The American intervention in Chile. The crisis of democracy

Seminar paper from the year 2021 in the subject History - America, grade: 8,5, VU University Amsterdam , language: English, abstract: On the 11th of September 1973, Salvador Allende, the democratically elected president of Chile, was deposed by a military coup that brought the dictator Augusto Pinochet to power. Allende died shortly after in what has been presumed to be suicide.2 The involvement of the American government and Kissinger in particular in these events has been a topic of heated debate. To what degree did American conceptions of democracy contribute? And how was its own democratic image hurt by it? This paper explores the way American conceptions of democracy influenced its actions in the Chilean coup of 1973. In order to do this, it first discusses the debate surrounding its actions in Chile itself. Did the US intervene to protect democracy? Or was there a - to them - more important reason that took precedence over it? Then, it turns to a discussion of the US government's actions after the fact to bring more nuance to the topic and ask whether its ideal of democracy had anything to do with it.