The United States, Great Britain, and the Chilean Presidential Election of 1942^*

Scheduled for February 1, 1942, the election of the successor of Chilean president Pedro Aguirre Cerda, who passed away on November 25, 1941, confronted the United States and Great Britain with an unexpected challenge and forced their governments to reassess their policies toward Latin America amidst a war that, after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, had become a truly world affair. Until then, the United States and Great Britain had not openly taken sides in Chilean electoral contests. Economic interests had been a significant concern of U.S. and British diplomats stationed in Chile, but no strategic alliance with national political forces had come about as a result of those interests. In the case of the United States, moreover, the implementation of the Good Neighbor policy by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration had stood on the principle of non-intervention in the domestic affairs of Latin American countries. The policy was more germane to U.S. hegemony over Central America and the Caribbean than to relations with South American countries, but it still operated as a framework for U.S. foreign policy decisions regarding the latter, including Chile. The election of February 1942, in which U.S. and British diplomats and intelligence agents identified one of the candidates as an ally of the Axis countries, forced the U.S. foreign policy apparatus to ponder the possibility of intervention in the race in a way that had no direct precedent and, more importantly, required a significant reappraisal of the principles and pertinence of the Good Neighbor policy in the new reality imposed by a war in which the United States was directly involved.

Documents from the U.S. Department of State, the White House, and recently declassified records from the British Foreign Office allow for a detailed reconstruction of the views and decisions of U.S. and British diplomats and policymakers regarding the Chilean presidential election of 1942. Pressed by the new reality of the war, the U.S. and British representations in Santiago, with some encouragement from Washington and London, identified some of the candidates in the race as better choices for the interests of their countries and conceived plans for intervening in their favor in the election. The correspondence between the U.S. Ambassador in Chile, Claude Bowers, and the Department of State, as well as his frequent exchanges with President Roosevelt, so far studied mostly with regard to the question of Chilean neutrality in the war, show clearly how the principles of non-intervention behind the Good Neighbor policy stood in tension with the necessities imposed by the war after December 7, 1941. Recently declassified records from the British Foreign Office, in addition, expose the willingness of officials in London and diplomats in Santiago to intervene in the Chilean election, their influence on the thinking of Ambassador Bowers, and their final resignation to the fact that Great Britain could not operate in Latin America without U.S. approval.

The non-intervention principle underlying the Good Neighbor policy still held in the conjuncture of early 1942. However, since U.S. and British diplomats and Chilean politicians pushed, through different means, for direct intervention from the United States in the election, the Roosevelt administration had to reassess the policy and the principle underlying it. All of this happened over the course of a few weeks, which in part explains why the presidential election of 1942 did not become a definitive turning point for the Good Neighbor policy or U.S. relations with South American countries. Nevertheless, the forced reappraisal of the principle of non-intervention and the explicit acknowledgement that the interest of the United States lay with some political forces and was in opposition to others meant in fact that the Roosevelt administration was taking one step away from the primordial tenets of the Good Neighbor policy. As various authors have shown, in its search for a continental policy for the war, which included pressuring Chile and Argentina into breaking with the Axis powers and the deportation of presumed Axis agents from Latin American countries to the United States, the Roosevelt administration gave up on the non-intervention principle underlying the Good Neighbor policy.¹ Without fully falling into that pattern, the events and the decisions surrounding the Chilean presidential election of 1942 foreshadowed some of the elements of the change in the U.S. strategy toward Latin America during the war.

No scholarly work has dealt directly with the question of foreign involvement in the Chilean presidential election of 1942, although some books on the effects of the war in Chile mention some of the events described in this essay.² In a more meaningful way, this essay contributes to an already robust literature on the matter of the Good Neighbor policy, especially its alteration due to the circumstances of the Second World War.³ Bryce Wood and C.A. MacDonald have argued, convincingly, that the policy of pressure and intervention in Argentine politics carried out by the Roosevelt administration with the purpose of aligning the country with the continental policy of the United States in the war entailed the end of the Good Neighbor policy.⁴ Similarly, Max Paul Friedman associates the end of the Good Neighbor policy with the persecution of presumed Axis agents in Latin America and the deportation of a considerable number of them to the United States, a very obvious violation of the non-intervention principle embraced by the Roosevelt administration before the war.⁵ This essay offers a contribution to the study of the trajectory of the Good Neighbor policy, identifying and explaining one of the first moments in which the Roosevelt administration had to seriously reassess it, thus opening a way toward its more clear abandonment through the actions studied by Wood, MacDonald, and Friedman.

On a second layer, this essay adds to the already abundant literature on U.S. involvement in Chilean political affairs. Various authors have explored U.S. relations with Chile in the context of the war, its immediate aftermath, and the Cold War, with different degrees of emphasis on the question of U.S. involvement in the domestic political affairs of the South American republic.⁶ The common thread between all of those works and this essay is the character of the relationships established between the United States and Chilean political forces. This essay offers an account of one of the earliest instances of the United States taking sides more or less explicitly with Chilean political forces and, as importantly, opposing leaders and groups whose access to power could be detrimental to U.S. interests.

Furthermore, the events described in this essay took place around a presidential election, much like other instances of U.S. involvement in Chilean politics, such as the well-known covert actions in the presidential elections of 1964 and 1970. The common theme is not purely coincidental. In a functioning and relatively solid democracy such as Chile’s between 1932 and 1973, it was logical for a foreign power seeking to exert its hegemony to support domestic forces with a strong anchoring in the political system and, conversely, to oppose the forces within that system that could erode that hegemony, all of which competed regularly in electoral contests. As the events of 1942 show, intervention was neither inevitable nor the primordial means in the repertoire of the hegemonic power in the continent, but the very character of elections in Chile made it a real possibility even before the United States assumed the role of world superpower that would define its relations with South American countries during the Cold War. In that vein, this essay is an initial chapter, heretofore unknown, of a history whose most prominent cases, the elections of 1964 and 1970, have received a great deal of attention by scholars in the United States and elsewhere.⁷

The candidates, the United States, and the war

In the populated landscape of Chilean party politics, it was natural that several names emerged as possible candidates for the presidency shortly after Aguirre Cerda’s death.⁸ In the Radical Party, the party of the deceased president, two men who had aspired to gain the nomination in 1938, Juan Antonio Ríos and Gabriel González Videla, seemed to have the best chance to win in 1942. Ríos, of the conservative wing of the Radical Party and a former supporter of military caudillo and dictator Carlos Ibáñez, did not project a very favorable image to U.S. and British diplomats serving in Santiago, even though he tried to assure U.S. interests in Chile that he would align the country with the United States.⁹ Claude Bowers, appointed U.S. ambassador in Santiago in 1939 after heading the diplomatic mission in Spain in the years of the Spanish Civil War, considered Ríos an “able man,” but “so far to the Right that it may require a microscope to differentiate his position from that of a totalitarian.”¹⁰ Bowers’s assessment, as most of his opinions about Chilean politics during his fourteen-year stint in the country, was heavily influenced by his experience in Spain, which led him to see with great distrust and fear anything that even remotely resembled the events that led to the downfall of the Republic and the ascent of Francisco Franco.¹¹ Accurate or not, his vision of the world stage, as a New Deal Democrat and a partisan of the Spanish Republic, influenced more than anything else how he conducted his diplomatic duties in Chile.

