The 1973 coup in Chile and its continuing echoes

50 years on, the Monroe Doctrine is still in effect

September 11 was the 50th anniversary of the coup in Chile against Salvador Allende, the elected President of Chile. Sam Seder¹ interviewed Marian Schlotterbeck on The Majority Report about the US role in the coup. Schlotterbeck is the author of Beyond the Vanguard: Everyday Revolutionaries in Allende’s Chile (2018).

Allende was the head of the Chilean Socialist Party and considered himself a Marxist. He pursued a project of achieving power through democratic elections in the classic Social Democratic tradition.

Much of the radical left in Latin America was more persuaded by the arguments of supporters of the Cuban Revolution and Maoists that a political program of national independence and anti-capitalist economics could only be achieved by armed struggle, because of the intransigence of Latin American oligarchies and the United States in prioritizing capitalist economics and American dominance over democracy and the social welfare of the people in Latin America.

The enduring Monroe Doctrine

Although in 1973 the Cuban Revolution and Cuba’s alliance with the Soviet Union that led to the Cuban Missile Crisis was the chief Latin American nightmare of the American government and the bipartisan Cold War consensus in the US, 1973 was far from the first time the US had asserted its option to call the political shots for its Southern neighbors. Although the US government considers it uncouth to talk about the Monroe Doctrine² of 1823 today, in practice it is still in effect .

In its original form, the Monroe Doctrine had a real pro-democracy and anti-imperialist element to it. President James Monroe and his Secretary of State John Quincy Adams developed the doctrine to declare that the US would oppose any European power attempting to establish new colonies in the Western Hemisphere. While today we are very aware of the difference between current standards of democracy and the realities of 1823, the United States was seen in Europe and Latin America back then as a model of an independent democratic country.

It wasn’t the only such model in the world. France during the 18th and 19th century was known for pushing the envelope on democratic development. The Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804 went beyond both the French and American revolutions in its democratic aspirations, but their influence on the Haitian one was enormous.³ Other less widely known trends such as the proto-populist governments of Juan Manuel de Rosas (1829-32 and 1835-52) in Argentina were writing their own chapters of that story. And though Britain’s government was notably less democratic than that of the US, and its colonial practices in India and elsewhere were appalling, it still remained an important model for liberal governance.

The US with the Monroe Doctrine was serious in wanting to protect Latin American nations pursuing their own independent governments, which generally followed some form of the American model.

As the name of this newsletter hints, I’m not spooked by the idea of contradictions being a constant feature of historical developments. (Hegel, who developed his own influential theory of history as the unfolding of contradictions, was a contemporary of Monroe and Adams.)

The present-day Quincy Institute, a think tank that is a current bastion of “restrainer” and “realist“ foreign policy analysis skeptical of US military interventions, takes its name from the future President who as Secretary of State was key in developing the Monroe Doctrine, which did include respect for the borders of its hemispheric neighbors. Secretary Adams famously declared to Congress in 1821 that the US “goes not abroad, in search of monsters to destroy.”⁴

But respect for Latin American borders of 1823 by the United States itself was, to put it mildly, not consistently held. What is known in the US as the Mexican War of 1846-48 was not based on a good-neighbor policy:

The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo 175 years ago put an end to the U.S. Intervention in Mexico, a conflict that resulted in the cession of much of Mexican territory. The terms of the Treaty demanded that the southern country would cede 55% of its territory, the present-day states of California, Nevada, Utah, and much of Colorado, New Mexico and Arizona. Mexico also had to renounce any claim to Texas and had to recognize the Rio Grande as Texas’ southern border. In return, the United States paid $15 million ($470 million in current dollars).⁵

In 1938 after Hitler Germany had illegally invaded Austria, Mexico was the only country to formally protest the aggression to the League of Nations.⁶ They obviously remembered their own experience with a neighbor from the North invading their country and seizing their territory.

Interventions into Latin American politics continued into the following centuries. President Dwight Eisenhower’s later scruples about the military-industrial complex didn’t hold his administration back from overthrowing the democratically elected government of Jacobo Arbenz in Guatemala in 1954 at the behest of the United Fruit Company.⁷ As fate would have it, a young Argentine physician named Ernesto Guevara was visiting in Guatemala at the time of the coup, an event which made a large impression on him.⁸

John Prados remarks on the Guatemala operation and the previous on in Iran, “In both Iran and Guatemala the United States [later] received credit from world public opinion for creating dictatorships, not democracies. In the short-term, though, these covert operations seemed [to the US] to be shining successes.”⁹

Monroe Doctrine in action: Chile, 1973

The 1973 coup in Chile generated considerably more public, media, and Congressional concern than the Guatemala action of 1954 had. After years of the Vietnam War, the civil rights movement, the assassinations of John and Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., Watergate, and revelations beginning in 1971 of massive FBI abuses under the COINTELPRO operation, there was far more public and journalistic willingness to question dubious US operations in other countries.

The 1976 assassination of Allende’s former Foreign Minister Orlando Letelier in Washington by agents of Chile’s dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet¹⁰ didn’t improve the reputation of the Chilean dictatorship and the coup that brought it to power. However much the Nixon and Ford Administration and ghouls like Henry Kissinger and Milton Friedman adored the dictatorship, most Americans in 1976 considered a foreign government assassinating someone in the United States with a terrorist act (a car bomb) right in the middle of the nation’s capital city had a pretty rancid odor.

