After finishing Mandela, Mobutu, and Me, I was inspired to return to a slender volume by Isabel Allende that is another of my highly-recommended memoirs, My Invented Country. The links are slim, mostly the Eisenhower/Dulles/Nixon thing, though both Congo and Chile are countries that the US has screwed over and both Duke and Allende are writers.
Though memoirs and autobiographies present a slew of problems, in particular regarding how reliable as a source in more academic writing—similar to books about people by friends/family, such as Bush Jr. writing 41, Margaret Truman writing a biography of her father Harry, or Peggy Noonan's hagiographies of Reagan—they also provide an insight into a person that is hard to get otherwise.
Allende's book is valuable in this sense for multiple reasons: not only is she a world-class author (my local book club is reading Violeta by her for October, if I manage to make it), she has a fascinating background, regarding Chile's history, and these tie together to give the audience a unique insight and perspective.
Isabel Allende's father's cousin was Salvador Allende, the 28th President of Chile. He stayed on friendly terms with Isabel's mother and stepfather after her father left, and she encountered him "several times" during his presidency. Her book The House of the Spirits draws heavily both on her family and this period of history in Chile.
Salvador Allende, a socialist who was democratically elected to the presidency, received a US-backed coup thanks to the Nixon Administration. It was a three-way election and a close one at that, meaning his hold on the position was tenuous under normal circumstances.
These were not normal circumstances. Borrowing again from My Invented Country:
"First [the CIA] tried to bribe members of Congress not to designate Allende [as President] and to call for a second vote... Since the bribes didn't work, the CIA planned to kidnap the commander-in-chief of the armed forces, General Rene Schneider, although the plot would be carried out by a neo-fascist group, it would appear to be the work of a leftist commando unit. ,,, The general was shot to death in the skirmish... Then the CIA activated an alternative plan: a so-called destabilization, which consisted of cutting off international credit and initiating a campaign of sabotage to incite economic ruin and social violence. ...
In 1973, the army surrounded the Palacio de la Moneda, the sea of government and symbol of our democracy, with tanks, and then its planes bombed it from the air. Allende died inside the palace; the official version is that he committed suicide. The were hundreds of dead and so many thousands of prisoners that the sports stadiums and even some schools were turned into jails, torture centers, and concentration camps. Using the pretext of liberating the country from a hypothetical Communist dictatorship that might occur in the future, democracy was replaced by a regimen of terror that was to last sixteen years, and leave its consequences..."
The military junta, presided over by General Augusto Pinochet, applied the doctrine of 'savage capitalism'..."
Sadly, Allende's willingness to hold a snap second election (akin to the UK model, where elections aren't at 'fixed' intervals) and step down if he didn't win was seen as a risky move. The Nixon Administration liked red-baiting and the broad brush used to paint, say, antiwar activists as deranged leftists working toward a totalitarian state; this image would take a serious defanging if Allende lost and proved he was perfectly happy to step down and allow a peaceful transition of power.
Long story short, we get September 11, 1973 instead, thanks to US intervention. You can even listen to his final speech to the people of Chile as the presidential palace is bombed.
"Surely Radio Magallanes will be silenced, and the calm metal instrument of my voice will no longer reach you. It does not matter. You will continue hearing it. I will always be next to you. At least my memory will be that of a man of dignity who was loyal to his country. ...
Workers of my country, I have faith in Chile and its destiny. Other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment when treason seeks to prevail. Go forward knowing that, sooner rather than later, the great avenues will open again and free men will walk through them to construct a better society."
After Allende was overthrown thanks to help from the Nixon administration, we got Augusto Pinochet, an incredibly brutal and cruel dictator, as discussed in the quotes from My Invented Country. But the strict Cold War geopolitics practiced by Eisenhower and the Dulles, inherited through the administrations, and now in the hands of Nixon and Kissinger, was willing to work with dictators—so long as they were friendly dictators. As ever, Reagan loved him some friendly dictators, too, including working to normalize relations with Pinochet's Chile.
