Researching Latin American – African connections: Traces of Chile-Zambia relations in Chilean Archives.

By Santiago García-Pardo, London School of Economics (LSE).

Between November 2025 and early January 2026, and thanks to the generous support provided by the Postgraduate Research Support Grant of the Society for Latin American Studies (SLAS), I conducted archival research in Santiago, Chile, for my dissertation, provisionally titled ‘Above all distances, copper makes us neighbours’: Chile-Zambia relations, the Global Cold War and Third World internationalism (1964-1976). During this period, I extensively reviewed the collections of three archives, gathering essential documents to reconstruct the political, economic and cultural relations developed by Chile and Zambia, as well as the development of the Intergovernmental Council of Copper Exporting Countries (CIPEC) -processes that have not been researched extensively to date. This research significantly expanded the available source base on Chile-Zambia relations, while also underscoring the role of commodities for practices of Third World internationalisms during the 1960s and 1970s. 

One of the principals aims of my research is to contribute to the understanding the role of Latin America for the development of the Third World as an emancipatory imagination that sought global economic and political equality (Field, Krepp, and Pettina, 2020; Adelman and Prakash, 2022). Histories such as the political-economic project that Chile and Zambia aspired to construct can shed light on these processes, as the documents stored within Chilean state and private archives reveal a range of positions from which Chilean actors related to Africa. During my time in Chile, I reviewed the documents held by the Archivo Nacional de la Administración (ARNAD), the Archivo General Histórico of Chilean Foreign Relations Ministry (AGH) and the documental archive of the Casa Museo Eduardo Frei Montalva (CMEFM), including diplomatic documents and reports, state copper records and personal letters. 

Although rich in content, these sources were often difficult to access, as most primary material related to Chile-Zambia relations remains uncatalogued within state-sponsored archival collections and dispersed across varied volumes and folders of unrelated themes in private collections. This dispersion is directly related to the limited value that entanglements with Africa have received in Chilean historical accounts to date. I conducted interviews with protagonists of the analysed process, which enriched my research greatly, both by providing evidence and allowing me to experience history and memory as a collective endeavour. These conversations enabled the reconstruction of solidarity practices, political and cultural connections that emerged around -and because of- copper and the diplomatic relations two “Third World” nations established through this material.

Each archive required a slightly different approach. At the AGH, collaboration with archivists was crucial for tracking down diplomatic notes and reports from the Chilean delegation to the United Nations that revealed Zambian agency in pursuing technical assistance from Chile for copper institutionality-building. At ARNAD, the lack of cataloguing of the Copper Corporation records required reviewing over ninety volumes. This process revealed the travel of technical experts to Zambia, preparations for CIPEC conferences, motivations within the Copper Corporations to pursue and develop Chile-Zambia relations, and the value attributed to this connection at different points in time. At CMEFM, tracing the communications of politicians from the Chilean Christian Democratic Party illuminated their views on CIPEC as an international projection of Chilean copper politics and their hopes for Chile-Zambia relations during the mid-1960s. 

Overall, the archival materials highlighted the complexity of Third World internationalism, revealing varied Chilean approaches to Zambia, contested political positions, expertise sharing practices, and networks of solidarity, as well as limits of these relations, rooted in colonial legacies or material constraints. The interviews further demonstrated how Chile-Zambia relations opened opportunities not only for high-end diplomats, but also facilitated cultural encounters, blurred geographical boundaries, and connected women and men of different occupations and ages with previously unknown realities. Speaking directly with historical actors about moments of their past that have largely not survived in my country’s collective memory underscored centrality of human experience in history and of the broader social impact of historical research beyond academic knowledge production. Although more than fifty years had passed, some memories remained vivid for my interviewees, attesting to the lasting impact that travelling to Zambia had on their lives -an experience that they never imagined they would have. In other cases, by discussing archival evidence with interviewees, we were able to recover dormant memories that reconnected them to those years, their families, or their colleagues on personal levels - an experience it was an honour to be a part of. 

My time in Chile also highlighted how Chile-Zambia relations have been obscured not only by historiographical decisions, but also by the ways information is stored within archives, affecting our capacity to recover and assess the significance of these episodes of the history of the Global South. Recovering these histories is crucial for decolonising global narratives and accounting for the lives they affected, the dreams they carried, and the memories of those who participated in them. Structuring archival research as a collective process -through collaboration with archivists and dialogue with historical actors- constitutes a necessary methodological step in this direction.

References:

Adelman, Jeremy, and Gyan Prakash, eds. 2022. Inventing the Third World: In Search of Freedom for the Postwar Global South. Histories of Internationalism. Bloomsbury Academic.

Field, Thomas C., Stella Krepp, and Vanni Pettinà, eds. 2020. Latin America and the Global Cold War. The New Cold War History. The University of North Carolina Press.