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H-Diplo
H-Diplo Article Review 1087- "The Chilean Christian
Democratic Party, the U.S. Government, and European
Politics during Pinochet’s Military Regime (1973–1988)"
Discussion published by George Fujii on Wednesday, February 2, 2022
H-Diplo ARTICLE REVIEW 1087
2 February 2022
Olga Ulianova and Alessandro Santoni. “The Chilean Christian Democratic Party, the U.S.
Government, and European Politics during Pinochet’s Military Regime (1973–1988).” Journal
of Cold War Studies 23:1 (Winter 2021): 163-195.
https://hdiplo.org/to/AR1087
Article Review Editors: Thomas Maddux and Diane Labrosse | Production Editor: George Fujii
Review by Sebastián Hurtado-Torres, Universidad San Sebastián, Santiago, Chile
Olga Ulianova’s and Alessandro Santoni’s article offers an informative and insightful account of the
evolution of the international network of relationships of the Christian Democratic Party (PDC) in the
years of the Pinochet dictatorship. This network, which was established in the decades following the
end of World War II, included European and Latin American Christian Democratic parties, and
counted on the support provided by the United States, whose Cold War administrations saw Christian
Democrats in Europe and Latin America as valuable allies in their foreign policy strategies. Even
though political activity and parties were banned in Chile after 1973, the PDC managed to keep alive
during the hardest years of the dictatorship and became the strongest party of the opposition in the
1980s, when the gradual opening of the regime allowed for a reconstruction of the Chilean party
system. Despite the strenuous efforts of the Pinochet dictatorship against the liberal principles that
underlay the Chilean political system until 1973, the institutional and symbolic strength of political
parties allowed them to regain their role and become the most important actors in Chilean politics by
the end of the 1980s. Somewhat paradoxically, the history of the Pinochet dictatorship, which was
perhaps the strongest and most rigid of the military dictatorships established in South American in
the 1960s and 1970s, is also the history of the activities of the political parties that survived under its
iron fist. Drawing on a wide array of sources from Chile, the United States, and European countries,
Ulianova’s and Santoni’s article is a great contribution to the international history of Chile and
[1]
testimony to the relevance of political parties in it.
One of the main reasons that the PDC and other parties survived the Pinochet dictatorship was their
[2]
ability to tap into the support offered by international networks. Throughout the twentieth century,
and especially in the decades of the Cold War, Chilean parties and movements across the political
Citation: George Fujii. H-Diplo Article Review 1087- "The Chilean Christian Democratic Party, the U.S. Government, and European
Politics during Pinochet’s Military Regime (1973–1988)". H-Diplo. 02-02-2022.
https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/9619058/h-diplo-article-review-1087-chilean-christian-democratic-party-us
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
1H-Diplo
spectrum had created strong links with international organizations and other parties of similar
ideological principles. To a large extent, this integration into transnational networks resulted from
the identification of Chilean political parties and movements with ideas of a global character and
formulated in universal terms. In a certain sense, this was a defining feature of the Cold War;
however, it is hard to find another Latin American political culture as impregnated with the most
[3]
conventional language of the bipolar ideological divide as that of Chile.
The Chilean PDC saw itself as the political vehicle for the implementation of a set of principles and a
program that had implications far beyond the confines of Chilean politics. After the party’s most
emblematic leader, Eduardo Frei Montalva, was elected president in 1964, the notion that the
ideological principles of Christian Democracy could become hegemonic in Chile and other Latin
American countries, as they had in West Germany and Italy, infused the members of the party and its
main international ally, the administration of President Lyndon B. Johnson, with an optimism that, in
hindsight, turned out to be quite prejudicial for the party’s interests. In any case, the PDC conceived
its role in Chilean politics as inseparable from the global political developments and the international
ideological struggles of the times. Thus, even if the PDC did not develop as tight a relationship with
international allies as the Chilean Communist Party did, the Christian Democratic program for Chile
belonged to a larger international project, based on a coherent set of principles that, in theory, could
apply globally—or at least to all societies shaped by or composed mostly of Christians.
The transnational character of Christian Democratic ideology and its international organization
offered Chilean Christian Democrats an institutional avenue for their survival in the harshest years of
the Augusto Pinochet regime. Ulianova and Santoni reconstruct with detail the story of the links
between Chilean Christian Democrats and their European counterparts in the 1970s and the1980s as
well as the links between those parties and the Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan administrations in
the United States. The authors maintain that, notwithstanding the massive support of the United
States to the Frei administration and the PDC in the years of the Salvador Allende government,
European Christian Democrats were the main partners of their Chilean counterparts (165). In
ideological terms, this is certainly the case, for Christian Democrats in Latin America and Europe saw
themselves as agents of a universal political project, if ones who were more attuned to national
circumstances than those of the revolutionary left.
