Chapter Twenty-eight

The 1970s

Major Gains: Greece, Portugal, Spain
Major Losses: Argentina, Chile, Uruguay
Major Hiccups: Bangladesh, India, Lebanon, Pakistan, Thailand, Turkey
Overall Trend: Bottoming out, from 26% (1969) to 28% (1979)

Democracy Hits Bottom

A Cold War Archetype: Chile

[Flag of Chile] Copper mining pours so much money into Chile that the fate of the country and the industry are inseparable. In the quarter century before 1970, taxes on copper produced between 10% and 20% of government revenues. Copper exports accounted for 30% to 80% of all hard currency coming into the country. Before the 1960s, the two largest copper producers in the country accounted for between 8% and 20% of the Chilean GDP, but these were wholly-owned subsidiaries of North American companies, sending profits overseas. The Chilean left wing had always wanted to keep more of the nation’s copper wealth for the people of Chile rather than watching it drain away to foreign corporations, so the last thing those corporations wanted to see was an electoral victory by the Chilean left.

Chile was one of the most stable democracies in Latin America. The constitutional rule of law had held firm since 1932 while dictators rose and fell all around them in neighboring countries. Then, in the 1970 elections, the openly Marxist Salvadore Allende came out slightly ahead of his competition, winning 37% of the vote in a three-way race for president. Lacking an outright majority, the decision was punted to the congress, where, after much angry debate and wrangling, the presidency was given to Allende, who became the first avowed Marxist in history ever to be freely elected to lead any country anywhere. Chilean conservatives and foreign investors could now only hope that the Chilean Army Commander, René Schneider, would launch a coup before Allende could be sworn in as president. On October 16, 1970, before the Chilean government even switched hands, the CIA cabled their station chief in Santiago Chile:

It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be overthrown by a coup. It would be much preferable to have this transpire prior to 24 October but efforts in this regard will continue vigorously beyond this date. We are to continue to generate maximum pressure toward this end utilizing every appropriate resource. It is imperative that these actions be implemented clandestinely and securely so that the USG [US Government] and American hand be well hidden.

General Schneider, however, made it quite clear that he believed in the strict constitutional separation of the military from politics. He publicly denounced any talk of a coup, so American CIA agents began conspiring with conservatives in the military to kidnap the general. It was hoped that once Schneider was out of the way, more cooperative junior officers would launch the desired coup. After sounding out one conservative general, Roberto Viaux, and deciding he was unreliable, the CIA turned to General Camilo Valenzuela of the Santiago garrison. They supplied Valenzuela with cash and weapons that could not be traced. However, in October 1970 before Valenzuela could do anything, General Viaux’s team went ahead and ambushed Schneider. When Schneider pulled his pistol to fight back, they killed him instead. His replacement as army commander, General Carlos Prats, turned out to be a believer in the constitution as well, so Allende was sworn in on schedule on November 4 and quickly got to work.

During the previous decade, the Chilean government had been negotiating the purchase of a controlling share in the largest mines. Shortly before Allende took office, the Chilean government of his predecessor had signed deals with the three largest copper mines in Chile, buying 51% interest in each. Allende had made no secret of his plans to claim a larger slice of Chile’s wealth for the people. Now, instead of negotiating a fair price for the remaining 49%, Allende abruptly nationalized the whole industry. He seized everything without compensation, explaining that the mining companies had already cheated Chileans out of enough of their national riches. Politically it made the masses of Chile ecstatic and a lot of powerful foreigners very angry.

The United States withdrew all foreign aid from Chile, and President Nixon used his influence to prevent banks, international agencies and investors from lending any more money to Chile. Eventually, the only hard currency coming into the country was the millions of dollars the US government steadily funneled to opposition parties and newspapers. Out of the fear that Allende was going to nationalize their Chilean subsidiary, the global telephone conglomerate IT&T ponied up a million dollars to help with any potential coup.

