I followed Chile very closely during the Frei and Allende years, spent
time in the country while Allende was president, and included a chapter on
the Marxist-Leninists of Chile in my 1976 book Castroism and Communism in
Latin America. During those years I was Latin American editor of the
Hoover Institution's Yearbook on International Communist Affairs, in
which I wrote the chapter on Chile. At that time I was completing my PhD
dissertation on Communist Chinese interest and influence in Latin America
and had taken Chile as a primary case study.
The Chilean situation in the late 1960s and early 1970s was infinitely more
complicated than is implied in some of the comments made in this discussion
up to now, as is inevitable when we must all write briefly - my words here
are already too many - on such subjects. But for the sake of discussion and
clarification:
1. The comment that "the U.S. decided that Allende must go" is true so far
as it goes but implies much more that is NOT true in the context of
commentary over the decades and the whole fueled the bottom line conclusion
that the US overthrew and directly or indirectly killed the only elected
socialists president up to then in Latin American history. There is far
more propaganda than fact here and in such popularized politically correct
stuff as the film "Missing." Why? Too briefly, because this position fails
to recognize that Chile was so highly developed politically and that
Chileans are extraordinarily resourceful - to bring it up to date, look at
the path-breaking reforms conducted by economic leaders during the Pinochet
period - and quite capable of running, screwing up and resolving their own
problems. This doesn't mean there was no foreign involvement, for of course
there was from Cuba, the Soviet Union and the United States. But Chile's
history during the late 1960s and early 1970s - as in most respects before
and since - is Chilean, and the Chilean people themselves must
overwhelmingly take pride in and responsibility for most of what happened.
2. Allende's death was the obvious stuff for - and then less obviously of -
propaganda against the post-1973 military government and, perhaps even
more so, against the United States. The military government said it was
suicide and had good medical reports to back it up its claim. Even
Allende's widow accepted suicide until she went to Cuba and flip-flopped
for reasons you may well imagine. From then on the charge that the
US-backed or installed military murdered Allende was a heavy club used to
pulverize the new government and the US. But truth sometimes surfaces.
Today virtually everyone, even on the reasonable left, including - so I am
told on good authority - some members of Allende's family, accept that it
was suicide. Let us foreigners bury the murder business for good as most
Chileans have already done.
3. I do not believe Eduardo Frei was so unpopular at the end of his term as
has been suggested by one commentator in this discussion. On the contrary,
though he would have won by less in 1970 than he did in 1964, for many
complicated reasons, I am convinced he would have won nonetheless if he
could have run, which by the Chilean constitution he could not, and
Chilean's followed their constitution as it was written, not revising it to
allow a ruling president to run again as has become the fashion (for
complicated and not always negative reasons) in the 1990s. The 1970
Christian Democratic candidate Radomiro Tomic, whom I interviewed
extensively at the time, was a compromise within the party and a loser from
the beginning. CD votes went both right and left in the election, away from
the CD. Tomic's vote IN NO WAY represents what Frei would have received.
4. Finally, we need to distinguish carefully between Chile's Maoists and
Miristas. At the time, through interviews and combing of book stalls in the
country, I assembled what is undoubtedly the largest collection in the
world on the Chilean Maoists, whose couple hundred members were indeed
active at the time in the context of the Sino-Soviet dispute. But although
I was then completing a PhD dissertation on Maoism in Latin America, with
Chile as a prime case study, and would have loved to find them major
factors in Chile, they were not.
The Miristas (Movement of the Revolutionary Left) were emphatically NOT
Maoists and were indeed a major factor because of the havoc they caused
pressing Allende to go faster than he wanted and infuriating the Communists
who were the main institutional base of Allende's government. In the
classifications of the day the Miristas were Castroite with Trotskyist
elements. These were mostly kids with some adult support in the Altamirano
wing of the Socialist party and all collectively they were the
"ultra-leftists" in Chilean Communist Party critiques. (The Chilean
socialists were fractured, all were to the left of the Communists, and many
supported the Miristas.) I do not believe Allende was behind atrocities
against communists since in the absence of firm support from his own party
the communists were critical to his staying in power. The communists and
Miristas hated each other, to be sure. They verbally attacked each other as
often as they did the Chilean Right, and on occasion they clashed
physically and killed each other, particularly in the universities.
Where next? Fragments of truth and reams of cause-serving propaganda -
frequently passed on unknowingly by people who didn't even support the
cause - became the very stuff of so much commentary on Chile, US policy and
all of Latin America for so long that even now neither Excedrin or time
have been able to bring full relief. To my knowledge, the definitive study
of how propaganda - from both sides, to be sure - dominated US policy
toward Latin American generally and key countries specifically remains to
be written, though some of us have tried to chip away at "correctness" in
isolated areas. I tried to do some of this in my 1993 book The Civil War
in Nicaragua, co authored with Roger Miranda, for years the chief aide to
Sandinista Defense Minister Humberto Ortega. Hoover fellow Timothy Brown, a
longtime foreign service officer with extensive experience in Central
America, has just complete a PhD dissertation that when published will
"revolutionize" studies of US policy toward Central America during the
1980s. Stanford Political Science Professor Robert Packenham, in his recent
The Dependency Movement, which should soon be out in paperback, has
extensively documented how politics dominated much of the official and
outspoken Latin American studies field for many, many years in the United
States, a fact now-retired Stanford Professor Gabriel Almond and some
others noted many years ago."
