LESSONS FROM THE 9/11/73 COUP IN CHILE
Jorge A. Lawton, Ph.D.
Jorge A. Lawton is a binational from the U. S. and Chile. During the
Allende Popular Unity years, he worked as a daily staff reporter for
the Financial Times (London)
from Chile . In May of 1974, he returned to Chile as advisor to
former Attorney General Ramsey Clark. Subsequently he worked as
Latin American analyst on the Senate “Church Committee”, and as
advisoto former Chilean Foreign Minister, Orlando Letelier until his
September 1976 assasination. Today, Dr. Lawton, former
Distinguished Fellow at Emory University's Center for Ethics, writes
and works from Atlanta, GA.
~ ~ ~
Pre-dawn, on Tuesday morning, 9/11/73, three years of
relentless intervention by the hemisphere's greatest power, the
United States, succeeded both in choking off Chile's historic
experiment in it's “transition to socialism thru democracy”, and
in giving birth to the brutal Augusto Pinochet years of
dictatorship. For many reasons, both U. S. perception and policy
against the “Allende experiment in socialism”, as well as U. S.
support for and use of the Pinochet alternative are rich in present
day and future lessons. Their close examination also reveals how
only the same relatively limited repertoire of policy tools is likely
to be available to implement U. S. interests in the future.
Over these past four decades many formerly classified documents have
been brought to light, and significant architects of the Chile
policies have been intervivewed. Not the least of these efforts came
in l974-75, through the Senate Select Committee to Investigate U. S.
Intelligence Activities, popularly known simply as the “Church
Committee”, after its Chair, Senator Frank Church (D. Idaho).
Valuable additional documentation has been unearthed thru persistent
Freedom of Information Act, or “FOIA”, requests for
declassification by public interests groups such as The National
Security Archive (WDC) and The Center for Constitutional Rights
(NYC), as well as authors and teams of investigators in Chile and
abroad. Finally, some of us who lived through and survived those
turbulent years, now growing older, are also putting pen to paper.
In the short space of this anniversary blog, I will attempt to
address four of the more persistent questions surrounding U. S.
behavior and “the Chilean experience”:
(1) Who constituted the the Popular Unity Coalition and what was the
essence of its social base?
(2) What were the four central strands making up the anatomy of
Nixon/Kissinger policy toward the Allende Popular Unity Coalition in
1970-73?
(3) What was most responsbile for Allende's overthrow: a) strategic
errors of his own coalition? b) internal opposition forces ? c)
external opposition forces?
And finally, (4) What were the fundamental post-coup priorities of
the United States ?
~ ~ ~
The Popular Unity Coalition
Senator Salvador Allende, M.D., had been a presidential candidate in
1958, again in 1964, and again in 1970. His Popular Unity Coalition
had been growing in strength over the years, and by 1970 included six
broad parties: 1) Allende's own Socialist Party; 2) the Chilean
Communist Party; 3) the middle-class, non-Marxist Radical Party; 4)
the Left Christian Party, a splinter from the powerful opposition
Christian Democrats of the Center-Right; and 5) & 6)two new
parties, MAPU and MAPU-OC (Obrero Campesino / Worker Farm Laborer).
The radical, pro-insurrectionary “MIR”, or “Movement of the
Revolutionary Left”, tho allied, did not form part of the Popular
Unity coalition. MIR could be seen as representing an ideological
pole far more than any offering a strategic alternative. Tactical
differences between Chile's broad Socialist Party – advocating
“advance without concessions”, and its old and more traditional
Communist Party – advocating “consolidate first in order to
advance”, were evident on nearly every level. The great majority
of organized labor also situated themselves firmly within the ranks
of the governing U. P. coalition.
Aligned against the Popular Unity parties were Chile's
center-right Christian Democrats; also a conservative splinter from
the majority, middle of the road Radical Party; the traditional right
wing National Party; and even an open, neo-fascist shock group known
as “Fatherland and Freedom”. Increasingly groupings of “guilds”
or “gremios”, and “owner associations”, such as the
truck-owners SIDUCAM, worked with the opposition.
The prevailing mood among all of the parties and social groups in the
U. P., from neighborhod and community organizations through the six
parties, was overwhelmingly one of optimism and hope. There was a
keen awareness, even in the midst of unbridled opposition and
mounting chaos, of how, as organized workers, they were fundamentally
transforming Chilean society.
For the status quo defending parties, the mood was increasingly one
of apprehension and visceral opposition to each and every U. P.
initiative. We will see how U. S. policy worked to further increase
this polarization on every level, and in its own words, “create a
coup climate.”
