Chile-US Relations

Author(s):  
Patrick William Kelly

The relationship between Chile and the United States pivoted on the intertwined questions of how much political and economic influence Americans would exert over Chile and the degree to which Chileans could chart their own path. Given Chile’s tradition of constitutional government and relative economic development, it established itself as a regional power player in Latin America. Unencumbered by direct US military interventions that marked the history of the Caribbean, Central America, and Mexico, Chile was a leader in movements to promote Pan-Americanism, inter-American solidarity, and anti-imperialism. But the advent of the Cold War in the 1940s, and especially after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, brought an increase in bilateral tensions. The United States turned Chile into a “model democracy” for the Alliance for Progress, but frustration over its failures to enact meaningful social and economic reform polarized Chilean society, resulting in the election of Marxist Salvador Allende in 1970. The most contentious period in US-Chilean relations was during the Nixon administration when it worked, alongside anti-Allende Chileans, to destabilize Allende’s government, which the Chilean military overthrew on September 11, 1973. The Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990), while anti-Communist, clashed with the United States over Pinochet’s radicalization of the Cold War and the issue of Chilean human rights abuses. The Reagan administration—which came to power on a platform that reversed the Carter administration’s critique of Chile—reversed course and began to support the return of democracy to Chile, which took place in 1990. Since then, Pinochet’s legacy of neoliberal restructuring of the Chilean economy looms large, overshadowed perhaps only by his unexpected role in fomenting a global culture of human rights that has ended the era of impunity for Latin American dictators.

2018 ◽  
Vol 32 (3) ◽  
pp. 283-292 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cécile Fabre

AbstractIt is widely alleged that President Putin's regime attempted to exercise influence on the 2016 U.S. presidential election. It is known that its Soviet predecessors funded Western communist parties for decades as a means to undermine noncommunist regimes. Similarly, the United States has a long history of interfering in the institutions and elections of its Latin American neighbors, as well as (at the height of the Cold War) its European allies. More recently, many believe that, absent U.S.-driven assistance, the Democratic Opposition of Serbia would have lost the 2000 Yugoslavian presidential election to Slobodan Milošević. As those examples suggest, attempting to subvert the democratic elections of a putatively sovereign country is a time-honored way of bending the latter's domestic and foreign policy to one's will. In this paper, I focus on the state-sponsored, nonviolent, nonkinetic subversion of nationwide elections (for short, subversion) through campaign and party financing, tampering with electoral registers, and conducting disinformation campaigns about candidates. I argue that, under certain conditions and subject to certain constraints, subversion is pro tanto justified as a means to prevent or end large-scale human rights violations.


Author(s):  
Iñigo García-Bryce

This chapter explores Haya’s changing relationship with the United States. As an exiled student leader he denounced “Yankee imperialism” and alarmed observers in the U.S. State Department. Yet once he entered Peruvian politics, Haya understood the importance of cultivating U.S.-Latin American relations. While in hiding he maintained relations with U.S. intellectuals and politicians and sought U.S. support for his embattled party. His writings increasingly embraced democracy and he maneuvered to position APRA as an ally in the U.S. fight fascism during the 1930s and 40s, and then communism during the Cold War. The five years he spent in Lima’s Colombian embassy awaiting the resolution of his political asylum case, made him into an international symbol of the democratic fight against dictatorship. He would always remain a critic of U.S. support for dictatorships in Latin America.


1990 ◽  
Vol 64 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 41-49
Author(s):  
Catherine A. Sunshine

