Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (13 page)

Having pulled the administration together to formulate policy toward Chile, Kissinger then targeted Nixon, who was distracted by the Republican Party’s congressional election campaign in late October and early November. Arguing that Chile could have severe domestic political consequences by being “the worst failure of our administration—Our Cuba by 1972,” Kissinger managed to get Nixon’s attention and to delay the forthcoming NSC meeting scheduled for 5 November so that he could ensure the president was fully briefed.
⁷⁷
It was a shrewd move, and it gave him an extra twenty-four hours to make his case. Indeed, Nixon was highly receptive to arguments regarding Chile’s potential impact on his domestic political standing, especially as he believed the Cuban revolution had cost him the 1960 presidential election. Having got the president’s ear in this way, Kissinger then outlined the international consequences of Chilean events in a memorandum to the president designed to prepare him for the forthcoming NSC meeting. As he stressed, Allende’s victory via the ballot box made Chile “more dangerous” than Castro’s Cuba because it posed an “insidious” model that Latin American, Italian, or French communists could follow.
⁷⁸

Pivotally, Kissinger also forwarded Nixon a copy of a memorandum he had received from General Vernon Walters, “Future Courses in Latin America,” which, in Kissinger’s words, was “directly related to the Chile problem.”
⁷⁹
Although Walters was the U.S. defense attaché in Paris, he was considered something of an expert on Latin American affairs and had advised Kissinger on regional developments during the transition period between Nixon’s election and his inauguration.
⁸⁰
He also had a close, personal relationship with the president, having accompanied Nixon on his disastrous vice presidential visit to Latin America in 1958 and his presidential tour of Europe in September and October 1970. In between, in 1964, he had played a key role in the Brazilian military’s coup plotting and had been an adviser on Latin America to successive U.S. presidents. There is also strong evidence to suggest that Walters visited Rio de Janeiro, Buenos Aires, Santiago, and Lima in late October around the very time of Schneider’s murder, although the details of this particular mission are not known.
⁸¹

What is clear is that Walters’s memorandum to Kissinger was a report on his trip and the conclusions that he had reached on the situation in
the Southern Cone. In it, Walters warned Kissinger that Latin America’s situation was “deteriorating steadily” and that the Alliance for Progress’s “coddling of leftists” had conclusively failed in Chile. It was also Walters who described the United States as being “engaged in a mortal struggle to determine the shape of the future of the world” in which there was “no acceptable alternative to holding Latin America.” As he saw it, the region’s “resources, the social and economic problems of its population, its proximity to the U.S.” all made it “a priority target” for Washington’s Cold War enemies.
⁸²
Nixon wholeheartedly and enthusiastically agreed with Walters’s conclusions: “K,” he scribbled to Kissinger, “read the Walters memo again + see that it is implemented in
every
respect.”
⁸³

To a large degree, Allende’s election was therefore a watershed that compelled the White House to pay attention to Latin America and to seize control of U.S. policies there. Like Castro, the Nixon administration had been unprepared for Allende’s election, but unlike the Cubans, Washington pursued immediate, risky, long-shot operations in Chile before stopping to evaluate the significance of Chilean events. When the Nixon administration finally paused to discuss the consequences of an Allende presidency, decision makers from the State Department to the Pentagon and from the White House to the CIA agreed that “saving” Chile and U.S. influence in Latin America were two sides of the same coin. Intragovernmental squabbles about how and what to do about Allende in no way detracted from the sense that the United States had just suffered a profound regional defeat, and one that would have a significant impact on the global contest for influence and power. And although the White House’s conclusions were more apocalyptic than those of other branches of government, the
whole
administration broadly shared fears of the possible international significance of Allende’s election. Indeed, like the Cubans, U.S. policy makers now believed that La Vía Chilena’s potential success or failure could significantly alter Latin America’s destiny.

