Chile [Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer, 2006, Excerpts]

Chile has suffered through less anarchy, civil war, and repression than almost any other country in the hemisphere. In the 139 years after its first constitution took effect in 1833, its democratic order was interrupted only three times. Two-thirds of the way through the twentieth century, Chile was well on its way to modernity, with a high literacy rate, a relatively large middle class, and a strong civil society. The democratic approach to life and politics was as deeply woven into the national psyche as anywhere in Latin America.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, American business became interested in Chilean copper. In 1905 the Braden Copper Company, which would later be absorbed into Kennecott Copper Corporation, began mining at El Teniente, a mountain of ore set in the Andes about one hundred miles southeast of Santiago, Seven years later a forerunner of the Anaconda Copper Mining Company began operations at Chuquicamata, in the northern desert.

These two American-owned companies, Kennecott and Anaconda, grew into the twin titans of the world copper business. By mid-century, El Teniente was the largest underground copper mine in the world, and Chuquicamata was the largest open-pit mine.

The United States also intensified its long effort to cultivate friends in the Chilean military. Between 1950 and 1969, nearly four thousand Chilean officers were trained at American military bases, most at the U.S. Army School of the Americas in the Panama Canal Zone, where students learned a rigorous counterinsurgency doctrine that equated Marxism with treason.

In the early 1960s, the CIA concentrated its support on the center-left Christian Democratic Party, whose leader, Eduardo Frei, was an ebullient reformer in exactly the right mold to fit Washington’s fancy. His good looks and media-conscious style even led reporters and columnists to call him the “Chilean Kennedy.” The CIA covertly spent $3million, more than half the cost of his campaign, to ensure that Frei would win the 1964 election and defeat Allende. Frei won easily.

Allende

Allende was the classic bourgeois revolutionary. Although born into privilege, he was a passionate advocate of radical social change. His militancy grew from a combination of Marist gospel and the realities of life he saw around him. Despite Chile’s relatively prosperous position among South American nations, millions of its people lived in desperate poverty, and this genuinely moved Allende. Equally outrageous to him was the fact that foreign companies controlled his country’s all-important copper industry. He was also a third-generation Mason – not common for Marxists – and mixed easily with the Chilean elite.

In 1970, Allende ran for president as the candidate of a leftist coalition called Popular Unity. The challenge of keeping him out of power came to obsess the American embassy in Santiago. Early in 1970, Ambassador Korry and his CIA station chief, Henry Heckser, asked the Nixon administration for permission to embark on a covert “spoiling” campaign to block him. David Rockefeller, whose Chase Manhattan Bank had multibillion-dollar interests in South America, urged Nixon to press ahead with the spoiling campaign.

The Spoiling

Phillips, who had run the highly successful “Voice of Liberation” radio campaign during the 1954 coup against President Jacobo Arbenz of Guatemala, became co director of the CIA’s newly formed Chile Task Force to use three tools – economic warfare, political warfare, and psychological warfare – to create a coup climate and a pretext or flash point for action.

Newspapers and radio stations, including several the CIA was subsidizing, denounced Allende and warned graphically of the horrors his government would surely bring. American banks stopped granting short-term credits to Chilean businesses; agents spread rumors of impending food rationing, bank collapses, and nonexistent plans by Allende to seize private homes.

The 1970 Election

On September 4, 1970, Chilean voters went to the polls and gave Allende his victory by plurality. Such outcomes were not unusual in Chile’s multiparty system, and Congress had a long-established tradition of choosing the first-place finisher as president. Under Chilean law, Congress had to certify Allende’s election within fifty days after the election. Nixon wanted that somehow to be prevented.

It is a tribute to the Chilean political system that despite all the CIA’s efforts, neither President Frei nor members of Congress could be persuaded that the threat Allende posed was great enough to require a break with Chile’s democratic tradition. Congress met on October 24 and, by a vote of 153 to 24, certified his election. He was inaugurated on November 4.

Orchestrated Overthrow

When Allende won the presidential election on September 4, 1970, he set off panic in the corridors of American power. He was a lifelong anti-imperialist and admirer of Fidel Castro who had vowed to nationalize the American owned companies that dominated his country. On November 6, 1970, just two days after Allende donned the presidential sash in Santiago, President Nixon convened the National Security Council to discuss ways of disposing him.

The Americans needed to push Chile toward chaos. Kissinger set out to do so, using all of the considerable resources at his command. Kissinger would be more directly responsible for what happened in Chile than any other American, with the possible exception of Nixon himself

Agustin Edwards, one of Chile’s richest men and owner of its largest newspaper, El Mecurio, was personally, professionally, and ideologically close to most of the leading American executives with interests in Chile. Through them, he had access to the highest circles of the Nixon administration. President Nixon had repeatedly declared his determination to protect American business interests abroad and fight communism.

Kissinger asked Helms to meet with Edwards to glean “whatever insight he might have” on ways of stopping Allende. Kissinger met with another powerful figure eager to protect large interests in Chile, his friend and patron David Rockefeller of Chase Manhattan Bank.

ITT was one of the world’s largest conglomerates. It had large holdings in Chile and faced the same threat that hung over Edward’s business empire. Its prized asset, the Chilean telephone system, was high on Allende’s list for nationalization.

John McCone, the former CIA director, had joined ITT less than a year after leaving the CIA but remained a consultant to the agency, meaning that he was simultaneously on both payrolls. This unique arrangement made him the ideal link between ITT and the top levels of the United States government.

