New York Times Reactions to the Election of Salvador Allende

Will Cummings

HIST 319D

Dr. Weinstein

New York Times Reactions to the Election of Salvador Allende

Cover picture by Luis Govenechea, New York Times, October 4, 1970, IV:3.

On September 4, 1907, Salvador Allende Gossens won a plurality in the Chilean presidential election. Allende was the candidate of a coalition of leftist parties including the Communists and Socialists called Unidad Popular (UP), and the first Mearxist head-of-state to be freely elected anywhere in the world. The hostility of the United States Government and several U.S. corporations toward the 1970 election of Salvador Allende to the Chilean presidency has been well documented.[1] Authors have paid much less attention to the U.S. media’s reactions to Allende’s election. The relative absence of such media analysis is surprising because the U.S. public relies so heavily on the mainstream press for information, particularly regarding international issues.

An investigation of the mainstream U.S. media’s response to Allende’s election could reveal a great deal about its ideological position at the time and the degree to which that position influenced its representation of events. Scholars on the left have often claimed that the mainstream U.S. media shares the interests and ideology of U.S. businesses and the U.S. Government. A famous example of such scholarship is Manufacturing Consent, in which Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky present a “propaganda model” of U.S. media behavior. Within this model, "money and power are able to filter out the news fit to print, marginalize dissent, and allow the government and dominant private interests to get their message across to the public.”[2] Given this model’s assertion that “the media giants, advertising agencies, and great multinational corporations have a joint and close interest in a favorable climate of investment in the Third World,”[3] one would expect U.S. newspapers to be extremely critical of Salvador Allende, a Marxist threatening to nationalize over $500-million worth of U.S. corporations’ investment in Chile.[4] Indeed, in perhaps the only essay to focus specifically on U.S. media reactions to Allende’s election, John C. Pollock and David Eisenhower assert that, “U.S. newspapers clearly reflect the hostility manifested by the U.S. Government and some U.S. corporations toward the first elected socialist government in our hemisphere.”[5] This essay will explore the extent to which such hostility was reflected in the New York Times, generally considered the U.S. paper of record, within articles and editorials on events in Chile between the September 4 election and Allende's inauguration on November 4, 1970.

The first New York Times editorial on Allende appeared on August 27, 1970, just over a week before the election, titled “Chile on the Tightrope.” The editorswrote that the effect of an Allende victory “on Chile and throughout the Americas—would be cataclysmic. It would enhance immeasurably the standing and influence of Fidel Castro” and “would plunge United States prestige in the Americas to its lowest point in the modern history of the inter-American system.”[6] In addition, the Times editorialized, it would “administer a coup de grace” to the Alliance for Progress, and perceptively acknowledged that it “might even bring on a military coup, something unheard of in Chile for forty years and an event that might create a worse crisis than an Allende administration.”[7] Finally, the editorial praised the fact that “the Nixon Administration has emphatically—and wisely—ruled out any intervention,” and concluded, “only the Chileans can walk this political tightrope.”[8]

This editorial establishes a pattern found in the majority of opinion pieces on Allende. First, it describes him as a real and serious threat to U.S. security, highlighting his connections to Fidel Castro and his commitment to Marxism. Second, the horrible consequences of his victory are assumed; Chilean democracy will end, U.S. business will be expropriated, the economy will collapse, and a coup, however unfortunate, may be inevitable. Third, the Nixon Administration is applauded for its apparent commitment to non-intervention and cautioned against a change in that policy. Not all three of these themes are necessarily present in every editorial, but every editorial stresses at least one of these themes.

For example, two days after Allende won the presidency on September 4, 1970, the New York Times editorialized, “there is no point in trying to minimize the importance of what has happened in Chile.” Which was that Allende won “without soft-pedaling the Marxist revolutionary program he hopes to carry out.” Such an outcome “is a heavy blow at liberal democracy” and “may mark the demise of the ailing Alliance for Progress.”[9] However, the editors added, “All the United States can do in this situation is to keep hands off, behave correctly and hope for the best…The Monroe Doctrine has no relevance here and neither does the Inter-American Defense Treaty.”[10] Again we find the Times editors highlighting the international gravity of Allende’s election, while cautioning the Nixon administration to avoid intervention.

