“Reagan and Pinochet” Intro & Ch.1

The book I will be reviewing this spring is called “Reagan and Pinochet: The Struggle Over U.S. Policy Toward Chile” and was written by Morris Morley and Chris McGillion. Here is the link to the book on Amazon if you would like to follow along with me: https://www.amazon.com/Reagan-Pinochet-Struggle-Policy-toward/dp/1107458099. It is divided into a lengthy and important introduction and seven chapters so I will be taking this two at a time. This book begins with a twenty-five page introduction to United States policy towards the Pinochet dictatorship of Chile. It describes the events leading up to the coup starting with the legal democratic election of socialist, Salvador Allende in September of 1970. Keep in mind this was during the Cold War and the red scare and everyone was super anti-communist. Since the United States was the hegemonic super power and Nixon was a paranoid control freak he said hey lets just use the CIA to train their military so they can have a little insurgency and take over the country to kick out communism in 1973. While officially the cabinet did not plan for Pinochet to become a dictator and stay in power for that long, he did and they did nothing about it. In fact they funded his regime under the table and defended it to congress when they brought up the countless crimes against humanity committed under Pinochet. Time passes, Nixon gets in trouble, and President Gerald Ford takes office in 1974. One of the first things to come across his desk is the threat by congress to control the junta and make them stop killing people. To be honest Ford was kind of a puppet and his main man Kissinger rejected that, “human rights per se outweighed other US interests and objectives in Chile,” (6). Honestly their only objective was to stop the spread of communism I am pretty sure that torturing and murdering a bunch of people probably is not the best idea, but hey it made them fear a strong state. Time moves on, Ford does nothing, and Jimmy Carter takes office in 1977. Now Carter has a little more of a conscious attacked Chile with sanctions, pulling back funding, and publicly critiquing their human rights violations. Finally we get to the main player of the book, President Ronald Reagan who began his presidency in 1981. This brings us to chapter 1: In from the Cold. This chapter describes the first actions of Reagan’s foreign policy with Chile. His mission when he first entered office was to return things back to a super anticommunist policy and patch up relations with Pinochet. It then goes on to describe the economic crisis of 1982 and the help enlisted by economics from the Chicago school. While the administration continued to ignore the human rights violations, things began to shift in Washington. They refused to continue to help solve Chile’s economic problems until it took their concerns on human rights seriously. While the book spells all of this out in much deeper detail, it is a lot of information to summarize. Just know that the main point was that while his presidency started with extreme support of the junta it turned into one that held human rights concerns higher than anticommunist concerns.