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Response to Petras and Morley
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 24 October 2022
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The Petras-Morley reply to my review is useful in bringing out the basic issues between us. I think they come down to two: one is on the nature of U.S. foreign policy in general, and the other is on the relation of U.S. policy to the 1973 coup in Chile. On the first point, Petras and Morley describe U.S. policy as that of “the imperial state” autonomously formulating a policy that is “largely the product of an integrated body of aggregate interests of the corporate world as a whole,” and in the Allende case involved “the combined and mutually reinforcing efforts” of the multinationals, the U.S. government, and the international banks. I see a variety of interests at work, including those of the corporations, which may and did differ among themselves; U.S. strategic or diplomatic interests, which may or may not coincide with those of the companies; bureaucratic interests within the U.S. government and the international financial institutions; and personal motivations and ideologies, which may make an important difference in the content and purpose of policy (as our limited experience with the Carter administration is already demonstrating). There is now full documentation of the divisions among the companies and within the U.S. government, and of the saliency of personal, ideological, and strategic motives in the decisions of Nixon and Kissinger. Indeed, the very quote from a U.S. government official that the authors cite with reference to ITT: “No country should sacrifice its overall relations or interests or other groups in the country for the sake of one interest group,” makes my point rather than that of Petras and Morley—not as Petras and Morley would have it, the need to subordinate ITT's interest to that of the corporate world as a whole, but the priority of considerations of the national interest over those of the multinationals.
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- Copyright © 1978 by the University of Texas Press
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Notes
1. Chile's debt increased by $800 million, or nearly $1 million a day, during the Allende period. (The figure of $2.6 billion for the 1970 debt is used by the Central Bank, CORFO, the IMF, and the OAS Economic and Social Council. The higher figure used by the Allende government included future interest payments on all outstanding loans, in some cases down to the end of the century.) The bulk of the debt increase comes from two IMF loans ($130 million expended) and short-term credits (not “development projects”) from Latin American and Western Europe ($400 million). Medium and long-term indebtedness to Latin America and Eastern Europe increased from $9 million to $149 million, far more than the debt increase to Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and China—which only rose from $14 million to $40 million (CORFO figures, quoted in OAS CIAP report on Chile, 28 January, 1974, p. V-9).
2. “It would be a mistake to underestimate the role of the USA in defeating the Chilean working class, but to place the major emphasis here is to go against the bulk of the available evidence. The coup would probably have occurred even if the USA had remained strictly neutral,” Ian Roxborough et al., Chile: The State and Revolution (London: MacMillan, 1977), p. 153.
If the documents on arms stockpiling and training by the Left published in the junta White Book are not acceptable as evidence, see the statement by Allende's advisor, Joan Garces, in Allende et l'Experience Chilienne (Paris: Fondation Nationale des Sciences Politiques, 1976), that “in 1973 sectors of the Socialist Party, the MAPU, and the Christian Left decided to prepare for civil war (securing arms, preparing clandestine hospitals and first aid programs and creating a communications infrastructure) [that] helped to facilitate the military uprising. In fact, all those preparations were detected and closely observed from the outset by the secret services of the armed forces [creating] among hesitant officers a psychosis which led them to believe that they were about to be attacked at any moment by armed ‘enemy’ elements” (pp. 244–45).
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