The Transnational Dimensions of the Pinochet Dictatorship’s Official Historical Narrative

From its very beginnings in September 1973, the Pinochet dictatorship used a particular narrative of recent Chilean history to justify ongoing military rule. From the perspective of Chile’s anticommunist leaders and their closest civilian collaborators, the September 11 coup had saved Chile from communist domination. In their view, Chile’s longstanding democratic system had failed to safeguard the country from the ‘subversive’ communist threat and only a ‘protected democracy’ – as enshrined in the 1980 constitution - could keep the communist menace at bay. This paper will examine how this official narrative of Chile’s recent history shaped its particular brand of anticommunism and the dictatorship’s perceptions of events elsewhere in Latin America’s Cold War.

Drawing on Chilean foreign ministry documents and private papers, this paper will use the Pinochet dictatorship’s response to events in Central America in 1979-82 as a means to explore the role that historical narrative played in Chilean understandings of the wider Cold War. Again and again, diplomats and senior members of the Pinochet dictatorship drew on examples from Chile’s recent history to make sense of events in the isthmus. As the Salvadoran Civil War escalated in 1980-81, the official narrative of Chile’s supposed ‘decline into communism’ shaped Chilean diplomats’ perceptions of Salvadoran politics, particularly when it came to Christian Democrat leaders in that country. Elsewhere, the rejection of liberal democracy that lay at the heart of the 1980 constitution produced friction between Chilean and US foreign policy in Central America as a whole. While the Pinochet dictatorship shared much of the wider Latin American Extreme Right’s common ideology, this paper will show how its perceptions of and response to events elsewhere in Latin America’s Cold War were nonetheless shaped by unique, national influences, pointing to the diversity of views held by Latin American anticommunists in this period.