Allende watched the Chilean economy crash as the country was cut off from international trade. Production collapsed; shortages developed; inflation surged. More and more workers went on strike. To protest food prices and shortages, housewives gathered in the streets, banging their empty pots and pans. In August 1973, General Carlos Prats, fed up with trying to keep order in all the chaos, insulted and abused from all directions, resigned as army chief of staff.

His replacement, General Augusto Pinochet, immediately started planning to take control and stop this drift into chaos. The best evidence suggests that the CIA was not as deeply or directly involved in the 1973 coup as they had been in 1970. They certainly knew it was coming, but they merely stood by and let it happen rather than trying to organize it themselves. Their failure in 1970 discouraged them from attempting any direct action.

The first thing in the morning of September 11, 1973, the Chilean navy took over the port of Valparaiso. Shortly afterwards, the army began seizing critical communication facilities in the capital at Santiago. By 9:00 AM, only the capital’s center remained under Allende’s control. He refused to surrender, so the army rooted him out with tanks and assault teams, killing many of his supporters and driving Allende to suicide.

The soldiers rounded up thousands of potential troublemakers and packed them into the Santiago’s football stadium for processing. Hundreds of known leftists were preemptively executed by firing squad before they could cause trouble for the junta. Pinochet then turned Chile into a brutal but business-friendly dictatorship. For the next decade and a half, foreign investment was safe while domestic dissenters were whisked away to be tortured, killed and dumped into unmarked graves or far out at sea.

The Copycat: Argentina

Leftist rebels kept up an ongoing campaign of terrorism that had killed a few hundred people over the years. Juan Peron was brought back from exile in Spain to run the country. After he died, his current wife Isabel took over, but the situation in Argentina quickly deteriorated. Inflation ran rampant. Unemployment persisted. Guerrillas continued their fight.

In February 1976, mid-level Argentine officials asked their contacts in the American embassy if Washington would mind terribly if the Argentine military seized control of the government, hypothetically speaking. Apparently, a planning group in the army had been brainstorming some scenarios and was wondering how the Americans would react. The United States didn’t seem too upset by the idea, but warned any theoretical junta that they might run into “trouble if they start executing people.” The Argentine plotters, however, wouldn’t make any promises. “Some executions would probably be necessary,” the Argentines explained. After all, they intended “to carry forward an all-out war on the terrorists.” Hypothetically of course.

Two months later, the Argentine military declared martial law, arrested the president, and seized all television and radio stations. Now they could fight the rebels without civilian meddling. The bodies began to pile up.

Brief Glimmer in Thailand

In Thailand through most of the twentieth century, a strong military pulled the strings of a weak monarchy. Then a student uprising on October 14, 1973 briefly put the government in the hands of elected civilians. They never quite got democracy working smoothly. Weak coalitions never lasted very long or got anything done.

Then the neighboring countries of Indochina fell to the communists at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, and the right wing in Thailand got jumpy. They were afraid that Thailand was next, so they got ready to roll out the tanks and clamp down on any crowd that looked even remotely communist. On October 6, 1976, when students gathered to protest the return of a hated former dictator from exile, troops quickly moved in and slaughtered them, putting Thailand back under military control.

Collapse of Lebanon

[Flag of Lebanon] The perpetual war between Christianity and Islam was about to open a new front. Under the post-WW1 agreements, the Christian communities along the coast of French Syria near Mount Lebanon were bundled into a new French mandate with a narrow Christian majority in 1922. Even so, the borders enclosed a lot of diverse communities, and Lebanon became a multiethnic hodgepodge of Maronite Christians, Sunni Muslims, Orthodox Christians, Shia Muslims, Druze, Kurds, and Armenians. Seats in Lebanon’s single chamber of parliament were allocated according to a fixed ratio of 6 Christians to 5 Muslims, which was the official proportion counted in the colonial census. For a while, the ethnic diversity worked in Lebanon’s favor. When Lebanon was set completely free in 1943 during Democracy’s Second Wave, it easily acquired a reputation as the Switzerland of the Middle East. The country was a relaxed and civilized democracy (mostly), a cosmopolitan financial center and tourist playground. Then it all went to Hell in the 1970s.