On the other hand, the United States was the main international partner of the Frei administration, at
[4]
least while the Democrats were in power. Furthermore, the support of the Carter and Reagan
administrations for the PDC and, later in the 1980s, the whole opposition coalition, while not couched
in the same specific ideological terms as the relationship between Chilean and European Christian
[5]
Democrats, was critical for the success of the opposition and the end of the Pinochet dictatorship.
In this sense, U.S. hegemony arguably played a more significant role supporting Chilean Christian
Democrats than the European Christian Democrats did, not because of the ideological preferences of
the partners involved in the relationship, but because the main ally of moderate democratic forces in
Latin America in the context of the Cold War was, almost inevitably, the United States. However,
since there are no objective standards against which to measure the absolute validity of these
assertions, one cannot but recognize that Ulianova and Santoni make a compelling argument for their
vision of the relationship between the Chilean PDC and its international partners.
Citation: George Fujii. H-Diplo Article Review 1087- "The Chilean Christian Democratic Party, the U.S. Government, and European
Politics during Pinochet’s Military Regime (1973–1988)". H-Diplo. 02-02-2022.
https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/9619058/h-diplo-article-review-1087-chilean-christian-democratic-party-us
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
2H-Diplo
One of the greatest strengths of Santoni’s and Ulianova’s article is its treatment of the different views
and strategies within the PDC in the light of the party’s relationships with its international partners.
These differences had built up over the years of the Frei administration, even leading to a significant
split in the party in 1969, and took on a new character after the overthrow of President Allende.
Officially, the PDC supported the coup, while some of its most emblematic figures courageously
condemned it. European Christian Democratic parties, for their part, took positions regarding the
new situation in Chile that, to some extent, converged with the divisions within the PDC. The CDU
and the Adenauer Foundation in Germany coincided with the official line of the PDC in attributing
main responsibility for the fall of Chilean democracy to Allende and his governing coalition, stopping
[6]
short, however, of endorsing the military coup (173).
The Italian Christian Democratic Party, for its part, took a different position, conditioned, as the
authors compellingly point out, by the circumstances and alignments of domestic Italian politics. The
Socialist allies of the Italian Christian Democratic Party criticized the Chilean PDC for its actions in
the crisis leading to the coup of 11 September 1973 and its official reaction to it (170-171). Thus, the
Italian PDC could not take the same supportive position of its sister party in Chile as the West
German Christian Democrats did. This must not be understood, however, as an endorsement of the
Chilean left. In 1970, in the wake of Allende’s triumph in the popular vote, Christian Democratic
Italian leader Mariano Rumor asked the U.S. Ambassador in Rome if the Nixon administration could
[7]
not do something to prevent Allende from taking office. That piece of evidence, although not
directly related to the events of 1973 and afterwards, supports Ulianova’s and Santoni’s argument
about the relative relevance of domestic political circumstances for the position adopted by Italian
Christian Democrats regarding Chilean politics and their Chilean comrades.
In the 1980s, the main issue in the international relations of the PDC was the Party’s strategy for the
pursuit of the restoration of democracy in Chile. Since the Chilean Socialist Party had abandoned the
revolutionary and insurrectional principles to which it had adhered before 1973, an alliance between
the two parties, not unlike the one formed by the Italian Socialist and Christian Democratic Parties in
the 1970s, took shape and became the backbone of a realignment in Chilean politics that paved the
way for the reconstruction of democracy and survives, albeit in a much weaker form, to this day.
Interestingly, Santoni and Ulianova point out that this understanding between former foes had been
favored by German Christian Democrats as the proper strategy for their sister parties in Latin
America (181). The Reagan administration, for its part, moved toward a more robust pro-democracy
position in the second half of the 1980s, pressured Pinochet to make good on his promises of
[8]
democratic institutionalization, and supported the opposition coalition in Chile. The critical
condition for the provision of support to this coalition was the exclusion of the Communist Party from
it, an issue on which the European Christian Democrats, especially the Germans, and the Reagan
administration were mostly in agreement.
