Salvador Allende

Salvador Allende Gossens, a physician and Socialist senator, was elected president of Chile in 1970 on his fourth attempt, at the head of the Popular Unity coalition of Socialists, Communists, and Radicals. He died in the La Moneda palace in Santiago on September 11, 1973, during the coup led by General Augusto Pinochet.¹

The 1964 Election

The CIA spent three million dollars to influence the election of 1964, in which Eduardo Frei Montalva defeated Allende. Former ambassador Edward Korry said in 1976 that the administration of John F. Kennedy had begun the program, and that aid and earthquake relief funds had been passed to Jesuit-led Catholic groups for the purpose.¹²

1970

On September 4, 1970, Allende won 36.3 percent to 35.3 for Jorge Alessandri, a margin of 39,000 votes in three million. CIA polls had predicted that Alessandri would win with 40 percent. Korry said that the fund-raisers of all three candidates approached the embassy, that Allende's asked for a million dollars, and that none was given. ITT, whose chairman Harold Geneen offered the agency a fund for Alessandri in July, passed at least 350,000 dollars to his campaign. On September 15 President Richard Nixon ordered the agency to prevent Allende's accession, and the attempts that followed, described at Project FUBELT, ended in the killing of General René Schneider. Congress confirmed Allende on October 24.¹³

Korry wrote to Senator Frank Church in 1975 that the Soviet Union and Cuba had given "very substantial sums for covert political action to the Communist party, to the Socialist Party and to Allende himself."⁴

In Office

Korry said that in early 1971 the United States offered to guarantee Chilean bonds with "the full faith and credit of the American Treasury" if Allende would negotiate compensation for ITT, Anaconda, and Kennecott, and that Allende told him that if he accepted "there would be no 'Chilean revolution.'" Allende told an ITT executive on May 26, 1971, "I wish to nationalize your company." An embassy cable of September 29, 1971, called the confrontation over copper "a deliberate political decision by Allende" and "a conscious challenge to the tradition of US defense of its major business interests in Latin America." The government took over ITT's telephone company that day. Compensation talks ended the day after Jack Anderson published the company's internal memoranda on its dealings with the CIA in March 1972. The Overseas Private Investment Corporation first proposed to deny ITT's insurance claim on the ground of those papers, and in 1975 paid 34.7 million dollars in cash and guaranteed 59.4 million in Chilean obligations.³⁴⁵⁶

The CIA spent eight million dollars in Chile between 1970 and the coup, more than three million of it in fiscal 1972. Its spending from 1963 to 1973 came to eight million for elections and parties, 4.3 million for propaganda and mass media, including El Mercurio, 900,000 for labor, student, peasant, women's, and private sector organizations, and 1.2 million under the heading "promoting military coup d'etat." The 40 Committee "did not approve any funds to be given directly to the strikers" in the truck owners' stoppages of 1972 and 1973, though "all observers agree that the two lengthy strikes could not have been maintained on the basis of union funds."¹

Death

Dr. Patricio Guijón of the presidential medical staff stated that he saw Allende shoot himself with a rifle during the assault on the palace. The Chilean truth commission reached the same conclusion in 1991. The CIA reported to Congress in 2000: "There is no information to indicate that the CIA was involved in Allende's death." His body was exhumed in 2011, and an international forensic panel confirmed suicide on July 19. His daughter, Senator Isabel Allende, said he "made the decision to end his life before being humiliated." Dr. Luis Ravanal, who had concluded in 2008 that the wounds came from two weapons, said the autopsy "did not reveal anything different."⁷⁸