Allende, Pinochet, and the Long Spanish Civil War in Chile

This paper, part of a larger research project on the Spanish Civil War’s impact throughout Latin America, explores the Spanish Civil War and its legacies, both as a metaphor for local power struggles and as a formative political consciousness-raising experience, in the politics and history of 20^th-century Chile. The paper discusses the Spanish conflict’s immediate reverberations in late-1930s Chile, and then traces the lasting influence of the Civil War on Chilean intellectuals and activists across the ideological spectrum in the ensuing decades, seeking to explain why, in 1976, Pinochet would choose to characterize his country’s situation as “a further stage of the same conflict which erupted into the Spanish Civil War.” In this, Pinochet was not alone; throughout the 1970s, political actors of wildly varying stripes continued to use a war fought a half-century earlier on the other side of the world as a key political and cultural reference point. The Chilean experience suggests, therefore, that to understand both the internal dynamics of the Latin American Cold War and its transnational dimensions, we must look not only northward from Latin America to the United States but eastward, across the Atlantic Ocean, to Spain.