Who names a country after a food? Chile thread.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > Who names a country after a food? Chile thread.

joepinetree: Apr 5, 2012

wateroverfire posted:

Moving this derail out of the Libertarian thread.

I dunno whether Kissinger ever spoke that line. For the rest we can go to the tape and look at documents archived by the State department.

It was Nixon who spoke that line:

http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/nsaebb8i.htm

quote:

What is well documented is that, in response to the Allende government expropriating American businesses without compensation, the Nixon administration considered a range of measures that would have put pressure on Allende to stop expropriating U.S. businesses or to pay compensation. Ultimately Nixon did not cut off money and the aid situation more or less fell out like this.

The idea that intervention came as a response to Allende expropriating American businesses is bullshit, and disproved so conclusively that I cannot really understand how anyone would still say that crap today in good faith.

Let's go step by step:

intervention started in 1962 with a group dedicated to helping ensure that Frei would win the 1964 elections:

https://www.cia.gov/library/reports/general-reports-1/chile/#4

Note that it is from CIA's own website.

Then, in the elections that Allende eventually won, the US spent more money to defeat him on per capita terms than both US candidates combined in the 1968 US elections.

After Allende won, the US ambassador to Chile started plotting ways to block Allende from taking power:

http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/docs/doc18.pdf

The make the economy scream line came from a September 15th, 1970 meeting:

http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/docs/doc26.pdf

Where the US decided how they were going to essentially disrupt the Chilean economy in every way possible. It also shows the US plotting a coup that early.

Then, as early as October 18th, 1970 the US started planning a way to fake a coup attempt by Allende so that their own coup would be justified:

http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/docs/doc27.pdf

And then as early as December 4th, 1970, with Allende in power for a month, the US had a de facto economic blockade against Chile:

http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/docs/doc20.pdf

quote:

Yes. In response to drivers having their trucks seized and other measures like that.

This is, again, not true. Originally the strike was about freight rates and difficulties in obtaining parts. As a result of the strikes the government seized some trucks. As with most other economic phenomenon, it later came out that the trucking strike was financed by the CIA:

http://static.history.state.gov/frus/frus1969-76v21/pdf/frus1969-76v21.pdf
(page 867, for example)

quote:

It's important to know the history, dude. =( Chile was not in a great place when Allende took power but his administration was basically a study in how to knock a country off its rails in the fewest possible steps. The administration didn't need any help from Nixon. I posted a link to an economic reading of Chilean history in the other thread that I'll include here: Economic Reforms in Chile: From Dictatorship to Democracy.

The idea that it "didn't need any help from Nixon" is false. As seen above, with evidence only from declassified US documents.

quote:

That was one of the better measures, yeah. The nationalization of copper began under Frei, who "negotiated" the government into a bunch of joint ventures giving it about a 50% stake. Allende came to power and basically told the private partners "gently caress you, we're taking it all and we're not paying". I think nationalization was the right call but seizure without compensation wasn't the way to do it. That poo poo more than any influence from Washington made it harder for Chile to get international financing.

Also, I guess this can be the Chile thread? ITT let's talk about Chile and current events in Chile. There's a lot going on. Tax and education reforms are big topics. There's always someone striking somewhere. Lots to gab about.

Once again, not true.
First, the third stage of the nationalization of the copper industry passed congress by a unanimous vote, so it is misleading to say it was Allende who did anything.
Second, Allende's government did pay for some of the copper companies that were nationalized. The reason most were not compensated and others received less compensation than they wanted was because the UP's government decided to deduct stuff like machinery that was turned over defectively, book value of unexplored mineral deposits that was included in the company's valuations, debts to the state, and previous payments by the state to the company:
http://digitalcommons.law.villanova.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1985&context=vlr
(see top of page 34 of pdf)

Not to mention that as controversial as you may feel those nationalizations were, not even Pinochet reversed them or changed anything related to compensation.

Now, as far as original contributions go, here's one thing that generally doesn't get the attention it should:

La Cuestion del Plebiscito

Even with all the evidence above you will still hear the eventual person defending Pinochet and the coup because "communism!" The part that is not told is about the plebiscite Allende was about to call.

http://books.google.com/books?id=cB...%201973&f=false

Allende had a speech set for September 10th, 1973 where he would have called a plebiscite on whether he should remain president because he saw the risk of a coup and wanted to avoid a bloodbath. He delayed the speech because they were in talks with the PDC to see if they would accept the plebiscite as a solution. Then Allende was extra naive and alerted the military commanders that he would announce the plebiscite on September 11th at noon. So the military commanders pushed up the coup to September 11th, 6 am. In other words, the coup was pushed up because Allende was about to announce that the population would get to vote on whether he would finish his term. And that wasn't even done in the hopes that he would win the plebiscite. But the coup was pushed up because even if Allende had lost, Unidad Popular would still have a significant presence in both houses of parliament (UP actually won seats in the 1973 election in comparison to 1969).

