Kissinger, Henry. “Policy Towards Chile.” In “Chile and the United States: Declassified Documents Relating to the Military Coup, September 11, 1973,” 1970. https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//NSAEBB/NSAEBB8/nsaebb8i.htm.
This source captures an early reaction by the US State Department to the Election of Salvador Allende in Chile. Right away, you can see the State Department’s outright hostility to an government by Allende due to his beliefs as a Marxist. The document begins by advising caution for the time being, but continues on to listing the first moves that the United States could make to isolate and control Chile. This is a good example of the United States behaving as an imperial power: the implication of the document is that since the Chilean people made the “wrong” choice in electing Allende, the US must now step in to right the situation.
The document is signed as being written by Henry Kissinger, at the time the US Secretary of State under Richard Nixon. Kissinger, a stanch anticommunist and proponent of US Military intervention abroad, was responsible in part for the US bombing campaigns in Laos, Vietnam, and Cambodia during the Vietnam war which resulted in somewhere around two million civilian deaths. He was also responsible for several instances of covert regime change operations against Latin American countries, as we can see here.
“The President has decided that (1) the public posture of the United States will be correct but cool, to avoid giving the Allende government a basis on which to rally domestic and international support for consolidation of the regime; but that (2) the United States will seek to maximize pressures on the Allende government to prevent its consolidation and limit its ability to implement policies contrary to US and hemisphere interests.”