South American Battleground: Soviet and American Involvement in Chile During the Cold War

The twentieth century was a period marred with violence and struggles for power beyond what was seen in the past. This affected all regions of the world through two World Wars and a nearly half-century long conflict between two world powers: the United States and the Soviet Union. Chile was one area of the world where this struggle came to a head, but not in an entirely apparent manner. This paper seeks to examine both the United States and the Soviet Union’s role in influencing Chilean politics, and how it affected their society, in both overt and covert ways. Beginning with the Gabriel Gonzalez Videla administration in the mid to late 1940s and ending with the fall of Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship in 1990, this paper demonstrates how Chile can be viewed as one microcosm of the global struggle between American and Soviet dominance and how democracies can turn into dictatorships overnight.