a different 9/11 memory
1973
It was a Tuesday when it all unfolded and views regarding the United States have never been the same.
I was out walking when the airliner plowed into the Pentagon, roughly a mile and a half away from Ft. McNair. I was on the final lap of my morning constitutional when I heard three massive explosions in instantaneous succession. I hoped it was a gas line ruptured by on-going renovations. By the time I rounded the northern side of the post, I doubted that the case.
I returned to Roosevelt Hall where the doors were locked, a phenomenon that sounds normal today but was peculiar then. The Dean’s administrative assistant was on his way out, surprised I was not on the gym watching the horrifying news about the World Trade Center. I was dubious this occurred, thinking he was passing on an ill-founded rumour as it sounded so incredible.
My initial thought minutes later when I saw the footage of the first tower’s collapse was that merely three days earlier, the government in Bogotá extradicted a drug kingpin (can’t recall which one now) to the United States. Back to the 1990 presidential campaign when multiple Colombian politicians and countless citizens died at the hands of the narcotraficantes, I immediately wondered if this was some escalation in that retaliation.
Then my mind took me to the date: 11 September. I felt a chill as I wondered it was somehow linked to another 11 September some 28 years earlier.
Few people over the age of 8 missed some recognition of the 2001 attacks. They were devastating for us psychologically, a condition we have never entirely erased from our psyche. We don’t have our groove back all these years later.
I went to school in the 1960s and 70s in Colombia with a lot of admittedly relatively prosperous kids. They responded to that date in 1973 for a different reason: it was the violent overthrow of Salvador Allende Gossens’ government by the harsh and enduring military dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet Ugarte. Many folks across Latin America blamed the United States for the action.
Chile was historically a relatively conservative society, one I labeled ‘an island’ in my Latin American course because the Pacific Ocean to the west, Atacama Desert to the north, highest parts of the Andes to the east, and the wild, frozen Patagonia to the south left the country somewhat isolated historically. If you went to Chile through much of its history, you had to want to be there as it wasn’t a place one simply wandered into.
Democracy, defined as organised parties alternating power after relatively legitimate elections, had always done better than average in Chile. It was not a bastion of simply one military regime replacing another for long stretches of time as so frequently occurred in Central America or Venezuela. Institutions were relatively robust, though the Catholicism was every bit as conservative as anywhere else in the region.
Chile had similar income distribution problems and a mono-culture export economy (copper!) so characteristic of struggling economies, even though independence from Spain occurred in the 1820s rather than during the post-World War II decolonisations.
Allende Gossens was a doctor and core supporter of the Socialist Party in this multiparty country. He had been in politics for decades and made a couple of runs at the presidency but assumed office in November 1970 after the duly constitutional step of Congress authorising his election following the three-way split in voting. Allende Gossens became an elected socialist, minority president. This was eleven years after Fidel Castro Ruz’s overthrow of Fulgencio Batista Zaldívar’s dictatorship in Cuba. Chile successfully executed an election but the socialist label upset many at home and abroad.
The 1970s were a period rife with high expectations in Latin America. The Brasilia regime, under a techno-nationalist military government beginning in 1964, sought to create a technocratic state to compete with burgeoning economies elsewhere. Argentina was still a volatile country struggling with Peronismo after Perón—or so they thought (he returned in 1973). Violence from armed rebels, indigenously-borne but nurtured with Castro Ruz and Moscow’s funding, threatened governments across the region. Political violence in neighbouring Uruguay culminated in 1972 but was well underway when Allende Gssens donned the presidential sash, proclaiming himself an elected Socialist committed to Chile’s democracy.
It’s difficult for those who don’t recall the Cold War atmosphere to understand the buzz words and underlying fears so fundamentally shaping the bipolar world. While the Cuban Revolution began during Dwight Eisenhower’s administration, then culminated as John Kennedy occupied the White House, fear gripped so many quarters that the dominoes for which we were fighting in Southeast Asia were actually falling in our own hemisphere.
Our own hemisphere. It’s a phrase we take for granted but one that so alienated many elites in the region who wanted to charter their own path, even if it was one similar to our own. But they wanted to chart their own paths rather than see U.S. multinationals benefit from raw material and energy extractive industries. Those who reaped financial wealth from the extractive industries were indeed multinationals but many of those chastising, local elites were also hypocritically feathering their own nests at the expense of the poor they claimed to protect.
Allende Gossens expanded educational opportunities, began agrarian reform, targeted living standard improvements for the Chilean workers, and nationalised many corporations with significant foreign connections. In particular, the American-owned International Telephone and Telegraph was a major target of nationalisation efforts; President Richard Nixon and National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger sought to shield ITT profits from threat.
Part of the reason I always taught about Chile’s position as an island was that it had never been the major focus of U.S. concerns in the region as had been Argentina or Brazil. Documents pursued by the National Security Archive, a Washington investigative group now under the George Washington University Library, forced the U.S. Government to declassify many programs previously unknown in Chile. These included CIA and other covert support to other candidates and institutions both to preclude Allende Gossens’ election, then undermine his government.