As the authors show, U.S. support for the PDC and the opposition coalition became more significant
and determined after conservative-leaning Patricio Aylwin assumed the presidency of the Party,
replacing Gabriel Valdés, who has been identified with the left wing of the PDC, and who is believed
by some foreign observers to have favored a coalition broad enough to include the Communists. This
was not really the case, but Valdés did not help himself by showing his antipathy for the United
Citation: George Fujii. H-Diplo Article Review 1087- "The Chilean Christian Democratic Party, the U.S. Government, and European
Politics during Pinochet’s Military Regime (1973–1988)". H-Diplo. 02-02-2022.
https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/9619058/h-diplo-article-review-1087-chilean-christian-democratic-party-us
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
3H-Diplo
States, which could be traced as far back as the years in which he occupied the post of Foreign
Minister in the Frei administration. In 1987, in a conversation with Assistant Secretary of State for
Western Hemisphere Affairs Langhorne Motley, which Ulianova and Santoni quote, Valdés accused
his U.S. interlocutors of a tendency to “see the right as the easy solution to the problem” and the
Embassy in Santiago of “isolating the Christian Democrats” (190). These words reflected Valdés’s
essential suspicion of U.S. actions and motives more than the reality of the situation at that point,
which in turn was a reflection of the sensibilities of a segment of the Christian Democratic Party and,
more broadly, Chilean political culture. A cold assessment of U.S. involvement in Chilean politics, for
which this article is an important contribution, shows that the main recipients of support of U.S.
assistance during the Cold War were not parties of the right —although the massive support for the
conservative El Mercurio newspaper in the years of the Allende government could fall into that
[9]
category—but parties of the center-left, especially the Christian Democratic Party. For the more
progressive members of the PDC, one of the most important of whom was Valdés, that reality was a
hard pill to swallow.
Ultimately, the article offers an excellent assessment of an international network of relations that was
defined by ideological affinities but that was also shaped by circumstances over which the parties to
the relations had only limited control. The authors achieve this through a creative reading of sources
of different origins and with different foci, an endeavor that goes to the core of the study of
international history. Fortunately, the study of the international dimensions of Chilean history has a
considerable number of practitioners, working from Chilean and foreign universities. Alessandro
Santoni offers an outstanding example of the interactions between Chilean and international history
both thematically and professionally, and his work on the convergence of Italian and Chilean politics
during the Cold War, a body enlarged quantitatively and qualitatively by this article, has made an
[10]
excellent contribution to a robust field.
Departing somewhat from the conventions and formalities of this type of piece, I end this review by
devoting a few words to Olga Ulianova, the other co-author of the article in question. Through her
research in the Soviet archives, her publication of scholarly articles and sources, and her teaching at
various universities in Chile, Ulianova played a determining role in the internationalization of Chilean
history. No researcher who studies the international history of Chile in the twentieth century can
[11]
work without reference to Ulianova’s research. Her passing in 2016 was an irreparable loss for
Chilean academia, not only because of the high quality of her professional work and her impressive
intelligence, but also because of her individual human qualities, which were appreciated by those
who had the chance to meet her personally. The writing of this review affords me, beyond the
opportunity to discuss the merits of an excellent work of scholarship, the privilege of paying a modest
tribute to one of the founders who blazed the path that all of us scholars of the international history
of Chile have followed in the past two decades. These words and thoughts are dedicated to her
memory.
Sebastián Hurtado-Torres received his Ph.D. in History from Ohio University and is currently an
assistant professor at the Instituto de Historia of Universidad San Sebastián, in Santiago, Chile. He is
Citation: George Fujii. H-Diplo Article Review 1087- "The Chilean Christian Democratic Party, the U.S. Government, and European
Politics during Pinochet’s Military Regime (1973–1988)". H-Diplo. 02-02-2022.
https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/9619058/h-diplo-article-review-1087-chilean-christian-democratic-party-us
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
4H-Diplo
the author of The Gathering Storm: Eduardo Frei’s Revolution in Liberty and Chile’s Cold War
(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020) and, in co-authorship with Diego Hurtado-Torres, La elección
presidencial de 1970: pasado y future de un momento extraordinario (Santiago: Historia Chilena,
2020). He is currently writing a book on the international history of South America in the 1970s in co-
authorship with Joaquín Fermandois and working on a research project on the relations between the
United States and Chile between 1938 and 1952, the period in which the latter country was governed
by coalitions formed around the middle-class, center-left Radical Party.
