Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War by Tanya Harmer (review)

Tanya Harmer’s international history of Salvador Allende’s Chile is a welcome addition to Cold War historiography on conflict in the global south. She presents the strategy for a peaceful path to socialism (La Vía Chilena al Socialismo) and its overthrow in the September 11, 1973 coup as one chapter in a larger story of the Inter-American Cold War. Her choice of terminology—Inter-American Cold War— signals an effort to downplay superpower bipolarity in favor of understanding how regional actors and interests shaped this multi-sited conflict. Harmer foregrounds the role of external actors within Chile’s revolutionary process—principally Cuba and the United States, and to a lesser extent Brazil—and the impact that Allende’s election and subsequent overthrow had beyond Chile’s borders.

Harmer organizes the book chronologically, opening with the Inter-American system on the eve of Allende’s victory in September 1970, turning to Cuban and US reactions, and then tracing Chile’s evolving foreign policy. As the book moves through the thousand tumultuous days of Allende’s presidency, Harmer balances how events within Chile influenced policy making in the region and how the Inter-American Cold War played out within Chile. Ultimately, Harmer concludes that while Chile opened the 1970s as a beacon of hope for socialist change, the Allende years marked a turning point in the consolidation of counter-revolutionary violence throughout the region.

In the vein of new Cold War history, Harmer used newly available archival sources, including the Chilean Foreign Ministry Archives. However, limited access to key Chilean and Cuban archives—most Allende era documents were burned before and after the 1973 coup and Havanás remain closed to the public—meant that Harmer relied heavily on US-based sources. In light of this, oral history interviews provided critical information, particularly for the Cuban side of the story. Of the thirty interviews Harmer conducted with "key protagonists," the majority came from Cubans stationed in Chile and Chileans close to President Allende (278). Particularly compelling is the untold story of the Cuban embassy staff′s pre-coup preparations and their response to the subsequent siege by the Chilean Armed Forces.

Methodologically, Harmer treats oral history as a legitimate source for writing top-down political history, and she made every effort to cross check interview information for accuracy. In a brief appended essay on sources and methodology, Harmer recognizes that "oral history sources … are by no means 100 percent accurate or the last word on Cuban involvement in Chile," yet "whatever their limitations, these sources are also the first significant contribution to understanding the rise and fall of Allende′s Chile from Cuban perspectives" (280). However, some oral historians may be troubled by the particular way she uses oral sources within her analysis. Allende’s Chile is not a told-in-their-own-words narrative either from Chilean, Cuban, or American officials′ perspectives, let alone an exploration of how everyday Chilean citizens lived those years. In one of the longer passages drawn from oral sources, Harmer opens chapter 1, titled "Ideals," with a personalized recollection:

"It is hard to imagine," a Chilean Socialist Party militant mused as he looked back on the late 1960s more than forty years later. Back then, when you walked into any bookshop, there were lots of Marxist publications, and news of Latin American guerrilla struggles reached Chile all the time. Especially toward the end of the decade, Che Guevara′s ideas and Régis Debray′s books were also endlessly discussed within Chile′s different left-wing parties, and everyone was engaged in what seemed like a permanent ideological debate (20).

As Harmer goes on to unpack the internal and external factors that contributed to Chile′s ideological ferment, she offers only small quotes from interviews and more often elects to paraphrase them, as in the above passage, in which "It is hard to imagine" is the only direct...