Three days later, a September 9 New York Times editorial, titled "Severe Tests for Chile," cast another dreary picture of that country's future under Allende, warning that the country likely faced “constitutional crisis or even civil war.”[11] Unlike the two previous editorials, "Severe Tests for Chile" goes beyond lamenting the inevitably fatal consequences of a socialist infection in Chile, to speculating on possible preventitive remedies. One prescription called for blocking Allende’s path to La Moneda, the Chilean presidential palace, under the provisions of the Chilean Constitution. Allende had received 36.3 percent of the vote, while the conservative Jorge Alessandri had received 34.9 percent, and Radomiro Tomic, the Christian Democrat whose platform closely resembled Allende’s, had received 27.8 percent.[12] Because no candidate had received more than 50 percent of the ballots, the Chilean Chamber of Deputies and Senate, in joint session, had the power to choose between the two leading candidates on October 24. The Times found it “understandable” that Jorge Alessandri’s supporters would try to subvert Chilean tradition and the plurality of the Chilean electorate by persuading the Congress to elect Alessandri instead of Allende. The Times could not endorse “the only other means for blocking Allende,” a military coup, because of “moral objections” and because the “remedy might be worse than the illness.”[13]

On September 25 the Times printed an editorial by C.L. Sulzberger, a longtime foreign-affairs correspondent for the New York Times, and the author of several books on international politics during the Cold War. The editorial examined Allende’s election, and the recent rumors that the Soviets were constructing of a submarine base at Cienfuegos, Cuba. Sulzberger felt that the former “danger, although not military, could ultimately prove far more important.” Sulzberger, echoing a common perspective among Allende’s critics, saw Allende as a dictator in democratic disguise “who may well lie low, stress his moderation, and international respectability,” but whose government “could well be tempted to employ totalitarian methods to achieve its aims.” Like the Times’s editors, Sulzberger predicted devastating international consequences following Allende’s inauguration, writing that if Allende’s government “were even inferentially backed up by any kind of Soviet military installation in Cuba, the entire effort to arrange a global détente between Washington and Moscow could be jeopardized.”[14]

Within these editorials we clearly see the anticommunism “filter” described by Herman and Chomsky at work. Herman and Chomsky describe anticommunism as an ideology that "helps mobilize the populace against an enemy and because the concept is fuzzy it can be used against anybody advocating policies that threaten property interests or support accommodation with Communist states and radicalism."[15] The immediate equation of Allende’s election to the establishment of a brutal, totalitarian regime in Chile is more evidence of reflexive dogmatism than an informed opinion based upon the available facts. It was clear that Allende was committed to nationalizing U.S. corporate holdings within Chile, and to a serious program of agrarian reform.[16] The assumption that such policies, and the prevalence of communists and socialists within the UP, necessarily threatened the "survival of freedom and democracy elsewhere in the hemisphere-and beyond,"[17] is illustrative of powerful paranoia and an anticommunist bias incapable of differentiating between reformers and revolutionaries, or democratic socialists and hard-line communists. In this sense, the Cold War perspective of the New York Times was identical to that of the U.S. Government. It is critical to note that the editorials cited above were written months before Allende took office. The New York Times had condemned Allende as a threat to global stability without him having committed a single official act.

In addition to an editorial stance that treated Allende’s election as a catastrophe, the Times’s ostensibly more objective news articles, through their emphases, tone, omissions, and selection of sources, betrayed a perspective hostile to Allende. The sense of alarm within the editorials is also conveyed, albeit more subtly, in New York Times articles through, for example, the choice to introduce Allende to the reader as “a Marxist who says he would like to see Chile follow the road of revolutionary Cuba.”[18] A headline reading “Moscow Seems Quietly Pleased by the Allende Victory in Chile,”[19] or the view that the UP victory was “a triumph for the Popular Front approach that Moscow has been supporting,”[20] also served to portray the election as a triumph for the forces of international communism.

Of twenty-eight articles written for the New York Times about events in Chile between September 4, 1970 and November 4, 1970, twenty-six stress Allende’s friendship with Fidel Castro, the presence of the Communist Party in the UP, or his Marxist beliefs, while only eight mention Allende’s long political career. Because we can assume that the average New York Times reader was as unable to differentiate between socialism, communism, and Marxism as the New York Times editors, the repeated references to Allende as “the Marxist candidate of a leftist coalition”[21] were undoubtedly as effective in instilling alarm as the reminders of his friendship to Castro, particularly in the absence of information on his over thirty-five year commitment to constitutionalism.

In one of three articles to provide any substantial biographical information on Allende, Juan de Onis concedes that “Allende does not believe in violence” and that “his long political career...has been within Chile´s democratic system.” “However,” De Onis cautions the reader, “Dr. Allende heads a leftist coalition that has at its core the strong Chilean Communist Party.” De Onis does not elaborate here; presumably the reader instinctively understands that Allende’s very affiliation with communists undermines any of his democratic credentials. Later in the article De Onis tells the reader that Allende pledged to be “gentle and cautious in bringing about changes” but follows this with a quote from an anonymous “critic” who says Allende “`will seem to be gentle, but it will be the iron fist in the velvet glove. If he is elected it will just be a matter of time before most of Latin America becomes Marxist.´”[22] Even in an article that acknowledges Allende’s long, democratic career the reader is left with the impression that his election signals the end of Chilean democracy and a devastating setback for the United States in the Cold War.

