Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War

Introduction

INTRODUCTION On 5 November 1970, thousands of people crammed into Chile’s national stadium to mark the beginning of Salvador Allende’s presidency and what was being heralded as the birth of a new revolutionary road to socialism. For some, Allende’s inauguration two days earlier had been a cause for mass celebration. Along the length of Santiago’s principal avenue, musicians , poets, dancers, and actors had performed on twelve open-air stages specially erected for the occasion, and crowds had partied into the evening . Now, on a sunny spring afternoon, along with foreign journalists and invited dignitaries from around the world, they flocked to hear the president’s first major speech. As Allende rose to the podium to deliver a message of national emancipation and rebirth, he looked out on a sea of flags in optimistic anticipation of what was to come. He then proclaimed that Chile was ready to shape its own destiny.1 The way foreigners in the audience interpreted his speech depended largely on where they came from and what they believed in. Delegates from Havana, Brasilia, and Washington respectively watched in jubilation, horror, and disdain—uncertain what the future held but conscious that Allende’s inauguration had significantly changed the way it would unfold. Indeed, right there, the seeds of what would develop into a new phase of a multisided inter-American Cold War battle were already firmly in place. And although the roots of this struggle lay in previous decades, its outcome would now be decided in a bitter contest over the course of the next three years. What follows is the story of those years, the people who lived through them, and the international environment they encountered. On one level, this is a history of Chilean foreign relations during the country’s shortlived revolutionary process that ended with a brutal right-wing military coup d’état and Allende’s death on 11 September 1973. Yet, it is also an examination of Chile’s place within what I call the inter-American Cold War. Rather than a bipolar superpower struggle projected onto a Latin 2 INTRODUCTION American theater from outside, this inter-American Cold War was a unique and multisided contest between regional proponents of communism and capitalism, albeit in various forms. With the Soviet Union reluctant to get more involved, it was primarily people across the Americas that fought it and, although global developments often interacted with regional concerns and vice versa, its causes were also predominantly inter-American. However, much remains to be understood about it, especially in the period after the Cuban revolution triumphed in 1959. From this year forward, the Cold War in the Americas changed, being definitively shaped thereafter by the clash between Havana and Washington as the polar opposites of revolution and reaction on the continent. An array of other Latin Americans were also involved, some of whom shared Washington’s or Havana’s views and were inspired by them, others who surpassed even their ardent zeal for combating each other, and far too many others who were caught up in the middle. In the early 1970s, for example, Brasilia’s role as a staunch anticommunist actor in the inter-American system was a particularly decisive dimension to this conflict, as were the tens of thousands who lost their lives in the dirty wars that engulfed the Southern Cone toward the end of that decade. But until now the story of how all these different groups interacted with each other has not been fully told. Although it is beyond the scope of this book to examine the inter-American Cold War in its entirety, what follows is one vital chapter of it: the Chilean chapter in the early 1970s. Sandwiched between the better-known histories of Ernesto “Che” Guevara’s death in Bolivia and Cuba’s intervention in Angola, or between the Alliance for Progress and Operation Condor, the Allende years certainly deserve more attention as a moment of profound transition in inter-American affairs. For one, Allende’s decision to shatter the Organization of American States’ isolation of Cuba by reestablishing diplomatic relations with the island in November 1970, together with the Cubans’ own shifting approach to regional affairs in the early 1970s, makes this an interesting episode in the history of Cuba’s relationship with the Americas—and, by extension, an important period for those of us trying to incorporate Havana’s side of the story into an international history of inter-American affairs. As it...