For one thing, the government didn’t dare hold another census because it was obvious that the Muslim population was growing faster than the Christian and the power structure would have to be rejiggered. The Muslim minority (majority?) was growing restless over this. Even worse, the mass migration of Palestinian refugees from Israel had filled southern Lebanon with a huge hungry, angry underclass. This festered into lawless zone of refugee camps run by sectarian militias. Violating Lebanon’s sovereignty, Israeli commandos and warplanes often raided Palestinian communities to retaliate for terrorist attacks. In April 1975, this escalated into outright civil war between Christian and Muslim militias all across Lebanon, which sucked in troops from Israel and Syria. For the next twenty years or so, Lebanon was the archetype of a failed state.

Everyone Else

The world was a mess everywhere in the 1970s.

President Ferdinand Marcos was elected president of the Philippines in 1965. Despite the general poverty of the land, he started beefing up the military and flexing his muscles by sending Filipinos to fight alongside the Americans in Vietnam. Paying for this put the government in heavy debt to foreigners, and the economy faltered. After that, each year saw more new problems. Leftist protests in 1970 erupted into riots that destroyed government property. After those were put down, a communist insurgency flared up in the countryside in 1971. That same year, someone threw a couple of grenades onto a stage full of political candidates. Finally, when unknown parties tried to assassinate the Defense Minister in September 1972, Marcos declared Martial Law. He shut down Congress and locked up everyone he didn’t like.

In 1970 President Velasco of Ecuador suspended the constitution, dissolved the legislature and assumed dictatorial powers to cope with financial emergency. The military deposed Velasco.

For a couple of years after Bangladesh became a country, it operated as a parliamentary democracy, but then in 1974, a famine hit and Mujib declared martial law. There’s an economic theory that famines don’t hit democracies because a free press will focus a spotlight on the suffering and any government that ignores its people as they starve is going to get quickly voted out of office. When Nobel-winning economist Amartya Sen came up with this theory, the 1974 Bengali famine was offered as both an example and a counterexample.

Ali Bhutto

In 1977, the Pakistani military ousted the democratic government after disputed parliamentary elections. General Zia dissolves the legislature, arrests politicians and declares martial law.

Constitutional Crises Everywhere

[Flag of India] The worldwide stumbling of democracy in the 1970s even tripped some of the world’s more traditionally stable governments. The United States, the world’s oldest democracy, faced an unprecedented crisis in the presidency, while India, the world’s largest democracy, suffered a major interruption.

Although thoroughly democratic, Prime Minister Jawarlal Nehru had run India without serious challenge until his death in 1964, after which leadership of the Congress Party -- and largely by default, of India as well -- fell on one of his unexciting colleagues. Within a year, however, Nehru’s daughter, Indira, who had moved comfortably in the circles of power ever since she had been a little girl, now asserted herself as the proper heir to her father’s legacy. By pure coincidence, Indira had married a man named Gandhi (“Grocer”) who was no relation to the famous Mahatma, although it gave her the same last name and probably a lot of votes from confused citizens.

Indira Gandhi proved to be a master politician and she controlled India for a decade, always tightening her grip on power. In 1973 she abolished elections for offices within the Congress Party making it more difficult for her allies to challenge her leadership. India, however, was going through a bad patch, and much of the blame fell on her. By 1975, strikes were crippling Indian economy. Gandhi was investigated for corruption and found guilty of electoral malpractice. The Supreme Court then barred her from holding office, but instead of complying with such a silly order, she just declared martial law in June 1975 and threw all her opponents in jail. To try to bring the country back under control, she slapped price controls on the economy and shut down the presses. After 18 months, however, she was pressured into holding new elections to validate her authority. The 1977 elections defeated Gandhi, and the Congress Party lost power for the first time in history.

