A number of assumptions concerning the situation in Chile had become fixed in the minds of Secretary of State George Shultz, other high-ranking Department officials, and Ambassador Harry Barnes by summer 1987. Chief among these was that the slowness of the regime to take concrete steps to advance the transition process (principally those measures needed to genuinely open up opportunities for antiregime forces to mobilize and campaign) raised more than suspicions about the military’s ultimate commitment to return the country to democratic rule. Most policy makers were convinced that Pinochet intended to stay in power. Shultz, in particular, worried that the General’s determination to do so had seen him “consciously diminishing possibilities for an orderly transition” and, were he to put himself forward as a candidate in the presidential plebiscite in 1988, the effect would be to “dangerously polarize Chile.” As to the opposition, it failed to inspire confidence in Washington, let alone among the regime leadership, as a potential alternative government: it was too divided for the comfort of either; too reluctant to fully embrace the plebiscite route for the transition from military to civilian government as laid down by Pinochet; and too far away from presenting a credible – and acceptable – policy platform. Most infuriating of all, Washington had very little influence over events in Chile and Pinochet had made it repeatedly clear that, ultimately, he cared little for how it was exercised.

By the beginning of Ronald Reagan’s second term, a number of factors were conspiring to make a gradual change in U.S. policy toward Chile inevitable. Prominent among these, in the most general sense, had been Reagan’s speech to the British Parliament in June 1982, in which he committed the United States to promoting “freedom and democracy” as a matter of principle throughout the world. The context for, and background to, this speech was the American President’s deeply held belief that the Soviet Union was an “evil empire,” utterly untrustworthy, and should eventually be consigned to history unless it was willing to fundamentally transform its society, politically and economically. The more immediate trigger was Reagan’s support for the Solidarity movement in Poland, which was posing a major challenge to the Soviet-backed government of General Wojciech Jaruzelski.

That speech had important repercussions. First, Reagan’s commitment did not sit well with the wholehearted support of a military strongman such as General Augusto Pinochet and left the White House open to the charge of double standards – supporting democracy where it served U.S. interests in the struggle against leftist movements and regimes, especially in Central America, but exempting dictatorships perceived as valued allies for strategic, political, or economic reasons. Indeed, in the closing months of 1984, pressure was again building inside Congress to apply tougher measures against Chile in response to the concern of some legislators that the administration, despite its lofty rhetoric, was simply choosing to ignore Pinochet’s continued repression. Second, the London speech gave some latitude to those State Department officials eager to pursue policy approaches beyond the strictures of the Kirkpatrick Doctrine and what it implied for Washington’s relations with anticommunist Third World autocrats. Jeane Kirkpatrick’s departure in early 1985 provided an opportunity to contest her interpretation and influence, especially in the White House. “[W]e started taking a different approach to Chile,” recalled a senior U.S. official, and simultaneously “started to draw new lessons from the fall of the Shah in Iran and of Somoza in Nicaragua.”

The Reagan administration came into office so determined to reverse the tone and nature of U.S. foreign policy as it had developed under President Jimmy Carter that one senior official in the ARA imagined his new superiors “felt that they were conducting a hostile takeover.” The atmosphere, he said, “was very much that nobody here could be trusted.” Transition team members, recalled Carter’s Deputy Assistant for National Security Affairs David Aaron, “were not interested in being briefed on anything.” Robert Pastor, the NSC’s Latin American staffer, encountered the icy nature of the transition environment in a meeting with incoming NSC Adviser Richard Allen: “Even though these people who were coming in represented much of what I disagreed with, I felt that as an American official I should be prepared to help them and brief them. Not only did Dick Allen express disinterest at best but he said to me ‘You’d better be out of that office at noon on January 20 or police are going to come and take you out of that office.’” On the other hand, Reagan’s Secretary of State, Alexander Haig, had quite a different view of the transition dynamics. “I found no great enthusiasm in the Department of State for the Reagan Administration,” he would later write. “The fear was abroad that a legion of right-wing activists was going to march in and start conducting American diplomacy according to the rules of a political rally.” The predominant view of Carter’s Latin American policy among the newcomers, according to a senior career Foreign Service Officer at the time, was that it had angered political allies, especially military regimes, and that “we should stop meddling and telling them what they ought to do with respect to their own internal situations and human rights. They were good anti-communists and wanted to be our friends. We should make the most of it.”

