the
election. They agreed that they could not permit "the enthronement of communism in Chile." They
soon found General Joaquín García, the second ranking officer in the air force, Admiral Hugo Tirado,
461
Kissinger, White House Years, 674; and H.R. Haldeman, The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House
[1994] (New York: Berkley, 1995), 77-78. See Richard Helms, A Look Over My Shoulder: A Life in the CIA (New York:
Random House, 2003), 405. "I do not consider myself to have been an unwary or even casual recipient of instructions by the
President from behind his desk in the Oval Office," Helms responded. "President Nixon had ordered me to instigate a
military coup in Chile…By what superior judgment was I to leave the White House and then decide that the President did
not mean what he had just said?"
462
Cited in United States Senate, Alleged Assassination Plots, 235. See, for example, Rabe, Killing Zone, 126-130;
and Kornbluh, Pinochet File, xi-78.
191
the second ranking admiral in the navy, Captain Raúl Lopez, another naval officer, and General Vicente
Huerta, the commander-in-chief of the Carabineros, who became their coconspirators. They feared that
Frei, depressed and uncommunicative, would become "the Chilean Kerensky." But they also
understood that several members of the administration, including the minister of interior, to whom
Huerta reported, sympathized with and would passively support them. Thus Viaux and his colleagues
believed that they were conceiving a coup d'état with some degree of encouragement and implied
consent from the government itself within days of the election.463
Two scenarios emerged by the third week of September. In the first one, an autogolpe, Frei's
cabinet would resign. Then the president would designate the commanders-in-chief of the armed forces
"an administrative cabinet," just as González had done in 1947. This would allow him to keep his hands
clean while enabling the army, navy, and air force commanders to seek emergency powers in order to
deal with the left. In the second one, Frei would permit the armed forces to seize power by coup,
provided Schneider took responsibility for it, and then leave the country. The president could return and
legally run in new elections, as President Arturo Alessandri (1920-1924, 1925, and 1932-1938), albeit
under different circumstances, had in the 1920s and 1930s.464
As Viaux explained, however, "the problem of the commander-in-chief of the army remained."
Schneider clarified his position when he convened the high command on 22 September. He ordered his
subordinates to stay out of the election. Chile's politicians, he explained, had made a mess of the
country, and it was their mess to clean up. Schneider did not believe in the predictions then circulating
in the capital that an Allende presidency would doom Chile, either. The commander-in-chief speculated
that the situation was being made to appear worse than it actually was. In any case, this remained
politicians' -- not the professional officer corps' -- problem. When one dubious general asked Schneider
what might happen if Allende were permitted to assume office, the commander-in-chief told him that
"we shall make sure that he gets into power."465
Schneider said that Allende was offering "all sorts of assurances" that his administration would
not force the army to submit to its partisanship or purge it for political motives. The commander-inchief also informed his subordinates that he had scheduled a private meeting with Frei, where he would
clarify "where we stand." Viaux's movement did not know what Frei and Schneider discussed during
463
Varas, Conversaciones con Viaux, 127-128.
Ibid., 132-133.
465
Ibid., 133; and Santiago Station to CIA, 22 September 1970. Chile Declassification Project.
464
192
their "long interview," but Santiago Station reported that the commander-in-chief had threatened to
resign if the president interfered in the election.466
Whatever Frei and Schneider discussed, and whatever the president really wanted, all knew that
the commander-in-chief of the army would not intervene against Allende. This weakened Valenzuela,
who "preferred to act only under the orders of a superior officer." None of the others who had joined
Viaux's movement would rise up without either Frei or Schneider's signal, either. They could
accomplish little without a unified army behind them, in any case. But they continued meeting and
discussing this fluid, time-sensitive situation well into October, as the congressional run-off grew
closer.467
Viaux remained the driving force behind these meetings and discussions. He had developed a
relationship with Santiago Station and the Track II task force, and was requesting covert arms drops
and money to support his own, unilateral move against Schneider. Santiago Station and CIA
headquarters exchanged cables on this through mid-October, when the agency's leadership finally
persuaded Nixon and Kissinger to drop the matter.
The CIA understood that Viaux was planning to kidnap Schneider. The general proposed
blaming militants in the PS and the MIR for it. Then he would exploit this "leftist coup" to rally the
professional officer corps around him as he declared a state of emergency and formed a new
government. He believed that Valenzuela and the others would join him once he started moving and
producing results. Santiago Station found the general's assumptions untested and his scheme farfetched,
reckless, and likely not only to fail, but to cause bloodshed and worsen the overall situation. But
Washington was still pressing the case officers there to produce results before the run-off. Thus the
station very resignedly recommended "the Viaux Solution" as the only viable option on 10 October.
Alto Mando [Schneider] Solution cannot be achieved…Frei plus Alto Mando Solution. See
subpara A…Regimental Commander Solution…lack requisite leverage…Navy or Air Force
Solution. Neither jointly nor singly, neither by persuasion nor by coercion, will they be able to
sway Alto Mando…
…You have asked us to provoke chaos in Chile. Thru Viaux Solution we provide you with
formula for chaos which unlikely to be bloodless. To dissimulate U.S. involvement will
clearly be impossible. Station [redacted] team, as you know, has given most serious
consideration to all plans suggested by hqs counterparts. We conclude that none of them stand
even remote chance of achieving [redacted] objective. Hence, Viaux gamble, despite high risk
466
Ibid., 128; and Santiago Station to CIA, 22 September 1970.
Varas, Conversaciones con Viaux, 133.
467
193
factors, may comment [sic] itself to you.468
Helms's senior operations officers read this recommendation between the lines, as its authors
intended. They met Kissinger and Haig at the White House on 15 October. All agreed that Viaux's plan
would not only fail in the execution, but that it would compromise Valenzuela and the others as well.
This would be more harmful than inaction. Kissinger decided to keep Viaux and the others in reserve,
and so the national security advisor instructed the general to preserve his assets and await more
auspicious opportunities.469
A new wrinkle appeared several days later, in the aftermath of the commander-in-chief of the
navy's -- Admiral Fernando Porta -- resignation on 14 October. The administration explained that the
admiral had resigned for health reasons. But Porta told a different story. According to the admiral,
Allende's victory had discouraged the entire navy. Unidad Popular had promised to leave the OAS and
the Inter-American Defense Board, repudiate the Rio Pact, and break all defense relations with the
United States, including the Unitas exercises. The admiralty feared this would gravely weaken Chilean
national security. These officers also feared that Allende would create parallel armed forces, as he was
already doing with his security detail, and subject the service to Marxist political control.470
The Frei administration granted Porta and his colleagues in the high command of the other
service branches permission to meet with Alessandri and Allende during the weeks before the run-off.
The admiral explained that since the former had already served as president, he did not require these
meetings. So he and the others only met with the latter, who reassured them that Chile would remain
within the Western community of nations and the OAS, and that it would maintain its defense
relationships with the United States. Allende had told Porta that "the wishes of the navy will be
respected." This satisfied the admiral. Thus Porta shared Schneider's position on Allende's election:
politicians would deal with politics, and the armed forces would remain focused on national security
and internal order.471
Porta's relationship with the Frei administration, particularly Minister of Defense Sergio Ossa,
collapsed after these meetings with Allende, much to the admiral's surprise. Press leaks and innuendos
468
Santiago Station to CIA, 10 October 1970. Chile Declassification Project.
Unlisted Author, "The Coup That Failed: The Effects on Allende and his Political Posture, with Special Emphasis
on His Stance before U.S. Positions, Moderate or Tough," 15 October 1970; and Unlisted Author, "Dr. Kissinger, Mr.
Karamessines, Gen. Haig at the White House -- 15 October 1970," 15 October 1970. Chile Declassification Project.
470
Admiral Fernando Porta's written explanation, dated June 1973. Reprinted in José Toribio Merino, Bitácora de
un almirante: memorias (Santiago de Chile: Editorial Andrés Bello, 1998), 104-120.
471
Ibid., 110.
469
194
began appearing, casting him in a negative light. Allende had allegedly compromised Porta's
professional integrity with promises of a new aircraft carrier, for example. The admiral began to feel
that something was very wrong. Ossa suggested he take time off, leaving Tirado temporarily in
command of the navy. Then the navy suddenly "detailed five men armed with submachine guns, under
orders not to leave me alone, not even in the bathroom," and his usual Carabinero escort of one became
five at the same time, around 13 October. Porta interpreted this as a form of house arrest, and he
complained to Frei about it, explaining he could not continue like this. Frei retired him and named
Tirado his successor the following day.472
Schneider visited Porta during this ordeal. The general asking the admiral not to retire, warning
him that he suspected something was up and that he should be careful. Porta later speculated that it was
as if it were all "a maneuver to get me to retire and replace me with Admiral Tirado, who, together with
General Viaux and General Valenzuela…and with other officers in retirement, were working with
politicians to produce an autogolpe."473
Whatever fully explains Ossa and Porta's falling out and Frei's decision to retire the admiral,
Vaiux's movement interpreted Tirado's promotion as a sign from Frei. The president had placed a procoup admiral in control of the navy and advanced him one step closer to power. This almost certainly
explained Valenzuela and the others' sudden enthusiasm and their urgent approaches to Santiago
Station, where they asked for a handful of untraceable submachine guns and teargas canisters. This
confused Karamessines and Philips at the CIA, who asked "What happened between morning 17
October and evening 17 October to change [redacted] from despondency to measured optimism? Who
exactly is involved in coup attempt? Who are leaders and which units will support them?"474
Viaux, Tirado, García, Valenzuela, and Huerta gathered after learning of the admiral's
promotion and "unanimously approved" of the plan that Santiago Station had named "the Viaux
Solution" on Saturday night, 17 October. They would kidnap Schneider. Huerta's Carabineros would
reveal several of the MIR's arms caches around Santiago while Viaux and the others "alerted citizens to
472
Ibid., 116.
