Washington would hardly have promoted Pinochet’s coup if it had not chained several successes in a row not only in Guatemala (1954), but also in Brazil (1964) or Bolivia (1971). In all cases, anti-communist military regimes emerged close to the United States, and many of those responsible had received training in counterinsurgency, especially starting in the early 1960s, at a US center in Panama. This center, operational since 1946, was later renamed the School of the Americas.
There are more coincidences. The tragic fall of Salvador Allende in the face of the military uprising of Augusto Pinochet had a very clear precedent in 1954. Then, as Vanni Pettinà, professor at the Center for Historical Studies of the College of Mexico, recalls, “a direct and accredited intervention of The United States, which trained the paramilitary groups that carried out the coup, deployed marines and helped design an operation that was supposed to sow chaos.”
Not everything was the same. In Guatemala, the expert warns, “the US intervention lasted until the day of the coup itself, while in Chile it only created a prior context that suffocated Allende, fueled the need for Pinochet’s operation and facilitated its success once it occurred. ”. Both Chile and Guatemala are the only two coups from that time, according to Pettinà, where direct intervention by Washington is proven. At the opposite extreme are those of Paraguay (1954) or Uruguay (1973), where Washington limited itself to helping the coup plotters after they took power. Finally, in Brazil (1964) and Bolivia (1971), the direct involvement of the CIA or the Pentagon seems the most likely scenario.
In any case, all the uprisings, with and without direct intervention, were favored by the turning point of US doctrine in 1950. It was then that the National Security Council adopted a memorandum justifying the country’s support for Latin American governments. related, regardless of their coup nature or whether they repressed the human rights of their population. This is how Washington entered the Cold War in Latin America. Four years later, he had already overthrown the Guatemalan Jacobo Árbenz and welcomed Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay.
Another aspect in which the coups of that period coincide is, in general, the exaggeration of the threat of Soviet intervention in the region. As Pettinà warns, “fear should never be underestimated in a US policy during the Cold War that identified countries as poor and geopolitically irrelevant as Guatemala or Vietnam as existential dangers… assuming that they could provoke, absurdly, a domino effect that would extend the communism to all its neighbors.”
Curiously, the domino effect that occurred in Latin America was the opposite: in 1976, Chile, Paraguay, Brazil, Bolivia, Argentina and Uruguay already had anti-communist rulers. And the Soviet Union, according to the professor at the Center for Historical Studies of the College of Mexico, had hardly done anything to prevent it.
The polarization and alarmism of the time, however, paved the way for it to appear that Jacobo Árbenz in Guatemala, João Goulart in Brazil or Salvador Allende in Chile had clearly taken sides on one of the sides of the Cold War, defying with this the power of the United States and sealing its end.
Actually, contrary to what propaganda claimed, the policies of Árbenz, Goulart or Allende did not have to anticipate the conversion of their countries into socialist republics, much less into satellites of Moscow. It could only be stated that the agrarian reform, the nationalization of strategic industries or the progressive tax reform were decidedly leftist, and that they directly harmed the economic elites and American multinationals (such as United Fruit, which owned enormous areas of crops in Guatemala, or the Kennecott Utah Copper, which controlled part of the copper production in Chile).
But in the context of the Cold War these nuances seemed to matter little. Fear and ideological fanaticism invaded everything, and that is why some sincerely believed that it was a matter of time before countries like Brazil or Chile embraced the Soviet orbit, which was the end of the steep, inevitable and slippery slope to which their measures. Either the US acted now or it would be too late. He was risking forever losing a region on which, for obvious reasons of proximity, American security depended. Who would want to take on a responsibility like that in Washington?
It is true that, starting in the sixties, the success of the Castro revolution, its ability to destabilize countries like Bolivia with its guerrillas, and the Cuban missile crisis were going to confirm for some that the future of the United States depended on controlling the present of Latin America.
However, even then there were different sensitivities in Washington about how it should be done, and that also influenced the way in which all the coups, including the Chilean one, were justified or encouraged. For example, Eisenhower opted for direct intervention in Guatemala amid the outbreak of McCarthyism in the 1950s, and Nixon preferred to create only the conditions necessary for Pinochet’s success to occur, because he feared the reaction of the US Congress.
Perhaps he was right, if we remember the way in which, later, the Senate prohibited the financing of the Nicaraguan Contras. Furthermore, according to Vanni Pettinà, President Nixon’s national security advisor, Henry Kissinger, asked Pinochet’s people after the uprising to “do what they had to do,” but to do it before Congress could react.
Kissinger’s words not only demonstrate that there were different sensitivities in the world’s leading power. They also suggest, in their indeterminacy, that Washington either did not want or could not avoid the suspension of freedoms in general and the brutal repression in particular that the coup leaders would impose not only on the communists, but on anyone who questions them or has previously questioned them. .
Starting in 1975, the United States supported Operation Condor, a campaign of political repression and state terrorism carried out against dissidents by the military intelligence services of Argentina, Brazil, Bolivia, Chile, Paraguay and Uruguay. It should be remembered that Videla’s coup d’état in Argentina occurred in 1976.
The relative indeterminacy of Kissinger’s indications, after months of unequivocal support for the Chilean coup plotters, is better understood in light of what the US intelligence services learned in Guatemala and its application in the subsequent coups. The Americans knew that the more direct his intervention, the more it would seem like a foreign operation and, in the worst case, an American imperialist invasion with the clear aspiration of installing a puppet government. And if the population or the military came to that conclusion, then in many cases they would not support it.
The military coup leaders wanted to be able to believe that they were the protagonists, patriots who were going to save their country from the clutches of foreign communism. And the population that would later accept the coup also needed to be convinced that the military’s action was nothing more than a way to defend itself from chaos. A chaos caused by some compatriots who had sold themselves to a foreign imperialist power like the Soviet Union… or to its Cuban subsidiary.
For this reason, American support, direct or indirect, would never have guaranteed the success of those coups by itself. Several factors were needed: prior political polarization, which included intense civil confrontations; the panic of a good part of the middle class in the face of growing disorders, in the fields or in the streets, that could destroy their only sources of income and return them to the hunger and poverty of their parents and grandparents; the outrage of millions of people in the face of massive and overwhelming misery and inequality; and the conviction on the part of the elites (industrialists, landowners, military) that, in their fight against socialism or communism, they could lose everything.
To this must be added the tenuous democratic tradition of the region, too accustomed to continuous coups and rigged elections, and the desperate need for political stability of a substantial part of the population. In the five decades before Pinochet, there were four successful coups in Chile and another nine failed ones. Augusto Pinochet later remained in power for fifteen years, something similar to what happened with Alfredo Stroessner in Paraguay or the military junta in Brazil from 1964 to 1985.
As can be seen, the experiences of previous coups shed light on the one that destroyed Chilean democracy on September 11, 1973. All of them take on a new meaning with that memorandum of the National Security Council of 1950, in all of them the threat is exaggerated. of the Soviet intervention, the result of fear and the ideological and geopolitical polarization of the Cold War, and all of them were influenced by the different sensitivities that existed at that time in Washington (which was never, simply, a monolithic bloc, nor were they Moscow or Havana).
Finally, in all of them the role of the United States is less decisive than it may seem. Washington, above all, took advantage of an extremely volatile local context that favored its interests and without which, most likely, none of those coups would have had the same success.