As the Church Committee report affirms, “at the express request of the President . . . The CIA attempted, directly, to foment a military coup in Chile.” The CIA funneled weapons to a group of Chilean officers who plotted a takeover, which was to begin with the kidnapping of René Schneider, the commander in chief of the Chilean army and a constitutionalist who had publicly stated he would support the proper transfer of power. U.S. ambassador Edward Korry had identified a retired general as a military figure who could move against Allende with Schneider out of the way. But two days before the congressional vote, a different group of right-wing extremists, not known to be tied to the CIA, tried to kidnap Schneider. General Schneider tried to defend himself and was mortally wounded in the exchange of gunfire.*
Nixon’s policies did not succeed in diminishing Allende’s popular support. Furthermore, the assassination so close to the congressional vote drew sympathy away from the Right. The Christian Democrats in Congress were already siding with Allende, aligning themselves with UP rather than the Right, thus maintaining Chile’s democratic precedent of confirming the candidate who won the most popular votes, no matter how slight the victory. First, though, they demanded and received a package of guarantees: UP would keep the multiparty system, would maintain civil liberties and freedom of the press, and would protect the armed forces from political purges. Allende wholeheartedly accepted the measures and was confirmed.
Among many on the Chilean Left, perhaps especially among the younger generation, Allende’s triumph brought the sense of a historic shift. The victory also reverberated throughout Latin America, where all eyes were turned toward Chile. This was the world’s first democratic election of a “Socialist parliamentarian,” as Allende described himself, who also held some Marxist ideas. The old orthodoxy of socialism and communism at that point maintained that the only way to create a new society was to take over the state, and the only way to do that was through armed revolution, as in Cuba. In order to establish a government that could implement socialism or communism, it was believed that it was necessary to impose terror on anyone who obstructed the necessary changes. Allende, and those who supported him, suggested and believed that democracy was another means to the same end, without violence.
After Allende’s inauguration, the UP government tried to establish socialism within a bourgeois state where the center and the Right controlled the judiciary and legislature. The UP’s strategy was to use the executive branch’s considerable strength to carry out some immediate economic reforms that would snap the economy out of the recession that Allende inherited. This included the nationalization of large industries, redistribution of income, and state hiring of the unemployed. The subsequent economic pickup was intended to be accompanied by mass political mobilizations, leading to a parliamentary electoral majority for the UP.
The CIA, as confirmed by a 1975 U.S. congressional investigation, covertly spent $8 million in the three years between 1970 and the coup in September 1973, sabotaging Allende’s government. Nixon blocked copper exports to the United States, which had been a staple of the Chilean economy. Meanwhile, those to the UP’s left, including organized Mapuche and the Marxist Movement of the Revolutionary Left (Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria, or MIR), were wreaking havoc with acts of political terrorism. The UP itself was a precarious coalition with little cohesion or agreement regarding the pace and character of change the government was to implement. Allende lacked a mandate while working within a democracy; unlike Castro, he wasn’t relying on a revolutionary army. The result was chaos and extreme political polarization.
Allende’s initial success with government programs ironically helped bring about their demise. Early efforts at redistribution of income through wage and salary adjustments, as well as increased government spending, boosted the stagnant economy. The adjustments were meant to eliminate a wide income gap, while also giving a stimulus to the middle class. But Chilean businesses, manipulated by rampant anti-communist propaganda and fearing what Allende might bring, didn’t reinvest their gains; instead, they sold off their inventory at speculative prices. They invested in dollars and other hard currencies instead of the Chilean peso, which, combined with hoarding and black market trade, consequently created severe shortages of basics: flour, cooking oil, soap, common car and television parts, bedsheets, toilet paper, comfort foods, and, perhaps most aggravating for those dependent on them, cigarettes. Discontent rose along with prices. The U.S. campaign against Allende didn’t help the situation. Upon Allende’s election, Ambassador Korry proposed a series of actions to destabilize the economy, including having U.S. companies in Chile “foot-drag to maximum possible” and “hold off on orders, on deliveries of spare parts.” Starting rumors of imminent rationing created a “run on food stocks.” He also suggested asking U.S. banks to suddenly halt renewal of credit to Chile, saying, “Not a nut or bolt will be allowed to reach Chile under Allende. We shall do all within our power to condemn Chile and the Chilean to utmost deprivation and poverty.”
Inflation skyrocketed. By mid-1973,
