The overthrow of Salvador Allende and the destruction of Chilean democracy on September 11, 1973, have long been understood as a central episode of the Latin American Cold War. On that day, an unprecedented attempt to reconcile democracy and socialism was brought to an end by a coordinated military action carried out by the Chilean armed forces. During the 1970s and the decades that followed, U.S. intervention—initiated in the early 1960s and intensified with Allende’s election in 1970—was widely identified as a principal external explanatory factor of the 1973 coup. Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger indeed conspired with local forces to destabilize Allende, both because of the perceived danger posed by a new socialist government in the hemisphere and because of the example it might offer other western countries seeking to challenge Cold War assumptions that framed socialism and democracy as irreconcilable.

Mila Burns’s book points in this direction while at the same time complicating our understanding of the process. In an explicit effort to challenge explanations centered on Washington’s supposedly omnipotent power, Burns explores the influence of the Brazilian dictatorship on Chilean events. In this respect, she is not alone. Solid and well-documented studies by the British historian Tanya Harmer and the Brazilian journalist Roberto Simon had already established the Brazilian military’s decision to destabilize Allende and their capacity to act with significant autonomy from Washington. Burns, although not directly engaging with these works, nonetheless contributes several novel and well-researched elements: the role of CIEX, the external arm of Brazilian intelligence, in infiltrating the Brazilian exile community in Santiago and reporting on developments under Allende; the individual, often harrowing, experiences of the exiles themselves, including the terrifying detention of some of them in Santiago’s National Stadium after the coup; and the links between Chilean and Brazilian military officers and business elites in their efforts to bring the socialist experiment to an end.

The book, however, presents significant problems in interpretive terms. Overly concerned with demonstrating the novelty of her findings, Burns tends to exaggerate the impact of the Brazilian dictatorship on Chilean events. Brasilia now occupies the place that Washington held in more traditional narratives. For Burns, Brazilian intervention was “essential for the success of the 1973 seizure of power” in Chile (5), a claim she reiterates throughout the book. The evidence presented, however, does not sustain such a conclusion. To do so would require a much more detailed consideration of Chile’s political, social, and economic conditions, which were far more relevant in explaining the coup. There is no discussion, for example, of the mass counterrevolution against Allende, divisions within the left, or internal tensions within the armed forces, all elements crucial to understanding the period and thoroughly examined by the historiography.

A similar problem arises in the discussion of Chilean neoliberal economic reforms, which Burns suggests were inspired, to some extent, by Roberto Campos and the Brazilian example. As classic studies by scholars like Juan Gabriel Valdes and Verónica Valdivia have shown, Chilean monetarism had a long domestic and transnational history that goes back to the late 1950s. The conditions that allowed the “Chicago Boys” to assume control of economic policy were shaped more by internal regime conflicts than by prior contacts with figures such as Campos. Moreover, some of the business leaders who forged ties with their Brazilian counterparts later became outspoken critics of neoliberal reforms, most prominently Orlando Sáenz. Likewise, the persecution of Brazilians after the coup would have benefited from greater contextualization within the radically xenophobic and anticommunist mindset of the military during the regime’s first months, a climate that also affected exiles and citizens of many other nationalities.

In sum, Burns’s book offers valuable stories and experiences that enrich our understanding of the Latin American Cold War. It also provides documentary evidence of the Brazilian dictatorship’s efforts to position itself as a dominant regional anticommunist force. Yet, in the absence of a sustained engagement with local conditions, the interpretive framework overestimates Brazil’s importance in Chile. Networks, contacts, resources, and influences matter, but they are not always “essential” for explaining complex historical processes.