Chile Under Frei: The Alliance for

Progress

DAVID R. SANDS*

Richard Nixon's image of the United States as a "pitiful, helpless

giant" illustrates the paradox of a great power frustrated by its limited
ability to control events abroad. In this article, David R. Sands looks at
one case in which, despite extensive American aid to a liberal, progressive
regime in a traditionalally, US interests suffered a major setback. Eduardo
Frei Montalva and his progressive Christian Democratic Party received
great material and moral aid from US administrators during the years
of the Alliance for Progress. But American policymakers misunderstood both
the complexities of Chilean politics and the enormous stake of private US
commercial interests in Latin America. The end result was the decisive
defeat of Frei'sparty in 1970 and the election of Salvador Allende. The
author discusses the difficulties a superpowerfaces in using its resources to
influence political developments overseas.

Like so many other American initiatives in Latin America, John F.

Kennedy's Alliance for Progress was proclaimed loudly and died young.
The 1960s was the last time that the United States had the temerity to
suggest that its relations with various Latin American states were consistent
enough to be subsumed under a single label. America was going to break
its ties with repressive interests which had kept Central and South America
pacified and poor for so long, and there was going to be, US politicians
and policymakers insisted, a new enlightened diplomatic attitude toward
their southern neighbors. This new policy, announced by President Ken-
nedy and the New Frontiersmen, lapsed into obscurity sometime early
in the Nixon administration.
This article deals with perhaps the signal failure of the Alliance years
- the career of Eduardo Frei Montalva and the Christian Democratic
administration in Chile in the years 1964-1970. In light of the evolution
of events in the country in the past ten years, it is hard to recall that
Chile was once considered the foremost social laboratory on the continent,
a vibrant place where political philosophies contended and thoughtful

* David R. Sands is a candidate for the MALD degree at the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy.

Copyright 0 The Fletcher Forum 1982

 THE FLETCHER FORUM WINTER 1982

men saw statecraft and governance as legitimate outlets for intellectual

creativity.
When Eduardo Frei Montalva won the 1964 Chilean election with 56. 1
percent of the vote to leftist Salvador Allende's 38.9 percent, the result
was a wave of excitement felt far beyond the long, narrow confines of
Chile. Frei and his left-of-center Christian Democratic Party (PDC) rep-
resented what seemed to be a new and immensely attractive force in Latin
American politics, a force at once dynamically progressive, aggressively
incorruptible and philosophically secure. They promised a leftist demo-
cratic reshaping of society, a "revolution in liberty." It was for just such
a force that John F. Kennedy had envisaged his Alliance for Progress.
Through the mandate of the PDC, Chilean bureaucrats and American aid
administrators would work to reform Chilean society, to distribute wealth
more equitably and to involve more of the desperately poor peasants and
urban unemployed in the national, industrializing economy. It would all
be done democratically, and would refute once and for all Castro's thesis
that gradualist, pluralist democracies in this hemisphere are incapable of
achieving genuine social and economic reform. The Frei Administration,
by its success, would undermine the attraction more radical solutions held
for the impoverished. The Socialist and Communist alternatives would
be discredited, as a progressive regime of the center-left brought stability
and broad-based prosperity to Chile.
Exactly six years later, on 4 September 1970, the PDC candidate
Radomiro Tomic limped home in third place with 27.5 percent of the
vote as Salvador Allende Gossens became the first freely elected Marxist
head of a government in the world. Allende denounced the Alliance for
Progress as an imperialist smokescreen to protect American investment
interests in Latin America. His program called for the immediate na-
tionalization of extensive US mining rights in Chile, a decided tilt away
from Chile's traditional diplomatic relationship with the US and the West,
and a scheme of land expropriation and social reconstruction that was
designed to make Chile's first flirtation with socialism "irreversible."
The course and conclusion of Allende's Chile were not inevitable, but
clearly the election of a dedicated socialist enjoying obvious and essential
communist support created a political and diplomatic strain that quickly
grew intolerable. The Alliance for Progress was designed to avoid just
such strains. Kennedy's and, more particularly, Lyndon Johnson's con-
ception of the Alliance was that of a program which would not only
progress but defuse, one which would alleviate the tensions in Latin
America before they reached the boiling point.
Frei's election afforded the US just such a chance to alleviate Latin
American tensions. Through the aid mechanisms of the Alliance for Prog-
 SANDS: CHILE UNDER FREI

ress the US tried to help Frei, and it is here that the era becomes interesting
for examination today.
American-Chilean relations in the 1960s can serve as a case study,
almost too neat for the real world, of the difficulty a major power with
an extensive official and private interest worldwide has in helping its
friends abroad. In one sense, it is a distinctly non-ideological story. US
aid to Chile hindered, and eventually helped to defeat, Frei, and the
American "contribution" was counterproductive not because of what the
US stood for or claimed to believe, but because of who it was. Frei became
identified with US interests in Chile, first through a very real confluence
of ambitions, and then later through a lack of any domestic alternatives.
The very closeness of the US to Frei made him a victim of domestic
suspicions and the target of an intra-party challenge that repolarized the
majority he had fashioned in 1964.
The Alliance for Progress in Chile suffered from a debilitating lack of
a sense of history. It failed to take into consideration the complexity of
Chile's socioeconomic development. It also was thought that the US could
change sides in Latin America and get behind the progressive wave of the
future solely on the foundation of Kennedy's slender mandate of 1960.
American policymakers tried to fashion a watershed out of a welter of
good intention, but their new consensus was neither stable at home nor
immediately welcomed abroad. As shall be seen, the idealistic impulse
of the early Alliance years did not long survive the death of President
Kennedy. President Johnson felt no special loyalty to leftist social reformers
in Latin America, and reverted to a more traditional concern for American
business interests.
In Latin America, the hopeful rhetoric emanating from Washington
resounded against the memory of more than a century of heavy-handed
interference and intervention by the US in Latin American reforms. Fur-
ther, the positive gestures the Alliance people were making did not affect
the present reality of a huge US business and commercial presence in Latin
America, allied in general with factions not particularly friendly to the
reformist ideals of the Alliance. Official American goodwill did not elim-
inate the economic friction between US and native interests that existed
in Latin America, nor did it reveal what America would do if the clashes
turned into conflicts. Many, like Frei, took the US at its word, and came
to regret it.
Finally, the US adventure in Chile raises a larger issue of practical
politics, one which this article cannot deal with extensively, but which
may have an important bearing on the adverse (by US standards) results
in Chile. That issue is whether a popularly elected government, constrained
by the limited duration of its mandate and the need to tolerate pluralistic
 THE FLETCHER FORUM WINTER 1982

dissent, can ever really effect a revolution. There is already an inherent

paradox in Frei's institutionalized "revolution in liberty," a revolution
that was to be carried out by the ministers of transportation and mining.
Revolutions promise long-term benefits, but entail immediate costs,
repression and often violence. A centrist revolution arouses violent hopes
and violent terror. The Christian Democrats in Chile designed their policies
to benefit the broad middle and lower classes. This was the numerically
preponderant faction in Chilean society, to be sure, and there were votes
to be won by appeasing it. But this targeted group was so broad that it
had little sense of its own interest and few spokesmen for its rights. It
was the smaller, more extremist parties which knew their rights and knew
how and when to scream to get them. The Christian Democratic paradise
was a receding vision; the closer the party got to "justice," the bigger
grew the left's appetite and the keener grew the right's fears. It is often
the very respect one holds for democracy that makes significant redistri-
butive democratic reform impossible.
The obstacles facing the Alliance were formidable, but were made
insurmountable only because the policymakers implementing the various
Alliance programs were- or, at any rate, acted as if they were- unaware
that any obstacles existed. The Alliance for Progress in Chile was not a
failure of good intentions, though the popular explanation today for its
failure is that it was somehow too idealistic - muddle-headed American
liberalism and moralism applied to foreign relations. It was not the ide-
alism of its goals that doomed the Alliance, but rather a failure by the
US to understand its position and how best to employ and withhold its
power to win friends and influence people.

