Stephen M. Streeter, “ Uncool and Incorrect” in Chile: The Nixon Administration and the Downfall of Salvador Allende

This book is an accurate, balanced, and rigorous essay of historical interpretation and a text of vast erudition skillfully seasoned with dry academic humor, beginning with the very title. In 200 pages of text and more than 100 pages of notes and bibliography Stephen M. Streeter provides a superb bird's-eye view of the thousand days Salvador Allende served as president under Chile's 1925 liberal Constitution, a performance that ended on 11 September 1973 when a military junta led by General Augusto Pinochet seized power. Streeter's specific goal is to provide an assessment of the role played in Allende's downfall by the United States, from President Richard Nixon, National Security Adviser Henry Kissinger, the State Department, the Treasury Department, and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) to the School of the Americas in Panama all the way to global U.S. corporations with major investments in two key sectors of the Chilean economy: copper (Anaconda, Kennecott) and telecommunications (International Telephone and Telegraph, ITT).Streeter concludes that “Despite these substantial contributions to creating a coup climate, the Nixon administration cannot be held entirely responsible for orchestrating Allende's downfall.” He also convincingly maintains that in the critical days of September 1973 “a peaceful transition of power was possible had Chileans not lost faith in their democratic institutions” (p. 201). In a metaphor introduced to the philosophical vocabulary by the U.S. pragmatist William James, we could say that the “cash value” of the second conclusion is simply that a peaceful transition was no longer possible. Both of Streeter's arguments are convincing, but the first will be disputed, from several corners. Competing interpretations will be put forth, and that is why it is important from the start to explain what “rational thinking” is.The first step in mastering it is to take a distance from language, an attitude that can be expressed by talking of “noises” rather than referring to terms or concepts. The challenge begins when we contrast questions that are answered by reasoning (about the norms governing how to form sentences in a language), “formal” truths, with a totally different group of questions, to wit, those arising from natural phenomena, the ultimate source of all facts, and “empirical” truths, those that are discovered only by observing the world. It is one thing to ask how the radius of a circle relates to a circle's area, a formal question that is solved by reasoning only. But asking whether there is a teapot in orbit around the sun between Earth and Mars is an empirical question that, like all others of that sort, is ultimately answered only by observation. Raphael Sanzio immortalized the contrast between formal and empirical questions with the two central figures of “The School of Athens,” the world-famous fresco he painted in the Apostolic Palace for Pope Julius II. The older Plato, pointing to heaven, eternal truths, and the realm of ideas, and Aristotle, Plato's disciple, pointing to the ground, where matter is organized in three realms: mineral, vegetable, and animal.Anyone wanting to master rational thinking must value information, hard facts about the world, rigor in argumentation, and imagination. In general, the contribution of imagination should be minimal, but permeated by humor and humanity. A necessary condition of achieving the argumentative rigor required by rational thinking is the ability to deal with conceptual distinctions in the spirit of the duck-rabbit figure, seeing the contrast between formal and empirical truths also the other way around, in terms of a convergence. How can that be achieved? By, again, taking a distance from language and realizing that, over and above the contrast between the language we use and the world we speak about, both kinds of questions have only one true or right or correct answer. In both cases only one position deserves to be treated with respect or taken seriously by rational thinking.Viewed in this way, formal and empirical questions reveal a “family resemblance.” This “noise” was introduced in the philosophical lexicon by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Austrian philosopher of Jewish origin who was the leading disciple of the third earl Russell, Nobel laureate and perhaps the most famous public intellectual of the 20th century (who, incidentally, coined the example of empirical question mentioned above in the third paragraph). In both realms, well-defined questions have one and only one true, right or correct answer, the only position worthy of being taken seriously or, if this “noise” is deemed better by the reader, treated with respect by rational thinking.From modernity onwards, after reason supposedly had liberated itself from the chains of the Christian version of monotheism, “science” in the strict and literal meaning of that “noise” would comprise only two fields, material reality and formal reality. And, in both cases, well-defined questions have only one true, correct or right answer. Here comes a methodological warning: over and above formal and empirical questions, rational thinking requires, demands, or needs acknowledging a third variety of question, which might be called prima facie human, associated with “normative” phenomena, meaning by that “noise” those that emerge from free agents and for which there is an internal point of view, to put this point in terms of the metaphor introduced in the philosophy of law by H.L.A. Hart, English Oxonian philosopher of Jewish origin.For that variety of question is answered by means of argument in a debate arbitrated by rational thinking, amongst a finite array of different positions which despite