~ ~ ~
The View from Washington
Richard Nixon viewed Allende's surprise plurality election in
September, 1970, as evidence of a “red sandwich” – with
Castro's Cuba in the north, and now “Marxist Chile” in the south,
where “soon all of Latin America in between may turn Communist”.
Henry Kissinger was somewhat more sophisticated. If allowed to
succeed, Kissinger viewed the cooperative coalition between Chile's
Socialist and Communist parties as posing “an insidious example”
to similar coalitions in France and Italy – whose societies were
accepted as directly effecting U. S. strategic interests.
Nixon was clear in his immediate instructions to his national
security advisors at Allende's election: “Make the economy
scream”, he privately ordered. Subsequently, U. S. Ambassador
Edward Korry would privately pledged that “not a nut or a bolt”
would make it into Chile on his watch.
The U. S. national security state under Nixon/Kissnger quickly
developed a powerful anti-Allende policy with four strands: 1)
diplomatic deception; 2) military-to-military intervention; 3)
economic pressure/strangulation; and, 4) a series of “covert
actions”.
U. S. Diplomatic Deception.
While the full force of U. S. power in fact moved swiftly and
mercilessly against Allende's Chile, the official U. S. position was
deceptively conciliatory: “Our position is one of “wait and see”.
We are prepared to have the kind of relations with the Allende
government that they want to have with us.”
Officially, the llitmus test for the Nixon Administration was said to
be whether or not they were satisfied by the terms of indemnization
by the Allende government for the private U. S. owned transnationals,
particularly the U. S. copper corporations – Anaconda, Kennecott,
and Braden, but also I.T.T, Chase Manhattan Bank, and not to be
overlooked, Nixon's former client, Pepsi Cola!
U. S. ire was hardly calmed when, after months and months of
deliberations, Allende's international legal counsel, Eduardo Novoa,
declared that neither side owed the other anything. According to
Novoa's doctrine of “retroactive excess profits”, adoped by
Allende, the transnationals would still end up with a traditionally
acceptable annual profit even if not paid anything further for the
nationalization of their properties in Chile.
U. S. Military Intervention.
Much of what has been publicly revealed, especially by the Church
Committee, of the U. S. military actions against the Allende
government, falls in the initial months in which the U. S. attempted
to prevent Allende from being confirmed by the Chilean congress,
rather than three years later at the time of the 9/11/73 coup itself.
Yet we know that U. S. opposition to Allende not only did not wane,
but significantly intensified as time went on. Thus it would hardly
be logical to expect U. S. military advice to have become less
involved and less interested as the military ultimatum against the
Allende regime escalated month after month.
In the earlier, pre-confirmation period, we know that the U. S. went
as far as to dispatch three “false flag” clandestine officers to
Chile with submachine guns whose serial numbers had been erased.
These clandestine U. S. officers, traveling as nationals of other
countries, had instructions to pass these weapons to one of two
renegade Chilean military factions in order to kidnap the
constitutionalist Commander-in-Chief of Chile's Armed Forces, General
Rene' Schneider. In the assault, General Schneider resisted and was
assasinated. This U. S.-backed terrorist action so shocked Chile's
constitutionalist majority, that it turned out to have precisely the
opposite effect, facilitating Allende's confirmation by the Congress
on October 24, 1970.
The first signs of the Chilean military coup itself came in the
pre-dawn hours of 9/11/73, and commenced with the uprising of the
Chilean Navy in the principle port of Valparaiso. Just concluding at
the time were the War Games being carried out by the U. S. Navy under
Operation Unitas. It was the unguarded boasts of U. S. Navy
officers, gathered at Viña del Mar's Hotel O'Higgins on the Sunday
night prior to the Tuesday a.m. coup, that U. S. filmmaker Charlie
Horman witnessed, leading to his subsequent kidnapping and
“disappearance”, later portrayed in the film, “Missing”.
In the capital of Santiago, as in cities up and down the length of
Chile, the intricate choreography of the coup was carried off with a
precision previously unassociated with Chile's Armed Forces. Were
they operating alone as we have been led to believe by the “official
accounts”? All traffic intersections and bridges had been taken
over and controled; all radio and T. V. stations taken over; all
“intervened” worker-controled factories were surrounded and
controled by specialized military units; a master “watch list”
of the thousands upon thousands to be arrested, interrogated and held
had been prepared and distributed; and as the two British Hawker
Hunter bombers slowly passed over La Moneda, the presidential palace,
fixing its coordinates to launch it's missiles, someone was there to
film the bombing and burning of the constitutional symbol of the
palace, with the elected president inside –and then feed the film
to the national television channels. The resulting burning image was
run over and over, exclusive T. V. content, accompanied only by
various official pronunciations and citizen warnings from the new
military junta!
