Introduction: The United States and Chilean Politics in the Cold War

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the relationship between Eduardo Frei's Revolution in Liberty and the United States. For the United States foreign policy apparatus, the Christian Democratic Party of Chile appeared to be a model partner in the realization of the goals of the Alliance for Progress, the Latin American policy conceived by President John F. Kennedy and continued, though without the same level of enthusiasm and hope, by his successor, Lyndon B. Johnson. In its original conception, Kennedy's Latin American policy had ambitious economic, social, and political goals. The channeling of aid from the United States to Latin American countries in the 1960s sought to reflect the interplay between those aims, even if the implementation of the Alliance for Progress sorely lacked in consistency and constancy. In the case of Chile and Eduardo Frei's Revolution in Liberty, the exceptionally generous provision of aid by the United States went hand in hand with a deep involvement of agents of U.S. foreign policy, especially the political staff of the embassy in Santiago, in the day-to-day functioning of Chilean politics—welcomed and, in many cases, invited by local actors.