9/16/70

The following is the text of Henry A. Kissinger's discussion of Dr. Salvador Allende Gossens's imminent election to the Chilean presidency at a background press briefing held at the White House on September 16, 1970.

QUESTION: Dr. Kissinger, one area that you did not talk about before was Latin America. You have Mr. Allende, a Marxist, elected in [Chile]. Could you talk just briefly about our long range view and the present dangers and opportunities and activities?

KISSINGER: The election in Chile brought about a result in which the man backed by the Communists, and probably a Communist himself, had the largest number of votes by 30,000 over the next man, who was a conservative. He had about 36.1 per cent of the votes, so he had a plurality.

The two non-Communist parties between them had, of course, 64 per cent of the votes, so there is a non-Communist majority, but a Communist plurality. I say that just to get the picture straight.

According to the Chilean election law, when nobody gets a majority, the two highest candidates go to the Congress. The Congress then votes in a secret ballot and elects the president. That election is October 24. In Chilean history, there is nothing to prevent it, and it would not be at all illogical for the Congress to say, "Sixty-four per cent of the people did not want a Communist government. A Communist government tends to be irreversible. Therefore we are going to vote for the number two man." This is perfectly within their constitutional prerogatives. However, the constitutional habit has developed that Congress votes for the man that gets the highest number of votes. But then, of course, it has never happened before that the man with the highest number of votes happens to represent a non-democratic party, which tends to make his election pretty irreversible. I have yet to meet somebody who firmly believes that if Allende wins there is likely to be another free election in Chile.

So this is the situation that is now confronted by Chile. By a constitutional habit, the Congress votes for the man with the highest number of votes. The man with the highest number of votes is the candidate backed by the Communists.

There is the additional problem that the Congress is not elected at the same time as the president, so in the Congress, as it now stands, the total number of seats is 200. The group that backs Allende, including the Communists, has 82 seats, so all Allende has to do is pick up 19 seats from the other parties, and he will be in. The conservative candidate, that is, the number two candidate, around whom the rallying would have to take place, has only about 45 seats. So he would have to pick up 57 or something like that to make it.

So both the internal structure of the Congress, plus constitutional habits, would argue that Allende is likely to win the Congressional election, barring something extraordinary. This problem is compounded by the fact that the non-Communist parties in Chile have been very divided among themselves, and you have the unusual phenomenon of people arguing, "Well, maybe Allende won't be so bad. Maybe he will run a democratic system." And it is the usual revolutionary dilemma that, with a revolutionary seeking power, those who represent the non-revolutionary side do not all at the same time clearly understand what is happening. Therefore you have a great deal of confusion in Chile.

Now, it is fairly easy for one to predict that if Allende wins, there is a good chance that he will establish over a period of years some sort of Communist government. In that case you would have one not on an island off the coast which has not a traditional relationship and impact on Latin America, but in a major Latin American country you would have a Communist government, joining for example, Argentina, which is already deeply divided, along a long frontier, joining Peru, which has already been heading in directions that have been difficult to deal with, and joining Bolivia, which has also gone in a more leftist anti-U.S. direction, even without any of these developments.

So I don't think we should delude ourselves that an Allende take-over in Chile would not present massive problems for us, and for democratic forces and for pro-U.S. forces in Latin America, and indeed to the whole Western Hemisphere. What would happen to the Western Hemisphere Defense Board, or to the Organization of American States, and so forth is extremely problematical. So we are taking a close look at the situation. It is not one in which our capacity for influence is very great at this particular moment now that matters have reached this particular point.

But you have asked me about what the situation is. It is one of those situations which is not too happy for American interests.

9/17/73

During his confirmation hearings prior to becoming secretary of state, members of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee questioned Kissinger on the recent military coup in Chile. The following is the text of a portion of those hearings, held in executive session on September 17, 1973.

SENATOR McGEE: As we pursued the collection of information with the assistant secretary so we might better understand the situation [in Chile], invariably the line of questioning would stop with his suggestion that that is all he knew, that he was not in on the final decisions. So the first questioning that comes to mind obviously is the intimation he made that after the coup was planned that somewhere at the top there was a conscious decision made by somebody to insure non-involvement, neutrality? At what level would that take place?