Ibid., 113.
474
Varas, Conversaciones con Viaux, 134; and CIA to Santiago Station, 19 October 1970. Chile Declassification
Project. Santiago Station likely knew little or nothing of Porta's retirement and Hugo Tirado's promotion at the time. The
case officers there had had to request the United States military attaché's assistance when identifying and approaching
Chilean army officers because they had no contacts with them themselves. Thus the Track II task force, in Washington,
Langley, and Santiago, was blind with respect to the Chilean navy, which explains why no one knew the answers to these
questions at the time.
473
195
the communist danger that was upon them." Frei would declare a state of emergency, which would
mobilize all forces in Santiago and place them under Valenzuela's command. Once this happened,
Tirado would form a military government and name Viaux the minister of defense. The president would
leave the country, and the conspirators would release Schneider, presenting him with a fait accompli.475
Valenzuela insisted, however, that someone other than Chilean officers or soldiers kidnap
Schneider. It was too much for the garrison commander to consent to a military operation directed
against a sitting commander-in-chief. Viaux was ready for this. He had maintained close relations with
the PN, which had already led him and attorney Pablo Rodríguez into each other's arms, just days after
the election.
Rodríguez and approximately 200 ultraconservative professionals had formed the Frente
Nacionalista Patria y Libertad (PL), a right-wing paramilitary organization, immediately after
Allende's victory. They identified with Viaux's movement and began publishing "Tacna," a newsletter
that targeted the army and sought to persuade the professional officer corps to seize power. The United
States embassy in Santiago believed that the organization eventually represented as many as 15,000 to
20,000 people, including about 300 active paramilitary members. Rodríguez's first operation was in
support of a group of women who were holding nighttime vigils in front of La Moneda, mourning the
death of Chilean democracy in the weeks leading to the run-off. PL became particularly active after
these and other women took to the streets with empty pots to protest Allende's presidency beginning in
December 1971.476
The American ambassador later deemed PL "amateurish and naïve. Rather than provoking the
military intervention in seeks, PL activities seem thus far to make it more awkward for the military to
move away from the government." The ambassador was writing in December 1971. But this
description also fit Rodríguez's organization in September and October 1970.477
Viaux had recruited Juan Diego Dávila, Luis Gallardo, and "several others, the majority of
whom I did not know," from the nascent PL, sometime around 11 September. Gallardo and others, such
as Jaime Melgoza, had come from the Alessandri campaign. Melgoza had driven a bus and sold cars
before joining PL as a self-professed martial-arts expert. Gallardo rented an apartment downtown from
475
Varas, Conversaciones con Viaux, 134-140.
Nathaniel Davis to Department of State, "Patria y Libertad," 23 December 1971. Chile Declassification Project.
For the history of right-wing women and the Allende administration, see Power, Right-Wing Women.
477
Ibid.
476
196
a friend. He and his group called it "la pecera" -- the fish tank -- and made it their operation's
headquarters. Viaux explained that he was planning on using them to kidnap Schneider, and they began
following the commander-in-chief to learn his security arrangements and routine immediately. Dávila,
Gallardo, Melgoza, and the others practiced target shooting at a site just outside the city and they also
stood guard at Viaux's residence most nights in the following weeks.478
Viaux met Gallardo's group in the evening on 17 October. The general instructed them to
execute Plan Alfa. They would kidnap Schneider and take him "to a place only Dávila and I knew
about." Then "a note would be sent to President Frei, in the name of an imaginary organization,
demanding that he designate a military cabinet as a condition of the general's release." Gallardo
understood that unnamed Christian Democratic leaders had given Viaux assurances that the president
was already aware of the operation and "would immediately agree" to the demands. They had several
handguns, chloroform, and ground pepper, and they expected all of it to be over within 48 hours.479
Viaux told Gallardo's group that Valenzuela had arranged a generals' dinner to lure Schneider to
an official army residence in Las Condes on Monday evening. Valenzuela would ensure the dinner
ended around 1:00 Tuesday morning, and Huerta would redirect police patrols away from the
neighborhood between 12:00 and 2:00, isolating the commander-in-chief on his way home. Gallardo
and his snatch-and-grab accomplices waited outside the residence. But his surveillance team had
reported that Schneider was travelling in his Mercedes. The commander-in-chief came and went to the
dinner in his private car, an Opel, and they never saw him. Gallardo tried improvising the following
day, simply stopping and seizing Schneider on the road. But no one in his group had a car that could
keep up with the Mercedes.
Viaux and his father-in-law met Gallardo's group again, passing teargas canisters and possibly
submachine guns to them, which they had probably acquired from the CIA, on Wednesday evening, 21
October. They assembled a larger group, consisting of approximately 20 cars, including a Jeep. The
other vehicles would create the appearance of a traffic jam, forcing Schneider's car onto a side street
near Américo Vespucio and Martín de Zamora, where the Jeep would crash into the rear of the
Mercedes the following morning. Melgoza "would take [Schneider's driver] out with a karate chop, and
then the kidnapping would proceed." Others would use sledgehammers to intimidate the commander-
478
Gallardo's testimony, in Varas, Conversaciones con Viaux, 148-170
Ibid., 159, 162, 165.
479
197
in-chief before moving him to the secure location.480
Plan Alfa proved a catastrophic failure in the execution. Schneider resisted and some from
Gallardo's group shot him before everyone else panicked and scattered that morning. Gallardo blamed
Melgoza, alleging that he was working for the MIR and had sabotaged the operation. But Gallardo's
group more likely failed because they were untrained thugs who had no idea what they were doing, and
because Schneider refused to submit to them, as they had assumed he would. Chile's Investigaciones
easily rounded up Viaux and those from Gallardo's group who had not fled the country. Gallardo's
people had all used their own names and driven their own cars. They all knew the general, and they all
knew each other, too. They ended up in prison with Vaiux and his father-in-law the following year.481
Frei declared a state of emergency and turned control of Santiago over to Valenzuela. Viaux,
never one to back down, believed the moment had finally arrived when the president did this. But
Valenzuela refused to even receive his calls. Tirado, García, and Huerta also abandoned Viaux after the
shooting, and scurried into the shadows. Allende relieved all of them after his inauguration -- Pinochet
replaced Valenzuela as the Santiago garrison commander at that time -- but none of them went to prison
as Viaux did, and he was bitter about it. "My crime," he told Varas, "was not to accept that my Chile
should become dependent on a foreign power and that my people become slaves…to international
communism."482
Conclusion
Viaux's movement marked the Chilean army's reemergence as a deliberative and interventionist
force in 1969 and 1970 -- which began more than a year before the CIA's Track II supposedly
politicized the service. As Cline reported after the Tacnazo, Viaux's initial complaints reflected the
army's loss of its sense of purpose in the 1960s. The Frei administration, consistent with its Revolution
480
Ibid., 167. As the Church Committee understood, the CIA, using the military attaché, had passed three
untraceable, .45 caliber submachine guns, six teargas canisters, and $50,000 to Valenzuela around this time. The attaché
forcibly recovered them and threw them into the sea after Gallardo's group shot Viaux. See United States Senate, Alleged
Assassination Plots, 243-245. The submachine guns and cash may never have left Valenzuela's residence. See Kornbluh,
Pinochet File, 30.
481
Juan Enrique Prieto, Jaime Melgoza's lawyer, denied these allegations. See his interview in Varas,
Conversaciones con Viaux, 172-201. The others arrested and imprisoned were Juan Diego Dávila, Julio Fontecilla, Carlos
Silva, Carlos Labarca, Jaime Requena, Rafael Fernández, Luis Hurtado, Edmundo Mario, Jorge Medina, Mario Montes,
Fernando Yapur, Julio Bouchón, León Cosmelli, Jorge Lagos, and Sergio Topelberg. See their sentences in Ibid., 211-221.
482
Cited in Varas, Conversaciones con Viaux, 139, 147.
198
in Liberty and the larger, inter-American framework of the Alliance for Progress, had contributed to
this by constantly decreasing the service's budget and by failing to even ponder "the problem of finding
a modern mission for its modestly-equipped army." Civic action did not satisfy the professional officer
corps, whose members had been indoctrinated and trained to see themselves as the country's last line of
defense against both external and internal threats since the 1880s, and who felt that Frei was
undermining them and the nation. Thus, as Cline concluded, "The complaints about low pay and
threadbare uniforms may well reflect the symptoms rather than the causes of military malaise." And so
they did.483
The Tacnazo marked a general worsening of civil-military relations in Chile. Although Frei
agreed to Vaiux's demands, he did so begrudgingly and, in Cline's view, insufficiently. The president's
response "produces a discouraging sense of déjà vu." Frei was clearly no army enthusiast, and he
probably looked at the service with the same lack of sympathy Lira did. When a captain attempted to
express his and his colleagues' grievances to the journalist, showing him his measly paycheck, he
brushed it aside. "First of all, I would not have joined the army, captain."484
This captain and many other officers, noncommissioned officers, and men found articulation,
sympathetic representation, and more in Viaux in 1969. The general reminded them of their reason for
being: They defended the patria, the eternal fatherland, in spite of civilians and their often corrupt or
otherwise dysfunctional governments. "Laws and constitutions," Viaux explained, "are born, grow old,
and die. The fatherland endures. The constitution and its laws are made by people to govern themselves
for a period of time. When times change, these laws also change. But the fatherland remains. The rest is
mere detail."485
These details crystalized for Viaux's movement when Allende won the presidency in 1970.
