Reddit reviews The Pinochet File: A Declassified Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability

A must read would be the pinochet file, about operation condor.

I recommend to have a look at the wikipedia's page on anti american sentiment in latin america as a starting point for specific actions and check out the "further reading sections" for each event.

The banana wars that are more about central america and the caribean are also worth looking into.

	

	

	

> # Did the “Invisible Blockade” against Allende’s Chile work?
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> Did an “invisible blockade” by the United States fatally undermine the Chilean economy under the presidency of Salvador Allende (1970-73)? Did it actually work? Short answer: No.
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> Note: this post is not about the wider US involvement in the September 1973 coup or about the regime of General Pinochet. It’s about the economic and financial dimensions of US-Chilean relations during the Allende years. (Edit: For a short post on post-Allende Chile, see my “There was no Chilean miracle“.)
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> [allende_at_un_1972](https://pseudoerasmus.files.wordpress.com/2015/05/allende_at_un_1972.jpg?w=300&h=222)On the eve of the violent military coup against Salvador Allende on 11 September 1973, Chile found itself in unprecedented economic chaos. Shaken by hyperinflation, widespread shortages, and labour unrest, the “Chilean road to socialism” might have been doomed by simple economic collapse, even if the coup had never taken place. But for many people it’s an article of faith that the United States was deeply responsible for the destabilisation of the Chilean economy. In that narrative, the Nixon administration had imposed an “invisible blockade” against Chile, a multi-front economic war conducted by an alarmed imperial hegemon bent on aborting the first democratic socialist experiment in Latin America.
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> But was the “invisible blockade” actually successful? Did it cause, or contribute substantially to, Chile’s shambles in 1972-73? This narrower question of the actual economic impact of the ‘blockade’ has gotten lost in the shuffle of the larger question of US culpability in Pinochet’s coup.
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> In this post, I argue, regardless of whether the “blockade” was as extensive or as maliciously intended as its maximalist critics allege, it did not make any difference.
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> (1)
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> The controversy about the US involvement in Chile peaked in the1970s immediately following the coup and in the wake of the Church committee hearings in the US Senate. But it has periodically flared up in tandem with coup anniversaries, the arrest of Pinochet in London, his prosecution in Chile, his death in 2006, etc. At the same time, there’s been a steady stream of books and articles dealing with US interference in Chile which mention the ‘blockade’ mostly in passing. Yet these usually assume as a matter of course that it must have ‘worked’.
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> For example, Peter Kornbluh’s The Pinochet File, now in its second printing (2013), combines a narrative of Yankee shenanigans with fascimiles of declassified US government documents relating to Chile. Amongst those are Richard Nixon’s hand-written instruction to the CIA to “make the [Chilean] economy scream“; or Henry Kissinger’s infamous National Security Memorandum 93, calling for economic and financial measures against Chile. The steps outlined in that memo bear close resemblance to what the United States actually did.
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> And such documents are essentially regarded as prima facie evidence for the efficacy of the “invisible blockade”. Or most people just don’t really give it much thought and default to the conventional view you can find by googling the “invisible blockade” (e.g., 1, 2, 3, 4, etc.)
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> The literature on Chile in 1970-73 is incredibly large. Yet the part that’s specifically on the ‘blockade’ that I’m aware of is quite modest in comparison:
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> - Farnsworth et al., Facing the Blockade (1973) (Spanish translation in PDF).
> - Paul Sigmund, “The Invisible Blockade and the Overthrow of Allende” (1974) (Spanish translation in PDF).
> - Exchange between Farnsworth and Sigmund in Foreign Policy (1974).
> - pp 79-118 of Petras & Morley, The United States and Chile: Imperialism and the Overthrow of the Allende Government (1975)
> - Farnsworth et al. “The invisible blockade: the United States reacts” in Chile: Politics and Society (1976), pp 338-373.
> - Petras & Morley, “On the U.S. and the Overthrow of Allende: Reply to Professor Sigmund’s Criticism” (1978)
> - Sandro Sideri, ed., Chile 1970-73: Economic Development and its Interational Setting (1979).
> - chapter 4 of Gonzalo Martner, El gobierno del presidente Salvador Allende 1970-1973 (1988);
> - pp 200-241, Mark Falcoff, Modern Chile, 1970-1989: A Critical History (1989).
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> Except for the Sideri volume, this ‘blockade’ literature is about financial politics and diplomacy, not economics. They dwell on (a) the motivations of the US government, various private banks and corporations, the multilateral financial institutions, etc.; and (b) the minutiae of Chile’s external financial relations in the years 1970-73, such as the Paris Club negotiations over the country’s external debt, World Bank deliberations, legal proceedings related to copper, etc.
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> The ‘blockade’ literature seems to agree on the following :
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> - US foreign aid to Chile fell dramatically in the Allende years. This included long-term development loans (USAID), trade finance (Eximbank), etc.
> - During Allende’s tenure, no new loans were originated by the World Bank, and the amount of loans from the Inter-American Development Bank fell dramatically. Chile had been a major beneficiary of both institutions before 1971.
> - At the end of 1971, the Allende government announced a moratorium on the servicing of foreign debt (mostly owed to US banks).
> - There was a gradual reduction, not a total elimination, of lines of credit from US private banks which normally financed Chile’s imports on a short-term basis.
> - There was no embargo on trade, but Chile had to pay for imports in cash upfront, in proportion to the loss of trade finance.
> - The Allende government completed the nationalisation of the copper mining companies initiated by the previous administration (Frei), but decided not to compensate the mostly U.S. owners.
> - US copper companies attempted in various jurisdictions, including France, to attach Chilean copper shipments, but this met with only partial success.
> - Chile was able to obtain aid and credit from alternative sources in Western Europe and Latin America, as well as the socialist bloc.
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> Sigmund and Falcoff, who might be called ‘anti-blockadists’, argue there was no blockade because there wasn’t a total cut-off in aid and credit. And the “credit squeeze” by private banks was not politically motivated, but largely a legitimate financial response to Chile’s deteriorating credit-worthiness. They also argue alternative sources of aid and credit went a long way in compensating for the loss of traditional sources.
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I just ordered this book to learn more

I'm a historian of Latin America, so I really only know about the US-Latin American cases or the US/Canadian/European - Caribbean cases. Peter Kornbluh has published a lot of declassified US primary source documents that relate to US interventionism abroad.

The Pinochet File, about Chile
Bay of Pigs Declassified, about Cuba

A really good secondary source is Greg Grandin's book Empire's Workshop.

A great secondary source on this sort of stuff occurring during the 1970s in Southeast Asia, by Alfred McCoy, is The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade. Meticulously researched (the book is over 1000 pages, the footnotes are endless). McCoy is a pretty tremendous historian, out of U of Wisconsin. His area of expertise is Southeast Asia, not the US, and like me, he stumbled into a much darker story than he ever expected to find.

It's a tricky subject and a lot of Very Serious People have written studies about what a boon it has been to the economy and populace of Chile, but most of those people are advocates of the neoliberal socio-economic model so they tend to see and say things that support that narrative.

I'd say if you really want to dive into this subject, you should start with the book The Pinochet File by Peter Kornbluh/the National Security Archive. It uses a wealth of declassified US intelligence and state department documents to examine the history of Pinochet's rise to power and his government around that time. While it doesn't directly address privatization of the country's social security system, it gives a great look at the political environment and conditions in which it happened and, in my opinion at least, is essential reading to parsing any sort of later analysis of the policy shift.