Abstract

Excerpted From: Zachary R. Evans, Reckoning with the Violent Legacy of Racialized U.S. Foreign Policy in Chile, 28 University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change 95 (2025) (220 Footnotes) (Full Document)

In 1990, shortly after the end of Chilean President Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship, I was born and placed in the care of a Catholic adoption agency outside Santiago. A year later, I was adopted by an American couple and whisked off to Upstate New York. In evaluating the role of U.S. Empire in Chile, I position myself as a child of Chile--though one detached by decisions both personal, and perhaps, political. From both a distance and closeness, I propose an analysis of the relationships between the two nations whose violent bond informed my life's trajectory. In adopting a Critical Race Theory lens, I aim to find lessons from the past to provide hope--and power--for the marginalized people of Chile and the United States.

“Democracy is memory and future,” proclaimed Chilean President Gabriel Boric before the United Nations General Assembly in September 2023. Only a few days before the fiftieth anniversary of the September 11, 1973 coup that ““brutally fractured” Chile, Boric reminded his international audience of how “the evidence that the United States ... had conspired from the beginning to promote the failure of the Chilean government, shook the democratic conscience of the world.” Although historians have uncovered much of U.S. involvement in the overthrow of Chilean President Salvador Allende, legal academia has left numerous legal aspects largely untouched.

Legal scholars and legal historians have grappled with the role of U.S. Empire in Hawaii, the Philippines, Central America, and current U.S. territories--yet South America, and Chile specifically, has been left unaddressed. An interrogation of how power, race, and political economy can build space to reconsider the role of law in the expansion and preservation of U.S. Empire in Chile. U.S. Empire is both territorial and economic, whose borders infiltrate, absorb, and disappear sovereign lands and their people, avoiding public demarcation while concealed by the law. In Jones v. United States (1890), the U.S. Supreme Court “lays the basis for the legal foundation for the U.S. empire because it establishes the constitutionality of the fact that the United States can claim overseas territory.” Two years later, the Court “gave judicial approval to the birth of 'the American Empire”’ in Downes v. Bidwell (1901). Now, U.S. Empire “is a new invention in the annals of political science ... a global hegemony whose grace notes are free markets, human rights and democracy, enforced by the most awesome military power the world has ever known.” Critical Race Theory, as a legal doctrine, can reveal how U.S. imperialism--and its legal underpinnings and racialized violence--strangled Chile's ascendent socialism, bolstered the violent regime of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990), and entrenched a free-market ideology in Chilean government and society. In Chile, the Pinochet dictatorship dominated and harnessed control through a distinctly U.S. form of economic and violent oppression. Such techniques were forged from the racial violence perpetrated by the U.S. against indigenous people and enslaved Africans. Further, U.S. methods of racialized violence have been deployed domestically and abroad, and their implementation in Chile was no less violent. The Pinochet regime rapidly privatized state-owned industries to shock the Chilean economy and populace into new behavior and empowered a secret police force to surveil and disappear its political opponents.

Current assessments of U.S.-Chile relations fall short in illustrating how economic and physical violence were not parallel nor separate, but instead intertwined and mutually reinforcing. Today, the specter of U.S. Empire in Chile threatens the rights of citizens of both nations. Chile failed to exorcise regressive, Pinochet-era provisions from its constitution in recent referenda and U.S. courts, as shown in decisions about the assassination of a leftist Chilean expat on U.S. soil, are willing to shield intelligence agencies from accountability. U.S. Empire pervades legal systems and oppresses people across the Western hemisphere. As global power has begun to shift towards a multipolar world, an evaluation of racial violence as a tool of U.S. Empire-- and proposals for reparative healing--has become a timely exercise.