Viaux failed to block the president-elect's inauguration, which he believed threatened national security.
But the general did not stop trying to overthrow the Allende administration after this, even from prison.
The CIA's intelligence directorate reported that Viaux "continues to be the leader of the opposition
plotting to overthrow the government…[and] is maintaining communications with his followers
through his lawyer, Pablo Rodríguez" in November 1972. This led to the tanquetazo, the tankers' affair,
where Patria y Libertad and Lieutenant Colonel Roberto Souper, commanding the Second Armored
483
Cline, "Chile: Causes of Army Discontent."
Lira, Ahora le toca, 51.
485
Cited in Varas, Conversaciones con Viaux, 81.
484
199
Regiment, a unit which had joined Viaux during the Tacnazo, attempted to overthrow Allende on 29
June 1973. Viaux's movement was following a long tradition of army officers who had seized power or
attempted to from the independence era forward. And they finally helped provoke the coup they wanted
the following year, although an entirely different group of generals and admirals shunted them aside
when they seized power.486
Both the Frei and Allende administrations responded poorly to this rising challenge from the
army in the late-1960s and early-1970s. They attempted to coopt sympathetic generals, beginning with
Frei's inviting Marambio, a retired general, to join his cabinet as minister of defense in May 1968. This
only "instilled a heightened sense of political power in the armed forces," as Cline recognized. Frei also
initiated the strategy of telling the army that it was apolitical, constitutional, and democratic by
tradition, hoping to convince the professional officer corps that it was so. This strategy, however,
accomplished nothing.487
A Soviet delegation attended Allende's inauguration in November 1970. One of its members
surveyed the situation after the dust had settled from the Plan Alfa fiasco. He saw a divided, minority
presidency, with some in the administration committed to the peaceful road while others preferred, and
were already perpetrating, violence. And he saw a strong anticommunist opposition in Congress and the
courts, the armed forces, and the press. "This is not going to end well," he remarked.488
486
Unlisted CIA Directorate of Intelligence Author, stamped 2 November 1972. Chile Declassification Project. For
the tanquetazo, see Kissinger to Nixon, "Attempted Chilean Rebellion Ends," 29 June 1973; Kissinger to Nixon,
"Attempted Coup in Chile," 29 June 1973; Unlisted Author, CIA memorandum, 9 July 1973; and Unlisted Author, CIA
memorandum, 25 July 1973. Chile Declassification Project. The best introduction to the coup in September 1973 and the
inter-American and Chilean forces behind it remain Tanya Harmer, Allende's Chile and the Inter-American Cold War
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Power, Right-Wing Women; and Sigmund, Overthrow of Allende.
487
Cline, "Chile: Causes of Army Discontent."
488
Olga Ulianova, "La Unidad Popular y el golpe militar en Chile: Percepciones y analisis soviéticos," Estudios
Públicos 79 (2000), 90. Also see Interview with Yuri Pavlov, Roll 10842, n.d. CNN, Cold War (1998). Transcript courtesy
of the National Security Archive, available at http://www.nsarchive.gwu.edu.
200
VIII. Reimagining Chile's Cold War Experience
The United States and Chile's Cold War experience was not primarily an expression of
American influence in Chile, but rather Chileans' complex, contested, and often highly unstable
transition from colony to nation in the fluid and evolving contexts of the Atlantic revolutions and
independence, the industrial revolution, the world wars, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression,
the Cold War, and the Cuban Revolution. This dissertation has extended multiarchival, international
Cold War history to this problem. It has broadened, deepened, and reimagined an ongoing discussion
through an alternative interpretation, which will help historians more fully appreciate the United States'
place in and relationship with the world.
The dissertation has also built upon political scientist Carlos Huneeus, historian Joaquín
Fermandois, and historian Jodi Pavilack's insights into Chilean history. Fermandois recommended
research into Chile's transatlantic history as "a new approach that would not only explain other
dimensions of the nexus between America and Europe, but also clarify aspects of inter-American
relations, which should not be seen in isolation." Huneeus and Pavilack have shown that Chilean
communists and anticommunists were fighting each other in Chile in 1947 and 1948, more than a
decade before the Cuban Revolution, African decolonization, and the Vietnam War quickened the Cold
War throughout the developing world.489
Historians need to broaden, deepen, and reimagine the United States and Chile's Cold War
history because too many historians, political scientists, and journalists continue to approach this
problem through the consensus interpretation that Gabriel García Márquez, Thomas Hauser, Costa
Gavras, and others, from Seymour Hersh to Peter Kornbluh, have cultivated for the last forty years.
Influential historians from Jonathan Haslam to Stephen Rabe still narrate how a crusading United
States, reaffirming its political, economic, and cultural control over Latin America, intervened in
Chilean affairs, destabilized the country's democratic society, and then engineered the overthrow of
President Salvador Allende (1970-1973). Their retelling of this story includes allegations that
Washington sent high-ranking officials to conceive, plan, and supervise Chilean generals and admirals
489
Jodi Pavilack, Mining for the Nation: The Politics of Chile's Coal Communities from the Popular Front to the
Cold War (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011); Joaquín Fermandois, "The Hero on the Latin
American Scene," in Christian Nuenlist, et al., Globalizing de Gaulle: International Perspectives on French Foreign
Policies, 1958-1969 [2010] (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011), 271; and Carlos Huneeus, La guerra fría chilena:
Gabriel González Videla y la ley maldita (Santiago de Chile: Random House Mondadori, 2008).
201
while doing everything necessary to ensure these officers' success short of actually occupying Santiago.
Some versions, beginning with García Márquez's piece in Harper's, have even featured United States
naval aviators flying the Hawker Hunters that bombed La Moneda -- because some have found it
impossible to accept that Chilean air force pilots, enjoying complete air superiority, could ever have hit
a large, easily identifiable and undefended, stationary target in their home country. As political scientist
Paul Sigmund commented, most Americans will ignore this and other Chilean actions while tending to
speak of "the U.S.'s role in overthrowing a Marxist regime in 1973 and in 'propping up' a brutal
dictatorship that followed" when asked what they know of the United States and Chile's Cold War
experience. Sigmund's observation remains just as valid today as it was in 1993.490
Not all historians and political scientists who study the United States and the world and
Chilean-American relations during the Cold War have followed this consensus interpretation. Sigmund
and those who have dissented, however, remain a small minority. This dissertation has attempted to
buttress and expand upon this minority position.
An Alternative Interpretation
This dissertation's second and third chapters lifted the United States and Chile out of their interAmerican quarantine and began reinterpreting the two nations' Cold War history within a broader,
transatlantic context. These chapters also started to enfold these countries into the whole Cold War,
which began in the late-1940s, rather than the United States-centered, inter-American one, which
started in the early-1960s. The United States and Chile's Cold War experience commenced with the
appearance of communists and anticommunists on the ground in Chile in the 1920s, and not with the
American interventions that occurred in that country in the 1960s and 1970s.
Chile had already become an important member of the inter-American community of nations
that Chileans such as Andrés Bello helped to create, and which remained an integral part of the larger
international community of nations initially centered in the Atlantic world, by the time the Cold War
started. They drafted their own constitutions and formed their own governments. They raised and
490
Paul Sigmund, The United States and Democracy in Chile (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), xi. See the
first chapter for a fuller discussion of these authors and filmmakers.
202
trained their own army and navy, which they used to expand and defend their own borders and then
impose their own jurisdictions through their own wars and interventions. They created and controlled
all the instruments and symbols of national sovereignty from the day they achieved independence from
Spain.
Thus Chile and its neighbors in southern South America do not belong with the Congo, Angola,
and Mozambique, or with Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos in historian Odd Arne Westad's "Third
World." Neither do they belong with Cuba, Panama, the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, and El
Salvador in Rabe's "Latin America." Chile and southern South America represent a more independent,
more developed, and less violent place than sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, or the Caribbean.
Their history unfolded within the Atlantic world, where, not coincidentally, no American or Soviet
military interventions occurred, either.
There certainly were coups and dictatorships in this transatlantic space, in countries like Spain,
Portugal, Brazil, Chile, and Argentina. The United States intervened in some of these events, too, but
these were political and economic interventions, sometimes supported with non-military covert
operations as well -- from the Marshall Plan in the late-1940s to the Alliance for Progress in the 1960s,
and from the CIA's influencing Italy's elections beginning in 1947 to its intervention in Chile's
elections starting in 1964. This hardly compares to the Johnson administration's invading the
Dominican Republic in 1965, the Nixon administration's (1969-1974) "Christmas bombing" in Hanoi
in 1972, or Soviet helicopters' marauding over Afghani skies in the 1980s.
Having established this Atlantic framework, the third, fourth, and fifth chapters showed how the
Cold War began gradually in Chile, in stages, following the emergence of a militant labor movement
with European connections and a German-trained anticommunist professional officer corps in the latenineteenth century. The Chilean Communist Party (PCCh) arose from this labor movement. Chilean
communists enlisted in the Comintern, which established a South American Bureau in Buenos Aires,
and which advised, trained, and modestly supported regional communist parties from the 1920s into the
1940s, when Joseph Stalin (1924-1953) disbanded it, for tactical reasons, to better collaborate with his
American and British allies during the Second World War.
