Allende’s Chile and the Inter-American Cold War

5 Battle Lines: Détente Unmasked, January–October 1972

5 BATTLE LINES Détente Unmasked, January–October 1972 A year after Allende’s presidency began, he spoke enthusiastically about signs that the world was undergoing some sort of profound transformation . “The American empire is showing signs of crisis,” he proclaimed. “The dollar has become nonconvertible. Apparently, the definitive victory of the Vietnamese people is drawing near.” More important, “The countries of Latin America [were] speaking the same language and using the same words to defend their rights.”1 Yet the transformative trends in international affairs in the early 1970s were obviously far more complicated than Allende suggested. In many ways, the world was changing dramatically but not necessarily in the manner in which he implied. In Latin America, Allende’s notion of “one” voice that seemingly excluded Brazil and Bolivia and unsatisfactorily lumped the immensely different economic and political nations of Chile, Peru, Colombia, Argentina, and Cuba together was a discordant one at best. President Médici had noted Brazil’s own peculiar position in Latin America when he met Nixon in Washington. Suggesting that Brazil and the United States were in the same boat when it came to being non-Spanish speakers in the Americas, he admitted that he had problems “dealing with and understanding the Spanish-American mentality.”2 Beyond questions of unity and language, it was also not just the United States that was in crisis. In 1970, Fidel Castro had had to acknowledge publicly that the pace of socialist revolution in Cuba would be slower than first thought, and Havana’s leaders had henceforth been undergoing a decisive transition toward a Soviet-style institutional and economic reform as a means of shoring up past failures. Meanwhile, the Soviet Union’s own economic strains led it to eagerly embrace superpower détente. Indeed, despite Washington’s financial difficulties and the United States’ role in Vietnam, Moscow was actually looking to improve trade with the West as a viable solution for its own shortages. 150 BATTLE LINES So where did Chile’s revolutionary process fit within this picture? Could it avoid ideological differences from determining U.S.-Chilean relations? Did détente and global economic upheavals in the early 1970s offer Santiago the opportunity that Allende and many of his closest foreign policy advisers hoped? The short answer to these latter two questions is no. It was in 1972—the very year that Nixon visited Moscow and Beijing—that the Chileans came to realize this and to acknowledge that détente actually closed doors instead of opening them. Pivotally, the Soviet Union was increasingly reluctant to let a Latin American revolutionary process spoil its new understanding with the United States, especially given indications of the UP’s growing economic and political difficulties at home. And where the United States was concerned, there remained little chance of any meaningful compromise with the Chileans or the Cubans. Indeed, on his return from Beijing, Nixon sent Secretary of the Treasury John Connally to Latin America for private “post-summit consultations” with six of the region’s presidents in which he explicitly delivered the message that détente with Beijing and Moscow would not extend to Havana.3 When it came to publicly affirming that Latin America was an exception to the new rules of the game, however, Washington officials appeared more reticent. While the United States’ ambassador to the OAS, Joseph Jova, succinctly explained that “Cuba is not China,” State Department officials obfuscated when answering broader questions about the double standards Nixon was applying to Mao or Brezhnev and Castro. According to the State Department ’s Robert Hurwitch, “consistency” was “a simplistic basis for addressing this complex question.”4 Of course, a more accurate answer would have been to admit that beyond superpower relations and Nixon’s opening to China, the inter-American Cold War—and the ideological battle at the heart of it—was still very much alive. As Allende’s ambassador in Beijing noted at the beginning of the year, détente “arbitrarily de-ideologized” the language of international politics but did not fundamentally change the substance of world affairs.5 Although détente would take years to unravel at a superpower level, its failures as a framework for solving a global ideological struggle between communism and capitalism—or even pausing it—were also already unmasked in Latin America when Nixon was touching down in China. As Letelier would acknowledge in mid-1972, the so-called “end of the Cold War” that he himself had championed only a...