As we have all been called to remember that this past Tuesday was the 11the anniversary of 9-11, I recall that I first learned about the event when I noticed some office people where I was working gathered around a television set in the break room; there were the Twin Towers on fire. The air of gravity, that something incomprehensible to the rational mind had occurred, was so intense that no one could find the right words to describe what they felt at that moment. The next day I overheard some Somali immigrants talking about the attack, referring to Bin Laden by his first name; why are they calling him “Osama” as if they knew him personally, I thought. Maybe it was a cultural formality I didn’t understand.
But September 11th is also the 39th anniversary of another infamous attack, the coup that toppled the government of Chilean President Salvador Allende, who it now appears shot himself before the soldiers attacking the presidential palace in Santiago could reach him. Before we talk about why we should remember this event, it might be useful to remember what kind of country Chile was before Allende was became president.
Chile was Spain’s poorest colony in the New World, with its lack of gold or silver deposits. Few Spanish colonists resided there at first, and by the early 1800’s most Chileans were of mixed indigenous and European character, although a significant portion of the population were still “upper class” Creoles who remained European in character. Despite the end of Spanish rule in 1817, the European elite minority insisted on retaining its trappings—much as the landed elites rule the antebellum South in this country. The vast majority of the population—indigenous and mestizos—were generally excluded from political and economic life. Today, discrimination along racial lines is still rampant, although many Chileans try to disguise it by calling it “classism.” As in most of Latin America, of course, class is generally defined by physical appearance, mainly skin color. There is very little opportunity for those of the lower “class” to move beyond their racially-defined position (all you have to do is watch Mexican-based television programming on Spanish-language channels to see how race defines social position).
In the years following independence, political, economic and social chaos ruled, which only strengthened the influence of those who favored a centralized, authoritarian form of government, and Chile was an informal dictatorship for the next century, albeit beholden to landed Euro-elites. By the mid-19th century, a new class of wealthy who made their fortunes largely from mining demanded a “liberalization” of the political system—although mainly to allow themselves a political voice. By the late 19th century, the middle class began making the same demands, and still later Marxist and socialist voices could be heard among the working classes (who in Chilean society are just one step above the “lower” classes). However, the longstanding disregard by the Euro elites of social reform led to widespread discontent that the “traditional” parties were unable to deal with, as well as having an inability to confront the poor state of the economy.
This would lead to the formation of more radical political parties. Despite the election of a reformist president in 1920, the legislature still beholden to the white upper class blocked his measures. Strangely, it was mid-level army officers who now rebelled, forcing the legislature to enact reforms, and even backing a fairly “liberal” constitution. While some progress was made to improve the lot of the working and lower classes, the elites’ own economic and political position was not challenged directly. Following the Great Depression and WWII, there were efforts to improve industrial production, but the attempts of the “radical” parties to change the social and economic structure of the country failed; while the position of the middle class did improve, that of the working and lower classes seemed only to fall further behind. This wasn’t helped by a move to the right in the next round of political rule, which abandoned reform during the 1950s.
During the 1960s, high unemployment among the poor led to public works programs to create jobs, but again without altering the racial and class structure of the country. Rising inflation while instituting wage controls helped weaken the right. In order to regain control of the country’s economy, a partial nationalization of the foreign-controlled mining interests took place after 1964; however, save for education reform that benefited the lower classes, little was accomplished to address the country’s core social structure issues. Part of the reason was because of loss of support from the middle classes, which saw aid to the lower classes as “threatening” to their own position on the social hierarchy. Agrarian reform, which limited the amount of land that a person could own, and the excess to be given to poor farmers, proceeded too slowly to have much effect.
That is the backdrop to Allende’s election in 1970, made possible in large part to the increased political participation of the working and lower classes. Allende did envision an eventual move toward a socialist society, which included a complete nationalization of foreign-controlled industries; Allende and his coalition partners also pushed for more equitable wages for those on the lower wage end. But this was also courting opposition from the middle class, which was conscious of its social and economic position being threatened. Allende—conscious of the fact he had only one six-year term to carry out his program—put it on the fast track. Although at first successful in raising economic activity and lowering unemployment and inflation, Allende was courting fear not just from the middle class, but the Cold Warriors abroad, especially the Nixon administration; It also didn’t help that the price of copper—Chile’s principle export—dropped dramatically during his tenure, helping to put the country into an excessive deficit and inflationary period. Although he continued to enjoy support from the lower classes and more progressive-minded people, his major opponents continued to be the middle and upper classes who accused Allende of acting in an unconstitutional manner, but in fact opposed any reform that threatened their positions; although later, labor unions would join in the opposition and go on nation-wide strikes, it appears that such actions were inspired behind the scenes by “foreign” agitators—like the CIA.