Over the past fifty years, declassified documentation increasingly shows the Nixon-Kissinger administration engaged with hard right elements in Chile, such as the Army which arrogated to itself the right to defend the patria. Immediately prior to the November 1970 inauguration, the CIA also supported efforts to rally the most conservative elements in Chile’s armed forces to prevent Allende Gossens’ successful move into government. Those officers botched a kidnapping of the Chief of Staff of the Chilean Army who protected the constitutional process; General Renée Schneider sacrificed his life to protect the on-going process. This was also a time when the Chilean Army genuinely saw this as an existential threat to the nation’s Christian heritage so foreign intervention was welcome.
Nixon administration and multinational business anxiety about a socialist, if not communist, government in the Americas was palpable. In an administration prone to secretive actions, moving to undermine the Chilean leader was a major objective both to support U.S. business and to thwart Soviet actions in the region. This is the same leadership team that had visited Maoist China 19 months earlier to threaten Moscow but Chile was a small, divided political class the United States could influence with much covert support which Washington, documents show, readily sent.
Allende Gossens introduced many new programs during his 34 months in power, some popular with Chileans, many not. Frustration with the resulting turmoil, thus undermining the economy contributed to massive public dissatisfaction. He ultimately lost support in the Congress and was on the verge of impeachment when Army General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte surrounded the Moneda Palace with tanks, assaulting the government. Allende Gossens died, probably by suicide, in La Moneda on 11 September.
Latin Americans half a century ago today were incensed by the perceived U.S. ouster a democratically, albeit minority, government. Allende Gossens likely would have fallen as a result of Chilean actors entirely on their own but that is an unknown in history. At a time when some of the world did not seethe war in Southeast Asia as an anti-communist struggle but an imperialist state acting for its own war machine, the Allende Gossens trauma left an indelible memory about how the United States reacts to states exercising their own sovereign rights.
When I realised the scale of the 9/11 attacks, my mind turned to Chile and the events of 1973. I realise it was a leap and we all know now that it was a completely different part of the world bent on what Usama bin Laden saw as ‘retribution’ for our actions in Islamic nations. Hard for us to see anything like that in his horrific actions but we were the victims.
But I cannot forget how fundamentally the 1973 golpe d’estado led kids my age to distrust the United States. The young friends I knew from elementary school were bitter, doubtful, and angry as rising high school seniors when I moved back to Colombia the same weekend this all unfolded. The couple of women I had stayed in touch with between departing and returning had nothing to do with me when I returned. They saw Americans as vein, untrustworthy, and aggressive.
As a graduate student focusing on Latin American economic history six years later in London, I was the only Yank in the program. The assumption of our ill intentions towards the region were pervasive among faculty and students who believed the United States would never allow Latin America its future, determined instead to control anything Washington found the least threatening. I wasn’t so surprised in London as I had witnessed it all in Colombia; I recognised the reaction straight away.
As we commemorate 22 years since the attacks, we see an America with mixed respect and distrust from everyone else around the world. It’s not always a happy picture by any stretch but humans create perspectives through their individual lenses of analyses.
Actions Create Consequences. Sometimes they are good. Chile today is a vibrant, democratic leader in Latin America but also suffered horribly under the Pinochet Ugarte dictatorship between 1973 and 1990. Some of the reforms Allende Gossens discussed have come to pass but certainly not all. The Soviet Union is gone but fears of socialism still resonate within the United States, a partial reason we so dislike China’s role in the world today.
We took steps of retribution against the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks in 2001. Each of us must decide how effective those were. We are blessed not to have had a repeat attack but millions of Afghanis and Iraqis died along with thousands of U.S. service women and men. Thousands more men and women suffer enduring effects of their service on our behalf. The economic costs of the consequences were phenomenally high as well.
Today we commemorate those lost, whether innocents on airplanes or working in buildings. Or the first responders who climbed the steps of the World Trade Center as loudspeakers told everyone to evacuate. We should honour those lost along with our innocence about how the world views us.
The sky cried buckets this morning as we had an inch of rain around sunrise. Out walking when the deluge occurred, I have not been that wet in decades. We were lucky that the sun eventually returned to give us hope for another day.
Thank you for reaching Actions Create Consequences. I appreciate your time and those of you who support me. Please feel free to restack this or any other piece; you may also circulate through email, of course.
Be well and be safe. FIN
National Security Archive, Chile, "Chile's Coup at 50 Kissinger Briefed Nixon on Failed 1970 CIA Plot to Block Allende Presidency".
James McElveen and James Seikmeier, editors, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1969-1976, volume XXI, Chile, 1969-1973. Washington, D.C.: government Printing Office, 2014, retrieved at https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1969-76v21
Paul E. Sigmund, The Overthrow of Allende and the Politics of Chile. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1980.