After three years of intensive preparation and unremiting hostility,
are we really to believe that onthe day of the coup itself, and
subsequent days, the U. S. military advisors were on vacation?
U. S. Economic Pressures
Immediately following Allende's election, the Nixon Administration
established an interagency working group to coordinate overt economic
pressure toward Chile. This was composed of the CIA's Western
Hemisphere Division Chief, and representatives from State, the NSC,
and Treasury. In 1970, U. S. direct private investment in Chile
reached $1.1 billion, out of an estimated total foreign investment of
$1.672 billion. Four-fifths of Chile's foreign exchange earnings at
the time came from copper exports, and 80% of Chile's copper
production was controled by U. S. based corporations.
The N. S. C. decision to isolate Chile from all sources of needed
foreign capital, summarizedin National Security Defense Memorandum 93
of November 1970, can be traced in the macro statistics. While U.
S. bilateral aid to Chile in 1969 reached $35 million, this had been
cut to only $1.5 million in 1971. U. S. Export-Import Bank credits,
which had totaled $234 milionunder President Eduardo Frei in 1967,
fell to zero by 1971. Chile's credit rating with the Ex-Im Bank was
dropped from “B” to “D” (it lowest level) at Allende's
election. Loans from the Inter-American Development Bank had totaled
$46. milion in 1970; by 1972 they were only $2 million. The World
Bank made no new loans whatsoever to Chile between 1970 and 1973.
As the Church Committee Senate report states, “the United States
[also] linked the question of indemnization for U. S. copper
companies with Chile's multilateral foreign debt. That
foreign debt, an inheritance from the obligations incurred by the
[previous Chilean governments of Presidents] Alessandri and Frei, was
the second highest foreign debt per capita of any country in the
world . Yet, in the 1972 1n 1973 Paris Club foreign debt negotiations
with Chile's principal foreign creditor nations, the United States
alone refused to consider rescheduling Chile's foreign debt payments
until there was movement toward indemnization for the U. S. copper
companies. The United States also exerted pressure on each of the
other foreign creditor nations not to renegotiate Chile's foreign
debt.”
U. S. Covert Actions
What do we mean by the category “covert actions”?
Broadly speaking, these are activities which the United States
government authorizes, pays for, coordinates, and carries out without
ever divulging any association or responsibility. They
may often be falsely attributed to other authorities or entities. In
intelligence slang they are often loosely referred to as “dirty
tricks”. This may involve
clandestine payments to individuals or parties, covert
military to military activity, or, one of the broadest
and most significant categories in the case of U. S. policy
toward Chile, “psy-ops” or
“psychological
operations”. This is non-attributed, or
falsely attributed (“black”) propaganda pouring
into a country such as Chile to act as “scare tactics”,
often in order to change how
people vote. The information itself does not have
to be true, and often is blatantly false. Ironically enough, the U.
S. covert action campaigns
directed against the Allende candidacy in 1964, and again in 1970
against his candidacy and subsequent government, were so
massive in character, that they often betrayed thier allegedly
“clandestine” nature. They thus turned out to be anything but
“covert” to their targets, the people of Chile; they often were
covert or unknown, however, to the U. S. people in whose name and
through whose taxes they were being authorized and spent! Only with
the major congressional investigation of the Church committee in the
Senate, and the Pike committe in the House were descriptions of U. S.
covert action programs against Chile ever revealed to the U. S.
public.
The C. I. A. chose to pour millions
into blatant attack copy into Chile's daily opposition radio, T.V.,
and print media, especially the conservative daily, El
Mercurio. The funds were
routinely channeled through Chile's black market, producing a
5 to 8 fold increase in a country whose entire population at the time
was 1/20 that of the United States. The “covert action”
strategy was twofold: First, it aimed to denigrate and smear each and
every initiative of the Popular Unity coalition, and increasingly, of
the character of President Allende himself; secondly, it furthered a
self-fulfilling prophecy that the
Allende government, per se, represented a threat to “freedom
of the press”, forcing the government either on the one hand to
choose between setting limits on what propaganda could be launched in
the press, including suspension of printing privileges when the
courts determined the attacks to be libelous, versus opting to refuse
to be coerced into any such suspension and thus allowing ever more
vicious daily attacks and rumors to spread. Allende and the U. P.
chose to keep even the most rabid of the opposition press open and
publishing all the time.