[US flag] Meanwhile, the American intervention in Vietnam had polarized politics between war hawks and peace doves in the United States. In 1971, the national press got hold of secret military documents showing that many early episodes of the war had been deliberately misrepresented, exaggerated and downright fabricated by the government as excuses for America to go kill some Commies. Outraged by the breach of security, President Richard Nixon set up a secret team of operatives, the Plumbers, to stop any more sensitive and embarrassing information from leaking into the hands of antiwar activists. In June 1972, the Plumbers were arrested repairing secret microphones in the middle of the night in the national headquarters of the opposition Democrats at the Watergate office complex in Washington. Over the next two years, escalating investigations discovered that Nixon had set up a huge network of surveillance, secret money and harassment directed at dissenters and political enemies. Even worse, just before almost every new discovery, Nixon’s people scrambled to illegally suppress the evidence of their wrongdoing. As more senior White House aides were fired, arrested, imprisoned and hauled before Congressional committees, support for Nixon withered away. Finally the President was forced to resign in August 1974.

This sort of thing was unknown in America. No president before or since had ever quit. In the general backlash against the growth of an all-powerful presidency, Nixon was followed by a couple of weak but good-natured presidents. First came Gerald Ford, the only American president not to be chosen by the Electoral College for either of the top jobs. Rather than being Nixon’s running mate in a massively expensive multimedia presidential campaign, he was simply appointed vice-president by Congress after Nixon’s original vice-president was convicted of old-fashioned bribery unrelated to the ongoing Watergate scandal. Ford then became President when Nixon resigned.

Elected next in 1976, Jimmy Carter is the only American president since Herbert Hoover (1929-33) to not bomb anyone. In fact, Carter may well have been the only president in many generations to make human rights central to his foreign policy. This showed up most notably in Nicaragua and Iran, where Washington allowed popular revolts to overthrow brutal American-backed strongmen without interference in 1979. Nixon certainly would never have allowed that to happen.

[US flag] Even democracy in Australia was under unusual stress. In 1972 the Labor Party won the House of Representatives for the first time and tried to enact a leftist agenda; however, a conservative coalition of the National and Liberal parties controlled the Senate and blocked everything Labor Prime Minister Gough Whitlam tried to do. The government of Australia stalled in a partisan deadlock, about to run out of money and unable to assemble a functioning cabinet. After watching Prime Minister Whitlam flounder uselessly for several years, Governor-General Sir John Kerr, a royal appointee from Britain, stepped out of his passive ceremonial role. He fired Whitlam in 1975 and brought in the opposition to run the government.①

This annoyed Australians who thought they were independent of Britain, and this wasn’t the only time the Crown had interfered in Australian politics. By a weird fluke of lawmaking, the 1931 Statute of Westminster granted sovereignty only to the central government of the Australian federation. The individual Australian states were theoretically still sort of answerable to the British government and were expected to clear everything with London. While the British wisely refused to get involved in local Australian politics most of the time, there had been a couple of occasions where the British disagreement had actually made a difference and stopped the Australians from doing whatever they wanted. Finally in 1986 the Labor Party came to power again in Australia, so they passed new laws making it quite clear that Australia had full control over its own affairs at all levels of government. This is the closest to a formal Declaration of Independence that Australia has.

Another Civil War in a Democracy: The “Troubles”

[UK flag] The six northernmost counties of Ireland are mostly inhabited by Protestant descendants of Scottish and English immigrants, so the United Kingdom kept these when they set the rest of Ireland free. These Protestants were perfectly happy to stay part of the United Kingdom. Living among them, however, were Catholic descendants of the original Irish Gaels, a minority that would rather have been included in the Republic of Ireland.

