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Security, Conflict and Cooperation
in the Contemporary World
Britain and the

Dictatorships of Argentina
and Chile, 1973-82
Foreign Policy, Corporations
and Social Movements
GRACE LIVINGSTONE
Security, Conflict and Cooperation in the
Contemporary World
Series Editors
Effie G. H. Pedaliu
LSE Ideas
London, UK
John W. Young
University of Nottingham
Nottingham, UK
The Palgrave Macmillan series, Security, Conflict and Cooperation in
the Contemporary World aims to make a significant contribution to
academic and policy debates on cooperation, conflict and security since
1900. It evolved from the series Global Conflict and Security edited by
Professor Saki Ruth Dockrill. The current series welcomes proposals that
offer innovative historical perspectives, based on archival evidence and
promoting an empirical understanding of economic and political coop-
eration, conflict and security, peace-making, diplomacy, humanitarian
intervention, nation-building, intelligence, terrorism, the influence of
ideology and religion on international relations, as well as the work of
international organisations and non-governmental organisations.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14489
Grace Livingstone
Britain and the

Dictatorships of
Argentina and Chile,
1973–82
Foreign Policy, Corporations
and Social Movements
Grace Livingstone
Centre of Latin American Studies
University of Cambridge
Cambridge, UK
Security, Conflict and Cooperation in the Contemporary World

ISBN 978-3-319-78291-1 ISBN 978-3-319-78292-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78292-8
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018936594
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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“The book is constructed by pioneering research of outstanding quality. It places
British foreign policy of the 1970s in a quite new and questionable light.”
—David Rock, Emeritus Professor of History, University of California, USA,
author of Argentina 1516–1987: From Spanish Colonization to Alfonsin
“Grace Livingstone provides a brilliantly original analysis of UK-Latin American

relations prior to the Falklands conflict. Her investigations into recently released
archives yield many important insights into the often murky fields of arms sales,
the politics of oil, and violations of human rights. Livingstone also develops orig-
inal and illuminating theoretical perspectives on her subject. Scholarly, compel-
ling and intellectually sophisticated, this book is outstanding.”
—John Dumbrell, Emeritus Professor of Government, Durham University, UK
“Meticulously researched, well-written and very convincing, this book is an

authoritative account of the making of British foreign policy towards the mil-
itary regimes of Argentina and Chile. It is an indispensable study of how both
Conservative and Labour governments tried to balance the competing forces
attempting to influence the policy-making process. I cannot recommend it too
highly.”
—Alan Angell, Emeritus Fellow, St Antony’s College, Oxford, UK
“In this major new study, Grace Livingstone contrasts the way in which British
Governments treated the military dictatorships in Chile and Argentina during the
1970s and 1980s, examining the conflicts between ministers and officials, and
the role of public opinion. It is an absorbing read which illuminates some dark
corners of British foreign policy.”
—Andrew Gamble, Professor of Politics, University of Sheffield, UK
“This is an exhaustive exploration of British National Archives covering

Pinochet’s coup in Chile in 1973 and the Argentine coup of 1976 leading to the
South Atlantic conflict in 1982. The resulting book provides a detailed analysis
of British foreign policy-making towards Chile and Argentina in the Cold War
years. The focus is on the diverging and contrasting attitudes of both Labour and
Conservative governments when dealing with Chile and Argentina. All in all, this
book is a must read for those interested in international relations, in the making
of British foreign policy, and in understanding the context that led to the 1982
conflict.”
—Celia Szusterman, The Institute for Statecraft, UK
“Grace Livingstone’s work marks an important contribution to the study of

British policy toward Latin America. Examining the informal networks of a wide
range of actors, from civil servants and politicians to business leaders and interest
groups, it demonstrates how the social class of officials influenced the policymak-
ing process.”
—Aaron Donaghy, EU Marie Skłodowska-Curie Global Fellow,
Harvard University, USA
“Grace Livingstone’s meticulous and detailed work to unearth and document the
execrable position of the FCO, its desk officers, section heads and embassy staff,
is wonderful. This book takes us behind the scenes to see how Foreign Office
ambassadors and civil service respond to and seek to mould the policies of gov-
ernments—nowhere more so than in their response to the 1973 military coup
in Chile. Conservatives wanted business as usual, Labour wanted an ethical for-
eign policy. Human rights campaigners wanted something stronger. Here, in tel-
egrams and briefing memos, you can see how it all played out. Grace Livingstone
has added a vital and previously missing component to our understanding of the
period.”
—Mike Gatehouse, former joint-secretary of the Chile Solidarity Campaign
Contents
1 Introduction: Making Friends With the Junta 1
2 Chile 1973–1982 35
3 Welcoming Pinochet’s Coup (1973–1974) 45
4 Ethical Foreign Policy? Labour Versus the Foreign

Office (1974–1979) 57
5 Tea with a Dictator: Mrs. Thatcher

and the General (1979–1982) 85
6 Chile Conclusion 115
7 Argentina 1976–2 April 1982 121
8 Business as Usual: Arming the Junta (1976–1979) 129
9 Oil, the Islands and the Falklands Lobby (1976–1979) 161
10 Befriending ‘Common or Garden’ Dictators

(1979 to 2 April 1982) 181
vii
viii Contents
11 Antarctica, Oil and Leaseback: Britain’s Strategic

Interests in the Falklands (1979 to 2 April 1982) 205
12 Conclusion 233
Appendix A 241
Appendix B 243
Appendix C 249
Bibliography 253
Index 271
List of Tables
Table 9.1 Anglo-Argentine negotiations on the Falkland Islands

1966–1982 163
Table 9.2 British oil exploration around the Falkland Islands
since 1982 170
Table 10.1 British interests in Argentina in 1981 according to the FCO 184
Table 10.2 British arms sales to Argentina 1967–1982 195
Table 10.3 Major defence items agreed by British ministers for sale
to Argentina 1980–1982 which were either not bought
by that country or were not delivered 196
Table 11.1 Anglo-Argentine talks on the Falkland Islands 1979–1982 207
Table 11.2 The Falkland Islanders and British citizenship 225
ix
CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Making Friends

With the Junta
While researching this book I interviewed a former minister in the

Thatcher government. As we sat in his private members club, sipping tea
and balancing biscuits on delicate china saucers, he told me that British
ministers had given little thought to the human rights abuses being com-
mitted by the Argentine dictatorship in the years before the Falklands
war. It was the Cold War he reminded me. I was surprised and impressed
by his frankness, but when I wrote to him afterwards asking for permis-
sion to cite his exact words, he refused and instead supplied me with an
anodyne quote which bore little relation to his previous remarks.
Interviewees can be unreliable sources for historians. It is hard for
anyone to remember accurately events from decades before. Politicians,
especially, can be prone to embellish or omit facts to ensure that they are
remembered in the best possible light. But after a war, the temptation
to embroider or erase is particularly great. It is therefore vital that we go
back to the contemporary records to find out what government ministers
and officials actually said at the time.
Using the newly-opened British government papers at the National
Archives, this book looks at Britain’s relations with the Argentine dicta-
torship that came to power in 1976. It not only gives the most complete
picture of British arms sales to the regime, providing evidence that minis-
ters violated their own guidelines on human rights, but also outlines the
political and military links between Britain and the junta. Neither Labour
nor Conservative governments imposed any sanctions on the Argentine
© The Author(s) 2018 1

G. Livingstone, Britain and the Dictatorships of Argentina and Chile,
1973–82, Security, Conflict and Cooperation in the Contemporary World,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78292-8_1
2 G. LIVINGSTONE
military government before the invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982.

Both governments promoted trade and sold military hardware that was
later used against British forces.
In contrast, the Labour governments of Harold Wilson and James
Callaghan (1974–1979) imposed a series of measures against the regime
of General Augusto Pinochet in Chile that represented an early example
of an ‘ethical’ foreign policy—an arms embargo, a refugee programme,
the cutting of export credits and the withdrawal of the British ambas-
sador. These measures were overturned when Margaret Thatcher’s
Conservative government came to power in 1979. While the British
labour movement barely noticed the coup in Argentina in 1976, it had
been horrified when Hawker Hunter planes bombed the Chilean pres-
idential palace on 11 September 1973. Thirty years later, the Chilean
coup still aroused passionate divisions among British politicians.
Speaking to the Labour Party conference in 1999, Tony Blair confessed
that he found General Pinochet ‘unspeakable’, while Peter Mandelson,
an architect of New Labour, which sought to eradicate naïve leftism
from the party’s ideology, declared that it would be ‘gut-wrenching’ if
the former Chilean dictator evaded extradition to Spain.1 Former Prime
Minister Margaret Thatcher and her ex-chancellor Norman Lamont,
meanwhile, spoke out in defence of Pinochet as a ‘friend of Britain’.
The opening of the archives has also made it possible to investigate
whether the British government had economic or strategic reasons for
retaining sovereignty over the Falkland Islands—a longstanding debate
between Argentine and British academics and politicians. While the doc-
umentary record suggests that fear of a domestic political outcry over
‘selling-out’ the Islanders was the primary reason British politicians failed
to reach a sovereignty deal with Argentina in this period, the evidence
presented here shows that the British government and British oil com-
panies were very interested in exploiting the oil in the waters around
the Islands and that whenever cabinet ministers discussed the Falklands
dispute, securing Britain’s access to the hydrocarbon and other marine
resources was part of the calculations. This book also presents exclusive
evidence that, during the Falklands War, ministers feared that losing the
Islands could set a precedent for Britain’s territorial claim in Antarctica.
But this is not a history of the Falklands dispute, nor is it simply
an account of Britain’s relations with two South American dictator-
ships; it is an investigation into the making of foreign policy. Taking an
inter-disciplinary approach, it assesses the factors that influence pol-
icy-makers and considers the role of private companies and banks,
1 INTRODUCTION: MAKING FRIENDS WITH THE JUNTA 3
politicians and party ideology, and the media. It gauges the extent to
which human right groups, solidarity campaigns and other social move-
ments can have an impact on policy.
The attitudes of British diplomats and officials are also looked
at closely. British diplomats welcomed the coups in both Chile and
Argentina and sought to dissuade Labour ministers from taking any
type of sanction against the military regimes. In this Cold War period,
they were profoundly suspicious of radicalism both at home and abroad.
British business leaders shared these attitudes and were critical of any
policies that might ‘sour the atmosphere’ for those who wished to
invest or trade with these dictatorships. This book examines the nar-
row social background of British officials and traces the informal social
networks between diplomats, officials, business leaders, and other influ-
ential figures such as newspaper editors, peers and Conservative poli
ticians. It argues that theoretical approaches to foreign policy-making
should not ignore the social class of state officials nor the social context
in which they operate. Similarly, when analysing how social movements
can influence policy, it is important to consider the existing biases of
policy-makers and their informal links to the private sector or other
influential societal groups.
One of the central themes of this work is the extent to which elected
politicians have the freedom to implement policy and how far they are
constrained by external factors: the agency-structure debate. One of
the main divisions among international relations theorists is between
those who focus on relationships between states and those who think
it important to look at how decisions are made within states. Informed
by foreign policy analysts who seek to ‘open the black box’ of the deci-
sion-making process, this study looks closely at how policy is made.2
While acknowledging that policy-makers may be constrained by systemic
factors, it accepts that there is, in Christopher Hill’s words, a ‘decisional
space’ in which politicians can choose between different policy options
or, as Gaskarth has put it: ‘The British government retains the capacity
to make political choices and these decisions have important effects.’3 It
accepts too, as Carlsnaes notes, that neither the individual (the national
politician) nor the structure (the international area) is an immutable sep-
arate entity: each continually influences and shapes the other.4 The book
is based on the premise that the state remains a legitimate focus of study
for understanding international relations, despite the growth of transna-
tional organisations, such as multinational corporations or international
4 G. LIVINGSTONE
non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Certainly, during the period

under study—the 1970s and 1980s—and to a large extent today, nation
states retain a capacity to shape the rules of the international game,
formulating policies on key areas such as trade, tax and immigration.5
A politician may have the freedom to make foreign-policy choices
within the constraints of international circumstances, but there is another
aspect of the agency-structure debate that is looked at more closely in
these pages and that is the extent to which a politician is able to pursue
his or her chosen policies in the face of bureaucratic opposition from the
civil service. Or to put it another way, it asks who makes policy: the dem-
ocratically-elected politician or the appointed official? David Vital, for
example, once suggested that the very excellence of the Foreign Office
bureaucratic machine, its efficiency and its competence, made its influ-
ence so formidable that the role of any Cabinet or Foreign Secretary
could become marginal.6 The question has been of particular interest to
the left wing of the Labour party which, from Harold Laski and Stafford
Cripps in the 1930s to Richard Crossman and Tony Benn in the 1960s
and 1970s, has long held the suspicion that a conservative civil service
will seek to undermine left-wing governments.7 Crossman’s diaries were
one of the sources of the BBC TV comedy Yes Minister, which portrayed
Machiavellian civil servants as the real power behind the throne.
Foreign Office documents show that Foreign and Commonwealth
Office (FCO) officials welcomed the overthrow of the socialist presi-
dent of Chile, Salvador Allende, and were critical of British activists and
Labour politicians who campaigned against the coup. Thus, the election
of a Labour government determined to take radical measures against the
Pinochet regime provides an opportunity to examine the power of the
elected politician versus the bureaucrat. The governments of Edward
Heath and Margaret Thatcher shared with the Foreign Office a similar
attitude towards the Pinochet regime, so there was little debate or antag-
onism between politicians and officials on policy towards Chile and there
is therefore little scope to examine the power of the politician against the
bureaucratic machine during those Conservative administrations.
In the case of Argentina, Labour did not seek to introduce tough
sanctions against the junta, so once again there was less conflict in the
policy-making process, although whenever Labour politicians did
consider taking measures on human rights, the Foreign Office advo-
cated moderation, warning of the risks to commercial and polit-
ical relations. The politician versus bureaucrat debate does arise in the
context of Argentina, however, as some British politicians and histo-

