Losing a model democracy: Salvador Allende and U.S.-Chilean relations, 1945--1970.

摘要

This dissertation breaks from the scholarly focus upon Allende's presidency and from the 1975 Church Committee's questions about U.S. actions towards Chile and Salvador Allende. It traces U.S.-Chilean relations from 1945 to 1970 and examines how U.S. perceptions of Chile as a model democracy intertwined with Allende's rise as the leader of the Chilean Left to create what U.S. officials deemed as one of the most dangerous threats of the Cold War. Drawing upon multiple U.S. and Chilean archives and primary sources, this study shows that at the start of the Cold War, U.S. policymakers defined Chile's primary asset as an ally as the symbolic value that its model democracy offered the world. They constructed the model democracy premise, which asserted that Chile had a firmly rooted democracy, resembled a European nation, and was located outside the immediate U.S. sphere of influence. The premise guided U.S. policy towards Chile until 1970, defined the primary U.S. objective as preserving democracy, and enabled Chileans to extensively shape or impede U.S. efforts.;Besides detailing the centrality of democracy in U.S. policy towards Chile, this study shows how U.S. perception of threats shifted from the Right to the Left during the Cold War. For U.S. officials, the initial postwar threat to Chilean democracy was rightist authoritarianism, embodied in General Carlos Ibanez and Argentina's Juan Peron. During the 1954 U.S. intervention in Guatemala, Salvador Allende criticized and led protests against U.S. policy, and then travelled to Moscow, turning U.S. officials' focus from the Rightist to the Leftist threat.;After Allende's near-victory in Chile's 1958 presidential election, U.S. policymakers considered him as dangerous to U.S. interests, if not more so, than Fidel Castro, because he could achieve socialism through democratic means and serve as a revolutionary prototype. Allende's words and actions encouraged and rarely mitigated U.S. concerns about his Cold War allegiances and aims. Beginning under President Kennedy, the United States interfered in Chile's domestic politics to keep Allende from power, but reduced its interference in the late 1960s. With Allende's victory in 1970 and the Nixon administration's efforts to subvert Chile's constitutional processes to deny him the presidency, the United States lost a model democracy. Ironically, in the aftermath of Allende's 1973 overthrow, critics of U.S. policy and subsequent U.S. policymakers drew upon the model democracy premise as they realigned U.S. policy towards promoting democracy and human rights and assisted Chile's return to democracy.