FRET AND THE ALLIANCE

The history of Chilean politics in the period 1964-1970 was neither

so deterministic nor so analytically neat as it has just been presented. But,
it is still hard to overestimate the very real congruence of interests and
views found in the principles of the Punta del Este Charter which launched
the Alliance in 1961 and the animating philosophy of the PDC. Both
felt, in light of Castro's triumph in Cuba and similarly incendiary con-
ditions in much of the rest of Latin America, a genuine sense of urgency.
"It was said that in Latin America it was 'one minute to midnight,' that
either 'evolution or revolution' would soon occur there, and that only
United States support for far-reaching reforms could stave off shattering
violence."'

1. Abraham F. Lowenthal, "Alliance Rhetoric Versus Latin American Reality," Foreign Affairs
(April 1970), p. 495.
 SANDS: CHILE UNDER FREI

The United States under President Kennedy sought its saviors in the
ranks of the generation of social democratic politicians who had come to
political maturity in the 1930s and 194 0s, precisely the generation of
most of the prominent and influential PDC leaders, including Frei, Tomic
and party ideologist Jaime Castillo. Ideally, United States aid adminis-
trators wanted a party committed to democratic reform, one which com-
bined a core of middle class support with a program that could reach out
to the politically and economically disenfranchised. Again, this was largely
the electoral base of the PDC. An additional advantage the PDC enjoyed
was its ready-made tie to the newly activist Catholic Church, a tie which
tempered the PDC's enthusiasm and provided an intellectual and admin-
istrative framework through which the PDC could work.2
The PDC was not tied to the old oligarchic interests - the latifundistas,
bankers, urban manufacturers - who had frustrated other Latin American
reform movements. In fact, the Chilean right in 1964 was in a peculiar
way dependent upon Frei. Frei's huge, unprecedented majority in the
1964 election stemmed mainly from the collapse of the rightist Radical
Julio Durin's candidacy. The right-wing parties - the Conservatives,
the Liberals and the right-center wing of the Radical Party - threw their
support to Frei when an Allende victory became a real possibility. They
-thus had a stake in the success of the PDC's comparatively limited agenda,
for Frei was, to their thinking, by far the lesser of two evils.
Finally, although vague, the PDC platform seemed to US policymakers
the best means of protecting existing and future American investment in
Chile, even though the founders of the Alliance were appallingly insensitive
to the nature of such investment. To the minimal extent that they did
consider US commercial interests as opposed to military or diplomatic
interests, they found the PDC's "Chileanization" program far more pal-
atable than Allende's expressed intention to nationalize the copper in-
dustry. Frei's program called for a much more extensive - but by no
means exclusive - Chilean role in the production and investment decisions
of American corporations operating in Chile. Frei welcomed (conditionally)
foreign private direct investment, counting on revenues gained from taxes
on these investments to finance a large portion of his other programs.
Aside from ill-exploited farmland, private property inside Chile would
be respected. Frei's economic policy of involving more of the rural and
urban poor in the national economy, expanding the private industrial base
of the economy through public and foreign funds, and reform of the
inequitable tax system also fitin well with the spirit of the Alliance. 3

2. For an interesting discussion of the role of the Catholic Church in Chile, see Leonard Gross,
The Last, BestHope: Eduardo Frei and Chilean Democracy (New York: Random House, 1967), pp.
64-79.
3. See Joseph Kraft, "Letter from Santiago," The New Yorker (January 30, 1971), pp. 84-7.
 THE FLETCHER FORUM WINTER 1982

All these factors made Frei a compelling symbol of power for the US.
If Frei could succeed, and if US aid could play a significant role in his
success, then the optimism of the Alliance ideals would be vindicated.
The United States would reverse the largely negative role it had played
in Latin American social development, and would show the world that
it could ally effectively with progressive, democratic forces in a world
where private enterprise still flourished and governments were not afraid
to have their actions judged by an uncoerced electorate. Endless com-
mentators saw Chile as a showcase. Frei and the PDC, for Leonard Gross,
were "the last, best hope" for Chile and for Latin American democratic
social reform in general. 4 In July 1967, two years into the PDC's term,
its symbolic force still glowed. U.S. News and World Report asked "Can
Chile Show Latin America the Way?" and noted that "Chile was still
being watched as a test case in the drive to make over and modernize
Latin American nations.'
Chile seemed to possess the resources and potential to back up the
PDC's ambitions, though redistributing those resources into the proper
hands and instilling a rational, aggressive entrepreneurial spirit in the
population posed two large problems. Chile is an aberration on the map,
a narrow strip along the western coast of South America. Chile contains
as much land as the state of Texas, yet at no point is wider than 220
miles. 6 Cut off on the east by the Andes and on the north by rainless
desert, "Chile is probably the most nearly isolated maritime nation in the
world." 7 This isolation, of course, has its drawbacks, but it has had
surprising benefits as well. Thanks to its near total separation from the
rest of the turbulent continent and to an energetic policy of social ab-
sorption of the native Araucanian Indians, Chile has achieved a cultural
and racial cohesion among its nearly ten million people uncommon in
Latin America. The rigid class system that does exist is frankly financial
and thus is easier to combat than racial or sectarian animosities. The
country is blessed with a diverse abundance of natural resources, though
foreign economic necessity skewed the country's economic development
first toward the mining of nitrates and later toward copper, to the detriment
of the agricultural sector. Still, there is 25 percent more arable land per
person than in the United States. 8 As Chile straddles a broad band of

4. Gross, The Last, Best Hope.

5. Unsigned report, "Can Chile Show Latin America The Way?", U.S. News and World Report (July
10, 1967), p. 74.
6. Thomas E. Weil, et al., Area Handbook for Chile (Washington: Foreign Area Studies of ihe
American University, 1969), p. 9.
7. Ibid., p. 11.
8. "Can Chile Show Latin America the Way?", U.S. Neus, p. 74.
 SANDS: CHILE UNDER FREI

latitudes, crop diversification is also possible. Indeed, some of the farmland

in the central regions of the country is tremendously fertile, and has been
described as, after California, "probably the best piece of farm real estate
in the world." 9 That is not to say that prodding Chilean agriculture into
more efficient production methods to exploit this potential was going to
be easy, but the capacity was clearly there.
In addition, the population was to a large extent literate, and one of
Frei's first priorities was to revamp the educational system (especially
higher education) and extend its benefits to all Chileans. Finally, and less
quantifiably, there was a longstanding tradition of political stability in
Chile. The constitution under which Frei operated was only the second
one the Chileans had had since 1833.*°
If the Christian Democrats in Chile closely fit the US bill as positive
agents of reform, they also shared many of the Alliance's faults and
misconceptions. The Alliance in one very important respect represented
a posing of false alternatives. The 1960s were seen as the "twilight of the
tyrants,""' the last gasp of the hopelessly anachronistic autocratic elements
that had dominated Latin American society since the end of Spanish rule.
The struggle, as US and PDC analysts saw it, was between a rational,
democratic left and a radical, communist left. "Reactionary" elements
remained an obstacle to be sure, but in the struggle for the hearts and
minds of the aroused masses, the oligarchy was not assumed to be a factor.
How broad could be the appeal of an ideology - if it could be called that
- based upon the protection of prevailing, patently unfair arrangements
of economic and political privilege? There was a pragmatic factor at work
as well, for it was believed that if the wealthier classes did not go along
with moderate reform, they would end up with nothing. As Kennedy put
it, "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent
revolution inevitable."' 2 In Frei's case, there was the extra protection that
the easily caricatured figure of Allende afforded to keep the oligarchy in
line.
But the confusion of the rightist Conservative and Liberal parties in
the 1964 election (and in the 1965 Congressional elections as well) could
only be temporary. The right-wing parties still controlled at least a loyal
25 percent core of the electorate, and had only been hampered in 1964
by the poor record of the previous conservative Alessandri administration
(1958-1964) and by the colorless campaign waged by their candidate,