rians have accused the Foreign Office of pursuing, in an underhand
manner, policies that were aimed at transferring the sovereignty of the
Falkland Islands to Argentina, against the wishes of both Labour and
Conservative governments. This claim is explored and judged to be
unfounded.
One of the central propositions of this book is that the attitudes of
British diplomats and state officials reflected, at least in part, their
social class: their upbringing, education, their socio-economic and cul-
tural status, and the social circles in which they moved. Theorists of
Foreign Policy Analysis—the sub-set of international relations which
has looked most closely at the decision-making process—have consid-
ered many attributes that might affect the decisions of policy-makers,
including their psychology, their belief systems and the political culture
in which they operate. Much useful work has been done on the func-
tioning of bureaucracies, their structures, inter-departmental rivalries and
the nuances of group dynamics.8 But social class is a factor that has been
overlooked.9
The ‘critical’ approach to foreign policy-making proposed by Dunne,
Hadfield and Smith, which emphasises the need to look at both agency
and structure, and advocates a theoretically-informed reading of the pri-
mary sources, could allow for the class background and informal social
networks of state officials to be considered; however the case studies in
their collection have not done so.10
There is a neo-Gramscian critique of international relations, follow-
ing the work of Robert Cox, which introduces the idea of class and class
conflict into the field of international relations; however, this work has
been largely theoretical, rather than empirically or historically based,
and it focuses on the international level rather than the national deci-
sion-making process.11 Marxist-inspired dependency theorists, mean-
while, did seek to study class formation in both the metropolis and the
periphery, but the state and decision-making were not their main focus
of study.12 If it is accepted, however, that national governments have
the power to shape the framework within which countries interact and
within which private companies operate, then the study of the deci-
sion-making process is a crucial question for those interested in power
and social class. And by taking account of the social context in which
these decisions are made, we can begin to identify the individuals or soci-
etal groups which have most influence on policy—accepting, of course,
6 G. LIVINGSTONE
that these state-societal relations will vary in different historical periods

and from country to country.
The Foreign Office has long drawn its recruits from a narrow stra-
tum of society. Originally recruited from the aristocracy, by the end of
the nineteenth century, officials were increasingly being drawn from the
class which Cain and Hopkins have described as ‘gentlemanly capital-
ists’, consisting of landowners and rich professionals from the fields of
finance, law or other services who had re-invested in land and through
their wealth, inter-marriage and public-school education had been ele-
vated into the social elite.13 This southern-centred elite, which dom-
inated the ancient universities, the civil service, the armed forces, the
church, the City and the major professions, was socially separate from,
and may have looked down upon, the manufacturing magnates of the
great northern cities such as Manchester and Liverpool. However, after
the Second World War, the financial and industrial elites became more
socially intertwined, as the City became more involved in financing large
scale industry, as corporations became more important wealth creators
than individuals, as productive manufacturing businesses came under the
control of banks, and as industrialists themselves invested in land and
adopted the lifestyle of the ‘gentlemanly capitalists’.14 One illustration of
this social transformation is the change in careers of Oxford graduates: in
1917 no graduate went into industry or commerce (all were employed
in education or public service), whereas by 1958, as many as 50% found
employment within industrial or commercial firms.15
Labour party intellectual Harold Laski memorably described the
Foreign Office in the 1930s as a ‘nest of public school singing birds’,
and throughout the twentieth century, the proportion of recruits who
attended fee-paying schools remained high, despite the reforms fol-
lowing the Fulton Report of 1968, which aimed to make it easier for
people from humbler backgrounds to reach top jobs in the diplomatic
service.16 In the period 1950–1954, 83% of recruits to the Foreign
Office had attended private school. Ten years later, the proportion had
fallen to 68%; but the figure for the top-ranking posts was higher: more
than 80% of ambassadors and senior FCO officials in 1961 had attended
fee-paying schools (and these public-school educated ambassadors took
all the most prestigious postings, such as Paris, Berlin and New York).17
Even by 1993, 66% of the fast-track entrants to the FCO—those des-
tined for the top posts—had attended public school.18 They were also
overwhelmingly male: in 1991, only 3.4% of the top grades in the
FCO were women, which added to the clubbish nature of the Foreign
Office.19 A survey conducted for this book of diplomats dealing with
policy towards Argentina and Chile in the 1970s and 1980s found that
more than 75% had attended fee-paying schools.20 Most Foreign Office
officials were also graduates of Oxford or Cambridge; in 1966, 84% of
successful applicants for the diplomatic service came from these two uni-
versities; by 1989, this had fallen only slightly to 73%.21 When a senior
diplomat claimed in 1977 that recruitment to the Diplomatic Service was
wide open, Labour MP Neville Sandelson retorted: ‘Like the Ritz’.22
While few deny that FCO officials are recruited from a narrow social
base, Theakston and others have argued that it is hard to draw a straight-
forward connection between diplomats’ class backgrounds and their
views.23 Certainly, a number of caveats need to be made. Working class
Jim Callaghan got on better with FCO officials than the young mid-
dle-class upstart David Owen, although Callaghan did make sure he
distributed Labour Party manifestos to FCO staff on becoming Foreign
Secretary.24 Similarly trade unionist Ernest Bevin—who liked to boast
that he was educated ‘in the hedgerows of experience’—was well-re-
spected, even loved, by the FCO, while aristocrat Tony Benn was always
highly suspicious of the civil service.25 So clearly social class—particularly
that of a single individual—cannot be the only indicator of a person’s
views and cannot be the only indicator worth evaluating.
There was also a range of views among FCO officials, although this
remained within a narrow spectrum from conservative to conservatively
moderate and all new recruits imbibed the ethos of gentlemanly capital-
ism that permeated the institution. But, the Foreign Office always kept
a certain autonomy; diplomats prided themselves on seeing the ‘overall
picture’ and certainly did not act as the ‘arm’ of the business-owning
class. In fact, other government departments, such as the Ministry of
Defence sales section, had a much closer relationship with the private
sector, sometimes acting as virtual lobbyists for arms companies and
chafing against any restrictions on sales opportunities. The Departments
of Energy and Trade also had close links with the oil and manufacturing
companies. To some extent, the FCO saw itself as an arbitrator between
departments and these bureaucratic rivalries—or differences of institu-
tional perspective—are explored throughout the work.
It should also be emphasised that Foreign Office attitudes evolved
during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as the social composition
of recruits changed. Otte, who accepts that the mindset of officials did
8 G. LIVINGSTONE
reflect their social class and, in particular, their public-school education,

concluded in his study of the nineteenth-century: ‘Foreign Office Mind’
that it was elitist, non-intellectual, had a strong code of honour and a
belief in public service. While it understood that security underpinned
Britain’s status in the world, it concentrated on political aspects of policy
and did not narrowly reflect the financial or commercial interests of the
class from which it came.26 Jones too emphasises the nineteenth-century
British diplomat’s reluctance to become a direct advocate of British mer-
chants and bankers in Argentina.27 The Foreign Office ‘mind’ may have
changed again in the late twentieth century as the recruitment base wid-
ened and Britain’s manufacturing sector shrank. But this study suggests
that in the decades following the Second World War, the Foreign Office
shared the business community’s outlook that trade and investment
should be promoted regardless of the nature of the recipient regime, and
shows that many diplomats—and businessmen—thought military gov-
ernments were beneficial for British business because they brought sta-
bility. Did this view reflect the class outlook of diplomats? A number of
objections may be made. Firstly, most of the population shared the view
that promoting British exports was in the national interest; it was the
hegemonic view, and certainly Labour ministers—particularly the min-
isters for employment, trade and industry—argued vigorously for trade
with the Argentine military regime. Another objection is that it was the
job of the Foreign Office to promote trade. At least since the nineteenth
century, one of the aims of British foreign policy had been to ensure
security for British trading interests. It was a short step from protec-
tion to promotion and the Committee on Overseas Representation (the
Duncan Committee) in 1969 specifically urged diplomats to promote
British business abroad, leading to complaints that ambassadors were to
become little more than ‘travelling salesmen’.28 In this post-war period,
it was a central objective of successive British governments to avoid bal-
ance of payments deficits and the dangers to sterling that these could
bring. Securing contracts to protect British manufacturing jobs was also
an important concern.
In the case of Chile, however, when a class-conscious trade union
movement at the height of its militancy in the 1970s, backed by Labour
politicians, demanded action against the Pinochet regime, there was a
clear difference between the outlook of Foreign Office officials and the
labour movement, and this may be attributed to differing class outlooks.
The Foreign Office favoured stability over radicalism, criticising the
chaos under Allende and predicting that the Pinochet regime would be
better for British business. The FCO was staunchly anti-Communist in
this Cold War period; many officials were critical of human rights cam-
paigners and Chile Solidarity activists, suspecting that they had underly-
ing ‘political’ motives, by which they meant left-wing or pro-Communist
objectives. The Foreign Office believed that Britain’s commercial inter-
ests should be put above ethical considerations and were against end-
ing arms sales, cutting export credits and withdrawing the British
ambassador.
There was less of a clash of views between the labour movement
and Whitehall in the case of Argentina, because the left had not taken
up Argentina as a cause in the same way. The Labour Party regarded
Peronism as akin to fascism and did not mourn the overthrow of the cor-
rupt and repressive government presided over by Juan Perón’s widow.
Chile, on the other hand, was viewed as a clear-cut case of a democrati-
cally-elected socialist being ousted by a fascist dictator. Nevertheless, the
pro-business attitude of the Foreign Office can be seen in its consistent
advocacy of closer commercial ties with the Argentina junta, despite the
growing awareness of the gross human rights abuses being perpetrated
by the regime. Indeed, in the absence of a strong lobby, the de facto
policy of the Foreign Office towards all the military regimes of South
America, including Argentina, Brazil, Uruguay and Paraguay, was to
impose no sanctions and to continue to promote trade, including arms
sales. Britain had a particularly strong relationship with the military
regime of Brazil, inviting dictator General Ernesto Geisel on a state visit
in 1976 and providing the Brazilian armed forces with British military
training manuals.29
Henry Fairlie, the Spectator journalist who coined the phrase ‘the
Establishment’ wrote: ‘By its traditions and its methods of recruitment
the Foreign Office makes it inevitable that the members of the Foreign
Service will be men…who “know all the right people”.’30 Using pri-
mary sources, this study traces the informal social networks between
Foreign Office officials and business leaders, financial executives, news-
paper editors and some Conservative politicians. They were often mem-
bers of the same private clubs—such as the Athenaeum in Pall Mall or
the Carlton in St. James’s Street—and they attended the same seminars,
lunches and drinks parties in Belgravia. Business executives had numer-
ous informal channels of access to the Foreign Office; officials regu-
larly reported conversations with representatives of—for example BP,
10 G. LIVINGSTONE
Rothschild or GEC—whom they had met at a function or had spoken

to on the phone. This elite often shared a common social and educa-
tional background, having attended the same universities and fee-paying
schools, and bought property in similarly wealthy parts of cities or afflu-
ent villages. They often had common cultural interests, reading the same
newspapers or following the same sports, such as horse racing or cricket.
These repeated informal and semi-formal encounters therefore had a
dual role, reinforcing existing social and political affinities, as well as giv-
ing private sector representatives direct access to policy-makers.
Ambassadors and embassy staff in Chile and Argentina socialised in
an even more tightly-knit social milieu, comprising the British business
community, many of whom were virulently right wing and in favour of
military rule, along with upper-class Argentines and Chileans, including
military officers. Embassy functions, drinks funded by private companies,
polo matches, dinner parties, as well as the more formal tasks of host-
ing trade missions or meeting Argentine or Chilean government officials,
were all part of the British diplomat’s life in South America. The com-
mon upbringing and education, socio-economic status and social con-
nections, may not have been the only factors determining the views of
Foreign Office officials, but there is a strong case for arguing they con-
tributed to the convergence of views between the Foreign Office and
Britain’s financial and commercial elites. Certainly, the Foreign Office,
as an institution, articulated a conception of the ‘national interest’ which
reflected the interests of the dominant industrial, financial, professional
and landed groups of post-war Britain.
The term elite has been used loosely in this work to describe individ-
uals who hold economic or political power, including the executives of
large private companies and financial institutions, people who hold great
personal wealth or land, government ministers, influential back-benchers,
peers, the monarchy, editors of influential broadsheets, magazines and
broadcasting companies, and those populating the higher ranks of the
civil and foreign service, the military, the judiciary and the Church of
England. The language of elites sits uneasily with that of class, the two
coming from distinct intellectual traditions. Certainly, elite is not used
here with any of the normative connotations of the early elite theorists,
Mosca and Pareto, who saw elitism as both inevitable and necessary in
all societies.31 But viewing the elite as the people within a class who are
most active in public life, or who act on behalf of powerful economic
sectors, is not necessarily incompatible with a class-based analysis.32
It is not suggested here that members of the elite coordinated

their actions in a conspiratorial way, rather that the elite shared an
anti-egalitarian, pro-business outlook in this post-war period, which in
foreign-policy terms translated into the promotion of British manufac-
turing and financial interests abroad.
However a simple binary opposition between the class outlook of
the labour movement and that of the pro-business elite—while use-
ful to describe differing perspectives on the Pinochet regime—has not
been found adequate to describe the political debates on the Falkland
Islands during the 1970s and 1980s, not least because the trade union
movement and the Labour Left had no coherent position on the sov-
ereignty dispute. Political divisions on the Falklands, particularly during
the Thatcher years, are best ascribed to splits within the elite and these
are analysed in the final chapter of this book.
Social Movements and Policy-Making

This study also looks at the circumstances in which non-parliamentary
campaigning groups can be successful. It explores why the Chile
Solidarity Campaign had a much wider appeal than the groups lobby-
ing for human rights in Argentina. It also considers the impact of the
Falkland Islands Committee, an organisation that campaigned for the
rights of Falkland Islanders. The two political science approaches that
look most closely at how social movements can influence policy-making
are political process theory, which uses the concept of ‘political oppor-
tunity structures’, and the veto-player/gate-keeper approach, which is
derived from game theory.33 The merit of these approaches is that they
examine the nature of the governing structures and do not just consider
the characteristics of the campaigning organisations. In Guigni’s terms,
both the ‘external’ and ‘internal’ are considered.34 While there are a
number of factors which help determine the success of a social move-
ment, including the clarity of its message, the breadth of its appeal and
its tactics and strategies, it is arguably crucial for a lobbying organisation
to have some sort of leverage over key policy-makers (or ‘gate-keepers’).
So, for example, the Chile Solidarity Campaign successfully persuaded
the Labour government to impose sanctions on the Pinochet dictator-
ship because it not only had the support of sympathetic ministers, but
also had institutional links to the government through both the party
and the trade unions. Its leverage was particularly strong because Labour
12 G. LIVINGSTONE
held only a small majority, then a minority, of seats in parliament. The

