Inspired by all the people who hate the US complaining about remembering the September 11th attacks and claiming that the US did much worse, blaming the CIA for the 1973 coup against Allende:
"I would have wished that my final impressions could convey a more complete and vivid impression of this country and its friendly people, a country so often referred to as the "English of Latin America." Nonetheless, Chile today is completely absorbed in a process of internal struggle over politics and economics. Politics invades every aspect of its life-the totality of its thought, its literature, its art, absolutely everything.... Commitment on one hand, emigration or complete passivity on the other; there seem to be no other choices. If Chile has some importance in the world, it is because the struggle here between Marxist and anti-Marxist forces, as well as the fight within individual Marxist groups, is being carried out outside the Iron Curtain rather than behind it.
- British Ambassador D. H. T. Hildyard to Foreign Office (Public Record Office, 1973)
This perceptive account, drafted by the British ambassador to Chile following the midterm parliamentary elections of March 1973, represents an alternative to the version that the crisis and collapse of the Allende regime was manipulated from Washington. This latter version is the one that has persisted since the 1970s, both in the mass media and in political discourse and debate throughout the world. This is not the conclusion normally reached by academic studies of different ideological persuasions, but it certainly dominates public opinion in many parts of the world and, indeed, much of Chile itself. A case in point is Chilean television's treatment of the thirtieth anniversary of the coup of September 11, 1973. All of the channels sent the same subliminal (or not so-subliminal) message: The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) (or, more generically, the United States) played the principal role in the fall of the Popular Unity government.
Anti-imperialism or anti-Americanism has been a powerful force in Latin American politics and in the Latin American vision of the world. In Chile, all of the political forces and conceptions throughout the twentieth century have been either pro- or anti-American...
Anti-imperialism has been the favored banner of the Latin American political class, propped up, as it were, by the belief that the United States is the principal cause of all of our difficulties and troubles. The United States is, and remains, the whipping boy of all anti-establishment forces in the region, although the phenomenon of anti Americanism is global and has been for much of the past century... The assumption is that whatever is wrong can be traced to some evil force located in some North American city...
Conspiracy theories arise from the inexorable need that all human beings have to explain both simple and complex processes...
There is something infantile about the urge to trace a direct line from one event to another without providing a moral lesson while the conspiracist is at it. If the world were as the conspiracist sees it, it is difficult to understand how any country or political regime can ever resist the desires of the United States. If it was possible to bring down the government of Salvador Allende by the covert expenditure of $6.5 million dollars-in a country where the gross domestic product (GDP) at the time was $10 billion dollars-how is it that similar actions have not occurred in other parts of the world? How can we explain the enormous leverage purchased in Chile by such a relatively small amount of money? Was it the ingenuousness and democratic spirit of the leaders of Popular Unity? Or the limitless evil of the opposition? Or something else yet undiscovered?...
Peter Kornbluh is well known in Chile among academic specialists and in the nongovernmental organizations dedicated to human rights. Over fifteen years, he created the National Security Archive in Washington, whose purpose is to reveal the dark side of American foreign policy over the past few decades. Although President Richard Nixon is the principal villain, other American authorities who preceded and followed him also are placed in the dock of the accused. Consequently and with the best will in the world, it is simply impossible to regard Kornbluh as a serious academic. His entire career-as well as this book reveals him to be a political militant driven by strong emotions and by a compulsive need to censure and denounce the foreign policy of the United States as irremediably immoral.
In this sense, Kornbluh belongs to a venerable tradition of American radicalism and self-criticism, which has driven an entire school of historical revisionism since the 1950s. The subject of critique inevitably is the "anti-Communist consensus" and "containment." The anticommunist liberalism that dominated a broad sector of the Democratic Party establishment during those years has gradually evaporated since then, precipitated by the war in Vietnam. Since the late 1960s, foreign policy has been the cornerstone in a liberal critique of American society. Kornbluh is a typical product of this process, part of a generation that sees only faults in U.S. foreign policy since 1945.
Leafing through the pages of this voluminous book, readers are immediately struck by the fact that Kornbluh has not taken the slight est effort to evaluate the existing literature on the subject. For Kornbluh, nothing written about Chile, and particularly on U.S. policy toward that country, has any value whatsoever. His subject apparently has no intellectual his tory, no historiography. He writes his book almost as if the documentation on which it is based was released just yesterday (rather than, in many cases, decades ago), a kind of smoking gun that he brandishes to expose the perfidy of Washington.