The other important candidate of the Radical Party was Gabriel González Videla, then Chile’s ambassador in France. A man of great ambitions and a cunning reader of the international scene, González Videla wasted no time in letting his intention to run for the presidency be known and, sensing with great acuity the atmosphere of the times, immediately took steps to seek the support of the United States. The day after Aguirre Cerda’s death, González Videla contacted the U.S. embassy in France and, besides informing its staff about his presidential bid, asked them to tell Washington that he was “in complete accord with the expressed policy of the President regarding international problems and … devoted to the purposes of the Good Neighbor policy.”¹² As all the other prospective candidates would, González Videla understood early on that the election would be significantly shaped by the international conflict of the time, both because the ongoing war in Europe demanded of governments the adoption of a position and, as importantly, because the ideological underpinnings of the conflagration had recognizable similarities with the ideological divides of Chilean politics. In addition, it was becoming clear that the United States would stand as one of the superpowers in the postwar world, and professions of trust and loyalty to that leadership made strategic sense, independently of the ideological affinities between Roosevelt and progressive politicians in Chile and elsewhere.

On the other side of Chile’s ideological spectrum, former dictator Carlos Ibáñez emerged as the strongest candidate. An officer who made his entry into politics as one of the leaders of the military revolts of 1924 and 1925, Ibáñez exhibited many of the authoritarian features of the fascist, nationalist, and other populist political movements that had gained ascendancy in Europe and Latin America in the interwar years.¹³ After conspiring against the first civilian president elected under the Constitution of 1925, he became president in 1927 and assumed dictatorial powers until the political shocks of the Great Depression brought him down in 1931. Ibáñez’s rule was a mix of economic nationalism, antioligarchic discourse, counterrevolutionary repression, and social legislation, which included the first comprehensive Labor Code in the history of the country.¹⁴ In 1938, Ibáñez ran for president supported by the only fascist party with a representation in the Chilean Congress, the Movimiento Nacional-Socialista, but his bid ended after a failed putsch attempt carried out by the nacis, as they wanted to be called, weeks before the election.¹⁵ In August 1939, Ibáñez was again implicated in a coup attempt, this time led by a nationalist and anticommunist officer, General Ariosto Herrera.¹⁶ The failure of Ibañez’s conspiratorial activities, however, did not affect his ambitions and did not end his political career.

Two other politicians of high prestige in Chilean politics expressed their intentions to run for the highest office of the republic. The Socialist Party put forth the name of Óscar Schnake, Minister of Development (Ministro de Fomento), as its candidate for the presidency. Schnake, a medical doctor, was one of the founders of the Socialist Party.¹⁷ In 1940, in his capacity as minister, he represented the Aguirre Cerda government at the Inter-American Conference of Havana and played a significant role in the negotiations for a loan from the Export-Import Bank to the newly created Corporación de Fomento, a governmental agency tasked with the responsibility of promoting industrialization in Chile. Returning from Washington in 1940, Schnake had to confront the opposition of the Communists, who saw a contradiction between the project of modernization of the Chilean government, meant to promote the economic independence of the country, and an association with the imperialist power in the Americas. Schnake did not see the situation in the same light. Like other politicians in Latin America and the rest of the world, he saw U.S. democracy, especially in its New Deal version, as the most powerful ally that progressive forces could have in a world at war. Despite the Socialist Party’s adherence to Marxist ideas and revolutionary rhetoric, Schnake’s pragmatic and sober personality and his high intellect made him very amenable to both the U.S. and the British embassies in Santiago and, in the immediate aftermath of Aguirre Cerda’s death, their preferred candidate to succeed the deceased president.

Finally, Eduardo Cruz-Coke, a forty-two-year-old medical doctor and a senator, sought the nomination of the Conservative Party. Unlike the older Conservatives, Cruz-Coke focused on social issues and, crucially, took a determined pro-Ally and pro-United States position in the dilemmas posed by the outbreak of the war.¹⁸ He became a close friend of the U.S. ambassador, and a well-known name among U.S. officials in the Department of State and the White House. In fact, only a few days before Aguirre Cerda’s death, Cruz-Coke met U.S. Under Secretary of State Sumner Welles in Washington and advised him that, in its relations with Chile, the United States should stress the “gravity of the Japanese situation and the potential danger of Japan,” as this emphasis would have a “far more practical effect in stirring up public opinion as to the need of continental solidarity than if all this stress were laid on the Atlantic and on Germany.”¹⁹

The events of the following month would prove the prescience of Cruz-Coke’s words. The entry of the United States into the war made the conflagration a more direct concern for all the parties involved in Chilean politics, even if no one proposed a significant change in the policy of neutrality. Simultaneously, the outbreak of the war in the Pacific consolidated the interest of the United States in Chilean domestic politics. Theretofore, U.S. foreign policy and diplomats had occasionally sided with forces in Chilean internal political conflicts. In the years of the independence wars, U.S. envoy Joel Poinsett became a close friend and adviser of one of the caudillos of Chilean emancipation, José Miguel Carrera; the U.S. ambassador in Santiago took the side of President José Manuel Balmaceda in the civil war of 1891; and the administration of U.S. President Herbert Hoover stood ready to send warships to quell a naval mutiny in 1931 in case the Chilean government requested it.²⁰ Still, none of those instances of involvement stemmed from or defined a permanent course of action for U.S. foreign policy toward Chile. Economic interests also conditioned U.S. policies toward Chile, and Latin American countries in general, at least since the beginning of the twentieth century, when U.S. capital entered Chile and copper, exploited by U.S.-owned companies, became the main staple of the Chilean economy. However, since the Chilean state did not generally seek to implement policies unfriendly to U.S. interests, no automatic political alignment derived from those interests. More important to the Roosevelt administration had been the renegotiation of Chile’s debt with U.S. bondholders, unpaid since the time of the Ibáñez government. The successful renegotiation of the debt resulted from the efforts of Gustavo Ross, the Minister of Finance in Arturo Alessandri’s presidential administration, who stood as the candidate of the conservative forces of Chilean politics in the presidential election of 1938, in which he lost to Aguirre Cerda, member of the Radical Party and supported by Socialists and Communists.²¹ Crucially, despite Ross’s adequate relations with U.S. officials and private interests, neither the Roosevelt administration nor its ambassador in Santiago thought that the interests of the United States lay indisputably with the candidate of the right.²²

