Chile con carnage
Malcolm Deas
THE LAST TWO YEARS OF SALVADOR ALLENDE by Nathaniel Davis I. B. Tauris, f22.50 Nathaniel Davis, a professional diplo- mat, was United States ambassador to Chile for the last two years of Salvador Allende's Unidad Popular government, and for a couple of months after the September 1973 coup that ended it. He sees himself as 'a slightly incongruous "chosen instrument" for Richard Nixon's Chilean policy,' and in 1975 he resigned as Henry Kissinger's Assistant Secretary of State for African Affairs in disagreement over 'covert action' in Angola. A true professional, he has not rushed into print about his Chilean experiences, but has bided his time to produce this admirable diplomatic memoir, well organised, frank, commonsensical and timely. United States ambassadors in difficult situations must expect close and hostile scrutiny. Mr Davis quotes Graham Greene on his predecessor in Santiago, Ambassador Korry: `. . . re- markable for the size and fatness of his earlobes, who symbolised perhaps the out- side aggression.' The book carries no picture of the author's earlobes, but on the evidence of the text he was a correct, sophisticated and, within the limits of the circumstances, a sympathetic envoy.
His book will probably be most closely read for what it says about the United States' involvement in Allende's fall, but its great merit is that it also presents the context of those two years, and a convinc- ing account of the fundamental weaknesses in Allende's strategy and tactics. The 'President was above all famous for his muneca, his fast and flexible political `wrist'. 'Wrist' is no substitute for realistic long-term calculation, and as his candid friend Regis Debray diagnosed, 'Allende never planned anything more than forty- eight hours in advance.' Allende was too welcoming to foreigners: profound social and political transformations are difficult enough to carry out, but it is harder still to make them palatable locally with an excess of cosmopolitan assistance. Fidel Castro's judgments on Allende's procedures — not radical enough — had a superficial realism, but his lengthy visit to Chile is rightly characterised here as a political disaster that excited illusions on the left and exacer- bated the fears of the government's oppo- nents. Most of Allende's coalition — the Communists were the exceptions — suf- fered from the nebulous ambitions of `leading Latin America', of solving the contradictions of socialism and liberty in a `Chilean way', and what got hidden in the clouds were some fatal universal and some specifically Chilean realities.
Ambassador Davis argues convincingly that Allende never made sufficiently clear his administration's commitment to the early Statute of Democratic Guarantees, and that he persisted in a course of `government by loop-hole and fait accom- pli'. Government by loop-hole may appeal to a certain sort of lawyer — have capital- ists not always taken advantage of every legal loop-hole in the bourgeois West? but it was a poor recourse for a President of all Chileans. Unidad Popular appeared to violate the Statute in the particularly sensitive matter of education. The second area of critical ambiguity was the degree of nationalisation of the economy: in June 1972 and in mid-1973 Allende was incap- able of either concession or definition. He did not have the political support for anything more than a 'commanding heights' programme. His failure to recog- nise this roused the gremios against him, and the opposition of truckers and shop- keepers was joined to that of more predict- ably unfriendly sectors. Allende got his political arithmetic wrong: his economic policies were bound to excite more opposi- tion than support. What is more, the small bourgeoisie proved a surprisingly formid- able opponent; it is not a class that Marxists have thought enough about.
Allende shared another blind spot with all Chilean politicians of his generation: the armed forces. Chile possessed, as a relic of a prosperous, modernising and expansionist 19th-century past, the only Potsdam-orientated army left in the world. It was neither well equipped nor well paid, but it was hermetic and well disciplined. It appeared to have strong constitutional traditions — exemplified in these two years by General Prats, on whose suspect 'diary' Ambassador Davis relies a little overmuch. In his dealings with the armed forces Allende's 'wrist' was at its floppiest. His defenders can argue that in relying on buttering up a few commanders he was only following prevailing civilian tradition. Where he departed from that tradition and showed his fundamental ignorance of milit- ary psychology was in his toleration of threats to the military's monopoly of force. He chose to be guarded by the 'Group of `It's a jolly good read.' Personal Friends', the GAP; this was ultimately predictably futile, and always a political liability. The President also showed his hand most unwisely at the time of the abortive tancazo of 29 June 1973: instead of relying on loyal elements in the army against this lieutenant-colonel's putsch, he called for a rising of workers' militias. His Socialist colleague Carlos Altamirano in the days before the Septem- ber coup committed the ultimate folly of encouraging mutiny in the ranks of the navy. Mr Davis's account of the planning of the coup shows General Pinochet sus- taining a Cromwellian hesitancy until very late on. All the same, when the other force commanders just signed their names to the final little bit of paper that confirmed the coup, Pinochet both signed and sealed.
The Last Two Years of Salvador Allende does not rely on criticisms of Unidad Popular, valid though they are, to excul- pate United States policy. It does address directly the question whether the United States' hostility to the government was either a necessary or a sufficient condition for its defeat. It examines the initial 1970 responses in Washington to Allende's elec- tion — 'Track I', some singularly naive ideas about inspiring unlikely constitution- al manoeuvres to prevent his confirmation by the Chilean Congress, and 'Track II', more sinister activities involving military conspiracy. The author's conclusion is that `Track II' was effectively abandoned some- time after Allende took office though it is impossible to say exactly when; he does not consider that it contributed to the coup. He also assesses the impact of United States economic policy and aid to opposition forces, and questions whether 'destabilisa- tion' — that is, the fall rather than the ultimate defeat of the government — was the aim of United States policy:
The US government wished success to opposition forces, a position intrinsically counter to the governing coalition's interest. Is that 'destabilisation'? March 1973 was probably the last time when covert financial aid to the opposition parties was relevant. In later months party electoral strength was no longer the decisive element. By mid-1973 it was becoming clear to responsible US offi- cials in Washington as well as in Santiago that the US record of abstention from coup plotting was going to be more important than any resort to increasingly superfluous covert intervention.
The moral and practical pros and cons of what had been done up until then by way of covert action are argued at fair length, and some myths are healthily exposed the author and others are sueing the makers of the film Missing, and they seem to have a case. Much of what Ambassador Davis has to say has an obvious relevance to Central America. He is himself clearly a democrat, and records without any joy the post-coup remark of General Washington Carrasco: 'The politicians have already worked a lot in this country. Now it is only fair that they take a long rest,' Nothing much any 'track' has been able to do about that.
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