In 1958 Salvador Allende nearly won the presidency and at the time the CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) decide to make its presence felt in Chile in order to combat the influence of the Chilean Communist Party.  The Communist Party had been outlawed from 1948 to 1958.  The CIA also intended to undermine any attempt on the part of the socialist and communist alliance from coming to power, legally or illegally.  After the success of the Cuban revolution in 1959 Washington became even more concerned about the possibility of communism spreading through South America.  At that time, there were many US copper companies in Chile and US was determined to defend their interests in the country.  Therefore they put pressure by a combination of covert action, economical and military assistance, and international pressure to prevent Allende from becoming President and to keep the Soviets and Cubans away from South America.
Once it became clear that the left had a very good chance to win the elections in 1970, the Nixon administration reversed its economical policy towards Chile of "low-profile" and became deeply involved in Chile.  By then the previous Chilean president
Eduardo Frei, as part of his successfully promoted economic growth, land reform, and Chile's purchase of the majority of the  US-owned copper companies, had lost the North American aid to his administration and instead the US provided the military  in Chile with generous assistance in form of grants and equipment.  Therefore, U.S., under the administration of Nixon spent  $300,00o for an anti-Allende propaganda campaign, while U.S. business funneled $600,000 to Jorge Alessandri, the candidate of the right.

David W. Dent, in his book The Legacy of the Monroe Legacy: A Reference guide to U.S. Involvement in Latin America and the Caribbean,  says that "Despite the covert efforts of the CIA and heavy involvement of the U.S. corporate community to prevent Allende from being elected, he emerged from the contentious election as the winner, but by only 1.2 percent over his closest opponent.  President Nixon ordered the CIA to prevent Allende from being approved by the Chilean Senate, and when that failed, to continue a program of destabilization.  According to Paul Sigmund, 'The CIA program included propaganda, economic destabilization, and a top-secret (even the U.S, ambassador was kept uninformed), ultimately unsuccessful, effort to promote a military coup." (79)
In the mean time, and according to the data provided by Dent,

“Allende’s determination to eliminate monopolies and the nationalization of foreign-owned mines and factories-while committed to pluralist democracy and freedom-provoked anger and resentment inside the Nixon administration.  However, President Nixon and Henry Kissinger, his national security advisor, worried less about the fate of American economic holdings in Chile than about the spreading of a leftist government on South America and the strategic interest of the United States around the globe.  Despite Allende’s solid socialist credentials, President Nixon considered Allende a ‘communist’ (Allende had always worked with the Chilean communists), someone who could not at the same time be a democrat…The CIA and department of state and defense indicated that Allende posed no threat to the region and that the United States had no vital interests within Chile, although most agreed that Allende’s victory symbolized a psychological defeat for the United States.” (79-80)
Allende’s policies of nationalization and independent foreign policy produced a severe reaction in the United States.  United States retaliated by reducing the economical aid (although they did not reduced the military aid), and pressured the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and private lenders to deny loans to Chile.  These economic pressures set forth by Nixon’s administration tried to undermine Allende’s administration.  As a result “On September 11, 1973, Allende was overthrown in a bloody military coup led by General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte” (Dent, p.80).
Today, we can read on line the disclosed secret documents of the National Security Archive at the website: http://www.gwu.edu/~nsarchiv/news/20001113/:  In this site we can read that,

“The National Security Archive today hailed the release of more than 16,000 secret U.S. records on the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, and Washington’s role in the violent overthrow of the Allende government and the advent of the military regime to power.  The release, totaling over 50,000 pages of State Department, CIA, White House, Defense and Justice Department records, represents the fourth and final “tranche” of the Clinton Administration’s special Chile Declassification Project.   The declassification includes 700 controversial CIA documents that the Directorate of Operations had refused to release—records of U.S. covert operations between 1968 and 1975 to destabilize the democratically atrocities during the Pinochet dictatorship.”

        The National Security Archive credited Clinton’s national security staff, particularly William Leary who coordinated the declassification project, as well as State Department officials with a strong commitment to using declassified U.S. documents to advance the cause of human rights abroad and the American public’s right-to-know at home. The release includes dozens of records on the September 1976 assassination of former Chilean ambassador Orlando Letelier and his American associate, Ronni Karpen Moffitt that had been previously withheld by the Justice Department as possible evidence in an ongoing investigation of General elected government of Salvador Allende and, after the violent 1973 coup, to bolster the military regime of Augusto Pinochet.  The final release, originally scheduled for September 14, was delayed two months while the White House pressured the CIA to relinquish these documents.  Some 800 other CIA intelligence records were also declassified.

        Peter Kornbluh, senior analyst at the National Security Archive, the public interest research center that led the campaign to declassify U.S. documents on Chile, called the release a “victory for openness over the impunity of secrecy.”  The documents, he said, “provide evidence for a verdict of history on U.S. intervention in Chile, as well as for potential courtroom verdicts against those who committed Pinochet’s personal role in the most famous act of international terrorism ever committed in Washington D.C.  Intelligence records that could directly implicate Pinochet remain classified.  The majority of the 16,000 documents come from State Department files covering the years 1970 to 1990.” (National Security Archive)

        The position of the Nixon administration was in the same line as the policy United States established with the rest of Latin America in order to keep its interests in that continent.  Chomsky describes the nature of the “threat” that Washington was taking into consideration as part of Latin American movements that may jeopardize those interests.  According to him,
 

        “High-level documents describe the primary threat to these interests… as “radical” and “nationalistic regimes” that are responsive to popular pressures for “immediate improvement in the low living standards of the masses” and development of domestics needs.  These tendencies conflict with the demand for “a political and economic climate conductive to private investment,” with adequate repatriation of profits and “protection of raw materials”- ours, even if located somewhere else.  For such reasons, the influential George Kennan advised that we should ‘cease to talk about vague and unreal objectives such as human rights, the raising of living standards, and democratization’ and must ‘deal in straight power concepts,’ not ‘hampered by idealistic ‘slogans’ about ‘altruism and world-benefaction’-and world-benefaction-though such slogans are fine, in fact obligatory, in public discourse” (p.21)

         Chile then was a threat to this stability that the US was seeking to establish al over the Latin American world and therefore the plan was to destabilize it and promote a kind of political and economic stability that would benefit the upper classes and the foreign investors.  Henry Kissinger described Chile as a “virus” that might spread to throughout Latin America.  But Washington expected to be able to implement the Monroe Doctrine in a special sense, since the United States only considers its own interests when applying this Doctrine.  In the hemispheric conference in February 1945, Washington proposed and “Economic Charter of the Americas” that would eliminate nationalism in all of it possible manifestations.  According to Chomsky, “Washington planners understood that it would not be easy to impose this principle.  State Department documents warned that Latin Americans prefer ‘policies designed to bring about broader distribution of wealth and to raise the standard of living of the masses,’ and are ‘convinced that the first beneficiaries of the development of a country’s resources should be the people of the country.’  These ideas are unacceptable: the ‘first beneficiaries’ of a country’s resources are U.S. investors, while Latin America fulfills its service function without unreasonable concerns about general welfare or ‘excessive industrial development’ that might infringe on U.S. interests.” (p.22-23)
 

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