offering different and often mutually excluding answers are intelligible and supported by hard empirical facts. Among other fields, such questions emerge in anthropology, economics, history, philosophy, politics, psychology and, of course, Cold War studies! The only true, right or correct answer to this third kind of question is constituted by the open but bounded interval which contains different but equally intelligible positions, built with rigor from documented facts, that are (or were once) alive in discussion and which hold among them “intimate argumentative relations.” The only way to improve the understanding of one position is to understand better the content of the other positions. And how can that be done? Begin by treating their practices with respect. When a Red-Indian visits an ancestor's tomb and leaves a culinary delight we are certainly facing a practice that differs from the Christian habit of leaving fresh flowers. But taking a distance from language again, each of these practices might be thought of as a variation of one and the same human costume: offering a sacrifice (of food or of flowers) to honor the memory of one's ancestors.Did President Allende commit suicide? Though of historical relevance, this is an empirical question. There is only one right answer to it, which Streeter (and this reviewer) holds is that indeed he did. But asking about the role played by the Nixon Administration in Allende's downfall is not an empirical question. It is a prima facie human question, one which an open but bounded interval of positions pretends to answer. And from their internal points of view, different people will live as a truth different positions, according to many factors, among other, their age, social origin, interests and histories. Some are happy to believe as a truth that American “imperialism” masterminded and executed the coup and that, therefore, Washington has complete responsibility for the crimes committed thereafter by the Junta headed by Pinochet.In the other extreme is the option favored by Streeter (and this reviewer): the coup that actually took place had a purely local origin, it was the brain-child of three Chileans: Rear Admiral José Toribio Merino, at the time the second in command of the Chilean navy, his mate, Ismael Huerta, and general Gustavo Leigh of the Air Force who were not acting on U.S. orders. Pinochet had been designated commander in chief of the Army by Allende only 19 days before the actual coup and joined the subversive plot at the last minute. A more precise formulation of Streeter's claim that “the Nixon administration cannot be held entirely responsible for orchestrating Allende's downfall” would be the following. The Nixon Administration had no direct link with the coup that actually took place. Allende's Untergang was caused by a local subversive movement in the Armed Forces, led by higher officials whose emotional thinking thrived in the terror of communism, “the enemy within” of the National Security Doctrine developed by the U.S. Department of Defense from George F. Kennan's ideas, which was taught at the School of the Americas. And, yes, of course, all this happened in the context a coup climate to the creation of which the U.S. government in alliance with the local Right-wing mass-media made a substantial contribution.But to be fair, five consecutive Chilean governments, all democratically elected during the Cold War, also share responsibility in creating the conditions that made possible the Junta atrocities, as former deputy Luis Valentín Ferrada has rightly pointed out. Such governments sent Chilean officers to the School of the Americas in Panama for decades during the Cold War. Their education was structured in terms of the already mentioned National Security Doctrine and its obsessive fear of “the enemy within.” The leading Chilean graduate of that worthy institution, General Manuel Contreras (1967), created and headed the National Intelligence Directorate (Dirección de Inteligencia Nacional, Dina), which organized the murder of several political opponents in foreign countries, including that of Orlando Letelier, former ambassador to the United States and Allende minister, who was assassinated in Washington, DC's Sheridan Circle in September 1976, together with his assistant, a 25 year-old U.S. woman.Rational thinking's natural rival is emotional thinking, which is characterized as the tendency to confuse the intensity of a conviction with proof of its truth. The former proceeds without haste, with time to check each intelligible position with the evidence for and against, together with the other intelligible positions, an exercise in which Streeter's book excels. But the latter relies chiefly on sentiments. It considers only those bits of information that reinforce and exacerbate them. And, of course, has no interest in other positions. Here endeth the methodological warning.Streeter rightly claims that the chapters of this book “are focused thematically and arranged in roughly a chronological order,” beginning with a review of U.S.