Fiery Crosses in the Southern Cone: Anticommunism and International Klan Networks Between the US South and South America, 1957–63

On May 21, 1958, police officers caught for four Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members carrying a bomb toward the Israelite Circle, a hub of Jewish life in Santiago, Chile. The city seemed an odd place for the KKK, a tradition of white supremacist vigilantism created in 1865 by former Confederate military officers after the US Civil War. People of African descent, the main targets of Klan violence, were a tiny minority in 1950s Chile, where prejudice against Jews (whom Klan members also targeted) was also in steep decline. Sensing his political marginality, Franz Pfeiffer, a rare Chilean fascist, contacted Horace Sherman Miller, a Klan leader in Texas. After joining Miller’s KKK organization in 1957, Pfeiffer and his Klan recruits repeatedly attacked Jewish people, whom Chilean Klan members erroneously viewed as co-directors of world communism. That KKK network spread to Argentina, where local members organized chapters and distributed anti-Jewish propaganda in several cities. This paper analyzes Pfeiffer and the hundreds of dues-paying KKK members who established Klan chapters in Chile and Argentina between 1957 and 1963. I argue that South American KKK members demonstrate how Cold War anticommunism provided flexible political discourses that linked otherwise disparate far-right groups at midcentury. Klan members in the US South often described themselves as anticommunists fighting a supposed “communist-Jewish conspiracy” behind African American civil rights advancements. In Chile and Argentina, postwar far-right extremists clung to similar conspiracy theories that blamed Latin American leftwing movements, including Fidel Castro’s revolution in Cuba, on alleged Jewish conspirators. These similar Cold War discourses created enough ideological common ground between US and South American far-right extremists for some of the latter to join a US-based KKK organization. Ultimately, the Klan proved to foreign and anti-Catholic for most far-right Chileans and Argentines, who overwhelmingly preferred nationalistic anticommunist organizations.