9. Jerome Levinson and Juan de Onis, The Alliance That Lost its Way (Chicago: Quadrangle Books,
1970), p. 234.
10. See Weil, Area Handbook, pp. 197-209.
11. Lowenthal, "Alliance Rhetoric," p. 495.
12. Eduardo Frei Montalva, "The Alliance That Lost Its Way," Foreign Affairs (April 1967), p. 438.
 THE FLETCHER FORUM WINTER 1982

Durin. By 1967, the right was once again effectively opposing reform
and the Frei program through its still substantial Congressional faction.
The PDC misread its mandate in the 1964 election. The election had been
an anomaly in the fractious history of Chilean electoral politics. A good
case can be made, despite the complaints of Henry Kissinger, 3 for the
proposition that the 1970 election, where Allende won with less than 40
percent of the vote, was far more in keeping with Chilean tradition than
the election of 1964.
Both the Alliance planners and PDC strategists also shared an acute
tendency to overpromise. Given the extraordinary expectations ushered
in with the PDC victory (its first) it was unlikely that the party could
have completed its term without disappointing some of those high hopes.
Even discounting the obligatory idealistic rhetoric of untested political
parties anxious for office, the Christian Democrats promised what seemed
heaven on earth. All that was left unspecified was where the money to
pay for it all was going to come from:
The Christian Democratic "revolution in liberty" promised
360,000 new houses in the next presidential term, an expansion
of education which would put every child in the first year of
primary school by the beginning of the next academic year,
and an agrarian reform which would give land to 100,000
families in six years. The program also promised tax reform,
economic development, (an) end to inflation over several years
• . .and Latin American economic integration as the basis4
for
an economic recovery which would make this possible.'

Other promises included an increased Chilean role in the copper industry,

unionization of the peasantry, and the creation of asentamientos, peasant
"communitarian" farm cooperatives which would serve as a transition from
sharecropping to private peasant plots.
When the PDC record fell short, the party became an easy target for
both the left and the right. This became a fundamental contradiction of
the Revolution in Liberty that the PDC never fully confronted (or, at
least, was afraid to mention out loud) - the fact that liberal, representative
democracies are not really designed for revolutions. Most socialist revo-
lutions solve their oligarchy problem by taking their oligarchs and si-
lencing them one way or another. A step-by-step approach like that of

13. See Henry Kissinger, White House Years (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1979), pp.
653-4.
14. Paul E. Sigmund, The Fallof Allende and the Politics of Chile, 1964-1976 (Pittsburgh: University
of Pittsburgh Press, 1977), p. 32.
 SANDS: CHILE UNDER FREI

the Christian Democrats, on the other hand, often exacerbates tensions

in direct proportion to its progress towards its stated goals. A half-achieved
redistributive revolution is often worse than one that fails utterly, for it
terrifies established interests without satisfying radical ambitions. A dan-
gerous polarization of politics results and the party that has taken the
country halfway to reform gets caught in a crossfire of blame.
Not only did the partial success of the PDC focus and polarize opinion
across the Chilean political spectrum, it aggravated tensions within the
PDC itself. The PDC had always gotten by more on youthful enthusiasm
and intellectual sophistication than on efficient organization and party
discipline. Throughout Frei's term, the president had to contend with
a rebelde wing of his own party, a wing frustrated by the slow pace and
patient nature of Frei's program. In early 1967, this wing actually captured
control of the party machinery and was only ousted by Frei and his
oficialista allies a year later. The rebeldes often allied with the left wing
socialists and communists, not so much to defeat Frei, but to extend and
intensify the radicalism of his policies. They served as an unwelcome prod
at a time when Frei was trying to pacify nervous propertied interests. By
1970, the PDC candidate Tomic was often sounding more radical than
more leftist candidates, demanding immediate nationalization of the cop-
per mines and a more vigorous prosecution of the program of agrarian
reform and land redistribution. This, of course, did nothing to allay right-
wing fears of the ultimate intentions of the PDC, while making the left
even more determined to hold out for more substantial reform.
These were all major obstacles which confronted the PDC. None,
however, seemed insurmountable. The PDC, for all its centrifugal forces,
sat squarely in the center of Chilean politics, with just enough of a leftist
tinge and intellectual core to keep it from ossifying. The parties to the
left and right, while still retaining their diehard followers, could only
pick and cavil at the PDC from the sides. The traditional centrist party,
the Radicals, was in chaos, unable to resolve its internal contradictions.
There was a distinct opportunity for the Christian Democrats to forge a
new centrist majority made up of themselves, ex-Radicals, "realists" of
the center-right and "pragmatics" of the center-left, along with the newly
politicized working masses who were supposed to flock to. the PDC banner.
All they had to do was succeed. And all they needed for success, it seemed,
was money.
Revolutions cost money. The confusion and uncertainty that follow any
social upheaval also upset established channels of commerce. New suppliers
and markets must be found. New methods of industrial organization must
be introduced. Traditional employer-employee relationships are over-
thrown, and the new economic masters are often unskilled in the finer
 THE FLETCHER FORUM WINTER 1982

points of technology and marketing. Although in the long run revolutions

may place nations on the road to surer and more equitable (however
defined) prosperity, in the short run they imply foregone profits, cancelled
investments and extensive opportunity costs in the training of new man-
agers. That is one very important reason why totalitarian and authoritarian
governments are so good at revolutions; relatively impervious to discontent
and insulated from the political consequences of economic chaos, they can
remain in power long enough for the revolution's benefits to catch up with
its costs. (Sometimes this catching-up process takes so long that govern-
ments feel obliged, for the good of the people, to remain in power forever.)
A leftist revolution entails even greater costs, for the ideologically required
heavy role of the state makes for very high administrative costs as well.
Frei's government had, essentially, three potential sources of revenue.
It could tax Chileans more heavily. It could tax the substantial foreign
industrial and mineral holdings in Chile, and, in particular, the American
copper interests. Or it could use American aid and promised Alliance for
Progress funds. To some extent, the PDC resorted to all three channels.
The succeeding sections of this article will deal in greater detail with
the two great reform controversies of the Frei era - the agrarian reform
bill and the Chileanization of Anaconda and Kennecott mines in Chile
- but the crucial point of the course of the PDC experience in running
Chile is this: Tapping each revenue source entailed the expenditure of
both political and ideological capital. Each time the PDC squeezed one
of these three sources for funds, it lost a little more of the internal unity
and ideological consistency that had given it such promise in 1964. Each
move it made to obtain financing pushed it a little further away from the
animating ideals of the Alliance for Progress, and made it less and less
likely that a center-left party could unify Chile along a progressive, non-
communist path to social justice.
Taxing the interests of the oligarchy - whether directly through a
revamped, progressive tax system or less directly through less-than-thor-
ough compensation for land expropriation - was obviously risky. The
initial Alliance enthusiasts seriously underestimated both the recalcitrance
of established interests and their ability to persevere in their reactionary
ways when all the world seemed to be collapsing around them. The right
still controlled at least one-quarter of the electorate and represented a
sizeable (if less than enthusiastic) portion of Frei's 1964 vote.
Taxing the multinational corporations operating in Chile cost far fewer
votes (indeed, it probably won at least as many as it lost), but Frei's
Chileanization program of gradual Chilean participation in the manage-
ment of the copper companies was so awkwardly timed and handled by
Frei that it managed to displease the right with creeping socialism, an-
 SANDS: CHILE UNDER FREI

tagonize the left through its gradualist means and modest ends and terrify
the multinationals with the specter of nationalization. The Chileanization
program was a main cause of intra-PDC discord as well. Jacques Chonchol,
a prominent PDC leader and director of Frei's agricultural reform program,
led the rebelde takeover of the PDC party machinery in 1967 and called
in his first act for a "noncapitalist road to development," including na-
tionalization of banks, utilities and the copper industry. 5 Frei beat back
the challenge, but "Chilean and foreign capitalist faith in Christian De-
mocracy was probably irrevocably shattered.' 6 The rift never completely
mended and the 1970 PDC candidate Tomic ran on a platform explicitly
rejecting the too-moderate corporativist oficialista program. Obviously,
the intra-PDC tensions were only magnified in the larger arena of Chilean
interparty competition.
This left Alliance for Progress funds. US support for Frei was more
than just rhetorical. The US knew it had a showcase and was willing to
expend substantial sums in order to see what President Johnson called a
"model for the Alliance for Progress"'17 do well. From 1945 to 1968,
Chile received approximately $1.3 billion from the United States, with
$767. 1 million of that coming after the start of the Alliance for Progress. 8
"The bulk of United States assistance has been received through AID, the
Export-Import Bank of the United States, and from use of the proceeds
of the sales of agricultural products imported under United States Gov-
ernment-financed programs. About $1 billion of United States assistance
has been extended in the form of loans."' 9 With 3.5 percent of the
population of Latin America, Chile received in the 1960s 13.4 percent
of all Alliance assistance, making it the largest per capita recipient of US
aid and the second largest recipient in absolute terms in Latin America.2
By the late 1960s, Chile was second worldwide only to South Vietnam
in per capita US aid. 2'
The dangers inherent in Frei's final option of accepting Alliance funds
are less obvious and require first an understanding of the evolution of the
American approach to the Alliance for Progress. The gravest charge that
can be laid against American policymakers so far is that they did not fully
appreciate the close resemblance between Chilean politics and a hornets'
nest. The same charge can be made against Frei and his party, who were