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joepinetree: Apr 5, 2012

Absurd Alhazred posted:

Ah, modern bureaucracies. The most despicable things are documented in triplicates.

I don't think I knew about this at all! In case someone takes issue with Haslam, I found another source for this:
The Overthrow of Allende and the Politics of Chile, 1964-1976, by Paul E. Sigmund. It seems that this was a point of contention within UP, but that Allende's pro-plebiscite opinion prevailed shortly before the coup. Is this commonly known, at least in Chile?

I used Haslam because it was the easiest English source you can find. But the note he quotes there, for example, comes from Jose Toribio Merino Castro's own memoir. Merino was one of the leaders of the coup, for the record.

# ¿ Jul 26, 2014 23:26

joepinetree: Apr 5, 2012

wateroverfire posted:

What is well documented is that, in response to the Allende government expropriating American businesses without compensation, the Nixon administration considered a range of measures that would have put pressure on Allende to stop expropriating U.S. businesses or to pay compensation. Ultimately Nixon did not cut off money and the aid situation more or less fell out like this.

Just saw something in this passage that I missed the first time around: did you really describe money spent on covert activities to depose Allende as "aid?" You do realize that the article you link to is not talking about money sent to Chile as "aid," but to finance covert activities, which included everything from financing the PN election campaign to paying organizations to protest and go on strike against Allende?

I mean, in order to support your argument that Nixon sent economic aid to Chile, you just linked to a section about the covert money spent trying to overthrow Allende...

# ¿ Jul 27, 2014 07:27

joepinetree: Apr 5, 2012

wateroverfire posted:

So, let's avoid being a typical D&D thread and make sure we're always talking directly at each other. In the post that spawned this derail, and that I quoted in the OP, Helsing said Nixon immediately terminated most of its foreign aid after Allende took power. I posted documents to flesh out the financing situation and show that no, that was not true, instead withdrawal of aid was threatened as a response to illegal (from the POV of most of the world) expropriation of American companies. For sure, the CIA (and the Russians, too, but there we have less information) had been meddling in Chile for awhile. Intervention in that sense had absolutely been going on before the expropriation.

How about we also avoid that "typical D&D thread" part where people who get contradicted immediately go "D&D amirite?" This thread is all in one page, we don't really need to argue over what you or someone else really said. Of course, the bit he said about terminating "most" of the aid is correct, as evidence is once again clear as day that aid was cut prior and increased after the coup. Of course, aid itself was a minor and almost insignificant part of what happened there. The main thing is that Nixon essentially froze the credit Chile got from most foreign institutions, like the IDB, IRBD, Import Export bank, etc. For an export oriented economy like Chile that was essentially a blockade.

Regarding the cutting of aid and assistance (note the date):
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/docs/doc09.pdf

Regarding the economic relief after the coup:
http://www2.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/docs/doc10.pdf

quote:

I stand corrected! But does striking over price controls and shortages of parts (among other things) make things different?

It's important to differentiate "CIA spent some money to support a thing" from "A thing happened because the CIA spent money on it." Especially in Chilean politics. The grievances behind the initial strike were real and the heavy handed government response escalated the matter into a general strike against the UP.
How much was the CIA involved? This is how the footnote of the same document describes CIA involvement.

So, private groups the CIA gave money to also gave some money to the strikers, over objections (probably tepid) by the agency. Anyone want to hunt up Covert Action in Chile, if it's available? Maybe it identifies which groups and how much.

No, it is not important to differentiate, because they are no different. It is sort of a purely rhetorical exercise to speculate whether or not the money flowing into the opposition helped them decide to go on strike or not. What is important is that without external financial support, the truck company owners would not have been able to stop the country for nearly a month.

quote:

That is a really awesome source and I would encourage everyone to read the whole thing. It's really interesting.

Possession is 9/10ths of the law and all that!

Nationalization of copper was extremely popular in Chile, and eventual full nationalization was the goal of the Frei administration in the late 60's. IMO that was ultimately a good thing. However, Allende's confiscatory approach was extremely controversial and caused a lot of unnecessary turmoil. There was certainly some normal commercial dickering over the value of the assets, but the two largest categories of deductions were for "excess profits" and "loans the government deemed had not been invested usefully", which were criteria related to social justice rather than business or the economics of the mines. And when taken in total the scheme was highly questionable.

