Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War

Conclusion

CONCLUSION A concerned scholar once asked me whether my researching the details of Cuba’s role in Chile meant that I thought the United States was justified in destabilizing Chilean democracy. Having spent decades uncovering the many wrongs of U.S. interventionism in the Third World, he wanted to know whether by writing about Cuban arms transfers and military training of the Left I was condoning U.S. covert operations, those who celebrated the bombing of La Moneda, and the violent repression in the years that followed . This question, together with fears expressed by some who shared their memories with me for the purpose of this book, has troubled me over the past few years. My immediate answer was (and is) a resounding no. However, beyond this, I answered him by saying that history should never be regarded as a zero-sum game—that understanding the role that one side played in the complex inter-American Cold War should not preclude investigation of another. Or to put it another way, to catalog one lot of wrongdoing should not automatically lead to us into the trap of thinking that the other side was passive and blameless or vice versa. Not only is this not what history is about—the past is mostly far more nuanced than a simple battle between good and evil—but to omit the role of the Cubans and the Chileans they worked with is actually to do an injustice to what they believed in and what both groups fought for. Just as many argue that the story of U.S. intervention in Chile should be “exposed,” therefore, the Cubans’ and the Chileans’ story—their “agency,” as academics like to call it—deserves rescuing, inconvenient as some of the details of Havana’s role in particular might be for those on the Left who would prefer now to pretend it had never taken place. Not making an effort to tell all sides of the story and how they related to each other makes it difficult to fully understand what happened. And inexcusable as the crimes committed by those who seized power on 11 September 1973 might be, examining all possible dimensions of the past is part and parcel of what history is all about. As it turns out, there is enough responsibility for what happened in 256 CONCLUSION Chile to be spread around—about which more in a moment. First and foremost, however, my interest in writing the international history of Allende’s Chile was not to add one more voice to the historiography of blame. Since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union, the New Cold War History has thankfully moved away from traditional narratives that focused on cyclical debates about whose fault the conflict was and has moved on to examining questions of why and how it took place.1 While scholarship on the Cold War in Latin America has so far tended to lag behind historiography of the ideological struggles that dominated other parts of the world in the latter part of the twentieth century, it has also begun to move beyond the blame game to explore other dimensions of the struggle.2 This has a lot to do with growing generational distance from the events that took place, which means that historians approaching this topic now do not feel compelled to refight battles of the past. But it is also thanks to new sources that are available for scholars to consult, which allow for a multidimensional and comprehensive examination of the past. For my part, I wanted to use these new sources to get to the heart of what shaped the intense struggles that consumed Chile, the Southern Cone, and the inter-American system in the early 1970s. Primarily, I was interested in understanding who the main protagonists of that conflict were, what they believed in and fought over, how the ideological struggles they engaged in evolved, and with what consequences. Yet, equally, I was keen to explore them with a view to examining broader questions, such as what détente meant to parts of the global South, how Third World revolutionary states dealt with the outside world during the Cold War years, and the extent to which this coincided with North-South divides in international politics. Like so many other views from the Third World, the international history of Allende’s Chile that emerged is a rather depressing story. The Cold War in Latin America, as the...