Allende's Chile and the Inter-American Cold War by Tanya Harmer

Author:Tanya Harmer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Brazil, Cuba - Foreign Relations - 1959-1990, International Relations, Chile, Cuba, Brazil - Foreign Relations - 1964-1985, 20th Century, Latin America - Politics and Government - 1948-1980, General, United States, South America, Political Science, Latin America - Foreign Relations - United States, United States - Foreign Relations - Latin America, Latin America, United States - Foreign Relations - 1945-1989, Chile - Foreign Relations - 1970-1973, History
ISBN: 9780807834954
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
Published: 2011-10-10T00:00:00+00:00

Although the Nixon administration was caught up in the high-level diplomacy of détente during 1972, this did not mean Washington ignored the hemisphere. The U.S. president was star-struck by his summit meetings with Mao and Brezhnev and, as we now know from the Nixon White House tapes, condescending toward Latin America’s “importance” in this context.163 Yet, he remained preoccupied with fighting the Cold War in the region, and U.S. policy makers continued to be concerned about how events south of their borders affected the United States’ credibility as a superpower and the strength of its ideological convictions. As Connally had reported to Médici, Nixon “was hopeful that a long period of peace could be achieved as long as the United States remained strong and had the support of the countries of the free world such as Brazil.”164 Indeed, global politics may have been shifting away from the certainties of an earlier bipolar Cold War era, but this did not mean Nixon and Kissinger were willing to relinquish control. Thus, when Nixon urged the Mexican president to let his message triumph above Castro’s in Latin America, he hoped not only that this would help ward off the “poison” of Chilean and Cuban influence but that his counterpart would contribute to spreading U.S. ideals of capitalist economic progress and its prescriptions of order in the hemisphere.

In return, Echeverría urged the U.S. president “for a whole new shaping or recasting of American policy vis-à-vis Latin America.”165 President Misael Pastrana of Colombia also urged the United States to “pay greater attention to [the] underdeveloped world and demonstrate less apathy toward Latin America” when he had met Connally in June.166 In fact, beyond Allende and Castro, others clearly worried about the drift in the United States’ commitment to regional development. What is more, by the late 1960s and early 1970s economic nationalists on the left and right viewed security not only in terms of external strategic threats but also increasingly in terms of economic stability. In this respect, many of the hemisphere’s armed forces increasingly regarded themselves as needing to play a key role in politics because, for them, defending their countries was a geo-economic as well as a traditionally geostrategic question.167 Within Chile, this was also the case, especially as there was an obvious contradiction between the claims of a government that purported to be bringing independence and sovereignty and the reality of growing indications that the UP was leading Chile to precarious dependency on external sources of funding.

Although Allende’s message had inspired other nations in the global South, the UP’s unique socialist democratic experiment therefore found itself increasingly out on a limb in late 1972. As UNCTAD’s former secretary Gamani Corea noted, the organization’s Third World members were ultimately more concerned with links to industrial nations in the East and West than with global bodies as a means of accelerating their countries’ development.168 And while other nationalists defaulted to traditional vertical patterns of trade and aid, reaping the benefits of the United States’

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