Meanwhile, rebellious field-grade and junior army officers rallied around Major Carlos Ibáñez
del Campo (1927-1931 and 1952-1958), a politically ambitious cavalry officer, in the 1920s. Ibáñez
defied the high command and even the president, seized power, enacted a new constitution that he had
203
helped to create, and then vigorously suppressed the PCCh, his dictatorship's primary target, between
1927 and 1931. He destroyed most of the party's organization, forcing what remained of it
underground. By the time Chilean communists reemerged, Marmaduke Grove, Salvador Allende, and
others had formed the Socialist Party (PS), the PCCh's main rival on the Chilean left from the early1930s to the mid-1950s.
The PCCh did not last very long in the open, however. Chilean communists had duly followed
Moscow's instructions when they embraced the Popular Front and national unity strategies and
generally got along with their countrymen from the late-1930s through Gabriel González's (1946-1952)
campaign for president, which they vigorously supported, in 1946. But they quickly fell out with
González. The president had won the election with a plurality and had had to negotiate with Chilean
conservatives to secure his victory. Chilean communists, feeling betrayed, confronted him about this.
González and the PCCh, however, were already moving into opposition because the world was
changing and they were choosing opposing sides and what was becoming the Cold War. The president
formed a military cabinet in response to a national strike that began in the coal mines before
suppressing and then outlawing the party in 1948.
Thus Chilean communists and anticommunists were already contesting their country's future,
often violently so, when the Cuban Revolution quickened Chile's Cold War experience in the 1960s,
which the sixth and seventh chapters treated. This attracted massive and sustained American
intervention, much of it overt, through the Alliance for Progress, but some of it covert, including the
approximately $2.6 million the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) contributed to President Eduardo
Frei Montalva's (1964-1970) campaign, and the nearly $3 million the agency spent against Allende.
This support likely influenced the election, but not nearly as much as those who subscribe to the
consensus interpretation believe. Rabe, for example, has alleged that the CIA "weakened the
democratic process in Chile by urging citizens to view political opponents as mortal enemies." In fact,
no Chilean, on the left or the right, needed any foreign power's encouragement to see their domestic
opponents as mortal enemies at any time in the twentieth century. Chilean politics had featured this
kind of hardline partisan opposition since communists and anticommunists first appeared -- as Ibáñez,
González, or the poet Pablo Neruda's acts, speeches, and writings attest.491
Frei's Christian Democratic Party (PDC) represented an expression of Chilean, not United
491
Stephen Rabe, The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America (New York: Oxford
University Press, 2012), 125.
204
States aspirations, politics, or crusades, and it was part of a larger, inter-American struggle against
communism and Cuban-style revolution that involved international organizations such as the
Organization of American States (OAS) and Latin American leaders like Venezuela's Rómulo
Betancourt and Brazil's Juscelino Kubitschek. Both Betancourt and Kubitschek were at least as
instrumental in forming the Alliance for Progress as Kennedy and Johnson. Frei, too, shaped and
conditioned the Alliance from its beginning to its end, when he wrote an article in Foreign Affairs,
hoping to revive it while desperately attempting to get on top of the arms trade.
Frei and Chile's Christian Democrats were not merely anticommunists opposed to fidelismo.
They were also progressive Catholics with strong connections to their counterparts across the Atlantic,
who followed a noncommunist critique of capitalist society that the Vatican had articulated decades
before the Cold War started. The sixth chapter explained this while revealing an underappreciated
Anglo-Chilean, advanced-technology dimension of Chile's Cold War history. Frei's approach to
modernization included using nonmilitary nuclear science and technology to further his country's social
and economic development. He benefitted from Chileans' longstanding friendship with Britain and
their relatively newer relationship with the international nuclear-science community centered in the
International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) in Vienna.
Frei failed to complete his nuclear-modernization project before his term expired. Chilean
society had become very unstable by then, however, and this was among the least of his worries. The
professional officer corps started deliberating politics again, in the pattern Ibáñez had established
earlier. Brigadier General Roberto Viaux led them this time. Their disagreements pertained to the
Chilean government's defense policies as they had been, in their view, undermining the army's budget,
personnel, and most importantly its core missions, since 1961. Viaux's movement compelled Frei to
modify some of these policies in 1969. This notwithstanding, the general and his movement's
grievances remained unresolved into the early-1970s.
Viaux's movement became an explicitly anticommunist, pro-coup one after Allende won the
presidential election. It grew to include a significant number of civilians, under attorney Pablo
Rodríguez's leadership, just days after Allende's victory. Viaux's abortive coup attempt in October 1970
led to his imprisonment in 1971. But Rodríguez's Frente Nacionalista Patria y Libertad (Nationalist
Front for Fatherland and Liberty) continued pressing the army to overthrow Allende through September
1973. Thus Viaux's movement represented the initial impulse that soon became the core of Chilean
205
anticommunism and pro-coup agitation between 1970 and 1973.
The United States-Chilean Relationship
This discussion on Viaux and Patria y Libertad, who had been in contact with the CIA and had
received some agency support in September and October 1970, has raised questions concerning the
United States, Chile, and the Cold War since 1973. What was the nature of the Chilean-American
relationship? How did United States involvement and intervention influence Chile during the Cold
War?
The United States and Chile established sustained relations with each other during the War of
the Pacific (1879-1883). This relationship, initially turbulent, was that between two nations, not empire
and subject or patron and client. The Baltimore affair, as unpleasant as it was for all involved, did not
compare to Britain in China after the Opium Wars or the United States in the Philippines, Cuba, and
Panama after the Spanish-American War, even though the parliamentary regime that had overthrown
and replaced President José Manuel Balmaceda (1886-1891) brooded over it for the next three decades.
The Chilean-American relationship matured after this parliamentary period ended in the 1920s.
This coincided with the United States' decision to begin withdrawing from nearly 30 years of
intervention in the Caribbean, and with Chile's finally resolving its outstanding territorial issues with
Peru. President Arturo Alessandri Palma (1920-1924, 1925, and 1932-1938) sought a close, friendly
partnership with the United States in inter-American affairs and especially in bilateral trade that decade.
This partnership continued flowering into the 1960s. Neither the Coolidge (1923-1929) nor the Hoover
(1929-1933) administration were involved in the rise of Ibáñez's anticommunist dictatorship or the
naval mutiny and rapid series of coups d'état that followed its collapse in 1931 and 1932, although
some Chileans explicitly requested American military intervention in those two years, and even though
Chilean communists blamed United States imperialism for Ibáñez and some of what followed.
The Truman administration (1945-1953) had nothing to do with the González administration's
falling out with the PCCh in 1947, either -- many accusations to the contrary notwithstanding.
González faulted the Soviet Union and international communism, especially the Yugoslavian and
206
Czechoslovakian governments. Chilean communists in turn blamed American imperialism. This was
symptomatic of the Cold War paranoia that encompassed the Atlantic world, Eastern Europe, and the
USSR in the conflict's early years. But it was not any more valid than Washington's characterization of
the Greek civil war as evidence of Soviet expansionism, Moscow's perception of Hungarians'
anticommunist uprising as an imperialist attack against the people, or the Johnson and Nixon
administrations' certainty that the antiwar movement in the United States was taking its orders from the
Soviet Union and North Vietnam. Allegations that President Harry Truman was pulling González's
strings, moreover, represent an expression of this and the still potent bias historian Max Paul Friedman
referred to when he opened his review article with the following joke:
Q: Why are there no coups d'état in the United States?
A: Because there is no U.S. embassy there.492
Frei, too, has tended to appear as an American puppet, "the U.S.'s main man in Santiago," or
"the Senator from Washington, DC," since the 1970s. Yet Frei was his own man. This became clear not
so much during his administration's falling out with President Richard Nixon, but when National
Security Advisor Henry Kissinger and the CIA frantically attempted to pull Frei's strings to block
Allende's ascension to the presidency in September and October 1970 -- and nothing happened.
Kissinger and the American ambassador in Chile threatened Frei and key members of his cabinet,
including his minister of defense, with a complete stoppage of military aid and spare parts if they did
not take immediate action -- and still nothing happened. This was because there were no strings to pull
and never had been.493
Kissinger and his associates learned this again after they encountered Viaux's movement during
the Track II operation, when they stumbled into Chilean politics without knowing much about the
country. Neither Viaux nor Rodríguez's Patria y Libertad was "set up by the CIA on 11 September
1970, after Allende's victory, via the leader of [the National Party (PN)], [Sergio Onofre] Jarpa," as
Haslam has written. Viaux had been intervening in politics since as early as October 1969, and the
agency did not begin reaching out to officers like him and to groups like Patria y Libertad until after 15
September 1970 -- and then only briefly. As the CIA's former director of Latin American operations
Theodore Shackley later acknowledged, the agency "did arrange funds to be channeled to Patria y
492
Max Paul Friedman, "Retiring the Puppets, Bringing Latin America Back in: Recent Scholarship on United
States-Latin American Relations," Diplomatic History 27 (2003): 621-636.
493
Betty and James Petras, "Ballots into Bullets: Epitaph for a Peaceful Revolution," Ramparts (November 1973),
20.
207
Libertad through some third parties" until it backed away after Allende's inauguration. His division
considered doing this again as the opposition to Allende grew in 1972 and 1973. "With the complete
agreement of the Santiago Station and Ambassador Nathaniel Davis," however, "it was agreed that this
group was to be avoided like the plague."494
Both Kissinger and the CIA failed to hold Viaux and Rodríguez back on 15 October 1970. The
general launched his operation, which he and his associated in Patria y Libertad called Plan Alfa,
several days later. Although this resulted in his imprisonment, his movement continued agitating for a
coup through September 1973, which it did without the United States' guidance or supervision. Some
covert American support to the PN likely indirectly reached Patria y Libertad, but given their
irrepressible anticommunism, they would have acted as they did even had they received no funds from
the United States.