Chile campaign had less influence on the Thatcher administration
because it had no supporters in cabinet and no institutional links to the
governing Conservative party, which had a large majority in parliament.
But neither political process theory nor the gate-keeper approach
analyses the social context in which policy is made, so do not consider
the potential biases of state officials stemming from their social class or
their informal social networks. Political process theorists have considered
a range of variables, including the relative repressiveness of a regime, its
openness to new actors and the multiplicity of power centres within in
it.35 Some have adopted a narrower focus on institutional arrangements
and compare features such as: federalism versus centralism, the electoral
system, the relationship between the legislature, executive and judiciary
and availability of referenda.36 But the role of state officials and their
biases has not been considered. The veto-player approach has considered
the role of unelected officials, suggesting that they will have more auton-
omy when there are more key policy-makers (veto-players), because as
the number of veto-players increases, the chain of command becomes
less clear and officials may play ministers off against each other.37 There
is no attempt, however, to discern the preferences or motives of officials;
unsurprisingly because in game theory all actors are divorced from their
social context and are ultimately reducible to quantifiable variables.
The actions of state officials may not always be the factor which
determines whether a social movement is successful. However, over-
looking the social matrix in which officials operate risks underestimat-
ing the resistance to campaigners’ demands from the state machinery
and the subtle ways in which officials try to dissuade ministers from
taking action. In the case of a weak lobby group, such as the Argentina
human rights campaign, the result was that no sanctions were imposed
and business links with the military regime were pursued. Even in the
case of a strong campaign, such as Chile, policy-making was a constant
process of negotiation between FCO officials, who advised caution, and
ministers, who were in turn under pressure from their base. While the
Labour government did succeed in introducing a policy that was radi-
cally different from that of its Conservative predecessors, officials suc-
cessfully persuaded ministers against taking the most extreme measures
demanded by activists such as the breaking of existing arms contracts
with the Pinochet regime. Meanwhile, the Falkland Island Committee,
which had the support of influential figures such as peers, high-ranking
former military officers and business leaders, had enhanced social access
to policy-makers; for example its supporters hosted private dinners and

drinks parties for FCO officials and the campaign’s secretary belonged
to the same private club as the head of the FCO’s Falkland Island
Department (see Chapter 5). This informal social nexus, complemented
its more traditional lobbying techniques such as writing to MPs. By tak-
ing an inter-disciplinary approach, using the methods of a social histo-
rian and reading the primary sources critically, this study aims to show
that officials cannot be regarded as neutral players and that their attitudes
and social networks must be taken into account when analysing deci-
sion-making in government.
Informal Empire
‘And so behold! The New World established and if we do not throw it
away, ours’, proclaimed Foreign Secretary George Canning in 1825.38
Britain became the dominant economic power in Latin America in
the nineteenth century until it was superseded by the United States from
1900 onwards. Britain controlled almost a third of Latin America’s trade
in 1870 and, by 1913, 50% of all foreign investment in Latin America
came from Britain.39 Even these figures mask the greater relative eco-
nomic weight Britain had in the Southern Cone economies of Brazil,
Chile and Argentina, where British companies and investors built rail-
ways, held controlling shares in banks and public utilities, had large hold-
ings of government bonds and bought substantial amounts of land. In
Chile, British companies controlled the lucrative nitrate-mining indus-
tries, while in Argentina they dominated the banks, transport industry
and import trade. In both Argentina and Chile, there was often a conver-
gence of interests between the British and Latin American landed elite,
who favoured free trade and welcomed foreign investment. The British
did not create this elite—it was a legacy of Spanish colonialism—but
they did help to strengthen it and ensure that it remained dominant for
longer than might otherwise have been the case.
The British dominance of the economy of Latin America, and in par-
ticular Argentina, has led to a debate about the extent to which Britain
profited at the expense of Latin Americans and distorted Latin America’s
development path. Robinson and Gallagher argued that Argentina was
part of Britain’s ‘informal empire’, exploited economically like a colony
but through informal means.40 Some historians, such as H. S. Ferns,
rejected this argument on the grounds that the relationship was mutu-
ally beneficial to Britain and Argentina.41 But while there may have been
14 G. LIVINGSTONE
a convergence of interests between the Argentine elite and the British

in the nineteenth century, it was clearly an asymmetrical relationship.
British investment in Argentina reached a peak in 1913 of 10% of total
British overseas investment—a not insignificant figure for a country that
was not even a colony—but in Argentina, it had far greater weight, rep-
resenting 60% of all inward investment.42
D.C.M. Platt and others attacked the concept of an ‘informal empire’
on the basis that it was not the British state that was investing or interfer-
ing in Latin America, but British firms. Platt argued that business imperial-
ism should be the focus of study and that the impact of British investments
in each country or sector should be examined to see whether or not they
were detrimental to indigenous interests.43 So Colin Lewis, for exam-
ple, maintained that British investment in the railways was beneficial for
Argentine economic development and that the counterfactual argument
that Argentine development would have been more balanced without the
British could not be proven.44 Charles Jones, on the other hand, argued
that although state imperialism did not exist because the British state did
not encourage or help investors overseas, British banks did ultimately
undermine the authority of the Argentine state.45 A new generation of his-
torians have looked at the cultural impact of British involvement in Latin
America placing greater emphasis on the subjectivity of experiences.46
British influence in Latin America declined in the twentieth century.
In 1870, Latin Americans bought 32% of their imports from British
merchants; by 1950 this had fallen to just 6.5%.47 But the concept of an
‘informal empire’ has some relevance to this study in helping to explain
the disjuncture between the attitudes of Britons and Argentines—for
example, among politicians, journalists and members of the public—
towards the Falklands dispute. While in Argentina, there is a strong his-
torical memory of British ‘imperialism’ among nationalists on the right
and left of the political spectrum, in Britain there is little awareness of
Britain’s ‘imperial’ past in Argentina.
Although the concept of ‘informal empire’ was intended to encom-
pass Britain’s relationship with all of Latin America, the vast majority
of the scholarship has focused on Argentina and there is less work on
Anglo-Chilean relations.48 Perhaps this is unsurprising given that by the
turn of the twentieth century, British trade and investment, which had
been quite evenly distributed between Latin American countries in the
1860s, was overwhelmingly concentrated on Argentina. But as Miller
points out, ‘what looked marginal to the British could be central to a
small Latin American country.49 From a Chilean perspective, the British

were the dominant foreign presence in the second half of the nine-
teenth century and remained Chile’s most important trading partner
until 1914. In 1895, 74% of Chilean exports went to Britain and almost
half its imports came from there.50 Despite the potential for anti-impe-
rialist resentment, however, the image of the British imperialist has not
become such a potent hate-figure in modern Chile as it has in Argentina.
This is partly because the ongoing dispute over the Falklands Islands has
been a source of nationalist anger in Argentina throughout the twenti-
eth century. But it also stems from the fact that British economic dom-
inance lasted longer in Argentina than in Chile. It lingered throughout
the 1930s, in large part due to the Roca–Runciman pact which gave
Britain preferential treatment in the Argentine market, whereas in Chile,
British influence was eclipsed by the United States after the First World
War. Chilean progressives therefore directed their ire at ‘Yankee imperi-
alists’ rather than the British in the twentieth century, while the Chilean
elite ‘the English of Latin America’, remembered the Anglo connection
with rose-tinted nostalgia. Pinochet, of course, had a fondness for old
England; during the days before he was arrested in London in 1998,
he had shopped at Burberry, lodged at a Park Lane hotel and dined at
Fortnum and Mason.
Britain and Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s

Latin America was a low priority for Britain after the Second World War.
The Duncan Report of 1969 defined it as an ‘outer area of concentra-
tion’ for policy-makers and Britain recognised that the region was a US
sphere of influence.51 Foreign Office reviews of British policy in Latin
America in 1975, 1978 and 1982 saw British interests as primarily eco-
nomic, combined with the geopolitical desire to keep Latin American
countries on the ‘right side’ during the Cold War. These interests were
identified as:
1. Latin America as a source of raw materials

2. Latin America more visible at the UN and international fora
3. Technological advances of Argentina and Brazil, particularly steps
towards nuclear power
4. Latin America as an export market
5. Latin America as a capital hungry area.52
16 G. LIVINGSTONE
These themes were strikingly similar to those highlighted by Victor

Perowne, the head of the South America Department at the Foreign
Office in his 1945 paper ‘The Importance of Latin America’: (i) Raw
materials; (ii) British investment in Latin America; (iii) Latin America as
an export market; (iv) The significance of Latin America for US strategic
interests; (v) The prospect of Latin American nations emerging with a
distinct identity in the new world order.53
After the Second World War, British politicians and policy-makers fre-
quently lamented Britain’s loss of economic influence in Latin America
and periodically launched export drives, but Britain’s overall share of the
Latin American market continued to fall, until by 1988, it was just 1.2%.54
There was one industry, however, in which Britain secured a significant
share of the Latin American market: the arms industry. During the 1970s,
Britain was the second-largest provider of armaments to South America,
supplying 25% of the total, compared with 29% for the United States, the
market leader.55 It was such a lucrative market that the Foreign Office
came under strong pressure from the Departments of Trade and Industry,
the Ministry of Defence’s sales department and from British companies
to allow arms trading with the military regimes of the Southern Cone,
despite human rights concerns and the potential threat to the Falklands.
British investment in the region, despite suffering an overall decline over
the twentieth century, experienced a mini boom in the 1970s—British net
outward investment flows to Latin America rose from 1.9% of total British
outward investment in 1970 to 8.2% in 1977—and a number of British
banks found themselves dangerously exposed when the Latin American
debt crisis broke in 1982.56 Although investment in Chile fell during the
Allende years, by 1981, Chile and Argentina were among the top three
destinations for British investment and exports within Latin America.57
Latin America, Human Rights

and Solidarity Campaigns
While Latin America was a low priority for British policy-makers in

the post war period, there was a growing public interest in the region.
The Cuban revolution sparked interest in Latin America among British
progressives and Che Guevara became an icon to the student radicals
of 1968. Meanwhile, the Latin American literary ‘boom’ of the 1960s
brought worldwide fame to authors such as Gabriel García Márquez,
Mario Vargas Llosa and Carlos Fuentes. The growing cultural and
academic interest was reflected in the Parry Report of 1962, which

assessed the state of Latin American studies in British universities and
led to the creation of five specialist Latin American studies centres in
Oxford (1964), London (1965), Cambridge (1966), Liverpool (1966)
and Glasgow (1967). Academics founded the Society for Latin American
Studies in 1964. The Latin American Newsletter was established in 1967
to provide specialized news to the growing audience, while the quantity
and quality of mainstream media reporting on Latin America increased,
culminating in the 1980s in numerous documentaries on the region, par-
ticularly after the creation of Channel Four.58
British governments in the 1970s and 1980s faced an array of pressure
groups trying to influence policy on Latin America. The Chile solidar-
ity movement was the largest and most successful, encompassing a broad
array of trade unions, political parties, human rights groups, religious
organisations, student groups and refugee organisations. The Argentina
campaign was much smaller, consisting mainly of human rights groups,
individuals with a prior interest in Argentina, and exiles. Revolt and
repression in Central America in the late 1970s and early 1980s led to
the creation of a new generation of solidarity organisations, including
the Nicaragua Solidarity Campaign and the El Salvador and Guatemala
Committees for Human Rights. The Latin America Bureau, a publishing
house funded by NGOs, was founded in 1977 to ‘raise public awareness
on social, economic, political and human rights issues in Latin America,
especially in relation to British involvement in the region’. It provided
an alternative nexus of human rights campaigners, progressive academics,
journalists and Labour politicians, which rivalled the traditional institu-
tions for Anglo-Latin interchange such as Canning House, whose mem-
bers tended to be diplomats and notables from the worlds of banking
and commerce.59
Ethical Foreign Policy

The British labour movement had a history of internationalism and had,
in the past, been inspired by international events such as the defence of
the Spanish republic against Franco—a cause to which events in Chile
were often compared. There was also a long tradition of humanitarian
organisations taking up the cause of subjugated peoples overseas. After
the Second World War, however, in most Western countries, the num-
ber of NGOs seeking to influence foreign policy proliferated and they
18 G. LIVINGSTONE
acquired a growing legitimacy among the public, press and politicians.60