~ ~ ~
Key Factors in Allende's Overthrow
There has been a long and largely
inconclusive academic debate over which factors were more influential
in the overthrow of the Popular Unity government on September 11,
1973. The question is usually put
in terms of the relative influence of external vs. internal
opposition factors.
We know that the most significant
and visible actor in
provoking the coup was, of course, the betrayal of the Chilean
Armed Forces: Army, Navy, Air Force, and Carabiñeros or National
Police, plus their various respective, and competing, intelligence
services. The C. I. A., the D. I. A., and the N. S. A. were far
less forthcoming with the investigating Senate Church Committee, when
it came to questions of the degree and nature of U. S. covert
involvement at the time of the 9/11 coup
itself, than with some of the details on the earlier “Track
1” and “Track 11”
covert U. S. intervention
programs. The nature of the coup being the culmination of three
years of unrelenting pressure and propaganda economically,
politically, psychologically and militarily is often conveniently
overlooked, as it is looked at as an isolated event. Even so,
serious questions continue to be raised regarding the likely
continuation of the U. S. intimate role, but in a far less visible or
highly more discrete deployment on the day of the coup itself. Some
critics have charged that the U. S. Airforce deployed two highly
sophisticated aircraft, similar to AWACs, with orders to maintain a
centralized military communication system far above the capital city
of Santiago, just in case the Chilean military's closely coordinated
monopoly of all ground communications should suffer any unforeseen
glitches.
Thus even today, 43 years after the
fact, we are still limited in what forces were visible at
the time, and in what
information has been revealed and confirmed by official
sources. This does not prevent,
however, further responsible and trained inquiry, given the
nature of the policy and the intervention.
We also must analyze the essence of
the C. I. A.'s work. It is a clandestine agency working across
national boundaries. As such, it primary task is to unite
covertly the international, or
external forces with the internal forces – not have one compete
against the other. Both external and
internal forces, so
long as they are loyal to the policy's central purpose – in this
case, in President Nixon's words, “to make the
economy scream” and “to create a coup climate” –
are aligned together if the C.
I. A. and its fellow clandestine agencies are doing their job.
Common cause is made
between the external and the internal forces. Thus the very question
as to which forces are more responsible for the overthrow
is clearly the wrong question to ask.
Does this mean for a moment that
Allende and the Popular Unity coalition did not commit their own
errors in the intense three years of governing? Of course not. The
most frequent charge against the
coalition is often thought to be that of their alleged naivete'.
“They should have seen the militarycoup coming and countered the
same by arming the workers in a popular uprising”, runs
the argument. This view, often expressed by some on the Left
from abroad, ignores how acutely aware each of the parties in the U.
P,. coalition were of a military coup, and how they realized that
discovery by the military of introduction of any parallel armed
militia, would only have accelerated the timing and resolve of the
military to protect themselves and act to carry out a coup.
While many tactical errors did
exist, the overwhelming thrust of the U. P, programs was one of
building a new, alternative social order. Time after time,
Allende, a gruff conciliator by nature, reached out to sectors of the
opposition to form broader national coalitions. One such accord had
been all but reached with the opposition Christian Democrats in 1972.
What remained was formal approval by former President Eduardo Frei,
then traveling in Yugoslavia. It was learned that Frei consulted
with the Nixon/Kissinger administration before ordering that
absolutely under no circumstances would his party enter into any pact
with the Allende coalition. One CIA report which \\ reached the
Church Committee, in dealing with the September timing of the coup,
predicted that if the coup were not
successfully launched then that it might well be “too
late” soon after, as Allende
was seen as consolidating his forces.
~ ~ ~
U. S. Post-Coup Priorities & “Los Chicago Boys”
The 9/11/73 military coup in Chile
marked a bloody watershed. It heralded far more than so-called
“regime change”.
The very democratic
institutions which the C. I. A. had carried out a drumbeat of
warnings as being “threatened” under
Allende, primarily the
country's ample electronic and print media, but also the
generations-old House and Senate Chambers, were summarily closed with
the coup. Strict nightly curfews were established. Gatherings of
more than five persons were prohibited. A new reality, the C. I.
A.-prepared “Watch List” guided mass arrests such that the
overflow soon had to be sent to locales such as the National Footbal
(Soccer) Stadium, now one massive political prison. Eleven
new “interrogation centers”, such as Villa Grimaldi or
Londres 38, were set
up. Old concentration camps, such as “Tres Alamos” or
“Pisagua”, not
used for decades, were re-opened.