None of this leaves the Kennedy (1961-1963), Johnson (1963-1968), or Nixon administrations
in a particularly favorable light with respect to the United States and Chile's Cold War history -- neither
is this intended to support triumphalist narratives about the end of the Cold War. These three
administrations knowingly and repeatedly violated the inter-American community's principle of
nonintervention while professing their dedication to it in public. Nixon's Track II initiative also reveals
his administration's, for lack of a better word, frantic insanity. But this should not obscure the basically
proper nation-to-nation contact that governed US-Chilean relations most years after 1880. No matter
how bad Kennedy, Johnson, or Nixon acted in Chile, no matter how much money they spent or what
they said, this does not sufficiently account for the United States and Chile's Cold War experience. As
political scientist Robert Pastor often said, American foreign policy could only partly explain Latin
American history.
The Importance of Getting the Story Straight
History as an art form and professional practice should not only be about questioning
494
Ted Shackley, Spymaster: My Life in the CIA (Dulles: Potomac Books, 2005), 270. These funds totaled
approximately $45,000 overall. See United States Senate, Staff Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental
Operations with Respect to Intelligence Activities, Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973 (Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 1975).
208
conventional wisdom, as this dissertation has done. It should also be about getting the story straight. I
use this as a figure of speech in the spirit of clarifying some of the allegation-driven oversimplifications
that have long propelled the consensus interpretation and influenced public opinion in the United
States, Chile, and elsewhere. These oversimplifications have tended to reduce the most important
events in the United States and Chile's Cold War history -- from González's anticommunist politics in
1947 and 1948 to Frei's election in 1964 and Viaux and Patria y Libertad's pro-coup activities
beginning in 1970 -- to American influence.
These oversimplifications pervade the consensus interpretation and its vocabulary, forming an
easily recognizable pattern where the United States tends to appear as subject and Chile as object.
González banned communism to please his patrons in Washington, because Truman pressed him to do
it. Johnson and the CIA weakened Chilean democracy by turning Chileans against each other in 1964.
Then Nixon and Kissinger destabilized and destroyed Chilean democracy. The US government was the
architect of the coup, or engineered it. Washington directed this sordid drama. Deputy Director of
Central Intelligence Lieutenant General Vernon Walters personally supervised the coup from a hotel
near La Moneda. The United States remains ultimately responsible for Allende's death, even if he took
his life by his own hand, and so on.
My use of getting the story straight as a figure of speech does not mean that I believe that
historians should attempt to discover the absolute, objective truth about the United States, Chile, and
the Cold War -- or about anything else, for that matter. There is no absolute, objective truth. Historians,
recognizing this, approach problems such as this one from different perspectives and for varying
purposes. They ask diverse questions and evaluate many forms of evidence -- and they do not always
read this evidence the same way.
But I do believe that equitable, evidentiary-based, reasonably proportioned analyses and
narratives remain possible in historical writing. Historians from Polybius in ancient Rome to Marc
Bloch in twentieth-century France have held similar beliefs for millennia. Regrettably, the United
States and Chile's Cold War experience, with few exceptions, has generally not received the sound
historical treatment that it deserves.495
495
I refer to Marc Bloch's advice to comprehend before judging and to keep the two separate, and to Polybius's
criticizing Phylarchus for conflating history with tragedy. See Marc Bloch, The Historian's Craft: Reflections on the Nature
and Uses of History and the Techniques and Methods of Those Who Write It, trans. by Peter Putnam (New York: Vintage,
1953), 138-189; and Polybius, The Rise of the Roman Empire, trans. by Ian Scott-Kilvert (New York: Penguin, 1979), 2.56.
209
Failing to get the story straight has produced real-world consequences for the United States far
beyond university classrooms and seminars. The consensus interpretation remains just one of several
problems that unduly complicate the United States' relations with the much of developing world today.
The coup that deposed Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq (1951-1953) in Iran in August
1953, for example, represents a higher-profile and more dramatic example than the Chilean one.
Council on Foreign Relations fellow Ray Takeyh reviewed this event two years ago. Iran represented
one of the CIA's first covert operations that targeted and helped overthrow a government that was not
behind the Iron Curtain and with whom Washington was not at war. Former Director of Central
Intelligence Allen Dulles and the agency's director of Near Eastern operations Kermit Roosevelt
boasted about the coup in press leaks at the time and in their memoirs later. New Left and revisionist
historians and journalists such as Stephen Kinzer have used this to chastise the United States and the
CIA since the 1970s. The story of how the Eisenhower administration (1953-1961) destroyed Iranian
democracy and then forced Iranians to live under an abusive monarchy that served American oil
interests remains well known.496
Takeyh reminded his readers, however, that well known does not necessarily mean well
founded. The CIA's operations against Mosaddeq, Dulles and Roosevelt's bragging notwithstanding,
were actually quite ineffective. "Regardless of anything the United States did or did not do," Takeyh
added, "Mosaddeq was bound to fall and the shah was bound to retain his throne and expand his
power." The prime minister became increasingly autocratic in office, alienating many, including much
of the professional officer corps, the middle class, and, most importantly, the conservative clerical elite.
The agency's British-supported, panicky efforts to mobilize pro-shah and anti-Mosaddeq
demonstrations were one thing, but religious leaders such as Ayatollah Abul-Qasim Kashani's
allegiance was another. And Kashani and his colleagues turned against the prime minister to support the
shah. This, more than any other single factor, accounted for the depth of Iranian opposition that
emerged and decided Iran's future in August 1953.497
The Islamic Republic of Iran, a theocracy that seized power in 1979, has joined historians and
journalists such as Kinzer in promoting the better-known version of this history, which has taken the
496
Ray Takeyh, "What Really Happened in Iran: The CIA, the Ouster of Mosaddeq, and the Restoration of the
Shah," Foreign Affairs 93 (2014): 2-12. See Stephen Kinzer, Overthrow: America's Century of Regime Change from Hawaii
to Iraq (New York: Henry Holt and Company/Times Books, 2007); and Stephen Kinzer, All the Shah's Men: An American
Coup and the Roots of Middle East Terror [2003] (Hoboken: John Wiley and Sons, 2008).
497
Ibid., 2.
210
form of a bitter grievance narrative against the United States. This has complicated Washington and
Tehran's relations ever since Iranians stormed the American embassy, with United States officials often
approaching Iranian leaders as sinners expiating their past transgressions, and with Iranian clerics and
politicians posturing as aggrieved victims while claiming the moral high ground. President Barack
Obama (2009-2017) apologized for the coup while speaking in Cairo his first year in office.
Takeyh advised Americans to develop "a better and more accurate understanding of the real
U.S. role in Iran's past." He also hoped that Iranian leaders would acknowledge Iranian ownership of
that past. If they did, then the two governments might stand a better chance of cultivating a more
constructive relationship in the future than they presently do.498
Not even the shrillest anti-American voices in Chile have ever delivered the same message or
spoken in the same pitch as Iran's Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini and his successors, and I do not
suggest otherwise. But some parallels remain. When the Clinton administration (1993-2001)
declassified approximately 20,000 documents pertaining to the Nixon administration's intervention
against Allende, it did so in an apologetic tone. When a student in Washington, DC brought up "past
events such as in 1973 when the United States staged a coup in Chile on September 11th, despite the
wishes of the Chilean populace against the coup, and in support -- and the populace in support of the
democratically elected President Salvador Allende, the CIA, regardless, supported the coup of Augusto
Pinochet [1973-1990] and that resulted in mass deaths" two years later, Secretary of State Colin Powell
told him that "it is not a part of American history that we're proud of."499
Obama faced similar pressure when he visited Chile in March 2011. President Sebastián Piñera
(2010-2014) ask him to declassify additional American documents on the Pinochet dictatorship. Other
Chileans asked him to apologize for Pinochet and his human-rights violations. Obama acknowledged
that US-Latin American relations had been rocky in the past. The president suggested, however, that "It
is important for us to learn from our history, to understand our history, but not be trapped by it."500
Obama and his successors should continue to declassify all American documents pertaining to
United States, Chile, and the Cold War. But the president rightfully declined to apologize for Pinochet.
498
Ibid., 3.
Department of State, press release, "Secretary of State Colin Powell Interview On Black Entertainment
Television's Youth Town Hall," 20 February 2003, available at http://www.fas.org; and Clinton administration, press release,
"Chile Declassification Project: White House Press Statement," 13 November 2000, available at http://www.state.gov.
500
"Chile President [Sebastián Piñera] to Ask Obama for Pinochet Files," BBC, 23 March 2011, available at
http://www.bbc.com.
499
211
Chileans should have demanded this apology from, more than anyone else, Pinochet. They should also
have sought one from Viaux, Rodríguez, and their many willing supporters and subordinates, including
most of the professional officer corps and their wives. They would not have got those apologies,
however, because Pinochet and these others remained certain that they had acted correctly, and they
were defiantly unrepentant for the rest of their lives.