During the first three decades of the twentieth century, the United States transformed itself from a dominant regional into a competitive global power, all the while projecting its power abroad driven less by a desire “to make the world safe for democracy” than to put down nationalist threats to an expanding U.S. capital and commerce. Throughout the Cold War era, the gap between idealistic rhetoric and policy practice showed no signs of closing: the verbal commitment to promoting democracy by American presidents “with few exceptions…was distinctly secondary to the U.S. quest for private economic opportunity and public support for military-dominated regimes that would maintain order.”

Between 1898 and 1933, the principal objective of U.S. policy in the Western Hemisphere – based on repeated military interventions and economic pressures – was to create a gaggle of client regimes in Central America and the Caribbean, which culminated in Franklin Roosevelt’s announcement of a Good Neighbor Policy. From then on, through the end of the 1950s, Washington’s policy toward Latin America gave priority to establishing a “closed economy in an open world.” Politically, this translated into supporting “dependable and weak” anticommunist regimes, irrespective of their origins or how they ruled. In pursuit of this overarching objective, successive administrations approved of, and accommodated, both “stability” achieved within a democratic context and “stability” imposed by brutal, autocratic governments. During the 1960s and early 1970s, maximum flexibility became the justification for diplomatic recognition of armed forces’ illegal seizures of power. Starting with the Kennedy administration’s approval of the January 1961 military coup in El Salvador, U.S. support for democracy in Latin America, in other words, remained selective and contingent rather than universal and principled.

The presidency of George H. Bush from January 1989 to January 1993 coincided with the collapse of the Soviet Union, the disintegration of its Eastern European bloc, and the emergence of a unipolar world where the United States was the only superpower. As momentous as these changes were, they did not result in a fundamental reevaluation of U.S. foreign policy goals. In appearance and style, the Bush administration initially leaned away from the emotionally charged and ideologically driven policy of the Reagan years to a more prudent and pragmatic approach in dealing with the Third World in particular. But Washington’s new enthusiasm for solving outstanding problems through diplomacy rather than confrontation was, as events were to show, conditional and largely a function of the need to adapt to a new global reality that denied U.S. policy makers compelling national security arguments to justify interventionist policies and created opportunities for political settlements to a number of regional conflicts.

In his inaugural address, Bush embraced his predecessor’s rhetoric about the need to support democracy and free market economies. The “day of the dictator is over,” the new President declared, and the totalitarian era was passing: “great nations of the world are moving toward democracy [and] freedom [and] toward free markets through the door to prosperity.” For all that, the Bush White House would continue to emphasize the necessity of American global leadership, in the process subordinating the ambitions of competitor allies in Europe and Japan to Washington’s interests. “American leadership,” Bush insisted, meant “economic, political, and military” leadership and in all three respects embodied “a hard-nosed sense of American self-interest.” This dictated the maintenance of large, Cold War–sized military and intelligence budgets, now justified on the basis of the need to maintain worldwide stability (rather than the containment of communism) and to deal with new and continuing threats posed by rogue states, terrorism, and international drug trafficking. In the Third World, the collapse of the Soviet bloc gave an enormous boost to American power, first by eliminating any significant counterweight to U.S. objectives or power projections, and second by increasing the costs to those regimes seeking to pursue alternative economic and political strategies now more vulnerable to hostile initiatives by the dominant imperial state.

Entering 1987, the Reagan administration faced a major challenge to restore a degree of coherence and credibility to its foreign policy-making processes in the wake of the Iran-Contra scandal involving illegal arms transfers to the Nicaraguan rebels. White House intervention in Nicaragua and elsewhere in Central America did not touch directly on Chile policy, but it did change the cast of characters previously involved in the debate and eventually altered the balance of influence between the various foreign policy agencies, damaging the reputation of the NSC and the CIA and restoring a leading role to George Shultz and the State Department in the overall conduct of foreign policy.

Although not at the top of the Reagan foreign policy agenda, Chile would rise to prominence at regular intervals – surrounding deliberations of the UNHRC and annual UNGA meetings, when the Pinochet regime’s human rights record came under scrutiny and when Chilean loan requests came before the MDBs. As well, Chile was fast becoming a standout concern in Latin America as other military regimes passed power back to democratically elected governments, and it was regarded by many within the administration as the sole major example the White House could cite to demonstrate that its professed commitment to democracy included targeting right-wing dictatorships in the region.

In contrast to the difficulties Reagan and his senior foreign policy officials now confronted domestically, Pinochet was in as srong a position as ever.