From the first moment of the coup
onward, the military succeeded in cutting Chile off from Argentina
to the East, while controling the northern border with Bolivia. That
left control of Patagonia to the south and the Pacific Ocean to the
west – effectively cutting Chile off from the world. This new
territorial control was then used to corral, interrogate, and
imprison not only all of the hundreds of thousands of Chilean
nationals, but also, of immediate interest, the thousands of foreign
nationals, including dissident leaders from their own countries, who
had been welcomed to Chile under Allende. The interrogation process
routinely employed torture. Summary executions ocurred widely,
especially during the first weeks following the coup. Some
prisoners, still alive, were cast into the Pacific Ocean from
helicopters. Many were simply “disappeared”, never to be
accounted for again.
One common experience was to have a
non-Spanish speaking man present in the torture sessions. Not
infrequently, some anti-Allende residents used the coup climate to
denounce and “turn-in” any neighbors who they knew to have
supported the previous regime. The highest level Chilean prisoners,
former party heads or Cabinet members, were separated and sent to the
extreme southern pole Dawson Island, Chile's equivalent of South
Africa's Robben's Island.
Two CIA agents were assigned to
prepare the military junta's own publication or, “White
Book” to justify the coup itself and to present the junta in a
uniquely positive light. Covert action programs designed to place
the Agency in close touch with the command level of the military, and
to direct the national and international media coverage in the most
favorable light toward the new junta, were maintained.
The agency deployed other agents to
help draw up the new national economic plans of the government.
Analysts on the Senate Church Committee learned in declassified
information that on the afternoon of the military coup ravaging
Chile, the C. I. A. station chief encouraged his staff of officers to
enjoy the bottles of champagne which they had uncorked, but to
realize that “our real work starts tomorrow morning as we carry out
the drafting of Chile's new economic plan.”
Even before the new national
economic plan could be drafted, Chile's broad public health network
and decades old social safety net had to be dismantled.
“Privatization” and
nearly universal “user-fees” in
instance after instance replaced former public benefits; decades old
Chilean trade unions, were intervened and banned. These plans
were a bold copy of fundamental “neo-liberal” or unfettered,
market-oriented, Chicago School principles. Deregulation became the
order of the day.
Eventually it became impossible to
square the more drastic of these raw capitalist measures with some
of Chile's oldest constitutional guarantees. But rather than curtail
the drastic economic measures, it was decided to rewrite Chile's
constitution – once again, with the explicit participation of U.
S. C.I.A. Agents! All new decision-making power was vested in the
military junta itself; Congress hadbeen closed and the
ultra-conservative Supreme Court was only too happy to be subservient
to the new mlitary executive, increasingly centered in the person of
Army General Augusto Pinochet. Elections, formerly a near-constant
in Chilean life, were now banned, and the new constitution guaranteed
unquestioned terms of rule for the new Pinochet junta and its
welcoming of foreign capital. Unemployment soared under Chile's “new
economy”, while a handful of well-placed financiers, including
future president Sebastian Piñera, became the new billionaires.
Nearly three years later, in June of
1976, Henry Kissinger paid a visit to Pinochet's Chile. The
dictatorship's human rights repression had become known around
the globe. Yet, in his private meeting
with Pinochet, recently declassified memos quote Kissinger confiding
to the dictator, “You did a great service to the West in
overthrowing Allende.” To his
undoubted embarrassment, upon parting, Pinochet turned to Kissinger,
and publicly assured him that, “You are my leader.”
General Pinochet remained in
unchecked power for the next 17 years, until a national plebescite
would vote him out. Even then he negotiated to remain as
Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces
for another 8 years – effectively preventing any member of the
military to cooperate with the various commissions of inquiry into
the crimes committed by the military. And to this day, 41 years from
the 9/11/73 military coup, the C.I.A.-counseled, Pinochet
constitution remains in place. Socialist President Michele Bachelet,
herself a former victim of the dictatorship, must now decide whether
the correlation of constitutional forces even today will allow her to
rewrite Chile's constitution.
[(a) Corraling and repression of all foreign and Chilean supporters
of the Popular Unity government,
together with corresponding “psy-ops” to portray them as
“terrorists”;
(b) CIA Santiago station chief: Enjoy your champagne now,
gentlemen, as of first order of business,
tomorrow morning we must draw up the plans of Chile's “new
economy”;
(c) dismantling of the “liberal” Chilean state, the media, and
the representative institutions;
& dismantling of the traditional Chilean social security,
pension, and public health systems;
(d) banning of the Central Labor Coalition (C.U.T.);
(e) drafting and adopting of a new national Constitution;
(f) opening of the post-coup economy to transnational financial
capital virtually without restriction;]
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