Notes
[1]
On the international history of Chile in the twentieth century, some of the best works are: Joaquín
Fermandois, Chile y el mundo 1970-1973. La política exterior del gobierno de la Unidad Popular y el sistema
internacional (Santiago: Universidad Católica de Chile, 1985) and Mundo y fin de mundo: Chile y la política
mundial, 1900-2004 (Santiago: Universidad Católica de Chile, 2004); Tanya Harmer, Allende’s Chile and the
Inter-American Cold War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011) and Harmer, Beatriz Allende: A
Revolutionary Life in Cold War Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020); Fernando
Purcell y Alfredo Riquelme, Ampliando miradas: Chile y su historia en un tiempo global (Santiago: RIL, 2009);
Harmer and Alfredo Riquelme, eds., Chile y la Guerra Fría global (Santiago: RIL, 2014).
[2]
On the international relations of Chilean political parties see, among others, Olga Ulianova and
Eugenia Fediakova. “Algunos aspectos de la ayuda financiera del Partido Comunista de la URSS al comunismo
chileno durante la Guerra Fría”, Estudios Públicos, 72 (Spring 1998): 113-148; Raffaele Nocera, Acuerdos y
desacuerdos. La DC italiana y el PDC chileno: 1962-1973 (Santiago: FCE Chile, 2015); Mariana Perry, Exilio y
Renovación. Transferencia política del socialismo chileno en Europa Occidental, 1973-1988 (Santiago: Ariadna,
2020).
[3]
Joaquín Fermandois, Mundo y fin de mundo. Chile en la política mundial 1900-2004 (Santiago:
Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile, 2004), 17; Alfredo Riquelme, “La Guerra Fría en Chile: los intrincados
nexos entre lo nacional y lo global,” in Harmer and Riquelme, eds., Chile y la Guerra Fría global, 11-44.
[4]
Sebastián Hurtado-Torres, The Gathering Storm: Eduardo Frei’s Revolution in Liberty and Chile’s
Cold War (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2020).
[5]
Morris Morley and Chris McGillion, Reagan and Pinochet: The Struggle over U.S. Policy toward
Chile (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Pablo Rubio, “Democracia y neoliberalismo sin Pinochet.
Estados Unidos y su influencia en la transición chilena, 1984-1994”, in David Aceituno and Pablo Rubio, eds.,
Chile 1984/1994. Encrucijadas en la transición de la dictadura a la democracia (Valparaíso: Ediciones
Universitarias de Valparaíso, 2020), 79-115.
[6]
On German, Italian, and other European Christian Democratic parties: Stathis Kalyvas, The Rise of
Citation: George Fujii. H-Diplo Article Review 1087- "The Chilean Christian Democratic Party, the U.S. Government, and European
Politics during Pinochet’s Military Regime (1973–1988)". H-Diplo. 02-02-2022.
https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/9619058/h-diplo-article-review-1087-chilean-christian-democratic-party-us
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
5H-Diplo
Christian Democracy in Europe (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1996); Michael Gehler and
Wolfram Kaiser, eds., Christian Democracy in Europe since 1945, vol. 2 (London and New York: Routledge,
2004); Jean Dominique Durand, ed., Christian Democrat Internationalism. Its Action in Europe and Worldwide
from post-World War II until the 1990s (Brussels: PIE, Peter Lang, 2013); Simon Green and Ed Turner, eds.,
Understanding the Transformation of Germany’s CDU (New York: Routledge, 2015); Piotr Kosicki and Slawomir
Lukasiewicz, eds. Christian Democracy Across the Iron Curtain: Europe Redefined (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2018); Carlo Invernizzi Acetti, What is Christian Democracy? Politics, Religion, and Ideology (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2019).
[7]
Hurtado-Torres, “The Chilean Moment in the Global Cold War: International Reactions to Salvador
Allende’s Victory in the Presidential Election of 1970,” Journal of Cold War Studies 21:3 (Summer 2019): 26-55,
here 37.
[8]
Paul Sigmund, The United States and Democracy in Chile (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University
Press, 1993); Morris Morley and Chris McGillon, Reagan and Pinochet: The Struggle Over U.S. Policy Toward
Chile (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015); Lars Schoultz, In Their Own Best Interest: A History of the
U.S. Effort to Improve Latin Americans (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2020), 264-275.
