Uncomfortable Allies: U.S. Relations with Pinochet’s Chile

Abstract

As Chile approached its fifteenth year under military rule, its president, General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, had been chief of state longer than any figure in that nation’s history. For that reason alone, he was an object of intense international interest on the part of the politically engaged in many Western countries. Political longevity was not the only reason for interest in Pinochet, however, or the most important one. Part of his notoriety consisted in the fact that he had become the dictator of the South American republic with the longest and firmest tradition of democracy just at a time when other, more historically troubled nations like Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru, were newly ruled by elected civilian governments. Most important of all, it was under his command that the armed forces of Chile deposed the first popularly elected Marxist president in the history of the Western hemisphere — indeed, of any nation — Dr. Salvador Allende, on September 11, 1973. Pinochet thus embodied not merely a particularly noxious form of Latin American militarism, but the extinction of one of the most important revolutionary utopias of the 1970s.