15. Albert L. Michaels, "The Alliance for Progress and Chile's 'Revolution in Liberty', 1964-1970,"
Journal of Inter-American Studies and World Affairs (February 1976), p. 90.
16. Ibid., p. 90.
17. Ibid., p. 82.
18. Weil, Handbook, pp. 390-1.
19. Weil, Handbook, p. 391.
20. Michaels, "Alliance for Progress," p. 77.
21. Levinson and de Onis, p. 204.
 THE FLETCHER FORUM WINTER 1982

much closer to the situation. It has been charged that the ambitions of
the Alliance for Progress were hopelessly idealistic. Indeed, when the first
returns from the Alliance programs did not demonstrate a perfect success,
there was a spate of "The Alliance for Progress is Dead" articles in the
early 1960s. 22 But it is unlikely that a drier, more realistic approach would
have succeeded in generating the fire and drive needed to instill hope and
confidence in Latin American reform elements. To a certain extent, people
will accept prosperity as a reasonable substitute for paradise, and will look
charitably upon politicians and planners whose reach exceeds their grasp.
The ambitions of the Alliance were - at least in the early years -
qualitatively different from all previous US aid programs. Its idealism was
central to its success. It was both precise and vague - precise in the
extent and resolution of its commitment to democratic reform, and wisely
vague in its description of the alchemical reaction it intended to create
in Latin America.
The charge that the Alliance for Progress in Chile faltered over its own
idealism is not only too easy, but misguided. Rather, the Alliance stum-
bled in Chile for two very specific reasons. The first is that the Alliance
philosophy in the US was evolving away from its ideological roots just
as a party came to power anxious to fulfill them. Johnson's and Under
Secretary of State for Latin American Affairs Thomas Mann's Alliance was
very different from John F. Kennedy's. Johnson replaced Kennedy's con-
cern for center-left democratic reform with a more traditional approach
which emphasized industrial expansion (however achieved), anticommun-
ism and concern for American investment. Juan de Onis and Jerome
Levinson in their study of the Alliance for Progress for the Twentieth
Century Fund describe the shift:
US policy in Latin America during the Alliance decade
pass(ed) through three distinct phases. From 1961 to 1963,
it sought to apply the Kennedy Administration's ideology of
democratic development. From 1964 through September 1968
it was dominated by economic concerns and maintained po-
litical neutrality except toward communist or potentially com-
munist regimes. Since October 1968 it has been based on what
might best be described as perplexity."
Just when Frei needed the most obvious and crucial ally in Latin
American politics for his far-reaching program, the US lost the ideological

22. See, e.g., "The Alliance for Reaction," The Nation, June 21, 1965; and Victor Alba, "The
Alliance for Progress is Dead," The New Republic, September 5, 1964.
23. Levinson and de Onis, Alliance That Lost Its Way, pp. 71-2.
 SANDS: CHILE UNDER FREI

fire in its belly. The traditional US allies in Chile - the members of the
oligarchy - clearly interpreted the US shift as a signal that their obstinacy
in the face of Frei's reforms was less obnoxious for LBJ than for the previous
administration. In 1967 Frei complained in an article in Foreign Affairs
about an "Alliance That Lost Its Way." 24 He wrote:
The name Alliance for Progress became yet another label
for all forms of aid. Uncoordinated emergency loans became
"Alliance loans;" technical and financial aid freely given to
dictatorships was all "Alliance aid." Even though the aid re-
tained its financial value, its ideological significance was com-
pletely lost. The flow of dollars given by the United States
was carefully watched, but there was no equivalent effort on
the part of Latin America to reform and become more dem-
ocratic. Hence the Alliance had not reached the people of Latin
America for whom it was created.25
Right-wing sabotage, of course, only fueled left-wing impatience and
further radicalized the PDC left. But Frei in effect became a prisoner of
US aid. He grimly persisted in a middle course which encouraged private
foreign investment - or at least that portion of foreign investment still
brave enough to invest in the contentious country - and refrained from
complete nationalization of US interests. He had little choice, for a more
radical path would have endangered the flow of US funds. The inconsis-
tency in the US position doomed Frei's attempts to straddle the political
center. It forced him to make a choice, and when he opted for a pallid,
right-of-center approach complete with submission to "imperialist" in-
terests and austere deflationary policies, his party's unity was shattered
and its support halved.
The second great fault of US Alliance planning in Chile reveals a
startling disjunction in US planning, a lack of coherence that discomfited
not only US aid administrators, but also those Latin American agents they
were trying to promote. Kennedy's intention in the creation of the Alliance
for Progress was to wipe the slate clean, to erase ancient memories of
Yankee exploitation and recent unpleasantry resulting from Vice President
Nixon's disastrous Latin American tour in 1958. This was to be done by
announcing a shift in the US's ideological bearings toward Latin America.
But simply saying it didn't make it so. The US had an enormous private
economic stake in Latin America. Despite the pronouncements in Wash-
ington, these interests remained, enormously profitable to their American

24. Frei, "The Alliance That Lost Its Way," p. 437.

25. Ibid., p. 444.
 THE FLETCHER FORUM WINTER 1982

owners, and enormously irritating to many Latin Americans. To start

from scratch, as Kennedy proposed, was ridiculous. One notes with certain
irony the charge that the Alliance was meant from the start to be a stalking
horse for American capitalists. The problem in reality was exactly the
reverse; there was not enough of a contribution from US commercial sectors
in the foundation of the Alliance. Sooner or later, a progressive redistri-
butionist government's program was bound to impinge upon US business
interests. It was a question of costs, and one early Alliance planners never
really confronted. Did the US consider the long-term benefits of stable
progressive regimes in Latin America worth the profits surrendered when
programs like Frei's Chileanization were passed? No serious Latin American
reformer can afford to let the multinationals get off unscathed, partly due
to the need for revenue and partly due to domestic political pressures.
Other common leftist proposals including regional free trade associations,
commodity controls and protection of domestic industry against US com-
petition, similarly ran counter to US commercial interests.
It is here, not in the ambitiousness and idealism of their goals, that
Alliance planners demonstrated their most striking naivete. The idea that
the US could start from scratch was in clear contradiction to reality. In
large part, US government planners were unaware of US commercial
opinion about the Alliance and the potential for a clash of interests because
they had never solicited it. De Onis and Levinson relate how Alliance
planners consulted US business leaders almost as an afterthought, long
after the planning for the Punta del Este meeting to fashion an Alliance
charter had begun. "It was not until about three days before the conference
that a White House aide called Richard Aldrich, a director of the Rocke-
feller-owned International Basic Economy Corporation, and asked him to
invite a group of businessmen to Punta del Este as observers (rather than
as members of the delegation)." 2 6 Since the Alliance planners relied heavily
on the flow of private investment to ensure Latin American prosperity,
this insensitivity to commercial opinion was disastrous. The businessmen
found little to encourage them at Punta del Este. Many had had long
experience with Latin American investment and found the chief US gov-
ernment representatives at Punta del Este - Douglas Dillon and Richard
Goodwin - unreceptive to their concerns. Dillon and Goodwin both
"assumed ... that US corporate management would come to terms where
necessary with Latin American political pressures. Thus they failed to
anticipate both the intensity of Latin American sentiment and the reaction
of US businessmen to being, as they saw it, snubbed by the Kennedy
Administration. ,27