U.S. and Cuban approaches toward Chile’s new government were being rapidly refined when delegations from both countries touched down in Chile to attend Allende’s inauguration. Primarily, both Havana and Washington continued to monitor how their Chilean policies were tailored to suit international, domestic, and Chilean audiences and feared that their ultimate objectives could succeed only if they were perceived as acting
“correctly.” As such, leaders in both capitals opted for double-sided public and private strategies. Allende and Cuban representatives were therefore simultaneously discussing how to facilitate Cuban assistance to Allende’s bodyguard even as they were laying the groundwork for reestablishing more formal diplomatic ties. Meanwhile, back in Washington, members of the Nixon administration were arguing over the difference between packaging and substance while feigning a “correct” response to the incoming government. The main difference of opinion in Washington lay between the State Department, which advocated covert and overt caution as a means of limiting Allende’s ability to rally support based on anti-Americanism, and Kissinger, who strongly urged Nixon to prevent a “steady shift toward the
modus vivendi
approach.”
⁸⁴
But in essence the long-term policy goal was the same across all branches of government: to bring down Allende.

Although Fidel Castro had wanted to attend Allende’s inauguration in person, he stopped himself from going so as not to provoke Allende’s enemies. Instead, Cuba was well represented by a high-level delegation led by Deputy Prime Minister Carlos Rafael Rodríguez. It also officially included the three Cubans who had been clandestine in Chile for more than a month and Cuba’s future ambassador to Chile, Mario García Incháustegui, a former Cuban delegate to the UN and an old school friend of Castro’s.
⁸⁵

In spite of this high-level presence, Havana issued words of caution to the new Chilean government that reflected the general shift in the Cuban revolution’s domestic and foreign policies since 1968. Rodríguez, for example, advised the Chileans not to be impatient to meet people’s needs but rather to concentrate on acquiring the technical, political, and economic resources to be able to do so.
⁸⁶
And as one journalist for the Havana-based news agency Prensa Latina recalled, Cuban news agencies intentionally avoided classifying La Vía Chilena or Allende in ideological terms.
⁸⁷
Fidel Castro also privately advised Allende not to “ignite” continental revolution or be “too revolutionary.” As he had told Beatriz when she visited Havana in mid-September, instead of Allende receiving the blame for “all the conflict situations in Latin America,” he was happy to continue assuming responsibility.
⁸⁸
And he had urged Allende to wait (“not to worry if he had to wait six months, a year, or two”) before establishing formal ties with Cuba.
⁸⁹

However, the incoming Chilean administration did not wait. On 12 November 1970, Allende formally announced the reestablishment of diplomatic relations with Havana, using the Cuban delegation’s presence in Chile to finalize arrangements. The move was hardly surprising, given
Allende’s election promises and national support for such a move. But by giving Havana its first diplomatic opening in Latin America since 1964, it was a major turning point. After the reestablishment of relations was announced, the three Cuban officials who had been so constrained previously also had a legitimate reason to be in Chile and to move around freely. For the time being, Luis Fernández Oña was named as Havana’s chargé d’affaires, and decades later he would remember his amazement when other diplomatic missions in Santiago began sending him flowers and congratulatory messages. However, he also found himself in a tricky position, having never been trained as a diplomat or knowing fully what one did.
⁹⁰

Oña’s transition from years of work as a covert agent to accredited chargé d’affaires was far from unique. To the contrary, the Cuban officials who began arriving in Santiago after November 1970 and handling the nuts and bolts of different party-to-party and governmental strands of the new Cuban-Chilean relationship were predominantly intelligence officers or members of the Tropas Especiales. After all, as a result of OAS sanctions imposed in 1964, Cuba had had little call for diplomats in Latin America. At the party-to-party level, eight or nine intelligence officers from DGLN including Oña and Juan Carretero, who had played a key role in coordinating Che Guevara’s Bolivian campaign, therefore took up posts as political counselors at the Cuban embassy in Santiago and began handling Cuba’s relationships with Chilean left-wing leaders.
⁹¹
Ulises Estrada, the DGLN’s desk officer for Chile and Che Guevara’s companion in Tanzania and Prague prior to his Bolivia venture, also traveled to Santiago twice a month to oversee operations and deliver or collect sensitive communications. Meanwhile, at the governmental level, Foreign Minister Raúl Roa, Cuba’s Ministry for External Trade, Ambassador García Incháustegui, and Cultural Attaché Lisandro Otero were responsible for rapidly developing commercial, scientific, technological, and cultural exchanges between both countries at a state level.
⁹²
And, of course, above them, Allende, Castro, and Piñeiro oversaw all strands of this new relationship.