Obama might also have added that while most Americans regret not merely Nixon's behavior
toward Allende, but his presidency overall, there remains more to know about the United States, Chile,
and the Cold War than that which the consensus interpretation and any amount of declassified
documents from Washington can tell historians and the public. The United States and Chile's Cold War
history mostly derived from Chile's century-and-a-half long transition from colony to nation in the fluid
and evolving contexts of the Atlantic revolutions and independence, the industrial revolution, the world
wars, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, the Cold War, and the Cuban Revolution, and not
American intervention. It was bigger than any single nation, government, or transnational corporation,
no matter how large that nation, government, or corporation may loom in historians and others'
imaginations. As the former director of the Soviet Foreign Ministry's Latin American division
explained after the Cold War, "it was well understood in Moscow that although the CIA had a lot to do
with the coup d'état, it was not the main reason. The main reason was that Allende lost support with the
majority of the population, probably never had it."501
501
Interview with Yuri Pavlov, Roll 10842, n.d. CNN, Cold War (1998). Transcript courtesy of the National Security
Archive, available at http://www.nsarchive.gwu.edu. For further discussion on Allende's "bad politics," or his failings as a
national leader in an ideologically diverse society, see Brian Loveman, Chile: The Legacy of Hispanic Capitalism [1979] 3d
ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 259-260; and Brian Loveman, "Allende's Chile: The Political Economy of
the Peaceful Road to Disaster," New Scholar 5 (1976): 309-323.
212
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Archives Consulted
Comisión Chilena de Energía Nuclear, Centro Nacional de Estudios Nucleares, La Reina
"Comisión Chilena de Energía Nuclear, 1964-1989." Santiago: CChEN, 1989.
Memorias anuales
Harry Truman Library, Independence, Missouri
Papers of Harry Truman
President's Secretary's Files
National Security Files
John Kennedy Library, Boston, Massachusetts
Papers of President Kennedy
National Security Files
Craig Van Grasstek, interviewer and editor, "Lincoln Gordon and the Alliance for Progress: An
Annotated Oral History," n.d.
Lyndon Johnson Library, Austin, Texas
Papers of Lyndon Johnson
National Security Files
Department of State, "The Department of State during the Administration of President Lyndon
B. Johnson, November 1963-January 1969"
Oliver Covey, oral history I, 2 December 1968
Oliver Covey, oral history II, 12 December 1968
Lincoln Gordon, oral history, 10 July 1969
Thomas Mann, oral history, 4 November 1968
Richard Nixon Library, Yorba Linda, California
Henry Kissinger telephone conversation transcripts (TELCONS)
National Archives, College Park, MD
CIA Records Search Tool (CREST)
Record Group 84, Foreign Service Posts of the Department of State: Chile/U.S. Embassy
Santiago
British National Archives, Kew Gardens, Richmond upon Thames, London
Foreign Office papers (to 1968)
Foreign and Commonwealth Office papers (after 1968)
213
Newspapers and Periodicals Consulted
Chicago Tribune
Foreign Affairs
La Nación (Chile)
Los Angeles Times
New York Times
Ramparts
Washington Post
Published Primary Sources
Bascuñan Montes, A. Recopilación de tratados y convenciones celebrados entre la República de Chile
y las potencias extranjeras, edición autorizada por el supremo gobierno y revisada por el Ministerio
de Relaciones Exteriores II: 1863-1893. Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Cervantes, 1894.
Central Intelligence Agency. "CIA Activities in Chile," 18 September 2000, available at https://cia.gov.
Pavlov, Yuri. CNN interview, roll 10842, n.d. Transcript courtesy of the National Security Archive,
available at http://www.nsarchive.gwu.edu.
Rockefeller, Nelson. The Rockefeller Report on the Americas. New York Times ed. Chicago:
Quadrangle Books, 1969.
Toro C., Bernardino. Recopilación de tratados, convenciones, protocolos y otros actos internacionales
celebrados por la República de Chile IV: 1902-1911. Edición oficial. Santiago de Chile:
Sociedad Imprenta y Litografía Universo, 1913.
United States Department of State, Bureau of Intelligence and Research, Office of the Geographer.
"International Boundary Study No. 65: Chile-Peru Boundary," 28 February 1966, available at
http://www.law.fsu.edu.
________. Chile Declassification Project, n.d., available at http://www.state.gov.
________. Department of State Bulletin 18 (23 May 1948).
________. Department of State Bulletin 28 (30 March 1953).
________. Department of State Bulletin 43 (1 August 1960).
________. Department of State Bulletin 43 (3 October 1960).
________. Department of State Bulletin 44 (3 April 1961).
________. Department of State Bulletin 49 (9 December 1963).
________. Department of State Bulletin 61 (17 November 1969).
________. Papers Relating to the Foreign Relations of the United States, transmitted to Congress, with
214
the annual message of the President, 4 December 1883. Washington, DC: Government Printing
Office, 1884.
________. The executive documents of the House of Representatives for the first session of the fiftysecond Congress, 1891-1892. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1892.
________. Foreign Relations of the United States 1922 I. Washington, DC: Government Printing
Office, 1938.
________. Foreign Relations of the United States 1924 I. Washington, DC: Government Printing
Office, 1939.
________. Foreign Relations of the United States 1925 I. Washington, DC: Government Printing
Office, 1940.
________. Foreign Relations of the United States 1931 I. Washington, DC: Government Printing
Office, 1946.
________. Foreign Relations of the United States 1932 V: The American Republics. Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1948.
________. Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers 1942 V: The American
Republics. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1962.
________. Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers 1942 VI: The American
Republics. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1963.
________. Foreign Relations of the United States 1946 VI: Eastern Europe; The Soviet Union.
Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1969.
________. Foreign Relations of the United States 1947 VIII: The American Republics. Washington,
DC: Government Printing Office, 1972.
________. Foreign Relations of the United States 1948 IX: The Western Hemisphere. Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1972.
________. Foreign Relations of the United States 1950 I: National Security Affairs; Foreign Economic
Policy. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1977.
________. Foreign Relations of the United States 1945-1950: Emergence of the Intelligence
Establishment. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1996.
________. Foreign Relations of the United States 1950-1955: The Intelligence Community, 1950-1955.
Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2007.
________. Foreign Relations of the United States 1952-1954 IV: The American Republics. Washington,
DC: Government Printing Office, 1983.
________. Foreign Relations of the United States 1952-1954: Guatemala. Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 2003.
________. Foreign Relations of the United States 1958-1960 V: American Republics. Washington, DC:
Government Printing Office, 1991.
________. Foreign Relations of the United States 1958-1960 VI: Cuba. Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 1991.
________. Foreign Relations of the United States 1961-1963 X: Cuba, January 1961-September 1962.
215
Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1997.
________. Foreign Relations of the United States 1964-1968 XXXI: South and Central America;
Mexico. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2004.
United States Senate. Committee on Foreign Relations. Multinational Corporations and United States
Foreign Policy, Hearings on the International Telephone and Telegraph Company and Chile,
1970-1971. 2 vols. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1973.
________. Staff Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to
Intelligence Activities. Alleged Assassination Plots Involving Foreign Leaders. Washington,
DC: Government Printing Office, 1975.
________. Staff Report of the Select Committee to Study Governmental Operations with Respect to
Intelligence Activities. Covert Action in Chile, 1963-1973. Washington, DC: Government
Printing Office, 1975.
Memoirs
Ayers, Bradley Earl. The War That Never Was: An Insider's Account of CIA Covert Operations against
Cuba. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976.
Bowers, Claude. Chile through Embassy Windows, 1939-1953 [1958]. Westport: Greenwood Press,
1977.
Chalfont, Alun. The Shadow of My Hand: A Memoir. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2000.
Colby, William. Honorable Men: My Life in the CIA. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978.
González Videla, Gabriel. Memorias. 2 vols. Santiago de Chile: Editora Nacional Gabriela Mistral,
1975.
Haldeman, H.R. The Haldeman Diaries: Inside the Nixon White House [1994]. New York: Berkley,
1995.
Kissinger, Henry. White House Years. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1979.
________. Years of Upheaval [1982]. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011.
König, Abraham. Memorias íntimas, políticas y diplomáticas de Don Abraham König. Compiled and
annotated by Fano Velasco. Santiago de Chile: Imprenta Cervantes, 1927.
Merino, José Toribio. Bitácora de un almirante: memorias. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Andrés Bello,
1998.
Neruda, Pablo. Memoirs [1974]. Trans. by Hardie St. Martin. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Girous,
1977.
Nixon, Richard. RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon. New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1978.
Pinochet, Augusto. El día decisivo: 11 de Septiembre de 1973. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Andrés
Bello, 1979.
________. Camino recorrido: Biografía de un soldado. 2 vols. Santiago de Chile: Telleres Gráficos del
Instituto Geográfico Militar de Chile, 1990, 1991.
216
Pérez Rosales, Vicente. Times Gone By: Memoirs of a Man of Action. Trans. by John Polt. Introduction
by Brian Loveman. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003.
Shackley, Ted. Spymaster: My Life in the CIA. Dulles: Potomac Books, 2005.
Smith, Russell Jack. The Unknown CIA: My Three Decades with the Agency. Washington: PergamonBrassey's International Defense Publishers, 1989.
Smith, Wayne. The Closest of Enemies: A Personal and Diplomatic History of the Castro Years. New
York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1987.
Stewart, Michael. Life and Labour: An Autobiography. London: Sidgwick and Jackson, 1980.
Straw, Jack. Last Man Standing: Memoirs of a Political Survivor. London: Pan, 2012.
Walters, Vernon. The Mighty and the Meek: Dispatches from the Front Line of Diplomacy. London: St
Ermin's Press, 2001.
________. Silent Missions. New York: Doubleday and Company, 1978).
Wilson, Harold. A Personal Record: The Labour Government, 1964-1970. Boston: Little, Brown and
Company, 1971.