26. Levinson and de Onis, Alliance That Lost Its W'a), p. 71.
27. Ibid., p. 72.
 SANDS: CHILE UNDER FREI

This clash had enormous consequences for the Alliance. Constructed

on the premise that Latin American stability meant prosperity for all, US
planners found US business even more reluctant to invest than in the past.
"The fundamental explanation of the shortfall in the private investment
flow into Latin America as envisaged at Punta del Este (was) that potential
US investors (had) become increasingly wary of the difficulties, risks and
uncertainties associated with new or extended operations in various of the
Latin American countries while Latin American countries (had) done little
to overcome investor reservations and, in fact, in numerous instances (had)
progressively circumscribed such investment in response to a variety of
domestic pressures."28 US businessmen thought that the amount of private
investment called for in the draft charter was unrealistic and felt further
(and rightly) that it was a promise made in their name without their
permission. De Onis and Levinson write, "The participants in the for-
mulation of private investment goals were ignoring reinvestment, depre-
ciation, and depletion considerations, and making no explicit provisions
for investment risk guarantees or formulas to assure remittance of profits
or royalties free of exchange restrictions."29
Things improved for US investors during the Johnson era, but Chile's
new sensitivity to the concerns of US corporations had unintended, del-
eterious consequences for Frei and his Chileanization program. Frei dis-
covered it was counterproductive economically to push the copper com-
panies too hard. He learned that
an expanded flow of United States private investment into
Latin America requires pulling, not pushing. It requires at-
tractive and voluntarily extended invitations from host coun-
tries, not unsolicited, unilateral initiatives on behalf of private
foreign investors that force host countries to choose between
unwilling submission and costly dangerous resistance. 3"
The natural ally of US investors was the traditional oligarchy, not Frei's
coalition. Once Frei became dependent upon US aid funds and US good
will to finance his revolution, he could not afford to offend the copper
companies. Indeed, as we shall see, by 1969 he was welcoming new copper
investment in Chile by offering politically harmful concessions to Ken-
necott and Anaconda in the Chileanization negotiations. To a certain
limited extent, he was successful; investment confidence returned and
Chilean production increased. But the political costs were enormous. The
right rejected almost any infringement upon private property and the left

28. Cole Blaiser (ed.), Constructive Change in Latin America (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh
Press, 1968), p. 108.
29. Levinson and de Onis, Alliance That Lost its Way, p. 71.
30. Blaiser, Constructive Change, p. 113.
 THE FLETCHER FORUM WINTER 1982

screamed fraud. Even the added revenues benefited Allende's government

more than they did Frei's. Because of Frei's earlier unpopular concessions,
"the Allende government was able to nationalize a healthier, more prof-
itable industry in 1970. "'

AGRARIAN REFORM

As is evident in El Salvador today, agrarian reform and land redistri-

bution are two of the most vexing problems for Latin American reformers.
Such reform is largely a zero-sum game - there are obvious winners and
obvious losers, and the latter are in general those who have traditionally
enjoyed power in the countryside and do not enjoy relinquishing it. The
audacity of the PDC attempt at land reform was admirable, but it earned
the undying enmity of the rural oligarchy, who came to oppose the
remainder of Frei's agenda as well. It was particularly galling for the rural
wealthy that it was in part their taxes which were financing Frei's program,
and they were getting precious little return on their money. Frei would
be able to override their opposition on the issue, but his policies left bitter
tastes in many mouths and set the foundation for the right's organized
resurgence under Alessandri in 1970.
Despite Chile's long tradition of genuine representative democracy, the
constitutional machinery was not geared very well for reform. The stag-
gered nature of congressional elections meant that half of the represen-
tatives that Frei addressed that November day had been elected back in
1961 and the Congress as a whole was disproportionately weighted toward
oligarchic interests. It was a system that "permitted the articulation of
divergent interests, but a system which also (bred) legislative obstruc-
tionism, fragmented party strength and polarization of extremist positions."2
The agrarian reform bill that Frei presented to the Chilean Congress
on 22 November 1965 "contained 167 articles and was probably the
strongest proposal for agrarian reform ever put before a democratic leg-
islature."" Following PDC thinking, Article 1, sections h and r of the
1967 Agrarian Reform Law defined the two basic elements of the envisaged
rural property structure. Section h defined the family agriculture unit as
"the area of land . . . that, when personally exploited by the producer,
'
permits a family group to live and prosper through its rational use." 1

31. Michaels, "'Alliance for Progress," p. 86.

32. Sigmund, The Fall ofAllende, p. 48.
33. W. Raymond Duncan, "Chilean Christian Democracy," Current Histor) (November 1967), p.
264.
34. Paul E. Sigmund (ed.), Models of PoliticalChange in Latin America (New York: Praeger, 1970),
p. 301.
 SANDS: CHILE UNDER FREI

Communitarian property, as defined by section r, was "that property

which belongs in common to all those who work it personally, or to a
cooperative formed by them which constitutes a human and economic
community. Each member contributes with his personal effort to the
common work and participates in the income obtained, according to the
nature and contribution of the work he performed." 35 The PDC charged
that the prevailing system of estates was grossly inefficient and led to both
the exploitation of the rural laborer and the steadily rising food import
bill. Frei declared, "It is impossible to obtain an increase in production
and productivity when the whole basic structure of landholding, credit
and marketing lends itself to stagnation and the concentration of income
36
in the hands of a few."
But again, as mentioned earlier, the fruits of Frei's reform were merely
potential while the losses were immediate and real. The reform law fixed
the basic family farm unit at 192 acres of irrigated land. Any property
larger than that - save vineyards and other interests clever enough to
be exempted - that was not being exploited efficiently was subject to
expropriation. The compensation price was to be based upon the tradi-
tionally low tax-assessment price and was to be paid back in long-term,
negotiable bonds. This last provision was an especially sore point for the
oligarchy, for given Chile's traditionally high inflation rates, the already
low compensations they would receive would 37be cut into even further.
The bill also nationalized all irrigation water.
Aside from the philosophical problem with the bill - essentially,
everyone, including the unasked American aid administrators, could find
something about the bill with which they fundamentally disagreed -
the PDC committed two tactical errors. The first, perhaps unavoidable
mistake, in view of the party's rhetorical overkill in the campaign, was
to put before Congress the agrarian reform bill, at the same time that the
copper bill was introduced, along with the amendment to allow deferred
repayment for expropriated property rather than a cash payment as was
required by the Constitution. This overloaded the legislative circuits and,
to a certain extent, led to the administration's losing control of its own
agenda. It also surrendered a lot of leverage to Frei's opponents. Opponents
of one or another of the reform measures could link concessions in one
area to the removal of offensive portions of another. That Frei got as much
as he did through Congress is a tribute to his dedication and political
savvy, but the way he chose to do it created unnecessary bitterness.

