Reimagining Chile's Cold War Experience: from the Conflict's Origins to Salvador Allende's Inauguration
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Reimagining Chile's Cold War Experience: From the Conflict's Origins to Salvador Allende's Inauguration Item Type text; Electronic Dissertation Authors Lockhart, James Publisher The University of Arizona. Rights Copyright © is held by the author. Digital access to this material is made possible by the University Libraries, University of Arizona. Further transmission, reproduction or presentation (such as public display or performance) of protected items is prohibited except with permission of the author. Download date 29/09/2021 13:53:14 Link to Item http://hdl.handle.net/10150/620841 Reimagining Chile's Cold War Experience: From the Conflict's Origins to Salvador Allende's Inauguration by James Lockhart Copyright © James Lockhart 2016 A Dissertation Submitted to the Faculty of the DEPARTMENT OF HISTORY In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements For the Degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY In the Graduate College THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA 2016 THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA GRADUATE COLLEGE As members of the dissertation committee, we certify that we have read the dissertation prepared by James Lockhart, titled "Reimagining Chile's Cold War Experience: From the Conflict's Origins to Salvador Allende's Inauguration" and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Michael Schaller Date: Elizabeth Cobbs-Hoffman Date: Jadwiga Pieper-Mooney Date: Fabio Lanza Date: Final approval and acceptance of this dissertation is contingent upon the candidate's submission of the final copies of the dissertation to the Graduate College. I hereby certify that I have read this dissertation prepared under my direction and recommend that it be accepted as fulfilling the dissertation requirement. Michael Schaller Date: Dissertation Director 2 STATEMENT BY AUTHOR This dissertation has been submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for an advanced degree at the University of Arizona and is deposited in the University Library to be made available to borrowers under rules of the Library. Brief quotations from this dissertation are allowable without special permission, provided that an accurate acknowledgement of the source is made. Requests for permission for extended quotation from or reproduction of this manuscript in whole or in part may be granted by the head of the major department or the Dean of the Graduate College when in his or her judgment the proposed use of the material is in the interests of scholarship. In all other instances, however, permission must be obtained from the author. SIGNED: James Lockhart 3 Acknowledgements I thank Professors Michael Schaller, Elizabeth Cobbs, Jadwiga Pieper Mooney, and Fabio Lanza for reading and commenting on my dissertation. Their knowledge, expertise, and insights were invaluable, and I have responded to their questions and suggestions as best I could. Although all of them read the dissertation, my choices in approach, interpretation, and conclusions remain my own. Apart from Professor Pieper, who specializes in Chilean history, I have had the good fortune to study US-Latin American relations and the Chilean past with Professors Brian Loveman and Thomas Wright, and I have had some exchanges with Professor Frederick Nunn as well. Professor Alejandro San Francisco was very collegial while I was in Santiago. Historian Matt Jacobs, my colleague at the Embry-Riddle Department of Global Affairs and Intelligence Studies, read the entire dissertation as I was writing it, and I very much appreciate our conversations, too. All of the archivists and librarians I interacted with were consummate professionals. I will always remember how the staff at the Harry Truman presidential library invited me to come into a back area to see the giant-sized Mein Kampf that Lieutenant General Walter Bedell Smith acquired at the end of the Second World War, and how the staff at the Lyndon Johnson library brought additional boxes out to me after learning the scope of my project, offering information that I might otherwise have overlooked. Both the British National Archives and the Chilean Nuclear Energy Commission's reading room were friendly and highly-efficient research environments. I received fellowships and grants from the George Marshall Foundation (the Marshall/Baruch Fellowship), the Lyndon Johnson Foundation (the Harry Middleton Research Fellowship), the John Kennedy Foundation (the Marjorie Kovler Research Fellowship), a research and travel grant from the Harry Truman Foundation, a grant from the Social and Behavioral Sciences Research Institute at the University of Arizona, and several supplementary grants from the Department of History as well (Barbara Payne Robinson, Richard Cosgrove, and Edwin Turville fellowships). I could not have researched this dissertation without these institutions' generous support, and I remain grateful for it. Program Coordinator Noora Balooshi helped me get my dissertation defense through its final administrative stages. She also helped set up a critical Skype connection in the department's conference room. Lisa Munro assisted with the formatting. 4 Although Professor Richard Eaton, who studies South Asian and world history, was not on my dissertation committee, he deeply influenced my thinking on global/comparative history, and in turn, my desire to think about how the United States and Chile's Cold War experience has fit into and might yet fit into new world-historical contexts. Also, I have never met historian Sally Marks. But her review article, "The World According to Washington," has long influenced my thinking on the United States and the world. It remains insufficient to study American foreign-policy formulation in region or nation A, B, or C. We must also become thoroughly familiar with A, B, or C's history itself, and we must recognize that the United States does not simply write other regions and nations' history however it pleases -- indeed, some of these regions and nations have shaped and conditioned American history, too. Only then can we begin to cultivate a sound understanding of the United States and the world in all its complexity.1 I came to the Department of History after having written a master's thesis titled "CIA- Sponsored Covert Action in Latin America and the Caribbean, 1953-1975," and I wanted to continue researching some aspect of United States, Latin American, and Cold War history in my dissertation. As I progressed in my doctoral studies, I felt more confident that historians and political scientists, from Aleksandr Fursenko and Timothy Naftali to Ariel Armony, Robert Pastor, and Piero Gleijeses, and emerging historians such as Matt Jacobs at Ohio University and Aaron Coy Moulton at the University of Arkansas, were already researching, writing, and/or dissertating about the United States, the Caribbean, and the Cold War from the perspective I had in mind. But the Chilean case, with few exceptions, seemed to remain mired in a discourse right out of the 1970s, which historian Tanya Harmer has aptly called "a narrow historiography of blame." So I decided to attempt to reimagine the United States and Chile's Cold War experience in order to transcend this.2 1Sally Marks, "The World According to Washington," Diplomatic History (1987) 11: 265-282. 2Tanya Harmer, Allende's Chile and the Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 7. 5 Table of Contents Acknowledgements....................................................................................................................................4 Abstract......................................................................................................................................................8 I. Introduction.............................................................................................................................................9 II. The England of South America: Chile and the World into the Twentieth Century.............................33 III. Chilean Anticommunism before the Cold War..................................................................................55 IV. Chilean Politics and the Transatlantic Origins of the Cold War: The Rise and Fall of the Democratic Alliance....................................................................................................................................................81 V. The Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy..........................................................................105 VI. Eduardo Frei and Nuclear Modernization........................................................................................131 VII. The Rise of General Viaux.............................................................................................................166 VIII. Reimagining Chile's Cold War Experience...................................................................................201 Bibliography...........................................................................................................................................213 6 Illustration Index Illustration 1: General Augusto Pinochet posing before a portrait of Diego Portales..............................37 Illustration 2: Chile's nuclear-science community, circa 1965...............................................................136 Illustration 3: Brigadier General Roberto Viaux speaking to the press during the Tacnazo..................177 Illustration 4: Tacna Regiment, Parque Cousiño, 21 October 1969.......................................................178