From the same document you linked:

Graciously, the Chilean government declined to go after Kennecott for 310 million dollars. Chile's takings fell well outside of international norms and, understandably, the international community and the companies involved had a problem with that. Pages 53-55 of the PDF talk about some of the consequences.

Mentioned as a footnote (because the document is about copper nationalization, nationalization of other businesses was going on at the time.

The combined effect of all of this was to push international business out of Chile and make it much harder to get international financing or capital, for understandable reasons. Since Chile's economy depended on trade that meant the Chilean economy and Chilean people were absolutely screwed. Frei's more moderate approach of negotiated nationalization would have avoided much of that at the expense of slowing down the process and I guess causing revolutionary socialists to pop less wood.

First of all, note that I chose that document precisely because it was an English source that opposed the nationalization (also note the date). So that even by that type of source what you had said regarding nationalization wasn't true.

quote:

Again, let's not be D&D ok? The quote below the link contains the info I linked to the article for and it's talking about aid money (in response to Helsing's assertion that Nixon cut off all financing).

First, the link led directly to the covert operations bit.
Second, did you notice that the paragraph you quote is in stark contrast to the rest of the section you mentioned? That is because that last paragraph is based on a frontpagemag "Article." I don't know if you are aware of what front page magazine is, but might as well quote world net daily at that point. Now, the interesting thing is even frontpagemag (the source for your wikipedia quote) admits that all those loans were agreed on before Allende took power, and no new loan agreements were made afterwards. The part about the IMF is specially hilarious, since it says "between 1970 and 1973." Here's the reality:

The last loan the InterAmerican Development bank gave Allende was in January of 1971. It only lent Chile money again after the coup. The World Bank made no loans to Chile while Allende was president. The IMF made a few loans to cover export shortfalls (mostly because if they didn't whoever Chile was importing from would go unpaid), but not the more usual standby loans. And all of this info can be found on Paul Sigmund's book on the matter mentioned above, and he hardly be claimed to be biased in favor of Allende (prior to the release of documents showing Nixon and Kissinger pressuring these institutions to cut off Chile Sigmund argued that the US had not exerted much pressure on these organizations).

Luckily, we also have easy to find economic data available to us:

http://databank.worldbank.org/

Lot's of data are not directly available on this site, but quite a few important ones are. For example, select Chile and Net ODA (%of GNI). Net ODA refers to net flows of Official Development Assistance as a percentage of gross national income:

1968 1.271328492
1969 1.233029595
1970 0.850003907
1971 0.465984943
1972 0.447106847
1973 0.307695632
1974 0.154510686
1975 1.829608533

Notice a pattern? Keep in mind that there is a lag in approving new aid, but not on cutting aid (i.e., aid approved now will only be disbursed in a few months, but if aid is cut it can stop immediately). That explains why 1970 already shows a decline, and it doesn't increase back again until 1975.

Same for all multilateral loans

Full disclosure, the image above comes from the Committee for Abolition of Third World Debt, which is fairly left leaning. But the graph contains the source of the data, so you can check for yourself if you'd like.

joepinetree fucked around with this message at 23:10 on Jul 28, 2014

# ¿ Jul 28, 2014 23:07

joepinetree: Apr 5, 2012

wateroverfire posted:

Ok. Now...

How do you parse out what happened because of Nixon's desire to pressure Chile because Communists from what happened as a reaction to Chile's deteriorating credit worthiness and an environment in which it was increasingly risky to loan money?

The long essay I posted lays out the timing of various financing moves and the contexts, what loans were pending, how much was requested later, what became unavailable, when, etc. After reading all of that, could you come to the conclusion that Chile was being economically blockaded? Would you have risked millions of dollars in Chile at say the end of 1971?

edit:

I mean, let me ask the question in another way. There's a record of how economic and political crisis were going down in Chile, of how businesses were being expropriated, of how Chile burned through its forex and racked up debts that it then walked away from. There's a record of what financing decisions were on the table and when they were made, their magnitudes, and ostensibly their motivations. How much of that should we discount based on later documents, and which documents and why?

As already mentioned, the article you posted is from 1974. It is entirely legitimate on the author's part to speculate that US actions were simple reactions. But then we had the documents declassified, which conclusively show that the economic blockade was planned when Allende's government was less than a month old. I mean, it is ridiculous that this is even under discussion anymore.

We have clear data that loans, credit, aid, etc. were sharply cut during Allende's presidency. We have clear evidence that the Nixon administration planned that before Allende even took over. The fact that Sigmund wrote in 1974 that "hey, it looks damning but maybe there is a legitimate reason for this" means nothing.

# ¿ Aug 3, 2014 07:25

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