Reimagining Chile's Cold War Experience: From the Conflict's Origins to Salvador Allende's Inauguration

Abstract

My dissertation explores the history of America and the world, focusing on Chile and southern South America during the Cold War. It reworks and reinterprets the United States and Chile's Cold War experience through multiarchival, international Cold War history in an Atlantic, rather than inter-American, global-historical context. Eight, overlapping, chronologically-organized chapters reconstruct the two countries' relationship from the conflict's origins to Salvador Allende's inauguration in November 1970. I locate United States and Chilean history within the international community of nations and the Atlantic world rather than the narrower, United States-centered inter-American one, and I recognize Chile as a free and sovereign power and a nation among nations, rather than a subject of United States imperialism, formal or informal. The Cold War began in Chile when the Chilean labor movement arose responsive to globalization trends in the late-nineteenth century, and when communists and anticommunists appeared on the ground there in the 1920s, rather than with the American interventions that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s. I thus offer an alternative, reimagined interpretation of the United States and Chile's Cold War experience. I argue that the United States and Chile's Cold War history was not primarily an expression of American influence in Chile, but rather Chileans' complex, contested, and often highly unstable transition from colony to nation in the fluid and evolving world-historical frameworks of the Atlantic revolutions and independence, the industrial revolution, the world wars, the Russian Revolution, the Great Depression, the Cold War, and the Cuban Revolution. This enables historians to gain new insight into the already well-studied rise and fall of the Allende administration and the coup and dictatorship that followed it in the 1970s. It also reinterprets Chilean-American relations and, through this, supports those who challenge the characterization of the United States as an empire or otherwise the prime mover in recent global history. I conducted research in the National Archives in College Park, and Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Richard Nixon's presidential libraries, and I reviewed documents in the British National Archives in Kew Gardens, the Chilean National Library in Santiago, and the Chilean Nuclear Energy Commission's reading room in La Reina as well. I also relied on published primary sources, including the Department of State's Foreign Relations of the United States series, the Chile Declassification Project, and historian Olga Ulianova's Russian-to-Spanish translations of Soviet papers pertaining to the Chilean Communist Party.