Secondary Literature
Aguirre Silva, Leonidas, ed. Discursos parlamentarios de Pablo Neruda (1945-1948) [1996]. Santiago
de Chile: Editorial Antártica, 1997.
Alegria, Fernando. "The Fall of Santiago." Ramparts 12 (December 1973): 32-37.
Basadre, Jorge. Chile, Perú y Bolivia independientes. Barcelona and Buenos Aires: Salvat Editores,
1948.
Blakemore, Harold. British Nitrates and Chilean Politics, 1886-1896: Balmaceda and North. London:
Athlone Press for the Institute of Latin American Studies, 1974.
________. "The Chilean Revolution of 1891 and Its Historiography." Hispanic American Historical
Review 45 (1965): 393-421.
Brands, Hal. Latin America's Cold War. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010.
Braun, Herbert. The Assassination of Gaitán: Public Life and Urban Violence in Colombia. Madison:
University of Wisconsin Press, 1985.
Bravo, Bernardino. De Portales a Pinochet: Gobierno y régimen de gobierno en Chile. Santiago de
Chile: Editorial Jurídica de Chile/Editorial Andrés Bello, 1985.
Bulnes, Gonzalo. Guerra del Pacífico. 3 vols. Valparaíso: Sociedad Imprenta y Litografía Universo,
1911-1919.
Burr, Robert. By Reason or Force: Chile and the Balancing of Power in South America, 1830-1905
[1965]. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1974.
Burr, Robert and Roland Hussey, eds. Documents on Inter-American Cooperation. 2 vols. Philadelphia:
University of Philadelphia Press, 1955.
Bushnell, David, ed. Trans. by Frederick Fornoff. El Libertador: Writings of Simón Bolívar. New York:
217
Oxford University Press, 2003.
Cardoso, Fernando Henrique and Enzo Faletto. Trans. by Marjory Mattingly Urquidi. Dependency and
Development in Latin America [1971]. Berkley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1979.
Cobbs, Elizabeth. The Rich Neighbor Policy: Rockefeller and Kaiser in Brazil. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1992.
Cobbs Hoffman, Elizabeth. All You Need Is Love: The Peace Corps and the Spirit of the 1960s [1998].
Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2000.
________. American Umpire. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2013.
Cockcroft, James, ed. Salvador Allende Reader: Chile's Voice of Democracy. Melbourne and New
York: Ocean Press, 2000.
Cohen, Warren and Nancy Tucker, eds. Lyndon Johnson Confronts the World: American Foreign
Policy, 1963-1968. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994.
Collier, Simon and William Sater. A History of Chile, 1808-2002 [1996], 2d ed. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2004.
Corvalán, Luis. El gobierno de Salvador Allende. Santiago de Chile: LOM Ediciones, 2003.
Cruz-Coke, Ricardo. Historia electoral de Chile, 1925-1973. Santiago de Chile: Editorial Juridica de
Chile, 1984.
Dallek, Robert. Nixon and Kissinger: Partners in Power. New York: HarperCollins, 2007.
Daniels, Robert, ed. A Documentary History of Communism and the World: From Revolution to
Collapse. Hanover: University Press of New England, 1994.
Davis, Harold Eugene, John Finan, and F. Taylor Peck. Latin American Diplomatic History: An
Introduction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977.
Davis, Nathaniel. The Last Two Years of Salvador Allende. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1985.
Debray, Régis. The Chilean Revolution: Conversations with Allende. New York: Pantheon Books,
1971.
Dinges, John. The Condor Years: How Pinochet and His Allies Brought Terrorism to Three Continents
[2004]. New York: The New Press, 2005.
Domínguez, Jorge. To Make a World Safe for Revolution: Cuba's Foreign Policy. Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 1989.
Edmundson, William. A History of the British Presence in Chile: From Bloody Mary to Charles
Darwin and the Decline of British Influence. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2009.
Edwards Vives, Alberto. La fronda aristocrática: Historia política de Chile [1928]. Santiago de Chile:
Imprenta Nacional, 1945.
Edwards Vives, Alberto and Eduardo Frei Montalva. Historia de los partidos politicos chilenos.
Santiago de Chile: Editorial del Pacifico, 1949.
Faúndez, Julio. Marxism and Democracy in Chile: From 1932 to the Fall of Allende. New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1988.
218
Fermandois, Joaquín. "La persistencia del mito: Chile en el huracán de la Guerra Fría." Estudios
Públicos 92 (2003): 287-312.
Fernández Valdés, Juan José. Chile y Perú: Historia de sus relaciones diplomáticas entre 1879-1929.
Santiago de Chile: RIL editores: Asociación de Funcionarios Diplomáticos de Carrera del
Ministerio de Relaciones Exteriores, 2004.
Frank, Andre Gunder. Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile
and Brazil. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1967.
Frei Montalva, Eduardo. "The Alliance That Lost Its Way." Foreign Affairs 45 (1967): 437-448.
________. Pensamiento y acción. Santiago de Chile: Editorial de Paćifico, 1956.
Friedman, Max Paul. "Retiring the Puppets, Bringing Latin America Back in: Recent Scholarship on
United States-Latin American Relations." Diplomatic History 27 (2003): 621-636.
Furci, Carmelo. The Chilean Communist Party and the Road to Socialism. London: Zed, 1984.
Fursenko, Aleksandr and Timothy Naftali. "One Hell of a Gamble": The Secret History of the Cuban
Missile Crisis [1997]. New York. W.W. Norton and Company, 1998.
Gaddis, John Lewis. George F. Kennan: An American Life. New York: Penguin, 2011.
________. We Now Know: Rethinking Cold War History. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997.
Galeano, Eduardo. Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent [1971],
25th anniversary ed. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997.
García Márquez, Gabriel. "The Death of Salvador Allende." Trans. by Gregory Rabassa. Harper's
(March 1974): 46-53.
Gavras, Konstantinos [Costa Gavras]. Missing. Universal Pictures, 1982.
Glenn, David. "'Foreign Affairs' Loses a Longtime Editor and His Replacement in Row over Editorial
Independence." Chronicle of Higher Education (25 June 2004), available at
http://www.chronicle.com.
Gleijeses, Piero. Conflicting Missions: Havana, Washington, and Africa, 1959-1976. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
________. The Cuban Drumbeat: Castro's Worldview: Cuban Foreign Policy in a Hostile World.
London, New York, and Calcutta: Seagull Books, 2009.
________. Shattered Hope: The Guatemalan Revolution and the United States, 1944-1954. Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1991.
________. Visions of Freedom: Havana, Washington, Pretoria, and the Struggle for Southern Africa,
1976-1991. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013.
Grandin, Greg. The Last Colonial Massacre: Latin America in the Cold War [2004]. Updated ed., with
an interview with Naomi Klein. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011.
Grow, Michael. U.S. Presidents and Latin American Interventions: Pursuing Regime Change in the
Cold War. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008.
Gustafson, Kristian. Hostile Intent: U.S. Covert Operations in Chile, 1964-1974. Washington, DC:
Potomac Books, 2007.
219
Harmer, Tanya. Allende's Chile and the Inter-American Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press, 2011.
Haslam, Jonathan. The Nixon Administration and the Death of Allende's Chile: A Case of Assisted
Suicide. London: Verso, 2005.
Hauser, Thomas. The Execution of Charles Horman: An American Sacrifice. New York: Harcourt
Brace Jovanovich, 1978.
Hersh, Seymour. The Price of Power: Kissinger in the Nixon White House. New York: Summit Books,
1983.
Hitchens, Christopher. The Trial of Henry Kissinger. London: Verso, 2001.
Hull, Christopher. "'Going to War in Buses': The Anglo-American Clash over Leyland Sales to Cuba,
1963-1964." Diplomatic History 34 (2010): 793-822.
Huneeus, Carlos. La guerra fría chilena: Gabriel González Videla y la ley maldita. Santiago de Chile:
Random House Mondadori, 2008.
Immerman, Richard. Empire for Liberty: A History of American Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin
to Paul Wolfowitz. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010.
Jian, Chen. Mao's China and the Cold War. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.
Joseph, Gilbert and Daniela Spenser, eds. In from the Cold: Latin America's New Encounter with the
Cold War. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008.
Klein, Naomi. The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism [2007]. New York: Picador, 2008.
Kornbluh, Peter. Bay of Pigs Declassified. New York: The New Press, 1998.
________. The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability. New York: The
New Press, 2003.
LaFeber, Walter. The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860-1898 [1963], 35th
anniversary ed. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998.
________. The Panama Canal: The Crisis in Historical Perspective [1978]. Updated ed. New York:
Oxford University Press, 1989.
Leffler, Melvyn. For the Soul of Mankind: The United States, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War
[2007]. New York: Hill and Wang, 2008.
________. The Specter of Communism: The United States and the Origins of the Cold War, 1917-1953.
New York: Hill and Wang, 1994.
Leffler, Melvyn and David Painter, eds. Origins of the Cold War: An International History [1994]. New
York: Routledge, 2005.
Leonov, Nilokai. "La inteligencia soviética en América Latina durante la guerra fría." Estudios
Públicos 73 (1999): 31-63.
Lira Massi, Eugenio. ¡Ahora le toca al golpe! Santiago de Chile: Abumohor Impresores, 1969.
Logevall, Fredrik and Andrew Preston, eds. Nixon and the World: American Foreign Relations, 19691977. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.
Loveman, Brian. "Allende's Chile: The Political Economy of the Peaceful Road to Disaster." New
220
Scholar 5 (1976): 309-323.
________. Chile: The Legacy of Hispanic Capitalism [1979] 3d ed. New York: Oxford University
Press, 2001.