[9]
On the involvement of the United States in Chilean politics, the literature is abundant. A few of the
most important works are: James Petras and Morris Morley, The United States and Chile:Imperialism and the
Overthrow of the Allende Government (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1975); Nathaniel Davis, The Last Two
Years of Salvador Allende (London: Tauris, 1985); Poul Jensen, The Garotte: The United States and Chile,
1970-1973 (Aarhus: Aarhus University Press, 1988); Edward Korry, “Los Estados Unidos en Chile y Chile en los
Estados Unidos”, Estudios Públicos, 72 (Spring 1998): 17-74; Peter Kornbluh, The Pinochet File: A Declassified
Dossier on Atrocity and Accountability (New York: The New Press, 2003); Jonathan Haslam, The Nixon
Administration and Allende’s Chile: A Case of Assisted Suicide (New York: Verso, 2005); Kristian Gustafson,
Hostile Intent: U.S Covert Operations in Chile, 1964-1974 (Washington, D.C.: Potomac Books, 2007); Michael
Grow, U.S Presidents and Latin American Interventions: Pursuing Regime Change in the Cold War (Lawrence:
University Press of Kansas, 2008), 93-113; Margaret Power, “The Engendering of Anticommunism and Fear in
Chile’s 1964 Presidential Election,” Diplomatic History, 32: 5 (November 2008): 931-953; Antonia Fonck,
Miradas Desclasificadas: el Chile de Salvador Allende en los documentos estadounidenses (1969-1973)
(Santiago: Universidad Alberto Hurtado, 2020); James Lockhart, Chile, the CIA, and the Cold War: A
Transatlantic Perspective (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2021).
[10]
Alessandro Santoni, El comunismo italiano y la vía chilena. Los orígenes de un mito político
(Santiago: RIL, 2011) and “El Partido Comunista Italiano y el otro “Compromeso Storico”: los significados
políticos de la solidaridad con Chile (1973-1977),” Historia, 43: 1 (2010): 523-546; Olga Ulianova, Alessandro
Santoni, and Raffaele Nocera, Un protagonismo recobrado: la Democracia Cristiana chilena y sus vínculos
internacionales (1973-1990) (Santiago: Ariadna, 2021).
[11]
Some of the most important scholarly articles by Olga Ulianova are: “La Unidad Popular y el golpe
militar en Chile. Percepciones y análisis soviéticos,” Estudios Públicos 79 (Winter 2000): 84-171; “Levantamiento
Citation: George Fujii. H-Diplo Article Review 1087- "The Chilean Christian Democratic Party, the U.S. Government, and European
Politics during Pinochet’s Military Regime (1973–1988)". H-Diplo. 02-02-2022.
https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/9619058/h-diplo-article-review-1087-chilean-christian-democratic-party-us
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
6H-Diplo
campesino de Lonquimay y la Internacional Comunista,” Estudios Públicos, 89, summer 2003, 173-223;
“Corvalán for Bukovsky: A Real Exchange of Prisoners during an Imaginary War. The Chilean Dictatorship, the
Soviet Union, and U.S. Mediation,” Cold War History 14:3 (2014): 315-336; “El despliegue de un antagonismo: el
ex presidente Frei Montalva y el dictador Pinochet en los archivos estadounidenses (1973-1982),” Historia, 47: 2
(2014): 401-441. In addition to her publication of multiple articles in scholarly journals, Olga Ulianova, in
collaboration with Alfredo Riquelme, translated and published hundreds of Soviet documents, an outstanding
effort that has contributed greatly to our understanding of the involvement of the Soviet Union in Chile:
Ulianova and Riquelme, eds., Chile en los archivos soviéticos 1922-1991. Tomo 1: Komintern in Chile, 1922-1931
(Santiago: DIBAM, 2005); Chile en los archivos soviéticos 1922-1991. Tomo 2: Komintern in Chile, 1931-1935
(Santiago: DIBAM, 2009); Chile en los archivos soviéticos 1922-1991. Tomo 3: Komintern in Chile, 1935-1941
(Santiago: DIBAM, 2017); and compiled exclusively by her, Chile en los archivos soviéticos. Tomo 4: Años 60
(Santiago: Ariadna, 2020).
Citation: George Fujii. H-Diplo Article Review 1087- "The Chilean Christian Democratic Party, the U.S. Government, and European
Politics during Pinochet’s Military Regime (1973–1988)". H-Diplo. 02-02-2022.
https://networks.h-net.org/node/28443/discussions/9619058/h-diplo-article-review-1087-chilean-christian-democratic-party-us
Licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
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