Santiago, 1970 to 1973

Salvador Allende won the Chilean presidential election of September 1970 with 36.6 per cent of the vote, in a three-way race that left the final decision to Congress.

What followed is documented to an unusual degree because of the Church Committee, the Senate inquiry that reported in 1975 and published a staff study titled Covert Action in Chile, 1963 to 1973. It is worth reading not because it is damning, though it is, but because it is careful, and the care is what most summaries throw away.

The committee established two things that are frequently merged and should not be.

The first is Track II. After the election, Nixon personally ordered the CIA to prevent Allende taking office. The channel was concealed from the 40 Committee, the body that was supposed to approve covert action, and from the American ambassador in Santiago. The agency approached groups of Chilean officers planning a coup. Every plan began with removing General René Schneider, the army commander who held that the military must respect the constitutional result. Schneider was shot during an abduction attempt on 22 October 1970 and died three days later. The CIA later paid money to help the men involved leave the country, and withheld that fact from the committee investigating it.

Track II failed. Allende took office.

The second is the three years that followed: sustained funding of opposition newspapers, parties, and strikes, and economic pressure intended, in the language of the documents, to make the economy scream. The objective was to create conditions in which the Chilean military and right would act.

On 11 September 1973 they did. Allende died in the presidential palace and Augusto Pinochet governed for seventeen years, with a record of killing, torture and disappearance that a later Chilean commission documented in detail.

Here is the distinction the Church Committee drew, and it matters. The committee did not find that the United States organised or directed the 1973 coup. It found extensive American effort to produce the conditions for one, and it found a documented American plot in 1970 that failed.

Two readings survive that finding, and they are less far apart than their advocates pretend.

The first says that a superpower spent three years deliberately degrading a country's economy and cultivating a coup climate, and that disclaiming the fire after pouring the petrol is not a serious moral position.

The second says that Chile was tearing itself apart on its own terms. A government holding a third of the vote was attempting a structural transformation of the economy; the opposition was large, well organised, and required no instruction from anybody; the officers who acted in 1973 had their own reasons and their own agency, and treating them as American instruments is its own kind of condescension.

The documents support the first on intent and the second on agency. An account that reports only one of them has decided the conclusion first and gone looking for the half that fits.