As the Chilean-Cuban relationship leaped into a new era, the United States’ representatives at Allende’s inauguration waited in the wings. The United States had sent a low-key delegation to Allende’s inauguration headed by Assistant Secretary Charles Meyer. As Nixon, Kissinger, and Rogers had calculated, by sending Meyer with an oral message of congratulations as opposed to a formal written letter, Washington could be as “cool as possible and still polite.”
⁹³
And Allende appears to have been
encouraged by the assistant secretary’s visit. When the new president met Meyer on 4 November, the latter promised to convey his impressions of the president’s “sincerity” and “cordiality” to Nixon when he returned to the United States. Afterward, one Chilean diplomat present at the meeting also observed that Meyer had “acquired a far more rational and well informed impression” of Chile than other U.S. officials he had spoken to.
⁹⁴

However, this was an optimistic reading of the situation. On his return to Washington, Meyer did not stand up for Allende as the Chileans had hoped, but instead told the 40 Committee that “very few Chileans accurately evaluate the Allende threat to Chile—they believe the ‘Chilean character’ will somehow miraculously preclude a Marxist take-over of the country.”
⁹⁵
Moreover, by the time Meyer returned on 6 November, the decision had already been made not to leave the situation to chance. As Kissinger warned Nixon during the twenty-four hours he had been given to make his case to the president, the “dangers of doing nothing” were bigger than the risks of doing “something.” It is true that Kissinger seems to have appreciated certain parameters for action. “We clearly do
not
have the capacity to engineer his overthrow ourselves in the present circumstances,” he gracefully acknowledged. However, Kissinger also raised the possibility of examining feasible actions that the United States could take “to intensify Allende’s problems so that at a minimum he may fail or be forced to limit his aims, and at a maximum might create conditions in which a collapse or overthrow may be feasible.”
⁹⁶
As Kissinger informed Nixon, it was “a question of priorities and nuance” between those who wanted to limit the damage Allende’s election had caused and those who wished to “prevent” it altogether.
⁹⁷

The State Department was the main advocate of “damage limitation” through flexible engagement and suggested seizing on Allende’s future challenges when they arose as opposed to creating them directly. In this respect, its recommendations closely reflected U.S. diplomatic consultations with Latin American leaders between September and November. As the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research noted, although the region was clearly divided on the subject of Allende’s likely alignment with Moscow and export of revolution, the majority’s view was that obvious U.S. intervention would encourage such a trend. Meanwhile, the Peruvian Foreign Ministry counseled “patience and restraint,” Venezuelan president Rafael Caldera Rodríguez warned Washington to be “careful,” and Mexico’s foreign minister, Antonio Carrillo Flores, urged a “posture of courage, serenity and confidence.” Overall, then, the State
Department’s analysts concluded that U.S. “over-reaction” could “push Chile away from the inter-American system,” as it had done in the case of Castro’s Cuba.
⁹⁸
Three days before the NSC meeting on Chile, the State Department’s Latin American Bureau had therefore advised Secretary Rogers that the United States’ approach to a democratically elected president in a continent where U.S. hegemony was a key concern could “incur even more serious losses” than Allende’s victory represented.
⁹⁹
Subsequently, at the NSC meeting, Rogers advocated “bringing him [Allende] down … without being counterproductive.”
¹⁰⁰