The idea that human rights should play a part in foreign policy consid-
erations became more widespread following the Universal Declaration
of Human Rights (1948), the European Convention of Human Rights
(1953) and the creation of rights-based lobbying organisations such as
Amnesty International (1961).
The 1974–1979 Labour governments’ policies towards the Pinochet
regime can be seen as an early attempt at an ‘ethical foreign policy’,
although the term is anachronistic as it did not become common usage
until the announcement in 1997 by British Foreign Secretary Robin
Cook that New Labour’s foreign policy would have an ‘ethical dimen-
sion’. Britain had only imposed peacetime sanctions on a foreign gov-
ernment for ‘ethical’ reasons twice before, and in both of these cases,
the UK had come under strong pressure from the United Nations to
do so. Harold Wilson’s Labour government (1964–1970) applied sanc-
tions on the British colony of Rhodesia in 1965, when Ian Smith uni-
laterally declared independence for a white minority regime, and after
the UN Security Council had urged Britain to take the strongest possi-
ble action. The Wilson government also imposed an arms embargo on
South Africa in 1964, but this followed the UN Security Council’s 1963
call for all states to impose voluntary arms embargoes. Britain’s sanctions
against the Pinochet regime were unilateral and not a result of pressure
from the UN. While campaigners were less successful in persuading the
British government to impose sanctions on Argentina, they neverthe-
less convinced the Labour government in 1979 to introduce guidelines
on weapon sales, which advised against the sale of arms that could be
used for internal repression. Such a formula had only been used once
before (on South Africa in 1961) but became increasingly common in
later years. These measures can be seen as part of a growing trend by
governments, in Britain and internationally, to consider the human rights
impacts of overseas policies.
In the United States, President Jimmy Carter’s (1977–1981) advo-
cacy of human rights as a foreign policy goal transformed the interna-
tional debate and ensured that ethics became part of the rhetoric of
policy-making. Trans-national human rights campaigns on South Africa
and Chile, as well as other Latin American countries, also helped to
ensure that during the 1970s the language of human rights became
an integral part of international politics.61 It is noteworthy that both
Labour foreign secretary David Owen and the Conservative MP Richard
Luce (who went on to become a minister in the FCO), published books

on human rights and foreign policy in the 1970s, while Labour MP
Stan Newens initiated a debate in parliament on ‘foreign policy and
morality’.62
During the Cold War, both superpowers used the issue of rights to
discredit the other, which led politicians from opposing sides to distrust
the motives of their opponents; in Britain, for example, Conservative
and Labour attitudes towards the abuses of the Pinochet regime often
divided along Cold War lines. Nevertheless, these international discus-
sions cemented the idea that human rights could be a legitimate ele-
ment of foreign policy.63 Academic work on ethics and foreign policy
has grown dramatically since the 1990s.64 Chandler and Heins date the
rising interest in ethical foreign policy from the end of the Cold War,
suggesting that the collapse of faith in broader explanatory frameworks,
such as Marxism or modernization theory has led to a demand from the
public for ethical action from governments.65
But while the language of ‘ethics’ has become more widespread in
government, the dilemmas of weighing economic, geopolitical and
strategic concerns against human rights issues remain as sharp as ever.
Just as the most contentious aspect of Labour’s 1970s Chile policy
was the decision not to break contracts to supply warships and sub-
marines to the Pinochet regime, so Cook’s ethical policy fell into dis-
array when his government honoured agreements to deliver Hawk jets
to Indonesia, which had invaded the former Portuguese colony of East
Timor in 1975. Similarly, Britain’s prioritising of economic and strate-
gic interests over human rights in its attitude toward the Argentine and
Brazilian dictatorships in the 1970s, has clear echoes in British policy
towards Saudi Arabia or Yemen in recent years. But the new global archi-
tecture of human rights laws and institutions—from the European Court
of Human Rights (1959, sitting permanently from 1998) and the Inter-
American Court of Human Rights (1979) to the UN Office of the High
Commissioner for Human Rights (1993)—as well as the public’s accept-
ance of ethics as a legitimate or even necessary facet of foreign policy,
allows social movements and civil society to apply pressure on govern-
ments at multiple levels in both the domestic and international arenas.
The campaigns on Chile—and to a lesser extent Argentina—were an
important early step in the construction of these new institutional and
conceptual frameworks for global human rights governance.66
20 G. LIVINGSTONE
Europe and the United States

Chile, then, was an international cause. Across Europe, broad and
popular solidarity movements were formed. Of the 200,000 political
exiles who fled the Pinochet regime, a half to a third settled in Western
Europe.67 The highest numbers of refugees settled in France, Sweden,
Italy, and—after the death of General Francisco Franco in 1975—Spain.
The overthrow of the democratically elected government in Chile
revived memories of the anti-Fascist struggle in Europe during World
War II and parallels were drawn with the anti-dictatorial cause both in
Spain, and in Portugal, where civil and military resistance to the repres-
sive Estado Novo erupted into revolution in 1974. The parties of the
left and centre in Europe had strong sympathy for the opponents of
Pinochet; the socialist prime minister of Sweden, Olof Palme, was a par-
ticularly prominent critic of dictatorships in Latin America. Meanwhile
Italy, governed by Christian Democrat prime ministers during the 1970s,
became the main place of refuge for the leaders of Chilean Christian
democracy. Even in countries not governed by the centre left, the large
socialist and communist parties, and their affiliated trade unions, pres-
sured their governments to welcome Chilean refugees. France, which
had a tradition of welcoming people fleeing political persecution, was
headed by centre-right president Valéry Giscard D’Estaing (1974–1981).
His government granted thousands of Chileans asylum—by 1983, up
to 15,000 Chileans were residing in France.68 The Chilean coup pro-
foundly affected the thinking of some European politicians. It convinced
the Italian Communist Party leader, Enrico Berlinguer, of the need for
compromise with other parties and played a part in his conversion to
Euro-communism: the idea that European communist parties should not
follow a ‘line’ from Moscow but adopt positions suited to their national
circumstances. Chilean political parties based their exiled headquar-
ters in Europe: the Socialist Party in Berlin, the Christian Democrats in
Rome and the Communist Party in Moscow. Rome was also the base
for Chile Democrático, the coordinating body of Popular Unity parties
set up to liaise with solidarity movements around the world, while the
Chilean trade union confederation, the Central Única de Trabajadores
(CUT) had its office in Paris. Chilean leaders were, in turn, influ-
enced by the moderating arguments of European social democracy and
Euro-communism; these convinced them of the need to create the broad
cross-party alliance, the Concertación, which went on to govern Chile
after the fall of Pinochet.69
The British Labour party was aware of the groundswell of

anti-Pinochet feeling across Europe and this reinforced its desire to take
a strong stance on Chile. Labour politicians kept in touch with European
opinion through the Socialist International. The Foreign Office too
kept a close eye on the positions taken by other European governments.
Britain joined the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1973, a
decision that was ratified in a referendum in 1975. Before advising the
British government on any policy decision on Chile, FCO officials con-
sidered what the other nine members of the EEC were doing.
The coup in Argentina, however, did not generate large solidarity
movements in Europe. Just as activists in Britain had been confused by
the complex Argentine political scene, not easily explicable along Cold
War lines, so too in Europe there was a lack of awareness of events in
Argentina, at least until the late 1970s, when the Mothers of Plaza de
Mayo began to draw the world’s attention to mass disappearances.
British politicians and officials also watched carefully the changes in
United States policy towards Chile and Argentina between 1973 and 1982.
President Richard Nixon (1969–1974) and his secretary of state Henry
Kissinger had sought to foment a coup against Allende and had heavily
funded his opponents. Nixon and his successor Gerald Ford (1974–1977)
were allies of the Pinochet regime, providing economic aid and technocratic
advisors, while the CIA worked closely with the Chilean security and intelli-
gence services. However, when a Senate investigation in 1974 revealed US
attempts to undermine Allende, the US Congress began to place restric-
tions on US aid and, in 1976, imposed a complete ban on arms sales.
Following the assassination of a Chilean former diplomat in Washington,
President Jimmy Carter cut all military and economic aid to the regime and
reduced the US diplomatic mission in Chile, but these sanctions were lifted
when Republican Ronald Reagan came to office in 1981.
US policy towards Argentina followed a similar trajectory: the Nixon
administration welcomed the 1976 coup, Henry Kissinger telling the
Argentine foreign minister in October 1976, ‘Look, our basic attitude is
that we would like you to succeed’.70 On coming to office, Carter imposed
a ban on military and economic aid, which was overturned by the Reagan
administration. This neoconservative-influenced administration had a close
relationship with the Argentine military regime; President Reagan welcomed
junta leader Roberto Viola as an official guest to Washington and during
his administration the US military worked closely with the Argentine armed
forces, training anti-communist paramilitary groups in Central America.
22 G. LIVINGSTONE
The Foreign Office were anxious to ‘keep in step’ with the United
States when considering, for example, when to recognise a new govern-
ment or whether to impose sanctions. But there is no archival evidence
to suggest that the United States sought unduly to influence British
policy towards the Pinochet regime, or the Argentine junta, before the
invasion of the Falklands Islands. After 2 April 1982, as has been well
documented, the Reagan administration sought to avert a conflict
between its two allies: Britain and the Argentine military regime.71
Britain, Argentina and Chile

There is a large and rich body of scholarship on British relations with
Latin America in the nineteenth century. There is, however, far less
material on the twentieth century and very little on the years follow-
ing the Second World War. Rory Miller’s seminal study of British-Latin
American relations in the nineteenth and twentieth century ends its
narrative in the 1940s.72 Victor Bulmer-Thomas’s Britain and Latin
America: A Changing Relationship (2008) is one of the few publica-
tions covering the more recent period.73 All academic books on Chilean-
British relations focus on the nineteenth century or the years preceding
the First World War. Journalist Andy Beckett has written one of the
few books on Britain’s relations with Chile in the twentieth century,
an evocative book based on secondary sources and interviews.74 There
are no archival-based studies of Britain’s relationship with the Pinochet
regime, although the arrest of the former dictator in London in 1998
prompted the publication of numerous texts on the legal implica-
tions of the Pinochet case.75 There is also a growing academic interest
in the Chile Solidarity Campaign and Chilean exiles in Britain.76 This
book, however, is the only work that uses primary material from the
newly-opened British government archives to examine British-Chilean
relations in the period 1973–1982.
The literature on Argentine-British relations extends further into the
twentieth century reflecting the longer-lasting British influence in that
country, but there are almost no accounts that go beyond Juan Perón’s
first administration (1946–1955).77 There is a vast literature on the
Falklands war and a sizable body of work devoted to the origins of the
conflict, but no academic study focused on Britain’s relationship with
the Argentine junta of 1976–1982. Very few books on the origins of
the Falklands conflict are based on official British government sources,
which have only recently opened in line with the thirty-year rule.
The Official History of the Falklands Campaign Volume 1: The Origins
of the War (2005) by Lawrence Freedman, who had early access to the
official sources, is an indispensable account of the British government’s
position on the Falklands dispute in the years preceding the war.78 Aaron
Donaghy’s The British Government and the Falkland Islands, 1974–1979
(2014) argues convincingly that the Wilson and Callaghan governments
took a more robust approach to the defence of the Falklands than the
Conservatives.79 The primary material examined for this book supports
Donaghy’s conclusion that James Callaghan and David Owen kept a
more watchful eye on defence deployments in the South Atlantic than
did Margaret Thatcher’s ministers. The Falkland Islands Review (1983),
the report of the official inquiry into the causes of the war chaired by
Lord Franks is also an invaluable account of the British government’s
actions in the years before the war, based on government papers and tes-
timonies, and its text is far more critical of ministers than its anodyne
conclusion would suggest. 80
This is a study of British policy-making and is therefore based on
British primary sources. The Argentine official archives for the period
covering the military dictatorship, 1976–1982, have largely remained
closed and substantial amounts of material may have been destroyed.
In 2015, however, the Argentine government announced the release of
thousands of documents relating to the dictatorship, which will be a rich
seam for future research. This book has, nevertheless, referred to a wide
variety of Argentine secondary sources.81
This book aims to give a much fuller account of Britain’s relations
with the Argentine military regime than any earlier study, and to place
Anglo-Argentine relations in the context of British policy towards the
other Southern American dictatorships. It does not attempt to provide
a detailed account of the origins of the Falklands war, which has been
well covered elsewhere. It does, however, look closely at the attitudes
of British business towards the Falklands dispute, an area that has been
insufficiently studied. It also considers whether Britain had strategic, eco-
nomic and commercial interests in the South Atlantic, a suggestion that
has been discounted in much of the British literature, but overplayed in
many Argentine accounts.
Among the British academics who downplay strategic and economic
factors is the war’s official historian, Lawrence Freedman, who con-
cludes: ‘Other than possible oil resources… the strategic and economic
24 G. LIVINGSTONE
value of the Falklands to Britain was minimal…For Britain, it was the

people who lived on the Islands.’82 Similarly George Boyce writes:
‘There was…no selfish economic or strategic British interest in the
Falklands’, while Hastings and Jenkins say the Islands ‘were never of any
great strategic importance—certainly not before the advent of coal-pow-
ered vessels’, but do not mention any subsequent strategic interests.83
Many popular British histories simply ignore the question of British stra-
tegic interests.84 A small number of British works do note strategic or
economic interests including those by Klaus Dodds, Robert Miller and
Martin Middlebrook.85
Most accounts by British politicians claim that the Falklands were of
little strategic value, with the exception of those by Margaret Thatcher
and Tony Benn. Thatcher wrote in her autobiography that ‘the islands
had obvious strategic importance’, and during the Falklands war she
attempted to win US support by emphasising their strategic role to
President Reagan.86 Tony Benn, who was energy secretary during the
1970s and witnessed oil companies’ interest in Falklands oil, wrote in his
diary on the outbreak of the Falklands conflict on 2 April 1982: ‘The
real interest there is oil’.87
But it was more common for politicians to dismiss their strategic
value. Barbara Castle, for example, reported in her diary a cabinet con-
versation in 1968: ‘It was Jim Callaghan who asked solemnly whether
the Falkland Islands were any use to us. Apparently none at all but there
would be one of those absurd parliamentary rows if we were to try and
disembarrass ourselves of them.’88 The foreign secretary at the time
of the Argentine invasion in 1982, Lord Carrington, assessed that the
Islands had ‘no vital strategic or economic interest for Britain’, and his
junior minister at the Foreign Office, Richard Luce, suggested that there
was ‘no direct British interest in the Falklands, but a responsibility for
the 2000 subjects who were mainly of British origin’.89
In contrast, many accounts by Argentine academics, journalists and
politicians suggest that Britain retains the Falkland Islands for strate-
gic and economic reasons, highlighting, in particular, their location as a
gateway to Antarctica and the access they provide to the oil, mineral and
marine resources in South Atlantic waters.90 As the Argentine ambassa-
dor told Nicolas Ridley in 1981: ‘The Argentine man in the street was
convinced that the UK was interested solely in the oil potential.’91 While
some Argentine works are highly polemical, others, such as Monica
Pinto’s balanced survey of Anglo-Argentine interest in hydrocarbons
around the Falklands, provide useful research that should be integrated

into British accounts.92 Lowell Gustafson also gives a useful overview of
negotiations about oil, but both accounts are limited by the source mate-
rial available in the 1980s.93
This book accepts the traditional British interpretation that domes-
tic factors are key to understanding the British government’s failure
to reach an agreement with Argentina over the sovereignty of the
Falkland Islands. However, it provides archival evidence that the British
government and British companies were interested in the oil around
the Falklands, and that officials were keen to preserve their access to
Antarctica, indicating that strategic and economic concerns did play
a role in the British government’s deliberations over the Islands in the
years before the war.
Political scientists are critical of purely ‘factual’ accounts and histori-
ans, too, try to explain events rather than simply relate ‘what happened’.
While this book has attempted to take a theoretically-informed analytical
approach to explaining Britain’s engagement with Argentina and Chile,
it also sees value in bringing into the public domain new empirical mate-
rial such as the details of export licences for armaments approved by the
British government for sale to the Argentine dictatorship—including
bomber planes, battle tanks and armoured cars—or the fact that the head
of the Argentine navy met the head of the British navy in Britain four
years before the Falklands war. Sadly, a complete picture of British offi-
cial actions may never be possible because, as a Freedom of Information
Request by this author has revealed, 322 FCO files on British relations
with Argentina between the years 1976 and 1982—including files on
military visits and arms sales—have been permanently destroyed by the
British government.94
Notes
1. Andy Beckett, Pinochet in Piccadilly: Britain and Chile’s Hidden History
(London: Faber and Faber, 2002), p. 6. ‘Gut-wrenching’ quote from
‘Jack Straw and General Pinochet’, The Economist, 3 December 1998.
2. Richard Snyder, H.W. Bruck and Burton Sapin, Decision Making as an
Approach to the Study of International Politics (New York: Free Press of
Glencoe, 1962). See also Valerie Hudson, Foreign Policy Analysis: Classic
and Contemporary Theory (Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2014) p. 4.
26 G. LIVINGSTONE
3. Christopher Hill, The Changing Politics of Foreign Policy (London:

Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), p. 294; Jamie Gaskarth, British Foreign Policy
(Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), p. 2.
4. Walter Carlsnaes, ‘The Agency-Structure Problem in Foreign Policy
Analysis’ in Walter Carlsnaes and Stefano Guzzini, Foreign Policy Analysis,
Vol. 4 (London: Sage, 2011), pp. 165–199.
5. On globalisation and foreign policy-making, see Chris Alden and Amnon
Aran, Foreign Policy Analysis: New Approaches (Abingdon, Oxon:
Routledge, 2012).
6. David Vital, The Making of British Foreign Policy (London: George Allen
and Unwin, 1968), p. 98.
7. Kevin Theakston, The Labour Party and Whitehall (London: Routledge,
1992); Tony Benn, ‘Obstacles to Reform’, in Ralph Miliband, Leo
Panitch and John Saville (eds.), The Socialist Register 1989 (London:
Merlin Press, 1989); G.D.H. Cole, ‘Reform in the Civil Service’ in
Essays in Social Theory (London: Macmillan, 1950); Stafford Cripps,
‘Parliamentary Institutions and the Transition to Socialism’ in Cripps
et al., Where Stands Socialism Today? (London: Rich & Cowan, 1933);
Richard Crossman, The Diaries of a Cabinet Minister, Volume 1 (London:
Hamish Hamilton & Jonathan Cape, 1975); Harold Laski, The Labour
Party and the Constitution (London: Socialist League, 1933); and Ralph
Miliband, Capitalist Democracy in Britain (Oxford: OUP, 1984).
8. For a history of FPA see Valerie Hudson, ‘The history and evolution of
foreign policy analysis’ in Steve Smith, Amelia Hadfield and Tim Dunne
(eds.), Foreign Policy: Theory/Actors/Cases (Oxford: OUP, 2012);
Chris Alden and Amnon Aran, Foreign Policy Analysis: New Approaches
(Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge, 2012).
9. Hill, The Changing Politics, p. 240.
10. Steve Smith, Amelia Hadfield and Tim Dunne (eds.), Foreign Policy:
Theory/Actors/Cases (Oxford: OUP, 2012), p. 5. Their critical approach
to foreign policy builds on the work of Colin Hay and Paul Williams.
11. Robert Cox and Timothy Sinclair, Approaches to World Order (Cambridge:
CUP, 1996); Andreas Bieler, Werner Bonefeld, Peter Burnham and Adam
David Morton (eds.), Global Restructuring, State, Capital and Labour:
Contesting Neo-Gramscian Perspectives (London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2006); Adrian Budd, Class, States and International Relations (London:
Routledge, 2013); and Richard Wyn Jones (ed.), Critical Theory and
World Politics (Boulder: Lynne Rienner, 2000).
12. See Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency
and Development in Latin America (Berkeley: University of California
Press, 1979).
13. P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, ‘Gentlemanly Capitalism and British

Expansion Overseas I. The Old Colonial System, 1688–1850’, Economic
History Review, 39 (1986), 501–525; P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins,
‘Gentlemanly Capitalism and British Expansion Overseas II: New
Imperialism, 1850–1945’, Economic History Review, 40 (1987), 1–26;
P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, British Imperialism 1688–2000 (London:
Pearson, 2001).
14. Cain and Hopkins, British Imperialism, pp. 620–621.
15. Author’s analysis of Oxford University Careers Data. University of Oxford
Appointment Committee Reports, 1917–2004. See Appendix A.
16. Laski quote from G.D.H. Cole (ed.), Plan for Britain (London: Routledge
& Sons Ltd., 1943), p. 119. ‘Committee on the Civil Service (Fulton
Committee)’, 1968, The National Archives (TNA): CAB/168/105.
17. Data for 1950–1954 and 1960–1964, from FCO sources, cited in
Moorhouse, The Diplomats, p. 59. The 1961 figure from Anthony
Sampson, Anatomy of Britain (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1962),
p. 304.
18. Ruth Dudley Edwards, True Brits (London: BBC Books, 1994), p. 91.
19. Ibid., p. 98.
20. See Appendix B.
21. John Dickie, Inside the Foreign Office (London: Chapmans, 1992), p. 17.
22. Ibid., p. 19.
23. Kevin Theakston, ‘New Labour and the Foreign Office’, in Richard
Little and Mark Wickham-Jones, New Labour’s Foreign Policy: A New
Moral Crusade (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000),
p. 118; Geoffrey Fry, ‘The British Diplomatic Service: Facts and
Fantasies’, Politics (1982) 4–8; Simon Jenkins and Anne Sloeman, With
Respect, Ambassador: An Inquiry into the Foreign Office (London: BBC
Books, 1985), pp. 105–106; and Hill, The Changing Politics, p. 241.
24. Theakston, ‘New Labour’, p. 113.
25. Bevin quoted in Sampson, p. 313.
26. T.G. Otte, The Foreign Office Mind: The Making of British Foreign Policy
1865–1914 (Cambridge: CUP, 2011).
27. Charles Jones, ‘“Business Imperialism” and Argentina, 1875–1900:
A Theoretical Note’, Journal of Latin American Studies, 12 (1980),
437–444 (p. 442).
28. Report of the Review Committee on Overseas Representation by Sir Val
Duncan (London: HMSO, 1969) [The Duncan Report]; ‘Travelling
salesman’ remark made by the Marquess of Lansdowne: Hansard: House
of Lords Debate, 19 November 1969, Vol. 305, cc917–1055.
29. H.E. Affleck-Graves, Capt. R.M., to DS5, RM7/14/5, 13 August 1976,
TNA: DEFE 24/1416.
28 G. LIVINGSTONE
30. Henry Fairlie, ‘Political Commentary’, The Spectator, 22 September 1955.

31. Gaetano Mosca, The Ruling Class (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1939);
Vilfredo Pareto, The Mind and Society (New York: Harcourt-Brace,
1935). See also James Burnham, The Managerial Revolution (New
York: Putnam, 1942); Charles Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1966); W.L. Guttsman, The British Political
Elite (London: MacGibbon & Kee, 1968); and Geraint Parry, Political
Elites (Colchester: ECPR Press, 2005) [orig. pub. 1969].
32. Works that combine an analysis of elites and class include, David Lane,
Elites and Classes in the Transformation of State Socialism (London:
Transaction Publishers, 2011); Ralf Dahrendorf, The Modern Social
Conflict (New Brunswick NJ: Transaction, 2007) and P.J. Cain and A.G.
Hopkins, British Imperialism 1688–2000 (London: Pearson, 2001).
33. Veto players is a term coined by George Tsebelis and is an analysis derived
from game theory. The term ‘gate-keepers’ is used by Joshua Busby who
thinks it better describes the role of key policy-makers who can facilitate
legislation, but not necessarily veto it. George Tsebelis, Veto Players: How
Political Institutions Work (New York: Princeton University Press, 2002);
Joshua Busby, Moral Movements and Foreign Policy (Cambridge: CUP,
2010), p. 60.
34. Marco Giugni, ‘How Social Movements Matter’ in Marco Giugni,
Doug McAdam and Charles Tilly (eds.), How Social Movements Matter
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), pp. xix–xx. See also
Margaret Keck and Kathryn Sikkink, Activists Beyond Borders: Advocacy
Networks in International Politics (New York: Cornell University Press,
1998); David Skidmore and Valerie Hudson, ‘Establishing the Limits of
State Autonomy: Contending Approaches to the Study of State-Society
Relations and Foreign Policy-Making’ in Skidmore and Hudson, The
Limits of State Autonomy (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993), pp. 1–22.
35. These variables are taken from Charles Tilly and Sidney Tarrow,
Contentious Politics, 2nd Edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press,
2015), p. 59. For foundational work on Political Opportunity Structures
see Herbert Kitschelt, ‘Political Opportunity Structures and Political
Protest: Anti-nuclear Movements in Four Democracies’ British Journal
of Political Science, 16 (1) (1986), 57–85; and Doug McAdam, John
McCarthy and Mayer Zald (eds.), Comparative Perspectives on Social
Movements (Cambridge: CUP, 1996).
36. Hein-Anton van der Heijden, ‘Globalization, Environmental Movements
and International Political Opportunity Structures’, Organization and
Environment, 19 (1) (2006), 28–44; Hanspeter Kriesi et al., Social
Movements in Western Europe. A Comparative Analysis (Minneapolis:
University of Minnesota Press, 1995).
37. George Tsebelis, Veto Players: How Political Institutions Work (New York:
Princeton University Press, 2002), pp. 235–239.
38. Leslie Bethell, George Canning and the Independence of Latin America
(London: The Hispanic and Luso Brazilian Council, 1970).
39. Victor Bulmer-Thomas, British Trade with Latin America in the
Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: ILAS, University of
London, Occasional Papers No. 19, 1998), p. 8.
40. John Gallagher and Ronald Robinson, ‘The Imperialism of Free Trade’ in
Economic History Review, 6 (1953), 1–15 (p. 13).
41. H.S. Ferns, Britain and Argentina in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1960); H.S. Ferns, ‘Argentina: Part of an Informal
Empire’ in Alistair Hennessy and John King, The Land that England Lost:
Argentina and Britain, a Special Relationship (London: British Academic
Press, 1992), p. 60.
42. 10% figure from Rory Miller, Britain and Latin America (London:
Longman, 1993), p. 5 and 60% figure from Alistair Hennessy,
‘Argentines, Anglo-Argentines and Others’ in Hennessy, The Land that
England Lost, p. 10.
43. D.C.M. Platt, ‘Further Objections to an ‘Imperialism of Free Trade’,
Economic History Review, 26 (1973), 77–91; D.C.M. Platt, Finance,
Trade and Politics in British Foreign Policy, 1815–1914 (Oxford:
Clarendon Press, 1968); and D.C.M. Platt (ed.), Business Imperialism,
1840–1930, An Inquiry Based on British Experience in Latin America
(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977).
44. Colin Lewis in Platt, Business Imperialism, p. 427; Colin Lewis in
Hennessy, The Land that England Lost.
45. Charles Jones in Platt, Business Imperialism; Charles Jones, ‘“Business
Imperialism” and Argentina, 1875–1900: A Theoretical Note’, Journal of
Latin American Studies, 12 (1980), 437–444 (p. 442).
46. See Matthew Brown (ed.), Informal Empire in Latin America: Culture,
Commerce and Capital (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008).
47. Bulmer-Thomas, British Trade, p. 8 and Miller, Britain and Latin
America, p. 246.
48. Works on Chilean-British relations which do not necessarily accept the infor-
mal empire approach but consider the evidence include Harold Blakemore,
British Nitrates and Chilean Politics 1886–1896 (London: Athlone Press,
1974); Juan Ricardo Couyoumdjian, Chile y Gran Bretaña: Durante la
Primera Guerra Munidal y la Postguerra: 1914–1921 (Santiago: Editorial
Andrés Bello, 1986); Robert Greenhill, ‘The Nitrate and Iodine Trades
1880–1914’ and Linda and Charles Jones and Robert Greenhill ‘Public
Utility Companies’ both in Platt, Business Imperialism; John Mayo, British
Merchants and Chilean Development 1851–1886 (Boulder, CO: Westview
30 G. LIVINGSTONE
Press, 1987); and Thomas O’Brien, The Nitrate Industry and Chile’s Crucial
Transition 1870–1891 (New York: New York University Press, 1982).
49. Miller, Britain and Latin America, p. 13.
50. Couyoumdjian, p. 27.
51. The Duncan Report, 1969.
52. Cited in Robert Graham ‘British Policy Towards Latin America’ in
Bulmer-Thomas, Britain and Latin America, p. 61.
53. Ibid., p. 55. See also ‘Bones of Contention in Latin America’, memoran-
dum by Victor Perowne, FCO, 22 April 1943, A3479/3479/51, TNA:
FO371/33929.
54. Miller, Britain and Latin America, p. 246.
55. Frank Barnaby, ‘Latin America and the Arms Trade’, in Britain and Latin
America (London: LAB, 1979), p. 67.
56. David Atkinson, ‘Trade, aid and investment since 1950’ in Bulmer-
Thomas, Britain and Latin America, p. 115.
57. Ibid., p. 113.
58. Gerald Martin, ‘Britain’s Cultural Relations with Latin America’ in
Bulmer-Thomas, Britain and Latin America, p. 32.
59. Britain and Latin America (London: LAB, 1979), inside cover page.
60. Hill, The Changing Politics, p. 269. See also Peter Willets (ed.), Pressure
Groups in the Global System: The Transnational Relations of Issue-Orientated
Non-Governmental Organizations (London: Frances Pinter, 1982).
61. Samuel Moyn, The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History (London:
Belknap, 2010); Flood, Patrick James, The Effectiveness of UN Human
Rights Institutions (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998).
62. David Owen, Human Rights (London: Jonathan Cape, 1978); Richard
Luce and John Ranelagh, Human Rights and Foreign Policy (London:
Conservative Political Centre, 1977). Hansard: ‘Foreign Policy and
Morality’: HC Deb., 9 February 1976, Vol. 905, cc35–99.
63. For more on superpowers’ use of the concept of human rights during the
Cold War, see Dilys Hill, Human Rights and Foreign Policy (Basingstoke:
Macmillan, 1989) and R. J. Vincent, Human Rights and International
Relations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986).
64. Karen Smith and Margot Light (eds.), Ethics and Foreign Policy (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001); William Walldorf, Just Politics:
Human Rights and the Foreign Policy of the Great Powers (London: Cornell
University Press, 2008); Richard Little and Mark Wickham-Jones, New
Labour’s Foreign Policy: A New Moral Crusade (Manchester: Manchester
University Press, 2000); and Jamie Gaskarth, ‘Interpreting Ethical Foreign
Policy: Traditions and Dilemmas for Policy Makers’, The British Journal of
Politics and International Relations, 15 (2013), 192–209.
65. David Chandler and Volker Heins, Rethinking Ethical Foreign Policy
(London: Routledge, 2006).
66. Thomas C. Wright, State Terrorism in Latin America: Chile, Argentina