The 1973 coup set the stage for what is now often seen as the successful launch of the “neoliberal” economic policies that did such damage to economies democracies and democracies across the world since.¹¹ As Patrick Iber writes:

The dictatorship led by Augusto Pinochet murdered and exiled many of its opponents—and worked to remake the relationship between state, economy, and society. To do the latter, it followed the advice of a group of economists known as the “Chicago Boys,” for most of them had trained at the University of Chicago, where their teachers included Milton Friedman (who became the most famous) and his colleague Al Harberger (who cared most about Chilean development). But Chicago’s economics department was not just any program. Its tendency was to trust markets and to mistrust regulation. The Chicago Boys extended the reach of market logic as deeply as they could: slashing state employment, dismantling unions, and creating a privatized pension system. By the time the regime left power in 1990, Chile was considered among the most “neoliberal” societies on Earth.¹² [my emphasis]

The National Security Archive is a good source for historical documentation about the overthrow of Allende.¹³

Sebastian Edwards summarizes the 1973 coup for Project Syndicate.¹⁴

NACLA has been covering Latin American politics from a progressive perspective for decades. They have several articles about Chile on the 50th anniversary of the coup, “Remembering Chile’s U.S.-backed Coup, 50 Years On.”¹⁵

1. Chilean Coup At 50 w/ Marian Schlotterbeck. The Majority Report YouTube channel 09/12/2023. (Accessed: 2023-12-09).

2. Waxman, Matthew (2023): The Anniversary of the Monroe Doctrine. Lawfare 12/02/2018. <https://www.lawfaremedia.org/article/anniversary-monroe-doctrine> (Accessed: 2023-13-09).

3. David Brion Davis: “The Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, mostly led by Toussaint Louverture, may well have been the most important single event in the history of New World slavery. Despite the revolution’s relatively small scale, its historical influence for some sixty or seventy years can even be compared to that of the 1917 Russian Revolution.” H Changed the World. New York Review of Books 05/31/2007 edition. <https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2007/05/31/he-changed-the-new-world/> (Accessed: 2023-13-09).

4. Adams, John Quincy (1821): Speech to the U.S. House of Representatives on Foreign Policy (July 4, 1821). Brian Loveman-San Diego State University website. <https://loveman.sdsu.edu/docs/1821secofstateJQAdmas.pdf> (Accessed: 2023-13-09).

5. Martínez, Alonso (2023): Intervención estadounidense: ¿cómo perdió México la mitad de su territorio hace 175 años? El País 19.May.2023. <https://elpais.com/mexico/2023-05-19/intervencion-estadounidense-como-perdio-mexico-la-mitad-de-su-territorio-hace-175-anos.html> (Accessed: 2023-13-09). My translation to English.

6. Joint communiqué by Austria and Mexico on the occasion of the 70th anniversary of the Mexican protest against the "Anschluss" of Austria by Nazi Germany. Federal Ministry Republic of Austria: European and International Affairs 03/19/2008. <https://www.bmeia.gv.at/en/the-ministry/press/news/2008/joint-communique-by-austria-and-mexico-on-the-occasion-of-the-70th-anniversary-of-the-mexican-protest-against-the-anschluss-of-austria-by-nazi-germany/> (Accessed: 2023-13-09).

7. June 27, 1954: Elected Guatemalan Leader Overthrown in CIA-Backed Coup . Zinn Education Project, n/d. <https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/jacobo-arbenz-guzman-deposed/> (Accessed: 2023-13-09).

8. "At age 26, Guevara arrived in Mexico. He had spent five weeks in Bolivia and nine months in Guatemala, where he witnessed the overthrow of reformist president Jacobo Arbenz by a CIA-backed military coup. The event forever fixed his hatred of the United States. By then he was a convinced Marxist, and ardent admirer of the Soviet Union." - Che Guevara (1928-1967). PBS American Experience, n/d. <https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/castro-che-guevara-1928-1967/> (Accessed: 2023-13-09).

9. Prados, John (2006): Safe for Democracy: The Secret Wars of the CIA, 123. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee.

10. Risen, James (2023): How Henry Kissinger Paved the Way for Orlando Letelier's Assassination. The Intercept 06/16/2023. <https://theintercept.com/2023/06/16/henry-kissinger-assassination-orlando-letelier-chile/> (Accessed: 2023-13-09).

11. Edwards, Sebastian (2023): The Chile Project: The Story of the Chicago Boys and the Downfall of Neoliberalism. Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press.

12. Iber, Patrick (2023): When Milton Friedman Met Pinochet. New Republic 05/15/2023. <https://newrepublic.com/article/172441/milton-friedman-met-pinochet> (Accessed: 2023-13-09).

13. Chile Documentation Project. National Security Archive. <https://nsarchive.gwu.edu/project/chile-documentation-project> (Accessed: 2023-13-09).

14. Edwards, Sebastián (2023): Chile’s 9/11, Fifty Years Later. Project Syndicate 09/08/2023. <https://www.project-syndicate.org/onpoint/pinochet-coup-50th-anniversary-by-sebastian-edwards-2023-09> (Accessed: 2023-13-09).

15. Remembering Chile’s U.S.-backed Coup, 50 Years On. NACLA 09/10/2023. <https://nacla.org/remembering-chile-coup-50> (Accessed: 2023-13-09).