35. Sigmund, Models, p. 302.

36. Levinson and de Onis, Alliance That Lost Its Way, pp. 234-5.
37. Ibid., p. 235.
 THE FLETCHER FORUM WINTER 1982

The second tactical mistake concerned money. Employing the admin-

istrative machinery already in place from the previous Alessandri regime,
the PDC bill proposed to use the Agrarian Reform Corporation (CORA)
to coordinate the reforms. Minister of Finance Sergio Molina disclosed
that under the agrarian reform plan the settlement of 98,000 peasants
over a ten-year period would require an investment of more than S1
billion, of which about 10 percent would be for land. 8 Much of the
funding was to come from the annual budget allocation to CORA, and
hence each year the program's funding was subject to the vicissitudes of
the prevailing political sentiment in Congress. Unlike Allende's plans,
the PDC program was constructed so as to be eminently reversible.
Neither tactical defect, however, was fatal, and an agrarian reform bill
passed the Congress (albeit after three years of bargaining) in substantially
the form Frei had envisioned. The problem was, however, that even the
completed bill satisfied no one. Its benefits were still hazy, its costs
obvious. It was both too radical and not radical enough. And finally, for
US planners now concerned less with ideological effect than with economic
rationality, the program made poor economic sense.
The cost to the oligarchy was evident. Not only were there direct asset
losses, but also the principle of inviolable private property had been
severely damaged. The upper and middle classes were not only required
to relinquish long-held advantages, but, through increased taxes and more
vigilant tax collection, 9 they were being asked to finance a revolution
whose benefits were not intended for them. Liberal and Conservative
leaders extracted several concessions from Frei.
Among them were a change in the text of a constitutional
amendment which made it possible for property owners to
appeal the terms of expropriations, a change in the system of
land equivalences giving owners of partially irrigated land a
larger right of reserve, and the grant to the landowner instead
of the agrarian reform agency of the right to decide upon the 4
location of the 'reserve' to be retained by the original owner. o
These PDC concessions were necessary to keep the moderate right in
line on the question of copper Chileanization. But it soon became evident
that even with them, the right remained dissatisfied and unresigned to
the permanence of the arrangement.
The left, of course, attacked the concessions and the generally tepid

38. Ibid., p. 235.

39. See Gross, The Last, Best Hope, p. 207.
40. Sigmund, The Fall of Allende, p. 49.
 SANDS: CHILE UNDER FREI

- to their view - nature of the reforms as a sellout to the bourgeois

interests. The united leftist front (UP) platform of 1970 demanded an
"accelerated" agrarian reform, "through the expropriation of land holdings
in excess of the size prescribed for private farms; .. .the expropriated
lands would be organized as cooperatives, and a national system of com-
prehensive economic planning would be established." 4 The efficiency
criterion of the PDC plan was eliminated. The Socialists and Communists
both accepted the Castroist thesis that a bourgeois revolution was intrins-
ically incapable of revolutionizing the structure of rural landholding and
agrarian labor relations.
Castro himself was highly contemptuous of Chile's agrarian reform
under Frei. (Interestingly, he dismissed the Chileanization of copper as
inevitable. The PDC could claim no credit in his eyes for doing something
that was bound to happen anyway. "Nationalization would have occurred
sooner or later anyway," he said. 42) In a speech at the University of Havana
in early 1966, Castro related a meeting he had had with several deputies
of the PDC:
They said they were going to carry out an agrarian reform
in which they were going to establish a limit of 80 hectares.
And I told them: If you carry out a revolution of 80 hectares,
you will have to fight against the oligarchy and you will not
be able to struggle against them without the support of the
peasants...
The first great fallacy of those efforts is the belief that it is
possible to reconcile the interests of imperialism and those of
the nation, the interests of the oligarchs and those of the
peasants, the interests of bourgeoisie and those of the workers.4
Castro allowed as how he always knew that "Frei was a representative
of the Chilean bourgeoisie," and ended at his quotable best, explicitly
linking what he saw as the fundamental defect of the Chilean revolution
and of the Alliance that tried to make it succeed:
Frei is showing the people of Chile and the world the kind
of government he is going to put forward, that is to say not
a revolution without blood, but a policy of blood without
revolution.
Blood without revolution! That is the policy of Frei.

41. Leon Goure and Jaime Suchlicki, "The Allende Regime: Actions and Reactions," Problems of
Communism (April 1971), p. 54.
42. Sigmund, Models, p. 323.
43. Ibid., p. 323.
 THE FLETCHER FORUM WINTER 1982

Blood without revolution! That is the government of Frei.

Blood without revolution! That is the policy of the Alliance
for Progress.4"
None of this opposition is especially surprising, either in hindsight or
to the policymakers and administrators behind the Punta del Este charter.
The Alliance was not intended to appeal to the fringes of the political
spectrum. It was intended to appeal to the supposed "broad center" of
public thought and to the masses of people who had never felt a stake
in the political process before. The most damaging attacks, then, on Frei's
policy came from within his own party. The center was not holding, and
Frei soon found himself on a knife's edge, as center-right and center-left
chose to emphasize minor ideological disagreements over the success of
their policies. Frei had to ram his program through almost in spite of his
own party; he held it together only on the strength of his own immense
popularity and the weakness (at the time) of the alternatives. But PDC
dissent did arise eventually, a persistent intra-party unrest, never crip-
pling, always nagging. The more centrist wing of the PDC, the wing
Frei most closely identified with, grew suspicious of its own ideology.
The "communitarian" rhetoric of the PDC envisaged rural cooperatives
which would ease the way to efficient private farming. But Jorge Rogers,
a PDC oficialista leader and prominent agricultural economist, voiced a
common doubt that the cooperatives were a waystation to anything.
Although Rogers had some legalistic reservations about aspects of the
reform bill, the crux of his complaint expressed a common right-wing
fear:
.. . It is an illusion to believe that the forms of collectivized
property, forced cooperatives, co-ownership and special asso-
ciation of CORA with the beneficiaries, and other forms dif-
ferent from private property holding will be only provisional
and supplementary. The reasons given for creating them, and
the fear that the property will return to its original form, will
continue, and they will become permanent and indefinite in
duration, as we know from experience in similar cases."
It was hard to make a convincing case for the Government's bona fides
when its own members were saying such things.
While Frei's administration was being hit on all sides, the US added
to its troubles by trying to be helpful. As we have noted, US attitudes
toward the Alliance under Johnson had taken a decided shift away from

44. Ibid., p. 324.

45. Ibid., p. 308.
 SANDS: CHILE UNDER FREI

the ideological fervor of the Kennedy years. The emphasis shifted to

technical matters and the nuts and bolts of economic development, in the
vague, unspecified hope that material prosperity would lead to democracy
and justice for all. As we have also noted, Frei's revolution was not, at
least in the short term, economically rational. It meant taking resources
and funds away from interests that were used to enjoying them and handing
them over to far less experienced agents. Immediate profits were foregone
in the expectation of a larger, future social good. Thus the new Alliance
perspective and the principles of Frei's plan were on a collision course.
The clash came when an economically rational plan suggested by the
Americans was rejected as politically infeasible by Frei. Levinson and de
Onis seem to share the US insensitivity to Frei's predicament. "The Chilean
agrarian reform," they write, "ran into political complications it might
have avoided or reduced if its primary objective had been to promote
efficient farm production, regardless of the size of the farm." 46 The US
recommendation was straightforward. The purpose of any Chilean agrarian
reform, the analysis ran, was to make a dent in Chile's crushing food
import bill, which drained away much of the profits made from copper
exports. To increase food production, a price support program for agri-
culture was called for. The higher prices would give an incentive to
domestic farmers to produce more. As only "inefficient" larger estates
were targeted for expropriation, those estates that enjoyed high produc-
tivity would benefit. The newly organized and socially conscious peasantry
would be able to gain some of these profits through higher wages or
through the increased return to their own smaller private plots. Chile's
high import bill would be 47reduced and the standard of living in the
countryside would improve.
All this is irrefutable, and US officials argued hard and long to make
Chilean administrators see it. But its immediate effect was to raise sub-
stantially the incomes of the traditional rural elite, an elite that was the
focus of much of the left wing of the PDC's rhetoric. "The left wing
generally regarded ownership of extended acreage, particularly farms run
by corporations, as an inherent social evil, and sought to replace it, through
the 'revolution in freedom' with collective or cooperative forms of farm
ownership. "48 Rogers's charge that cooperative farming arrangements were
not so transitional as they claimed was not without merit. "The Chilean
left interpreted the US insistence on an agricultural price support system
as a reversion to pre-Alliance relationships the US enjoyed with oligarchical

46. Levinson and de Onis, Alliance That Lost Itt Way, p. 237.
47. Ibid., p. 237.
48. Ibid., p. 238.
 THE FLETCHER FORUM WINTER 1982

interests.' 49 The US priorities, perfectly rational from a production stand-

point, were impractical in the context of Chilean politics.
Thus the agrarian reform fight was substantially successful and satisfied
no one. The left saw it as halfhearted, so sensitive to the concerns of the
bourgeoisie that it avoided meaningful, permanent reform. The PDC
attempt to organize rural workers also was seen as a clear challenge (which
it was) to the traditional Communist and Socialist domination of the labor
unions. The agrarian interests of the right perceived a clear threat to their
hegemony and the threat of rural class warfare. The urban, financial
oligarchy was less exercised over the move, and it was their relative
indifference plus a coalition of oficialista PDCers, students, intellectuals
and the Church which finally pushed the bill through. But even here the
unity and cohesion of Frei's backing suffered. The communitarian ideal
that was the soul of Chilean Christian Democracy displayed in practice
a strong ability to divide people. Some were afraid that the communi-
tarianism would not be temporary, and others were afraid that it would.
And always at Frei's shoulder was the US, unreasonably reasonable, asking
Frei to make choices when the one thing that would have helped him was
a bit of creative ambiguity.