and International Human Rights (Lanham, MD: Roman & Littlefield,
2007); Patrick William Kelly, ‘The 1973 Chilean coup and the origins
of transnational human rights activism’, Journal of Global History, 8 (1)
(2013), 165–186.
67. Thomas C. Wright and Rody Oñate Zúñiga, ‘Chilean Political Exile’,
Latin American Perspectives, 34 (4) (2007), 31–49.
68. Nicolas Prognon, ‘France: Welcoming Chilean Exiles’ in Kim Christiaens,
Idesbald Goddeeris and Magaly Rodríguez García (eds.), European Solidarity
with Chile, 1970s–1980s (Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2014), pp. 187–207.
69. Peter Read and Marivic Wyndham, ‘Eurocommunism and the
Concertación: Reflections on Chilean European Exile’, 1973–1989,
Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research, 21 (1) (2015),
116–125.
70. Grace Livingstone, America’s Backyard (London: Zed Books, 2009),
p. 69, citing US State Department Memorandum of Conversation, 7
October 1976.
71. Grace Livingstone, ‘British and US policy towards Argentina before
and during the Falklands/Malvinas War’, paper presented at the 2013
Congress of the Latin American Studies Association, Washington
DC. See also: Richard Aldous, Reagan and Thatcher: The Difficult
Relationship (London: Arrow, 2012); Louise Richardson, When Allies
Differ: Anglo-American Relations during the Suez and Falklands Crises
(New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996).
72. Miller, Britain and Latin America.
73. Bulmer-Thomas, Britain and Latin America.
74. Beckett, Pinochet.
75. Reed Brody and Michael Ratner, The Pinochet Papers: The Case of Augusto
Pinochet in Spain and Britain (The Hague: Kluwer Law International,
2000); Madeleine Davis (ed.), The Pinochet Case, Origins, Progress and
Implications (London: Institute of Latin American Studies, 2003); and
Ariel Dorfman, Exorcising Terror: The Incredible Unending Trial of
General Augusto Pinochet (London: Pluto Press, 2002).
76. Alan Angell, ‘International Support for the Chilean Opposition, 1973–
1989: Political Parties and the Role of Exiles’, in Laurence Whitehead
(ed.), International Dimensions of Democratization (Oxford: OUP,
2001); T. Kushner and K. Knox. ‘Refugees from Chile: A Gesture of
International Solidarity’ in K. Knox and T. Kushner (eds.), Refugees in an
Age of Genocide (London: Frank Cass, 1999); Jasmine Gideon, ‘Health
and Wellbeing among Chilean exiles in London’, Birkbeck College, 2015
https://ageingandmigration.files.wordpress.com/2013/10/gideon-age-
ing-and-migration-pp.pdf; Paola Bayle, ‘La Diáspora de una Población
Calificada: el Exilio Académico Chileno en el Reino Unido’, unpublished
32 G. LIVINGSTONE
doctoral thesis, Universidad Nacional de Cuyo, Argentina, 2010; Michael

D Wilkinson, ‘The Chile Solidarity Campaign and British Government
Policy towards Chile, 1973–1990’, European Review of Latin American
and Caribbean Studies, 52 (1992), 57–74; and Ann Jones, No Truck with
Chilean Junta (Canberra: Anu Press, 2014).
77. Alistair Hennessy and John King, The Land That England Lost: Argentina
and Britain: A Special Relationship (London: British Academic Press,
1992). This excellent collection includes three essays on the post-war
period.
78. Lawrence Freedman, The Official History of the Falklands Campaign, Vol. 1
(London: Routledge, 2005).
79. Aaron Donaghy, The British Government and the Falkland Islands, 1974–
1979 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014).
80. Falkland Islands Review, Report of a Committee of Privy Counsellors,
Chairman: The Rt Hon The Lord Franks (London: HMSO, 1983).
81. Books the author has found particularly useful include: Carlos Escudé
and Andrés Cisneros, Historia General de Las Relaciones Exteriores de
la República Argentina, Tomo XII, La Diplomacia de las Malvinas,
1966–1989 (Buenos Aires: CEPE/CARI/Nuevohacer, 2000); Federico
Lorenz, Las Guerras por Malvinas (Buenos Aires: Edhasa, 2006);
Federico Lorenz, Malvinas: Una Guerra Argentina (Buenos Aires:
Editorial Sudamericana, 2009); Vicente E. Berasategui, Malvinas:
Diplomacia y Conflicto Armado, Comentarios a la Historia Oficial
Británica (Buenos Aires: PROA AMERIAN Editores, 2011); and Atilio
Borón y Julio Faúndez, Malvinas Hoy: Herencia de un Conflicto (Buenos
Aires: Puntosur, 1989). Studies focusing on strategic issues are referred
to below in note 90.
82. Freedman, The Official History, p. 18.
83. George Boyce, The Falklands War (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan,
2005), p. 4. Hastings and Jenkins, p. 7.
84. Duncan Anderson, The Falklands War 1982 (Oxford: Osprey, 2002);
Dale, Memories; McManners, Forgotten Voices, Michael Parsons, The
Falklands War (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2000).
85. Klaus Dodds, Pink Ice: Britain and the South Atlantic Empire (London:
IB Tauris, 2002); Martin Middlebrook, The Falklands War 1982
(London: Penguin, 2001); and Robert Miller, Liability or Asset? A Policy
for the Falkland Islands (London: Alliance, for Institute for European
Defence and Strategic Studies, 1986).
86. Margaret Thatcher, The Downing Street Years (London: Harper Collins,
1993), p. 174; ‘Record of Telephone Conversation between President
Reagan and the Prime Minister on 13 May 1982’, TNA: FCO7/4532,
1982.
87. Tony Benn, The End of an Era, Diaries, 1980–1990 (London:

Hutchinson, 1992), p. 202.
88. Barbara Castle, The Castle Diaries, 1964–1976 (London: Macmillan,
1990), p. 207.
89. Lord Carrington, Reflect on Things Past (London: Fontana, 1988),
p. 349; Richard Luce, Ringing the Changes, A Memoir (Norwich:
Michael Russell, 2007), p. 135.
90. Accounts that highlight strategic factors include: Oscar Abudara
Bini et al., Malvinización y Desmentirización: Un Aporte Económico,
Político y Cultural en el marco de la Patria Grande (Buenos Aires:
Ediciones Fabro, 2013); Rodolfo Balmaceda, La Argentina Indefensa:
Desmalvinización y desmalvinizadores (Buenos Aires: Editorial Los
Nacionales, 2004); Carlos Alberto Biangardi Delgado, Cuestón
Malvinas, A 30 Años de la Guerra del Atlántico Sur (Buenos Aires:
Editorial Dunken, 2012). Borón and Faúndez, Malvinas Hoy; Carlos
Chubrétovich, Las Islas Falkland o Malvinas: Su Historia, La Controversia
Argentina-Británica y la Guerra Consiguiente (Santiago: Editorial
La Noria, 1987) [Chilean]; Juan José Cresto, Historia de las Islas
Malvinas: Desde su Descubrimiento hasta Nuestros Días (Buenos Aires:
Editorial Dunken, 2011); Julio Laborde y Rina Beraccini, Malvinas en
el Plan Global del Imperialismo (Buenos Aires: Editorial Anteo, 1987);
Rubén Oscar Moro, La Trampa de Malvinas: Historia del conflicto de
Atlántico Sur (Buenos Aires: Edivérn, 2005); Adolfo Silenzi de Stagni,
Las Malvinas y El Petróleo (Buenos Aires: Editora Theoría SRL, 1983);
and Otto Vargas et al., La Trama de Una Argentina Antagónica: Del
Cordobazo al fin de la Dictatura (Buenos Aires: Editorial Agora, 2006).
91. Anglo-Argentine Ministerial Talks on the Falkland Islands: New York,
23/24 February 1981, FCO record, TNA: PREM 19/612.
92. Mónica Pinto, ‘Islas Malvinas/Falkland, Georgias y Sandwich del Sur:
Algunas Consideraciones Relativas a los Hidrocarburos’ in Borón &
Faúndez, pp. 125–155.
93. Lowell Gustafson, The Sovereignty Dispute Over the Falkland (Malvinas)
Islands (Oxford: OUP, 1988).
94. Freedom of Information Request to the FCO, reference 1014–14, 12
June 2015. All the files for 1982 have been kept.
CHAPTER 2
Chile 1973–1982
The overthrow of Salvador Allende aroused strong political passions in

Britain. Not since the Spanish Civil War had the labour movement been
so inspired by an international cause. Politicians’ responses to the coup
divided along party lines. While Labour politicians regarded it as a ter-
rible, shocking and seminal moment in post-war history, Conservatives
were more equivocal, emphasising the chaos under Allende, which—they
maintained—had led to the coup. Some on the right of the Conservative
party went on to become admirers of Pinochet, extolling the economic
prescriptions of his ‘Chicago Boys’, the US-trained technocrats who
introduced free-market policies to Chile.
British policy towards Chile was therefore highly influenced by p arty-
political ideology and can be divided into three clearly distinct phases.
The Conservative government of Edward Heath (1970–1974) did not
oppose the Pinochet regime. Ministers were happy to leave policy in the
hands of Foreign Office officials, who were sympathetic to the coup and
who were exasperated by its opponents. British policy abruptly changed
when Labour won the election in 1974. An arms embargo was imposed;
economic aid and export credits were cut; refugees were welcomed and,
in 1976, the British ambassador was withdrawn from Santiago. These
measures reflected the abhorrence that the labour movement felt for the
Pinochet regime and are an early example of an ‘ethical foreign policy’.
© The Author(s) 2018 35

G. Livingstone, Britain and the Dictatorships of Argentina and Chile,
1973–82, Security, Conflict and Cooperation in the Contemporary World,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78292-8_2
36 G. LIVINGSTONE
Margaret Thatcher, on coming to office in 1979, abandoned this ‘eth-

ical’ stance. She restored arms sales, export credits and returned an
ambassador to Chile. Mrs. Thatcher’s relations with Pinochet became
even more cordial after Chile gave covert logistical aid to Britain during
the Falklands War.
This book focuses on how and why these policies were adopted and
does not attempt to assess systematically their impact in Chile. It is a sad
fact that, despite worldwide condemnation, the Pinochet dictatorship
(1973–1990) outlived all the other military regimes in South America.
Some military governments may have lasted longer than Pinochet’s sev-
enteen years (Paraguay: 1954–1989, Brazil: 1964–1985, Bolivia: 1968–
1980), but by the end of the 1980s, Chile was the only country in the
continent that was not a democracy. It was not until March 1990 that an
elected president, Patricio Aylwin, was sworn in.
Internal factors are the key to understanding the longevity of the
Pinochet regime. Underpinning the Chilean dictatorship was a broad
and stable alliance between the military and the civilian elite.1 Right-
wing parties and business organisations backed Pinochet loyally through-
out his time in office. It was not until the 1980s that divergences within
the corporate class emerged over economic strategy, but these were not
translated into political opposition. Among Chile’s traditional institu-
tions, only the Church gave a voice and protection to those who criti-
cised human rights abuses. It was a highly-personalised regime; power
was concentrated in the hands of Pinochet. Early divisions within the
military junta were soon resolved and Pinochet became the undisputed
source of authority presiding over this civilian-military elite alliance.
The armed forces lacked a political project beyond eliminating ‘sub-
version’ from Chile, but they remained loyal to the tenets of hierarchy
and military discipline. The policies were provided by a technocratic
elite of economists, who implemented a shock programme of neolib-
eral reforms, including privatisation, slashing import tariffs and opening
Chile to the world market, reducing the role of the state and disman-
tling trade unions. The military and the economic projects were inter-
twined, because the security forces’ persecution, torture and killing of
thousands of trade unionists and left-wing activists destroyed the power
of the labour movement.2 These economic policies led to rapid growth
in the 1980s, but also to a concentration of wealth, a rise in poverty
and unemployment, which further weakened the power of organised
labour. With the creation of the secret service, the DINA, in 1974, the
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of space
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Title: The colour out of space
Author: H. P. Lovecraft
Illustrator: J. M. de Aragon
Release date: June 4, 2022 [eBook #68236]
Language: English
Original publication: United States: Experimenter Publishing

Company, 1927
Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed

Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE

COLOUR OUT OF SPACE ***
THE COLOUR OUT OF SPACE
By H. P. Lovecraft
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from