Although everyone talks about Catholic versus Protestant, the conflict in Northern Ireland wasn’t religious in the sense that the loser had to convert or be burned at the stake. Rather the Church served as the glue holding each community together and was the simplest touchstone for whether a person was “us” or “them” since both sides spoke the same language, looked the same and had roots in Ireland going back for generations. Of course, many of those roots included honest-to-god religious conflicts hundreds of years earlier that had required the loser to convert or be burned at the stake, so there was plenty of old anger bottled up.②

Despite the overall ratio in favor of Protestants, some communities in Northern Ireland were predominantly Catholic, such as the city of Londonderry/Derry③, where the Protestant minority had manipulated voting to hold onto power. For starters, local voting was still limited to heads of household and people of property, which automatically eliminated the largely Catholic lower class. On top of that, the government heavily gerrymandered voting districts to reduce Catholic voting strength even more. And finally, the government tended to rent scarce public housing to young Protestants before Catholics, leaving many young Catholics living with their parents where they’d remain disenfranchised for not being “heads of households”. Street protests against this injustice started in June 1968.

As the months passed, the protests escalated, so in October the police lost patience and waded in to club some sense into the marchers. Riots then erupted in other cities, especially Belfast, Northern Ireland’s largest city, and by the end of 1969, about a dozen people had been killed in the streets. British troops arrived to patrol the cities. More riots killed another couple of dozen across the region during 1970. By 1971, the troops were using increasingly serious weaponry such as tear gas and rubber bullets to break up the protests. Paramilitaries such as the IRA (Catholic) and UVF (Protestant) were setting off car bombs in enemy neighborhoods. The British army started rounding up potential troublemakers and locking them deep in jail for long, long periods without trial. More troublemakers quickly took their place on the streets.

By 1972, the conflict was taking lives continuously. On Bloody Sunday, British troops fired into a peaceful protest march, killing 13. On Bloody Friday, the IRA exploded around 20 bombs in crowded streets and stations all around Belfast. Killings became too common to keep naming them, and nearly 500 more people were dead by the end of the year, most of them civilians caught in the middle. It continued like this for the next four years. Pubs were bombed. Informants turned up dead. Prisoners died of hunger strikes. Pretty soon, the cities were split into segregated neighborhoods by barbed wire and roadblocks patrolled by armed vigilantes in ski masks. The British government suspended home rule in Northern Ireland and ran the place directly.

The fighting tapered off after 1976. By the 1980s, the rate of violent deaths in Northern Ireland was still far higher than anywhere in Europe, but really no worse than, say, Miami. It took nearly twenty years of frustrating talks to get everyone to completely stop killing each other. Nobel Peace Prizes were earned in 1976 by a grassroots citizen’s group that tried to end the violence and in 1998 by negotiators who did.

The peace process really took off in 1996 when talks mediated by the United States finally got everyone to agree to the procedural ground rules. Home rule was then restored to Northern Ireland. Ultimately, it was two local politicians from opposite sides, John Hume and David Trimble, who worked out the concluding agreement two years later.

-- Matthew White

① Some people suspect darker shenanigans in Australia’s Constitutional Crisis. Prime Minister Whitlam was shifting Australia towards a more pacifist foreign policy, and he started asking uncomfortable questions about what the American CIA was doing inside their supersecret spy base that they leased from the Australians at Pine Gap. Then, literally the day he was scheduled to say something about it, Whitlam got suddenly booted out by John Kerr, an old-school Cold Warrior with hawkish connections. Meanwhile, several key American personnel stationed at the US embassy and elsewhere in Australia had previously been seen sneaking around Chile in 1973 and Indonesia in 1965 when those countries had pro-American coups. Coincidence? Well, yes, probably. (John Pilger, “The British-American coup that ended Australian independence”, The Guardian, 23 October 2014. James Curran, “Gough Whitlam’s Pine Gap problem”, The Australian, November 5, 2014. Phillip Frazer, “Dirty Tricks Down Under”, Mother Jones, Feb-March 1984)

② To avoid religious overtones, some people call the two sides Republican (for the Republic of Ireland) and Unionist (for the United Kingdom), but that’s misleading in its own way, making it sound like the dispute was political when it was really tribal.

③ Each side calls it something different. They can’t even agree on that.

Ⓐ Sami M. Moubayed, Steel & Silk: Men and Women who Shaped Syria 1900-2000 (Cune Press, 2006) pp.308-314

Ⓑ David Schafer, “Triumph and Catastrophe”, The Humanist, Nov/Dec. 2002.