Chile: The Dilemma for U.S. Policy

Mark Falcoff

From Foreign Affairs, Spring 1986

Summary:  The recent collapse of personalist dictatorships in Haiti and the Philippines has served to remind Americans that since World War II, some of our most grievous foreign policy wounds have been inflicted not by adversaries but by self-styled (and self-seeking) friends. Though nothing is inevitable, and no two situations are exactly alike, it is difficult to ignore the intimate, indeed inextricable, relationship between the collapse of Chiang Kai-shek and the rise of Mao Zedong in China; of Fulgencio Batista and Fidel Castro in Cuba; of Anastasio Somoza and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

Mark Falcoff is Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute and author of Small Countries, Large Issues. Portions of this paper were presented at a Washington, D.C., symposium, "Uncomfortable Allies: Problems of Choice and Assessment," sponsored by the Institute in December 1985.

The recent collapse of personalist dictatorships in Haiti and the Philippines has served to remind Americans that since World War II, some of our most grievous foreign policy wounds have been inflicted not by adversaries but by self-styled (and self-seeking) friends. Though nothing is inevitable, and no two situations are exactly alike, it is difficult to ignore the intimate, indeed inextricable, relationship between the collapse of Chiang Kai-shek and the rise of Mao Zedong in China; of Fulgencio Batista and Fidel Castro in Cuba; of Anastasio Somoza and the Sandinistas in Nicaragua.

Generically speaking, the dilemma can be stated quite simply: when all avenues of political devolution in a Third World society are closed, the moderate center is the first casualty. The United States is then left to choose between polar extremes, one of which is unviable, the other unacceptable. By that time its own preferences are somewhat beside the point, and it usually ends up getting both. There is no easy solution to this problem, but recent experience suggests one prescription at least?the need to act before matters reach the point of no return.

Such is the challenge to U.S. policy in Chile today?to persuade a military dictatorship to return power to civilian, democratic forces before that government loses all control of the situation, and also before the acceptable alternatives are deprived of all credibility by forces allied to Cuba and the Soviet Union. The task is neither simple nor easy, and fraught with particular poignance given the background of Chile?s own democratic past, its place within the region, and its special relationship with the United States.

At this point the principal obstacle to Chile?s expeditious return to democracy is General Augusto Pinochet, who has ruled the country since 1973, and appears determined to perpetuate his power by means of the 1980 constitution. This document makes it possible for him to remain president-dictator for life, to be followed, apparently, by a regime in which an emasculated parliament will coexist with a militarized executive. It is expected that Pinochet will be the candidate nominated by the junta for the 1989 plebiscite. If he proves victorious, his term will be extended to 1997, when?health permitting?he will be eligible for another eight-year period, which is to say, until 2005. It is to these arrangements that Chilean diplomats refer when they claim that their government already has plans for a "democratic transition."

For its part, the vast majority of Chile?s political community has passed into opposition. After a long period of internal squabbling, these groups signed a "National Accord on Transition to Full Democracy," drafted in August 1985, which advocates the incorporation of truly democratic features into Pinochet?s 1980 constitution. The accord brings together an unusually broad range of political forces and personalities, including ex-functionaries of the Allende regime and former supporters of Pinochet. The document was abruptly rejected by the Chilean government, however, within hours of its delivery to the Interior Ministry.

Meanwhile, the Chilean Communist Party and its allies have assumed a posture of extreme militance, calling for the overthrow of the regime by any means necessary. Through the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front, they have engaged in terrorism and political assassination, as well as acts of industrial sabotage. Though historically strong in certain trade unions, the party is now growing in two areas where it was weak prior to 1973?the universities and the squatter settlements surrounding Santiago and other cities. Its decision to remain apart from the National Accord, while momentarily convenient for the moderate forces of the opposition, suggests that it believes the government?s plans for the future will prevail, and is positioning itself for a later, more confrontational phase in which its less radical rivals will have been discredited.

II

As a small, remote and vulnerable country, Chile has sought historically to strengthen its international posture through carefully managed alliances with distant nations?principally Great Britain in the nineteenth century, the United States in the twentieth. The complex mix of factors that has shaped U.S.-Chilean relations since the First World War includes geographical, naval, military, economic and political considerations. While elements of all survive into the present day, over time the U.S. emphasis has periodically shifted, a fact that Chileans seem often not to recognize. Instead, they prefer to regard each separate interest as an undifferentiated accretion to a huge structure. This has the effect of exaggerating the country?s importance to the United States and introducing some curious distortions into the bilateral relationship.

Probably the heyday of the relationship was the period between the two world wars, when American capital and engineering expertise developed a modern, large-scale copper industry, and with it, the income for Chile to finance its government budgets for more than two generations. By the end of the Second World War, in spite of distances and evident cultural differences, the United States was clearly the country to which the preferences of the Chilean elite?and even selected members of its (then small) middle class?were most attuned.

Whether it was the economic relationship tout court, or some more diffuse sense of congruent interests, Chile began to follow U.S. international policies somewhat closely during World War II and into the postwar decade, even to the point, in 1947, of reflecting the U.S. stance in the emerging cold war by outlawing its local Communist Party. In the 1950s, however, relations entered the doldrums as U.S. interests, economic and other, were turned to the rebuilding of Western Europe. It was during this period, also, that for the first time some Chilean politicians began to call for the nationalization of the copper industry.