Following the collapse of negotiations involving Interior Minister Sergio Jarpa and the AD, State Department Counselor Edward Derwinski arrived in Santiago in early November 1983 carrying a singular message for the Chilean government: with the recent transition from military rule to democracy in Argentina the previous month, Chile risked being the “odd man out” in the region vis-à-vis relations with Washington. Derwinski’s instructions from Motley were to “exert gentle but firm pressure” on the regime to negotiate an agreement with the moderate opposition on a transition timetable. In meetings with the opposition, Derwinski encountered an AD leadership that was “uniformly pessimistic” about the future of any dialogue, convinced that Jarpa’s “good intentions” would inevitably fall victim to Pinochet’s refusal to accept any erosion of his “dictatorial powers” and that this, in turn, would almost certainly “radicalize the political process” in ways that could only benefit “the far left.” The severity of the socioeconomic crisis reinforced the appeal of the more radical sectors of the opposition movement. Until further notice, Derwinski was told, the AD saw no alternative to returning to civilian disobedience and mass mobilization politics to put maximum pressure on the regime to make concessions, otherwise nothing would change. Nevertheless, at a press conference before his departure, Derwinski saw no contradiction in reaffirming the existing U.S. policy approach: “silent diplomacy is something we prefer.” A State Department policy review did not suggest otherwise. The “uncertainty” surrounding the domestic political landscape, it concluded, dictated that in the short term, U.S. interests “would be best served by maintaining a cooperative bilateral relationship with Chile” (meaning the junta) and working behind the scenes to get the regime and the nonradical opposition to agree on a transition timetable.

By 1986, the Chilean dictatorship seemed out of step with a transformed regional political landscape, and the nation was led by what Secretary of State George Shultz now pointedly called “the odd men out.” Within the State Department, the debate over Chile policy had decisively shifted in favor of a more activist effort to prod the ruling generals to improve the human rights situation and accelerate the democracy transition process. Driving this new approach were Shultz, Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs Elliott Abrams, his deputy Robert Gelbard, Ambassador Harry Barnes, and their bureaucratic allies, who were, in turn, being continuously pressured by Congress where dwindling support for the autocratic regime was evidenced by the defection of previously uncommitted legislators more and more annoyed by “Pinochet’s continued intransigence and [the] persistence of severe human rights violations.” Yet making Pinochet and his more conservative advisers appreciate Washington’s commitment to this policy shift remained an uphill battle given a strong belief in Santiago that the regime still had the unstinting support of senior Defense and White House officials. This necessitated repeated messages to the regime leaders, often via Chilean Ambassador Hernán Errázuriz, that “there [were] no significant divergences within the administration on Chile policy” and that Ambassador Barnes had the President’s unqualified support.

Pinochet’s refusal to deal with the National Accord in a way that might advance the transition to democracy had a number of significant implications. First, it provided further evidence – if any was needed – of his total refusal to compromise or bend to opinions other than his own. The Accord was not a perfect arrangement from the military’s point of view: many of its signatories were divided by “old feuds and rivalries” and disagreed over some of the concessions the regime would have to make to warrant the opposition’s full cooperation. Nonetheless, those who signed the multiparty document had come close to accepting Pinochet’s transition plan in full.

Ronald Reagan entered the White House determined to jettison what he perceived as Jimmy Carter’s hostile human rights policy toward autocratic regimes in Latin America and revert to a more traditional Cold War approach based on stability, security, and quiet diplomacy. The government of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile was greeted as an ideological (anticommunist) ally presiding over a model free market economy with little beyond lip service paid to its violent method of rule. Pinochet himself was showered with praise for having saved Chile from the chaos of the Allende years, and the military junta was offered all possible support to consolidate and maintain its hold on political power to counter any residual Marxist-terrorist threat.

During the latter half of Reagan’s first term, however, a policy of cohabiting with “acceptable” dictators was becoming increasingly less viable, as public and congressional support for foreign alliances justified in the name of anticommunism had ebbed considerably and as military regimes across Latin America were revealed as unable to contain popular discontent because of their repressive political rule and/or their incompetence as economic managers. For Washington policy makers, this trend posed the problem of how to influence transitions from dictatorship to democracy in a way that conserved the institutional power and integrity of the armed forces and preserved U.S. strategic, political, and economic interests during and after a transition from military rule. Under Reagan, this translated into efforts to co-opt and shape political transitions in a manner that minimized losses and provided the best possible outcomes from the point of view of U.S. interests. What mattered was which sectors of the opposition movement would inherit power and thus oversee the direction of change: antisystem forces that conjured up images of major shifts in the distribution of political and class power, the restructuring of a capitalist economy, and the transformation of the state; or antiregime forces willing to accommodate and coexist with existing authoritarian/military state structures and compatible with U.S. interests.