Was the U.S. Involved?

The U.S. has a long and mostly inglorious history of meddling in the internal affairs of Latin American nations. Thus it came as no surprise to Washington that the Chilean junta's overthrow of President Salvador Allende sparked a flurry of angry charges that either the CIA or the White House had somehow engineered the coup. At a special meeting of the United Nations Security Council called by Cuba to protest attacks by Chilean troops on its embassy in Santiago during the coup, Cuban Ambassador Ricardo Alarcon y Quesada charged: "The trail of blood spilled in Chile leads directly to the dark dens of the Central Intelligence Agency and the Pentagon."

In Mexico, former Chilean Ambassador Hugo Vigorena Ramirez, a career diplomat who resigned his post in Mexico City after the coup, claimed to have seen documents outlining what he called the "CIA's war against Allende." The alleged plan, code-named Centaur, was said to involve economic and psychological subversion of the Allende government, including such dirty tricks as introducing counterfeit money and upsetting the rhythm of crops. "The CIA plan prepared for the coup," insisted Vigorena. "It was a systematic campaign of torpedoing the government."

Vigorena's charges seemed to be bolstered by Washington's lack of concern at Allende's fall. President Nixon sent no message of condolence to Allende's widow--a customary gesture on the death of an elected head of state. Nor did the Administration lament the demise of the democratically elected government in Chile. "We will have to work with the generals," said a State Department spokesman, "and it makes no sense to issue some moral statement about democracy." On top of all that, world suspicions were aroused by the department's admissions that it had known beforehand about rumors of a possible coup--not that this would have been much of a surprise to anyone, presumably including Allende.

Yet there is a strong and plausible case showing that the U.S. was not involved in the military's coup. Administration officials issued unqualified denials of U.S. complicity--perhaps suspect in light of recent revelations about, say, the secret bombing of Cambodia in 1969 and 1970. There were equally strong denials from leaders of the junta that their coup had outside help. Most tellingly, the CIA called the Centaur plan a hoax.

U.S. intelligence sources contended that the documents outlining the purported plot were circulated in Mexico by one Richard Alexander Zander, 31, an ex-convict and accused kidnaper who fled the U.S. last month while on parole from McNeil Island federal penitentiary in Washington State, where he had served time for transporting stolen goods. A U.S. court has issued a warrant for his arrest as a fugitive from justice.

Even Latin American experts with reason to be skeptical of Nixon Administration statements on Chile tend to believe that the U.S. was not involved. Educator Ralph Dungan, who was Lyndon Johnson's Ambassador to Chile, contends that in the wake of Watergate and the ITT affair, the CIA would have been almost excessively cautious about getting involved in so potentially embarrassing an international scandal. "It all suggests to me that there was probably no mucking around," he says.

International Fiancier Sol Linowitz, former U.S. representative to the Organization of American States, finds it difficult to believe that the U.S. could be active in subversion while the American mission was headed by Ambassador Nathaniel Davis, a circumspect career envoy. Even Democratic Senator Frank Church, who conducted hearings into the assorted plots by multinational ITT and the CIA against the Allende government, says:

"Without evidence to the contrary, I have to accept the State Department word."

Charges have been made, however, that Washington played a large and possibly crucial role in Chile's economic difficulties. Pressure from Washington on such institutions as the World Bank seriously aggravated Chile's fiscal crises. As Latin American Experts James F. Petras and Robert LaPorte Jr. noted in Foreign Policy magazine, "Dominican style 'gunboat diplomacy' has been replaced by 'credit diplomacy.' " But the Chilean economy was already in a sorry state as a result of the drop in the world price of copper and inefficient fiscal management.

Moreover, the refusal of the Allende government to modify its socializing policies forced some international lending agencies to curtail their programs in Chile.

In light of Allende's nationalization of U.S.-owned properties, it was hardly to be expected that the Administration would help him. Yet the military coup was unfortunate not only for Chile but for the U.S. For as Dungan observes:

"Nothing would have served our interests better than if [Allende] had completed his term in office and then been repudiated by the Chilean people in constitutional elections."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.