Only days before the coup, Allende responded to the challenge by declaring that “Chilean democracy is a conquest by all of the people. It is neither the work nor the gift of the exploiting classes, and it will be defended by those who, with sacrifices accumulated over generations, have imposed it . . . With a tranquil conscience . . . I sustain that never before has Chile had a more democratic government than that over which I have the honor to preside . . . I solemnly reiterate my decision to develop democracy and a state of law to their ultimate consequences . . . Parliament has made itself a bastion against the transformations . . . and has done everything it can to perturb the functioning of the finances and of the institutions, sterilizing all creative initiatives.”
It would do him no good. When sectarian conflict rent India asunder following independence from Britain, Gandhi said that the country may have problems, but they were India’s problems, not that of the British. But for the U.S., you were either our friends, or our enemy, and how a country chose to meet its own internal challenges tended to define what those ideological lines were. Allende attempted to maintain normal relations with the U.S., but the Nixon administration withdrew first economic and then humanitarian assistance, and private investors also backed-off. It was only after it was clear that the U.S. was trying to undermine his policies, did Allende turn to the Soviet Union, which proved reluctant to provide assistance to country that was still technically a democracy with a strong opposition element—thus not a reliable “satellite.”
Both Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger feared that if a democratically-elected Allende successfully established a socialist political and economic order in Chile, it would be what Kissinger called “a living example of democratic social reform in Latin America”—which had to be stopped at all costs. A “successfully elected Marxist government in Chile would surely have an impact on…other parts of the world; the imitative spread of similar phenomena elsewhere would in turn significantly affect the world balance and our own position in it…Our failure to react to this situation risks being perceived in Latin America…as indifference or impotence…in a region long considered our sphere of influence” Kissinger wrote in a secret memo to the president. Nixon himself seems to have believed that Latin American countries taking control of their own destinies was an affront to the American patriarchy. “If we let the potential leaders in South America think they can move like Chile and have it both ways,” Nixon told aides, “we will be in trouble. No impression should be permitted in Latin America that they can get away with this, that it's safe to go this way."
Nixon—who referred to Allende as “that sonofabitch”—at first directed the State Department (under its “Track I” plan) to take measures to prevent Allende from taking office in 1970 by attempting to persuade the out-going president to undermine Allende by skirting the Chilean constitution and void the election. When that failed, the CIA (with instructions by Kissinger) initiated a “Track II” plan, which sought to find and lend support to Chilean military officers who favored a coup. This plan backfired when an attempt to kidnap the army commander, Rene Schneider—who respected the election process—went awry and he was killed, an event that at least temporarily united the country behind Allende. The CIA settled for establishing conditions (mainly exacerbating economic disruption and inciting interest groups to rebel) in which the Chilean military could stage a coup. Although no CIA documents presently released prove that the U.S. had a direct hand in the coup, there is no doubt that the Nixon administration desired that a coup occur; furthermore, Kissinger instructed the CIA station chief in Chile to insure that any U.S. activity there be conducted in a manner that would “hide” our “hand.” Many documents relating to U.S. activities in Chile during that period remain classified.
What is not in doubt is that for at least a few years the U.S.—as was its policy in many parts of the world—supported the military junta in Chile as a “moderating” force against radical change. However, what followed was the murder of at least 1,500, and perhaps as many as 3,000 Chileans, the assassination of scores living in exile—including former Allende minister Orlando Letelier, who was killed in a car bomb explosion in Washington, DC in 1976. These killings along with widespread arrests and torture of dissidents were a part of an organized program of clandestine and systematic repression by a half-dozen Latin American countries, called “Operation Condor,” whose activities the U.S. State Department were aware of, but did nothing to stop. Total numbers can never be known, but in post-Allende Chile under Augutso Pinochet where political parties and democratic governance were put in “temporary” hibernation, tens of thousands of citizens were arrested and tortured, many more exiled. Two American journalists, Charles Horman and Frank Teruggi, were incarcerated in a soccer stadium-turned-detention center days after the coup, and murdered—some say with the acquiescence of the Nixon State Department. Although the Pinochet regime faced armed opposition from the MIR guerilla movement, the latter was never a true threat, and was often used as a reason to arrest, torture and sometimes kill political dissidents.