[First paragraph]The Cuba reader: the making of a revolutionary society. PHILIP BRENNER, WILLIAM M. LEOGRANDE, DONNA RICH, and DANIEL SIEGEL (eds.). New York: Grove Press, 1989. xxxv + 564 pp. (Paper US $14.95). Cuba: the test of time. JEAN STUBBS. London: Latin America Bureau, 1989. xvii + 142 pp. (Paper UK £3.95). Cuba: politics, economics and society. MAX AZICRI. London: Pinter Publishers Ltd., 1988. xxiii + 276 pp. (Cloth US $35.00, Paper US $12.50). Cuba libre: breaking the chains? PETER MARSHALL. Boston: Faber & Faber, 1987. viii + 300 pp. (Cloth US $18.95). The closest of enemies: a personal and diplomatic account of U.S.-Cuban relations since 1957. WAYNE S. SMITH. New York and London: W.W. Norton & Co., 1987. 308 pp. (Paper US $8.95). Imperial state and revolution: the United States and Cuba, 1952-1986. MORRIS H. MORLEY. New Rochelle, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1987. ix + 571 pp. (Paper US $16.95, Cloth US $59.50). From confrontation to negotiation: U.S. relations with Cuba. PHILIP BRENNER. Boulder, Colorado: Westview Press, 1988. x + 118 pp. (Cloth US $30.00, Paper US $9.95).Nineteen eighty-eight marked the completion of the Cuban revolution's third decade. Several events that year suggested that Cubans might finally look forward to a lessening of the island's international isolation, if not its domestic economic woes. The revolution had survived eight years of hostility from the Reagan administration. Washington's attempts to secure international censure of Cuba on human rights grounds had culminated in the visit of a United Nations delegation, at Havana's invitation and with relatively little damage to Cuba's image. Fidel Castro's visits to Ecuador and Mexico to attend the inaugurations of two Latin American presidents underscored Cuba's reinsertion into the hemispheric community. Finally, Cuban military successes against South African troops in Angola and Cuba's role in the subsequent negotiations over Angola and Namibia were a source of pride.


2019 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 114-151
Author(s):  
Tanya Harmer

This article explains how Latin American governments responded to the Cuban revolution and how the “Cuban question” played out in the inter-American system in the first five years of Fidel Castro's regime, from 1959 to 1964, when the Organization of American States imposed sanctions against the island. Drawing on recently declassified sources from Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Uruguay, and the United States, the article complicates U.S.-centric accounts of the inter-American system. It also adds to our understanding of how the Cold War was perceived within the region. The article makes clear that U.S. policymakers were not the only ones who feared Castro's triumph, the prospect of greater Soviet intervention, and the Cuban missile crisis. By seeking to understand why local states opposed Castro's ascendance and what they wanted to do to counter his regime, the account here offers new insight into the Cuban revolution's international impact and allows us to evaluate U.S. influence in the region during key years of the Cold War.


Urban History ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 42 (4) ◽  
pp. 663-685
Author(s):  
DAVID JOHNSON LEE

ABSTRACT:The reconstruction of Managua following the 1972 earthquake laid bare the contradictions of modernization theory that justified the US alliance with Latin American dictators in the name of democracy in the Cold War. Based on an idealized model of urban development, US planners developed a plan to ‘decentralize’ both the city of Managua and the power of the US-backed Somoza dictatorship. In the process, they helped augment the power of the dictator and create a city its inhabitants found intolerable. The collective rejection of the city, the dictator and his alliance with the United States, helped propel Nicaragua toward its 1979 revolution and turned the country into a Cold War battleground.


Author(s):  
Jennifer Hoyt

Relations between the United States and Argentina can be best described as a cautious embrace punctuated by moments of intense frustration. Although never the center of U.S.–Latin American relations, Argentina has attempted to create a position of influence in the region. As a result, the United States has worked with Argentina and other nations of the Southern Cone—the region of South America that comprises Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina, Chile, and southern Brazil—on matters of trade and economic development as well as hemispheric security and leadership. While Argentina has attempted to assert its position as one of Latin America’s most developed nations and therefore a regional leader, the equal partnership sought from the United States never materialized for the Southern Cone nation. Instead, competition for markets and U.S. interventionist and unilateral tendencies kept Argentina from attaining the influence and wealth it so desired. At the same time, the United States saw Argentina as an unreliable ally too sensitive to the pull of its volatile domestic politics. The two nations enjoyed moments of cooperation in World War I, the Cold War, and the 1990s, when Argentine leaders could balance this particular external partnership with internal demands. Yet at these times Argentine leaders found themselves walking a fine line as detractors back home saw cooperation with the United States as a violation of their nation’s sovereignty and autonomy. There has always been potential for a productive partnership, but each side’s intransigence and unique concerns limited this relationship’s accomplishments and led to a historical imbalance of power.