________. The Constitution of Tyranny: Regimes of Exception in Spanish America. Pittsburgh:
University of Pittsburgh Press, 1993.
________. For la Patria: Politics and the Armed Forces in Latin America. Wilmington: Scholarly
Resources, 1999.
________. Struggle in the Countryside: Politics and Rural Labor in Chile, 1919-1973. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1976.
Loveman, Brian and Thomas Davies, eds. Guerrilla Warfare [1985], 3d ed. Wilmington: Scholarly
Resources, 1997.
________. The Politics of Antipolitics: The Military in Latin America [1978], 3d ed. Wilmington:
Scholarly Resources, 1997.
Mann, James. Rise of the Vulcans: The History of Bush's War Cabinet. New York: Penguin, 2004.
Maxwell, Kenneth. "The Other 9/11: The United States and Chile, 1973." Foreign Affairs 82 (2003):
147-151.
Miller, Nicola. Soviet Relations with Latin America, 1959-1987. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1989.
Mutchler, David. The Church as a Political Factor in Latin America: With Particular Reference to
Colombia and Chile. New York: Praeger, 1971.
Neruda, Matilde and Miguel Otero Silva, eds. Passions and Impressions [1978]. Trans. by Margaret
Sayers Peden. New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1983.
Neruda, Pablo. Canto General [1950]. Trans. by Jack Schmitt. Berkley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 2011.
Ninkovich, Frank. The Global Republic: America's Inadvertent Rise to World Power. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2014.
Nixon, Richard. "Asia after Viet Nam." Foreign Affairs 46 (1967): 111-125.
Nuenlist, Christian, Anna Locher, and Garret Martin, eds. Globalizing de Gaulle: International
Perspectives on French Foreign Policies, 1958-1969 [2010]. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield,
2011.
Nunn, Frederick. Chilean Politics, 1920-1931: The Honorable Mission of the Armed Forces.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1970.
________. The Military in Chilean History: Essays on Civil-Military Relations, 1810-1973.
Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976.
________. Yesterday's Soldiers: European Military Professionalism in South America, 1890-1940.
Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1983.
Partido Comunista de Chile. Ricardo Fonseca, combatiente ejemplar. Santiago de Chile: Talleres
Gráficos Lautaro, 1952.
221
Pastor, Robert. Exiting the Whirlpool: U.S. Foreign Policy toward Latin America and the Caribbean
[1992], Rev. ed. Boulder: Westview Press, 2001.
Pavilack, Jody. Mining for the Nation: The Politics of Chile's Coal Communities from the Popular
Front to the Cold War. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2011.
Pedemonte, Rafael. "La 'diplomacia cultural' soviética en Chile (1964-1973)." Bicentenario 9 (2010):
57-100.
Pérez, Cristián. "Salvador Allende, Apuntes sobre su dispositivo de seguridad: el grupo de amigos
personales (GAP)." Estudios Públicos 79 (2000): 31-81.
Pérez Rosales, Vicente. Ensayo sobre Chile [Hamburg: F.H. Nestler and Melle, 1857]. Introduction and
annotations by Rolando Mellafe Rojas. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones de la Universidad de
Chile, 1986.
Petras, Betty and James. "Ballots into Bullets: Epitaph for a Peaceful Revolution." Ramparts
(November 1973): 20, 26-28, 59-62.
Phythian, Mark. The Politics of British Arms Sales since 1964. Manchester: Manchester University
Press, 2000.
Pieper Mooney, Jadwiga. The Politics of Motherhood: Maternity and Women's Rights in TwentiethCentury Chile. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009.
Pilat, Joseph, ed. Atoms for Peace: A Future after Fifty Years? Washington, DC: Woodrow Wilson
Center Press, 2007.
Pike, Frederick. Chile and the United States, 1880-1962: The Emergence of Chile's Social Crisis and
the Challenge to United States Diplomacy. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1963.
Power, Margaret. Right-Wing Women in Chile: Feminine Power and the Struggle against Allende,
1964-1973. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2002.
Qureshi, Lubna. Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende: U.S. Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile [2009].
Lanham: Lexington, 2010.
Rabe, Stephen. Eisenhower and Latin America: The Foreign Policy of Anticommunism. Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1988.
________. The Killing Zone: The United States Wages Cold War in Latin America. New York: Oxford
University Press, 2012.
________. The Most Dangerous Area in the World: John F. Kennedy Confronts Communist Revolution
in Latin America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999.
Ramírez Necochea, Hernán. Balmaceda y la contrarrevolución de 1891. Santiago de Chile: Editorial
Universitaria, 1958.
________. Historia del imperialism en Chile. Santiago de Chile: Austral, 1960.
________. Origen y formación del Partido Comunista de Chile. Santiago de Chile: Editora Austral,
1965.
Regnault, Jean-Marc. "France's Search for Nuclear Test Sites, 1957-1963." Journal of Military History
67 (2003): 1223-1248.
Rogers, William and Kenneth Maxwell, "Fleeing the Chilean Coup: The Debate over U.S. Complicity."
222
Foreign Affairs 83 (2004): 160-165.
Ryan, Patrick. "Allende's Chile: 1000 Bungled Days." New York: American-Chilean Council, 1976.
San Francisco, Alejandro, ed. La Academia de Guerra del Ejército de Chile, 1886-2006: Ciento veinte
años de historia. Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Centro de Estudios Bicentenario, 2006.
________. La toma de la Universidad Católica de Chile (Agosto de 1967). Santiago de Chile: Globo
Editores, 2007.
Sater, William. Andean Tragedy: Fighting the War of the Pacific, 1879-1884. Lincoln: University of
Nebraska Press, 2007.
Schoultz, Lars. Beneath the United States: A History of U.S. Policy toward Latin America. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 1998.
Scott, James, ed. The International Conferences of American States, 1889-1928. New York: Oxford
University Press, 1931.
Sigmund, Paul. The Ideologies of the Developing Nations [1963], 2d rev. ed. New York: Praeger, 1972.
________. Multinationals in Latin America: The Politics of Nationalization. Madison: University of
Wisconsin Press, 1980.
________. The Overthrow of Allende and the Politics of Chile, 1964-1976. Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1977.
________. The United States and Democracy in Chile. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993.
Stern, Steve. "Feudalism, Capitalism, and the World-System in the Perspective of Latin America and
the Caribbean." American Historical Review 93 (1988): 829-897.
Streeter, Stephen. "Interpreting the 1954 U.S. Intervention in Guatemala: Realist, Revisionist, and
Postrevisionist Perspectives." The History Teacher 34 (2000): 61-74.
Suri, Jeremi. Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente [2003]. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press, 2005.
Taffet, Jeffrey. Foreign Aid as Foreign Policy: The Alliance for Progress in Latin America. New York:
Routledge, 2007.
Thompson, Nicholas. The Hawk and the Dove: Paul Nitze, George Kennan, and the History of the
Cold War. New York: Henry Holt and Company/Picador, 2009.
Ulianova, Olga. "Corvalán for Bukovsky: A Real Exchange of Prisoners during an Imaginary War: The
Chilean Dictatorship, the Soviet Union, and U.S. Mediation, 1973-1976." Cold War History 14
(2014): 315-336.
________. "La Unidad Popular y el golpe militar en Chile: Percepciones y analisis sociéticos."
Estudios Públicos 79 (2000): 83-171.
Ulianova, Olga and Eugenia Fediakova. "Algunos aspectos de la ayuda finaciera del Partido Comunista
del URSS al comunismo chileno durante la guerra fría." Esutdios Públicos 72 (1998): 113-130.
Ulianova, Olga and Alfredo Riquelme Segovia, eds. Chile en los archivos soviéticos, 1922-1991 I:
Komintern y Chile, 1922-1931. Santiago de Chile: Dirección de Bibliotecas, Archivos y
Museos/LOM Ediciones, 2005.
223
________. Chile en los archivos soviéticos, 1922-1991 II: Komintern en Chile, 1931-1935: Crisis e
ilusión revolucionaria. Santiago de Chile: Dirección de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos/LOM
Ediciones, 2009.
Uribe, Armando. The Black Book of American Intervention in Chile [1974]. Trans. by Jonathan Casart.
Boston: Beacon, 1975.
Varas, Augusto, compilador. El partido comunista en Chile: Estudio multidisciplinario. Santiago de
Chile: Centro de Estudios Sociales/FLACSO, 1988.
Varas, Florencia. Conversaciones con Viaux. Santiago de Chile: Impresiones EIRE, 1972.
Verdugo, Patricia. Allende: Cómo la Casa Blanca provocó su muerte. Santiago de Chile: Catalonia,
2003.
Vicuña Mackenna, Benjamín. D. Diego Portales [1863]. 3d ed. Santiago de Chile: Editorial del
Pacífico, 1974.
Wallerstein, Immanuel. The Modern World-System, 3 vols. [1974-1989]. Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 2011.
Westad, Odd Arne. The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times
[2005]. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
Williams, William Appleman. The Tragedy of American Diplomacy [1959], 50th anniversary ed. New
York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2009.
Wright, Thomas. Latin America in the Era of the Cuban Revolution [1991], Rev. ed. Westport: Praeger,
2001.
Wyden, Peter. Bay of Pigs: The Untold Story. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979.
X [George Kennan]. "The Sources of Soviet Conduct." Foreign Affairs 25 (1947): 566-582.
Young, John. The Labour Governments, 1964-1970 II: International Policy. Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2003.
Zubok, Vladislav. A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War from Stalin to Gorbachev.
Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.
224