Foreign Affairs
Half a century after the event, conservatives should reflect on the 1973 military coup in Chile and draw lessons for a modern America First foreign policy.
Background chatter echoed in the ambassador’s reception hall, forcing me, a greenhorn American diplomat, to lean in closer. My elderly questioner spoke Spanish in a high, almost squeaky, voice with a heavy Chilean accent. The one-way conversation was friendly and warm, even avuncular: “How long have you been posted to Santiago? Have you enjoyed excursions to Viña del Mar, our beautiful beach resort? Did you travel yet down to see Chile’s incredible mountains, lakes, and forests in the south? When are you going next to the country’s great port city of Valparaiso?”
The friendly chit-chat was over after a few minutes, as a relaxed General Augusto Pinochet, bedecked in his grey tunic and accompanied by a discreet military aide, quietly worked the room.
I was struck by Pinochet’s unassuming manner. His immense pride in Chile was no surprise, but his unpretentious personal style contrasted starkly with the intense vilification from his many enemies, who not only constantly denounced Pinochet as Latin America’s worst dictator, but had actively tried to assassinate him.
Many Chileans are marked by a polite reserve that separates them, for example, from the flash and bravado of their Argentine neighbors across the Andes. In that style, Pinochet neither expected nor created any pomp and circumstance at the small cocktail gathering. On that particular evening, he acted as though he were with old friends, happy to put aside past differences in dealing with the gringos to enjoy good conversation and fine Chilean wine.
It was 1995, the beginning of Chile’s austral winter, and U.S. Ambassador Gabriel Guerra-Mondragón—President Clinton’s man in Santiago—had decided that, after years of the State Department giving Pinochet the cold shoulder, a bit of a personal rapprochement might ease some anti-American tension in the ranks of the Chilean military and among the general’s conservative political allies. At that moment, the bilateral relationship was focused on a free-trade deal, and all American diplomacy really wanted from Pinochet was to help nudge him towards the exit door off Chile’s national stage.
Pinochet was then in his 70s, having grudgingly but peacefully given up the Chilean presidency after the referendum that ended his rule in 1990. Even after having served 16 years as dictator, Pinochet still had won 43 percent of the referendum vote from Chileans who wanted to keep him in power. Defeated by the ballot box, the general moved out of Santiago’s famous La Moneda presidential palace, but continued serving as comandante-en-jefe of the Chilean army. By the early 1990s, Pinochet doubtless thought he was in the final senior statesman phase of a long career of service to his country.
But his was not to be a quiet retirement, as Pinochet’s many enemies, both in Chile and abroad, would launch a ceaseless prosecutorial criminal campaign to put him in the dock. He died in 2006 in Santiago, under house arrest, facing hundreds of criminal charges.
This September marks the 50th anniversary of Pinochet’s 1973 coup against the Marxist President Salvador Allende. With half a century of hindsight, we see an event that has not only been intensely researched and written about, typically by left-leaning historians, but one that still calls for fresh and thoughtful reexamination. Better understanding of Pinochet’s coup can help inform contemporary American foreign affairs, particularly on the wisdom of Washington’s direct intervention in countries to advance the U.S. national interest.
For international leftists and most American liberals, the Chile coup story is long settled, and it is one of Yanqui arrogance, meddling, and human rights abuses. For them, Washington’s support for the Pinochet regime represents the classic example of a major U.S. international blunder, a Cold War intervention that served only to overturn a legitimately elected government and install a ruthless dictatorship. It made Washington, in their blame-America-first Weltanschauung, principally responsible for Chile’s tragedy.
The Left’s retelling of the Pinochet drama is choreographed with many of their favorite bad actors: President Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, and the CIA. Later, even the likes of Milton Friedman and his “Chicago Boys” arrive on the stage to implement neoliberal capitalism. Rarely do the leftist historians fault the Marxist radicalism of Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, and their revolutionary efforts to turn the Western Hemisphere into “two, three, many Vietnams.”
Today, looking back with Cold War fury long past, a modern America First analysis must ask when, if ever, is a major Chile-like U.S. intervention justified? Such questions are abstract and hypothetical, of course, and real scenarios are highly dependent on actual circumstances, but surely the answer with hindsight is that such interventions for America Firsters must be rare and extraordinary. They always bring about massive unintended consequences, and demonstrate that Washington planners, however well intended, rarely control events as they play out.
America First policy has learned much from American reversals in recent decades. Today, U.S. interventions, along the lines of Chile in 1973, are justified foremostly in responding to direct foreign threats coming from territory geographically near to the United States. Such a foreign policy tradition is nothing new, long anchored in the Monroe Doctrine. President Herbert Hoover and Senator Robert Taft also advocated the same approach, calling such a U.S. security policy focused on the Western Hemisphere “continentalism.”
To intervene or not in Chile was a close call. There is a strong case that some action from Washington was justified. Yet even that conclusion must be weighed against the fact that, as we will examine, Pinochet likely would have launched a coup without any push from the Americans.
Given Cold War Realpolitik, I would suggest that today’s America First practitioners, had they been in Washington making foreign policy in 1973, would have approved of the Nixon-Kissinger response. Given the unique circumstances, most conservatives, even today, would say the U.S. needed to provide some kind of active support to the anti-Marxists in Chile. At the time, the threat from Fidel Castro’s Cuba had the potential to set wildfires across Latin America.
Our hemisphere was vulnerable to insurgency. In 1967, Bolivian security forces had killed Che Guevara and successfully contained Castroism with only modest U.S. assistance. Chile’s fall into Havana’s orbit, brought about by Allende’s narrow victory in the 1970 election, represented a real new threat in the Americas and was an extraordinary challenge given Cold War dynamics.
Allende’s playbook of course drew great inspiration from Castro’s revolution, and the impact of clandestine assistance that Havana funneled to Chile is an ignored chapter that needs more attention even today. But Allende’s operational plan of slower revolution was less Cuban and much more comparable to the Chavez-Maduro model that has in recent years destroyed Venezuela. Throughout 1970–73, Allende undermined the country’s established social norms while implementing radical policies that devastated Chile’s economy, with inflation reaching 300 percent.
Nixon-Kissinger had given instructions to pass the word that Washington would support the Chilean armed forces in overthrowing Allende’s government. The CIA station in Santiago, however, actually recruited and partnered with incompetent plotters who brutally botched the job; overthrowing the government in a country like Chile was not easy. Moreover, U.S. analysts had written off Pinochet as an Allende regime loyalist. » …
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