In addition to presenting Allende as the next Castro, New York Times reports focused their perspective on Allende’s opposition, and for the most part neglected to inform the reader that many Chileans were enthusiastic about his election. Out of twenty-eight articles, seventeen relied heavily on either U.S. governmental sources or upper-class Chileans opposed to Allende, while only two focused on Allende’s supporters. Despite the fact that massive celebrations followed Allende’s election, the New York Times never mentioned such festive reactions among Allende’s working and middle-class supporters. Rather, we learn from Joseph Novistski that the members of the Prince of Wales Country Club in Las Condes had adopted a “wait and see” approach and that “young rugby players greeted each other jokingly as Comrade.”[23]

Several articles report massive bank withdrawals, rising black market exchange rates, and booked flights out of the country in the weeks following the election.[24] While Chile did indeed face such problems during those months, the focus on, and repetition of those themes, in the absence of articles addressing the very large section of the population celebrating Allende´s victory, paints a disingenuous picture of a country at best resigned to a hard future, and at worst in a state of utter panic. In at least one case the Times was guilty of outright distortion when it reported on October 18 that the cost of living in Chile had risen another 2.7% in September, as further evidence of economic trouble. What they failed to mention was that the cost of living rose more than 32% in the first three quarters of 1970.[25]

“Chilean Coal Miners Await Allende’s Rule Hopefully” by Joseph Novitski, was the only article to appear in the New York Times in the two months between the election and Allende’s inauguration that focused on working-class support for the UP, despite the fact that the majority of Allende’s votes had come from this demographic. Indeed, Novitski writes that “the miners and the unemployed in the chronically depressed coal-mining region...were a basic element in Dr. Allende’s victory at the polls,” and that “they voted heavily for him and for the Marxist program that his coalition...has proposed.”[26] Novitski points to a 37 percent pay increase won by the miners’ “Communist-led union,” the long history of such communist leadership, and the workers’ faith in Allende’s promises of increased production and full employment, as explanations for their support of the UP. Yet, Novitski also writes that “unswerving support of Allende is not typical of all organized labor,” and that the miners of the Chuquicamata copper mine “are perhaps worried about their future under a government that has promised to nationalize Chile’s largest copper mines.”[27] While such concern likely did exist among many Chuquicamata workers, by failing to tell the reader that Allende received well over half of the vote at Chuquicamata, Novitski gives an inaccurate impression that the coal miners’ support of Allende was not shared by workers in other sectors of Chilean industry.[28]

In the only other article to focus on the attitudes of Allende’s supporters, Juan de Onis states that the “political choice...of a course toward a revolutionary change has been made by an influential sector of the middle class, as well as by the labor base of the Marxist parties.”[29] De Onis seems largely unable to explain Allende’s middle class support, as it undermines “the theory that a growing middle class guarantees capitalist stability in Latin America,” the fundamental assumption of the Alliance for Progress.[30] Such thinking is based on the rather patronizing view that the attraction to Marxism among Latin America’s popular classes is the product of “economic backwardness,” ignorance, and political immaturity.[31] De Onis provides an excellent summary of Chile’s long history of governmental intervention in the economy, and of the growth of the left’s political power during the twentieth century. He even quotes one member of the MIR (Movimiento de la Izquierda Revolucionaria), Chile’s armed revolutionary party, as saying that Chile’s economic inequality generated the leftist shift of the Chilean electorate. Yet, it is clear that de Onis views middle class support for Allende as fundamentally irrational: “Like Chile’s unstable geology, which causes her frequent earthquakes, the middle class here contains ‘faults’ that produce constant political tremors and sometimes upheavals.”[32]

The Times also presented UP fears of U.S. hostility as irrational. After a right-wing group shot General René Schnieder Chereau, the Commander in Chief of the Chilean Army, the New York Times reported that the left-wing Chilean press had been accusing the CIA of plotting against Allende and of masterminding the Schneider assassination. This was followed by a paragraph summary of a statement by Edward A. Korry, the U.S. Ambassador to Chile, denying such charges and another paragraph stating that “United States officials were concerned that the attack on General Schnieder would be used by anti-American elements to step up a campaign that seeks to link United States diplomats here with right-wing extremist groups.”[33] The day after Schneider died the paper quoted Aniceto Rodriguez, the secretary-general of “Dr. Allende’s Socialist party,” as identifying, “in a vaguely worded” statement, “`the CIA as the moral author’” of the Schnieder assassination.[34] This was not followed by any official U.S. denials, but an editorial printed the same day asserted that U.S. relations with Allende were already being made difficult by his “Communist allies” and their accusations of CIA complicity in the assassination. Worse still, “the very forces that used Fidel Castro in their own television campaign” were accusing the U.S., “which had remained scrupulously aloof, of intervention in the election.”[35]