Nixon, Kissinger and Allende: US Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile (review)

Few Latin American historical topics have been as much discussed as the fall of the socialist regime of Salvador Allende in Chile in 1973. Much has been published about the role of the United States in the end of Allende's government and about U.S. support for the subsequent dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. A large amount of this literature has sought to demonize the U.S. government, especially President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser, Henry Kissinger, despite a considerable body of evidence that paints a more complex picture. Lubna Z. Qureshi's Nixon, Kissinger, and Allende falls into this ideologically motivated bracket.

Qureshi's book offers no new revelations about the U.S. role in Chile and takes no line not already pursued in other works on the topic within the last five years by distinguished authors such as Christopher Hitchens, Peter Kornbluh, and Jonathan Haslam. This is surprising because the book, published in 2009, began as a PhD dissertation completed in 2006. Qureshi had access to these works; yet she all but disregards them. What is more surprising for research of this vintage is that it makes almost no use of the large Spanish-language literature about Allende's government and the subsequent military coup. Where are the works of Joaquin Fermandois and Joan Garcés and much other original research recently published by the Santiago think tank Centro de Estudios Publicos? Apparently unknown or unread. Qureshi lists the Chilean Foreign Relations Ministry Archive in her bibliography, but I could find only two citations from this archive, both of English-language documents (see ch. 4 n. 127). It seems a gross oversight for a book about affairs in Chile to make only token use of Spanish-language sources.

More surprising still is Qureshi's failure to deal with the arguments presented in Jonathan Haslam's The Nixon Administration and the Death of Allende's Chile (London: Verso, 2005) and my own work, Hostile Intent: U.S. Covert Operations in Chile (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2007). Both of these works are cited and dismissed in her introduction. With regard to Haslam, Qureshi writes, "[In his view] Allende was a man of poor political judgment who lacked any competence in economic matters. To make matters worse, Allende had a sentimental attachment to Moscow and its worldwide agenda. . . . In this book, I will challenge these affirmations" (p. xii). Yet at no point in the subsequent text does she actually engage and refute the evidence presented in those works with which she so pointedly disagrees. Haslam's work is at least cited sparsely throughout Nixon, Kissinger and Allende (my own not at all), but the particular arguments Haslam and I make are not dealt with. The introduction is the last time in the text that one reads Haslam's or my name or finds comments on any of our arguments. Qureshi fails to capitalize on openings presented by some newly available declassified documents to criticize my own work or that of Haslam (with whom I do not agree on many counts), apparently choosing instead to ignore these documents. If this is how she chooses to deal with the carefully weighted evidence and arguments of other academics, what reliability can we ascribe to the construction of her own assertions?

Qureshi's arguments throughout are highly American-centric, which is curious because U.S. exceptionalism seems to be the basis of her critique of the Nixon-Kissinger team's treatment of Chile. A strength of Haslam and of Spanish-language work such as the book by former Allende adviser Joan Garces, El estado y los problemas tácticos en el gobierno de Allende (The State and the Tactical Problems of Allende's Government), is that they sympathetically highlight how Allende's own weak leadership of his combative coalition led to increased polarization in Chilean politics. Qureshi dismisses Chilean political strife with a few sentences about the nationalization of...