Economic Warfare

The first blows they struck were economic. The cutting of aid, loans and credits to Chile became know as an “invisible blockade. Two principal American foreign aid agencies, the Export-Import Bank and the Agency for International Development announced that they would no longer approve any new commitments of U.S. bilateral assistance to Chile. The Inter-American Development Bank was instructed to lock all proposals for loans to Chile. When the bank’s president protested, the administration forced his resignation. The new president reduced Chile’s credit rating for B to D. Private banks followed suit. The Export-Import Bank canceled a scheduled $21 million loan intended to pay for new Boeing jets for Chile’s national airline. The World Bank suspended a $21 million livestock improvement loan to Chile.

Soon after Allende’s inauguration, most of the leading American companies active in Chile, including ITT, Kennecott, Anaconda, Firestone Tire & Rubber, Bethlehem Steel, Charles Pfizer, W.R. Grace, Bank of America, Ralston Purina, and Dow Chemical, joined to form a Chile Ad Hoc Committee. It was dedicated to working with officials in Washington who were “handling the Chile problem.” Over the next few months, its members set out on a quiet destabilization campaign of their own that included office closings, delayed payments, slow deliveries, and credit denial. It was so effective that within two years, one-third of Chile’s buses and 20 percent of its taxis were out of service due to lack of spare parts.

Chile Nationalizes Industry

Allende faced intense pressure from groups of workers and peasants whose revolutionary passion he had helped awaken. His rhetoric led many of them to dream of a new social order in which they would enjoy higher wages, better housing, and other amenities of the good life. They pushed him relentlessly toward radicalism, as did militant Chilean leftists who took up their cause. Among them were radicals who embraced Che Guevara’s theory that the only way to bring justice to Latin America was to repress traditional ruling classes, using violence if necessary.

On July 11, 1971, the Chilean Congress unanimously approved a constitutional amendment authorizing the nationalization of Kennecott, Anaconda, and the smaller Cerro Mining Corporation. Allende proclaimed that the date would henceforth be “National Dignity Day.” Soon after taking this momentous step, the Allende government took another one, assuming management control of the ITT-owned Compania de Telephonos de Chile.

Downward Spiral

Although Allende could never move quickly enough to satisfy his most radical supporters, his march toward socialism horrified other Chileans and helped polarize the country. At the same time, the United States was engaged in a multilayered campaign against him. These two forms of pressure – internal and external – reinforced each other and pulled Chile into a downward spiral.

By the end of 1972, Allende’s divisive policies and the American destabilization campaign had combined to throw Chile into grave crisis. Street disturbances became so regular that Allende was forced to replace his police chief and his interior minister. Shopkeepers and truckers staged crippling strikes. Food became scarce. Basic products like coffee, tea, and sugar were ever harder to find. Prices raged out of control. Electric power became unreliable. Antigovernment gangs in the countryside dynamited roads, tunnels, and bridges Several cities were put under temporary states of emergency..

Allende Addressed the UN

Against this backdrop, Allende arrived in New York to address the United Nations. On December 4, 1972, after a brief meeting with George H. W. Bush, the American ambassador to the United Nations, Allende strode to the General Assembly podium.

Our economy could longer tolerate the subordination implied by having more that eighty percent of its exports in the hands of a small group of large foreign companies that have always put their interest ahead of those of the countries where they make their profits.

These same firms exploited Chilean copper for many years, made more than four billion dollars in profit in the last forty-two years alone, while their initial investments were less than thirty million.

We find ourselves opposed by forces that operate in the shadows, without a flag, with powerful weapons, from positions of great influence. We are potentially rich countries, yet we live in poverty. We go here and there, begging for credits and aid, yet we are great exporters of capital. It is a classic paradox of the capitalist economic system.

Pinochet Overthrows Allende

Plotters at CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia, directed their agents in Santiago to begin probing for military possibilities to thwart Allende and to look for ways of strengthening the resolve of the Chilean military to act against Allende.

The CIA had noticed General Pinochet’s growing willingness to consider the idea of a coup. At a birthday party for General Pinochet’s younger daughter, on September 9, Chilean officers made their final decision to strike against President Allende. The coup proceeded methodically. Soldiers across the country and began securing radio stations, town halls, police stations, and other centers of power.

On September 11, 1973, Allende addressed his last words to his people:

I will not resign. I am ready to resist by all means, even at the cost of my own life. Foreign capital – imperialism united with reaction – created the climate for the army to break with their tradition. Long live Chile! Long live the people! These are my last words. I am sure that may sacrifice will not be in vain. I am sure it well at least a moral lesson, and a rebuke to crime, cowardice and treason.

Soon after Allende delivered his impassioned farewell, infantry units began advancing on the palace under cover of artillery fire. Defenders fired back, and men of both sides fell. Shortly before noon, tow British-made Hawker Hunter fighters roared out of the sky. They swooped down and fired at the palace, striking so accurately – one missile flew right through the palace’s main door – that some theorists later suggested that the pilots must have been American. Eighteen rockets hit the old building, which burst into flames.

“Mission accomplished,” General Javier Palacios, who led the assault, reported to his superiors by radio. “Moneda taken. President dead.”

Pinochet Rules

One of Pinochet’s first acts after the coup was to order a nationwide series of raids on leftists and other supporters of the deposed regime. The harshness with which this campaign was conducted, the tens of thousands of people who were arrested, the conditions under which they were held, and the fact that many were never seen again set the tone for what would be years of repression. Officials of the Allende government were rounded up and sent to a prison on desolate Dawson Island, in Chile’s extreme south.

Pinochet moved quickly to resolve the conflicts with American companies that had contributed so decisively to hostility between Washington and Santiago. Less than a year after the coup, his government announced an agreement with Anaconda Copper, Kennecott Copper, and ITT.

“My evaluation is that you are a victim of all left-wing groups around the world, and that your greatest sin was that you overthrew a government that was going communist,” Kissinger told Pinochet. “We welcomed the overthrow of the communist-inclined government here. We are not out to weaken your position.”