Curiously enough, Kornbluh's book actually does not put forth an explicit argument. From the first page to the last, he prefers to "let the sources speak." In fact, he organizes those sources with one purpose in mind and one only--namely, to show that everything that happened in Chile was the work of Nixon and Kissinger, using the CIA as their chosen instrument...
Patricia Verdugo is a very different kind of writer. She is a successful journalist whose life took a drastic turn when her father was killed by Pinochet's security forces in 1975...
The two books have one other thing in com mon. They are wholly U.S.-centric in their notion of world events. Everything is controlled and determined in and from Washington. Noth ing else is worth discussing, except for the occasional revolt against the U.S.-dominated world system...
This deficiency is even more marked in Kornbluh, for whom-presumably without wishing to say so, and perhaps even without being fully aware of his intentions Chileans can be nothing more than marionettes whose strings are pulled by Washington. If this was the case, one wonders how Allende could have been elected in the first place. Both authors also make much of the initial support that the Nixon administration granted to the military government, but neither seems aware of the conflicts between Pinochet and Washing ton after 1977, particularly during the Carter administration. In fact, from about 1975, the United States began to regard General Pinochet as a liability, although it found itself basically powerless to do much about him. This basic contradiction dominated the entire history of the relationship until the end of the regime in 1989 and constitutes a separate and fascinating chapter rich in irony for some potential histor ian. To be sure, to have touched on such incon venient subjects would have destroyed the coherence of the arguments put forward in these two books and deprived their stories of the black/white dichotomy that is their essential characteristic. We probably should not be surprised at the way the authors-particularly Kornbluh represent the United States as virtually omnipotent...
I choose to focus on two aspects: the documents concerning the efforts of Washington to prevent the accession of Salvador Allende to the presidency and those that reveal the support given by the United States to opponents of his Popular Unity government (1970-73). Are these documents as sensational as their publishers' publicity handouts claim?...
Unfortunately, everything cited in these books, as well as in the thousands of documents declassified over the past ten years, do not add any important new twist to the story-that is, anything more than what was already known. We refer here to the report of the Church Commission of the U.S. Senate (1975) and the documents relating to the role of the International Telephone and Telegraph Company in promoting a coup to prevent the constitutional accession to power of Salvador Allende; the documents were published in 1972 by American newspaper columnist Jack Anderson and the Chilean government itself. At issue are roughly two thousand pages of documents. I dare say that few people in Chile (perhaps nobody) and hardly more than a dozen people in the United States have, in all likelihood, read these materials since they were made available in 1975...
During the period between the election of September 4, 1970, and the inauguration of Salvador Allende on November 3, 1970, it is possible to infer that the White House continued its plan to promote a coup after October 15. The U.S. government and, on repeated occasions, Henry Kissinger himself, have insisted that all efforts to block Allende's accession to the presidency came to an end after that date...
Larger U.S. policy toward Chile dating back to at least 1962. The policy's purpose was to prevent the advent of a Marxist government in Chile... The Christian Democratic Party also received assistance from its European counterparts. On the other hand, as the work of Olga Uliinova has shown, the USSR began to finance the local communist party from at least the mid-1950s. By the second half of the 1960s, Castro's Cuba was training young Chileans, ardent partisans of armed revolution, to take advantage of such situations as might arise in their country at some unspecified date...
The points at issue here are what American involvement means and what importance we should assign to it. We believe that in the first period-during the time of Track I and Track II, September-October 1970-American involvement was a marginal factor in the course of events. Later, in contrast, the role of financing the opposition was significantly greater, although not decisive-far from it. To be sure, this last assertion is open to debate. What can not be accepted is the caricaturization of the U.S. role simply on the basis of documents such as these.