COPPER

It is hard to lose politically in Latin America by attacking multinational

corporations. Copper earned 60 percent of Chile's foreign exchange in the
1960s, and US companies, notably Anaconda and Kennecott, owned 85
percent of the industry. To the Socialists and Communists, the situation
was intolerable and the solution clear - nationalize the industries. Com-
pensation, to their way of thinking, would not be too burdensome, because
naturally all "excess" profits would be subtracted from the compensation
total. (When Allende came to power, the copper industry - along with
many others - was duly nationalized; substracting past excess profits
Chilean accountants discovered that the US companies actually owed Chile
money! 50)
Frei's Chileanization followed a more measured path. Nationalization,
he argued, would lead to unstable surpluses through the loss of foreign
markets. Not persuaded by the excess profit argument, he argued that
the compensation costs would be too high. Moreover, nationalization was
not the way to attract further foreign investment. But copper was too
important to the Chilean economy to be left in the hands of agents largely

49. Ibid, p. 239.

50. "United States-Chilean Relations," Hearings Before the Inter-American Affairs Subcommittee of the
Committee of Foreign Affairs, House of Representatives, 6 March, 1973, pp. 8-9.
 SANDS: CHILE UNDER FREI

beyond the sway of Chilean sovereignty. Thus he proposed a "direct

government partnership in the management of the mines with an eye to
forcing production up to one million tons a year."'" (Production in 1964
had been 600,000 tons.) He also proposed moderate tax increases on other
foreign investment in Chile. Nationalization, he also knew, would cut
off the substantial Alliance funds Chile was receiving.
Frei was not averse to foreign investment. Although in his younger
days he had considered capitalism incapable of achieving equitable dis-
tribution of wealth, in 1964 he knew that his revolution was too dependent
upon the stable revenue flows that taxes on foreign investment supplied
to risk offending foreign interests too seriously. In April 1965, in an
interview with U.S. News and World Report, he noted, "We have never
confiscated foreign investments and have always guaranteed the persons
and property of foreigners." He also promised to cooperate with American
copper companies in a joint effort to expand Chilean production.52
Corporations, despite legal fictions, are not persons. They are not nec-
essarily animated by ideals of social justice nor are they outraged at evidence
of social inequity. Their primary responsibility is to their stockholders.
The corporation was conceived as a money-making organism, and it seems
almost an aesthetic insult to claim that it is less than good at what it was
designed for. But it almost seems at times that US Alliance for Progress
planners forgot this. The US presence in countries like Chile exhibited
a bizarre kind of schizophrenia. On the one hand, solicitous and idealistic
true believers like US Ambassador Ralph Dungan spread the gospel of
PDC reform; 53 on the other, companies like Kennecott displayed massive
indifference to the difficulties of Frei and his party and were only willing
to relinquish their assets in Chile under the threat of harsher measures
if they did not. US private and public interests in Chile were (at least
rhetorically) wildly out of synch. The irony is that Frei could not attack
the one without offending the other. In the Johnson years, when push
came to shove, the nearly $1 billion investment of US interests outweighed
the suspiciously leftist-sounding charges of the PDC. Eventually, Frei
could no longer afford to antagonize the copper companies or to worsen
that nebulous thing known as the investment climate. "He was a prisoner
of choices he had made in 1965. Frei opted for economic growth and
social stability at the expense of social justice. The United States had
opted for protecting its economic interest at the cost of slowing down the
political momentum of its most successful Latin American ally. ""

5 I. Donald W. Bray, "'Chile Enters a New Era," Current History (January 1965), p. 23.
52. Michaels, "Alliance for Progress," p. 84.
53. Sigmund, The Fall ofAllende, p. 40.
54. Michaels, "Alliance for Progress," p. 83.
 THE FLETCHER FORUM WINTER 1982

Attacking the copper companies did garner Frei many votes initially,
but he made the cardinal sin of not appearing to drive as hard a bargain
as he had hoped to obtain. "The major disappointment (of the PDC's
entire reform program) was the government's ineptitude in dealing with
the copper industry."" The government announced an intention to assume
51 percent control of the companies' operations and to double production
by 1972. The government did gain control of 51 percent of Kennecott's
huge El Teniente mine, "but only won 25 percent of two relatively small
new ventures of Anaconda and Cerro." The government completely failed
to Chileanize existing Anaconda plants.56
Moreover, the government negotiators initially took almost on faith
extremely low valuations of book value that the companies offered as
taxable assets. With the Chilean government assuming much of the risk
and offering tax breaks as bargaining chips, foreign business profits in
Chile actually rose. Business Week noted that
Chilean tax rates have been cut so drastically that Kennecott's
share of El Teniente earnings is rising from 14 to 27 percent
. . . The beauty of the deal is that Kennecott is getting a
bigger share of a bigger
57
pie without any outlay of money from
the United States.
There is perhaps nothing more damaging to the image of a Latin American
politician - especially one who portrays himself as a leftist reformer
- than to be swindled by gringo capitalists. James Beckett, writing in
Commonweal, noted puckishly that, "according to informed sources, Ken-
necott's major difficulty during the negotiation was keeping a straight
face.""
Frei considered the copper agreements the "master plank (viga maestra)"
of his program.59 He pushed them even ahead of his agrarian reform,
somewhat to the chagrin of leftist elements both within and beyond his
party. To have come up short was a tremendous loss of prestige. Allende
thundered that Frei and the PDC were "mere reformists" (a serious charge
in Allende's book) who had adopted a policy "of 'dependence on the US'
and were carrying out a policy of 'dechileanization'."60
After this initial burst of "reform," the world price of copper rose
substantially, partly due to the Vietnam war and partly to overheated
world demand in general. Having locked Chile into a low valuation and

55. James Beckett, "Chile's Mini-Revolution," Commonweal (February 1968), p. 407.

56. Ibid., p. 407.
57. Michaels, "Alliance for Progress," p. 92.
58. Beckett, "Chile's Mini-Revolution," p. 407.
59. Sigmund, The Fall of Allende, p. 47.
60. Sigmund, The Fall of Allende, p. 48.
 SANDS: CHILE UNDER FREI

lower tax base for American investments, Frei and the PDC watched as
benefits of the new price rise accrued largely to the Americans. (Chile's
trade balance, however, did run substantially in the black during Frei's
term.) Further, the "high world price of copper meant that the Americans
could finance new investments from profits instead of importing new
capital as they were required to do." 6 '
The pressures from the left grew intense and a divisive split arose within
the PDC. A leftist wing headed by Jacques Chonchol and Tomic demanded
a more sweeping nationalization. The right, heretofore tolerant of Frei's
moves against the universally unpopular copper companies, grew alarmed.
Chileanization was one thing, but the rhetoric now being generated -
partly, at least, from within the ruling coalition - seemed to be an
irrational, dangerous attack upon the very legitimacy of private property
itself.
Frei returned to the bargaining table determined to obtain better ar-
rangements. In 1969, when the shine was beginning to wear off rather
obviously, Frei resumed talks with Anaconda over the status of its still
largely un-Chileanized holdings. The screams and ravings of expropriation
by the left proved to be persuasive background music as the two sides got
down to talks. The final deal allowed for the Chilean purchase of 5 1
percent of Anaconda's holdings, including Chuquicamata, with payments
to be made over twelve years at an interest rate of 6 percent. (With
inflation at the time running in the high twenties, this represented a real
loss to the copper companies.) Compensation this time was to be based
upon a low book value. Anaconda, considering the alternatives, had no
choice but to accept. Even the left was reported not too "unhappy."
Production began to rise again, and government revenues and the trade
surplus increased. 62
But the long, hard negotiations took their toll. The ideological impetus
that Frei had relied on in 1965 had by this time dissipated. The nego-
tiations became less an assertion of Chilean sovereignty and national dignity
than a business deal over the division of spoils. Worse, the example of
Anaconda knuckling under to threats of nationalization served as an im-
mense inspiration to the left. Frei's program seemed to them an excru-
ciatingly slow way to deal with pirates. Any source of encouragement to
the left naturally disconcerted the right.
This was a problem that should have been foreseen by Alliance planners
and was not. US commercial interests in Latin America represented a huge
given. Not only were those interests not consulted adequately when the