The war against the Axis, on the other hand, redefined the foreign policy of the United States in a comprehensive manner and the position adopted by the countries of the Americas toward the conflict became an urgent matter for the U.S. foreign policy apparatus. For most of the war, the question of breaking relations with the Axis powers would be the most pressing issue in U.S. relations with Argentina and Chile. Fears of the actions of Fifth Columns and spy rings prompted the Roosevelt administration to place great urgency on the question of rupture and to cooperate with the efforts of the Chilean government to seek and root out presumed Axis agents. Moreover, as the evolution and result of the war pushed the United States toward the status of a superpower whose interests were at stake across the world, the course of the domestic politics of a country like Chile required more attention and, possibly, direct involvement from agents of U.S. foreign policy. This position of the United States toward Chilean politics, aided by the interest of Chilean actors in drawing the United States into domestic political affairs, would take its most dramatic form in the involvement in Chile of Lyndon B. Johnson and, especially, Richard Nixon’s administrations in their waging of the Cold War. Due to the unforeseeable circumstances created by the death of President Aguirre Cerda and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor only two weeks later, the presidential election scheduled in Chile for February 1, 1942 became an instance in which U.S. interests, as they were interpreted by the ambassador in Santiago and other officials in Washington, clearly identified with one of the sides in competition. This preference announced a strategic shift toward a more direct involvement in the internal political affairs of Chile and the rest of South America, which meant reconsidering the principles underlying the Good Neighbor policy.

Juan Antonio Ríos defeated González Videla in the internal election of the Radical Party in mid-December and thus became the standard-bearer of the party of the deceased Aguirre Cerda.²³ On the other side, Carlos Ibáñez received the official support of the Liberal and Conservative parties around the turn of 1942, only after both organizations went through excruciating debates and suffered significant defections as a result of their choices.²⁴ The Conservatives’ decision put an end to the ambitions of one of the men held in high esteem by Ambassador Bowers, Eduardo Cruz-Coke —though only for the time being, as the Senator would be the candidate of the party in the 1946 election. Consequently, Ibáñez’s chances to become president grew substantially. The personal popularity of the former soldier stood relatively high, despite his record as a dictatorial president and his prominent participation in the coup attempts of 1938 and 1939. However, his independence from parties with a solid anchorage in Chilean politics decreased his possibilities of winning a presidential election. After Liberals and Conservatives decided to support Ibáñez, the same man who had persecuted many members of their parties during his presidency a decade earlier, the former dictator had a higher chance to win the election.

Fears of a right-wing uprising circulated profusely in Chile at the time, even before Aguirre Cerda’s death. Most of those fears stemmed from rumors for which little evidence could be provided. On the other hand, the very real coup attempts of 1938 and 1939, and the long history of conspiratorial activity by Ibáñez gave substance to those fears. In any case, the danger of a right-wing, fascist, and/or pro-Ibáñez insurrection in the weeks after Aguirre Cerda’s passing genuinely scared Chilean politicians and military officers. The aggravation of the international conflict with the U.S. entry in the war only compounded the situation. In the days after the attack on U.S. territories and possessions in the Pacific, the chief of the Chilean army, General Óscar Escudero, interviewed with Bowers a few times, to express his moral support for the United States and to discuss the international and domestic political situations, then intermingled as at few other times in the electoral history of the country. First, Escudero expressed the preoccupation of the armed forces with the possibility of a Japanese attack on the Chilean coast, a fear that would condition a great deal of Chilean foreign policy in the following years.²⁵ Second, the Chilean army chief told Bowers that Ibáñez was “plainly a Nazi” and that “the German Embassy [was] prodigiously interested in his candidacy.”²⁶ On the latter count, Escudero saw a real prospect of a violent conflict in Chile, either as a result of a coup attempt or, less likely, the victory of an anti-American candidate in the presidential election. Fearing both internal upheaval and a foreign attack, the Chilean general requested material support from the United States, mostly in the form of tanks.²⁷ At the time, the Chilean army only possessed a few tankettes of British origin. Escudero’s request, probably based on a calculated exaggerated appraisal of the situation, nonetheless emblematized the impact of the Second World War in the national politics and international position of Chile. The Roosevelt administration could not send the materiel with the urgency requested by Escudero, but in 1943 a dozen M3 Stuart tanks arrived in Chile and became the first such weapons of the Chilean army.²⁸

The U.S. and British embassies’ plans for the election

The U.S. and British missions in Santiago reached the conclusion early on that a victory for Ibáñez in the presidential election would prejudice the interests of their countries in Chile and the wider war effort. In one of his frequent letters to Roosevelt, Bowers described Ibáñez as a “dull man intellectually” and expressed his conviction that the former general’s candidacy confronted the United States with “an open fight with the Nazis, and their Italian, Spanish, and Japanese allies.”²⁹ In other reports, the U.S ambassador reiterated his absolute certainty that Ibáñez’s campaign was being funded by the Germans, the Spanish, the Italians, and the Japanese, and that the former dictator was the “candidate of the Nazis and the Fifth Column.”³⁰ Bowers made up his mind about Ibáñez’s candidacy based on information obtained from Chilean interlocutors who had their own vested interests in the matter. In addition, his visceral rejection of anything that smacked of fascism and militarism, a result of his experience in Spain, often led him to see the most sinister intentions in people who deviated from the liberal democratic convictions to which he adhered.³¹ In this sense, his partisanship for democracy and the enthusiasm with which he embraced democratic principles sometimes prevented him from making cold appraisals of complex political situations. His conviction that Ibáñez’s candidacy relied mostly on Axis powers and Spanish funding dovetailed perfectly with his preconceptions about international politics and with the image that the opponents of the military caudillo tried to create. Ibáñez’s populist appeal, born of his leading role in the military movements of 1924 and 1925, in some ways anticipated the trajectory of Juan Domingo Perón in Argentina. The views of officials of the Roosevelt administration about him and the intentions of Ambassador Bowers to intervene in favor of his adversaries in the presidential election of 1942 to some extent announced the ways in which the United States would deal with Perón and his brand of populism in the immediate aftermath of the Second World War.