In this article, I view Pinochet-era economic and political repression through a Critical Race Theory lens to uncover how U.S. deployment of racialized violence as foreign policy continues to shape both U.S. and Chilean societies. My analysis is based in the theories of racial capitalism and capitalist periphery. I trace a line of racialized violence from the free-market teachings of Milton Friedman to the influence of the Chicago Boys in Pinochet's cabinet to the car-bombing of Chilean ex-pat Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C. Each vignette serves as a snapshot of U.S.-Chilean relations, a relationship that-- despite the passage of five decades--remains concerningly static. As President Boric's declaration suggests, an understanding of contemporary challenges, such as Chile's recent efforts to rewrite its constitution and protect its natural resources, are tinged by the legacy of U.S. imperialism.

In arguing this point, I introduce the theories and frameworks central to my analysis of racialized violence through economic and political repression. These include capitalist world economy, Critical Race Theory, visual culture and racial characterization, and the politics of retrenchment. Next, I review Pinochet's socioeconomic policies and enforcement, including free-marketism and U.S. training of the dictatorship's secret police. I then begin my analysis, in which I discuss how U.S. interference in Chile constituted racialized violence. Further, I review the lasting impacts of this violence, both in the U.S. and Chile. Lastly, in the spirit of human liberation, I conclude with a call for a reopening of Chile's Truth and Reconciliation Commission, aimed at accountability for U.S. interference in Chilean affairs. Declassification of U.S. involvement would reset broken trust between the nations, tend to the open wounds of survivors of the Pinochet dictatorship, and encourage Chile to strive for a future unfettered by the chains of U.S. Empire.

[. . .]

The consequences of the Pinochet years are stark for the futures of Chile and the U.S. Following the 2019 affirmative public referendum, Chile's duty craft a new constitution remains unfulfilled--remaining an obligation that, once realized, would make Chile a leading example of a democratic socialist society. Although “Chile has never had a fully democratic process of drafting its fundamental charter,” the constituent process for developing constitutional proposals provided a new “way to institutionally-channel a social uprising.”

The U.S., arguably in the midst of an emerging redux cold war with Russia, could be goaded into proxy wars in Latin America once again. As a result of the Biden administration's industrial policy, the U.S. government's focus on a transition to clean energy has unleashed global competition for extractive natural resources from peripheral states, such as lithium, an essential metal for domestic decarbonization. Further, the architects of the second Trump administration's proposed Department for Government Efficiency to shrink the U.S. government may look to Pinochet's policies and “have a template for crashing a national economy to facilitate right-wing rule.”

At this time, the U.S. government should reject its policies of the past and seek to reset its relationship with Chile by claiming accountability for its actions at the end of the last century. Doing so provides an opportunity for the U.S. to signal a shift away from empire, and towards a new doctrine rooted in respect for sovereignty and decolonization. To break from the world-capitalist system, the U.S. must treat Chile as a sovereign equal rather than a peripheral state to be exploited.

To better understand the iterative way in which racialized violence both creates and is created by U.S. foreign policy, a thorough analysis of current declassified documents and those still yet to be declassified is required. Also worthy of further exploration are the complex gender and indigenous facets of state economic and violent oppression, as well as the well-documented resistance of many Chileans to Pinochet's regime. Further, a comparison between U.S. and Chilean dispossession of native land-- and the accordant legal frameworks--through an economic and ecological lens could enrich an analysis of racial capitalism. Such an analysis should be viewed through a lens of intersectionality. Lastly, Critical Race Theory scholars devoted to the unveiling of U.S-Chilean historical narratives, especially those of racial violence, must also advocate for action. As described by scholar Mary Matsuda, we must look to ““fundamental social transformation” and “challenge hierarchy itself.” To conclude, I look to Chilean President Salvador Allende's call for action to Chileans who supported his vision for a “road to socialism.” Minutes before his death on September 11, 1973, as military forces stormed his presidential estate, he declared: “History is ours, and it is made by the people.”

Zachary R. Evans, J.D. Albany Law School, 2024; B.A. Williams College, 2012, majoring in History and concentrating in Latina/o Studies and Leadership Studies: U.S. Foreign Policy Track.