Early in the book, very early, she makes the first ties between the 1973 and 2001:
",,,the commandeered airplanes struck their US targets on a Tuesday, September 11, exactly he same day of the week and month—and a almost the same time in the morning—of the 1973 military coup in Chile, a terrorist act orchestrated by the CIA against a democracy. The images of burning buildings, smoke, flames, and panic are similar in both settings. That distant Tuesday in 1973 my life was split in two; nothing was ever again the same: I los a country. That fateful Tuesday in 2001 was also a decisive moment; nothing again will ever be the same, and I gained a country."
Allende's brilliance, I think, comes through tying these two events together—it seems obvious, in retrospect, I suppose, but for me, it was eye-opening to get an idea about how the shared trauma of both 9/11s served as significant anchors in her life. One led to Allende having to leave her homeland; the other helped her, in the opposite way, to help her kinda do a form of transference due to the similarities.
I'm sure I'm not the only one who, despite being young, can remember September 11th, 2001 vividly. Things were more tense than usual around the house, I kept hearing my parents whispering back and forth in hushed voices, and I couldn't piece it together. Got to second grade and our teacher, Mrs. C., calls us over into the reading corner at an unusual time of the morning to tell the class it's been a difficult day, our parents might act a little strange because something bad has happened, but everything is going to be okay, we're safe, and we'll understand more when we're older.
Some things stick with you, and Mrs. C. was a really good teacher, one of the best. And it certainly was better than coming home to find my mom panicking about some rumor she'd heard or invented about how "sleeper cells" were planted all across the US and it might be our school next!
Anyway, as confused and muddled as my memories of that bewildering, frightening day still are, it also helps me to understand a fraction, I think, of what Allende tries to get at in her book.
For her, both September 11, 1973 and September 11, 2001 were tragic and world-changing, both on a personal and a global level, but sometimes the pain and the suffering teach us lessons. To borrow from RFK—the normal one, not whatever the fuck happened with his kook of a son—about pain and the wisdom that can come from it:
"My favorite poet was Aeschylus. He once wrote, 'And even in our sleep, pain which cannot forget falls drop by drop upon the heart, until in our own despair, against our will, comes wisdom through the awful grace of God.'"
—
*Nixon's policy, it should be noted, was likely learned at least in part from his time as VP under Eisenhower and encountering the Dulles Brothers (Dulles is not just an International Airport—John Foster Dulles was Eisenhower's Secretary of State, Allen Dulles was head of the CIA). Under the influence of the Dulles brothers, we pulled off or attempted coups that overthrew governments in: Guatemala (Arbenz), Indonesia (Sukarno), Iran (Mosaddegh), Congo (Lumumba), Cuba (Castro—though set up under Eisenhower, JFK gave the order for Bay of Pigs), and Vietnam (Ho Chi Minh).
No, they were not for good reasons. Guatemala, in particular, was a client of the Dulles brothers when they were lawyers. Details elude me, but as memory serves: banana plantations were owned by the United Fruit Company, which ducked taxes on them by giving a way lowball figure for the value of land they owned. Guatemala had a problem with poverty, so the government had a solution: they'll pay United Fruit Company the value of the land and use it to improve their own nation! Except United Fruit doesn't like that—they've been skimming on their taxes and misreporting the property value, after all, so if they are forced to sell at the values they've listed, they're gonna bleed a lot of money.
Basically, we destabilized their entire country for a grudge held by two asshole lawyers for their former client.
United Fruit Company might not ring any bells, but their successor might. Today, the name Chiquita has some distinct stickers and I certainly looked at enough of them before I memorized that the Produce Code for nanners is 4011 (interestingly, this also occurred around the time Panama Disease ravaged worldwide banana crops and forced us to shift from Gros Michel to today's Cavendish bananas; Koeppel's Banana is a surprisingly fascinating book; Panama Disease, for instance, spreads so easily among bananas because they're essentially clones—if a single banana catches it, it'll probably spread like wildfire because they share most of the same genetic weaknesses).
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