One might ask whether the economic assistance offered by the Americans and the Soviets to "their" Chileans was moral or immoral. I am afraid there is no clear answer to that question. In a political system in which the rules of the game are based on widely accepted legitimacy, requesting foreign aid might be regarded as treason to one's country, to democracy, and to the tactic political contract pre-established among citizens. But if politics becomes a war without quarter in which, at a given moment, one's adversary is deprived of the possibility of defending his own rights and interests, is it not legitimate for the latter to appeal to foreign assistance? This was the view of opponents of Popular Unity between 1970 and 1973; after September 11, it was also the view of Allende's supporters after his overthrow, many of whom were subject to a conflict in the most literal sense of the word. Let us not forget, how ever, that Popular Unity was not an advocate of conventional democracy as we had known it in Chile; rather, it favored a different kind of legitimacy, one that would have kicked down the traces of the established democratic order. Indeed, the opposition to Allende was not far off the mark in objecting to the government's cynical use of "constitutionality" to cover its evidently revolutionary (and extraconstitutional or even anticonstitutional) objectives...
The efforts to organize a military coup, which the Americans also supported, were prepared in a slipshod way... The whole business bears the mark of improvisation; even CIA documents suggest uncertainty as to how well the efforts were coordinated...
Without question some groups were in touch with some functionaries of the U.S. embassy in Santiago who actually were intelligence agents disguised as diplomats. It is interesting to note that the coup plotters-principally General Camilo Valenzuela, head of the Santiago military district, and retired General Roberto Viaux-were anxious to make sure that they had U.S. support, even to the extent of demanding financial security in case things turned out badly.
But neither Valenzuela nor Viaux was a creature of the CIA or anything closely resembling such. The agency had been ordered by Washington to create "chaos" but could do nothing except testify to the shock in which many Chileans found themselves. According to their own reports, the agents felt powerless to do anything. In Kornbluh's book, it is difficult to locate the document to which he refers-without any clear reference to the source-as evidence of Frei's supposed deep complicity in the coup plots (39). When American money began to arrive in Chile at the end of September 1970, the U.S. approach finally had been decided. A typical report from the CIA agents on the ground for that period reads:
There now exists the rumor of a possible coup which requires the approval of Frei to take the following steps: (1) resignation of the entire cabinet (2) creation of a new cabinet made up wholly of military figures (3) appointment by Frei of an interim president (4) Frei's departure from the country. (qtd. in Kornbluh 2003, 142)
The speculative nature of the message is highly typical. One is stunned to learn that the White House could pin its concrete hopes on such vague speculations. The truth is that the CIA agents in Chile often were as inclined to repeat rumors and send information pockmarked with factual errors as they were to be well informed on the situation.
New information-not cited by these authors-shows how Ambassador Korry him self was sick and tired of pursuing a policy based on wishful thinking and cafe gossip (informacidn pintoresca). On October 6, he sent a cable to Washington saying, "[W]e should stop relying on all these reports and be prepared to be completely surprised by any action taken by the armed forces. . . . For this reason, I am giving instructions [to the CIA in Chile] to cease and desist from normal intelligence gathering concerning possible military movements."...
Their lack of intellectual perspicacity, or perhaps simply their need to adhere strictly to their monocausal view of history, led both Kornbluh and Verdugo to miss entirely the sense of ironic desperation that gripped the CIA agents in Santiago, who concluded that the situation could end badly for everybody...
This is, in fact, an extraordinary document. Our authors cite it only partially; its ironic tone escapes them entirely. The CIA agents in Chile are in despair because--wonder of wonders they cannot control events. The report of the Church Commission leads to much the same conclusion. The history of these sixty days is an example of American impotence, at least to the extent that it reveals Washington's inability to manipulate events on the ground...
In a report dated March 14, 1973, the United States said:
We should make it clear that we will not support any attempt at a coup unless it is evident that it enjoys the support of the greater part of the armed forces and of the democratic political parties, including the Christian Democrats. (Kornbluh 2003, 117)
Here we can see the American strategy. The United States had discarded the useless and possibly counterproductive enterprise of trying to promote a coup, as in September and October 1970...
One way of tying up the loose ends of all of these events is to take refuge in the myth that "the CIA did it all." A simple reading of the materials in these two books renders that task impossible. It represents another myth that subordinates history to present-day political necessities and pushes us into a fatalistic acceptance of supposed historic forces. The history of contemporary Chile was the result of choices made by Chilean actors, as indeed it remains today"
--- Review: The Persistence of a Myth: Chile in the Eye of the Cold War Hurricane: Books under Review / JOAQUÍN FERMANDOIS and Mark Falcoff