2020 ◽  
Vol 53 (2) ◽  
pp. 153-176
Author(s):  
Anthony DiFilippo

This article will analyze the connection between history, countervailing ideologies, that is, the legacy of the Cold War, and the perceived identification of human rights violations as they pertain to countries with major security interests in Northeast Asia. This article will further show that the enduring nuclear-weapons problem in North Korea has been inextricably linked to human rights issues there, specifically because Washington wants to change the behavior of officials in Pyongyang so that the Democratic People's Republic of Korea (DPRK) becomes a state that at least remotely resembles a liberal democracy. Although supported by much of the international community, including the United States' South Korean and Japanese allies in Northeast Asia, Washington's North Korean policy has remained ineffective, as Pyongyang has continued to perform missile testing and still possesses nuclear weapons.


2020 ◽  
pp. 205-248
Author(s):  
Vanessa Walker

This chapter examines the dramatic reinvention of U.S. human rights policy during Reagan's first year in office. The Carter administration pursued human rights as a corrective to U.S. interventionist legacies, emphasizing pluralism and eschewing regime change. The Reagan administration, in contrast, aggressively promoted human rights within a reinvigorated but narrow Cold War framework. This construction, championing a limited range of civil and political rights, downplayed the human rights violations of pro-American governments, focusing instead on what it considered the much greater moral flaws and violations of communist regimes. The Cold War framing of human rights under Reagan empowered a pairing of military power and moral values, leading the United States to not only not limit arms sales to governments but also recast military aid as a critical aspect of both hemispheric defense against communism and the advancement of human rights. The chapter studies this policy shift in the Reagan administration's first year in regard to Chile and Argentina.


2018 ◽  
Vol 45 (4) ◽  
pp. 6-41 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald H. Chilcote

The Cold War assumptions of mainstream Latin American studies in the United States were challenged in the 1960s by a new generation of academics that opened up the field to progressive thinking, including Marxism. West Coast intellectuals played a major role in this transformation. These new Latin Americanists rejected the university-government-foundation nexus in the field and emphasized field research that brought them into close relationships with Latin Americans struggling for change and engaging with radical alternatives to mainstream thinking. In the course of this work, they confronted efforts to co-opt them and to discourage and even prevent their field research. Despite this they managed to transform Latin American studies into a field that was intellectually and politically vibrant both in theory and in practice. Los supuestos de la Guerra Fría dominantes en los estudios latinoamericanos en los Estados Unidos fueron cuestionados en la década de 1960 por una nueva generación de académicos que abrió el campo al pensamiento progresista, incluso el Marxismo. Los intelectuales de la costa oeste jugaron un papel importante en esta transformación. Estos nuevos latinoamericanistas rechazaron el nexo universidad-gobierno-fundación que caracterizó el campo y enfatizaron la investigación en el terreno que los ubicó en una estrecha relación con los latinoamericanos que luchan por el cambio y se enfrentan con alternativas radicales al pensamiento dominante. En el curso de este trabajo, confrontaron esfuerzos para cooptarlos y desalentar e incluso prevenir su investigación en el terreno. A pesar de esto, lograron transformar los estudios latinoamericanos en un campo que era intelectualmente y políticamente vibrante tanto en la teoría como en la práctica.


1997 ◽  
Vol 39 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-43 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph S. Tulchin

The key to understanding Latin American relations with the United States as the century, and the millennium, draw to a close is to realize that all of the nations in the Western Hemisphere are still caught up in the transition from the Cold War. That transition, which began nearly a decade ago, is proceeding more slowly, and with greater confusion, than most observers had anticipated. The issues that constitute the framework, or infrastructure, for Hemispheric relations in the coming century emerge from the efforts of each nation in the Hemisphere, including the United States, to effect their insertions into the emerging world order. Given the priority accorded commercial and economic questions in the insertion of most Latin American nations, those are the questions that dominate the discourse. However, questions of governance — and what I call the international code of good behavior — are rapidly assuming greater salience in inter-American relations. It is my judgment that they will dominate relations among the nations of the Hemisphere in the 21st century.


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