61. Alan Angell, "Chile: From Christian Democracy to Marxism?", World Today, November 1970,
p. 490.
62. Ibid., p. 492.
 THE FLETCHER FORUM WINTER 1982

US decided that leftist reformism was the Latin American wave of the
future, the subsequent, inevitable clash of distributionist policies and
established US business interests was scarcely considered. Alliance planners
assumed at the beginning that US businessmen would get into the spirit
of things, that they would sacrifice short-term profits and medium-term
managerial control in exchange for a long-term, democratic equilibrium
in Latin America, whose promised stability would make up for financial
assets surrendered. But businessmen do not usually operate that way. They
(like a goodly majority of mankind) like to keep what is theirs - as they
define it - and also keep control of what they do with it. There was no
historical precedent for believing that Kennecott and Anaconda would not
try to drive the hardest bargain they could with the Frei government, no
matter whose showcase it was. And when they found they lacked leverage
in such negotiations, their next response was to halt further investment
in Chile, frustrating another cherished Alliance goal, and confirming the
leftists in their conviction that compromise with bourgeois interests and
the government that protected those interests was futile.
The fault lies mainly with the Kennedy Administration planners. They
attempted to make the Alliance succeed through an ideological impulse.
Men would be inspired and forces overcome by a common bond of idealism
shared by US and Latin American progressive elements. But the impulse
could not be sustained for long, and the consequences of the US failure
to stay the course were disastrous for those in Latin America relying on
American patronage. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, there appeared
another spate of Alliance-related articles, this time playing on the theme
that it was "time for a little realism" in the Alliance for Progress. 6' But
this turn to "realism" meant that the Alliance as a departure from tra-
ditional American diplomacy in Latin America was dead. The Alliance
approach pushed by Kennedy upset old friends. It did not, as promised,
undercut the Castroist/Communist appeal. It was not economically ra-
tional. Johnson as president did not share the same ideological sentiments
in his approach to foreign policy. When the signals from the US changed,
reformers like Frei were caught out on a limb, committed to reliance on
US aid but no longer sustained by a firm US commitment to the principles
which had forged the partnership in the first place.

CONCLUSION

On 21 May 1969, President Frei addressed the Chilean Congress on

the achievements of his government. Even allowing for "the acute political

63. See, e.g., David Rockefeller, "What Private Enterprise Means to Latin America," Foreign Affairs,
April 1966; and Lowenthal, Foreign Affairs, April 1970.
 SANDS: CHILE UNDER FREI

division that now exists prior to the coming presidential election," the
list of accomplishments was by no means inconsiderable. Almost
2,204,000 students were by 1968 enrolled in primary and secondary
education, an increase of 595,000 over 1964. Unemployment was down
from 6.5 percent to 4.4 percent in January 1968. The number of "new
dwellings registered" in the last four years came to 175,000; housing had
been found for 312,000 families representing about 1.8 million inhab-
itants, while population had increased by about 830,000. Of inflation
Frei had less to say, primarily because he had had less success in controlling
it, partly because a severe drought had raised food prices. Still, an agrarian
reform law was on the books. The Chileanization 64
program had essentially
been achieved, and copper prices were rising.
All in all, a very respectable performance. Governments have been
reelected having accomplished much less. The problem for the PDC was
that there was no one in Chile willing to run on that record. Frei noted,
"In Chile, there has been in recent years a profound transformation of
social values and of the perception of the future." 65 As Alan Angell wrote,
"This was part of the problem of the Christian Democrats. For some the
transformation was too slow, for others too fast." 66 A left-wing slice of
the PDC broke off to join with the Socialists and Communists in a Popular
Front. Tomic "led the Christian Democrats from a position well to the
left of Frei and seemed uneasy about campaigning on the record of the
government . . .He took up the challenge on the understanding that the
party would fully support his left-wing stands and his platform of radical
social change, including complete nationalization of copper. '"67 Another
observer noted, that "at times Tomic's campaign seemed almost as radical
as that of Allende. "68
Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the right under ex-President
Alessandri reemerged as a distinctly conservative alternative to the PDC.
Frei's program had not succeeded in dislodging the oligarchical position
in Chilean life. It had been expected that the fight against the well-
financed, well-disciplined left would go on for quite some time. But the
revival of rightist electoral strength - given the supposed sterility of its
doctrine and its declining sway over the masses - was not expected.
Given the normally divisive nature of Chilean politics, Allende's election
can hardly be considered a stinging rebuke of all Frei stood for. Henry
Kissinger was probably right in remarking that even in 1970, Frei was

64. Sigmund, Models, pp. 330-338.

65. Alan Angell, "Chile," Current History (February 1971), p. 86.
66. Ibid., p. 87.
67. Ibid., p. 87.
68. Goure and Suchlicki, "The Allende Regime," p. 52.
 THE FLETCHER FORUM WINTER 1982

still considered "the most popular and able man in Chile. '69 Only the
Chilean constitution prevented him from running for and gaining a second
term. Allende's share of the vote fell slightly below what it had been in
1964 and he only got into office because the center and right had returned
to their old partisan ways. Aside from the obvious fact that the Chileans
had elected a Marxist, the 1970 election in effect represented a return to
normalcy. In a showcase of reform, that return is probably the gravest
failing of the Alliance for Progress in Chile.
With Allende's victory, the high hopes engendered by Frei's election
in 1964 turned to ashes. The US policy was in ruins. Throughout his
ensuing term, Salvador Allende realized America's worst fears simply by
proving that, whatever else he was, he was genuinely sincere. He had
meant what he said during the campaign. Chile under the UP proceeded
to nationalize the copper companies, accelerate land redistribution policies
and to break diplomatic ranks with the rest of the Continent by initiating
closer ties with several Soviet bloc nations and with Cuba.
The Alliance for Progress was not designed to convert Allende, but to
frustrate him. It is important not to misread the results of the 1970
election. The signal US failure was not merely that an inimical leftist had
won, but also that the conservatives had done so well. US policy, even
given the best of opportunities and the most capable personnel, could not
help its friends and natural allies (at least for JFK) create a lasting,
progressive, centrist majority.
Furthermore, this failure came, not by some excess of idealism, but
because of several very specific factors. These factors all emanated from
the fact that US policymakers had little sense of the American presence
in toto; that, as a major power, US identity and reach in Chile went far
beyond sincere rhetoric. Whether US business investment in Chile was
good, bad or indifferent, it was a fact. US aid in Chile was not so much
a lever as an apron string; the more Frei clung to it, the fewer his options
and the lower his popularity in Chile. Finally, Kennedy initiated in Latin
affairs an ideological impulse - a promise, in effect, to brave and in-
novative Latin American politicians - that he took few pains to sustain.
Johnson proceeded to do what every president before him save Kennedy
had done. The result was bitterness at home, confusion abroad and, in
Chile, an unmitigated setback for American interests.

69. Kissinger, White House Years, p. 662.