–Chile relations during the 19th century (p. 5). All main events in the period immediately before Allende's inauguration are recorded, though his previous 40-year-long career in Chilean democratic politics is not even mentioned. Many myths about the role of the United States in Allende's downfall are carefully dissolved by Streeter. His treatment of the Plan Z affair is the best I have read.After the coup, the right-wing press, headed by El Mercurio (the longest publishing newspaper in Spanish), ventilated the Junta's claim to have discovered an Unidad Popular scheme to kill thousands of political opponents, both civilian and military. Agustín Edwards, the newspaper's owner, had already rushed to the White House on September 5, 1970, the day after Allende came ahead in the presidential election with 36.5% of the vote, to request a coup to prevent him from swearing. He met with National Security Advisor Dr. Henry Kissinger, CIA Director Richard Helms, and U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell. The Plan Z hoax was probably written by Gonzalo Vial Correa, a history professor at the Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, an early piece of propaganda to justify the coup. Ismael Huerta, designated by the Junta as its first Foreign Affairs Minister, denounced Plan Z as an empirical truth in the United Nations General Assembly early in October 1973. Though such a plan never existed, it triggered the worst human-rights violations in Chilean contemporary history.The Cold War is the background against which this drama unfolded, a conflict the peculiarities of which are key to understanding that both Allende's suicide and Pinochet's coup achieved worldwide fame. To begin, the conflict between two of the former Allies, the Soviet Union and the United States, was largely a propaganda war though in Indochina real fighting was still prevalent. After defeating Hitler, communism and capitalism began competing for new acolytes in the Third World, with the Kremlin taking a clear lead since 1945. To begin, Stalin's contribution to Hitler's defeat was paramount.He sent nearly ten million young Soviets to die in battle, while British and U.S. casualties were under one million. For this reason, Roosevelt and Churchill could not refuse Stalin's offer to negotiate with him in the Soviet Union at the Yalta conference on the eve of Hitler's final defeat. A bit over a decade later, the Soviet Union put in orbit round the Earth the first artificial satellite (October 1957), the first dog (November 1957), the first man (April 1961) and then the first woman (June 1963), bringing these last two back alive. A truly impressive performance. During that period, all chess world champions were Soviet citizens, with just one brief exception, Bobby Fischer, a U.S. citizen who thus achieved international fame. In the Olympics, Soviet athletes won many medals, rivaling the United States.In the propaganda war, the Soviet authorities presented such achievements as evidence of the intrinsic superiority of Communism. Supposedly, they offered empirical confirmation that centralizing production and organizing society in terms of a one-party system was the rational option. A “scientific” refutation of private property, the key bourgeois cum capitalist “instrument of oppression,” was held out by Moscow as the only way to avoid the “exploitation of men by men,” the original sin of the liberal system based on free markets. The Communist utopia claimed to offer free education for all and that the State would take care of elderly citizens for life. Two different ways of organizing society were competing, and things looked bright for the Kremlin in the 1950s and 1960s, as newly independent states in Africa and Asia opted for state-led models of economic development. A revolution led by Fidel Castro, a charismatic lawyer educated by the Jesuits, triumphed in Cuba the first day of 1959. After expatriates living in Miami, Florida, failed in April 1961 to spark a counterrevolution through the Bay of Pigs invasion (despite U.S. support authorized by Dwight Eisenhower and ratified by John Kennedy), Castro, until then the darling of progressive New Yorkers, turned to the Soviet Union.People in the highest positions of the U.S. government during the Cold War, according to Streeter, perceived political reality in terms of sheer emotional thinking, though he does not use that “noise.” They too were ultimatel, victims of propaganda politics, an option inaugurated by Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi Reichsminister für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda, with his skillful use of the new mass media. Streeter's book documents that Kissinger was wont to compare Allende with Hitler, thus showing his scant knowledge of local reality, particularly of Allende's political trajectory. If in a democratic society, a freemason medical doctor elected president had succeeded in leading a “peaceful” way to socialism (“la vía chilena al socialismo”), the impact in South America and Western Europe would have been enormous. As the late Christopher Hitchens rightly argued in the London Review of Books in July 2000, “Chile . . . to its glory and misery has produced more history than it can consume locally.”During the thousand days Allende lasted as president, he surfed with dexterity the gigantic waves created by the Cuban revolution in its Marxist version. This is the context in which his true significance can be assessed. Henry Kissinger, the Metternich of the 20th century, rightly saw that Allende posed a far greater challenge to the United States than the guerrilla options advocated by Che Guevara. A handful of youngsters imbued with emotional thinking would never have been a match for a professional military. Pinochet's 1973 coup was a point of inflexion of the Cold War. At long last, Washington seemed to be taking the lead from Moscow.The book contains only a handful of minor mistakes. For example, it claims that “Spanish authorities detained Pinochet in London” when in fact he was detained by the British police at the request of a Spanish judge (p. 3). Also, that Pinochet's “bloody dictatorship . . . lasted 17 years” (p. 4). This mantra, oddly enough, is sung with equal fervor both by his admirers and by his critics, though the dictatorship lasted only 16 years and six months, from 11 September 1973 to 11 March Also, after the of the Constitution, as Pinochet then claimed and not without the he over a rather than a It is also to the of the Chilean group as and of and (p. the philosopher of Jewish origin, is as a (p. 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