The U.S.’ complicity in such “regime” change obviously predates Iraq, and usually with much less brazenness. The so-called “National Security Act” of 1947 and the establishment of the CIA allowed for covert activity with few restrictions and even less guidance in the ethical behavior. Its early “covert” interventions that toppled “unfriendly” governments included Iran in 1953, when Premier Mohammed Mosaddeq nationalized British oil interests and drove into the exile the more pliable shah, and in Guatemala in 1954 when President Jacobo Arbenz sought to institute a “New Deal,” which included land redistribution in the “banana republic”—where 70 percent of the land (much of it unused) was owned by 3 percent of the population—and force the “elite” classes to pay more in tax. U.S. concerns about relations with the Soviet Union were more often than not a product of the U.S.’ own seeming indifference to—and support of—oppressive regimes and policies while opposing populist and progressive initiatives. That the U.S.’ actions usually backfired in the long-run—most notably in Iran, and certainly in the loss of moral credibility with its support of right-wing murder regimes in Guatemala and El Salvador—is lesson hard learned, as could be seen in the Iran-Contra affair, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, and attempts to destabilize “unfriendly” elected leaders in Bolivia and Venezuela.
Attempts to reign-in CIA activity in internal foreign political disputes—such as the Boland Amendment during the Reagan administration—seemed to lead to even more brazenly illegal activity. Ronald Reagan declared that he was a Nicaraguan Contra “freedom fighter” against the Sandinistas who had fought against the (initially) U.S.-backed Somoza dictatorships. The problem was that the Contras were not an organic group of “freedom fighters,” but a creation of the CIA, essentially composed of mostly thugs led by opportunists who hoped to enrich themselves; the Contras soon became known for terrorist activity, killing civilians for fun and profit—their leaders mostly for profit. Despite signing the Boland Amendment, Reagan directed his underlings to find “unilateral” means of supporting the Contras; naturally, he wasn’t to know what these “means” were. The principle means turned out to be that directed by Lt. Col. Oliver North, who can only be described as a fanatic for whom ethical scruples was a foreign concept. He was assisted in this project by Richard Secord and his partner Albert Hakim, who had established a “business” called the Stanford Technology Trading Group International, which at first was little more than a conglomeration of shell companies, mainly to conceal their income and avoid paying taxes.
But one segment of their “business” became better known as the “Enterprise,” which Sen. Daniel Inouye charged was “a shadowy government with its own Air Force, its own Navy, its own fundraising mechanism, and the ability to pursue its own ideas of national interest, free from all checks and balances, and free from the law itself.” According to Independent Counsel Lawrence Walsh’s report on Iran-Contra,
“By the summer of 1986, the Enterprise’ had this scope: The organization that Richard Secord ran at Lieut. Col. Oliver North's direction controlled five aircraft, including C-123 and C-7 transports. It had an airfield in one country, warehouse facilities at an air base in another, a stockpile of guns and military equipment to drop by air to the contras and secure communications equipment obtained by North from the National Security Agency.''
The “Enterprise” was obviously more than a “business”—it was in fact an “agent” of the U.S. government, or rather the Reagan White House—a front organization whose employer wished to remain anonymous. The “Enterprise” solicited funds from well-heeled, “patriotic” Republican donors, which were secreted in a secret Swiss bank account, money that was supposed to be used to help the Contra insurgency effort. The “Enterprise” also bought weapons from the CIA, with were to be sold then at a substantial mark-up to Iran—when the U.S. was supposed to be engaged in an economic embargo of that country. The profit from these arms sales was supposed to be used to sell arms to the Contras—again at a substantial mark-up. Secord told a Senate investigating committee that he wasn’t helping the Contras merely for altruism or out of patriotic zeal, but to make a profit for himself; he was, after all, in “business” to make money. According to the Walsh report,
“In 1986 the Enterprise received $30.3 million from the sale of U.S. Government property to Iran and for replacement TOW missiles to Israel. Only $12.2 million was returned to the United States. Direct expenses of the Enterprise were approximately $2.1 million. Thus, the amount of U.S. Government funds illegally held by the Enterprise as its own was approximately $16 million.”
It is one thing to discuss the “interests” of the U.S. in regard to foreign policy. Certainly with China as a growing international competitor for natural resources, there are reasons to exert as much influence as this country can globally. However, while the U.S. has tried to walk a fine line during the so-called “Arab Spring,” this has not always been the case in the past, and it has paid a price for this in Latin America, especially in countries with large indigenous and mixed-race populations who have long been oppressed by the descendants of Europeans who maintained control of the economic and political structures by separating and isolating themselves from the rest of the population. The U.S. has a long history of maintaining these “elites” in power while viewing the aspirations of large segments of the population as being a “threat” to stability—meaning its own hegemony—on the continent. It is only ignorance of this past that allows people here to wonder why Latin America's have the bad manners of not always act as if the U.S. is their "friend."
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