University of Pennsylvania Journal of Law and Social Change
Publication Date
Spring 2025
Document Type
Article
First Page
95
Abstract
Critical Race Theory scholars have shone a spotlight on the legal underpinnings of imperial power and violence in numerous topics, including foreign policy. Absent from this critical scholarship is an analysis of United States interference in South American affairs. In centering the violent histories of dispossession and enslavement, I propose a rethinking of modern U.S.-Chile relations, with a particular eye to the role of the U.S. in the rise and brutal regime of the Augusto Pinochet dictatorship. As an imperial power, the U.S. exported and embedded racial violence in Chilean society. The effects of this practice are most evident in the racial character of state terror and economic oppression perpetrated by Pinochet against the Chilean people. With the recent failure of Chile’s constitutional reform referenda and reignited debates over the U.S. role in geopolitical affairs, this article applies an analysis of history and the law to illuminate how the specter of racial violence pervades society and law in the U.S. and Chile. I conclude with a call for a reparative reset, proposing declassification of U.S. interference in Chile and a binational search for truth and reconciliation.
Repository Citation
Zachary
R.
Evans,
Reckoning with the Violent Legacy of Racialized U.S. Foreign Policy in Chile,
28
U. Pa. J.L. & Soc. Change
95
(2025).
Available at:
https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/jlasc/vol28/iss2/2
