I still have the cassette recording I made of Salvador Allende’s last speech on September 11, 1973.
The Chilean president knew he could no longer resist the military takeover. He had told his supporters in the presidential palace to surrender. He promised us that the way would open up again for free men and women to construct a better society. I can still taste the bitter disappointment, the deep feeling that it can’t really be over. That day, some of us made the trek to the worker-controlled industrial belts around Santiago, thinking the defense of the revolution would start there. It didn’t.
I still have the cassette recording I made of Salvador Allende’s last speech on September 11, 1973.
At the time, Chile had been a center of hope and political optimism. Tens of thousands of people from all over the world—mostly young—gathered there to live the great experiment: to experience, and in many cases, to work in an elected government with a program for real revolution and democracy. Many who came were exiles from military governments elsewhere; others were academics and experts from the United States and Europe who wanted to do their part to make Allende’s ambitious projects for land reform, income redistribution, and economic growth a success. They had a stake in what was happening in Chile, just as the International Brigades came to the defense of Spain’s Republic in the 1930s, conscious that they were a bulwark against encroaching fascism in Europe.
Library of the Chilean National Congress
The bombing of La Moneda (the presidential palace) in Santiago, Chile, on September 11, 1973.
In Chile, the internationalists were aware that we might be witnessing a model for a more just global future. And at first, it seemed to be working, as wages, production, and employment soared. The country seemed to be moving toward a social-ist economy that mixed capitalist ownership, worker control, and state planning to wrench the working class and peasants out of poverty and integrate them into a culture of dignity and social opportunity. Political rhetoric promoted democracy and people power; there was a raucously free press like none other in Latin America; and an explosion of new music, film, and theater created a joyful cultural scene. The positive vibe seemed to have drowned out other undemocratic Marxist topics, such as the dictatorship of the proletariat and armed struggle, which never disappeared but were relegated to the margins.
In Washington, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon could envision no greater threat to U.S. interests. “What happens in Chile over the next six to twelve months will have ramifications that will go far beyond just U.S.-Chilean relations,” Kissinger wrote in a memo to Nixon after Allende came to power. “They will have an effect on what happens in the rest of Latin America and the developing world . . . . They will even affect our own conception of what our role in the world is.”
The world balance of power, and the U.S. ability to control it, could be upset by what Kissinger called “the imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere,” such as in Italy. The danger of Allende was not that he threatened America’s democracy, but that he was a democrat himself. Kissinger continued: “Allende was elected legally, the first Marxist government ever to come to power by free elections. He has legitimacy in the eyes of Chileans and most of the world; there is nothing we can do to deny him that legitimacy or claim he does not have it.” Moreover, Allende was likely to steer a path independent of the Soviet sphere and could not be portrayed as “communist.”
Allende’s legitimacy made it all the more important that the United States devise a way to prevent his success, as failing to act risked “being perceived in Latin America and in Europe as indifference or impotence in . . . our sphere of influence.”
Kissinger recommended a “cold, correct approach” in public coupled with an immediate and unremittingly hostile strategy “to prevent him from consolidating now when he is at his weakest.” In other words, kill the model before it spreads.
The story of U.S. efforts to undermine the Allende experiment has been copiously established in declassified U.S. document collections and in the section of the 1976 Church Committee report called “Covert Action in Chile.” The measures included an international credit blockade, millions of dollars in support for opposition parties and violent rightwing groups, and paying for propaganda in mainstream media to create images of violence, repression, chaos, and a looming communist dictatorship in Chile.
The widely accepted notion that the United States orchestrated the military coup is not supported by the documentary evidence, neither in U.S. nor Chilean records. Kissinger and Nixon did their part to foment economic chaos and political polarization and to lay the groundwork for a military takeover, which was viewed as the most desired outcome. But the United States was not the only, and certainly not the determinative, factor causing the failure of the Allende experiment.
That kind of conventional wisdom is not only historically wrong, but it also shifts the moral responsibility away from Chilean actors, who formed a powerful coalition of rightist and centrist parties, business interests, civil society organizations, and—in the final analysis—a unified military to plot Allende’s overthrow. Moreover, it minimizes the factionalism and economic mismanagement on the part of the Allende government that arguably would have inevitably led to its political defeat in the 1976 elections, if democracy had been allowed to run its course.
Public domain
Victims of the coup being detained at the National Stadium, September 1973.
To my mind, reflecting on many years of writing and reporting on the issues, the most destructive effect of the U.S. approach outlined above was U.S. acquiescence to seventeen years of Chilean dictatorship, which resulted in the execution and disappearance of more than 3,000 people, the systematic use of torture and mass imprisonment, and a generation of Chilean exiles. The United States was not needed to organize and carry out the military operations of the coup. But U.S. officials signaled that a military putsch was preferable to elections as a resolution of the Chilean crisis. And after the coup, Kissinger told the dictator General Augusto Pinochet, in a personal meeting, that the rampant human rights violations already committed were not an obstacle to continued U.S. support. In interviews, two U.S. diplomats summed up for me Kissinger’s instructions to them about Pinochet’s regime: “No criticism,” and “Defend, defend, defend.”
Allende’s experiment went down in ignominious defeat, and with it, the vision of a left-of-center, democratic, social-justice-oriented option for Latin America and—perhaps—the world. The disillusionment of the internationalist observers and collaborators was total.
As in Spain, the progressive foreigners who tried to fight on Chile’s side in an international geopolitical struggle were able only to watch on the sidelines as more powerful forces—conjoined with unforced errors and infighting Allende could not control—overwhelmed the workers’ and peasants’ movements with weeks of raids and killings.
Allende’s experiment went down in ignominious defeat, and with it, the vision of a left-of-center, democratic, social-justice-oriented option for Latin America and—perhaps—the world.
A foreign passport provided no protection. Many of the internationalists faced lethal danger as the new regime targeted “foreign extremists” for detention. Eight hundred were rounded up, mostly to the improvised cells in the National Stadium. Fifty were killed, including two Americans. Thousands sought protection by crowding into embassies and U.N.-organized safehouses, then exited Chile into a second or third existence in exile.
Alone among the prosperous democracies, the U.S. embassy gave protection to no one. In a diplomatic note to the new authorities, the embassy wrote that it “had the honor to inform the [Foreign] Ministry that no persons have been granted asylum in the American Embassy of Santiago.”
The academics and experts folded their tents and went home, but found that grand strategies to defeat poverty amid egalitarian cultural change had dwindled. I stayed on as a journalist for five more years, shifting my focus from soft pieces about a democratic revolution to documenting the human rights atrocities of the military.
The Chilean coup created as many as one million political and economic exiles. In Europe and the United States, the Chilean refugees and their allies threw themselves into the new cause of human rights. The horrors revealed about Chile were translated into the first effective human rights legislation in Congress, and with the arrival of the administration of Jimmy Carter, the defense of human rights became a foreign policy premise that has persisted until today.
During the Republican administrations of the late 1980s, the U.S. ambassador played a possibly indispensable role in ensuring that Pinochet relinquished power and allowed an elected government to resume in 1990.
The cause of Chile did not invent international solidarity, but the hope of Allende followed by the despair at his fall left a mark on those of us who were there that has lasted a lifetime.