Amazing Stories September 1927.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
Here is a totally different story that we can

highly recommend to you. We could wax rhapsodical
in our praise, as the story is one of the finest
pieces of literature it has been our good fortune to
read. The theme is original, and yet fantastic
enough to make it rise head and shoulders above
many contemporary scientifiction stories. You will
not regret having read this marvellous tale.
West of Arkham the hills rise wild, and there are valleys with deep
woods that no axe has ever cut. There are dark narrow glens where
the trees slope fantastically, and where thin brooklets trickle without
ever having caught the glint of sunlight. On the gentler slopes there
are farms, ancient and rocky, with squat, moss-coated cottages
brooding eternally over old New England secrets in the lee of great
ledges; but these are all vacant now, the wide chimneys crumbling
and the shingled sides bulging perilously beneath low gambrel roofs.
The old folk have gone away, and foreigners do not like to live there.
French-Canadians have tried it, Italians have tried it, and the Poles
have come and departed. It is not because of anything that can be
seen or heard or handled, but because of something that is
imagined. The place is not good for imagination, and does not bring
restful dreams at night. It must be this which keeps the foreigners
away, for old Ammi Pierce has never told them of anything he recalls
from the strange days. Ammi, whose head has been a little queer for
years, is the only one who still remains, or who ever talks of the
strange days; and he dares to do this because his house is so near
the open fields and the travelled roads around Arkham.
There was once a road over the hills and through the valleys, that
ran straight where the blasted heath is now; but people ceased to
use it and a new road was laid curving far toward the south. Traces
of the old one can still be found amidst the weeds of a returning
wilderness, and some of them will doubtless linger even when half
the hollows are flooded for the new reservoir. Then the dark woods
will be cut down and the blasted heath will slumber far below blue
waters whose surface will mirror the sky and ripple in the sun. And
the secrets of the strange days will be one with the deep's secrets;
one with the hidden lore of old ocean, and all the mystery of primal
earth.
When I went into the hills and vales to survey for the new reservoir
they told me the place was evil. They told me this in Arkham, and
because that is a very old town full of witch legends I thought the evil
must be something which grandmas had whispered to children
through centuries. The name "blasted heath" seemed to me very odd
and theatrical, and I wondered how it had come into the folklore of a
Puritan people. Then I saw that dark westward tangle of glens and
slopes for myself, and ceased to wonder at anything besides its own
elder mystery. It was morning when I saw it, but shadow lurked
always there. The trees grew too thickly, and their trunks were too
big for any healthy New England wood. There was too much silence
in the dim alleys between them, and the floor was too soft with the
dank moss and mattings of infinite years of decay.
In the open spaces, mostly along the line of the old road, there were
little hillside farms; sometimes with all the buildings standing,
sometimes with only one or two, and sometimes with only a lone
chimney or fast-filling cellar. Weeds and briers reigned, and furtive
wild things rustled in the undergrowth. Upon everything was a haze
of restlessness and oppression; a touch of the unreal and the
grotesque, as if some vital element of perspective or chiaroscuro
were awry. I did not wonder that the foreigners would not stay, for
this was no region to sleep in. It was too much like a landscape of
Salvator Rosa; too much like some forbidden woodcut in a tale of
terror.
But even all this was not so bad as the blasted heath. I knew it the
moment I came upon it at the bottom of a spacious valley; for no
other name could fit such thing, or any other thing fit such a name. It
was as if the poet had coined the phrase from having seen this one
particular region. It must, I thought as I viewed it, be the outcome of
a fire; but why had nothing new ever grown over those five acres of
grey desolation that sprawled open to the sky like a great spot eaten
by acid in the woods and fields? It lay largely to the north of the
ancient road line, but encroached a little on the other side. I felt an
odd reluctance about approaching, and did so at last only because
my business took me through and past it. There was no vegetation
of any kind on that broad expanse, but only a fine grey dust or ash
which no wind seemed ever to blow about. The trees near it were
sickly and stunted, and many dead trunks stood or lay rotting at the
rim. As I walked hurriedly by I saw the tumbled bricks and stones of
an old chimney and cellar on my right, and the yawning black maw of
an abandoned well whose stagnant vapours played strange tricks
with the hues of the sunlight. Even the long, dark woodland climb
beyond seemed welcome in contrast, and I marvelled no more at the
frightened whispers of Arkham people. There had been no house or
ruin near; even in the old days the place must have been lonely and
remote. And at twilight, dreading to repass that ominous spot, I
walked circuitously back to the town by the curving road on the
south. I vaguely wished some clouds would gather, for an odd
timidity about the deep skyey voids above had crept into my soul.
In the evening I asked old people in Arkham about the blasted heath,
and what was meant by that phrase "strange days" which so many
evasively muttered. I could not, however, get any good answers,
except that all the mystery was much more recent than I had
dreamed. It was not a matter of old legendry at all, but something
within the lifetime of those who spoke. It had happened in the
'eighties, and a family had disappeared or was killed. Speakers
would not be exact; and because they all told me to pay no attention
to old Ammi Pierce's crazy tales, I sought him out the next morning,
having heard that he lived alone in the ancient tottering cottage
where the trees first begin to get very thick. It was a fearsomely
ancient place, and had begun to exude the faint miasmal odour
which clings about houses that have stood too long. Only with
persistent knocking could I rouse the aged man, and when he
shuffled timidly to the door I could tell he was not glad to see me. He
was not so feeble as I had expected; but his eyes drooped in a
curious way, and his unkempt clothing and white beard made him
seem very worn and dismal.
Not knowing just how he could best be launched on his tales, I
feigned a matter of business; told him of my surveying, and asked
vague questions about the district. He was far brighter and more
educated than I had been led to think, and before I knew it had
grasped quite as much of the subject as any man I had talked with in
Arkham. He was not like other rustics I had known in the sections
where reservoirs were to be. From him there were no protests at the
miles of old wood and farmland to be blotted out, though perhaps
there would have been had not his home lain outside the bounds of
the future lake. Relief was all that he showed; relief at the doom of
the dark ancient valleys through which he had roamed all his life.
They were better under water now—better under water since the
strange days. And with this opening his husky voice sank low, while
his body leaned forward and his right forefinger began to point
shakily and impressively.
It was then that I heard the story, and as the rambling voice scraped
and whispered on I shivered again and again despite the summer
day. Often I had to recall the speaker from ramblings, piece out
scientific points which he knew only by a fading parrot memory of
professors' talk, or bridge over gaps, where his sense of logic and
continuity broke down. When he was done I did not wonder that his
mind had snapped a trifle, or that the folk of Arkham would not speak
much of the blasted heath. I hurried back before sunset to my hotel,
unwilling to have the stars come out above me in the open; and the
next day returned to Boston to give up my position. I could not go
into that dim chaos of old forest and slope again, or face another
time that grey blasted heath where the black well yawned deep
beside the tumbled bricks and stones. The reservoir will soon be
built now, and all those elder secrets will lie safe forever under
watery fathoms. But even then I do not believe I would like to visit
that country by night—at least not when the sinister stars are out;
and nothing could bribe me to drink the new city water of Arkham.
It all began, old Ammi said, with the meteorite. Before that time there
had been no wild legends at all since the witch trials, and even then
these western woods were not feared half so much as the small
island in the Miskatonic where the devil held court beside a curious
stone altar older than the Indians. These were not haunted woods,
and their fantastic dusk was never terrible till the strange days. Then
there had come that white noontide cloud, that string of explosions in
the air, and that pillar of smoke from the valley far in the wood. And
by night all Arkham had heard of the great rock that fell out of the sky
and bedded itself in the ground beside the well at the Nahum
Gardner place. That was the house which had stood where the
blasted heath was to come—the trim white Nahum Gardner house
amidst its fertile gardens and orchards.
Nahum had come to town to tell people about the stone, and had
dropped in at Ammi Pierce's on the way. Ammi was forty then, and
all the queer things were fixed very strongly in his mind. He and his
wife had gone with the three professors from Miskatonic University
who hastened out the next morning to see the weird visitor from
unknown stellar space, and had wondered why Nahum had called it
so large the day before. It had shrunk, Nahum said as he pointed out
the big brownish mound above the ripped earth and charred grass
near the archaic well-sweep in his front yard; but the wise men
answered that stones do not shrink. Its heat lingered persistently,
and Nahum declared it had glowed faintly in the night. The
professors tried it with a geologist's hammer and found it was oddly
soft. It was, in truth, so soft as to be almost plastic; and they gouged
rather than chipped a specimen to take back to the college for
testing. They took it in an old pail borrowed from Nahum's kitchen,
for even the small piece refused to grow cool. On the trip back they
stopped at Ammi's to rest, and seemed thoughtful when Mrs. Pierce
remarked that the fragment was growing smaller and burning the
bottom of the pail. Truly, it was not large, but perhaps they had taken
less than they thought.
The day after that—all this was in June of '82—the professors had
trooped out again in a great excitement. As they passed Ammi's they
told him what queer things the specimen had done, and how it had
faded wholly away when they put it in a glass beaker. The beaker
had gone, too, and the wise men talked of the strange stone's affinity
for silicon. It had acted quite unbelievably in that well-ordered
laboratory; doing nothing at all and showing no occluded gases
when heated on charcoal, being wholly negative in the borax bead,
and soon proving itself absolutely non-volatile at any producible
temperature, including that of the oxy-hydrogen blowpipe. On an
anvil it appeared highly malleable, and in the dark its luminosity was
very marked. Stubbornly refusing to grow cool, it soon had the
college in a state of real excitement; and when upon heating before
the spectroscope it displayed shining bands unlike any known
colours of the normal spectrum there was much breathless talk of
new elements, bizarre optical properties, and other things which
puzzled men of science are wont to say when faced by the unknown.
Hot as it was, they tested it in a crucible with all the proper reagents.
Water did nothing. Hydrochloric acid was the same. Nitric acid and
even aqua regia merely hissed and spattered against its torrid
invulnerability. Ammi had difficulty in recalling all these things, but
recognized some solvents as I mentioned them in the usual order of
use. There were ammonia and caustic soda, alcohol and ether,
nauseous carbon disulphide and a dozen others; but although the
weight grew steadily less as time passed, and the fragment seemed
to be slightly cooling, there was no change in the solvents to show
that they had attacked the substance at all. It was a metal, though,
beyond a doubt. It was magnetic, for one thing; and after its
immersion in the acid solvents there seemed to be faint traces of the
Widmänstätten figures found on meteoric iron. When the cooling had
grown very considerable, the testing was carried on in glass; and it
was in a glass beaker that they left all the chips made of the original
fragment during the work. The next morning both chips and beaker
were gone without trace, and only a charred spot marked the place
on the wooden shelf where they had been.
All this the professors told Ammi as they paused at his door, and
once more he went with them to see the stony messenger from the
stars, though this time his wife did not accompany him. It had now
most certainly shrunk, and even the sober professors could not
doubt the truth of what they saw. All around the dwindling brown
lump near the well was a vacant space, except where the earth had
caved in; and whereas it had been a good seven feet across the day
before, it was now scarcely five. It was still hot, and the sages
studied its surface curiously as they detached another and larger
piece with hammer and chisel. They gouged deeply this time, and as
they pried away the smaller mass they saw that the core of the thing
was not quite homogeneous.
They had uncovered what seemed to be the side of a large coloured
globule embedded in the substance. The colour, which resembled
some of the bands in the meteor's strange spectrum, was almost
impossible to describe; and it was only by analogy that they called it
colour at all. Its texture was glossy, and upon tapping it appeared to
promise both brittleness and hollowness. One of the professors gave
it a smart blow with a hammer, and it burst with a nervous little pop.
Nothing was emitted, and all trace of the thing vanished with the
puncturing. It left behind a hollow spherical space about three inches
across, and all thought it probable that others would be discovered
as the enclosing substance wasted away.
Conjecture was vain; so after a futile attempt to find additional
globules by drilling, the seekers left again with their new specimen—
which proved, however, as baffling in the laboratory as its
predecessor. Aside from being almost plastic, having heat,
magnetism, and slight luminosity, cooling slightly in powerful acids,
possessing an unknown spectrum, wasting away in air, and attacking
silicon compounds with mutual destruction as a result, it presented
no identifying features whatsoever; and at the end of the tests the
college scientists were forced to own that they could not place it. It
was nothing of this earth, but a piece of the great outside; and as
such dowered with outside properties and obedient to outside laws.
That night there was a thunderstorm, and when the professors went
out to Nahum's the next day they met with a bitter disappointment.
The stone, magnetic as it had been, must have had some peculiar
electrical property; for it had "drawn the lightning," as Nahum said,
with a singular persistence. Six times within an hour the farmer saw
the lightning strike the furrow in the front yard, and when the storm
was over nothing remained but a ragged pit by the ancient well-
sweep, half-chocked with caved-in earth. Digging had borne no fruit,
and the scientists verified the fact of the utter vanishment. The failure
was total; so that nothing was left to do but go back to the laboratory
and test again the disappearing fragment left carefully cased in lead.
That fragment lasted a week, at the end of which nothing of value
had been learned of it. When it had gone, no residue was left behind,
and in time the professors felt scarcely sure they had indeed seen
with waking eyes that cryptic vestige of the fathomless gulfs outside;
that lone, weird message from other universes and other realms of
matter, force, and entity.
As was natural, the Arkham papers made much of the incident with
its collegiate sponsoring, and sent reporters to talk with Nahum
Gardner and his family. At least one Boston daily also sent a scribe,
and Nahum quickly became a kind of local celebrity. He was a lean,
genial person of about fifty, living with his wife and three sons on the
pleasant farmstead in the valley. He and Ammi exchanged visits
frequently, as did their wives; and Ammi had nothing but praise for
him after all these years. He seemed slightly proud of the notice his
place had attracted, and talked often of the meteorite in the
succeeding weeks. That July and August were hot; and Nahum
worked hard at his haying in the ten-acre pasture across Chapman's
Brook; his rattling wain wearing deep ruts in the shadowy lanes
between. The labour tired him more than it had in other years, and
he felt that age was beginning to tell on him.
Then fell the time of fruit and harvest. The pears and apples slowly
ripened, and Nahum vowed that his orchards were prospering as
never before. The fruit was growing to phenomenal size and
unwonted gloss, and in such abundance that extra barrels were
ordered to handle the future crop. But with the ripening came sore
disappointment, for of all that gorgeous array of specious
lusciousness not one single jot was fit to eat. Into the fine flavour of
the pears and apples had crept a stealthy bitterness and
sickishness, so that even the smallest of bites induced a lasting
disgust. It was the same with the melons and tomatoes, and Nahum
sadly saw that his entire crop was lost. Quick to connect events, he
declared that the meteorite had poisoned the soil, and thanked
Heaven that most of the other crops were in the upland lot along the
road.
Winter came early, and was very cold. Ammi saw Nahum less often
than usual, and observed that he had begun to look worried. The
rest of his family too, seemed to have grown taciturn; and were far
from steady in their churchgoing or their attendance at the various
social events of the countryside. For this reserve or melancholy no
cause could be found, though all the household confessed now and
then to poorer health and a feeling of vague disquiet. Nahum himself
gave the most definite statement of anyone when he said he was
disturbed about certain footprints in the snow. They were the usual
winter prints of red squirrels, white rabbits, and foxes, but the
brooding farmer professed to see something not quite right about
their nature and arrangement. He was never specific, but appeared
to think that they were not as characteristic of the anatomy and
habits of squirrels and rabbits and foxes as they ought to be. Ammi
listened without interest to this talk until one night when he drove
past Nahum's house in his sleigh on the way back from Clark's
Corners. There had been a moon, and a rabbit had run across the
road; and the leaps of that rabbit were longer than either Ammi or his
horse liked. The latter, indeed, had almost run away when brought
up by a firm rein. Thereafter Ammi gave Nahum's tales more
respect, and wondered why the Gardner dogs seemed so cowed
and quivering every morning. They had, it developed, nearly lost the
spirit to bark.
In February the McGregor boys from Meadow Hill were out shooting
woodchucks, and not far from the Gardner place bagged a very
peculiar specimen. The proportions of its body seemed slightly
altered in a queer way impossible to describe, while its face had
taken on an expression which no one ever saw in a woodchuck
before. The boys were genuinely frightened, and threw the thing
away at once, so that only their grotesque tales of it ever reached
the people of the countryside. But the shying of horses near
Nahum's house had now become an acknowledged thing, and all the
basis for a cycle of whispered legend was fast taking form.
People vowed that the snow melted faster around Nahum's than it
did anywhere else, and early in March there was an awed discussion
in Potter's general store at Clark's Corners. Stephen Rice had driven
past Gardner's in the morning, and had noticed the skunk-cabbages
coming up through the mud by the woods across the road. Never
were things of such size seen before, and they held strange colours
that could not be put into any words. Their shapes were monstrous,
and the horse had snorted at an odour which struck Stephen as
wholly unprecedented. That afternoon several persons drove past to
see the abnormal growth, and all agreed that plants of that kind
ought never to sprout in a healthy world. The bad fruit of the fall
before was freely mentioned, and it went from mouth to mouth that
there was poison in Nahum's ground. Of course it was the meteorite;
and remembering how strange the men from the college had found
that stone to be, several farmers spoke about the matter to them.
One day they paid Nahum a visit; but having no love of wild tales
and folklore were very conservative in what they inferred. The plants
were certainly odd, but all skunk-cabbages are more or less odd in
shape and hue. Perhaps some mineral element from the stone had
entered the soil, but it would soon be washed away. And as for the
footprints and frightened horses—of course this was mere country
talk which such a phenomenon as the aerolite would be certain to
start. There was really nothing for serious men to do in cases of wild
gossip, for superstitious rustics will say and believe anything. And so
all through the strange days the professors stayed away in contempt.
Only one of them, when given two phials of dust for analysis in a
police job over a year and a half later, recalled that the queer colour
of that skunk-cabbage had been very like one of the anomalous
bands of light shown by the meteor fragment in the college
spectroscope, and like the brittle globule found imbedded in the
stone from the abyss. The samples in this analysis case gave the
same odd bands at first, though later they lost the property.
The trees budded prematurely around Nahum's, and at night they
swayed ominously in the wind. Nahum's second son Thaddeus, a
lad of fifteen, swore that they swayed also when there was no wind;
but even the gossips would not credit this. Certainly, however,
restlessness was in the air. The entire Gardner family developed the
habit of stealthy listening, though not for any sound which they could
consciously name. The listening was, indeed, rather a product of
moments when consciousness seemed half to slip away.
Unfortunately such moments increased week by week, till it became
common speech that "something was wrong with all Nahum's folks."
When the early saxifrage came out it had another strange colour; not
quite like that of the skunk-cabbage, but plainly related and equally
unknown to anyone who saw it. Nahum took some blossoms to
Arkham and showed them to the editor of the Gazette, but that
dignitary did no more than write a humorous article about them, in
which the dark fears of rustics were held up to polite ridicule. It was a
mistake of Nahum's to tell a stolid city man about the way the great,
overgrown mourning-cloak butterflies behaved in connection with
these saxifrages.
April brought a kind of madness to the country folk, and began that
disuse of the road past Nahum's which led to its ultimate
abandonment. It was next the vegetation. All the orchard trees
blossomed forth in strange colours, and through the stony soil of the
yard and adjacent pasturage there sprang up a bizarre growth which
only a botanist could connect with the proper flora of the region. No
sane wholesome colours were anywhere to be seen except in the
green grass and leafage; but everywhere were those hectic and
prismatic variants of some diseased, underlying primary tone without
a place among the known tints of earth. The "Dutchman's breeches"
became a thing of sinister menace, and the bloodroots grew insolent
in their chromatic perversion. Ammi and the Gardners thought that
most of the colours had a sort of haunting familiarity, and decided
that they reminded one of the brittle globule in the meteor. Nahum
ploughed and sowed the ten-acre pasture and the upland lot, but did
nothing with the land around the house. He knew it would be of no
use, and hoped that the summer's strange growths would draw all
the poison from the soil. He was prepared for almost anything now,
and had grown used to the sense of something near him waiting to
be heard. The shunning of his house by neighbours told on him, of
course; but it told on his wife more. The boys were better off, being
at school each day; but they could not help being frightened by the
gossip. Thaddeus, an especially sensitive youth, suffered the most.
In May the insects came, and Nahum's place became a nightmare of
buzzing and crawling. Most of the creatures seemed not quite usual
in their aspects and motions, and their nocturnal habits contradicted
all former experience. The Gardners took to watching at night—
watching in all directions at random for something they could not tell
what. It was then that they all owned that Thaddeus had been right
about the trees. Mrs. Gardner was the next to see it from the window
as she watched the swollen boughs of a maple against a moonlit
sky. The boughs surely moved, and there was no wind. It must be
the sap. Strangeness had come into everything growing now. Yet it
was none of Nahum's family at all who made the next discovery.
Familiarity had dulled them, and what they could not see was
glimpsed by a timid windmill salesman from Bolton who drove by one
night in ignorance of the country legends. What he told in Arkham
was given a short paragraph in the Gazette; and it was there that all
the farmers, Nahum included, saw it first. The night had been dark
and the buggy-lamps faint, but around a farm in the valley which
everyone knew from the account must be Nahum's, the darkness
had been less thick. A dim though distinct luminosity seemed to
inhere in all the vegetation, grass, leaves, and blossoms alike, while
at one moment a detached piece of the phosphorescence appeared
to stir furtively in the yard near the barn.
The grass had so far seemed untouched, and the cows were freely
pastured in the lot near the house, but toward the end of May the
milk began to be bad. Then Nahum had the cows driven to the
uplands, after which this trouble ceased. Not long after this the
change in grass and leaves became apparent to the eye. All the
verdure was going grey, and was developing a highly singular quality
of brittleness. Ammi was now the only person who ever visited the
place, and his visits were becoming fewer and fewer. When school
closed the Gardners were virtually cut off from the world, and
sometimes let Ammi do their errands in town. They were failing
curiously both physically and mentally, and no one was surprised
when the news of Mrs. Gardner's madness stole around.
It happened in June, about the anniversary of the meteor's fall, and
the poor woman screamed about things in the air which she could
not describe. In her raving there was not a single specific noun, but
only verbs and pronouns. Things moved and changed and fluttered,
and ears tingled to impulses which were not wholly sounds.
Something was taken away—she was being drained of something—
something was fastening itself on her that ought not to be—someone
must make it keep off—nothing was ever still in the night—the walls
and windows shifted. Nahum did not send her to the county asylum,
but let her wander about the house as long as she was harmless to
herself and others. Even when her expression changed he did
nothing. But when the boys grew afraid of her, and Thaddeus nearly
fainted at the way she made faces at him, he decided to keep her
locked in the attic. By July she had ceased to speak and crawled on
all fours, and before that month was over Nahum got the mad notion
that she was slightly luminous in the dark, as he now clearly saw
was the case with the nearby vegetation.
It was a little before this that the horses had stampeded. Something
had aroused them in the night, and their neighing and kicking in their
stalls had been terrible. There seemed virtually nothing to do to calm
them, and when Nahum opened the stable door they all bolted out
like frightened woodland deer. It took a week to track all four, and
when found they were seen to be quite useless and unmanageable.
Something had snapped in their brains, and each one had to be shot
for its own good. Nahum borrowed a horse from Ammi for his haying,
but found it would not approach the barn. It shied, balked, and
whinnied, and in the end he could do nothing but drive it into the yard
while the men used their own strength to get the heavy wagon near
enough the hayloft for convenient pitching. And all the while the
vegetation was turning grey and brittle. Even the flowers whose hues
had been so strange were graying now, and the fruit was coming out
grey and dwarfed and tasteless. The asters and goldenrod bloomed
grey and distorted, and the roses and zinnias and hollyhocks in the
front yard were such blasphemous-looking things that Nahum's
oldest boy Zenas cut them down. The strangely puffed insects died
about that time, even the bees that had left their hives and taken to
the woods.
By September all the vegetation was fast crumbling to a greyish
powder, and Nahum feared that the trees would die before the
poison was out of the soil. His wife now had spells of terrific
screaming, and he and the boys were in a constant state of nervous
tension. They shunned people now, and when school opened the
boys did not go. But it was Ammi, on one of his rare visits, who first
realized that the well water was no longer good. It had an evil taste
that was not exactly fetid nor exactly salty, and Ammi advised his
friend to dig another well on higher ground to use till the soil was
good again. Nahum, however, ignored the warning, for he had by
that time become calloused to strange and unpleasant things. He
and the boys continued to use the tainted supply, drinking it as
listlessly and mechanically as they ate their meagre and ill-cooked
meals and did their thankless and monotonous chores through the
aimless days. There was something of stolid resignation about them
all, as if they walked half in another world between lines of nameless
guards to a certain and familiar doom.
Thaddeus went mad in September after a visit to the well. He had
gone with a pail and had come back empty-handed, shrieking and
waving his arms, and sometimes lapsing into an inane titter or a
whisper about "the moving colours down there." Two in one family
was pretty bad, but Nahum was very brave about it. He let the boy
run about for a week until he began stumbling and hurting himself,
and then he shut him in an attic room across the hall from his
mother's. The way they screamed at each other from behind their
locked doors was very terrible, especially to little Merwin, who
fancied they talked in some terrible language that was not of earth.
Merwin was getting frightfully imaginative, and his restlessness was
worse after the shutting away of the brother who had been his
greatest playmate.
Almost at the same time the mortality among the livestock
commenced. Poultry turned greyish and died very quickly, their meat
being found dry and noisome upon cutting. Hogs grew inordinately
fat, then suddenly began to undergo loathsome changes which no
one could explain. Their meat was of course useless, and Nahum
was at his wit's end. No rural veterinary would approach his place,