On the other hand, intelligence gathered by agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), at the time the only civilian agency conducting that type of work in Chile, reaffirmed Bowers’s ideas. According to the information received by the FBI, “the Nazi, Spanish, and Italian groups [were] contributing large sums of money to General Ibáñez.”³² Bowers, however, did not trust the information provided by the FBI to the Department of State, in a reflection of his own style of leadership of the U.S. mission in Chile but also as an inevitable consequence of the still indeterminate relationship between the role of an ambassador and the secrecy with which intelligence activities must be conducted.³³

The British mission in Chile reached a similar conclusion to that expressed with great certainty by Bowers. According to Sir Charles Orde, the British ambassador in Santiago, Ibáñez was spending about $30,000 a month in his campaign, much of which came from German sources.³⁴ Besides the information the British may have gathered on the ground, the partnership between Ibáñez and Germany fit with the views on the retired general held by the staff of the embassy. For the deputy chief of the British mission, “Ibáñez [had] always favoured totalitarian methods,” and was moreover “in close touch with German and Fascist groups and the former [were] financing his campaign.”³⁵ Neither the British nor the U.S. diplomats stationed in Chile explained in detail the strategic intent behind the Germans’ presumed support for the former general beyond generic assertions to the effect that an Ibáñez government would obstruct U.S. continental policies. Still, they were convinced without any shadow of doubt that a government headed by Ibáñez would favor the interests of Germany, Italy, Japan, and even Franco’s Spain.

German records examined by historian Graeme Mount confirm the assessments of the U.S. and British embassies. According to Mount, the German ambassador and an Abwehr agent in Santiago requested funds for supporting Ibáñez. The ambassador even described the retired officer as “a friend and admirer of the German people” and a man who shared “Nazi values.”³⁶ Other reports informed about a $16,000 contribution of the Japanese to the Ibáñez campaign.³⁷ According to later reports from the FBI, even Dominican dictator Rafael Trujillo provided funds for Ibáñez, although neither Bowers nor his staff seemed to have been aware of this at the time of the election.³⁸

Ibáñez and some of his supporters, aware of the image they projected, tried to dispel doubts about his intentions toward the United States and the war. As all the other men who wanted to run for the presidency after Aguirre Cerda’s death, Ibáñez understood that the United States would play a large role in shaping the international conditions under which the Chilean economy and Chilean politics would work in the years to come. Siding with the Axis powers was simply unconceivable; alienating the United States did not seem a good choice either. Consequently, Ibáñez tried to assure U.S. diplomats and public opinion that as president he would align with U.S.-led initiatives of continental solidarity. In an interview with The Detroit News, Ibáñez stated explicitly that he would support the United States in the war.³⁹ In a publicized communication with Carlos Dávila, president of Chile for a brief period in 1932, Ibáñez requested him to take the position of ambassador to the United States.⁴⁰ Dávila served as Chilean ambassador in Washington during Ibáñez’s first government and had resided in the United States since 1933, where he established close links with officials in the U.S. government. Even President Roosevelt sent Dávila a note of condolence after the death of his wife in March 1941.⁴¹ This informal web of contacts made Dávila a rather significant asset for Ibáñez and the promise of appointing him ambassador to the United States sent the message that he had no intention of deviating from the general terms set by U.S. continental leadership. The broader questions about political philosophies and views on democracy, however, were a different matter. In a conversation with diplomat Spruille Braden, Dávila recounted that he had once told Sumner Welles that the United States should support dictators like Brazil’s Getulio Vargas, Guatemala’s Jorge Ubico, and Chile’s Ibáñez, who, in his interpretation, were “sui generis fascists, but who for their own preservation would have to oppose the European dictators.”⁴² At the crossroads of the 1942 election, Ibáñez could not present himself as a committed and uncompromising democrat, but he knew that Chile could not afford to confront the United States.

Unlike González Videla and Cruz-Coke, Ibáñez did not have the benefit of interviewing directly with U.S. diplomats, but he still made overtures to the U.S. embassy in Santiago through some of his supporters in the political establishment. On January 2, 1942, a correspondent for The New York Times hosted a dinner for U.S. embassy officials and Jaime Larraín, a senator and member of the Conservative Party. Bowers, who was not present at the dinner, did not have anything good to say about Larraín. The U.S. ambassador, much like many of his successors in the position, had no sympathy for the social class to which Senator Larraín belonged nor for the values men like him espoused. In Bowers’s words, the Agriculture National Society formerly presided over by the Senator was “the most reactionary organization in Chile, composed of and dominated by the old feudal landowners,” many of whom, moreover, the ambassador thought to have Nazi sympathies. Larraín knew that neither the ambassador nor his staff liked him or his party, but still made the effort of trying to convince them that Ibáñez was not against the United States. The Senator told his interlocutors that Ibáñez was “absolutely pro-American,” that he wished to “cooperate with the United States entirely and [was] all in favor of Western Hemisphere defense.” Asserting with great confidence that, should Ibáñez win the election, he would be appointed minister of foreign affairs, Larraín went on to say that he was “for all the Americas declaring war on Japan immediately.” The Senator added that Chileans “couldn’t conceive of [themselves] being dominated by a ‘yellow’ race” and that, if it was up to him, “he would ship all the Japanese in Chile to Japan immediately.”⁴³

The efforts of Ibáñez and his supporters had no effect on the U.S. ambassador. Bowers and the British embassy did not move an inch from their stated conviction that Ibáñez was the candidate of the Axis powers. For both embassies the interest of their countries would be better preserved by other candidates. Before the Conservative Party threw its support behind Ibáñez and the Radicals officially chose Ríos as their standard-bearer, Bowers considered Cruz-Coke and González Videla as better prospects than Ibáñez and Ríos.⁴⁴ The British embassy, for its part, shared Bowers’s initial assessment of Ríos as too conservative, “honest in business matters,” but “an untrustworthy explorer in politics.” In addition, the Deputy Chief of the British mission in Santiago noted that Ríos had been expelled from the Radical Party because of his association with Ibáñez at the time of the latter’s dictatorship. The British diplomat also insinuated that Ríos might not be totally opposed to the Axis because his father-in-law was German and had a high position in one of the firms blacklisted by Great Britain and the United States.⁴⁵

By the first week of 1942, the pool of candidates for the election had shrunk to three names: Ríos, Ibáñez, and Schnake. Schnake adhered to the Marxist principles of his party, had been a vociferous promoter of socialist policies in the 1930s, participated in the brief Socialist Republic established in 1932, and was the son of a German immigrant.⁴⁶ On the other hand, Schnake adopted a determined pro-Ally and pro-United States position in the war, even before Pearl Harbor, and participated constructively in the negotiations between the Aguirre Cerda government and the United States for a loan for the newly created Corporación de Fomento and in the Inter-American Conference of Havana in 1940. Furthermore, in 1940, Schnake took aim at the Communists, who had been supportive of the Nazi-Soviet pact, and defended a cordial relationship between Chile and the United States in the context of the times.⁴⁷ In light of these positions, the U.S. and British embassies in Santiago reached together the conclusion that the Socialist politician was the candidate who would best protect the interests of both countries in the war.

The staff of the U.S. and British embassies in Santiago had an exceptionally high opinion of Schnake. Bowers, for whom the members of the Radical Party were unprincipled jobseekers, thought that Schnake’s chances to become the successful candidate of a united center-left were slim because he was “too superior and too much of a statesman of principle to appeal to enough voters.”⁴⁸ For the British embassy, Schnake was a “moderate” and had always been “a sincere friend of [the British] cause.”⁴⁹ Schnake’s first appearances in the national stage of Chilean politics in the early 1930s had been far from moderate, but the evolution of his thinking and actions throughout the decade and after he was appointed minister by Aguirre Cerda set him on a convergent path with New Deal Democrats and the European anti-Axis camp.

Nonetheless, for all the qualities that endeared him to U.S. and British diplomats, the candidate of the Socialists had a steep road ahead. Since the Radicals had already chosen Ríos as their candidate and Ibáñez was running as the standard-bearer of a united right, the presence of a third candidate could complicate matters significantly and hurt the chances of the center-left to win. The constitution stated that if no candidate received a majority of the popular vote, a joint session of Congress would choose between the two largest pluralities. If two candidates of the center and the left ran, the chances of Ibáñez obtaining the largest share of the popular vote grew exponentially, thus giving him the advantage in the runoff in Congress. The British embassy, as did most Chilean political actors, reached the conclusion that the left-wing majority in Congress would not choose Ibáñez even if he won the popular vote. In that scenario, the British thought, and the Americans agreed, Ibáñez intended to “stage a coup with the help of a sufficient portion of the armed forces, dissolving Congress and installing himself as President.”⁵⁰

Still, Bowers and the British thought that Schnake could win under certain conditions that they could help to create. If the Communists voted for Schnake, the Socialist candidate might pull off a victory in the popular vote, and then be elected by the Congress. The U.S. ambassador wrote directly to Roosevelt proposing that both the United States and Great Britain “bring the actual situation [in Chile] to the attention of Stalin and get secret orders from him to [the Communists] to follow this course.” Furthermore, Bowers endorsed the British suggestion that the United States and Great Britain should provide funding for the candidate who would stand against Ibáñez in the election.⁵¹ In fact, in another letter to Roosevelt, Bowers laid out a plan whereby private U.S. mining interests would direct funds to Schnake without any involvement of the embassy, thus allowing the United States to keep the appearance of noninvolvement in the election.⁵² The British embassy proceeded likewise, recommending that British officials asked Soviet authorities to instruct Chilean Communists to vote for Schnake, albeit without announcing that intention previously, as this could be counterproductive for the interests of the Socialist candidate.⁵³ That Schnake had made open and strong professions of anticommunism in the recent past did not trouble Bowers or the British diplomats stationed in Santiago, who assumed that Chilean Communists would always proceed as instructed by Moscow.

Neither Roosevelt nor the Department of State responded immediately to Bowers’s proposals. The Foreign Office, for its part, agreed that Schnake was the best candidate for British interests but decided not to follow the suggestion of the embassy in Santiago. In the view from London, dealing with the Soviets, who did not have formal relations with Chile, “would open the path to all sorts of unpleasant possibilities.”⁵⁴ The British, however, did not forego every avenue to intervene in the campaign and help defeat Ibáñez. In order to avoid the scenario that would embolden Ibáñez’s presumedly dictatorial ambitions, the Foreign Office, acting in coordination with the Special Operations Executive, approved the expenditure of an undisclosed amount of money to spend on Schnake’s campaign.⁵⁵ Viscount Halifax, the British ambassador in Washington, informed of the communications between the Foreign Office and the embassy in Santiago, advised that the United States should be consulted before making any final decision regarding the Chilean presidential race.⁵⁶ Recently declassified records show that the planned British operation in the Chilean election did not take place, because eventually Schnake dropped out of the race and, more importantly, because the Roosevelt administration requested the British not to intervene, to the disappointment of the British ambassador in Santiago and some officials at the Foreign Office and the Special Operations Executive. As one internal communication of the Foreign Office put it, in Latin America, Great Britain could not act “otherwise than as the State Department would wish.”⁵⁷ The United States had become the indubitable hegemon in the Americas well before the war, but the deference of the British toward the Americans in the matter of their own foreign policy toward Chile in early 1942 still attests to the shifting fates of one empire in decline and another in an upward trajectory.⁵⁸

The last breath of the Good Neighbor policy and the aftermath of the election

Schnake withdrew from the race on January 11, 1942, and the Socialist Party announced its support for Ríos, in a reiteration of the alliance formed, under different circumstances, in 1938. The Communists, on the other hand, stated their continuing support for Gabriel González Videla as their candidate for the presidency. Naturally, this attitude angered the other forces of the left. Salvador Allende, then Minister of Public Health and an adherent of the fierce anticommunist ideas prevalent in the Socialist Party at the time, appealed to the United States for assistance in the challenge entailed by the upcoming election and the unhelpful attitude of the Communists. Allende, who had returned from a trip to the United States only a few weeks earlier, asked Hugo Fernández Artucio, a well-known Uruguayan socialist and a veteran of the Spanish Civil War then in New York, to pass an urgent message to the Department of State. According to the message relayed by Fernández Artucio, Allende characterized the situation in Chile as one of “an enormous and imminent danger.” “The danger,” Allende went on, “[came] from the Chilean communists,” who “had given [themselves] over to furious agitation.” For Allende, the only plausible explanation for the Communists’ continuing support for González Videla, a man who was not running and was actually one of the managers of Ríos’s campaign, lay on their complicity with the Nazis. In Allende’s reasoning, the Communists were muddying the waters with their support for González Videla with the secret purpose of aiding right-wingers, “who [had] publicly proclaimed themselves as Nazis” and, “on the pretext of defending the country against a Communist peril,” were pushing for a coup d’état.⁵⁹

As presented by Fernández Artucio, Allende’s thesis seemed quite far-fetched, and he may have been exaggerating on purpose to appeal to the fierce anti-Nazi sensibilities of U.S. officials in Washington and the U.S. ambassador in Chile. On the other hand, Allende’s cry for help reiterated some points he had made in June 1941 in a letter addressed to the U.S. ambassador in London, John Gilbert Winant. The main intent of Allende’s letter was to ask for material assistance for his ambitious project for the establishment of a national health service in Chile, the same motive for which he was in the United States when Aguirre Cerda died. In the letter, Allende argued that, besides its social impact, U.S. material cooperation with the modernizing efforts of the Aguirre Cerda government would strengthen “the bonds of friendship” between both countries. More importantly, U.S. material aid for development projects—which Allende would later in his career deride as a tool of the United States’s imperial policy in Latin America—would help Chile’s progressive forces in their “struggle against the anti-democratic activities [of] the Third International and Fifth Columns.”⁶⁰ The German invasion of the Soviet Union in June 1941 changed the situation significantly, as the Communists switched their strategy once again, turned their vitriol against Nazi imperialism, and moderated their anti-American discourse. However, the Socialists’ suspicions of the Communists’ intentions and motives, including those held by Allende, remained in place well after the events of mid-1941. The continuing feud between Socialists and Communists, in addition to Allende’s relative inexperience—he was just thirty-three years old—explain why the Socialist politician appealed for U.S. assistance in the eventful and momentous race of 1942 arguing with such conviction that the Chilean Communists were participating in a Nazi conspiracy.

Allende’s direct appeal for help against the Communists went unanswered. However, his plea for U.S. material aid for his public health plan did catch the attention of U.S. officials. The young minister cushioned his request in terms that he thought would appeal to his U.S. interlocutors in the circumstances of 1941, prior to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Granting a credit for the expansion of the Chilean public health system would be, in fact, a policy toward continental defense. In Allende’s argument, “financial aid in the form of a credit to make the immediate and necessary protection of children, mothers, and workers possible [would] create a psychological and human basis of recognition and understanding, which [would] serve as the best barrier to stop the permanent and tortuous charges of Nazi propaganda.”⁶¹ These ideas coincided to some extent with the intent of initiatives sponsored by Nelson Rockefeller through his position as Coordinator of Inter-American Affairs, although the Chilean politician’s plan went much further than what the Roosevelt administration could or wanted to do at the time.⁶² Allende’s words in 1941 foreshadowed the intent of U.S. policies like the Point Four program and the Alliance for Progress and did appeal to the sensibility of officials in the Roosevelt administration’s Department of State. The realities of the war and the lack of significant precedents for a policy of financial aid for social purposes, however, prevented the materialization of Allende’s project. On December 18, 1941, Sumner Welles responded in writing to Allende’s request, recognizing the value of the Chilean minister’s plan and offering technical support, but stating that the new circumstances made any close and massive cooperation in such a project impossible for the time being.⁶³ The postwar world, on the other hand, would be certainly different and U.S. officials were already working under the assumption that the United States should update its policies and institutions to support more robustly initiatives for modernization and development in foreign countries, like the one proposed by Allende in 1941.⁶⁴

The preponderant view in the Roosevelt administration was against intervention in the Chilean election. Early in the race, Bowers informed the Department of State that men from the campaign teams of several prospective candidates were asking U.S. businessmen for financial aid.⁶⁵ The response from Foggy Bottom, in line with the broadest lines of the Good Neighbor policy, was straightforward and set the policy of the Roosevelt administration toward the upcoming election: “This Government … signed conventions … whereby it undertook not to intervene in the internal affairs of any American country, directly or indirectly. This policy is believed of equal pertinence to private United States interests.”⁶⁶ Bowers, because of his personal stakes in the day-to-day workings of Chilean affairs and his fervent antitotalitarian convictions, preferred a more direct involvement of the United States in the process. Moreover, he saw himself as a champion of the principles of democracy, because of his personal experience in Spain and his understanding of the role of the United States in Latin America. Later U.S. ambassadors in Santiago during the governments of Eduardo Frei Montalva, Allende, and Augusto Pinochet would assume analogous positions regarding domestic Chilean politics to a large extent because of the foundation established by the change in the paradigm of U.S.-South American relations brought about by the Second World War and the specific role Bowers played in the Chilean context.⁶⁷ Bowers’s active involvement in matters around the election of 1942 included his push for the provision of military assistance in the terms suggested by General Escudero; his advocacy for the Chilean position at the Rio Conference, held between January 15 and 28, 1942; and his agreement with the British representation in Santiago on the convenience of actively supporting Schnake in the race.⁶⁸ The ambassador, however, could not get his way, because events were unfolding too rapidly for the Roosevelt administration to fashion a comprehensive response and most officials in Washington preferred to stick to the principles of the Good Neighbor policy.

Still, the new war reality forced a reappraisal of the Roosevelt administration’s strategy toward Latin America and the event of the Chilean presidential election became one of the first instances in which the Good Neighbor policy had to contend with a serious push for intervention in the domestic affairs of a sovereign South American country. Some officials in Washington agreed with Bowers and his willingness to go beyond the stated U.S. policy of non-intervention followed by the Roosevelt administration since 1933 and attempted to persuade the president to proceed correspondingly. The available records do not identify who these persons were, but Secretary of State Cordell Hull saw in these attempts to involve the United States in the Chilean election a real danger for the Latin American strategy of the Roosevelt administration and advised the president not to heed the calls of these well-connected people who wanted to avoid an Ibáñez victory at any cost. In Hull’s assessment, “the confidence of the United States which other American republics [had, arose] precisely because the United States [had] scrupulously refrained from intermeddling in the internal concerns of these countries.” The Secretary of State asserted that intervening in the Chilean presidential election, even if that intervention was directed against the presumedly totalitarian candidate, would lead to the loss of the good will among Latin American countries earned by the United States through the implementation of the Good Neighbor policy.⁶⁹

A few days after Hull advised Roosevelt against intervention in the Chilean presidential election, Assistant Secretary for Latin American Affairs Adolf Berle, who was also the conduit in the Department of State for the intelligence gathered by the FBI in Chile, met with the Deputy Chief of the British Mission in Washington and told him that the United States was against any sort of direct intervention in the Chilean presidential election. For Berle, even if successful, any intervention in the Chilean election would be counterproductive, for many Chileans and probably other Latin Americans would not take well any foreign attempt to influence an essentially domestic electoral contest. Furthermore, Berle bluntly told his British interlocutor that neither he nor other officials of the Roosevelt administration believed that the British government had the capabilities to successfully conduct an operation in Chile.⁷⁰

The message transmitted by Berle was clear, if somewhat paradoxical. The United States was the hegemon in the continent and the British would have to take that reality into account for any of their decisions about Latin America. The British foreign policy apparatus already recognized that state of affairs, which is why consultations with U.S. officials in Washington and diplomats in Santiago were considered indispensable for the proper design and implementation of a policy toward Chile. On the other hand, U.S. hegemony over Latin America, clearly asserted by Berle in his conversation with the British diplomat, did not lead necessarily to intervention in the domestic affairs of South American countries and, on the contrary, its exertion under the principles of the Good Neighbor policy required constraint in these matters. The U.S. foreign policy apparatus, starting with Ambassador Bowers and going all the way up to the highest echelons of the Department of State, had little to no sympathy for Ibáñez. Bowers went further than any other U.S. official when he stated explicitly that the interest of the United States lay with some of the prospective candidates. This attitude in itself indicated a change in the nature of the U.S. understanding and involvement in Chilean politics, as no other electoral contest in Chile had raised such concerns among U.S. diplomats before.

In the circumstances of December 1941, the role of the United States in the arena of international politics and the domestic affairs of other countries was just starting to go through the seismic transformation that would launch the United States to the position of the largest superpower in the history of the world by the end of the Second World War. Consequently, the Chilean presidential election of 1942 constituted an event of the greatest concern for the United States and its British allies, but, according to the strategy still pursued by the Roosevelt administration, did not warrant direct intervention, even if one of the candidates was seen with less favor than the others. Nevertheless, the decision of the Roosevelt administration not to intervene in the Chilean presidential election of 1942 was something of a last breath of the Good Neighbor policy. In his conversation with British diplomats in Washington, Adolf Berle stated that, while no operation in the race could be expected to successfully protect and promote the interests of the Allies, the Roosevelt administration would not stand still if the Chilean election resulted in an unfavorable situation for the United States and Great Britain. In the unlikely scenario of an Ibáñez victory or his accession to power through a coup, Berle assured his British interlocutors, “the United States Government thought that they and other parties could render his position untenable.”⁷¹

The decision not to intervene went against Bowers’s desires, suggestions, and even plans. Bowers concluded that a victory of Ibáñez in the election or his access to power by force would deal a powerful blow to the continental policy of the United States, serve the interests of the Axis powers, and irretrievably damage Chilean democracy, which the U.S. diplomat genuinely admired. And yet, Bowers’s ideas about the role of the United States in the election did not come exclusively from his fervent antitotalitarian convictions and his strong opposition to the ideological inclinations of men such as Ibáñez. Chilean actors of almost all the sensibilities represented in the political spectrum reached out to Bowers and other U.S. officials to express their support for the continental policy of the Roosevelt administration, both before and after Pearl Harbor, and in some cases to ask for assistance in their political fights inside Chile, which many of them saw as convergent with the larger struggle of the United States and the European allies against fascism. None other than Salvador Allende, later a foe of the United States during the Cold War, asked for U.S. help against the Chilean Communists. Only a couple of days before the election, the mayor of Viña del Mar, Eduardo Grove—brother of Marmaduke, one of the most renowned leaders of the Socialist Party—asked the U.S. embassy for funds to pay for the transport of Ríos voters to the polling stations on election day.⁷² The prospect of intervention in the election was not a matter exclusively determined by the unilateral intent of the United States. The possibility of intervention, though ultimately not materialized, stemmed to a large extent from the willingness of Chilean actors to involve the Roosevelt administration, with whose international policies many of them identified, in the contingency of a presidential election that, by pure happenstance, coincided with the moment in which the United States entered the most defining conflict of its history and started the path toward the status of a global superpower.

Two days before the election, Juan Antonio Ríos finished his campaign with a massive rally in downtown Santiago. The stage where various politicians spoke to a crowd of tens of thousands of people featured large pictures of the late Pedro Aguirre Cerda, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, and French General Charles de Gaulle.⁷³ Arturo Alessandri, former president and member of the Liberal Party, was among the speakers in a meeting that successfully portrayed the election as a contest between democracy and totalitarianism. In many ways, the characterization of Ibáñez as a totalitarian leader close to the Axis powers was based on conjecture, but the words and deeds of many of his followers seemed to confirm these suspicions. A few weeks after the election, the police arrested a few naci militants and charged them with an attempt to blow up the stage where the Ríos rally took place.⁷⁴ In any case, the election of February 1, 1942, went well for the center-left coalition that supported Ríos. The Chilean people gave a substantial majority to the candidate of the Radical Party (fifty-five percent), who served through the rest of the war but died in 1946 before completing his six-year term. Ríos’s foreign policy did not respond to the highest expectations of the Allies, as he refused to break with the Axis powers until January 1943, and did so only after a period of tense relations with the Roosevelt administration, which included public chastisements from U.S. officials and a failed visit of the Chilean president to the United States in 1942.⁷⁵

Ríos’s reluctance to break with the Axis notwithstanding, his victory in the presidential election of 1942 did favor the interests of the Allies more clearly than an Ibáñez presidency would. After Chile broke with the Axis, U.S. intelligence sources identified Ibáñez as an agent of Japan, whose intelligence services and embassy in Santiago apparently provided funds for a putsch attempt that would have taken place in the austral summer of 1943.⁷⁶ The coup attempt did not occur, although rumors about its planning abounded in Chile at the time. Nevertheless, Ibáñez’s career as a political leader was far from over. In 1949, the former soldier was elected senator and in 1952, in the first presidential election in which women could vote, Ibáñez won handily. By that time, the reality of Chilean politics, as usually aligned with the ways of world politics, had changed significantly.

Most Socialists, the most ardent proponents of alignment with the Allies even before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, supported Ibáñez in 1952; the rest of the Socialists presented the formerly anticommunist Salvador Allende as their candidate, with the relatively open support of the Communists, still operating in Chilean politics despite their outlawing in 1948.⁷⁷ As a populist leader, with support from parties on the left and the right, but increasingly leaning toward conservative policies, President Ibáñez did not constitute a threat to U.S. interests—nor to the interests of the British, for that matter—and, on the contrary, aligned the country unreservedly with the United States.⁷⁸ Mirroring the ways in which the post-war order was set in Europe shortly after the defeat of Germany, the Cold War brought about important realignments in Chilean and inter-American politics. The Second World War had become a memory and, much like in Europe, the situation was different enough that former friends—the U.S. embassy in Santiago and the Socialists—could turn into enemies, and old adversaries—Ibáñez and the Socialists, Allende and the Communists—could become allies.

Although the Roosevelt administration chose, against the suggestion of its ambassador in Santiago and other officials in Washington, to remain neutral in the Chilean presidential election of 1942, the circumstances of the war had forced a serious reevaluation of some of the principles underlying its policies toward Latin America. Until 1941, the United States had cared little about the domestic politics of South American countries—Central American nations had been spared U.S. intervention in the years of the Roosevelt administration, but had been the stage of the first U.S. imperial expansion in the first three decades of the twentieth century. The perils entailed by a world war forced a reassessment of this position, as some political forces in countries like Argentina and Chile held views perceived by U.S. diplomats as detrimental to the continental policy of the United States and the larger war effort. In the case of Chile, moreover, the views and positions of the British reinforced some of the most extreme views of U.S. diplomats about the intentions of important local politicians. Consequently, the result of a presidential election, until then of secondary importance for U.S. foreign policy, became a matter of significant concern and, in the view of men such as the ambassador in Santiago, required an alteration of the principles that underlay Roosevelt’s Good Neighbor policy. Even if the Roosevelt administration preferred a path of restraint, the fact that it had to make a decision regarding intervention in the Chilean election signified a qualitative change in the conditions and views that underlay U.S. foreign policy and its manifestations in South America. After 1941, and at least until the end of the Cold War, the domestic politics of Chile and other South American countries would be of interest to the United States and, on various occasions—Argentina in 1946, Brazil in 1964, and Chile in 1964 and 1970–1973—Republican and Democratic administrations would intervene with the purpose of influencing the course of internal political affairs.

Ambassador Bowers pushed for intervention for various motives. The challenge imposed by the war was the most important reason for the ambassador’s sense of urgency, shared by his British counterparts in Santiago and London. Bowers’s experience in Spain contributed to shape his views on Chilean political forces and leaders, and made him very sensitive to what he perceived as threats to Chilean democracy that resembled those he observed in Spain before the military insurrection that started the Civil War in 1936. Since the landscape of Chilean politics had many similarities with that of the short-lived Second Spanish Republic, including a Popular Front government, Bowers’s associations were logical and pertinent. In the context of the presidential election of 1942, in which one of the candidates displayed many of the features of the totalitarian leaders in power in several European countries, parts of the diagnosis of Ambassador Bowers made sense.

Nevertheless, the U.S. ambassador’s certainty that Ibáñez’s candidacy was underwritten by the Axis powers owed more to his own ideological inclinations and sensibilities than to a cold analysis of the available evidence. Bowers based his reports to Washington on information received from Chilean sources, most of which had vested interests in the presidential race, and the British embassy, which also based its appraisals on information provided by Chilean political actors. Furthermore, the U.S. ambassador did not trust the intelligence gathered on the ground by FBI agents, operating under conditions still defined with great autonomy by the head of the agency in Washington, even though their reports to a large extent confirmed Bowers’s certainty. In this regard, the Chilean presidential election of 1942 also constitutes a landmark in the history of U.S. involvement in the domestic politics of the South American country. The transformation of U.S. foreign policy during and after the Second World War included the creation of a system of foreign intelligence, whose main arm is the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), that would rapidly become an important agent in the conduct of U.S. policy toward South American countries, starting with its primordial role in gathering information on the ground.

In 1942, the necessity for the United States to carry out intelligence-gathering activities in Chile already existed and had become significantly more pressing after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. The institutional capacities of the United States to conduct such operations, however, still depended on the existence of an agency—the FBI—originally tasked with domestic responsibilities and directed by its head, J. Edgar Hoover, with little strategic input from the foreign policy apparatus.⁷⁹ After the end of the war, with the onset of the Cold War and the establishment of the U.S. national security structure, the involvement of the United States in the domestic affairs of South American countries would be conducted partly by an intelligence agency, the CIA, whose actions belonged in a systemic design that was only in its infancy in 1942.

The Chilean presidential election of 1942 coincided with the precise moment in which the very foundation of a historic U.S. foreign policy, namely, safety from overseas conflicts, crumbled under Japanese fire. After the attack on Pearl Harbor, the strategy of the United States, already favoring one of the sides in the European and Asian stages of the war, had to change in a comprehensive manner. The strategic shift included South America and for the rest of the war Roosevelt and the Department of State would relentlessly try to include all the countries of the region in the war effort. In the last weeks of 1941 and the first month of 1942, however, that strategic shift was still incipient and for U.S. diplomats it was not clear what it would mean for the Good Neighbor policy of the Roosevelt administration. For Bowers and his British interlocutors in Santiago, the presidential election was virtually another battleground of the war, and some officials in Washington and London agreed. For Cordell Hull and other officials at the Department of State, the non-intervention principle of the Good Neighbor policy had to stand, precisely because the good will earned among Latin American countries as a result of its rigorous implementation in the previous years was an asset in the context of a war that the United States was now actually fighting. In any case, the dispute between these visions foreshadowed some elements of the more definite shift in the U.S. strategy toward South America that would characterize relations between Washington and the countries of the region in the Cold War, especially the clear identification of the interests of the United States with some of the forces competing in the domestic politics of South American nations.

Footnotes