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Britain and the Dictatorships of

Argentina and Chile, 1973–82 1st ed.

Past Human Rights Violations and the Question of

Britain and the Arctic 1st Edition Duncan Depledge

Human Rights and Transitional Justice in Chile 1st ed.

Britain and Danubian Europe in the Era of World War II,

The Political Economy of Agrarian Change in Latin

Transnational Islam and the Integration of Turks in

Aviation in the Literature and Culture of Interwar

On Wheels (1973) John Jakes

Britain and the

More information about this series at

Britain and the

Security, Conflict and Cooperation in the Contemporary World

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018936594

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover credit: © Homer W Sykes/Alamy Stock Photo and © mirjanajovic/Getty Images

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer

“Grace Livingstone provides a brilliantly original analysis of UK-Latin American

“Meticulously researched, well-written and very convincing, this book is an

“This is an exhaustive exploration of British National Archives covering

“Grace Livingstone’s work marks an important contribution to the study of

1 Introduction: Making Friends With the Junta 1

3 Welcoming Pinochet’s Coup (1973–1974) 45

4 Ethical Foreign Policy? Labour Versus the Foreign

5 Tea with a Dictator: Mrs. Thatcher

6 Chile Conclusion 115

7 Argentina 1976–2 April 1982 121

8 Business as Usual: Arming the Junta (1976–1979) 129

9 Oil, the Islands and the Falklands Lobby (1976–1979) 161

10 Befriending ‘Common or Garden’ Dictators

11 Antarctica, Oil and Leaseback: Britain’s Strategic

Table 9.1 Anglo-Argentine negotiations on the Falkland Islands

Introduction: Making Friends

While researching this book I interviewed a former minister in the

© The Author(s) 2018 1

military government before the invasion of the Falkland Islands in 1982.

non-governmental organisations (NGOs). Certainly, during the period

context of Argentina, however, as some British politicians and histo-

that these state-societal relations will vary in different historical periods

reflect their social class and, in particular, their public-school education,

Rothschild or GEC—whom they had met at a function or had spoken

It is not suggested here that members of the elite coordinated

Social Movements and Policy-Making

held only a small majority, then a minority, of seats in parliament. The

to policy-makers; for example its supporters hosted private dinners and

a convergence of interests between the Argentine elite and the British

small Latin American country.49 From a Chilean perspective, the British

Britain and Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s

1. Latin America as a source of raw materials

These themes were strikingly similar to those highlighted by Victor

Latin America, Human Rights

While Latin America was a low priority for British policy-makers in

academic interest was reflected in the Parry Report of 1962, which

Ethical Foreign Policy

acquired a growing legitimacy among the public, press and politicians.60

Luce (who went on to become a minister in the FCO), published books

Europe and the United States

The British Labour party was aware of the groundswell of

Britain, Argentina and Chile

value of the Falklands to Britain was minimal…For Britain, it was the

around the Falklands, provide useful research that should be integrated

1. Latin America as a source of raw materials

3. Christopher Hill, The Changing Politics of Foreign Policy (London:

13. P.J. Cain and A.G. Hopkins, ‘Gentlemanly Capitalism and British

30. Henry Fairlie, ‘Political Commentary’, The Spectator, 22 September 1955.

66. Thomas C. Wright, State Terrorism in Latin America: Chile, Argentina

87. Tony Benn, The End of an Era, Diaries, 1980–1990 (London: