Chile:

The Legacy of
Hispanic Capitalism,
Third Edition

Brain Loveman

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Chile
LATIN AMERICAN HISTORIES

thomas e. skidmore, series editor

James R. Scobie
Argentina: A City and a Nation
second edition

Franklin W. Knight
The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism
second edition

Herbert S. Klein
Bolivia: The Evolution of a Multi-Ethnic Society
second edition

Louis A. Perez, Jr.

Cuba: Between Reform and Revolution
second edition

Ralph Lee Woodward, Jr.

Central America: A Nation Divided
third edition

Thomas E. Skidmore
Brazil: Five Centuries of Change

Peter Flindell Klarén

Peru: Society and Nationhood in the Andes

Brian Loveman
Chile: The Legacy of Hispanic Capitalism
third edition
Chile F
THE LEGACY OF HISPANIC CAPITALISM

THIRD EDITION

Brian Loveman

New York • Oxford

OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
2001
Oxford University Press

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Copyright © 1979, 1988, 2001 by Oxford University Press, Inc.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Loveman, Brian.
Chile : the legacy of Hispanic capitalism / Brian Loveman.—3rd ed.
p. cm.—(Latin American histories)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-19-512019-1—ISBN 0-19-512020-5 (pbk.)
1. Chile—History. 2. Social conflict—Chile—History. 3. Political
participation—Chile—History. 4. Chile—Social conditions. 5. Chile—Economic
conditions. I. Title. II. Series.
F3081. L68 2001
983—dc21 00-039938

Printing (last digit): 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Printed in the United States of America

on acid-free paper
Contents

list of maps vii

list of tables ix
preface xiii
preface to the second edition xv
preface to the first edition xvii

Introduction 1

1 Land and Society 8

2 The Politics of Conquest 55

3 Hispanic Capitalism 75

4 Independence and the Autocratic Republic 98

5 Modernization and Misery 119

6 Nitrate 145

7 Politics, Labor, and the Social Question 162

8 Chilean Democracy 196

9 Christians and Marxists 230

10 Dictatorship 261

11 Concertación: The Past in the Present 308

Epilogue 349

political chronology 360

selective guide to literature on chile 370
index 409

v
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List of Maps

1 Chilean Ports and Main Cities of the Central Valley 12

2 Chile: Climate and Major Economic Activities 17

3 The Norte Grande and the Norte Chico 18

4 Central Chile and the Frontier Region 20

5 The Lake Region and the Far South 21

6 Administrative Subdivisions and Regional Capitals, 1999 22

7 Chile: Mining in the Norte Grande and the Norte Chico 33

8 Chile: Central Power Grid, 1997 44

9 The Routes of the Conquest 60

10 Major Mining Discoveries 1811–70, Atacama and Coquimbo 125

11 The South-Central Biobío Region 136

12 Chilean Expansion Northward 149

vii
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List of Tables

1–1 Chilean Ports and Main Cargo Activity, 1999 11

1–2 Chilean Exports, 1990–98, by Country of Destination 14

1–3 Exports 1990–98, by Region (Customs) 15

1–4 Imports, by Region of Entry, 1995–98 15

1–5 Region of Antofagasta: Exports, by Firm 25

1–6 Region of Atacama: Mining Production 25

1–7 Region of Atacama, Exports, by Firm 25

1–8 Indicators of Chilean Economic Growth, 1987–98 28

1–9 Selected Social Indicators, 1920–98 30

1–10 Exports as Percentage of Gross Domestic Product 31

1–11 Spatial Distribution of Population, 1952–92 35

1–12 Estimated Population of Major Cities and Santiago

Metropolitan Area 39

1–13 Growth of Population, by Region, 1970–99 40

1–14 Estimated Population of Chile, June 30, 1998 51

3–1 Estimated Population of Chile, 1540–1620 76

4–1 Political Crises, Pardons, and Amnesties, 1814–1925 102

4–2 Average Annual Value of Agricultural and

Livestock Production 114

5–1 Comparison of Urban and Rural Population in Selected

Northern and Central Valley Departments, 1875 129

7–1 Workers in the Nitrate Industry 170

7–2 Strikes in Chile, 1911–20 170

ix
x TABLES

7–3 Politics, Amnesties, and Pardons, 1925–42 190

7–4 Political Amnesties in Chile, 1943–90 191

8–1 Growth of Voter Participation in Presidential Elections, 1925–70 200

8–2 Employment in Public Sector, Central Administration 200

8–3 Demographic Changes in Chile, 1920–60 202

8–4 Legal and Illegal Strikes in Chile, 1932–57 204

8–5 Elections, Chamber of Deputies, 1937 205

8–6 Presidential Election, 1938 209

8–7 Net Terms-of-Trade Relations: Price Index for Chile 219

8–8 Presidential Election, 1952 223

8–9 Presidential Election, 1958 224

8–10 Summary Overview of Landowner-Government Response to

Rural Labor Activism in Chile, 1932–57 226

9–1 Electoral Evolution of Falange Nacional, Partido

Demócrata Cristiana, Chamber of Deputies 234

9–2 Comparison of Policy Objectives and Performance

of “Revolution in Liberty” 238

9–3 Distribution of Labor Force by Economic Sector, 1960–70 241

9–4 Illegal Strikes, Urban Land Invasions, Factory Seizures, and

Farm Seizures, 1966–1970 242

9–5 Christian Democratic Agrarian Reform: Expropriations,

1965–July 14, 1970 244

9–6 Growth of Campesino Cooperative Movement, 1965–70 244

9–7 Union Membership in Chile—1964 and 1970 245

9–8 Improvements in Public Health during the Frei Administration 245

9–9 Presidential Elections, 1964 and 1970 248

TABLES xi

9–10 The Agrarian Sector: Export of Goods and Agricultural Imports,

1965–70, 1971, and 1972 251

9–11 Requisitions and Interventions, November 1970–November 1972 252

9–12 Industrial Establishments Controlled by the Chilean State 253

10–1 “Legal” Foundations of Military Rule, 1973–87 273

10–2 Availability of Goods and Services per 10,000 Population,

1970–81 279

10–3 Selected Economic Indicators, 1973–82 281

10–4 Nutrition, Health, and Education Indicators, 1970–82 289

10–5 Foreign Debt, Debt as Percent of Exports of Goods and Services,

and Ratio of Interest Payments to Exports of Goods and Services 293

10–6 Workers Inscribed in PEM, POJH 293

10–7 Congressional Elections (Cámara de Diputados), 1989 305

10–8 Presidential Elections, December 14, 1989 306

11–1 Presidential Election, December 11, 1993 320

11–2 Elections: Chamber of Deputies and Senate,

December 11, 1997 321

11–3 Electoral Trends, by Party and by Coalition, 1988–98, Percent

of Vote 322

11–4 Major Episodes and Tension Points in Civil-Military Relations,

1990–99 331

11–5 Human Development Index (HDI), 1998, United Nations

Development Programme 338

11–6 Trends in Human Development, 1998 United Nations

Development Programme 340

11–7 Chile 1998 and the United Nations Development Programme:

Gender Empowerment Program 342

11–8 Chile 1998 and the United Nations Development Programme:

Gender-Related Development Index 344

11–9 Chile 1999: A Marketing Perspective of the Social Pyramid 346

xii TABLES

11–10 Chile: Incidence of Poverty and Indigence, 1990–98, by

Percentage of Population and Households 347

11–11 Chile: Percent Distribution of Household Money Income, by

Deciles, 1990–98 347

E–1 Presidential Elections, 1999/2000 355

Preface

When the second edition of this book appeared in 1988, Chileans still lived under a mil-
itary dictatorship. In 2001, as the third edition comes off the press, Chileans have com-
pleted a decade of civilian rule. The third elected president since the transition from
military rule took office in March, 2000: Ricardo Lagos, a socialist who had participated
in the Unidad Popular government (1970–73) and vigorously opposed the dictatorship
from exile. Lagos spearheaded the anti-Pinochet forces during the 1988 plebiscite that
defeated the dictator. Nevertheless, more than ten years after restoration of civilian
government, the military-imposed 1980 constitution remained in place, and the legacy
of the military regime (1973–90) continued to influence everyday life in many ways.
In the preface to the second edition of this book, I indicated that the “proper con-
clusion of the last chapter,” the end of the military government, had not yet occurred.
As I was preparing the third edition, the ex-military dictator was detained in England,
at the request of a Spanish judge who requested his extradition to Spain on charges of
violating international law regarding human rights (October, 1998). In Chile his sup-
porters claimed that international communism was taking its revenge on him for “de-
feating communism.” They also claimed that his arrest violated Chilean sovereignty. In
contrast, human rights organizations and his political opponents applauded the British
and Spanish authorities who sought to bring the general to justice—a justice they be-
lieved could never be done in Chile.
General Pinochet’s detention in England altered Chilean political history, and per-
haps that of the international human rights movement. His eventual return to Chile in
March 2000, when the British authorities decided that he was too ill to be deported and
stand trial, provoked new controversies over his congressional immunity as a “senator
for life” and his potential accountability before Chilean courts for human rights viola-
tions. By mid-July 2000, an infirm, eighty-four year old Pinochet potentially faced over
140 separate criminal cases. He lost his immunity from prosecution in a decision of the
Santiago Court of Appeals in June 2000. His lawyers appealed the decision to the
Chilean Supreme Court. As Chileans awaited the Supreme Court’s decision, numerous
other military officers were called as witnesses in outstanding criminal cases or were
charged with crimes committed during the military dictatorship.
Despite the government’s inability to repeal or annull the 1978 amnesty decree or to
fundamentally reform the 1980 constitution, the officers who had carried out the 1973
coup and their successors witnessed a mounting attack on their impunity and even on
their version of their salvational role in Chilean history. In early July 2000, inauguration
of a monument to ex-president Salvador Allende (1970–73) in the Plaza de la Constitu-
ción—in front of the Ministry of Justice and the La Moneda Palace, where he died on
September 11, 1973—testified symbolically to the shifting political conditions in the
country, and to the mounting pressures for further political reform.
In July 2000, Pinochet was too ill to stand trial, whatever the ultimate decision of the
Supreme Court regarding his congressional immunity. He would play no significant

xiii
xiv PREFACE

personal role in the ongoing history of the country. But the legacy of the military regime
and the 1980 constitution continued to influence pervasively Chile’s present and its fu-
ture. The challenges confronted by the Lagos government, the third government of the
Concertación coalition, and also by the political opposition, included most directly the
ongoing demands for “truth and justice” regarding the human rights violations of
the past and for democratization of the political regime imposed by the military gov-
ernment in 1980. What part of the Concertación coalition’s program of 1988 would be
possible to achieve still remained uncertain in 2001, as did how successfully Chile
would respond to the overwhelming pressures exerted on its natural resources and en-
vironment by the model of economic growth chosen since the 1970s.
In preparing this third edition I have called upon the talent, insights, historical cre-
ativity, and friendship of numerous Chilean scholars. I cannot thank them all here, nor
can I avoid repeating names mentioned in the preface to the first and second editions
of this book. In different ways they have all helped me better understand Chile. I must
especially express my gratitude, in some cases for special moments of illustration and
in others for years of conversation and shared professional dedication to Chilean his-
tory, to Felipe Agüero, Gonzalo Arroyo, José Bengoa, Eduardo Cavieres, Joaquín Fer-
mandois, Hugo Fhrüling, Cristián Gazmuri, Sergio Grez, Iván Jaksić, Alfredo Jocelyn-
Holt, Elizabeth Lira, Mario Garcés, Luis Ortega, Julio Pinto, Francisco Rojas, Rafael
Sagredo, Sol Serrano, Augusto Varas, and Sergio Villalobos. The third edition has es-
pecially benefitted from four years of collaborative research and joint publications on
Chilean historical topics with Elizabeth Lira. Kimlisa Salazar Duchicela prepared the
index for this edition. At Oxford University Press Linda Jarkesy has collaborated in
preparation of this third edition from the start and Justin Collins has done more than
any other production editor I have ever encountered to improve the quality of the final
product—for which I am very grateful.
Thomas M. Davies, Jr., Paul Drake, Iván Jaksić, Mara Loveman, Thomas Skidmore,
and Louis Terrell have read drafts of new material for the third edition and spared me
errors of fact and interpretation. Whenever I write about Chile, I take into account the
wisdom and humor of my friend and colleague Frederick Nunn. The book still benefits
from the contributions to the first and second editions of Jacques Barbier, Harold Blake-
more, Simon Collier, Henry Landsberger, William Sater, William Sherman, and John
Whaley. Like anyone writing about Chilean history, I must acknowledge an intellectual
debt to Diego Barros Arana. Also a thank-you is due to my favorite nineteenth-century
storytellers, J. Joaquín Vallejo (Jotabeche) and Vicente Pérez Rosales.

Solana Beach, California B. L.

August 2000
Preface to the Second Edition

I have completed the second edition of this book at a time when Chileans are in their
fourteenth year under an authoritarian, military-dominated dictatorship. This dicta-
torship, led by General Augusto Pinochet, has effected radical changes in many aspects
of Chilean life.
Unlike the military-dominated governments in Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, and
Peru during the 1970s and early 1980s, the Chilean government came to be identified
ever more closely with the personalist control of one officer rather than the institutional
control of the country by the armed forces. For this reason, an appropriate conclusion
to the last chapter of this edition of the book would have been the departure of General
Pinochet and the transition to another sort of political leadership. Unfortunately, while
the passage of time and the many changes that have transpired in Chile made a second
edition essential, the proper conclusion of the last chapter still has not occurred—
though it is inevitable.
As in preparation of the first edition of this book I have had the advantage of rely-
ing upon the important research and historical analysis of a number of Chilean writers
and intellectuals too numerous to identify individually. In addition, conversations and
discussions with Alejandro Foxley, Manuel Antonio Garretón, Sol Serrano, Gonzalo
Tapia, Francisco Tomic, Maria Elena Valenzuela, and Augusto Varas have assisted me
greatly in understanding the last fourteen years. Luis Ortega’s valuable published cri-
tique of parts of the first edition and suggestions offered by him for improvement have
also proved useful in making revisions. Likewise, an extensive set of suggestions for re-
vision by Michael Monteón assisted me in preparing the second edition.
Thomas M. Davies Jr., Paul Drake, Iván Jaksić, Sharon Loveman, Frederick Nunn,
Michael Stanfield, and Augusto Varas have all struggled through drafts of new mate-
rial for the second edition, and spared me errors of fact or interpretation. Naturally, the
errors that remain are my responsibility.
I have also been fortunate to have the assistance of Iliana Sonntag in revising and
updating the bibliography, Melinda Wedgewood in preparing new maps, Kirsten Mul-
vey and Cecilia Ubilla in copyediting, and Helen Kanavel in preparation of the new ta-
bles. Michael Arguello once again constructed the index.

San Diego B. L.
July 1987
Translation: Jack Schmitt

xv
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Preface to the First Edition

Chile is a nation where historians and social theorists have participated actively in pub-
lic life as well as in scholarship. Presidents, ministers of state, legislators, and party
leaders have contributed to Chile’s historical tradition, to its literature, and to its art.
No historian, Chilean or foreign, can undertake a new look at Chilean history without
returning, first, to the great intellectual contributions of Chile’s national writers. While
this book departs in some important ways from conventional interpretations of
Chile’s past, it owes much to the insight and thorough research of generations of
Chilean writers.
To the intellectual debt I owe to Chilean writers must be added the use I have made
of the studies of hundreds of non-Chilean “Chileanists” who have dedicated their at-
tention to Chilean history. As the format of this book generally precluded systematic
footnote citations, I have attempted to note appropriately those works upon which I re-
lied extensively in the selective bibliography at the end of this volume.
As I wrote this study, my friend, teacher, and general editor of Oxford University
Press’s Latin American Histories Series, James Scobie, offered his advice, encourage-
ment, and critical reviews of the manuscript for which I am extremely grateful. The
manuscript has also benefitted from the comments and suggestions made by Jacques
Barbier, Harold Blakemore, Simon Collier, Thomas M. Davies, Jr., Philip Flemion,
Henry Landsberger, Sharon Loveman, Vincent Padgett, William Sater, William Sher-
man, and John Whaley. Larry Stickell generously allowed me to read chapter drafts of
his doctoral dissertation on the development of the nitrate industry in Chile and to use
data from his research in the present volume. While the insights of these scholars have
greatly improved the present book, I am, of course, responsible for any errors of fact or
interpretation that remain in the volume.
I have been fortunate to have help from a number of people in the preparation of the
manuscript. Special thanks go to Veva Link, Helen Triller, Jeri Haddon and Paula For-
rester, and to Phoebe Hoss for her careful copy-editing. Nancy Ferris provided invalu-
able assistance in preparation of the bibliography as did Michael Arguello in construc-
tion of the index.
A final thank you must also go to my friends in Trovolhue who taught me the polit-
ical meaning of life’s daily struggle against the legacy of four centuries of Hispanic
Capitalism.

San Diego B. L.
August 1978

xvii
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Chile
 Valdivia entró la lanza goteante
en las entrañas pedregosas
de Arauco, hundió la mano
en el latido, apretó los dedos
sobre el corazón araucano,
derramó las venas silvestres
de los labriegos
exterminó
el amanecer pastoril,
mandó martirio
la casa del dueño del bosque,
cortó las manos al cacique,
devolvió a los prisioneros
con narices y orejas cortadas,
empaló al Toqui, asesinó
a la muchacha guerrillera
y con su guante ensangrentado
marcó las piedras de la patria,
dejandola llena de muertos,
y soledad y cicatrices

Pablo Neruda
Canto General, Clandestine edition, 1950: 63–64
Illustration by José Venturelli, especially for the
1950 edition of Canto General.

And so the people’s war began.

Valdivia drove his dripping spear
into Arauco’s stony bowels,
he plunged his hand
into the pulse, squeezed his fingers
around the Araucanian heart,
emptied the tribe’s
wild veins
exterminated
the pastoral dawn
sent martyrdom
to the kingdom of the forest, burned
the master of the forest’s house,
chopped off the chieftain’s hands,
returned the prisoners
with their noses and ears cut off,
impaled the Chief, murdered
Canto General/Pablo Neruda the woman warrior,
University of California Press, 1991 and with his bloody glove
Asi nació la guerra patria. soiled the country’s stones,
leaving it full corpses,
and solitude and scars.
Introduction

In January 1520, almost thirty years after Christopher Columbus’ first voyage to the
Caribbean, Ferdinand Magellan sailed from Buenos Aires toward the southern tip of
South America. According to Chilean historian Francisco Encina, ten months later as
the Europeans sailed through what later became the “Strait of Magellan,” the many
bonfires they saw on land to the south inspired them to designate the territory as Tierra
del Fuego (land of fire), “a name that posterity has preserved.” Magellan’s small fleet en-
tered the deceivingly calm (therefore, “pacífico”) Pacific Ocean in late November, then
continued to the Marianas and the Philippine Islands without further contact with the
native peoples of Chile. In a second Spanish expedition to the region in 1526, one of the
ships, the San Lesmes, separated by storms from the rest of the tiny fleet, accidentally
discovered Cape Horn (Cabo de Hornos). With these two voyages, the webs of global ex-
ploration cast outward from Europe first touched the territory that would become the
Republic of Chile.
Over the next three centuries conquest and colonization in the name of God, the
Holy Catholic Faith, and the imperial authority of the monarchs on the Iberian penin-
sula enmeshed Chile and its peoples in a global economy and an international political
system. The Iberian invaders altered fauna and flora, subjected Indian peoples to
forced labor and slavery, and engendered through rape, promiscuity, and concubinage
a new ethnic and cultural identity: la raza chilena.
As elsewhere in the Western Hemisphere, encounters with the Europeans afflicted
Chile’s native population with disease and decimation. Most of the Indian peoples of
the Caribbean islands and those of Chilean Patagonia are now virtually extinct as a
consequence of European colonialism. In most of Spain’s American empire, however,
including the rest of Chile, disease, labor exploitation, and miscegenation disrupted
and transformed indigenous societies, rather than entirely eradicating them.
Almost from the outset of conquest some Spaniards, especially individual Catholic
priests, opposed the brutality and the cultural-religious premises of conquest. On Ad-
vent Sunday 1511 in Hispaniola, the Dominican priest Father Antonio Montesinos
condemned the Spaniards for their despicable treatment of Indian peoples: “Tell
me, . . . by what right or justice do you hold these Indians in such cruel and horrible
slavery? By what right do you wage such detestable wars on these people who lived
idly and peacefully in their own land, where you have consumed infinite numbers of
them with unheard-of murders and desolations?” Four decades later, in a letter written
to the Council of the Indies from Lima in 1553 regarding the situation in Chile, the Do-
minican friar Francisco de Victoria reported: “[I]it is evident that Christian principles
and charity are completely lacking in that colony, and the abominations that occur
there cry out to heaven for vengeance.”
In Chile, as elsewhere, history does not repeat itself. But many historical experiences,
sociocultural practices, and evolved institutional patterns remain active influences in
daily life. History, in that sense, is not “passed” nor the past, but an ongoing presence
in the present.

1
2 CHILE

Approximately four centuries after Victoria’s letter to the Council of the Indies, Al-
berto Hurtado, a Chilean Jesuit priest beatified in 1994, founded an organization to
help the homeless: the Hogar del Cristo. Hurtado also helped organize workers’ unions
based on Catholic social doctrine. In 1951 he introduced the first issue of the magazine,
Mensaje. The new magazine (which in the late 1990s could be read on the Internet) was
prefaced with the words of French Cardinal Jules-Gerard Saliege: “We are partially re-
sponsible for the destiny of humanity. We are called on to make history, rather than to
be molded by it. Let us bring creative imagination to the task. The past lives in the pres-
ent. The present carries within it the future. What will tomorrow’s world be like? It will
be what our faith, our hope, and our efforts to overcome human misery make it.”* Fa-
ther Hurtado’s editorial called on Chileans to apply Christian principles to everyday
life; to reject materialism, whether capitalist or Marxist; and to value human life and
defend human rights. His message was a call for modern-day Chileans to apply Chris-
tian principles to life in their times, to a Chile inserted in a bipolar world, an interna-
tional system framed by the Cold War.
Alberto Hurtado had written a book called Is Chile a Catholic Country? (¿Es Chile un
país católico?) He concluded that most Chileans did not know or practice the social
teachings of the Church, that the country’s chronic social and economic problems im-
posed a continuous state of misery on the workers and peasants who made up the ma-
jority of the population. Hurtado’s calls for social justice echoed the pleas of Father
Francisco de Victoria in 1553 and of the Jesuit priests Luis de Valdivia and Diego de
Rosales in sixteenth-century Chile for “peaceful conversion” of the territory’s indige-
nous population—pleas ignored by Spanish colonial governors and soldiers who
hunted, branded, and exported Indians to northern mines and Peru.
In 1620, more than eighty years after the first Spanish expedition to Chile, the king
of Spain ordered an end to coerced labor and the payment of a minimum daily wage to
agricultural laborers. Resistance by landowners and encomenderos and failure of gov-
ernment officials to enforce the decree made it a dead letter. More than three centuries
later, in 1953, a Chilean national government enacted a minimum wage law for agri-
cultural workers and sought to regulate labor conditions in the agricultural estates
( fundos, haciendas). Landowners generally resisted successfully the Ministry of Labor’s
feeble and underfunded efforts to enforce the law.
In 1620 Indian and mestizo laborers living on the haciendas of Spaniards were re-
quired to work for the landlord 160 days a year. In 1953 Chilean rural tenants and la-
borers typically worked over 200 days a year and provided landowners not only their
own labor but also that of family members or other hired hands. In 1620, with land
more plentiful than labor, landowners attempted to attract tenants to work their es-
tates. In 1953, with most good land concentrated into several thousand large rural es-
tates ( fundos), landowners punished labor indiscipline, the protest of working condi-
tions, or union organizing by expulsion from the fundo. Expulsion meant loss of the
small house with dirt floors, the garden plot, and perhaps pasture rights for some ani-
mals that were the rural tenant’s only security.

*Archbishop of Toulouse, Jules-Gerard Saliege, led the moral resistance to the anti-Jewish mea-
sures in Vichy France. He declared in a Pastoral letter: “There is a Christian morality that im-
poses duties and recognizes rights. . . . Why does the right of sanctuary no longer exist in our
churches? The Jews are real men and women. They are our brothers, like so many others.” Fa-
ther Hurtado’s decision to invoke the voice of Archbishop Saliege in the inauguration of Men-
saje presaged the magazine’s role in the 1970s and 1980s as a voice against human rights viola-
tions during the military government that ruled the country from 1973 until 1990.
INTRODUCTION 3

No matter. Chile had achieved a record of constitutional government that made it

unique in Spanish America from the 1840s. Chileans were proud of their distinctive
tradition, their institutional stability when compared with “tropical America.” Foreign
historians and political leaders also lauded Chile’s “exceptionalism.” Chileans “forgot”
that their 1833 constitution was the first among the independent Spanish American re-
publics to provide for state of siege and constitutional dictatorship; it would be emu-
lated by constitution-writers in the Dominican Republic, the Provinces of Rio de la
Plata (Argentina), Bolivia, El Salvador, and, later, other Latin American countries. Chile
became a “model” of stability and progress in nineteenth-century Latin America;
Chilean presidents and political leaders repeatedly reminded their compatriots, and
other Latin Americans, of the country’s “exceptionalism.”
Addressing Congress in 1858, the year that South America’s first animal-drawn
tramway (carros de sangre) began operations in Santiago, President Manuel Montt de-
clared that Chile’s record of political stability and economic progress was “an example
for all the Spanish American republics.” Montt’s government encouraged the first rail-
roads in the country, connecting northern mines to Pacific ports and then to European
and North American markets. Chile sent wheat, flour, wine, and adventurers to Cali-
fornia, responding to gold fever and commercial opportunity. Public and private
schools multiplied; telegraph wires began to connect the principal cities and towns.
Andrés Bello, Venezuelan intellectual, advisor to the Chilean government, and author
of Chile’s Civil Code (1855), wrote in 1857: “[T]the progress made in the last five years
can be called fabulous.”
For some the progress was fabulous. But in 1858, the same year that President Montt
acclaimed the country’s economic progress and unique political stability, he twice de-
clared states of siege to repress the political opposition and control elections for Con-
gress. Civil war followed in 1859. Chile’s “exceptional” political system had its own
special authoritarian institutions and practices that, with small modifications, persisted
to the end of the twentieth century. Modernization came to Chile from afar, as had the
colonial regime; it was imposed top-down, by authoritarian governments, and ex-
cluded from many of its benefits the great majority of the country’s peoples.
For its perpetuation in the twentieth century the Chilean political system also re-
quired recurrent declarations of states of siege, delegation of “extraordinary authority”
( facultades extraordinarias) to presidents, and jurisdiction of military courts over civil-
ians for “crimes against the internal security of the state.” After 1930, laws to protect
the “internal security of the state” (1932, 1937, 1958) and then a law “for the permanent
defense of democracy” (1948) were added to the government’s arsenal of legal repres-
sion to protect Chile’s much-vaunted democracy against more militant labor move-
ments and the rise of populist and Marxist political parties. This corpus of “protective”
legislation, beginning with Decree Law 50 in 1932, melded Chile’s modern political his-
tory to the colonial inquisition and the post-1833 autocratic republic. Article 1 of Decree
Law 50 began: “Any person who propagates or foments, by word of mouth or in writ-
ing, doctrines that tend to destroy the social order or the political organization of the
State through violence, shall be considered an enemy of the Republic.” Law 6.026
(1937) reaffirmed this language and provided new sanctions for persons who threat-
ened the “internal security of the state.” Building on this legal foundation for repres-
sion of its “enemies,” Chilean democracy contained the threats of destabilization and
revolution until the early 1960s.
In 1964 Chilean president Eduardo Frei Montalva initiated a “revolution in liberty.”
Priority was given to increasing participation of workers, artisans, peasants, rural
workers, women, and Indian peoples in national life; to promoting social and economic
4 CHILE

opportunities for the poor and lower-middle classes; and to stimulating the internal
market and enhancing social justice. It soon became evident that agrarian reform, agri-
cultural unionization, peasant cooperatives, activation of community organizations,
increased labor militancy, and expansion of the electorate could not be reconciled with
maintenance of the existing socioeconomic order. Mounting pressures for further and
more drastic socioeconomic reforms induced counter pressures to detain and constrain
what was perceived as runaway social mobilization.
By 1970 antagonistic dreams for the future had acutely polarized Chilean politics
and society. Revolutionaries and reformers joined in an effort to destroy the institutions
and values of the old order. Once again Chile was “a model,” becoming the first Latin
American country to elect as president, in free and fair elections, albeit by plurality
rather than majority vote, an avowed Marxist, Salvador Allende Gossens. The coalition
of parties and movements that supported the socialist president called itself Popular
Unity (Unidad Popular). Leaders of the Popular Unity coalition also thought Chile was
exceptional; it would be the only country ever to install a truly Socialist regime via elec-
tions, constitutional reform, and extensive legislative initiatives. Unlike any other
country, Chile would find a “peaceful road to socialism.”
Like Chile’s rulers since colonial times, the Popular Unity coalition determined to
transform Chile from the top down: by decree, by force, and by pragmatic evasion and
subtle application of the law. Socialists, Communists, Catholic reformers, and revolu-
tionaries allied in the Popular Unity coalition were as Chilean as their adversaries.
They relied on a centralized bureaucracy augmented with party loyalists and hangers-
on, a style of hierarchical, conspiratorial politics imbued with the prejudices and de-
fects accumulated from the time of colonial governors and notaries. Unlike the gov-
ernments of the past, however, the policies adopted by the Popular Unity government
threatened to unleash poder popular, an ill-defined “power from below” that menaced
the old order from the bottom up, including the authority of the Unidad Popular gov-
ernment itself.
Unfortunately for the Popular Unity coalition, it lacked control over the armed
forces, the Congress, the Supreme Court, and other agencies of El Estado. It also lacked
the support of a majority of the Chilean electorate and faced the challenge of paramil-
itary rightist opposition. Opponents counted also on the meddling and intervention of
the U.S. government and its intelligence agencies. Overt and clandestine policies of the
U.S. government and international corporations weakened and subverted the Popular
Unity government. The attempt to take the country on the “Chilean road to socialism”
did not prosper.
In 1973 a military coup cut short the Chilean road to socialism. Repression of heretics
and adversaries, now labeled subversives and other less pleasant names like “Marxist
cancer,” imposed a new inquisition in the name of “western Christian civilization” and
economic progress. Opponents of the new military government lived in an atmosphere
of fear, much as had the liberal adversaries of the Conservative government minister,
Diego Portales, before his assassination in 1837. Portales directed the installation of
Chile’s “autocratic republic” after a brief civil war in 1829–30 and the promulgation of
the 1833 constitution. His methods would later be repeated: repression of political op-
position, press censorship, courts-martial, summary executions, imprisonment, and
exile for his adversaries. An aphorism attributed to Portales set the tone for the strug-
gle between liberty and autocratic order that characterized Chile in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries: “The stick and the cake, justly and opportunely administered, are
the remedies with which any nation can be cured, however inveterate its bad habits
may be.” As Portales observed, the social order in Chile was preserved by the “weight
of the night. . . . [T]he masses near universal tendency to repose was the guarantee of
INTRODUCTION 5

public tranquility.” In case the “weight of the night” should lighten, Portales and his
successors never hesitated to use “the stick” to secure that tranquility. From 1833 until
1874 liberals battled without success to change the 1833 constitution. After forty years,
Congress finally enacted reforms to limit presidential emergency powers and a decade
later legislated a statute on civil liberties and rights that lightened the “weight of the
night.” More than a half-century had been necessary to dilute, but not eliminate, the in-
stitutions of the autocratic republic.
The military government that took power in 1973 proclaimed: “In every soldier there
is a Chilean; in every Chilean a soldier.” The junta ruled the country from an office build-
ing named after Diego Portales. The Diego Portales Building was located on Santiago’s
main boulevard, named after Captain-General, then “Supreme Director of the Nation”
(1817–23), Bernardo O’Higgins. Now Captain-General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte would
rule the country from this building as “Supreme Chief of the Nation” ( Jefe Surpremo de
la Nación) until the Junta Militar designated him President of the Republic in December
1974. Like Portales in the 1830s, the military junta that took power in 1973 decreed the
death penalty for exiles who returned to Chile without government authorization.
In answer to this apparent return to the spirit of conquest and inquisition, Cardinal
Raúl Silva Henríquez issued a plea for “Reconciliation” in April 1974 (“La reconciliación
en Chile”), reminding his compatriots that “there are rights essential to human dignity;
they are absolute and inviolable. The Church must be the voice of all, and especially the
voice of those who have no voice of their own. We are convinced that it is not possible
to build a lasting order on repression.” Silva Henríquez became a symbol of resistance
to repression for the next fifteen years, as the Vicariate of Solidarity he founded in 1976
struggled to protect thousands of Chileans against the repressive fury unleashed by the
Junta de Gobierno Militar.
From 1973 until 1990 the military regime and its civilian advisers and ministers in-
tensified the exploitation of natural resources and the conquest of internal frontiers.
New roads penetrated virgin forests and the southern wilderness. Modern energy and
communication networks crossed the deserts, the Andes, and the oceans, linking
mines, forests, fisheries, and wineries to global markets. As in the nineteenth century,
Chile was “the model” in the Western Hemisphere, a virtual “economic miracle.” Once
again the political and economic changes came top-down, imposed by force. The mili-
tary government maintained the country under “state of siege” from September 1973
until March 1978, and under one or another regime of exception until 1988.
The costs of the miracle wrought by the military government were high for many
Chileans: widespread human rights violations, evisceration of the labor organizations,
a new constitution in 1980 that enshrined “protected democracy.” As had occurred
after adoption of the 1833 constitution, a small cadre of religious leaders and opponents
of the military regime rejected the legitimacy of the 1980 constitution, urging political
liberalization and more attention to social justice.
Writing in 1860, liberal politician and future president Federico Errázuriz had at-
tacked the 1833 constitution as a regime of tyranny that “falsified all principles of dem-
ocratic government.” He wrote that “until civil liberties and rights are a reality, there
will not be in Chile a solid and durable tranquility, founded in a sincere love by its cit-
izens of its institutions.” Eleven years later Errázuriz, elected president, swore an oath
to uphold the constitution that he had denounced as tyrannical, although still pro-
claiming his desire to see it reformed. In 1874, more than four decades after its prom-
ulgation, Congress finally approved important reforms of the “autocratic republic’s”
constitution by limiting presidential authority under state of siege and restricting the
scope of “extraordinary authority” that could be delegated by the legislature.
Similarly, in March 1990, Patricio Aylwin, a politician who six years earlier had de-
6 CHILE

nounced the 1980 constitution as a “regime of permanent dictatorship,” swore to up-

hold the 1980 constitution until it could be reformed. A plebiscite in 1988, carried out
under the terms of the 1980 constitution, had paved the way for restoration of civilian
government. Voters said “No” to another eight years of General Pinochet’s presidency.
But the plebiscite also confirmed the “legitimacy” of the constitution imposed by the
military junta.
From 1990 to 2000 two elected presidents governed in Chile. They achieved virtu-
ally no change in the military-imposed political system. Economic growth continued at
an accelerated rate, at least until the 1997–99 recession partially caused by the so-called
“Asian crisis” (approximately one-third of Chilean exports went to Asia in the late
1990s). Inflation declined decidedly, as did the percentage of the population that qual-
ified as “poor” and “indigent.” Foreign investors poured billions of dollars into new
mining ventures, forestry, fishery, and agricultural industries. In 1998 the U.S. State De-
partment “Country Report on Economic Policy and Trade Practices” for Chile reported
that “as of a result of legislation passed in December 1997, business opportunities for
foreign banks in Chile and Chilean banks abroad have been enhanced substantially.
Legislation is also now in place for privatizing Chile’s ports, water and sewage com-
panies.” The next year, the Chilean government’s official Internet Web site proclaimed:
“Chile: A Country Open to the World.”
The political coalition that had replaced the military government in 1990, the Con-
certación of Parties for Democracy, had first enthused voters in 1988 with the slogan
“happy times are coming” (“la alegría ya viene”). After taking office, the Concertación
government quickly transformed the promised “happy times” into a call for modera-
tion, prudence, and “justice, to the extent possible.” Fear of military and business reac-
tion to overly populist policies restrained government policymakers. Army general
Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, who headed the military junta and served as the country’s
unelected constitutional president from 1981 to 1990, stayed on as Commander of the
Army and then, in 1998, became a “senator for life” as stipulated in the 1980 Constitu-
tion. For some he remained a hero who had saved the country from the abyss, for oth-
ers a villain who had ordered death, torture, and exile for thousands of Chileans and
now enjoyed the impunity afforded the powerful in Chile since colonial times.
Surprisingly, in October 1998, General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte was arrested in
London at the request of a Spanish judge for extradition to that country for prosecution
for human rights abuses. The Chilean government, including a Foreign Minister exiled
during his dictatorship, and Pinochet’s supporters denounced what they called a vio-
lation of Chilean sovereignty. Others applauded the General’s detention, believing that
justice could never be done in Chile. During the next year Senator-for-life Pinochet re-
mained in limbo in England while his supporters in Chile denounced his “kidnapping”
by the British government. Some political pundits quipped that the country was so
“open to the world” that it even depended on foreigners for justice. On October 8, 1999,
a British judge ruled that Pinochet should be extradited to Spain for crimes against hu-
manity covered by international law regarding state terrorism and torture. The armed
forces’ commanders and those who had supported the military regime squirmed, but
also threatened to “protect the constitutional order” if the need should arise. Pressure
for constitutional and political reforms mounted; perhaps it would not require four
decades to achieve fundamental reform as it had from 1833 to 1874?
As the December 1999 presidential elections approached, both candidates sought to
downplay the “Pinochet question,” but the basic dilemmas persisted. How could lib-
erty be enhanced in Chile while maintaining political order? How could economic
progress be achieved without exploiting the working classes and degrading even fur-
INTRODUCTION 7

ther the natural environment? How could the country mediate international economic
and political influences over national destiny? How could an end be brought to the im-
punity of the powerful and social justice be promoted? This was the historical legacy
and current challenge of Chile as the nation entered the third millennium headed by re-
cently elected president Ricardo Lagos—the victor in January, 2000 in the country’s
first-ever presidential run-off election, after failing to obtain the required fifty percent
in the first round.
President Lagos promised that he would be the president of all Chileans. He told
them that the past could not be forgotten, but that he intended to focus on the future.
He called on the courts to administer justice with independence and respect for the rule
of law, for the Congress to reform the constitution and the political system, and for the
armed forces to cooperate in discovering the “truth” about the disappeared and in de-
termining their final resting place. With most of the Concertación program of 1988 still
unachieved, and the opposition initially suspicious of the country’s “second socialist
president,” the road ahead looked difficult. Nevertheless, President Lagos pushed his
agenda of promoting political tolerance, economic realism, and increased social jus-
tice—for democratic convivencia in the present even if full reconciliation of the conflicts
of the past proved impossible.
1 Land and Society

The territory occupied by the Chilean nation is the prize of military conquest. From
Copiapó south to the Biobío River, Spanish conquistadors took the land from a variety
of indigenous peoples in the sixteenth century. From an undefined point somewhat
north of Copiapó (lat. 27° 22⬘ S), nineteenth-century Chilean armies extended the na-
tional domain by defeating Bolivian and Peruvian forces in the War of the Pacific
(1879–83). The territory Chile acquired then has remained a source of friction and po-
tential conflict among the three countries. South of the Biobío River the Araucanian In-
dians successfully impeded consolidation of Spanish and then Chilean rule until after
1880, when modern weaponry finally overcame the descendants of the Indian groups
that had offered the most determined resistance to the Spanish conquistadors. Only at
the end of the nineteenth century, therefore, did the political unit that is now Chile ef-
fectively achieve its present boundaries, extending some 2600 miles from the north-
ernmost city of Arica (lat. 18° 28⬘ S) past the Strait of Magellan and the world’s south-
ernmost town, Puerto Williams, to latitude 56° S. Chile also claims substantial portions
of Antarctica (lat. 53° W-90° W) and, since 1888, Easter Island, located in the middle of
the Pacific Ocean, 2700 kilometers from the Chilean coast and 4000 kilometers from
Tahiti.
For most of its history Chile did not include the great northern desert containing the
vast mineral wealth for which the country became known around the world. Nor did
the territory south of the Biobío River form an integral part of European settlement. In
colonial times (1535–1810) Chile meant a small number of semi-urban places, from La
Serena through the central valley, in addition to the precarious frontier fort towns south
of the Biobío River which Araucanian Indians periodically destroyed. Bounded on the
east by the Andes Mountains, on the west by the coastal mountain range and the Pa-
cific Ocean, and on the north by one of the world’s driest deserts, the Chilean colony
was little more than a backwater of the Spanish Empire.
Between Copiapó and the Biobío River the Andes chain occupies from one-third to
one-half of the width of present-day Chile (though certain areas in what is now west-
ern Argentina—Tucumán in the early colonial period and Cuyo until the late eigh-
teenth century—also pertained to the Chilean colony). Moving south from Copiapó,
the Andes narrow and become a single dominant cordillera, with some of the highest
peaks in South America. In Argentina at the headwaters of the Aconcagua River, Mt.
Aconcagua, the loftiest peak in the western hemisphere, rises some 22,835 feet (7000
meters). In Chilean territory in the same Andean region, Mt. Salado reaches over 22,500
feet (6900 meters). The Andean passes as far south as the central valley town of Curicó
(lat. 35° S) are typically found at more than 10,000 feet. Los Leones, Lagarto, and Casa
de Piedra are located at more than 13,000 feet, and less than ideal weather makes pas-
sage extremely difficult. Near Aconcagua, the pass at Los Patos (4,720 meters) served
as a conduit for the liberating army of the independence movement led by General San
Martín in 1817. Through the gap at Juncal, almost due east of the city of Los Andes, lies

8
LAND AND SOCIETY 9

the railroad between Chile and the Argentine city of Mendoza. In general, however, the
Andes represent a significant barrier to transport and communication.
South of the Biobío River, the Andes lose height and passes are found at lower ele-
vations southeast of Concepción, at Antuco (2000 meters); east of Valdivia at Hua Hum,
at less than 1000 meters; and northeast of Puerto Montt at Paso Pérez Rosales, at almost
1100 meters. Permanent snow levels are also lower, so that inland from the city of Val-
divia (lat. 40° S) snow persists above 5000 feet year round. In this area beautiful yet
treacherously active snow-capped volcanoes edge magnificent lakes. Southern Chile is
a region of pine and eucalyptus plantations, forest industries, natural fisheries and
aquiculture, cereal production, diversified agriculture, livestock raising and dairies set
within the spectacular forested cordilleras, fjords, channels, glaciers, and hundreds of
islands and islets. At the southern extreme are the inhospitable Patagonian plains and
Tierra del Fuego, where the Strait of Magellan affords a perilous transit around the tip
of South America. Before the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914, this southern pas-
sage made Valparaíso a commercial competitor of Lima-Callao for the Pacific shipping
trade.
In the late nineteenth century Chile incorporated much of the Atacama desert into
the national domain and consolidated control over the provinces south of the Biobío
River. This gave the country more territory with great natural resources, but these
northern and southern territories remained sparsely inhabited. To this day some 70
percent of Chile’s population resides between Aconcagua and the Biobío River. On a
map, the nation that emerged in the twentieth century looks like a long, irregularly
scalloped ribbon trimming south-western South America. Seen from the air the coun-
try is an indentation of varying depths between the Andes on the east and the coastal
mountains to the west. Its territory of approximately 757,000 square kilometers
(292,000 square miles) is more than double the size of Italy and stretches a distance ap-
proximately that of San Francisco to New York or from Madrid to Moscow. Chile’s con-
tinental coastline extends some 6435 kilometers and is rich in sea life, in part due to the
frigid Humboldt Current that runs its full length.
Chile’s major urban centers—Santiago, Valparaíso-Viña del Mar, Concepción-
Talcahuano—and the regional and provincial capitals from Arica in the north, through
the central valley to the southern cities of Temuco, Valdivia, and Puerto Montt are sit-
uated in one of the world’s most geologically active regions and over the centuries they
have been repeatedly damaged or destroyed by earthquakes and tidal waves. Indeed
Chileans assume that “every president will have his earthquake.” Beyond earthquakes,
floods and droughts make agriculture risky in the south as well as in the north and the
central valley. Landslides, volcanic eruptions, and avalanches add to the natural vio-
lence that persistently threatens Chilean lives and property. According to one of the
country’s most important nineteenth century historians, Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna,
as late as 1650 the Spanish authorities considered abandoning the Chilean colony due
to the periodic droughts, floods, and earthquakes.
Nature provides Chile not only a continual challenge but also an incredible variety
of landscapes, climates, and natural ecologies, ranging from the arid northern deserts
to the Chilean antarctic in the south. Partly for this reason, Benjamín Subercaseaux ti-
tled his classic and unconventional geography Chile, o una loca geografía (Chile, or A
Crazy Geography). Subercaseaux began his story by referring to the explorer Magalhaes’
(Magellan, in English) “heroic craziness (locura heroica); he then told the reader that in
the Aymara language Chilli means “where the world ends,” and in Quechua, Chiri
means cold—then confessed that no one really knows where the country, this “long
and narrow sash” (la larga y angosta faja) got the name Chile. (Another version, Agustín
10 CHILE

Edwards, My Native Land, claimed that Chile “comes from the Quichua word Chili, sig-
nifying “earth’s best”; still another that it came from the word Killing or Kildinghe, the
Flemish for cold). Subercaseaux then asks whether “it is worth straining our eyes to
study a country so small.” The answer? Chile “has the highest mountains in the world,
excepting the Himalayas, its coasts are among the longest and most interesting that
exist; its strange shape for the length of 4200 kilometers makes our country a small
world of the most varied climes and territories that the world possesses.” Unfortu-
nately, says Subercaseaux, the existing geographies are economic, written for business-
men, but something of art is needed to understand the fatherland (la patria). And Chile
is a vast, imposing country that is the pride of geographer, naturalist, and traveler. “A
Country, in a word, that is the satisfaction of Man in his most legitimate sense, and with
more reason still, the artist, that is Man at his maximum potential and sensibilities.”
Elías Almeyda Arroyo, a somewhat less poetic Chilean geographer, whose Jeografia
de Chile in its multiple editions was read by students from the early twentieth century
into the 1940s told readers on the first page of his text: “our country is in an unfavor-
able location, besides being at the extremes of a continent and of the commercial world,
it is so isolated from its neighbors that it developed only a small commerce with them.
For this reason we live as if on an island, or better said, as if on various islands. The en-
tire history of Chile has developed as if our territory were an archipelago. From the
first voyages of discovery to our wars and revolutions; from our oldest commerce until
today [1914, and also 1930 when the 9th edition was published and Jeografia had be-
come Geografía], . . . everything reminds us that to prosper Chile needs to control
and actively exploit its beautiful Ocean.” Agustín Edwards also emphasized Chile’s
isolation: “the Chilean people have grown up with their eyes set on the obstacles which
separate them from other people. . . . [T]heir geographical situation gave them, on
the one hand, a certain natural protection against aggression, and on the other it iso-
lated them from enforced contact and left them open only to associations laboriously
sought and dearly won.”
Even when written, these ideas were a bit overstated. The oceans had connected
Chile to much of the world since at least the sixteenth century. In the eighteenth and
nineteenth centuries British and other merchants came without much “laborious seek-
ing” by Chileans. Chilean ports and the sea’s bounty increased even more in impor-
tance from the mid-twentieth century; the coastline was riveted with small and larger
maritime openings to the world that collected the country’s commodities and indus-
trial production for embarkation and received sundry industrial, fuel, and foodstuff
imports. The military government that ruled the country from 1973 to 1990 initiated
programs of port modernization that forcefully overcame the resistance of dockwork-
ers and stevedores, whose loss of control over working conditions reduced shipping
costs. Chilean products became more competitive in international markets as Chilean
workers’ real income declined.
The country’s internal “isolation” was also gradually overcome with railroads,
highways, transverse road networks, and air travel. By the end of the twentieth century
Chileans blithely spoke of bioceanic corridors (corredores bioceánicos) linking the coun-
try’s ports to rail and road networks that extended across the Andes to Brazilian,
Uruguayan, and Argentine ports and urban centers. Approximately forty permanent
mountain passes connected the country to Argentina by land, with various other sea-
sonal passes and cattle trails also operating legally and clandestinely as they had since
colonial times.
From north to south the country is internally tied together by the Pan American
Highway running through the middle of the country some two thousand miles from
 table 1–1. chilean ports and main cargo activity, 1999
Major Ports:
North to South General Description and Cargo Activity

Arica Northernmost city. Port serves city and transit cargoes to and from Bolivia. Bulk min-
erals, metals, timber, fishmeal. Imports: grains, fertilizers, flour, consumer goods.
Iquique Port serves fishing industry, industrial and consumer goods for the Iquique free zone.
Bulk and bagged fishmeal, copper, canned fish, and fish oil. Imports: consumer goods,
industrial raw materials, wheat and other grains. Terminal Minero Patache, copper
concentrates from Miñera Doña Inés de Collahuasi. Terminal Celta, off-loads coal for
thermoelectric plant. Terminal accedes, receives liquids for processing copper.
Antofagasta Largest port in north (until completion of Mejillones “megaport”), serving the major
mines in region II: Chuquicamata, Radomiro Tomic, El Abra, Minera Escondida, Man-
tos Blancos, Zaldívar y El Lince. Also serves Bolivia and Argentina. Metallic copper,
copper concentrates, copper mining subproducts and fishmeal; zinc lead, tin, and an-
timony from Bolivia; bagged beans from Argentina. Imports: grains, flour, general
cargo for Bolivia, and consumer and industrial goods for Chile. Mejillones located 37.5
miles north, to become a “megaport” complex, for copper, containers, bulk solids and
liquids, general cargoes; discharging of liquid ammonia by pipeline (1999); 120 miles
north is the Carolina de Michilla mining company’s terminal used for discharging sul-
phuric acid; 12.5 miles south is the Minera Escondida facility at Caleta Coloso, which
handles copper concentrate.
Valparaíso Chile’s largest port, 100 kilometers west of Santiago. Road and rail links with rest of
the country. Manufactured goods, metallic copper, fresh fruit, wine. Accounts for
large share of country’s imports of all sorts. Sometimes moves cargoes to and from
Argentina. Major container port and naval base. Heavily damaged in 1985 earth-
quake, rebuilt and modernized after 1990.
San Antonio Most imports and exports of bulk cargoes, including bulk liquids, other than petro-
leum products, for central Chile. Also general cargo and fresh fruits. Major container
moving port (with Valparaíso accounts for over 70 percent of container movement).
Talcahuano One of several ports in, or near, Concepción/San Vicente Bays. Forestry, seafood and
fishmeal; imports: industrial products. Naval base and shipyards.
San Vicente Bay of San Vicente, forest products, fishmeal, steel products; discharging coal and ore,
fertilizer, general cargo.
Punta Arenas Southernmost commercial port. Methanol, wool, mutton, and seafood. Imports: gen-
eral cargo and industrial goods. In the Strait of Magellan there are several small
ports/terminals used for loading natural gas and crude oil.

Smaller Ports: North to South

Caleta Patillos Private terminal, 33 miles south of Iquique; loading rock salt.
Tocopilla Nitrate, fishmeal. Codelco pier, built for the discharge of coal for the power plant sup-
plying Chile’s largest copper mine.
Chañaral Metallic copper, copper concentrates, iron ore. Imports: supplies for copper industry.
Petroleum terminal.
Caldera/ On opposite sides of peninsula separating two bays. Bulk and bagged fishmeal, fresh
Calderilla fruit. Imports: coal and fuel.
Huasco Iron ore loading port, some general supplies for mining industry. Privately owned
piers: Guacolda I, fully mechanized coal discharging pier; Guacolda II.
Coquimbo/ Copper ores and concentrates, fishmeal, minerals, early season fruit. Guayacán: iron
Guayacán ore loading terminal 1 mile south of Coquimbo.
Quintero Bay 20 miles north of Valparaíso, port of Ventanas is a liquid gas terminal; crude oil and
petroleum products. Ventanas used by the thermoelectric generating plant for un-
loading coal and loading copper concentrates. Some general cargo.
Lirquén, Privately owned ports in, or near, Concepción and San Vicente Bays. Forestry, in-
Coronel, cluding wood chips, paper, wood pulp, seafood, and fishery products. Before 1997
Lota major coal exporting port. Some general cargoes.
Puerto Montt Forestry, seafood and fishery products; imports of fertilizer.
Chacabuco Lead and zinc concentrates, frozen fish; imports supplies for Puerto Aysén and
Coihaique.
12 CHILE

FPO

map 1: Chilean Ports and Main Cities of the Central Valley

LAND AND SOCIETY 13

Arica to Puerto Montt. For most of the distance the highway runs parallel to the longi-
tudinal railroad, much of which the national government built and has operated since
the late nineteenth century. In the 1980s the military government carved a far southern
road system (the carretera austral) from Puerto Montt into the almost-pristine splendor
of the lake region to Coihaique and south to Cochrane. Airline service also connects
most major cities, and the expanding network of ports provides an increasingly mod-
ern infrastructure. New shipping docks, giant cranes, and container facilities link
Chile’s computerized mines, industry, forest sector, and products of the countryside
with domestic and international markets. In the late 1990s the government moved to-
ward privatization of the major port facilities to encourage additional investment and
competition; one project, at Mejillones, had an initial announced cost of $200 million
dollars for its first phase, as an effort to better service the more than twenty major min-
ing operations in Region II, involving over 2.5 million tons of copper cathodes and
other mineral-related commodities. Chilean ports advertised their specialized capabil-
ities and functions on the Internet. The Mejillones venture told Web users in 1998:

The Port of Mejillones is an enterprise formed in equal shares by Ultramar and Belfi,
who won the concession for unloading 600,000 tons of coal annually to supply the
Edelnor thermoelectric plant in Mejillones. The Ultramar Group is a major maritime
firm, with more than forty years experience, and with agencies from Africa to Puerto
Williams. . . . [I]t is also the owner of container ships [and other specialized vessels].
Belfi has constructed infrastructure projects since its founding in 1955, among them
the major portworks of Chile since that date. Puerto Mejillones is a commercial mar-
itime terminal which, at the present time, principally moves sulphuric acid and coal.

This company advertising blurb is followed by the technical description of the port,
its docks, cranes, storage tanks capacities, and storage yard.
In September 1997, ENAEX, S.A., the major Latin American producer of industrial
grade ammonium nitrate and nitric acid, awarded a contract to Krupp Uhde GmbH of
Dortmund (Germany) to construct in Mejillones the largest nitric acid plant in the world
using the Krupp Uhde high-pressure process and an ammonium nitrate plant with ca-
pacity of 1060 tons a day. Similar descriptions appear for the other terminals at Antofa-
gasta and Tocopilla and for new investments in mineral, chemical, and fishing indus-
tries. Thus while the northern desert, the Andes to the east, the Pacific Ocean, and the
bleak Patagonian steppes historically somewhat isolated Chile, post-1980s investments
in transport, ports, airports, pipelines, transandean power generation and transmission,
and highways, in addition to state-of-the-art communication technology, including
fiber optics (beginning in 1991) and a fully digitalized telephone system (after 1994),
new submarine cables linking Chile to the west coast of the United States, Europe, and,
via Unisur, Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, made Chile ever less “the end of the earth.”
Chilean multinational firms and their transnational subsidiaries invested around the
globe; North Americans, Europeans, and Asians purchased stock in Chilean enterprises
in New York, London, and Tokyo. The value of Chilean exports more than doubled be-
tween 1990 and 1997, then slightly declined due especially to recession in Asia. Imports
likewise greatly increased; as in the past the northern and southern ports contributed
considerably to the volume and value of exports, but well over 60 percent of the value
of imports entered the main ports of the central valley, Valparaíso, and San Antonio.
The geopoetic Chile of Benjamín Subercaseaux, and its “crazy geography” at the
“end of the world,” were succumbing ever more to the economic geography of re-
source exploitation and transnational enterprise as the twenty-first century began. In-
14 CHILE

table 1–2. chilean exports, 1990–98, by country of destination

(in millions of u.s.$ fob*)

1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998

United States 1469.2 1596.3 1649.4 1655.2 2012.1 2559.1 2710.5 2710.5 2609.7
Japan 1388.2 1644.0 1707.3 1502.3 1976.2 2906.4 2495.7 2675.8 1959.3
United Kingdom 558.7 408.4 571.5 554.4 523.0 1076.0 886.5 1061.6 1161.2
Brazil 487.4 447.6 450.9 407.1 604.7 1056.8 934.5 957.2 781.2
Argentina 113.5 257.4 461.6 588.9 637.1 585.6 700.9 780.9 735.1
Italy 406.2 344.8 388.2 330.3 359.3 608.8 475.3 499.5 668.5
Germany 941.3 709.4 603.7 486.5 582.4 837.4 742.3 747.0 538.4
Taiwan 279.8 395.3 490.9 407.7 538.5 703.2 629.1 785.6 525.0
Mexico 57.7 43.5 92.4 130.8 212.2 132.3 146.6 376.3 488.5
China and Hong Kong 70.1 137.5 443.3 260.2 217.5 374.8 467.2 598.1 459.7
France 402.3 389.9 395.6 373.7 404.0 508.2 392.8 458.0 443.5
Holland 314.8 362.9 333.7 260.3 345.5 437.6 393.6 423.2 432.6
South Korea 259.3 263.2 242.8 413.4 583.7 896.5 864.1 989.7 384.7
Peru 74.2 146.0 172.6 204.2 329.3 438.0 321.3 347.8 352.9
Belgium 233.3 234.7 186.5 129.7 203.8 391.5 247.6 272.4 345.1
Spain 268.3 345.5 366.5 240.7 219.1 319.5 281.8 345.2 271.1
Bolivia 73.3 112.5 151.4 161.9 171.5 196.9 207.9 228.5 249.6
Colombia 80.2 53.7 74.0 71.7 116.9 189.0 194.8 227.9 211.2
Ecuador 41.3 58.1 64.2 55.3 82.7 124.3 144.2 156.3 194.5
Venezuela 35.6 54.8 75.2 73.7 73.3 135.3 141.1 158.3 176.8
Canada 56.2 53.1 63.7 61.1 70.4 96.0 139.6 131.0 143.5
Sweden 65.2 60.9 74.8 64.5 67.0 90.1 73.6 104.5 103.6
Greece – 29.1 35.8 41.5 40.4 51.8 39.2 57.6 71.6
Paraguay 24.0 37.8 42.7 48.6 57.6 76.0 66.5 64.4 60.7
Uruguay – 27.1 35.3 44.6 52.9 56.3 57.9 60.6 56.7
Singapore 33.2 39.0 57.0 47.7 55.6 79.4 86.2 115.2 55.3
Indonesia 55.7 31.8 59.1 70.8 102.1 158.1 145.0 155.5 55.1
Norway – – 8.0 13.1 27.1 44.6 38.9 37.4 50.5
Thailand 33.3 31.7 35.0 65.1 112.7 149.6 117.9 133.5 45.8
Saudi Arabia 44.2 48.5 59.0 52.7 43.8 56.1 57.4 48.5 40.4
Finland – 29.1 45.9 26.7 37.6 66.5 85.1 108.7 39.8
Phillipines – – 45.3 43.5 52.3 65.6 103.4 67.7 38.1
South Africa 68.6 79.0 59.8 30.4 84.0 91.0 62.8 62.0 33.4
Russia – – – – – 113.8 119.9 42.2 21.0
Portugal 33.4 42.9 36.5 9.1 12.2 16.3 16.7 11.1 13.4
Poland 1.4 32.9 54.9 3.5 3.6 29.4 11.2 5.3 3.9

Subtotal 9048.4 8930.9 11,012.1 15,555.7 14,447.8 16,005.0 13,821.4

Others 491.0 484.1 631.3 911.0 948.4 1,019.8 935.7
Total 8580.3 9048.4 10,125.5 9415.0 11,643.4 16,444.7 15,396.2 17,024.8 14,757.1

Source: Dirección Nacional de Aduanas, Zofri, S.A. (www.chile-exporta.com/estadísticas/)

*Free on board (without charge to buyer for goods on board a carrier at the point of shipment).

deed, never before did entrepreneurs enjoy more prestige in a country where intellec-
tuals, politicians, landowners, merchants, and bankers had historically predominated.
Presidential candidate (1999) Joaquín Lavín’s 1997 best-seller, Chile, the Silent Revolution
(Chile, la revolución silenciosa), attributed much of the credit for this economic transfor-
mation to the atmosphere created by the military regime, “which favors individual ini-
LAND AND SOCIETY 15

table 1–3. exports 1990–98, by region (customs) (in millions of u.s.$ fob)

Region 1990 1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998
1: Tarapacá 256.83 369.90 437.28 379.49 498.72 708.39 751.96 887.78 819.4
2: Antofagasta 2451.56 2509.82 2694.26 2369.69 2859.05 4374.27 4240.23 4982.64 3951.5
3: Atacama 468.0 430.26 426.75 361.58 455.89 845.31 768.04 899.25 750.8
4: Coquimbo 223.62 188.22 233.11 163.36 189.38 172.26 204.50 170.38 159.6
5: Valparaíso 3289.61 3156.28 3486.36 3444.28 4023.75 5462.60 5402.64 5549.81 5423.3
13: Metropolitan 642.99 876.44 800.74 829.81 978.59 1100.43 1322.45 1315.25 13122.7
8: Talcahuano 1011.47 1089.64 1311.308 1272.21 1679.65 2508.56 2038.60 2031.96 1786.8
10: Los Lagos 88.4 167.09 257.15 271.31 272.37 351.36 309.17 329.44 251.3
11: Aisén 47.10 49.5 65.43 53.89 60.24 76.57 86.77 13.80 252.5
12: Magallanes 141.52 153.30 162.53 179.81 351.04 302.12 282.47 402.60 302.5
Total Chile 8522.13 8989.43 9920.89 9325.45 11,368.68 15,901.87 15,406.84 16,682.94 14,841.0
Chile plus reexport 8915.23 9712.13 10,733.29 10,059.05 12,351.88 16,993.37 16,450.14 17,830.34 15,969.0

Source: Dirección Nacional de Aduanas, Zofri, S.A. after COMEXI. (www.chile-exporta.com/estadísticas/)

table 1–4. imports, by region of entry, 1995–98 (in u.s.$, millions, fob)

Region 1995 1996 1997 1998

1: Tarapacá 712.90 667.92 713.49 592.91

2: Antofagasta 960.81 1078.80 1300.17 1042.28
3: Atacama 119.34 43.40 41.40 21.71
4: Coquimbo 50.84 38.36 43.28 31.47
5: Valparaíso 9740.44 11,028.45 11,869.83 11,145.75
13: Metropolitan 2037.20 2297.63 2666.43 2974.77
8: Bío Bío 1104.87 1352.36 1335.73 983.26
10: Los Lagos 35.73 60.32 70.97 44.57
11: Aisén 5.92 2.71 2.84 2.91
12: Magallanes 138.0 322.11 103.75 246.09
Total Chile 14,903.06 16,810.06 18,111.92 17,087.80
Chile plus Zofri 16,978.86 18,745.66 21,086.92 19,338.20

Source: Dirección Nacional de Aduanas, Zofri S.A., after COMEXI.

tiative, creativity, innovation, entrepreneurial audacity and capability.” Agreeing with

Lavín, in 1988 Manuel Feliú, president of the Confederation of Production and Com-
merce, wrote that in the past “cultural circles underestimated the central role of the en-
trepreneur in economic expansion . . . subordinating them to political decisions.
. . . [E]conomic liberty makes possible the organization of production and distribu-
tion of wealth without need for the discretional intervention of [government] author-
ity” (The Enterprise of Liberty, La Empresa de la Libertad). Now the entrepreneur was a
hero, someone to be emulated. Books authored by, and about, the economists who
helped invent the neoliberal program implemented in the 1970 multiplied: “The Brick”:
Bases of the Chilean Military Government’s Political Economy (Sergio de Castro, 1992); The
Economists and President Pinochet (Arturo Fontaine, 1988); Privatization in Chile, an Eco-
nomic Appraisal (Dominique Hachette and Rolf Lüders, 1993).
As these economists and policymakers emphasized, Chile’s increased insertion into
the world economy changed its internal economic geography, but perhaps more im-
portantly, the status given to business—instead of to government. Chile in 2000 was
16 CHILE

hardly the “island” depicted by Almeyda Arroyo for generations of Chilean students.
In 1975 some 200 Chilean firms with overseas markets exported perhaps 500 products
to 50 markets; in 1998 approximately 6000 firms with operations in Chile exported over
4000 products to some 170 different foreign markets. First the military government,
then the two succeeding elected governments vigorously pursued expanded trade op-
portunities. Chile became a full member of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation
Forum (APEC) and the Pacific Economic Cooperation Council (PECC), an associate
member of MERCOSUR, the common market of the sourthern cone, and signed free
trade agreements with Canada, Mexico, and other Latin American countries. Chile also
signed a Framework Cooperation Agreement with the European Union to liberalize
trade. In 1997 the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Report ranked
Chile among the world’s fifteen most competitive economies.
Politics and administrative reforms also conspired to further integrate the regions of
Chile into national and international grids of control and commerce. The military gov-
ernment (1973–90) reorganized the country into twelve regions plus the Santiago met-
ropolitan area. Intendentes now headed regions, and gobernadores administered the
provinces into which the regions were divided. Municipalities (municipalidades) were
charged with local administration of jurisdictions called communes (comunas) under
the direction of mayors. The mayors were subordinate to the provincial gobernador and
the regional intendente. The Organic Law of Municipalities (Decree Law 1289, 1976)
specified three types of comunas (urban, rural-urban, and rural) along with the legal au-
thority, functions, and administrative organization of each type of local entity. After
1990 local officials were once again elected and some effort made to decentralize re-
gional administration; but the intendentes, governors, and lower level officials (except
municipal councilors and most mayors) remained direct agents of the president and
their appointments depended on the patronage system within the party coalitions that
dominated the national government. Political and administrative centralization was a
hard-to-overcome way of life in Chile. One of Chile’s great storytellers, Vicente Pérez
Rosales, wrote a satirical account in the Revista Chilena in 1877 called “Something about
What We Call Here Centralization” (“Algo sobre lo que por acá llamamos centralización”).
He described the efforts of a local government in a southern province to obtain budget
approval for a latrine, made necessary, he explained, “because of the inevitable conse-
quences of providing victuals to the prisoners in the town jail, their chewing and di-
gesting them.” According to Pérez Rosales it was no easy task to secure authorization
to pay for the ceramic fixture (bacín) commissioned by the town council.
Centralized planning and administration still plagued the country in the 1990s. With
almost 40 percent of the population in Santiago, even the military government’s inno-
vation of moving the national congress to Valparaíso for its reopening in 1990 (making
the congressmen drive back and forth between the capital and the port with their cell
phones glued to their ears) gave political cartoonists good material but failed to break
the hold of Santiago on the rest of the nation. By mid-1999 serious political bargaining
was underway to bring the congress back to Santiago near the ministries, Supreme
Court, and executive office buildings from whence the country was governed.
From north to south the variety of Chilean landscapes may be illustrated by compar-
ing Chile’s several natural subdivisions with the strip of land running from the desert of
Baja California to the Yukon and Alaska: the deserts of the Chilean “great north” or norte
grande (regions I, II, and part of III as indicated in Map 6—see Map 3 for an enlargement
of this area); the transitional steppes and transversal river valleys of the “little north” or
norte chico (part of region III, region IV, and part of region V—Map 3); the fertile central
valley (part of region V south, including part of region VIII—Map 4); the “frontier” re-
gion of cereal production and forests south of the major industrial center of Concepción
LAND AND SOCIETY 17

Major Economic Activities

Oasis cultivation, mining,

nitrate, fishing and limited
industry.

Early vegetables, fruit, nuts,

limited vines and cereals,
goats, sheep, limited cattle
mining, fishing.

Central valley agriculture,

fruits, vines, wheat, corn,
hemp, tobacco, vegetable
oils, diversified livestock
–70% of all Chilean industry.

Coal, steel, petro-chemicals,

forest products, cereals,
potatoes, dairy and cattle,
limited vegetables, orchards
and vineyards, fishing
aquaculture.

Forest industries, livestock,

subsistence agriculture,
fishing, sheep.

Sheep and livestock, wool,

coal, oil, and natural gas.

map 2: Chile: Climate and Major Economic Activities

18 CHILE

CHILE
The Norte Grande
and the Norte Chico
Regional Boundaries, 1999

map 3: THE NORTE GRANDE and the NORTE CHICO

LAND AND SOCIETY 19

(most of region VIII and all of region IX—Map 4); the lake region (most of region X, ex-
cluding Chiloé—Map 5); and the sparsely settled region of southern continental Chile
(Chiloé and regions XI, XII—Map 5).
The Chilean norte grande is part of South America’s western coastal desert which ex-
tends northward through Peru and into Ecuador. In much of this region the coastal
range amounts only to rounded hills which drop sharply to the Pacific. From the Loa
River south, the first major surface water to reach the Pacific flows in the Copiapó. The
major urban concentration and farming belt around Copiapó (almost 90 miles long) is
often taken as the southern limit of the Atacama desert. At the time of the initial Span-
ish expedition of conquest from Peru into Chile (1535), Copiapó marked the northern
boundary of the territory that became Chile.
This northern region is a vast desert. Scattered oases and river valleys provide slight
relief from the barren landscape. Charles Darwin’s description of a part of this region
near Santa Rosa and Huantajaya as a “complete and utter desert,” in which he saw only
cacti and lichen, matches that of Preston James in the twentieth century: “No part of the
west coast of South America is more forbidding, more utterly desert-like in aspect than
the stretch of about 600 miles between Arica and Caldera.” Despite the fact that weather
stations in some parts of the norte grande have never recorded rainfall, there are notice-
able differences in climate between the coastal and the interior regions. The coast expe-
riences much greater relative humidity and often cloudiness, due to the cooling effects
of the Humboldt Current. Inland, skies are cloudless and humidity much less. For ex-
ample, humidity in the coastal city of Iquique averages about 81 percent, while in
Calama, to the southeast, it averages about 48 percent.
For thousands of years small groups of people lived as fishermen along the coast or
took advantage of the limited water resources in this region for oasis valley agriculture,
especially in the fertile valleys of Azapa and Lluta. Available evidence suggests that the
site of Chile’s northernmost city, Arica, supported small population clusters many cen-
turies before the Spanish conquistadors came south from Cuzco. To the present, lack of
water and the ecological constraints of the desert environment severely limit agricul-
tural activity in this region. The few irrigated valleys and oases such as Azapa and
Belén, east of Arica, and Pica, southeast of Iquique in Region I, and Calama, southwest
of the port of Tocopilla (near the copper mine at Chuquicamata), as well as San Pedro
de Atacama and Toconao, northeast of Antofagasta in Region II, contribute olives, fruit,
herbs, and a variety of food and specialty crops to the regional economy.
Many of the population centers in the norte grande owe their origins to the mining
activity made possible by the great mineral wealth of the desert. The major ports—
Iquique, Antofagasta, Tocopilla—as well as minor ports and interior cities arose, and
prospered or declined with mineral finds (silver, gold, nitrates, copper, iron). Iquique
owed its colonial significance to silver strikes at Huantajaya and its nineteenth-century
boom to nitrates. In 1870 a silver strike at what came to be called Caracoles, 200 kilo-
meters northeast of Antofagasta, attracted some 10,000 miners in its glory days and
transformed Antofagasta into an urban and commercial center. Tocopilla and Antofa-
gasta both prospered from copper mining, and then from nitrates in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. Other settlements briefly flourished and then died when the min-
eral deposits to which they owed their existence were exhausted. The remains of min-
ing camps and settlements that litter the desert are reminiscent of the ghost towns of
the western United States in an even bleaker setting.
In the late nineteenth century the ports of the norte grande served as service centers
and transshipment outlets for the nitrate works (oficinas) and copper mines. At the time
these ports seemed more like overgrown villages than real cities, though in several,
particularly Iquique and Antofagasta, luxurious mansions and new public services
20 CHILE

CHILE
The Central Valley
and
the “Frontier” Region
Regional Boundaries, 1999

map 4: Central Chile and the Frontier Region

LAND AND SOCIETY 21

CHILE
The Lake Region
and
the Far South
Regional Boundaries, 1999

map 5: The Lake Region and the Far South

22 CHILE

FPO

map 6: Administrative Subdivisions and Regional Capitals, 1999

LAND AND SOCIETY 23

gave the wealthy a sense of living in modern comfort. This was made possible by im-
porting fuel, food, and even topsoil for plazas while piping water over great distances.
An early twentieth-century description of these mining ports tells us that they were
sometimes “mere collections of tin shanties crowded at the base of cliffs . . . con-
nected by little lines of railways with the mines in the interior.”
Mining of caliche ore dates from the 1830s, when sodium nitrate was used in explo-
sives and fertilizer. Not until after the War of the Pacific (1879–83) would nitrate be-
come the most important Chilean export and source of foreign exchange. The nitrate
deposits themselves occur at elevations between 3000 and 9000 feet above sea level, at
distances varying from 10 to 80 miles from the Pacific coast. Layers of caliche or raw ni-
trate sometimes lie on the surface of the earth; at other times they are found 20 to 30 feet
below the surface. In addition to the nitrate itself, important byproducts of processing
include iodine, salt, sulphur, and sulphuric acid. In 1968 the Chilean government and
private partners created the Chilean Chemical and Mining Company, SOQUIMICH
(SQM) to stimulate the decaying nitrate industry. CORFO and the Anglo Lautaro Ni-
trate Company held shares in SQM. During the Popular Unity government (1970–73)
the company was nationalized, only to be privatized again after 1983. In the early
1980s, important byproducts of the nitrate industry included iodine, salt, sulphur, and
sulphuric acid. In 1986 SOQUIMICH entered into new contracts for nitrate sales to
China, which, along with Japan, had become an important destination for Chilean min-
eral, seafood, and forest products. By 1988 the company had been fully transferred to
private ownership. Significant investments followed in modern technology and new
plants built at the Pedro de Valdivia, María Elena (south of the port of Tocopilla), Sierra
Gorda (processing of mine tailings, southeast of Tocopilla), and the Coya Sur facilities.
According to official publications, the company added new product lines such as
potassium nitrate and iodine derivatives. SQM gradually became a multinational com-
pany with subsidiaries and manufacturing establishments in Latin America, North
America, and Europe. It operated plants manufacturing products for agriculture and
industry near Santiago and acquired a 49 percent interest in the U.S. company Ajay
North America L.L.C., which produced inorganic and organic iodine derivatives. In
addition, potassium chloride production began at Salar de Atacama in 1995.
SQM was only one example in the 1990s (albeit the most important) of the webs of
international finance, technology, marketing, and mergers that thoroughly trans-
formed the nitrate business in the northern deserts. New investors and industry spe-
cialization brought the Atacama Minerals Company to Aguas Blancas, near Antofa-
gasta. From export sales of approximately $80 million a year (1980–85), the value of
nitrate and related products such as iodine, sodium sulphate, and potassium nitrate
exports reached $200–300 million in the 1990s.
Though the norte grande occupies about one-third of the national territory (Antofa-
gasta is as large as the territory from Santiago to the Biobío River), it contains less than
8 percent of the country’s population. Despite its sparse population, the region has
played an extraordinary role in determining Chilean economic development since the
nineteenth century. The extraction of silver, nitrates, nitrate byproducts, and copper al-
lowed foreign investors and Chilean capitalists to accumulate incredible wealth. It also
allowed Chilean politicians and governments to avoid fundamental political and insti-
tutional issues well into the twentieth century, as they could depend upon revenues
from the desert to finance public service and projects instead of devising rational and
equitable systems of internal taxation and public finance.
While the desert was yielding wealth to foreign investors and a Chilean elite in the
nineteenth and the early twentieth century, its ports, rail lines, and mining camps were
the principal battleground for Chile’s emergent proletariat. Both the wealth of the
24 CHILE

desert and the experience of working-class organization and struggle came south to in-
fluence the rest of Chile. Nitrate revenues and the earnings from copper financed the
public sector of the Chilean economy, providing funds for public works and govern-
ment services. Peasant workers returning south with the new experience of class or-
ganization, strikes, blacklists, and sometimes massacres by police or military, brought
a new consciousness to the wheat fields of the frontier or the grape harvest of the cen-
tral valley. Union organizers in the north became national leaders of the Chilean work-
ing classes and spread their message from the deserts to the centers of economic and
political power in the cities and countryside of the “real” Chile to the south. Our
geopoet Subercaseaux, partly for these reasons, told readers that “the North is an ulcer
(llaga) in the healthy body of Chile, it discharges pus and attracts the maggots of death.
Even politics was poisoned by contact with it.”
Even with the decline of the nitrate industry after World War I, and the depression of
the 1930s, the minerals (especially copper), and byproducts such as molybdenum) of the
norte grande still constituted the principal source of foreign exchange for the Chilean
economy. Most of the country’s copper came from the norte grande, though to the south
there are significant deposits in the coastal cordillera and the lower elevations of the
Andes. Chuquicamata began production in 1915 and was acquired by Anaconda Cop-
per Mining Co. in 1923; in 1927 the Andes Copper Mining Co., a subsidiary of Anaconda,
began exploiting the mine at Potrerillos. The largest open-pit copper mine in the world,
Chuquicamata, is located inland almost due east from Tocopilla and slightly north of
Calama. Until the early 1970s, when the leftist coalition government of President Sal-
vador Allende nationalized the largest copper operations, this mine, like most of Chile’s
largest copper mines, was controlled by United States companies. Other important
mines in region III include Exótica (closed in 1975 and later reopened as Chuqui sur),
Mantos Blancos, El Abra, Tuina, Leonor, Lomas Bayas, Santa Catalina, Zaldívar, and the
Escondida mine, which accounted for 27.5 percent of Chilean copper production in
1997. Major copper firms and other large mining operations in region II accounted for
almost 30 percent of all Chilean exports in 1998, contributing over $4 billion. The cop-
per mines in region III (Candelaria and Manto Verde) and IV (El Indio/Tambo and An-
dacollo) also add thousands of tons to Chilean copper exports. In addition impressive
growth in gold and silver mining and investments in the iron sector added to the
1990–97 economic expansion in the northern provinces. CODELCO remained the most
important mining enterprise in the Region III as well as Region II, but other firms also
contributed significantly to exports from this area. Numerous small and medium-size
copper operations also contribute to the norte grande’s copper output and provide full or
part-time employment for thousands of the region’s inhabitants. Gold and silver are
among the important byproducts of the copper refining process. Copper in the 1960s
and 1970s accounted for 70 to 80 percent of the value of Chilean exports, making the
economy highly sensitive to small changes in the international price of this commodity.
In 1974–77 drastic declines in copper prices played a significant role in exacerbating the
substantial economic depression of 1974 to 1976 in the first years of the military gov-
ernment headed by General Augusto Pinochet.
Economic recovery from 1977 to 1980 brought expansion of copper production to
over one million tons in the early 1980s. At the same time, however, a new emphasis on
exports of fruit, fish products, wood and paper products, and other non-traditional
Chilean exports reduced the relative share of the value of copper exports ($1.6 billion
to $2 billion in the early and mid-1980s) to approximately 50 percent of the value of all
Chilean exports. The Chilean National Copper Corporation, CODELCO, the largest
copper company in the world in the 1980s, controlled most of the large copper mines,
called the gran minería, including Chuquicamata, El Salvador, and the Radomiro Tomic
LAND AND SOCIETY 25

table 1–5. region of antofagasta: exports, by firm

(1998, in millions of u.s.$)

Firm U.S.$ FOB Percentage

CODELCO Chile 1749.0 43.5%

Minera Escondida 966.7 24.1%
Minera El Abra 329.3 8.2%
Minera Zaldívar 200.2 5.0%
SQM Nitratos 155.9 3.9%
Minera Mantos Blancos 117.7 2.9%
Minera Michilla 97.9 2.4%
Fundación Refimet 90.5 2.3%
SQM Químicos S.A. 53.5 1.3%
SQM Salar S.A. 41.6 1.0%
Others 216.1 5.4%
Total 4018.4 100.0%

Source: Unidad Regional MINECON, after data provided by PROCHILE.

table 1–6. region of atacama: mining production (index 1990 = 100)

Copper Index Gold Index Silver Index Iron Index

Year (F. Tons) 1990 = 100 (Fine kg) 1990 = 100 (F. Tons) 1990 = 100 (M. Tons) 1990 = 100

1990 154,966 100.0 8534.5 100.0 198.4 100.0 4679.6 100.0

1992 164,109 105.9 13,246.3 155.2 552.5 278.5 3594.9 76.8
1994 182,777 117.9 15,730.7 184.3 430.6 217.0 4273.1 91.3
1996 360,318 232.5 19,978.0 234.1 458.4 230.0 4955.5 105.9
1997 378,617 244.3 20,311.9 238.0 456.3 230.0 4834.1 103.3

Source: Unidad Regional de Minecon, from data provided by INE and SERNAGEMIN.

table 1–7. region of atacama: exports, by firm (1998, in millions of $u.s.)

Firm Exports, U.S.$ FOB Percentage

CODELCO Chile 248.9 26.1%

Compañía Contractual Minera Candelaria 246.0 25.8%
Compañía Minera Mantos de Oro 96.1 10.1%
Empresa Minera de Mantos Blancos S.A. 81.4 8.5%
Puerto Guacolda II 72.1 7.6%
N.D. 47.2 4.9%
Compañía Minera Maricunga 44.9 4.7%
Compañía Minera Can-Can S.A. 14.8 1.6%
Aguas de la Falda S.A. 13.9 1.5%
Sociedad Punta del Cobre S.A. 10.3 1.1%
Others 78.8 8.3%
Total 954.6 100.0%

Source: Unidad Regional MINECON, after data provided by PROCHILE.

26 CHILE

facility that opened in 1995, at an elevation of 3000 meters in the Andes some 45 kilo-
meters north of Calama. In the north, as well as El Teniente and Andina to the south,
CODELCO counted for some 80 percent of the country’s production. In the years after
1974, liberalized foreign investment legislation and new mining laws allowed millions
of dollars of new foreign investment in the copper sector and in other mining opera-
tions. Large investments in exploration and opening new mines more than tripled
Chilean copper output by 1997. The booming mining economy, not only in copper but
also in gold, silver, molybdenum, boron, lithium, nitrate, and related products, such as
iodine and fertilizers, broke all records in 1996. Chile became the number one supplier
of copper concentrates to Japan and also sent copper to Korea, Hong Kong, the Philip-
pines, Indonesia, Malaysia, China, Singapore, Thailand, and Taiwan. Mining expan-
sion promoted large-scale energy production and transmission projects across the
northern Andes from Salta to the desert and then to the port of Mejillones.
Northern Chile was being transformed by the “economic miracle.” The “miracle”
also brought increasing environmental degradation and, finally, a new environmental
law (Law 19.300, 1994) requiring environmental impact studies before approval of
major new economic projects—in mining and other sectors of the economy. It remains
to be seen, however, whether environmental regulations will be rigorously enforced
when they impede “progress.” Early signs indicated that, at the least, the law would
make companies and the public more aware of the consequences of resource-based eco-
nomic growth and its industrial byproducts. The Ministry of Mining announced in
March 1998 that the “Maritime Governor of Antofagasta ordered an investigation into
the dumping of industrial wastes generated in the copper industry, from tanks located
some 270 kilometers south of Antofagasta in the Punta Grande sector.” A Navy heli-
copter had detected direct dumping of industrial wastes into the sea by the Santo
Domingo Mining Company—a firm that was buying minerals from small mining firms
whose operations had resulted in the “virtual extinction” of marine life, both flora and
fauna, in the immediate area. For its part, CODELCO announced in 1996 a massive de-
contamination program involving treatment of gas emissions from its El Salvador
(Potrerillos), El Teniente (Caletones), and Chuquicamata operations and water and en-
ergy conservation from the northern deserts to its El Teniente mine near Rancagua. This
portended the evolution of the private gran minería alongside the state-controlled min-
ing firms. By the late 1990s, CODELCO remained the largest copper producer and ex-
porter, accounting for 36 percent of production, followed by the privately owned Es-
condida mine (27.5%) and other private mining firms.
The extensive coastline of the norte grande makes fishing and fish-related industries
of great potential importance. In the early 1960s fishmeal production rapidly expanded,
only to decline after 1965 as the anchovetas, the small fish whose processing induced
large investments in plants at Iquique and Arica, seemed to disappear. Renewed em-
phasis on the fishing industry in the mid 1970s brought dramatic results. Between 1975
and 1983 the fish and shellfish catch more than tripled, reaching some 4 million tons.
After 1980, Chile passed Peru as the world’s leading producer of fishmeal and fish oil.
More than 80 percent of this production came from the northern coast, with the port of
Iquique concentrating some 60 percent of the catch. The Chilean government claimed
that Iquique had become the largest fishing port in the world in terms of volume han-
dled. Impressive expansion in fish product exports contributed significantly to the in-
creasingly diversified composition of Chilean exports and, even with declines in prices
for fishmeal, accounted for over 450 million dollars in export sales in 1985. In 1997 this
figure had increased to over $1.6 billion, including large quantities of fishmeal (although
Chile dropped to second place among world fishmeal producers) derived largely from
LAND AND SOCIETY 27

anchovies and sardines (harvested out of Tocopilla and Iquique) and a substantial role
for products of aquaculture, especially salmon from the Biobío region and further south.
In 1984 Chile exported 100 tons of salmon; in 1996 salmon exports exceeded 130,000
tons. Diversification of markets also was impressive, with increasing quantities sent to
Asia and Europe, although the United States remained an important customer.
To great extent, the continued expansion after 1990 resulted from the shift in eco-
nomic policies adopted after 1973 by the military government’s economic advisers.
Emphasizing liberalization of the domestic economy, privatization of public enter-
prises and services, attraction of foreign investment, and export promotion, the gov-
ernment had gradually lowered tariffs, with a brief blip back up to 35 percent in 1984
then back down to 15 percent in 1985. It also eliminated most nontariff barriers and in-
serted Chile aggressively into the international economy. In 1974 Decree Law 740 es-
tablished the Instituto de Promoción de Exportaciones (PROCHILE). Acting semiau-
tonomously until 1979, PROCHILE became a part of the Ministry of Foreign Relations
in 1979 and encouraged Chilean firms to enter new markets, diversify export products,
and began actively promoting Chilean products in its overseas offices. PROCHILE
maintained data banks accessible to Chilean firms and also active Internet Web sites
promoting Chilean goods and services. Other government policies, from special tax
credits to favorable commercial credit for “nontraditional” exports, transformed
Chile’s inward-looking nationalist trade and development policies of the 1950s and
1960s into policies among the most liberal in the world. Exports as a percentage of gross
domestic product increased from 11 percent in 1970 to almost 30 percent in 1987 and al-
most 40 percent in 1997. Diversification cut the share of mining exports from over 80
percent to less than 50 percent, despite the boom in the mining sector.
In 1991 the Concertación government further reduced tariffs to 11 percent. Despite
the political opposition’s criticism of the military economic model during the 1988–89
electoral campaigns, government spokespersons later acknowledged the “positive
legacy” of the economic transformation orchestrated after 1973, in contrast with the
continuing battle to overturn the constitutional, political, and human rights legacies of
the military regime.
The economic expansion accelerated in the 1990s, still based overwhelmingly, but
not so completely, on the mining operations of the norte grande. Inequalities in distri-
bution of wealth and income persisted, as did gender discrimination (women earned
approximately 65 percent of male counterparts with similar education, and even less
for university-educated women in 1995). Nevertheless, Chileans lived longer, obtained
higher levels of formal education, earned more, and had access to more consumer
choices than ever before in the country’s history. More tourists and business travelers
made Chile their destination; more Chileans had telephones, televisions, automobiles,
and even access to the Internet. Use of cellular telephones expanded rapidly to almost
500,000 by 1998 (2.78/100 inhabitants compared with 12/100 in the United States).
Modern shopping malls, located at first in upper-income barrio alto neighborhoods,
sprang up by the late 1990s in lower- and middle-income neighborhoods in Santiago
and could also be found in many regional capitals.
As in Europe, North America, and elsewhere, some Chileans lamented the hectic
pace and “consumer-society values” that had transformed and “uglified” the Chile of
the 1960s, substituting global fast-food chains and advertising for items to satisfy every
imaginable whim. Other Chileans welcomed “modernity”: Cable News Network; the
next generation computer; air miles awarded for frequent flyers; and decent prices for
goods put out of reach in the past by high tariffs and lower incomes. Whatever side of
the modernity debate taken, most all Chileans lived in a dramatically different country
28 CHILE

table 1–8. indicators of chilean economic growth, 1987–98

Year 1987 1988 1989 1990 1991 1992

Population/1000 12.081 12.275 12.474 12.675 13.100 13.30

PIB/GDP, 20,694 24,154 27,547 30,323 34,650 41,882
millions U.S.$
Exports, – 7.052 8.080 8.373 8.942 10.00
billions U.S.$
Industrial Exports, – 2,273 2,613 2,741 3,316 4,033
millions U.S.$
Exports of wine, – – – 52 84 119
millions U.S.$
(FOB)
Exports of salmon – – – 114 160 267
and trout, mil-
lions U.S.$ (FOB)
Exports of cellulose, – – – 314 305 527
millions U.S.$
(FOB)
Copper production – 1,451 1,609 1,588 1,814 1,933
1000 metric tons
Exports of copper, – – – 3.820 3.603 3.91
billions U.S.$
Imports billions – 4.833 6.595 7.089 7.456 9.28
U.S.$ (FOB)
Tourists, millions – – – – – –
Tourist income, – – – – – –
millions U.S.$
Investment, % of 19.6 20.8 23.5 23.1 21.1 23.9
GDP
National savings, 17.3 22.3 23.7 24.2 24.1 24.8
% of GDP
Unemployment 10.6 11.1 8.4 8.1 8.2 6.7
Real wages, index 78.6 84.2 93.6 100 109.0 113.8
1990 = 100
Inflation, % 21.5 12.7 21.4 27.3 18.7 12.7
Telephone – 629 691 864 997 1.21
lines/1000
Cellular phone – – – – – 0.48
subscribers/100

Sources: Banco Central; INE; Subtel; Infor; Sernatur, CNE; CoChilco; Sernageomin.
 LAND AND SOCIETY 29

1991 1992 1993 1994 1995 1996 1997 1998

13.100 13.300 13.514 14.095 14.289 14.495 14.712 14.987

,650 41,882 44,474 50,919 65,216 68,568 75,777 72,949

8.942 10.007 9.199 11.604 16.024 15.405 16.923 14.895

,316 4,033 4,056 5,115 6,608 6,487 6,923 6,713

84 119 129 143 182 293 412 501

160 267 297 354 475 534 668 715

305 527 444 716 1.229 725 679 692

,814 1,933 2,055 2,220 2,488 3,116 3,436 3,707

3.603 3.910 3.266 4.485 6.392 5.839 6.851 –

7.456 9.285 10.189 10.872 14.655 16.500 18.218 17.391

– – 1.413 1.634 1.540 1.450 1.693 1.8

– – 744.4 845.6 900.4 905.3 1047.9 1,200

21.1 23.9 26.5 26.3 27.2 28.3 – –

24.1 24.8 23.9 25.4 27.6 23.3 – –

8.2 6.7 6.5 7.8 7.4 6.5 6.2 –

109.0 113.8 119.5 123.9 129.5 135.0 – –

18.7 12.7 12.2 8.9 8.2 6.6 6.0 –

997 1.213 1.324 1.545 1.754 2.056 2.394 2.650

– 0.48 0.61 0.82 1.38 2.19 2.78 –

 30
table 1–9. selected social indicators, 1920–98
Age Age In Average Social With
6–14 15–18 University Number Security Access to With
Deaths/ Male Female in in and of School Coverage: Potable Access to
Deaths/ 1000/ Life Life School School Professional Years Employed Water Sewer
Year 1000 Infants Expectancy Expectancy Illiteracy (%) (%) Schools (%) Completed Covered (%) (%) (%)

1920 30.5 250.0 31 32 36.7

1930 24.1 200.0 40 42 25.3
1940 21.3 170 41 43 27.1
1950 13.0 129.0 53 57 19.8
1960 12.5 120.0 54 60 16.4 44.8 21.3
(1963) (1963)
1970 8.7 82.0 58 64 11.0 94.4 37.9 7.8 4.3 66.5 31.1
1974 7.7 65.2 63.9 70.6 10.2 51.2 12.8 69.2 38.2
1975–80 1975–80
1978 6.7 40.1 8.9 97.7 51.8 10.2 7.5 76.9 86.0 56.3
(1976)
1980 6.1 23.6 67 74 8.7 93.6 55.5 8.7 7.6 53.6 92.1 70.0
1986 5.9 19.1 6.2 92.9 68.2 10.4 8.2 57.6 97.0 77.2
1990 6.0 16.0 71 77 5.4 89.2 75.5 11.3 8.6 58.7 98.0 80.9
(1988) (1988)
1995 5.5 11.1 71.5 77.4 4.9 87.1 68.5 18.0 9.6 62.6 95.0 NA*
1990–95 1990–95
1996 5.3 11.1 72.3 78.3 4.8 NA*** NA*** NA*** 9.6 NA*** NA**
1997 5.2 10.0 47
72.3 78.3 NA*** NA*** NA*** NA*** NA*** NA***
1995–2000 1995–2000

Source: INE; Anuarios de Demografía; Banco Central, Indicadores Económicos y Sociales; Ministerio de Educación, Compendio de Informa-
ción Estadística; Dagmar Raczynski, “Para combatir la pobreza en Chile: Esfuerzos del pasado y desafios del presente” in Cortázar and Vial
(1998).
*This category changes in official statistics after 1990, incorporating latrines, and other methods of disposing of human wastes.

CHILE
**This category changes to “access to safe water” in official statistics after 1995.
***These data are not reported after last entry in each case by government agencies.
LAND AND SOCIETY 31

table 1–10. exports as percentage of

gross domestic product

Year Percentage of GDP

1960 12
1965 12
1970 11
1973 10
1974 14
1975 17
1976 20
1977 21
1980 24
1981 20
1982 25
1983 25
1984 25
1985 26
1986 27
1987 28
1990 32
1996 38

in 2000 than they had in 1970, a country ever more connected to the web of globaliza-
tion. Other efforts to industrialize the norte grande included installation of vehicle as-
sembly plants in Arica, expansion of copper refineries, smelters, and other mineral-
related industries, and the processing of agricultural commodities. Above all, however,
the norte grande remains a copper-mining region which, in the words of ex-President
Salvador Allende, provides the “salary of Chile.”

South of the norte grande, part of the province of Atacama, Coquimbo, and part of
Aconcagua form a transition from desert to steppes and then to the fertile central val-
ley. Here, in the norte chico, the desert gives way to scrub and brush vegetation which
increases toward the south. The transitional character of this region is well illustrated
by the average rainfall for selected stations from Arica in the norte grande to Quillota at
the southern margin of the norte chico. Average annual rainfall increases from 1 to 2 mil-
limeters (mm) in Arica or Iquique to 28 mm at Copiapó. It is 65 mm at Vallenar and 133
mm in La Serena. Copiapó and the surrounding region are a transition between the arid
desert and the semi-arid norte chico. At the Aconcagua Valley around Quillota, where
average annual rainfall exceeds 400 mm, there is another transition to the temperate cli-
mate of central Chile (see Map 3).
Once called the “region of ten thousand mines,” the norte chico, like the desert to the
north, contains great mineral wealth. In 1811 silver discovered near Vallenar, inland
from Huasco, led to the opening of some 150 mines. From 1830 to 1850 mining activity
in the region reached a peak with new silver strikes at Chañarcillo, south of Copiapó.
Production continued here until the 1890s. In this region, in July 1851, Chile inaugu-
rated one of the first three railroads in South America, to transfer ore from the inland
mines to the port at Caldera.
While not as large as the Chuquicamata deposits, copper from Potrerillos and then
El Salvador contributed significantly to Chilean copper production. The smelter at
Paipote, just south of Copiapó, serves what is called the small and medium copper sec-
32 CHILE

tor, which gives employment to thousands of Chileans. The smaller mines are usually
less efficient and contain lower ore content, making them highly vulnerable to changes
in world prices. Government policy toward this sector is often controversial since in-
ability to compete in the world market as prices decline produces temporary shutdowns
and mine closures, unemployment and demands for further subsidies through the Em-
presa Nacional de Minería (ENAMI), a government enterprise created in 1960. The eco-
nomic recession in Asia (1997–99) produced just such a dilemma in the region, giving
rise once again to pressures to end government intervention to support the small mine
sector. Held up as a counterexample was the large-scale Phelps-Dodge owned La Can-
delaria mine (near Paipote), which produced almost 5 percent of Chile’s copper in 1997.
ENAMI served the medium and small mine sector by purchasing, smelting, refining,
marketing, and subsidizing ore produced by thousands of small operators. It main-
tained purchasing agents in various locations and processing plants in TalTal, Manuel
Antonio Matta, Vallenar, and El Salado in addition to the smelter at Paipote and the
smelter and refinery at Las Ventanas (region V). In the late 1990s ENAMI’s copper sales
amounted to some $800 million (less than 4% of the national total) and also contributed
to gold and silver exports, which became increasingly important in the 1990s. Chile be-
came a major gold producer after 1978 with the startup of the El Indio mine; in 1997 Chile
was the third leading silver producer in Latin America, after Mexico and Peru.
Abrupt declines in copper and gold prices in 1997–98 and pressures for moderniza-
tion of facilities to meet new environmental standards renewed debates regarding
ENAMI’s future. According to Sergio Bravo Yuraszeck, a company director, at the be-
ginning of the 1980s ENAMI served 1500 small and medium-sized mining enterprises;
rising mineral prices increased this number to almost 4000, which then dropped to only
410 in 1998. In June 1999, the National Mining Association’s Boletín Minero featured a
photo of protesting miners outside ENAMI headquarters in Santiago, demanding more
resources and subsidies for the small mine sector. Meanwhile, government policymak-
ers considered bringing private capital to the rescue or even total privatization of
ENAMI.
In the norte chico, unlike the norte grande, a number of rivers cross the otherwise arid
region, making possible important agricultural activities and the existence of a number
of important interior urban concentrations. Still, this region contains only 3 percent of
Chile’s arable land. During the colonial period, tiny coastal settlements served as col-
lection points for gold or silver brought down from the cordillera and the inland val-
leys for shipment to Lima and Spain. English, French, and Dutch buccaneers repeat-
edly menaced these towns and occasionally sacked them, terrorizing their inhabitants.
Initially agriculture in the norte chico met the needs of a limited local market and of
the workers in nearby mines. Only later did agriculture expand to supply wheat, spe-
cialty crops, and fruits to southern and foreign markets. Always, however, the interde-
pendence of agriculture and mining persisted and has dominated the economy of the
norte chico to the present.
Like the norte grande, although to a lesser extent, the norte chico has played a dispro-
portionate role in shaping the development of Chilean labor movement and working-
class organizations while at the same time exporting its products to support the Chilean
economy. Owing to the tendency of many rural laborers and peasants in this region to
work alternately in agriculture and mining, depending upon weather conditions and
access to cultivable land, the militancy of the mine workers spread to the rural regions.
In the valley of Choapa, southeast of Illapel, and in much of Aconcagua, the natural ecol-
ogy and political economy of the region forged a rural working-class militancy in the
early twentieth century; it spread to the rest of rural Chile only after the 1930s.
Agriculture in the norte chico combines pastoral activities (goats and sheep espe-
LAND AND SOCIETY 33

FPO

map 7: Chile: Mining in the NORTE GRANDE and the NORTE CHICO
(Source: Harold Blakemore, “Chile” in Latin America: Geographical Perspectives, Metheun &
Co. Ltd., London, 1971.)
34 CHILE

cially) in the cordillera with intensive cultivation of vegetables and fruit, especially
grapes, orchard crops, tomatoes, and melons. These products command excellent
prices in urban centers, particularly Santiago, because they arrive before the harvests
in the central valley. Cereal crops are also cultivated, but the region’s susceptibility to
periodic droughts makes all agriculture risky. Experiments with drought-resistant pas-
tures have given good results in some areas for sheep and goat forage. After the mid-
1960s expanded plantings of fruit orchards increased production of apricots, peaches,
avocados, and walnuts in selected area of Coquimbo to complement chirimoya, pa-
paya, and olive production.
Also in the norte chico, especially Coquimbo, there prevails a distinctive pattern of
partially communal land tenure called comunidades. Many of the comunidades origi-
nated in colonial times with mining concessions. Depletion of minerals or failure to
strike pay dirt turned the laborers’ attention to agriculture and animal husbandry.
Today the limited land of the comunidades forces young adults to migrate in search of
better opportunities. Thus the comunidades have a disproportionate number of the very
young and of older adults.
The comunidades typically contain large extensions of dry, hilly or cordillera land
which the members, called comuneros, use as a common pasture. In addition, the co-
muneros have small amounts of permanently or seasonally irrigated land divided into
parcels which they work individually. Wheat, barley, potatoes, corn, and beans are cul-
tivated, and in the higher valleys (Limarí, Hurtado, Rio Grande, Rapel) fruits and vine-
yards play an important part in the comunero economy. Goats constitute the main ani-
mal resource, providing dairy products, hides, and meat to the comuneros along with
some cash income. Intensified goat husbandry has produced significant erosion of soils
in the common pasture lands.
The circumstances of the small and medium-size mining operations and of agricul-
ture in the norte chico make stable employment a considerable problem for its popula-
tion. In the dry years comuneros seek work in the nitrate fields, the gold, silver, copper,
or iron mines in order to support their families who remain on the land. Despite their
poverty, the desperate hope of striking it rich holds many peasant-prospectors in the
region. From the exploitation of iron, however, the small miners are essentially ex-
cluded. Large foreign interests (Bethlehem Steel) have dominated ore production be-
ginning in 1921 at El Tofo, 68 kilometers north of La Serena, and then, when the ore at
El Tofo was practically depleted in the early 1960s, at El Romeral, also to the north of
La Serena some 25 kilometers. From these sites the ore is sent south to the steel mill at
Huachipato near Concepción for processing or is exported. Other centers of iron pro-
duction include Cerro Imán, southeast of Caldera and Algarrobo, some 40 kilometers
southwest of Vallenar (see map 7). The value and quality of iron exports increased sig-
nificantly from the mid-1970s until 1981 when it reached over $160 million; interna-
tional recession reduced this to around $100 million from 1984 to 1986.
In 1996 Minera Huasco, owned by the Compañía Minera del Pacífico (CMP), and
M.C. Inversiones, a subsidiary of Mitsubishi, Japan, announced the opening of a new
mine at Los Colorados to replace the practically exhausted Algarrobo mine. According
to CMP company information, iron ore exports increased from 5.7 million long tons in
1986 to over 8.3 million in 1996 along with other products from the Algarrobo, Los Col-
orados, and El Romeral facilities. The company shipped ore on the privatized and in-
ternationalized railway (FERRONOR, majority interest acquired in 1997 by Rail Amer-
ica) and the line that connected El Romeral to the mechanized port at Guayacán. In the
same immediate region in 1995–96, the Empresa Eléctrica Guacolda, S.A. (owned 50%
by Chilgener), put a new mechanized port for unloading coal and two new thermo-
LAND AND SOCIETY 35

electric plants into operation, connecting them to the central power grid (SIC). Financ-
ing and construction of the port was contracted out to Mitsibushi Corp. Thus the norte
chico took part in the transnationalization and modernization of mining in post-1980s
Chile much as it had from the 1830s to the 1870s: by importing capital, technology, fuel,
water, and foodstuffs and exporting its minerals via expanding coastal ports.
Unlike the nineteenth-century experience, however, from the late 1970s, despite
these major investments, the norte chico lost population. The long-term trend of net out-
migration continued—over 3 percent from 1977 to 1982 and the same for 1987 to 1992.
In a relative sense, almost all regions of the country saw their share of the population
reduced from 1970 to 1992 as the Santiago metropolitan region went from 28 percent to
almost 40 percent of the country’s population. While the overall population growth
rate of 1.6 percent/year in the late 1990s was down significantly from the 2.5 percent
rate in the 1960s, the growth in the Santiago metropolitan region was many time higher
because of internal migration. From 1952 to 1992 the city of Santiago grew from ap-
proximately 1.5 million to almost 5 million people, an average of over 3 percent/year
for the forty-year period. Some other major urban areas also experienced over 3 per-
cent/year average growth for this period: Arica (over 5 percent), Iquique, Antofagasta,
Copiapó, La Serena-Coquimbo, Rancagua, Los Angeles, Temuco, and Puerto Montt.
Apart from processing of agricultural commodities, pisco* production, fruit drying
and canning, fishing, and mining, the norte chico lacks significant industrial establish-
ments. Periodic droughts and the limited agricultural resources of the region, notwith-
standing some increase in irrigation and vineyard as well as fruit production near
Copiapó in the 1980s, make rural poverty endemic. This leaves many inhabitants de-
pendent for survival upon part-time mining endeavors, government make-work proj-
ects, and food distribution for survival. Extremely large investments in irrigation, crop
development, and agricultural extension are necessary before the norte chico can over-
come the obstacles to economic development imposed by nature.

At the southern extremity of Aconcagua province, the fertile region known as the
“Vale of Chile” marks the northern boundary of Chile’s heartland (Map 4). The central
valley of Chile contains some 70 percent of Chile’s population, provides more than 70
percent of industrial employment, and even accounts for 20 percent of copper produc-
tion. Within a 100-mile radius of Santiago lives more than 50 percent of Chile’s popu-
lation. The central valley, like all of Chile, is dominated by the capital city, Santiago, and
the surrounding metropolitan area. Santiago city has more than thirteen times the pop-
ulation of the country’s next largest city, Concepción. The metropolitan area grew faster
from 1970 to the 1990s than any region in Chile except sparsely populated Tarapacá,
bordering on Peru. Despite policies intended to decentralize economic activity and
public administration, Santiago’s traditional overbearing influence on the rest of the
country increased in the last decades of the twentieth century. Traffic snarls, air pollu-
tion, overtaxed public utilities and communication systems, problems with water qual-
ity—in short, all the travails of late twentieth-century cities—afflicted Santiago as the
center of Chilean “modernization.” Consuming agricultural land at its perimeters for
suburban housing developments, the capital city spilled its traffic and other urban
problems into the central valley south toward Rancagua, west toward the port at San
Antonio, and into the Andes cordillera. More than ever, Santiago was a primate city, a
megalopolis in a country without another city over 500,000 people, although the major

*A clear South American brandy made out of grapes.

36 CHILE

table 1–11. spatial distribution of population, 1952–92 (percent of total)

1952 1960 1970 1982 1992

Population in cities over 100,000 33.7 37.9 46.0 56.0 60.3

Population in cities over 20,000 47.5 55.0 62.4 68.6 72.2
Total urban population 60.7 68.2 75.1 82.2 83.5
Population in localities with less than 2000 41.2 35.5 27.8 21.5 15.5
Total rural population 39.3 31.8 24.9 17.8 16.5

Source: CELADE, Proyecto DEPUALC, based on national census for each year.

ports and metropolitan areas of Valparaíso-Viña del Mar and Concepción-Talcahuano

both were growing toward 1 million by the late 1990s.
At its widest the central valley measures some 45 miles between the Andes and the
coastal mountains or the sea, and only along the Biobío River at its southernmost bound-
ary does the flat valley floor extend all the way to the Pacific. Valparaíso, the major port
in the region, is the primary doorway for imports to the Santiago market. To the south,
Chile possesses only two other major ports—Talcahuano (Concepción) and Valdivia.
The Chilean central valley has a mediterranean climate with rainfall increasing
gradually toward the south. The climate and the fertility of the soil, reminiscent of cen-
tral California, are ideal for intensive truck farming, orchards, and vineyards in addi-
tion to cereal crops and livestock. With the advantage of a harvest season that occurs
during Europe’s and North America’s winter months, the central valley offers Chile a
source of foreign exchange through export of high-quality fruits, vegetables, wines,
dairy products, and specialty crops.
Despite this potential, prior to the 1970s extensive wheat cultivation and cattle op-
erations, along with vineyards located in a relatively small number of large estates,
dominated the valley’s agricultural history. Only a minority of these estates had moved
to more modern agricultural practices, making the backwardness of Chilean agricul-
ture a critical obstacle to economic development. After 1964 massive agrarian reform
programs disrupted traditional agricultural and land tenure patterns by creating agrar-
ian cooperatives operated by campesinos under the not always benevolent tutelage of
government administrators. After the military coup of 1973, former owners recovered
many of the large farms (perhaps 30 percent of those expropriated from 1964 to 1973),
and the new government made efforts to break up the production cooperatives into in-
dividual family farms.
More than half of the residents of the farms in the reformed sector of agriculture
failed to receive land allotments under the military government’s scheme. As a result
the policies created a group of over 35,000 landless rural workers who resorted to oc-
casional, seasonal, and migratory labor in agriculture, artisanship, or movement to
towns and cities in order to survive. Others sought shelter in small makeshift settle-
ments (villorrios) which sprang up in the countryside. At the same time a new group of
relatively prosperous small- and medium-size commercial farms emerged. Auctions of
land from the reformed sector still controlled by the land reform agency, CORA (before
its abolition in 1978), added additional units to the small and medium farm sector.
The policies of the military government emphasized creation of an active land mar-
ket to encourage efficient utilization of farm land. These policies, accompanied by the
overall focus on export promotion and on opening the Chilean economy to interna-
tional trade, altered old patterns of production and discouraged reconstitution of the
archaic hacienda system. Output of traditional agricultural crops such as wheat, sugar
LAND AND SOCIETY 37

beets, potatoes, corn, oats, and barley grew slowly or declined, though production of
some food crops, such as beans and rice, experienced notable increases. Fruits, vegeta-
bles, flowers (and lumber products from the south-central and southern regions), and
other commodities previously of relatively little importance were responsible for huge
increases in Chilean agricultural exports. In 1986 Chile satisfied 27.5 percent of total
consumption of table grapes in the United States, and exports of grapes, apples, nec-
tarines, plums, pears, and peaches, along with other assorted fruits and vegetables,
amounted to over 58 million boxes.
In the decade that followed, fruit and wine exports dramatically increased. Chile be-
came the Southern Hemisphere’s leading exporter of fruit, with over 150 million cases
shipped in the 1997–98 crop year compared to 12 million cases in the early 1970s. The
FIB value of fruit exports in 1996/97 grew to U.S.$ 1.77 billion—almost equal to the value
of copper exports a bit more than a decade before. In 1984 the entire agricultural sector
had accounted for less than $350 million in exports. By the late 1990s over 12,000 grow-
ers from region III to region VIII (Chillán) produced fruit on some 18,000 hectares, with
most of the fruit coming from region VI and the metropolitan area. As with minerals,
seafood, and forest products, a growing assortment of Chilean fruits and wines went to
increasingly diverse markets on every continent of the world. Table grapes, apples, kiwi
fruit, pears, plums, and nectarines led the list of nearly thirty major fruit exports. As with
the mining boom, the environmental costs of orchard and wine production was heavy:
increasing residues from pesticides and herbicides, fertilizer run-off into streams, and
chemical poisoning of agricultural laborers—whose union movement had been virtu-
ally destroyed in the 1980s. Like other sectors of the economy, the fruit export business
came to be dominated by a small number of transnational firms (in the 1996/97 crop
year four firms accounted for over 40 percent of fruit exports). After 1993 Dole Chile was
the leading export firm, followed by David del Curto, U.T.C., and Unifrutti. Dole, and
the other leading firms, also directly controlled many orchards, packing plants, and
wood crate and carton factories. In 1999 agriculture employed approximately 15 percent
of the active labor force; more and more these were seasonal and migrant workers in the
fields and the packing sheds, in the vineyards “as needed,” and in the forests as “sub-
contractors” with chainsaws logging native forests and commercial plantations to send
logs, pulp, and chips to Asian (especially Japanese) markets.
The dynamism in speciality crop and timber exports to Europe, Japan, Korea, other
Latin American countries, and the United States was accompanied by a trend toward
importation of more and more of the basic foodstuffs consumed internally—including
as much as 40 percent of the country’s wheat requirements in the early 1980s. Justifying
this trend and the government policies that encouraged it, an ex-Minister of Agriculture
noted in 1983 that fruit production from only 34,000 hectares would produce enough
foreign exchange to purchase more than one million tons of wheat. To produce this same
wheat in Chile would have required more than 200,000 hectares of agricultural land.
Nevertheless, under pressure of international recession, growing indebtedness, and de-
clines in foreign exchange earnings, the military government reversed policy by
strengthening price supports and introducing barely disguised import barriers to pro-
tect local agricultural producers. In the 1985–86 crop year, after five years of steep de-
clines in production, wheat output again reached some 800,000 tons. According to gov-
ernment sources this covered 90 percent of domestic consumption. By 1989 wheat
production more than doubled, then varied from 1,200,000 to 1,700,000 tons until 1998.
Like most traditional crops (corn, barley, oats, rice, potatoes, sugar beets), wheat took a
back seat to the dynamic fruit, vineyard, and forest sectors. Increased production came
as a result of greater efficiency as acreage planted declined and indirect government sub-
sidies (“price bands”) somewhat insulated these crops from international competition.
38 CHILE

With cropping patterns and land values highly responsive to international demand
and radical shifts in domestic agricultural policies, the Chilean countryside experienced
considerable economic and social instability in the years after 1973. Agro-industrial
firms linked to urban capital and transnational firms and markets increased in impor-
tance at the same time that small- and medium-size farm units also played a more sig-
nificant role in the rural sector. Seasonal labor requirements in the production of fruit,
vegetables, and in the vineyards induced unprecedented levels of labor mobility and so-
cial dislocation. With the gradual disappearance of the old pattern of resident rural labor
on the traditional haciendas and continuing rural-urban migration (over 80 percent of
Chile’s population was considered urban in 1999), it appeared that social, economic, and
political domination of the central valley by the large traditional agricultural estates had
finally ended.
The large rural estates in Chile’s central valley historically influenced much more
than agricultural production. They constituted the single most important political and
social institution in Chile. Their owners belonged to a small social elite that has con-
trolled most of Chile’s best agricultural land as well as its political institutions. As late
as 1930, from 60 to 75 percent of Chile’s rural population resided on the haciendas. The
tremendous power exercised by landowners or proprietors over the rural labor force
made each rural estate a quasi-political unit. The landowner controlled access to land,
housing, and employment. The resident rural laborer who disobeyed the landlord’s
orders risked being fined, whipped, dispossessed, or otherwise punished. Service-
tenants, or inquilinos, worked the landlord’s land in exchange for access to perhaps half
an acre or an acre of land, a house and garden plot, and various in-kind payments or
perquisites, such as food rations, firewood, or permission to graze a designated num-
ber of animals on the fundo’s pasture.
After adoption of minimum wage legislation for agriculture in 1953, landowners
theoretically paid these workers a minimum wage established by the government, pro-
vided minimally decent housing, and obeyed a number of labor laws intended to pro-
tect the workers. In practice, landowners successfully ignored or evaded the minimum
wage legislation as they had previously evaded other labor laws; workers who com-
plained or registered protests with the Labor Department faced reprisals or dismissals.
In 1952 an inspector of the Chilean Labor Department reported:

In the fundo Las Pataguas, owned by the Archbishop of Santiago but rented to Mr. Dario
Pavez, the administrator Ramiro Ramírez, aided by the foreman [mayordomo], applied
about 100 lashes to the worker [voluntario], Roberto González. The same administrator
has also whipped other workers [four named] and for this has been nicknamed “The
Lash” [El Azotador]. In fundo La Carlina, owned by Carlos Aspillaga Sotomayor, and
administered by Vicente Salazar, if workers ask for their social security booklets so they
can go to the health service, they are insulted and offered a kick in the ass.

Families who had lived for generations on a fundo could be fired and evicted at the
landowner’s whim, with no compensation for improvements they had made to their
residence or to the land by way of fences, fruit trees, or outbuildings.
The dependence of the central valley’s agriculture upon a rigidly stratified social sys-
tem and the economically inefficient fundos permeated Chilean society and made rela-
tions between the upper classes and working classes authoritarian, patronizing, and ex-
ploitative. This situation prevailed after 1932 as the Chilean political system apparently
developed into a functioning formal democracy. The inherent contradictions between a
truly democratic political system, efficient agriculture, and maintenance of the centuries-
old hacienda system generated intense political conflict in Chile in the years 1964–73.
LAND AND SOCIETY 39

It is difficult to understand the pervasive influence of the haciendas of the central

valley on Chile’s politics, economy, and social relations unless one has witnessed the
ritual subservience of the campesino listening to his landlord’s orders—the bowed
head, eyes toward the ground, hat held over the genital area—all symbolic admissions
of the huge gap separating the hacendado from “his” workers.
Lack of opportunities in the countryside, and the stifling hacienda system in the cen-
tral valley in the mid-nineteenth century, pushed rural workers to northern mining
camps, railroad construction gangs, and the cities in search of employment and a bet-
ter life. The rural to urban trend has continued throughout the twentieth century. In
1999 the Santiago metropolitan region accounted for approximately 40 percent of
Chile’s population, while over 70 percent of all Chileans lived in cities with over 20,000
inhabitants—most of these in the central valley. As the twentieth century came to an
end continued urbanization and suburbanization was gobbling up the last major vine-
yard located in the country’s capital, the historic Viña Cousiño Macul, established by
Matías Cousiño in 1856. A large sign at the corner of Quilín and Tobalaba announced a
major subdivision project by Crillón Desarrollos Inmobiliarios offering high-end hous-
ing in Peñalolén.
Not only have agriculture and the hacienda system made the central valley the po-
litical, economic, and social heartland of Chile, but historically, industrial activities
(other than the mines) have been concentrated in Santiago, Valparaíso, and Concep-

table 1–12. estimated population of major cities and

santiago metropolitan area

1992 Census 1999

Santiago (metropolitan area) 5,170,293 5,922,990 (1998)

Santiago (city) 4,048,282 4,739,946
Concepción 308,581 374,166
Viña del Mar 296,488 338,779
Valparaíso 240,611 284,679
Talcahuano 232,959 277,104
Antofagasta 219,976 248,968
Temuco 193,926 266,727
Rancagua 175,929 209,890
Arica 163,443 183,281
Talca 150,299 179,954
Iquique 133,102 166,647
Chillán 133,073 168,503
Calama 104,624 125,854
Punta Arenas 104,487 122,897
Osorno 101,730 130,014
Quilpué 99,608 118,629
La Serena 99,467 128,042
Los Angeles 92,272 114,398
Copiapó 94,249 119,861
Valdivia 88,937 124,740
Puerto Montt 86,683 135,125
Coronel 80,983 91,101
Coquimbo 72,143 132,754

Source: INE: 1992 census and estimate for 1999, courtesy INE and Fundación Terram.
40 CHILE

table 1–13. growth of population, by region, 1970–99

Percent 1999
1982 1992 Increase, Population, INE
Region 1970 Census Census 1970–92 Estimate

Tarapacá 184,180 275,144 341,112 85 386,226

Antofagasta 265,028 341,702 407,409 53 456,083
Atacama 162,081 183,407 230,786 42 264,464
Coquimbo 355,519 419,956 502,460 41 561,665
Valparaíso 1,016,099 1,210,077 1,373,967 35 1,525,494
Metropolitana (Santiago) 3,316,289 4,318,097 5,170,293 56 5,922,990
Libertador Gen. B. O’Higgins 510,869 586,672 688,385 34 768,663
Maule 649,161 730,587 834,053 28 898,418
Biobío 1,319,669 1,518,888 1,729,920 31 1,895,160
Araucanía 631,245 698,232 774,959 22 855,585
Los Lagos 782,734 848,699 953,330 22 1,039,478
Aisén 52,771 66,361 82,071 56 92,214
Magallanes and Chilean 94,020 131,914 143,058 52 155,274
Antarctica

Total 14,821,714

Source: INE census, 1999 INE estimate, courtesy Fundación Terram.

ción. Modern industry in Chile resulted largely from import-substitution through

World War II, but later expanded considerably into secondary products, heavy indus-
trial products, and capital goods. In the mid 1950s over 70 percent of all manufacturing
centered in Santiago (51%) and Valparaíso (20%). Since that time decentralization re-
sulted in the emergence of a major steel and petrochemical complex in Concepción-
Talcahuano, at the southern extreme of the central valley. Lumber industries, manu-
facturing based on processing of agricultural products, textile firms in southern Chile,
and limited industrialization in the north, typically based on mineral processing, food
production, seafood processing or canning, complement the core industrial establish-
ments of the central region.
At the Biobío River the central valley gives way to the frontier region (see Map 4) (re-
gions VIII and IX after 1974), marked by year-round rainfall. Instead of the central val-
ley’s irrigated fields on alluvial fans sloping toward the sea, the cereal and pasture
lands of the frontier region still bear the scars of forest clearing, which makes cultiva-
tion possible. From Arauco to Cautín, the overgrazed, overutilized land of the Ma-
puche Indians and other smallholders present a red-brown image of eroded soil on the
increasingly denuded coastal mountains and the valley floor. To the east the Andes con-
tinue to dominate but are not as high as they are north of the Biobío River. The climate
in this region is comparable with the Pacific Northwest of the United States, with
stormy wet winters and cool, less damp summers. The region takes its name from the
historical role it played in the struggle between the Spanish invaders and the indige-
nous Indian population. Until late in the nineteenth century the Biobío River marked
the limits of Spanish and then Chilean control (see Chapter 2). In a social and economic
sense it also remained a frontier region with very limited urban population, agricul-
tural production or industry into the late nineteenth century.
Concepción dominated the development of the frontier provinces from the time of
the conquest, serving first as the main base of the frontier garrison and later as the Biobío
LAND AND SOCIETY 41

region’s commercial center. Livestock and cereal production, which supplied the raw
materials for mills and other processing industries, paced economic development.
Talcahuano is the region’s major port and features the country’s most important
naval shipyards owned by the Navy’s ASMAR. Created as an autonomous govern-
ment agency in 1960, ASMAR also operated smaller and less sophisticated facilities in
Valparaíso and Punta Arenas. A joint venture with General Electric Company of Eng-
land (GEC), SISDEF Ltda. founded in 1983 and located at Viña del Mar has developed
various military systems, such as command and control, mission control, fire control
systems, and simulators (many listed on the companies’ Web site product page). The
ASMAR Talcahuano facilities are the most important, offering repair, maintenance and
modernization of naval and commercial vessels, specialized armaments, and electronic
works. The naval presence in Talcahuano and ASMAR’s new initiatives have con-
tributed to the region’s growth since the 1980s; it also makes the port city extremely im-
portant politically as the government considers control of the seas, economic growth,
and civil-military relations.
Mining activities, principally coal, also played a role, and the mines around Lota re-
mained economically important into the 1980s. A traditional bastion of coal mine
unions and leftist political parties, Lota and environs suffered the political and eco-
nomic consequences of the military regime’s policies. In the 1997, the deepening of the
neoliberal model and the losses accumulated by the government-owned National Coal
Enterprise (ENACAR) resulted in the Lota mine’s closing, despite strikes and violent
protest marches in Santiago. The government announced a redevelopment plan for the
region, based in part on a major upgrading of the port, sales of ENACAR properties as
industrial condominiums, and public investment in roads, waterworks, and housing.
Miners and ex-ENACAR employees received severance pay, pensions, and some re-
training, but the immediate impacts of ENACAR’s decisions were a combination of bit-
terness and nostalgia for a “way of life” that was being lost.
In political terms, the government’s decision on the Lota mines seemed to ratify the
decline of the old political left, the weakness of the labor movement, and the turn to pri-
vate initiative as the engine of economic growth. The opportunity to modernize the
port of Lota was offered to private international bidders and the Lota-ENACAR prop-
erties were also put on the auction block. An effort to promote tourism through the coal
mines at Lota, under the Pacific Ocean, remained limited to an “adventure excursion”
for those willing to be lowered in the iron cage some 120 feet below the surface to begin
a claustrophobic, kilometer-long trek to a mine face. The tour, led by ex-miners through
the empty shaft, bereft of light except for the battery-powered lamps on the borrowed
miners’ hats, reminded visitors of the hellacious conditions suffered from the 1840s to
the 1990s by generations of coal miners—so vividly described in Baldomero Lillo’s
short stories, such as “The Devil’s Pit” (1904): “Between starving and being crushed
by a cave-in, the latter was definitely preferable. It had the advantage of being quick.
. . . So they had to submit, to fill the vacancies that this Devil’s Pit constantly opened
in the files of the weak unfortunates who spent their lives in constant struggle against
the adversities of fortune, abandoned by all and against whom any injustice and in-
dignity was permitted.”
Agriculture in the frontier region depends much less on irrigation than is the case in
the central valley of Chile with its Mediterranean climate. Farms in the frontier
provinces accounted for around 40 percent of Chile’s wheat production in the mid-
1980s—a relative increase since the 1970s—attributable in part to a 40 to 50 percent de-
cline in national wheat output in the period 1976–77/1982–83. The region also con-
tributed some 35 to 40 percent of the country’s cattle output, while an often backward
42 CHILE

timber industry provided seasonal employment for numerous rural workers and raw
material for Chile’s expanding paper and cellulose manufacturers in the region around
the Arauco, La Laja, Nacimiento triangle. Between 1975 and 1994 the forestry sector in
Chile grew at an average rate of 6.7 percent/year, faster than agriculture, mining, and
industry. Saw wood; pulp; wood chips (astillas); finished wood products such as furni-
ture, windows, and doors; paper; particle board and plywood (by 1995 Chile was the
largest medium density fiberboard producer in Latin America); and newsprint were the
main exports. In 1997 approximately 45 percent of forest exports went to Asian markets,
much of them from the port at San Vicente (Talcahuano). Though over 1500 sawmills
were in operation, less than ten firms dominated the pulp industry, headed by major
transnational companies: Copec, Shell, CMPC, and Attihholtz. The trend toward even
further concentration of production and ownership was ongoing, making any snapshot
of the industry almost immediately inaccurate. To illustrate, in late 1997: “The Royal
Dutch/Shell Group of Companies (Shell) announced the acquisition of interests held by
Empresas (CMPC, Companía Manufacturera de Papeles y Cartones, the major firm in
the Matte group conglomerate, 19.95%) and Inversiones Citiminera Limitada, ICL
(19.95%) in Forestal y Agrícola Monte Aguila S.A. (Monte Aguila), a company of the
Santa Fe Group owning and managing Eucalyptus plantations in region VIII. As a re-
sult Shell would own 99.97 percent of Monte Aguila while .03 percent would remain
with existing shareholders. At the same time, CMPC would acquire from Shell and ICL
their respective shareholdings in Forestal e Industrial Santa Fe S.A. (Santa Fe), the Santa
Fe Group company owning and managing a Eucalyptus pulp mill in Nacimiento, Chile.
As a result, CMPC would become the 100 percent owner of Santa Fe.” In addition, a long
term wood supply agreement was signed between Monte Aguila and Santa Fe. Thus,
like the Chilean national economy and the environmental resources upon which it de-
pended, the Concepción area’s regional history was more and more being determined
and written amongst large transnational corporations and their local Chilean conglom-
erate associates (labeled grupos económicos in Chile, the major groups in 1997 were An-
gelini, Matte, Luksic, Yuraszeck, and Said). Expanded hydroelectric capacity installed
in the cordillera near Lake La Laja to the east of Los Angeles, including plants at El Toro,
El Abanico, and the newer facility slightly to the west at Antuco, supported the agro-
industrial complex of the region and exported power to the central valley.
In 1989 the Chilean government approved plans for the hydroelectric development
of the Biobío River by ENDESA, the privatized electric and resource development com-
pany. The river runs through the ancestral lands of the Pehuenche Indians, and the pro-
posed project had massive environmental impacts. ENDESA, relying on the 1982 Elec-
trical Services’ Decree Law promulgated by the military government, intended to
exercise the right of eminent domain to take the Pehuenche lands. Before 1994 no law
existed that required environmental impact statements for even such large-scale proj-
ects. ENDESA asked the World Bank Group for financing for six dams, though it ar-
gued that the first project, the Pangue dam, was “stand alone” in the event the others
were not built. The Chilean government and ENDESA built a road in 1990 from the Pan
American highway into the upper Biobío escarpment. Passage of environmental legis-
lation and the Indigenous Peoples Law (1993) gave environmentalists, the Indian peo-
ples, and international human rights activists a new basis for resisting the massive hy-
droelectric scheme, involving at least six major dams and displacement of hundreds of
Indian people.
ENDESA claimed that the 1982 Electrical Services Law took precedence and insisted
on the need, first, to build the Ralco dam (upstream from Pangue) and then continue
with the rest of the project. In 1996 the National Indigenous Development Commission
(CONADI), the agency created by the Indigenous Peoples Law, charged that the EN-
LAND AND SOCIETY 43

DESA projects violated the law; the Chilean president and his cabinet seemed to sup-
port “development,” forcing the resignation of CONADI’s director. The Pangue dam
was completed in 1996, but the World Bank admitted it had erred in supporting the
project and that ENDESA had violated the environmental conditions stipulated in the
financing agreement. Controversy continued into 1999, with all sides maintaining ac-
tive international and domestic public relations campaigns.
Environmentalists and some of the affected Pehuenches, with political support from
leftist groups and students, engaged in protests, some violent, in efforts to stop the
Ralco project. Like many of the massive projects in the desert north, the expansion of
the hydroelectric system in the frontier provinces raised numerous political, legal, and
environmental issues. In a special report (1998), the Committee for Human Rights of
the American Anthropological Association summed up these issues as follows: “[T]he
damage to the environment, society, and human rights inflicted by the Pangue-Ralco
project has many precedents in World Bank-financed, grand-scale development proj-
ects requiring the removal and resettlement of local populations. . . . [The chronic in-
stitutional problems] result from the recently intensified emphasis on privatization in
development financing associated with economic globalization, and accompanying
pressures for the abolition of public control over economic activity.” But the rapidly ex-
panding forest, mining, chemical, and fishery industries of the region and the country
required more power; almost 75 percent of Chile’s electricity was from hydroelectric
plants in the late 1990s. Meanwhile, the United States Energy Information Administra-
tion lauded Chile in 1997 as “a shining example of how free trade policies and privati-
zation efforts can fuel economic growth.”
Fishing and related industries, especially fishmeal, also contribute significantly to
the regional economy in the Biobío region, but much less so to the south in Araucanía.
In the mid-1990s Talcahuano, Tomé, San Vicente, and Coronel along with other smaller
embarkation points shipped over 50 percent of Chile’s expanding fishery exports, and
lesser shares of shellfish (5–10%) and algaes (10–15%). As in the case of mineral and
agricultural products, Chilean seafood and fishmeal exports increasingly went to Asian
markets, but shipments also increased to the United States and Europe. Control over
exports of the fishery sector, from fishmeal to frozen seafood, also became more and
more concentrated in a small number of firms, dominated by the major economic
groups and foreign investors.
Also found in the frontier provinces are the remaining communal landholdings (re-
ducciones) of the Araucanian (Mapuche) Indians. Deprived of much of their land by the
Spanish conquest, and further despoiled by speculators and politicians in the nine-
teenth century, many Mapuche continue to eke out a livelihood through pastoral, agri-
cultural, and artisan activities. Estimates of the number of Mapuche in the reducciones
vary considerably, but there are probably between 300,000 and 500,000. Some reduc-
ciones are located in Valdivia, but most are in the provinces of Biobío, Arauco, Malleco,
and Cautín—the last alone accounts for almost 200,000 Mapuche. In Cautín the reduc-
ciones contain some 343,000 hectares, accounting for 22 percent of the agricultural land
in the province, and 86 percent of all agricultural units.
The Mapuche on the reducciones—or sometimes “ex-reducciones,” or comunidades
without legal title—are family groups that exploit the land, both in common and on in-
dividual parcels. Data from an investigation carried out in 1966 by the Dirección de
Asuntos Indígenas on 493 reducciones indicated that the average reducción amounted
to 290 hectares with a population of 83 persons. Economic activity in the reducciones
includes fishing and seaweed collection along the coast, lumbering, charcoal making,
and extensive production of pigs, sheep, chickens, and cattle, as well as crops. House-
hold manufactures include basketmaking, weaving, and metal working.
44 CHILE

FPO

map 8: Chile: Central Power Grid, 1997

(Source: CDEC-SIC Estadísticas de Operaciones, 1988–1997.)
LAND AND SOCIETY 45

The Mapuche are a poor people subjugated by outsiders after a four-century strug-
gle to maintain their independence. The bravery of the Mapuche, celebrated in Alonso
de Ercilla’s epic poem La Araucana, may afford a source of national pride for educated
Chileans, but the persisting poverty of these Indians seems to have little effect on the na-
tional conscience. Chileans adore Indian heroes such as Lautaro and Caupolicán who
defeated the conquistadors but, like their North American counterparts, ignore the pres-
ent-day plight of the Mapuche. One study of the Mapuche in the 1970s concluded: “The
Mapuche works his depleted lands and waits. For a long time he has lived . . . in a
world not under his control. He has lost his land. . . . He lives exploited, submerged
in poverty.” From 1965 to 1973 agrarian reform programs mobilized many Mapuche for
land occupations or “recuperations.” After 1973 the return of land to former owners and
repression of organized rural militancy have restored “calm” to the region, but at the
cost of the assassinations of Mapuche leaders and the deaths of Indian farmers.
As part of its program to modernize Chilean agriculture and create a national land
market, the military government implemented a new law in 1979 promoting subdivi-
sion of the Mapuche reservations. At the time this decree-law took effect the govern-
ment estimated that some 58,000 Indian families controlled 2066 “properties” consist-
ing of a total of 375,500 hectares. To encourage subdivision the government offered
property tax exemptions of up to twenty years; by the end of 1982 the government re-
ported that more than 42,000 Mapuches had requested “regularization” of their land ti-
tles, and that more than 30,000 had already received title to individual parcels. Sys-
tematic studies of the impact of this legislation on the Indian communities remain to be
completed, but initial indications suggest that intracommunity conflict and social dis-
location have resulted, along with intensified outmigration to towns and urban centers.
Many of the Indians work as day laborers on neighboring farms or seasonal hands dur-
ing peak agricultural periods. Beyond the economic consequences of the subdivision
law, however, parcelization of the Indian reducciones threatened the cultural founda-
tions of the Mapuche community, based as it was on kinship relations and communal
land-tenure patterns. Indicative of the plight of these Indian peoples was the title of a
revealing study of the Mapuche published in 1983: “Poverty and Subsistence in Con-
temporary Mapuche Society.” The previously mentioned report by the American An-
thropological Association regarding the Pehuenche people in 1998 in the upper Biobío
region is illustrative:
[T]he Pehuenche struggle for economic survival under harsh climatic and economic
conditions, maintaining a close attachment to ancestral territories and nature. . . .
Access to forest products protects those below the poverty line from becoming indi-
gent and those below the indigence line from starvation. Wood cutting provides the
principal source of income for at least 30% of the households. Taking advantage of
summer pastures, Pehuenche collect piñón (Araucaria pine nuts) which are their pri-
mary source of nourishment.
Often little better off than the Mapuche, thousands of campesinos work their small
parcels throughout the frontier provinces, barely scratching out a subsistence from de-
pleted soil. During the winter rains long periods of relative idleness are spent around
wood-burning stoves in small houses built from the native trees of the region. Larger
farms also exist, but they lack the large resident populations previously characteristic
of the central valley.
While most of the frontier region is rural and agricultural, more than 70 percent of
the population lives in urban places (almost 80% in the Biobío region and more than
60% in the region of Araucanía). Significant industrial activities include Chile’s steel
industry at Huachipato, textiles, forest industries, including cellulose, paper, and fur-
46 CHILE

niture, petrochemicals, seafood, and processing of agricultural products, such as flour,

beet sugar, matches, cooking oil, cheese, and butter. Southeast of Concepción, Temuco,
the historical capital of “Indian territory,” experienced extraordinary growth from the
mid-1980s and a construction boom changed the face and the character of a formerly
tranquil provincial center. Remodeling of the old rustic central market greatly im-
proved sanitary conditions at the cost of a certain authenticity. The ubiquitous ox and
horse carts of the 1960s and 1970s were a much rarer sight in the 1990s. Urban traffic
snarls, pedestrian jams on the narrow streets, and industrial and automobile pollution
of the air and water made Temuco and environs a part of the Chilean “miracle.” Paved
roads from Temuco to the coast at Puerto Saavedra replaced the rutted gravel and dirt
kidney tortures of the past. Nostalgia aside, this was a great improvement for the en-
tire region’s commerce and tourism that also facilitated exploitation of its remaining
forests and suburbanization of the countryside in an expanding radius from the re-
gional capital. Although many of the region’s indigenous peoples still remained out-
side the socioeconomic “mainstream” and discrimination against them persisted, the
Biobío River no longer separated a “frontier region” (except in name) from the rest of
the country. Significant industrial activities of the region include Chile’s steel industry
at Huachipato, paper and cellulose manufacture, textiles, petrochemicals, and process-
ing of lumber, flour, beet sugar, matches, cooking oil, cheese, and butter.

The lake region—the provinces of Valdivia, Osorno, and Llanquihue—begins south of

the Toltén River and is an extension of the frontier provinces (Map 5). Storminess in-
creases as one moves south and is greater, latitude for latitude, in Chile than in North
America. Valdivia (lat. 39° 48⬘ S) receives almost three times the annual rainfall of
Tacoma, Washington. Founded by Pedro de Valdivia in 1552, the city of Valdivia wit-
nessed one of the most memorable amphibious military operations in South American
history when, in 1820, Lord Cochrane led a seemingly suicidal assault against Spanish
fortifications to capture the port for the independence movement.
Renowned for its natural beauty, the lake region contains numerous snow-capped
volcanoes; the tourists it draws supplement agricultural activities. Valuable natural
hardwood forests as well as plantations of pines are the basis for an expanding timber
industry. Depletion of the natural forests, however, meant that more of all lumber came
from the pine plantations. Dairy farms, beef cattle, and other livestock dominate the
agrarian economy, though cereals and diversified small-scale farming also contribute.
The lake region supplies much of the country’s potatoes, oats, and barley.
Valdivia, Osorno, and Puerto Montt are the most important urban centers in this re-
gion, where almost 40 percent of the population still lives in the rural sector. Most of
the industries, like that in the frontier provinces, depend upon agrarian production—
lumber, wood products, flour mills, textiles, canneries, beer, beet sugar, leather prod-
ucts—or else upon the harvest of the sea. From the remaining native forests and pine
plantations of the region comes high quality lumber, while the sea yields a variety of
fish and shellfish, thereby supporting a number of canneries and processing plants in
Puerto Montt, Chiloe, and Valdivia. In the 1990s the Lake region accounted for almost
50 percent of shellfish exports.
Many industries owe their existence to the influence of German immigrants enticed
to Chile in the mid-nineteenth century. When the newly formed Society for Industrial
Development (Sociedad de Fomento Fabril, 1883) published a preliminary list of in-
dustries in Valdivia and Osorno in 1884, all the breweries, tanneries, brick factories,
bakeries, machine shops, furniture manufacturers, and mills (except one) belonged to
persons with non-Spanish (mostly German) surnames. While this was the principal re-
LAND AND SOCIETY 47

gion of Chile in which the national government actively intervened to promote colo-
nization in the nineteenth century, the relatively small number of immigrants (perhaps
3000) heavily influenced the economic and cultural development of the provinces from
Cautín south, and especially Osorno, Valdivia, and Llanquihue. For example, in 1902 a
list of the rural estates in the commune of Valdivia valued at over 40,000 pesos con-
tained not a single Spanish surname. The descendants of these immigrants who cleared
dense forest land and prospered through their toil and intellect are still a dominant
force in the economy of the lake region.

The territory south from the Gulf of Reloncaví, comprising almost a third of continen-
tal Chile, contains no more than 3 percent of the nation’s population. This is a region of
cold driving winds, great storminess and rainfall, and rough seas. In places rainfall ex-
ceeds 200 inches a year. Between Puerto Montt and about latitude 44° S the main struc-
tural features of central Chile continue—though the coastal mountain range now runs
partly beneath the sea or becomes a chain of forested islands. The snowfall in the east-
ern cordillera descends to only 2300 feet above sea level at Tierra del Fuego.
The island of Chiloé (lat. 42° S), in a geographical position similar to Vancouver Is-
land in North America, is a forested territory where smallholders and a small number
of indigenous peoples engage in subsistence agriculture, sheep raising, lumbering,
fishing, and potato cultivation. Chiloé makes no great economic contribution to the na-
tional economy, although shellfish and salmon aquaculture took off in the 1990s. Its
main towns are Ancud and Castro.
Aisén province is made up of canals, lakes, islands, and mountains, though grass-
lands and plains support thousands of sheep. Aysén, along with Magallanes, is Chile’s
last frontier. Punta Arenas, located on the Strait of Magellan, is Chile’s most southerly
city (pop. 107,000 [1985]). It supports a number of industries based on the thousands of
sheep raised on the Patagonian plains. Oil wells and natural gas exploration have in-
creased the economic importance of Magallanes in recent years. Most of the petroleum
is shipped to Concón, near Valparaíso, or to Concepción for refining, though a topping
plant at Manantiales, where the first wells were exploited in 1945, supplies Magallanes
with gasoline, kerosene, and diesel fuel.
In the early 1980s oil wells in the Strait of Magellan accounted for over 70 percent of
total output. New oil production in the years after 1980, combined with expanded coal
production, made possible by exploration and investment by foreign firms, allowed
Chile to cover approximately 50 percent of its hydrocarbon requirements. Develop-
ment of new coal mines in the Peckett deposits, 36 miles northeast of Punta Arenas,
promised to alleviate to some degree Chile’s deficit of fossil fuels, with output destined
to a great extent for the thermoelectric plant at Tocopilla. After 1992 the Compañía de
Carbones de Magallanes, S.A., an affiliate of COCAR, S.A., which had begun produc-
tion in 1987, exploited the Peckett coal deposit with open-pit technology and produced
around 1 million tons a year. In 1997 underground methods were introduced in hopes
of improving output to satisfy the country’s thermoelectric appetite at Tocopilla, Mejil-
lones, Patache, and elsewhere. Increased production and exports of natural gas along
with large-scale foreign investment in the Cape Horn Methanol plant near Punta Are-
nas also gave increasing importance to Magallanes in the national economy. Neverthe-
less, Chile still imported annually between $500 million and $980 million worth of
fuel—the equivalent in value to 25 to 40 percent of the value of copper exports (1980–
85). In the next decade Chile’s oil demand more than doubled, and crude oil produc-
tion declined by two-thirds. Oil imports increased significantly, from Argentina, Nige-
ria, Ecuador, Venezuela, and Angola. Sipetrol, S.A., an affiliate of the National Petro-
48 CHILE

leum Company (ENAP) operating in the Argentine Patagonia, provided much of the
Argentine crude; the other major Argentine contribution came from the Transandean
Oil Pipeline running from Neuquén, Argentina, to Talcahuano. The country’s major re-
fineries, operated by ENAP at ConCon (RPC), Talcahuano (Petrox), and Magallanes
imported over 90 percent of their crude oil, a major item in the country’s international
trade and balance of payments, ranging from 800 million to 1.2 billion dollars annually
from 1990 to 1999. Offshore exploration continued, both in the Magallanes region and
in the far north; additional Methanol plants were planned near Punta Arenas.

The vast majority of Chileans descend from the European invaders of the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries and the Indian peoples resident in Chile at the time of Spanish
conquest. Africans and non-Iberian Europeans contributed much less to the formation
of the Chilean nationality. As elsewhere in Spanish America, Spanish racism and social
prejudices have generally reserved the highest social and political positions for those
who claimed “purity of blood” (limpieza de sangre), thereby creating caste-class stratifi-
cations that distinguished Spaniards from “white” mestizos, “Indian” mestizos, Indi-
ans, blacks, mulattoes, and zambos (offspring of Indian and black). From generation
to generation stratification could become quite complex within the castas (racially
mixed peoples), but customs and legal practices sought to ensure the “integrity” of the
ruling class, especially after the massive miscegenation of the sixteenth and seven-
teenth centuries.
Legal suits filed in the late eighteenth century by family members who feared that a
proposed marriage might put a stain on the family honor reveal the fundamental racial
and social biases of colonial society. Royal officials were asked to prohibit marriages on
the legal grounds of “inequality of castes.” An irate mother could “charge” a would-be
son-in-law with being the grandson and great-grandson of blacks, “mulatto-colored,”
or “a pure mulatto” with “obviously Negro hair.” While official Spanish policy declared
that “being an Indian is not a rational or just motive for denial of parental consent,”
Chilean colonists looked with disfavor upon “staining the family honor” with marriage
to Indians or “Indian mestizos.” But these attitudes no more prevented widespread con-
cubinage and miscegenation in the later colonial period than they had in the formation
of Chilean nationality in the mestizaje of the first century and a half of conquest.
While Chilean national mythology claims descendancy from Spaniards and Arau-
canians, the Indian component of Chilean racial stock was somewhat more varied than
this simple union of the heroic Araucanian Indians with their European enemies.
About the indigenous population in Chile at the time of the conquest much less is
known than about the Indians of Mexico, Central America, and Peru. Some investiga-
tors believe all originated in a single racial stock, differentiated in customs, language,
and organization over time in response to local conditions. Other researchers affirm the
diversity of the indigenous groups in Chile, noting differences in language, culture,
farming implements, weapons, and political organization. The nomenclature adopted
to describe Indian groups often referred merely to their location—for example, puelches
(people of the east, eastern cordillera down to Mendoza); picunches (people of the
north—though those south of the puelches called them picunches). Less gradually the
Spaniards came to refer to los pencos, los quillotanos, los mapochos, and so on, but again
these names simply denote Indians of Penco, Quillota, and Mapocho.
As there are neither important archaeological sites south of Copiapó, nor a written
language, nor any large territorial political units, we are unlikely to have any great clar-
ification of the evolution of pre-Hispanic Indian cultures in Chile except in the north,
where the desert has preserved artifacts and cemeteries thousands of years old. Con-
ventional designations of major Indian groups in Chile at the time of the conquest de-
LAND AND SOCIETY 49

pend upon the work of a limited number of scholars, most notably Ricardo Latcham.
Latcham adopted the generic terms Diaguitas (valley of Copiapó to the Choapa River),
Mapuche or Araucanian (Itata River to Toltén River), and Huilliches (south of Toltén
River). In reality no such clear-cut divisions are possible since Araucanian is an inde-
pendent linguistic family, and each region or tribal group in Chile apparently had only
small differences of dialect. The authoritative Handbook of South American Indians divides
the Araucanians into the following main groups: Picunche, Mapuche, Huilliche, and
Cunco (west of the Andes), Pehuenche (Andean Highlands), Argentine Araucanians
(east of the Andes). New research by Guillaume Boccara (1999) and others on the re-
sponse of native Indian peoples in Chile to the Spanish conquest suggests that the term
mapuche only came to be commonly used after the mid-eighteenth century and that be-
fore that time it was more appropriate to use the term reche (hombre auténtico o verdadero,
the “authentic or true man”) to refer to the native peoples between the Itata and Toltén
rivers. Use of “Araucanians” refers indiscriminately to the native peoples living in the
territory of Arauco and does not include other native peoples. Present-day usage in
Chile refers to the major Indian groups south of the River Itata as Araucanos or, more
frequently, simply Mapuche. Estimates of the Araucanian population at the time of the
Spanish conquest range from 500,000 to 1,500,000. According to the 1992 census, “Arau-
canians” or “Mapuches” numbered over 900,000, making them by far the largest ethnic
minority in the country (although many people identified as Mapuche in the census
were, biologically, mestizos), followed by main Indian groups in the far north: Aymaras,
Quechuas, Atacameños, and Kollas. The National Indigenous Development Commis-
sion (CONADI), created in 1993 by the government of President Patricio Aylwin, esti-
mated that these groups together numbered perhaps 100,000 people in the late 1990s.
Handfuls of other native peoples, such as the Kawashkar (less than one hundred) and
the Yaganes (less than fifty), still “survived” in the Canal zone to the south and around
the Strait of Magellan. The other major ethnic group recognized by the CONADI is the
native people of Rapa Nui, Chile’s Pacific Island territory.
Prior to the arrival of the Spanish, Inca influence and tribute collection extended as
far south as the Itata River or perhaps the Biobío River, but gradually diminished to-
ward the south. Despite initial resistance and occasional revolts, by the mid-seven-
teenth century the Spaniards had pacified, enslaved, or exploited most of the Indian
groups north of the Maule River, exacting tribute and recruiting military auxiliaries, as
had the Incas. From the River Maule south and into what became the frontier provinces
(south of the Biobío River), the Araucanians effectively resisted Spanish domination, as
they had that of the Incas. By 1568 the Araucanians were making significant use of cav-
alry in battle against the Spaniards, and well before the end of the sixteenth century
they had adopted Spanish firearms, swords, armor, and any other armaments they
could capture. By 1600 the Indian stock of horses, estimated at over 10,000, greatly ex-
ceeded the horses available to the Spanish settlers and frontier garrisons. Though a
simple people with limited handicrafts, a subsistence agriculture, and highly dispersed
settlement patterns with no centralized political authority, the Araucanians developed
a complex system for organizing large-scale military forces to defend their territory. In-
deed, their very dispersion and lack of centralized political structure made virtually
impossible either a definitive “victory” or the administration of a Spanish conquest on
a scale like that of Peru.
Though they attained no definitive military victory, the Spanish did subjugate thou-
sands of Indians to work in mines, fields, or households. In addition, many Spaniards
transferred “their” Indians (Huarpes) from Cuyo (including the towns of present-day
Mendoza, San Juan, and San Luis in Argentina) to Santiago or La Serena. Miscegena-
tion and the gradual reduction in the number of “pacified” Indians meant that by the
50 CHILE

mid-seventeenth century mestizos constituted a majority of the rural population. Popu-

lation data on Chile in the colonial period must be viewed with great caution since con-
temporary writers provided widely disparate estimates. Chilean historian Francisco
Encina estimated that at the end of the seventeenth century the population of Chile,
north of the Biobío River, consisted of 110,000 Spanish and “mestizos classified as
such,” 20,000 Indians and “Indian” mestizos, 15,000 blacks, mulattoes and zambos, and
7000 pacified Indians in Chiloé. Most Chileans lived in rural districts on the vast ha-
ciendas or encomiendas. According to the educated estimate of Chilean researcher
Rolando Mellafe, as early as 1620 “white” mestizos already outnumbered European
and criollo settlers by a ratio of some four to one.
As in the rest of Spanish America, the total population of Chile was substantially re-
duced due to the effects of the conquest on the native peoples. Mortality among
the Spaniards was also high; at the close of the sixteenth century 20 to 25 percent of
the Spanish population were killed in the Indian uprising which liquidated eight of the
twelve “cities” then in existence. Disease and natural disasters, including earthquakes
and floods, also contributed to the losses. Only in the mid-nineteenth century (1843)
did the population of Chile (including the unconquered Indians south of the Biobío
River) approximate what it had been in 1540—about one million! Of these, historian
Luis Galdames has estimated that no more than 40 percent were of European descent
and the remainder were Indian and castas, including several thousand Negro slaves.
From the outset the towns were the centers of European civilization in Chile, but
none could really be called cities until the eighteenth century. Near the end of the colo-
nial period (1810), Chile contained thirty or more so-called cities; Santiago had some
40,000 inhabitants, and the next largest town, Concepción, some 5000 to 6000. Increas-
ingly, however, the population of Chile moved to towns and cities, so that by 1875 over
25 percent of the population could be found in “urban” places; by 1907 this had in-
creased to 43 percent. According to official estimates in the mid-1990s, approximately
85 percent of all Chileans lived in urban areas.
Unlike Argentina and Brazil, Chilean population growth in the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries depended little upon the waves of European immigration that also
greatly changed the composition of the United States’s population during these years.
In 1895 only 2.9 percent of Chile’s 2,687,985 inhabitants were foreign born, and in 1907
this had increased but to 4 percent of a total population of 3,114,755. While by the early
1900s hundreds of thousands of Italians had become agricultural laborers or tenant
farmers or had settled in urban areas in Argentina, from 1889 until 1914 total net im-
migration to Chile reached only about 55,000. The largest foreign contingents arrived
from Peru, Bolivia, and Spain. Despite their small numbers, however, European immi-
grants owned nearly one-third of Chile’s commercial companies (1907), 20 percent of
the 554 most valuable rural estates (1908), and, by 1914, 49 percent of all industrial es-
tablishments. European, Syrian, and Lebanese immigrants to Chile rarely became rural
laborers or urban workers, as in Argentina, but instead formed an upper-middle-class
commercial element which often intermarried with Chilean social elites.
The role of the immigrants was most apparent in the mining districts of the north, in
the major cities of Antofagasta, Santiago, Valparaíso, Concepción, and Valdivia, and in
the farming regions of the south, heavily influenced by Germans. The immigrants’ role
in Chilean urban society continued into the 1960s, when estimates indicated that three-
fourths of Santiago’s major industrial establishments were owned by immigrants or
their offspring. Emigration to Chile, consequently, little affected the race and class strat-
ifications that grew out of the miscegenation and politics of conquest, and only served
to insert a small, heterogeneous, non-Hispanic, upper- and upper-middle-class group
LAND AND SOCIETY 51

A huaso on horseback, 1953.

(Courtesy of Archivo
Universidad de Chile.)

Campesino and ox-team,

Central Valley, 1952.
(Courtesy of Archivo
Universidad de Chile.)
52 CHILE

table 1–14. estimated population of chile, june 30, 1998

(rural and urban distribution and distribution by sex and region)

Male Female

Region Total Urban Rural Total Urban Rural

Total 7,336,118 6,153,975 1,182,143 7,485,596 6,469,084 1,016,512

Tarapacá 196,806 184,698 12,108 189,420 181,247 8173
Antofagasta 231,500 221,198 10,302 224,583 221,005 3578
Atacama 136,058 120,731 15,327 128,406 119,774 8632
Coquimbo 279,244 199,229 80,015 282,421 211,306 71,115
Valparaíso 746,221 676,124 70,097 779,273 717,411 61,862
Libertador General 390,564 255,357 135,207 378,099 259,445 118,654
B. O’Higgins
Maule 453,546 273,805 179,741 444,872 288,158 156,714
Biobío 944,228 741,473 202,755 950,932 772,898 178,034
Araucanía 429,233 270,489 158,744 426,352 286,765 139,587
Los Lagos 524,910 329,742 195,168 514,568 343,360 171,208
Aisén 48,361 34,091 14,270 43,853 34,370 9,483
Magallanes and Antarctic 82,050 73,388 8,662 73,224 69,658 3566
Santiago metropolitan 2,873,397 2,773,650 99,747 3,049,593 2,963,687 85,906
region

Source: INE, Compendio Estadístico, 1998: 85.

between the upper castes of Hispanic society and the mass of Indian, mestizo, and casta
laborers in the fields, mines, docks, and factories.
Class and caste stratifications have also produced certain Chilean stereotypes which
serve both as national symbols and pejorative epithets, particularly the roto and the
huaso. The huaso is the Chilean cowboy but connotes much more. The flesh and blood
huaso is a campesino on horseback or in the fields, who, before the 1970s, worked from
sunup to sundown, frequently barefoot or in crude sandals called ojotas, and wearing
an apron or a flour sack around his waist. When not at work he sported a jacket inher-
ited from his father or older brother and a well-worn hat. There is also the tourist’s
huaso, dressed for the rodeo in a three-colored manta and a sash around his waist (red,
white, and blue like the Chilean flag). He rides a strong, well-kept horse which he
prods with silver spurs. This was the hacendado, or his hireling, dressed in his best
huaso outfit to visit the countryside at the harvest or to make sure the campesinos at-
tend to their labors. The first huaso, the rural worker, bears the brunt of hundreds of
country bumpkin jokes. The latter, the postcard huaso, typifies the historic rural basis
of the wealth and power of many of Chile’s leading families. Together they are the story
of Chile—a national symbol which denotes hard work, sacrifice, and struggle to the
campesino, and power, leisure, and privilege to the hacendado.
The roto is the urban counterpart of the huaso. The roto is the Chilean worker, coura-
geous, strong, persistent, quick to take advantage of a favorable opportunity (Vivo!).
But roto also means “broken one.” The command ¡No sea roto! lets one know that he is
lacking in social graces, that his behavior is out of line. Perhaps only the typically
southern Chilean insult ¡No sea indio! (“don’t act like an Indian”) is as denigrating a
way to put someone “in his place” as to call him roto. Yet used among family and
friends, with the right tone of voice, with the appropriate adjective—roto choro—roto
becomes a compliment, even a sign of affection.
LAND AND SOCIETY 53

El roto chileno, Central Market,

circa 1960. (Courtesy of Archivo
Universidad de Chile.)

Chilean Congress, 1961. (Courtesy of Archivo Universidad de Chile.)

54 CHILE

Joaquín Edwards Bello, a leading twentieth-century Chilean novelist, published El

Roto Chileno just after World War I. It depicts the underworld of Santiago society—the
brothel, the gambling den, the police station . . . the Senate. There was a bit of the roto
at all levels of Chilean society, but while the working-class roto languished in prison or
died in the streets, the upper-class roto, the Senator and his collaborators at the police
station, lived the good life. Edwards Bello’s El Roto makes clear that the good life of
these latter depended upon the exploitation and suffering of the former. Like the huaso
then, the roto is a complex symbol of chilenidad (“Chilean nationality”) which signifies
both the misery of the poverty-stricken worker and the viveza (“opportunism”) of those
who benefit from the sweat of his toil.
Since the conquest this tension between the powerful minority and the vast major-
ity of the territory’s population has been at the core of Chilean history. The most recent
chapters of this story saw the breakdown of the country’s much-celebrated “democ-
racy,” almost seventeen years of military dictatorship, and return to civilian govern-
ment in 1990. At the beginning of the third millennium, Chile sought to find finally a
balance between its authoritarian legacy and its urge for social justice and political
democracy, to reconcile not only the antagonists of the recent past, but also almost five
centuries of exploitation of land, resources, and peoples for the benefit of the ruling
minorities.
2 The Politics of Conquest

In the sixteenth century Spanish soldiers, ecclesiastics, and administrators created a

vast colonial empire in North and South America. Moving from their initial bases in the
Caribbean—Haiti, Santo Domingo, Cuba—the Spanish and their Indian allies con-
quered and despoiled the major indigenous civilizations of Mexico, Central America,
and the west coast of South America. In the name of the monarchy and the Church they
sought to Christianize the native peoples of America while exploiting their labor in the
mines and on the land of the “new world” they called las indias. Shiploads of treasure
came back to the Iberian peninsula as the Spanish exacted tribute from the new subjects
of the king of Spain. After each new conquest, groups of Spaniards who failed to make
their fortunes, or who lost the booty acquired, or who dreamed of obtaining even
greater wealth and power in new expeditions, sought to extend the empire still farther
to as yet unknown lands. From Cuba to Mexico, to Central America, and then to Peru,
the Spanish conquistadors reaped the spoils of the conquest as rewards for their daring
and their brutality.
As a political and economic venture the Spanish conquest initially combined
national-imperial aggrandizement with a semi-feudal form of private enterprise. Indi-
vidual conquistadors raised armies and financed their own expeditions by authority of
the Spanish monarch. In exchange for authorization to collect tribute from the subju-
gated natives, to operate mines, to use the land for crops or livestock, or to engage in
commerce, the king claimed for the royal coffers a share of all the spoils of conquest and
of the production of colonial enterprises. In Mexico, Peru, and parts of Central Amer-
ica booty from the accumulated wealth of sophisticated indigenous civilizations con-
stituted a source of quick fortunes for the first Spanish expeditions. Afterward, how-
ever, the accumulation of wealth and capital depended upon large-scale exploitation of
labor in mining, agriculture, and commercial enterprises.
Social attitudes of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Spain reserved manual labor and
even craftsmanship to the “lower orders.” As the Spanish invaders had no intention of
working either the mines or the land themselves, this made control over or access to In-
dian laborers critical for any productive endeavor. The Indians had no tradition of daily
work obligations and, still less, of contractual or wage labor. But the success of con-
quest as an economic enterprise turned upon somehow mobilizing Indian labor or im-
porting African slaves to work the mines, tend livestock, and cultivate the land. Con-
sequently, despite the flow of bullion and commodities from the colonies into
intercolonial and international markets, and the predominance of “private” enterprise
in the conquest economy, the earliest modes of production in Spanish America, includ-
ing Chile, were less capitalistic (in the sense of relying upon wage labor) than they were
bastardized or transitional forms of feudal labor dues, fixed-term labor contracts for
“indentured” servants (asientos de trabajo), forced labor, or slavery.
Over time Spain created an elaborate administrative apparatus to direct the con-
quest and the government of las indias. All authority emanated from the Spanish

55
56 CHILE

monarch who claimed a divine right to rule. From 1524 the crown governed the new
territories through the Supreme Council of the Indies, which began as a handful of of-
ficials and expanded to about twenty under the Hapsburg monarchs. The Council of
the Indies legislated for the colonies and supervised administration. The royal patronato
extended by the Pope granted the Spanish kings the right to name religious func-
tionaries in the New World, thereby extending the authority of the Council of the In-
dies to matters of religious concern.
In practice the great distances between Spain and the New World left daily or, more
accurately, yearly governance of the colonies in the hands of appointed officials. To
govern the largest administrative units, the viceroyalties, the king named viceroys, and
to lesser territories, captains-general or governors. In addition, a royal judicial council
or audiencia, composed of judges called oidores, and ecclesiastical authorities shared and
to some extent checked the power of viceroy or governor. Local officers responsible to
the viceroy or governor—or, in their absence, to the audiencia—governed smaller juris-
dictions or Indian districts. In the towns and cities, municipal councils called cabildos
legislated and administered regulations of local concern, including fixing prices of
commodities, granting licenses to engage in business, and regulating the activity of ar-
tisans. Wealthy colonial-born Spaniards (criollos) tended to dominate the cabildos, while
the higher administrative posts usually were reserved for native-born Spaniards or
peninsulares. Some peninsular officials, however, established local roots, founded
prominent criollo families, and acquired interests that conflicted with their bureaucratic
duties. From the late seventeenth century onward, sale of offices to criollos accentuated
tensions between royal policies and their implementation in the colonies. Moreover, in
some cases the cabildos sought to extend their authority and frequently found them-
selves in conflict with royal officials. Eventually the cabildos would become a rallying
point for independence movements in the nineteenth century.
On paper the government of the empire resembled a strictly hierarchical, neatly
arranged chain of command. In reality overlapping authority and conflict between the
Council of the Indies, viceroys, governors, ecclesiastical officials, and the cabildos
made for continual bureaucratic maneuvering, evasion of royal decrees, and corrup-
tion. Though justified by the “donation” to the Spanish monarchy of most of the so-
called New World by Pope Alexander VI—in his role as Vicar of Christ—in order to ex-
pand the realm of Christendom, the Spanish conquest gave rise to numerous doctrinal
and theological conflicts over appropriate treatment of the indigenous peoples. Did the
Indians have souls? Could they achieve salvation? If so, could they be forced to accept
Christianity, or should conversion be accomplished only through persuasion? Could
the Indians be enslaved? Could they be forced to pay tribute? If so, could tribute take
the form of forced labor? Everywhere in Spanish America, Church officials and theo-
reticians debated these questions. In every colony and administrative sub-unit the con-
quistadors and those who came after them resisted efforts by royal officials and certain
churchmen to regulate the exploitation of the conquered peoples. Nowhere did the ide-
alism of the reformers effectively prevent the abuse and eventual decimation of the Na-
tive American peoples, as economic realities won out over spiritual and humanitarian
objections to the exploitation of Indian labor.
By the time Pedro de Valdivia undertook the conquest of Chile (1540) the formal res-
olution of numerous doctrinal questions had already resulted in official policies pro-
hibiting many of the early abuses of the Indian peoples. For example, a decree signed by
Charles V in 1528 prohibited enslavement of the Indians as well as the widespread prac-
tice of using the Indians as pack animals or for other “personal services.” It also required
that the conquerors provide Indians laboring in the mines with religious instruction, in-
THE POLITICS OF CONQUEST 57

cluding Mass on Sundays and feast days. Later ordinances outlawed the removal of In-
dians from cold climates to work in hot climates, and vice versa, as well as the “renting
out” of Indians by those commended to supervise their care and religious instruction.
But the Spanish colonials evaded or violated these restrictions and the hundreds of oth-
ers adopted in the protolabor codes contained in the royal decrees and ordinances that
regulated taxation or tribute paid by the Indians to Spanish officials. Thus, the history
of the Spanish conquest in Chile and elsewhere must be seen on three levels: Church
doctrine and official policy, administrative implementation or non-implementation,
and the reality of everyday life—or death—for the native population.
As a primary institution of conquest and colonial economy in Chile as throughout
the Spanish empire, the encomienda, with all its variations, illustrates the tremendous
gap between Church doctrine or official policy and its implementation upon the sub-
jugated peoples of America. As a reward for military service, and with the obligation
to provide for Christianization of the Indians, the crown or its representative “com-
mended” the care of groups of Indians for a specified time—for example, two or three
generations—to selected Spaniards and their heirs. The crown insisted that the Indians
were free peoples, not to be enslaved except as punishment for rebellion or for resist-
ing Spanish authority. As free vassals, however, the Indians were subject to tribute or
taxation. This gave rise to the questions of the form of the tribute and how it could be
collected. Concessionary, rather than proprietary, rights to Indian tribute or labor pro-
vided incentives to exact quickly whatever profits could be made from Indian labor. A
new governor might give the encomienda to someone else; a court proceeding could
alter the terms of the grant; a new decree might effectively limit the tribute or restrict
forced labor. Quick profits through intensive exploitation of the labor force became the
main endeavor of individual conquistadors.
A year after the foundation of Chile’s first settlement at Santiago in 1541, the New
Laws, issued by the Spanish king to control the ambitions of the encomenderos in the
American dominions, prohibited enslavement of Indians even as punishment. They
also forbade the granting of new encomiendas and ordered ecclesiastics and royal offi-
cials to give up any encomiendas they held. Existing encomiendas could be retained
but not passed on to heirs; tribute was to be strictly fixed and regulated by crown offi-
cials to avoid abuses by the encomenderos. The encomenderos rebelled against these
laws in Peru and other parts of the empire, defending the spoils of conquest. Although
the crown partially repealed these laws, it subsequently enacted a succession of legal
codes and ordinances that specifically defined the obligations of encomenderos and
limited demands upon the Indians.
The history of Chile for its first two centuries as a Spanish colony centered upon the
implacable resistance of the encomenderos to regulation of their exploitation of the na-
tive Chilean peoples and the never-ending struggle of these peoples to maintain their
freedom against the Spanish invaders. This struggle shaped the social and economic
structure of colonial Chile and its development within the Spanish Empire. Formation
of the Chilean ethnic stock, race relations, social stratification, and economic develop-
ment depended upon the ebb and flow of warfare. No other Amerindian peoples resis-
ted Spanish conquest as did the Araucanians, although many groups partially submit-
ted to mestization, evangelization, and acculturation. No other Spanish colony drained
the royal treasury and expended the lives of thousands of Spanish and mestizo troops
for more than two centuries after initial contact with indigenous peoples. Nowhere else
in the Spanish Empire did warfare or the threat of warfare so significantly shape the de-
velopment of the colonial economy or influence the fate of Spanish towns. Only in Chile
did pillage and slave raids, or malocas, constitute an important source of wealth for colo-
58 CHILE

nial administrators and military personnel into the mid-seventeenth century. In Chile
alone among the South American colonies did provisioning a standing army become a
principal stimulus to colonial production and internal commerce, buttressed continu-
ally by a military subsidy, the situado, from Peru and Spain.
Recurrent warfare and the periodic destruction of Spanish settlements gave a
unique character to the Chilean colony. Plunder, illegal trade with the Indians, slave
raids, and profiteering from the military budget provided unique opportunities for so-
cial and economic mobility, at the same time that the risks of an uprising or reprisal raid
made economic enterprises in the southern regions insecure. The insecurity of the
southern territory encouraged concentration of the Spanish population in the central
valley, thereby promoting the development of a relatively homogeneous, geographi-
cally integrated society to the north of the Maule River.
Episodic warfare also perpetuated Indian slave labor and the encomiendas in Chile
long after these institutions had declined in most of Spanish America. In contrast to the
more established colonies, Chilean military leaders and soldiers in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries could still obtain booty, privileges, and rewards from the king for
their efforts to subjugate the indigenous population. In a sense, the prolonged resort to
violence as a means of acquiring fame, position, and wealth made physical brutality
and coercion an integral part of daily life on the Chilean frontier among Spaniards,
mestizos, Indian allies, and enemies. This coercion, or threat of coercion, carried over
into the encomiendas and haciendas and became the principal mechanism governing
relations between the workers and their masters. The inability to enforce the royal de-
crees regulating these relationships merely added disrespect for law, evasion, and cyn-
icism to the other legacies of the Chilean colonial experience.
Spanish religious and government authorities periodically negotiated peace treaties
with Indian leaders in what became a ritualized system of conferences (parlamentos)
and peace accords (paces), followed by breaches of the agreements and renewed con-
flict. From the peace agreements promoted by the Marquis de Baides and the treaty at
Quillín (1641) that recognized Mapuche sovereignty beyond the Biobío River, Spanish
and Indian leaders repeatedly warred and reached truces, but never resolved the un-
derlying antagonisms. The Spanish desired to enforce the Indians’ subjugation to royal
authority, to concentrate the Indian population in villages, to end polygamy, to convert
the Indians to Catholicism, to have access to Indian labor, to secure Indian collabora-
tion against other European invaders and pirates, and to obtain the return of Spanish
prisoners and hostages, especially women, whom the Indians incorporated into the
system of polygamy, and “Christian” Indians (thus taking women and children from
the Indian communities). They also attempted to force the Indians to recognize Span-
ish jurisdiction over “wrongdoers.”
The Indians, for their part, wanted to maintain their land, freedom, and cultural au-
tonomy and to end slavery and forced labor, in exchange for allowing the Spanish
priests to evangelize. They offered to end raids against Spanish farms and towns and
permit a loose system of frontier commerce. From 1641 the provisions (capitulaciones) of
the peace agreements detailed the reciprocal obligations of Spaniards and Indians. In-
termittent conflicts and occasional major insurrections (1655, 1723) resulted in impor-
tant parlamentos and paces in 1647, 1651, 1738, 1756, 1760, 1764, and 1767. In 1767 the
Spanish agreed that the Indians were “not obligated to live in villages and would be
left in the tranquil possession of their lands.” Renewed conflict led to another major
parlamento in 1794.

The conquest of Chile was an extension of the Spanish victory, led by Francisco Pizarro
and Diego de Almagro, over the Inca empire in Peru. In 1534 the Spanish crown di-
THE POLITICS OF CONQUEST 59

vided the land south of Ecuador into four political units (gobernaciones): Nueva Castilla,
assigned to Pizarro; Nueva Toledo, 200 leagues from Ica to latitude 25° 31⬘ S, assigned
to Almagro; and two others assigned to Pedro de Mendoza and Simón de Alcazaba.
Mendoza sold his claim to Almagro, and Alcazaba led a disastrous expedition, which
was to go by sea to the Strait of Magellan and from there overland to the north but only
reached Puerto de los Leones on the east coast. Almagro contested Pizarro’s control of
Cuzco but agreed to lead an expedition south to explore the rest of Nueva Toledo while
awaiting the king’s resolution of the conflicting claims.
The Peruvian Indians, who were plotting a rebellion against the conquering Span-
iards, had told exaggerated tales of the wealth of the land to the south. These tales,
along with Pizarro’s prodding, had persuaded Almagro. In organizing the expedition
to Chile, he rapidly depleted the fortune he had acquired in the Peruvian conquest. He
assembled a force of more than five hundred Spaniards (almost half cavalry)—a larger
army than Cortés had led into Mexico or Pizarro into Peru. Many of these Spaniards
had participated in earlier expeditions to Mexico, Guatemala, and, of course, Peru. Ac-
cording to various estimates, 10,000 to 15,000 Indian auxiliaries and a small number of
Negro slaves accompanied the Spaniards on the first expedition to Chile.
After sending out advance parties—including Inca emissaries to collect tribute from
the Indian subjects to the south—as well as some forces by sea, Almagro left Cuzco in
July 1535. The main expeditionary force, more than two hundred Spaniards and thou-
sands of Indian auxiliaries, crossed the Bolivian plateau through the Andes range bor-
dering Lake Titicaca. After much privation the expedition reached Tupiza, where it
rested for about two months. Here Almagro received a message informing him of the
arrival in Cuzco of an emissary from Spain authorized to settle the dispute with
Pizarro. The message urged Almagro to return to Cuzco to defend his interests, but he
decided to go on to Chile. He led his forces on to Chicoana, near the present Argentine
city of Salta; there they encountered hostile Indians while reprovisioning themselves
and preparing for the Andes crossing.
Upon leaving Chicoana, many of the Indian bearers fled. Rivers flooded from the
melting snow, and summer rains drowned numerous llamas, used as pack animals,
and destroyed provisions, so food had to be rationed. Almagro’s force crossed the
Campo del Arenal desert and pushed into the cordillera at the San Francisco pass. In
this part of the cordillera the Andes average more than 13,000 feet. There was no pas-
ture for the animals, and often no firewood could be found. Soroche or puna—a condi-
tion of nausea, headaches, and sometimes convulsions produced by the altitude—and
frostbite added to the misery of the expedition. Many of the scantily clad Indians froze
to death, as did horses—to be “defrosted” and eaten five months later by other Span-
iards coming to join Almagro in Chile.
Almagro’s forces stayed in Chile until the end of 1536, exploring as far south as the
Maule River or perhaps the Itata. Periodic skirmishes with hostile Indians, as well as
the Indians’ strategy of hiding food and possessions, hindered Almagro’s efforts to es-
tablish control. Exploratory expeditions found no gold, no silver, no cities. Failure to
find a new Peru, combined with news that Cuzco apparently fell into the jurisdiction
of Nueva Toledo, persuaded Almagro and his lieutenants to return to Peru. At the end
of 1536 they joined forces at Copiapó, and then crossed the desert in small groups, from
water hole to water hole, as a ship followed them up the coast.
Upon arrival in Peru, Almagro found the Indians in rebellion and Cuzco under con-
trol of Pizarro’s brothers. Almagro liberated the city but proved unable to resolve the
conflict with the Pizarros. Civil war ensued. At the battle of Las Salinas in 1538, Alma-
gro was taken prisoner and executed by the Pizarros.
The tales of Almagro’s men discouraged further expeditions to Chile for nearly five
60 CHILE

FPO

map 9: The Routes of the Conquest

(Source: H. R. S. Pocock, The Conquest of Chile, Stein and Day, New York, 1967.)
THE POLITICS OF CONQUEST 61

years. As Chilean historian Diego Barros Arana wrote, “After the return of Almagro
this country [Chile] was the most discredited of the Indies in the minds of the conquis-
tadors . . . a cursed land without gold . . . inhabited by savages of the worst kind
and incapable of repaying the costs occasioned by the conquest.” The failure of Alma-
gro’s expedition also meant that Chile’s Indians could not again be surprised or intim-
idated. They now knew that the Spanish were human, not gods, that they could be bar-
baric and treacherous, and that their horses could be killed or captured.
It therefore came as somewhat of a surprise to the Spanish elite in Peru when the
commander of Pizarro’s forces at the battle of Las Salinas, Pedro de Valdivia, gave up
his valuable encomienda and a silver mine at Porco in exchange for permission to ex-
plore and conquer Chile. Valdivia’s motivation cannot be known with certainty, but it
seems clear that it went beyond mere wealth, as he sacrificed an immense fortune to or-
ganize his Chilean expedition.
In 1540 Valdivia left Cuzco with a few Spanish soldiers (from 5 to 20 according to
various estimates), his mistress, Inés de Suárez, and perhaps a thousand Indian auxil-
iaries. Along the way from Cuzco to Arequipa other Spaniards joined him, among them
some former members of the Almagro expedition. At Tarapacá, Valdivia waited for re-
inforcements, but when the army set out across the Atacama desert, it numbered fewer
than 110 Spaniards including two priests. After eleven months of hardship, skirmishes
with Indians, and internal conflicts Valdivia’s forces arrived in the valley of the
Mapocho. Almost immediately they were attacked by an Indian army led by the local
chief Michimalonco. The Spaniards eventually drove off the Indian warriors and soon
thereafter convinced the local Indians to aid in the construction of Chile’s first “city”—
Santiago—founded in February 1541. Less than a month later Valdivia created a ca-
bildo, which, in turn, called upon Valdivia to make himself governor of Chile in the
name of the king of Spain rather than as Pizarro’s lieutenant. After appropriate objec-
tions Valdivia acquiesced. Seven months later (September 11, 1541) the Indians of the
region attacked Santiago, burned the straw-roofed houses to the ground, and left the
Spaniards little more than grain for seed and some livestock. The battle for Chile had
begun in earnest.
From 1541 until 1553, Valdivia’s forces pushed south from Santiago, warring against
the Indians and establishing a number of fort towns. These included Concepción, La
Imperial (at the site of present-day Carahue), Valdivia, and Villarrica. In addition, on
the other side of the Andes, Francisco de Aguirre governed Santiago del Estero. With
the foundation of each “city,” Valdivia handed out encomiendas to selected conquista-
dors, thereby granting them authority to collect tribute from the Indians in their juris-
diction and take charge of the Indians’ Christianization. Since the Chilean Indians had
little accumulated wealth, tribute typically took the form of forced labor in the mines
or gold washings that the Spaniards “discovered.” Of course, if the Indians were to be
forced to work, they had first to be subjugated; and south of the Maule River this
proved no easy task. Instead of a unified Spanish army, each encomendero had to
pacify the Indians in his own grant, and his fortunes depended upon his success at this,
not upon a salary from a government treasury.
On Christmas day 1553, the Araucanians, led by the cacique Lautaro—who, in his
earlier service as Valdivia’s groom, had acquired knowlege of Spanish tactics and lim-
itations—lured the Spanish leader into a trap and obliterated his force of about fifty
men at the still smoldering ruins of Tucapel. There were no survivors. Although a leg-
end has the Indians capturing Valdivia and pouring molten gold—the metal so sought
after by the Spaniards—down his throat, it is more likely that his decapitated head
ended up on the point of an Araucanian lance, the Indians’ customary treatment of con-
62 CHILE

quered enemies. Following up the victory at Tucapel, the Indians defeated an army led
by Francisco de Villagra at Marigüeñu, despite Villagra’s use of six small cannon and
thirty harquebuses.* The defeated survivors abandoned Concepción. After twelve
years of “conquest,” a fearful group of Spanish at Santiago welcomed the refugees from
the southern towns fleeing the Araucanian armies.
The Spanish, under Pedro de Villagra, maintained a presence in the south only at
Valdivia. Between 1555 and 1557 efforts to resettle the other southern towns met with
further defeats at the hands of the Indians, and were complicated by a struggle for
power among Valdivia’s lieutenants. At first the audiencia at Lima left matters in the
hands of the local cabildos, but the ensuing chaos led to the appointment of Francisco
de Villagra as the ranking officer in Chile. As Lautaro marched toward Santiago, Villa-
gra’s forces and Indian auxiliaries surprised the Araucanians at Peteroa, killed Lautaro,
and after a gruesome battle, emerged triumphant. This victory avoided total liquida-
tion of the Chilean colony, just as a new governor, García Hurtado de Mendoza, the
twenty-one-year-old son of the Peruvian viceroy, arrived at La Serena with 500 soldiers.
This was only the first installment in the continuing and costly flow to Chile of rein-
forcements and war materiel from Peru and Spain.
By authorizing the expenditure of funds from the royal treasury at Lima, the viceroy
also recognized the inadequacy of the private seigniorial model of conquest in Chile.
Despite the crown’s general policy of relying upon private financing of the conquest,
by the mid-1560s Chilean governors expended small sums from the royal treasury to
help feed and equip soldiers on the Indian frontier. And while Philip II continued to in-
sist upon the traditional policy of avoiding crown expenditures for the conquest of new
territories, by 1572 he had authorized the viceroy at Lima to spend moderate sums
from the royal coffers to support the war effort in Chile. Until 1600 most financing for
the Chilean venture came from the private fortunes of royal officials, encomenderos,
and merchants; but the crown gradually moved toward assuming financial responsi-
bility as it became clear that private resources could not pay for the armaments and sol-
diers necessary to maintain Chile and Peru secure against the threat of Spain’s Euro-
pean rivals and the Araucanians.
Shortly after his arrival, Hurtado de Mendoza arrested Aguirre and Francisco de Vil-
lagra in order to assert his own control, and then continued the war against the Arau-
canians. Numerous brutalities followed, including the torture of the cacique Galvarino,
immortalized in Alonso de Ercilla’s epic La Araucana. In 1558 Mendoza ordered the re-
settlement of Concepción, for the third time. Ensuing military engagements reestab-
lished a line of southern forts. Just as Mendoza believed he had pacified Araucania, the
king decreed his dismissal at the same time his father was removed as viceroy of Peru.
Powerful conquistadors had complained that Mendoza was rewarding his own fol-
lowers and, more important, was enforcing measures devised by his legal adviser to
regulate forced Indian labor.
Replaced by Francisco de Villagra, García Hurtado de Mendoza would return to the
colonies as viceroy of Peru some twenty years later. But his hope that the Araucanians
had been pacified proved illusory, though a terrible smallpox epidemic from 1561 to
1563 certainly reduced their war-making capability. The best estimates available sug-
gest that 20 to 25 percent of the Indian population perished, though reliable data do not
exist. Renewed warfare and persistent conflict among the conquistadors and royal of-

*A harquebus was an early type of fuse-fired gun.

THE POLITICS OF CONQUEST 63

ficials led the king to decree the establishment of a royal audiencia in Chile in August
1565. The audiencia failed to resolve either the internal political or the military problems
of the colony. While the encomenderos resisted any restriction on their exploitation of
the Indians, and refused to subordinate private interests to public necessities, the Arau-
canians renewed their struggle against the European invaders.
The Araucanians’ relative success against the invaders resulted largely from their
adaptability and ingenuity in warfare. When the Spaniards arrived, Araucanian arma-
ments consisted of bows and stone-tipped arrows, hardened wooden spears or lances,
clubs, and slings. For protection they wore helmets and coats of sealskin or whalebone
and carried thick skin shields. Like other Amerindians their initial encounters with
horses and the Spaniards’ killer dogs provoked panic and dismay. The Araucanians,
however, quickly modified their weapons and their tactics. They constructed new
weapons to fight the Spanish cavalry, including lances tipped with pieces of Spanish
swords and nooses to yank the Spanish from their mounts. By the late 1560s the Indi-
ans frequently used horses and were improving as cavalrymen. A system of double-
mounting allowed a lancer and an archer to ride a single horse. Near the end of the six-
teenth century the Araucanians even occasionally utilized captured harquebuses,
though having learned the limitations of the fuse-fired weapons they attempted to con-
front the Spaniards when rain or surprise prevented the lighting of fuses.
To avoid the Spaniards’ scorched earth tactics, the Indians began to sow hidden
fields and to retaliate in kind—waiting until the harvests of the fort towns reached ma-
turity and then trampling the fields at night in cavalry raids. By the end of the sixteenth
century the Araucanians had become accomplished guerrilla fighters, effectively ha-
rassing the cumbersome Spanish armies, in which each soldier traveled with several
Indian servants to do his cooking and bear his weapons. Lack of mobility combined
with scarcity of munitions and artillery to assist Indian resistance. At the time of the
general uprising at the end of the sixteenth century, Chilean historian Crescente Errá-
zuriz claimed that in Chillán, Concepción, Angol, Arauco, and Santa Cruz the Span-
iards had only 282 harquebuses, 44 muskets, and 26 cannon and lacked sufficient pow-
der and fuses for even these. But above all, the Indians’ determination, inventiveness,
and courage stifled the enterprise of conquest.

Half a century after Pedro de Valdivia’s forces entered Chile, the colony remained a
frontier, governed by military officers who repeatedly took to the field against the
Araucanians. The population resided in dispersed fort towns that increased or de-
creased in number according to the vicissitudes of warfare. Initially, the only significant
source of wealth for the conquerors other than crafts in the towns, consisted of limited
placer gold mines and the exploitation of Indian labor. Control of the mines and Indi-
ans or permission to engage in industry or commerce stemmed from rights vested in
the conquistadors by the governor or the cabildos as the reward for military service or
simply as personal patronage. Whether in the form of an encomienda grant or a con-
cession for a flour mill, economic opportunity and wealth originated in the manipula-
tion and control of the law and of political authorities. If Indian labor made possible
agricultural production, manufacturing, and mining activities, only “politics” deter-
mined the distribution of the booty—including the Indian workers themselves. Val-
divia granted encomiendas to his followers shortly after founding Santiago and re-
warded other conquistadors as well as religious orders with encomienda grants of
Indians surrounding all the towns and forts founded between 1541 and his death in
1553. In contrast to the more established colonies such as Mexico or Peru, his succes-
sors continued to grant encomiendas until almost the end of the eighteenth century—
64 CHILE

though by that time their importance had greatly diminished in relation to the large
rural estates employing tenant labor.
The perpetual state of war in Chile led the crown to put the Chilean Indians in a
“special” category which, through contorted legal and doctrinal reasoning, made them
subject after 1608 to legal enslavement as well as to the usual abuses of the conquista-
dors. This eventually made war not only a fact of life in Chile but a great business ven-
ture—based on raids of pillage or “slave hunts” called campeadas or malocas. Before
such slave hunts became legal, however, over half a century of warfare had led the
Spanish monarch to establish a permanent Chilean garrison and a yearly budget to sus-
tain the war against the Araucanians. The Chilean encomenderos, the royal officials sta-
tioned in Chile and Peru, and the small merchant class would soon owe a portion of
their wealth and power to the Araucanian war and the budget associated with mainte-
nance of the Chilean garrison. Thus the war that periodically devastated the Concep-
ción-southern region, made livestock and agricultural enterprise insecure, and de-
prived the colony of its richest gold mines, enriched royal officials and merchants in
Santiago, La Serena, and Lima.
Following continued defeats at the hands of the Araucanians, despite more rein-
forcements from Peru, and an earthquake that destroyed Concepción in 1570, King
Philip II abolished the audiencia in Chile in 1573 and named a veteran conquistador, Ro-
drigo de Quiroga, as governor of the territory. Quiroga, a lieutenant for both Valdivia
and García Hurtado de Mendoza, actually assumed office in late January 1575. Two
months later another earthquake destroyed La Imperial, Villarrica, Osorno, Castro, and
Valdivia and also affected Santiago and Valparaíso. Nevertheless, Quiroga pressed for-
ward with a brutal campaign of terror against the Indians in order to end the war. Sup-
ported by the viceroy of Peru, Quiroga executed captured caciques and deported pris-
oners to the north to work the mines in Coquimbo. In order to prevent their escape,
Quiroga ordered that their feet be mutilated with a machete or a chisel; to avoid loss of
blood and subsequent death, each stump was thrust into a pot of boiling tallow. The
governor’s concern with the lawfulness of this policy is enlightening. Legal proceed-
ings against the Indians, in their absence, had condemned them to death for rebellion
against the empire—and then Quiroga generously reduced the sentence to mutilation
and forced labor. The king also instructed Quiroga to ship rebellious Indians to Peru,
but the latter replied, on behalf of Chile’s encomenderos, that the Indians would sur-
vive neither the trip nor the change in climate. The king reconsidered his decree and
thus saved most of the human booty for the Chilean conquerors. In the meantime the
English corsair Francis Drake sacked Valparaíso and attacked La Serena, thus increas-
ing the military pressure upon the colony.
Between 1580, when Quiroga died, and 1598 three more governors sought to com-
bine warfare and conciliation in order to pacify Araucanía. The last of these three, Gar-
cía Oñez de Loyola, was a nephew of the Peruvian viceroy and also a relative of Ig-
natius de Loyola, founder of the Jesuit order. When Oñez de Loyola arrived in Chile, a
major economic activity of the southern-based army garrisons consisted of hunting
down Indians for personal use or for sale. Since the soldiers found it easier to capture
Indians from pacified tribes, many more of them were seized and sold into slavery than
rebel Indians captured in war. Despite the new governor’s decrees outlawing such
practices, Chilean historian Domingo Amunátegui Solar wrote that the whole territory
of the Bishopric of Imperial “had been converted into an immense human ‘meat mar-
ket,’” where the soldiers enriched themselves through the sale of Araucanians, and
where the encomenderos and wealthy residents of Santiago and Serena found their do-
mestic servants or replaced the personnel of their encomiendas as the local natives died
THE POLITICS OF CONQUEST 65

off from overwork or disease. In January 1598, Oñez de Loyola wrote to the king that
throughout the country one saw multitudes of lame or mutilated Indians, Indians with-
out hands, noses, or ears, and blind Indians whose tragic condition “incites the others
to die rather than surrender.”
Ironically, García Oñez de Loyola attempted to end deportation of Indian prisoners
beyond the Maule River and otherwise to moderate the abuses of the encomenderos,
yet he ended up like Pedro de Valdivia, decapitated after the massacre of his soldiers
at the battle of Curalaba in 1598. The defeat at Curalaba marked the beginning of a gen-
eral uprising by the Araucanians. All major Spanish settlements south of the Biobío
River were destroyed or abandoned: Santa Cruz and Valdivia in 1599; La Imperial and
Angol in 1600: Villarrica in 1602; Osorno and Arauco in 1604. At about the same time
Dutch pirates attacked Valparaíso and Chiloé. Four governors succeeded one another
in rapid succession, and the efforts to subdue the Araucanians continued to no avail.
In 1600 the king of Spain established a permanent military subsidy, or situado, for
Chile, and war in Chile became a permanent, institutionalized business of the Lima
merchants and shippers until almost the end of the seventeenth century. The situado, a
symbol of the poverty of the Chilean colony, also freed the encomenderos from most fi-
nancial and military obligations of the war. Conquest and pacification thus became
largely a public venture instead of a private semi-feudal imitation of the Spanish re-
conquest of their homeland from the Moors.
Exasperated by the loss of all the towns and mines of southern Chile after 1598 and
the continued fighting, including the loss of more than a hundred Spanish soldiers at
Boroa in 1606, the Council of the Indies proposed the legal enslavement of all captured
Indian males over ten and one-half years old and females older than nine and one-half
years; captured children would be commended to “virtuous” Spaniards to serve them
and to be instructed in the Faith until the age of twenty. On May 26, 1608, the Spanish
king signed a royal decree that legalized, indeed encouraged, the enslavement of “re-
bellious” Indians in Chile. Though in practice, enslavement of Indian captives was
common from 1570 onward, this royal decree legitimated slave raids and pillage by the
Chilean garrisons. Interim governor and audiencia judge, Luis Merlo de la Fuente,
promulgated the decree in Santiago in August 1610, and then led a force to the south
which took nearly a thousand Indian prisoners.
By 1610, seventy years after Valdivia’s entry into the country, Chile boasted five
“cities”: La Serena, with 46 adobe houses, 11 with tile roofs and the rest of straw; San-
tiago, 200 houses; Chillán, 52, eight with tile roofs, 39 with straw, and five ranchos of
wood and thatch roofs; Concepción, 76 houses, 36 wooden with straw roofs; and Cas-
tro, on Chiloé, with 12 straw-covered houses. The rest of the Chilean population
resided in the countryside on the immense territories of the encomiendas* where sub-
jugated Indians panned gold, tended flocks of sheep and cattle, and cultivated the land.
With the loss of the encomiendas south of the Biobío River, gold mining near La Serena,
Santiago, and Concepción took second place to agriculture and livestock as the major
source of occupation for the Chilean work force.
Accustomed by the Inca conquest to the idea of tribute long before the arrival of the
Spanish, many of the Indians of northern Chile (Copiapó to Maule) gradually submit-

*Strictly speaking, the encomienda grant did not involve title to land; it merely conveyed the
right to exact tribute from the Indians. Nevertheless, encomenderos in Chile often exercised a
patrimonial authority within the territory of a grant.
66 CHILE

ted to Spanish domination. They provided the labor that produced gold, food, hides,
and tallow—the major exports to Peru—to enrich the encomenderos. As forced labor,
mistreatment, and disease (especially smallpox) decimated the encomienda Indians,
their periodic replacement was necessary in order to maintain the conquest economy.
The war against the Araucanians, as well as the capture of the Huarpe peoples in the
eastern cordillera, provided the main source of this replenishment and of concubines
for Spanish males; it also supplied Indian labor to Peru. The cruel treatment of captured
Indians, in “peacetime” or in war, reinforced their will to resist. The Spaniards used the
struggle of the Indians to justify their enslavement, mutilation, “commendation,” or
“deposit” for use by the encomenderos. Even as the war persisted, so did the never-
ending succession of decrees, taxes, and ordinances, which the colonizers applied, ap-
pealed, or ignored as suited their convenience.

From 1558 until the general uprising after 1598, the crown’s major representatives en-
acted numerous tribute regulations aimed at controlling the encomenderos and
protecting the Indian laborers. In each case Catholic clerics influenced adoption of
these codes. But in each case Chilean encomenderos subverted or prevented their
implementation.
In 1557, Hernando de Santillán, an adviser to Governor García Hurtado de Men-
doza, promulgated in Chile the royal decrees that prohibited using Indians as pack an-
imals, forbade the encomenderos to employ more than one-fifth of “their” Indians in
the gold washings or mines, and ordered them to pay the Indians one-sixth of the gold
they mined. In addition, they were to free pacified Indian servants and, if these Indians
voluntarily worked the mines, to give them one-fourth of the ore extracted as well as
adequate food and tools. Further decrees sought to regulate the conditions of the Indi-
ans laboring in the fields, the vineyards, the artisan industries, and even in households.
A similar tribute was promulgated in mid-1558 for the region of Concepción and the
south.
Taking account of the recent rebellions in Peru, Santillán did not seek to abolish the
encomiendas themselves. Nevertheless, the Spanish settlers had no intention of ame-
liorating the lot of the subjugated Indians and thereby decreasing their own income. In
a communication to the Council of the Indies after his departure from Chile in 1560,
Santillán described the brutality of conquest from the first entry of the Spanish: “[They]
killed, maimed and set dogs upon the Indians, cut off feet, hands, noses and teats, stole
their lands, raped their women and daughters, chained them up and used them as
beasts of burden, burned their houses and settlements and layed waste their fields.” In
La Serena in 1557, Santillán had reported that the encomenderos sent the Indians to the
mines as pack animals, as well as employing them in other personal services, leaving
them not an hour to rest.
In the tradition of Bartolomé de Las Casas, the best-known clerical defender of the
New World Indians against the abuses of conquest, another Dominican, Fray Gil de
San Nicolás, provided more ammunition for the growing “black legend” of Spanish
barbarism:
They take the Indian men and women prisoners in chains and use them for “dog
bait,” watching the dogs tear them apart for sport.
They destroy the crops, burn the houses and villages full of Indians, shutting the
doorways [of the houses] so none can escape.
Describing the mines, he wrote that at first the Indians were to receive a sixth part of
the gold they extracted and then an eighth part, but they often received nothing at all.
THE POLITICS OF CONQUEST 67

In any case, the regulations obligated the Indians to pay the salary of their “protector”
from their “earnings.” Either purchased in Spain or acquired from a royal official, the
post of “protector” allowed venturesome Spaniards to make their fortunes in the New
World by mediating between the encomendero and the native peoples. From limited
evidence it appears that the gold earned by the Indians was often actually a source of
risk capital for Spanish pastoral and commercial enterprises as the “protectors” and en-
comenderos colluded in defrauding the Indians.
In 1563 Pedro de Villagra promulgated a dozen new tribute ordinances, including
provisions that limited the work period in the placer mines to six months, reaffirmed
payment of one-sixth of the gold mined to the Indians, prohibited use of Negro
taskmasters, and required the “protectors” of the Indians to buy sheep for them with
their gold. The new ordinances also split the obligation of the protector’s salary between
the Indians and the encomendero and increased the number of “protectors.” Once
again, the encomenderos largely evaded the new regulations. However, the recently
created posts did provide a source of income for the new “protectors” authorized to de-
fend the Indians’ rights.
Another major reform of the tribute system in 1580 was the tasa of Gamboa, which
also failed to halt the encomendero’s abuse of Indian labor. The tasa of Gamboa sought
to substitute a fixed money or commodity tax for forced labor. The encomenderos and
even some churchmen opposed the new tax as “prejudicial to the colony and the Indi-
ans.” Its principal innovation consisted of a commutation of labor tribute for a money
or commodity tribute. This innovation in no way benefited the encomenderos since it
fixed the tribute at seven to nine pesos a year—one-fourth to one-twelfth the value that
an Indian could produce in a normal work cycle of eight to twelve months.
Despite the resistance of the encomenderos, the tasa of Gamboa merely appeared be-
nign in contrast to previous policies. Illustrative is the tribute owed by the Indians to
Luis Jufré, who inherited from his father the encomiendas of Macul near Santiago, Pe-
teroa and Mataquito in Curicó, and Pocoa north of the Maule River. The Macul grant
contained 22 tributary Indians; Mataquito, 142; and Pocoa, 57. These Indians owed col-
lectively to their encomendero the following monies and commodities each year.
Macul: 110 gold pesos plus two gold pesos to pay the priest, corregidor,* and the ad-
ministrator of the encomienda; 30 fanegas† of wheat, 20 fanegas of barley, and 20 fane-
gas of maize delivered to the house of the encomendero; sufficient fish, chickens, or
sheep necessary to equal 44 pesos. In addition, the Indians of Macul were to supply
nine household servants who would receive a salary and not pay tribute.
Peteroa: In addition to two gold pesos for administrative costs, 985 gold pesos; 394
pesos worth of fish and agricultural commodities, including 200 fanegas of wheat, 100
of barley, 120 of corn, and six of beans; 11 household servants to the encomendero.
Mataquito: two pesos each for administrative costs; 710 gold pesos; 284 pesos in
foodstuffs: 150 fanegas of wheat, 80 of barley, five of maize, four of beans, and sufficient
quantity of fish, tools, sheep, vegetables, or other commodities to complete the tribute;
10 servants for the encomendero’s household.
Pocoa: In addition to two gold pesos for administrative costs, 285 gold pesos; four

*The corregidors were representatives of royal authority in towns and rural districts. Corregi-
dores de Indios were responsible in particular for Indian settlements or areas of Indian popula-
tion.
†
A fanega is approximately equivalent to 11⁄2 bushels.
68 CHILE

domestic servants; 114 pesos in commodities, including 80 fanegas of wheat, 40 of bar-

ley, and 50 of maize.
Ruiz de Gamboa prohibited any tribute beyond that specified, but allowed the en-
comenderos to purchase, at a “just price,” commodities to eat and drink or other ne-
cessities. In order to avoid abuses, copies of the tribute regulations were given to the
encomenderos and the Indian caciques; and to ensure compliance, Gamboa appointed
new officials to inspect the mines of Coquimbo and Quillota. The Indians could, of
course, choose “personal service” instead of paying the tribute. Around La Imperial
continual war made enforcement of tribute largely academic, but north of Maule initial
implementation of the tribute aroused the animosity of the encomenderos.
The encomenderos emerged again victorious when the king sent a new military ex-
pedition and a new governor, Alonso de Sotomayor, with the charge to defend the
colony and the wealth of Peru against the attacks of English pirates and to pacify the
Araucanians. Sotomayor reinstated forced labor, thereby gaining the encomenderos’
cooperation for a new campaign to the south. In this campaign he ordered that the
hands and noses of Indian prisoners be cut off before they were released, in order to ter-
rorize their fellows. Terror again failed to intimidate the Araucanians, who fought back
with vigor. According to García Oñez de Loyola some years later, Sotomayor’s policies
forced the Indians to produce more than 100 pesos in goods and services in exchange
for garments worth at most three to four pesos. Sotomayor also appointed to the Indian
districts new corregidores whose salaries consisted of one-fourth of the grain and live-
stock raised by the natives, and approved a work cycle or demora of eight months in-
stead of the six established by Pedro de Villagra. To “benefit” the Indians, the governor
named clerics to the rural districts; their salaries also came out of the Indians’ sweat and
blood in the fields and the mines.
Although encomenderos continued to evade the regulations intended to improve
the conditions of the Indians, the periodic rebellions, and then the disaster following
the defeat of the Spaniards at Curalaba in 1598, gave increased credibility to the voices
of those few clerics who sought “justice” for the Indian peoples. The best known of
these, the Jesuit Luis de Valdivia, finally persuaded the Spanish monarch to introduce
a policy of “defensive warfare,” which had been suggested earlier by officials in Lima.
After 1612 official policy forbade sorties or settlements across the Biobío River—except
by Jesuit missionaries. Luis de Valdivia returned to Chile with a new military governor,
Alonso de Ribera, and with comprehensive authority to impose the policy of defensive
warfare. This included pardons for rebellious Indians, suspension of the decree per-
mitting slavery of captured Indians, prohibitions on selling outside of Chile those pre-
viously captured, dismantling the forts of Angol and Paicaiví, and a recommendation
to the audiencia to suspend the labor obligations of the Indians and replace them with
money and commodity tribute.
Frontier garrisons resisted defensive warfare for both professional and economic
reasons. Encomenderos and most other colonials also sought to reverse governmental
policy. Governor Ribera openly violated his charge, while other Spanish violations
made a mockery of the defensive warfare policy. New instructions from the king, at the
insistence of Luis de Valdivia, reaffirmed this policy, but Alonso de Ribera had died by
the time these arrived in Chile (1617).
His interim successor received explicit instructions to comply in all respects with the
defensive warfare policy; but when the next governor arrived in Concepción, he wrote
to the king that forced Indian labor still had not been eliminated from Chile. At the in-
struction of the viceroy of Peru, still another tribute regulation, the tasa of Esquilache,
THE POLITICS OF CONQUEST 69

attempted to limit the encomenderos’ abuse of the Indians, while officials also sug-
gested that the importation of one thousand black slaves to be sold “at cost” would
help to liberate the Indians from their slavery. The tasa of Esquilache prohibited any In-
dian, whether peaceful or not, from providing “personal service”; it specified a new
formula for taxation or tribute; it limited the percentage of encomienda Indians obli-
gated to work to one-third each year; and it freed the others to sell their labor if they
desired. If the encomendero did not need all his laborers, he could rent them to other
encomenderos or deserving Spaniards.
The encomenderos, nevertheless, resisted all prohibitions against Indian slavery or
forced labor in the mines, and any limit on the number of days that Indians could be
forced to work. Luis de Valdivia’s departure for Spain in 1619, along with the deaths of
the Chilean governor and King Philip III, soon eliminated even the pretense of defen-
sive warfare. Chile’s governor from 1625 to 1629, Luis Fernández de Córdoba y Arce,
boasted to King Philip IV that he had captured more than 250 Indians in fighting near
Imperial in 1627 and had killed or captured more than 2500 in Yumbel and Arauco. Ac-
cording to this governor:

I entered in the province of Imperial and thereabouts, where Spanish have not trod
since the uprising twenty-eight years ago, with such good results that I burned many
houses and more than 14 or 15 thousand fanegas of food of all sorts, and destroyed 4
or 5 thousand head of livestock. . . . Despite the obstinate resistance of the enemy
we have only lost thirty Spanish dead and some hundred Indian allies.

Still, the governor attempted to ameliorate somewhat the condition of non-hostile In-
dians—by prohibiting the branding of Indians who were not, within three months of
their capture in war, registered in the appropriate government office! Araucanian coun-
teroffensives, led by the cacique Lientur, inflicted important defeats on the Spanish in
the La Imperial region, including a total rout of Spanish forces at Las Cangrejeras. The
Indians killed 70 Spaniards or mestizos and took 36 Spanish prisoners, including Fran-
cisco Nuñez de Pineda y Bascuñan, who later described the battle and his long captiv-
ity in a diary of his life with the Indians called Cautiverio Feliz (“Happy Captivity”).
The long history of war, brutality, pillage, and unenforced decrees “protecting” the
Indians continued as Governor Laso de la Vega (1629–39) persisted in the offensive in
Araucania. An initial Spanish victory at Albarrada in 1633 ended with butchery or en-
slavement of the routed Indians—812 dead and some 600 prisoners—and halted the In-
dian advance into the central valley, blunting yet another threat to Concepción and
Santiago. The new governor also faced a new royal order abolishing “personal service”
or forced labor “wherever and in whatever form.” Despite the determined resistance of
the cabildos of Santiago and Concepción, this reform and others emerged in yet an-
other decree—the tasa of Laso de la Vega in 1635.
The new tasa consisted of sixteen regulations, including the elimination of “personal
service,” although the Indians still were to pay tribute to the encomenderos in money
or commodities each year in the presence of the “protector” and the priest in the en-
comiendas, or of the administrator and priest in the Indian villages. In general, this new
legislation was meant to complement, not replace, the tasa of Esquilache by giving the
Indians a choice of paying tribute with either labor or commodities and by adding
more paternalistic supervision and enforcement. The Indians could pay tribute in labor
if they so informed the corregidor, who would also evaluate the commodities delivered
by the Indians to the encomendero. In addition, the Indians were authorized to “rent”
70 CHILE

themselves, with preference to their own encomendero during the time necessary to
pay the tribute, and after that to anyone whose property was located within four
leagues of the town or hacienda where they resided.
The new restrictions on the encomenderos met with resistance and were little en-
forced. In 1639 a judge of the audiencia of Chile reported to the crown that while some
of the poorer Spaniards observed the tasa, the rich and powerful continued as always
“using the natives as if they were slaves, treating them harshly, without paying them
the small wage of their sweat and labor . . . bringing them from as far as Tucumán
and Río de la Plata . . . and working them day and night in the copper mines at La
Serena or . . . to mine gold at Andacollo.” The judge also noted that due to the bru-
tality of the soldiers and the venality of the corregidors and priests, as well as to the ex-
ploitation of the encomenderos, most of the Indian villages had been depopulated and
the lands gradually appropriated by Spaniards. In a classic understatement concerning
the judge’s report, Chilean historian Amunátegui Solar suggested:

From this exposition, it can be deduced that the tasa of Laso de la Vega was as ineffi-
cacious as those of Santillán, Ruiz de Gamboa, Sotomayor, Ribera and Esquilache; and
that at the end of his [Laso de la Vega’s] government the Chilean natives were subju-
gated to forced labor with the same harshness as in the times of Pedro de Valdivia.
The orders of the king and the ordinances signed by viceroys and governors came to
nothing.

In 1639 another professional soldier—Francisco López de Zúñiga, who had fifteen

years’ experience in Flanders and Germany—replaced Laso de la Vega as governor.
Faced with continued Indian resistance, the new governor attempted to carry out a
modified policy of defensive warfare by arranging the Pact of Quillín, in which
Spaniards and Mapuche celebrated a “peace treaty.” The Spanish formally recognized
Indian sovereignty south of the Biobío River with the exception of the fort at Arauco
and the region thereabouts. In all the enterprise of conquest since 1492, Spain had never
before recognized the sovereignty of an Indian people. The Spanish also agreed to dis-
continue the slave hunts and forced labor. In exchange the Indians agreed to return
Spanish captives, to allow missionaries to preach in Indian territory, and to ally them-
selves with the Spanish against English and Dutch corsairs. King Philip IV approved
the pact in 1643. But despite the governor’s half-hearted efforts, the frontier garrisons
as well as other royal officials and encomendero-commercial interests refused both to
observe the tasas and to comply with the terms of the Pact of Quillín. Indian labor was
too valuable to give up merely because of a peace treaty or official policies.
The soldiers on the frontier continued slave hunts and pillage as their principal
source of enrichment. Events slowly led to still another general uprising on the scale of
the butchery between 1598 and 1606, as Araucanian resistance to “Christianization,”
especially to the ban on polygamy, frustrated clerics and governors alike.
Despite reaffirmation of the Pact of Quillín in March 1651, Indians in the region of
Cunco killed the shipwrecked survivors of the Spanish vessel bringing the military
subsidy to Chile. A punitive expedition slaughtered a number of Indians and sent
many women and children north as slaves. Then a series of raids led by the governor’s
two brothers-in-law provoked increasing Indian retaliation.
The governor and his brothers-in-law took over provisioning of the troops, stole
supplies, and launched a large-scale commerce in Indian slaves, with the Boroa fort
town serving as a clearing house. The 1608 decree allowing enslavement of rebellious
THE POLITICS OF CONQUEST 71

Indians provided the basis for a lucrative “certification” business, in which frontier of-
ficials certified that the Indians were captured in battles with rebellious tribes.
In February 1655, a mestizo called Alejo, an ex-soldier in the Spanish garrison, led an
Indian uprising and at the same time inspired rebellion by the prisoner-slaves still in the
frontier region. The Indians again destroyed the towns and forts south of the Biobío
River and forced the abandonment of towns as far north as Chillán. According to the his-
torian Carvallo y Goyeneche in the years following the uprising, the Indians captured
1300 Spaniards, sacked 396 estates, took over 400,000 head of cattle, horses, and sheep,
and caused property damage estimated at 8 million pesos. The Spanish lost Arauco, San
Pedro, Colcura, Buena Esperanza, Nacimiento, Talcamávida, San Rosendo, Boroa, and
Chillán, along with over half the armaments in the region. An angry mob in Concep-
ción—shouting, “Long live the king! Death to the bad governor!”—temporarily de-
posed the corrupt governor, and he was officially replaced in 1656. By then the Spanish
held only the town of Concepción in all the Bishopric of Imperial, and communication
with Santiago was possible only by military patrols. For all practical purposes Chile con-
sisted of the towns of La Serena, Santiago, and Concepción, along with the encomien-
das, mines, and rural estates from the valley of Coquimbo to the Maule River.
From 1657 to 1662 Spanish and Indian soldiers battled each other without resolu-
tion, until a Spanish army of 600 soldiers surprised and defeated 1500 Indians led by
the cacique Misqui near Curanilahue. Soon thereafter the interim governor ordered the
resettlement of Chillán and requested still more troop reinforcements to press the war
against the Araucanians. In the meantime the king named a new royal governor and,
in order to secure another force of 1000 soldiers in Spain, promised the recruits for Chile
the same benefits enjoyed by soldiers who served in Flanders.
Governor Francisco de Meneses came to Chile in 1664 and ruled it as a Hispanic rob-
ber baron until 1668. Taking full advantage of the warfare economy, the governor de-
manded heavy bribes for renewal of encomienda grants, sold military and civilian gov-
ernment posts, and made those he promoted pay him in gold; he taxed ships carrying
on commerce between Valparaíso and Callao before they left port—unless they carried
his merchandise; and he appropriated for sale in his own retail outlet a large part of the
goods arriving as part of the military subsidy. Supported by the Peruvian viceroy’s de-
sire to increase the flow of Indian slaves to the mines and fields of Peru, Meneses re-
newed expeditions to the south, especially against the pacified tribes, where it was eas-
ier to obtain human merchandise. In a single raid around Paicaví, Cayucupal, and
Tucapel, the Spaniards obtained 400 piezas (a weighted equivalent of four hundred In-
dians, allowing for the lesser value of the labor of children or the old) and assassinated
twenty chiefs who spoke out against these “military” operations. Meneses’s arbitrary,
corrupt rule also adversely affected the interests of important Chilean colonists. Even-
tually he was replaced owing to their letters of protest and after an unsuccessful at-
tempt on his life.
With a permanent force of some 2500 soldiers, Meneses’s successor Juan Henríquez
vigorously carried the war into Araucanian territory and also withstood attacks by
English Corsairs, including Bartholomew Sharp’s sack and burning of La Serena in
1680. He also accumulated vast wealth from slaving, despite the royal decree of 1674
prohibiting Indian slavery. Chilean historian Luis Galdames claims that during his
tenure Governor Henríquez took prisoner some 800 Indians and sold them as slaves.
The governor set the price at 500 fanegas of wheat for each Indian, with the fanega val-
ued at 50 centavos (in the mid-seventeenth century a first-class Indian, pieza de lei, sold
for 200 to 300 pesos and lesser valued Indians, piezas de servidumbre, for 150 to 200
72 CHILE

pesos). When he had accumulated 400,000 fanegas of wheat, he sold the grain to the
contractors of his own army at two pesos a fanega and was paid from the royal trea-
sury. War was good business! Henríquez left office after almost twelve years (1682)
with a fortune estimated at close to one million pesos.
In 1674 and 1679, during Governor Henríquez’s tenure, new decrees abolishing In-
dian slavery challenged the ingenuity of Chilean encomendero and business interests.
In response the Chileans adopted a legal device called the depósito, which placed cap-
tured Indians in the custody of encomenderos or landowners who agreed to supervise
them in exchange for the right to use their labor. An Indian under the depósito did not
legally “belong to” a particular Spaniard as did a slave, but in practice he might as well
have. The Chilean economy continued to depend upon warfare, slave hunts, pillage,
and exploitation of the rural labor force.
At the end of the seventeenth century, not only the Indians but also the Spanish-
mestizo troops manning the frontier outposts suffered the consequences of govern-
ment corruption. As Chilean historian and liberal political leader Benjamín Vicuña
Mackenna noted, the military subsidy became “an open bag of money into which
everybody dug with both hands, except those [the soldiers] for whom the subsidy had
originally been established.” The war budget profited Lima merchants, royal officials,
and Chilean colonials, while the human booty of the continual raids “stocked” the
mines, farms, and obrajes. Until 1685 the situado consisted largely of commodities, many
of which were of no use at all to frontier garrisons which lacked shoes, clothing, and
munitions. Moreover, the purchase of oil, salt, and soap in Lima for shipment to Chile
benefited only the Lima military contractors, since these commodities were generally
available in Chile. The shipwreck of the San Juan de Díos, which was bringing the situ-
ado to Chile, provided the pretext for a request by Chile’s governor that the subsidy be
sent overland from Potosí—in coin of the realm—thereby avoiding the risks of loss at
sea and attack by pirates. The approval of this request in 1685 meant that the soldiers
were to be paid in cash and buy their supplies at lower costs in Chile. Unfortunately,
however, from the mid-1680s onward the subsidy often arrived late if at all.
An earthquake which shattered Lima-Callao and led to the loss of the Peruvian
wheat crop in 1687 induced a temporary boom in Chilean wheat exports and also a con-
siderable increase in prices (see Chapter 3). This made it difficult to buy the needed pro-
visions for the Chilean garrison within the constraints of the military budget. By the
time the last seventeenth-century governor of Chile (1692–1700) took over, the Chilean
frontier army could not depend upon the annual subsidy as a sure source of support.
From 1692 to 1697 the export boom allowed the governor to maintain the army with
loans from colonial merchants. But with the military subsidy almost seven years in ar-
rears, Chile’s governor wrote the king in August 1697 that the soldiers were not only
unclothed, but in debt for what they had purchased or borrowed in recent years; and
“what never before has occurred, now is happening, the captains and the corporals of
the army leave their posts, as they find themselves in the same misery as the sol-
diers . . . going to the rural estates to feed and clothe themselves . . . [destroying]
order and military discipline.”
In the first years of the eighteenth century, the Wars of the Spanish Succession in Eu-
rope intensified difficulties in the Spanish-American colonies. When in 1702 the new
Chilean governor, Francisco Ibáñez de Peralta, received a payment of 292,000 pesos—
against a debt of over 2 million pesos, he made sure that his own salary and certain
other obligations were paid in full, leaving little for the garrison. (Ibáñez had already
opened a butcher shop, sold a number of official positions, and collected payments for
renewal of the encomiendas.) This situation provoked a military uprising that led to se-
THE POLITICS OF CONQUEST 73

rious internal disorders. The governor ordered rebellious soldiers tried by military tri-
bunals, and executed a number of the revolt’s leaders, despite an earlier promise of par-
don if they surrendered. In 1704 the military subsidy was eight years in arrears, and the
army lacked armaments and munitions. In these conditions official policy sought to
avoid provocation of the Araucanians by soldiers or missionaries.

By the last two decades of the seventeenth century, the effects of the 1655 uprising had
been largely overcome north of the Biobío River. To the south the Araucanians re-
mained in control. The degeneration of Spanish military capabilities from the Homeric
exploits of the sixteenth century to the professional rabble-garrisons sent from Lima in
the seventeenth left the conquest incomplete. Corruption, war-profiteering, and insuf-
ficient troops combined with the fierce resistance of the Araucanian and allied Indian
armies to prevent Spanish control of the regions most coveted by Pedro de Valdivia and
his followers.
In the first decades of the eighteenth century, tentative initiatives to renew the con-
quest and establish settlements in Araucania met with another general uprising (1723).
In response, Governor Gabriel Cano y Aponte (1717–33) ordered the dismantling of the
forts of Colcura, Arauco, and Tucapel and the erection in their stead of forts with sim-
ilar names north of the Biobío River. Apparently the Indians did not share Francisco
Encina’s judgment that “contrary to the fantasies and neurotic mysticism of the Jesuits
and the nineteenth century historians, the Indians’ condition when left to themselves
was much worse than the harshest servitude imposed by the Spanish.” A new agree-
ment, celebrated at Negrete in 1726, established the usual obligations of the Indians to
receive Christian missions and to ally themselves against enemies of the king; it re-
stored “peace” temporarily, until the next major conflict later in the century (1766).
In 1700 some 100,000 to 150,000 Spanish, mestizos, Indians, mulattoes, and Negroes
lived in Spanish Chile. From 1541 until 1664, 20,000 to 30,000 Chilean soldiers and set-
tlers had died fighting the Mapuche at an official cost of 17 million pesos—though the
Jesuit Diego de Rosales estimates the toll from 1545 to 1674 at 42,000 Spaniards, in-
cluding deaths from accidents and epidemics, and a military subsidy of 40 million
pesos from the Peruvian and Spanish treasuries. This does not include the vast per-
sonal fortunes expended in sixteenth-century enterprises of conquest. Estimates of In-
dian losses are too varied to be relied upon, but there can be no doubt they amounted
to many times those of the European invaders, especially taking into account death
through epidemic diseases. The material losses of the indigenous peoples of Chile like-
wise cannot be accurately measured—for they had no great stores of wealth but rather
lost their autonomy, their land, and ultimately their cultural integrity.
The uncompleted military conquest would be resolved only late in the nineteenth
century, but the authoritarian politics of conquest had already created in Chile the
foundations of a highly stratified class society in which labor was denigrated and la-
borers were exploited. The politics of conquest also institutionalized political corrup-
tion, arbitrary use of government authority, disrespect for and evasion of law—in
short, impunity for the powerful—and consolidation of the institutions of Hispanic
capitalism that would condition the development of a more complex social and eco-
nomic system in Chile in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
These latter characteristics Chile shared with most of the Spanish colonies. Unlike
the principal colonial centers, however, relative geographical isolation, poverty, and
lack of significant gold and silver mines contributed to the development of an agrarian-
based economy in Chile. Relative ease of communication and concentration of popula-
tion in the central valley, along with the constant threat and challenge of the Indian
74 CHILE

frontier, forged a colonial elite with strong localistic orientations, a fortress mentality,
and a significant military tradition. An impressive ability to coopt royal officials
through business or marital ties and to absorb new wealth and successful immigrants
created an integrated political, economic, and social elite with interests in agriculture,
commerce, and mining. Intermarriage, shared social values, and dependence for eco-
nomic well-being upon the exploitation of the rural labor force unified the Chilean
upper classes and helped forge a unique variant of Hispanic capitalism on the periph-
ery of the Spanish Empire. Chilean “exceptionalism” thus began in the colonial era; it
would persist in a number of ways into the twenty-first century.
3 Hispanic Capitalism

The colonial experience in Chile drastically reduced the indigenous population of the
territory between Copiapó and the Strait of Magellan and resulted in a deterioration in
the quality of life for the overwhelming majority of the territory’s population. Disease,
warfare, and exploitation destroyed the fabric of Indian life. At the same time misce-
genation gave rise to a new people descended from the conquistadors and their Indian
or Negro slaves and servants, or from Indians and their Spanish captives. Accustomed
to polygamy, Indian women adapted to Iberian promiscuity if they were not forcefully
subjected to it, and bore increasing numbers of “Spanish” children. To a lesser extent
Spanish women gave birth to the children of their Indian captors or lovers. Though by
1810 the entire population of Chile had probably not reached the size of the indigenous
population at the time of conquest, its character testified to the profound ethnic trans-
formation that accompanied the social and economic evolution of colonial Chile.
If, in retrospect, the most important product of colonialism in Chile is the mestizo,
the Spanish had not come to Chile with that intention. They came to take mineral
wealth and the booty from Indian empires—as they had done previously in Mexico,
Central America, and Peru. Shortly after the founding of Santiago in 1541, gold from
the mines at Marga Marga and other gold washings in the northern and southern dis-
tricts seemed to justify the prospect of a profitable extractive economy based upon the
forced labor of subjugated indigenous peoples. But by 1600 the relative poverty of eas-
ily worked gold mines in Chile became evident, and when the Spanish lost all the
southern settlements (1598–1604), the products of the countryside came to dominate
the colonial economy. Rapid proliferation of livestock soon made tallow and hides
Chile’s most important exports.
Both in the export of gold and tallow, Chile’s Spanish settlers operated from the out-
set in the intercolonial and international market. The essentially commercial motiva-
tion of the Chilean conquest and the distinctly export orientation of the colony’s lead-
ers contradict the common characterization of the early colonial economy as feudal,
autarkic, or merely subsistence. Yet caution must be exercised in labeling this colonial
economy capitalist merely because of its participation in international commerce. The
colonial economy functioned within a Hispanic, absolutist juridical order that had
more in common with a bastardized Iberian feudalism than with nineteenth-century
capitalism. Spanish imperial theory, property institutions, and commercial policy, as
well as the economic enterprises of the religious orders and the Araucanian war, com-
bined to give a distinctive character to colonial economy and society. If it was capital-
ist, then it was a special sort of capitalism, modified by the unique milieu of colonial
Chile—a miserably poor backwater of the Spanish Empire. The colonial economy of
Chile produced a surplus for export, but it did not do so under the fundamental con-
ditions of capitalist production—the sale by free workers of their labor to the posses-
sors of money and the means of production. Private enterprise and private profit de-
pended upon coerced labor and the protection of royal authority for commercial

75
76 CHILE

table 3–1. estimated population of chile, 1540–1620

Spanish and Negros and Encomienda

European “White” “Nonwhite” and Peaceful Unpacified
Creoles Mestizos Mestizos Indians Indians Total

1540 154 – 10 – 1,000,000 1,000,164

1570 7000 10,000 7000 450,000 150,000 624,000
1590 9000 17,000 16,000 420,000 120,000 582,000
1600 10,000 20,000 19,000 230,000 270,000 549,000
1620 15,000 40,000 22,000 230,000 250,000 557,000

After Rolando Mellafe, La introducción de la esclavitud negra en Chile, 1959, p. 226.

monopolies, price-fixing, and severe limitations upon economic competition. Thus,

while Hispanic capitalism in Chile certainly entailed commodity production for local,
regional, and international markets, it did not depend upon a significant wage-labor
force until the nineteenth century.
In principle, every economic enterprise in colonial Chile operated only with the per-
mission of the royal authorities or the cabildo, which fixed by decree the price for
commodities, labor, and services. Spanish imperial policy sought to limit trade among
the colonies to approved channels and to direct the economic surplus to Spain. In turn
the colonies were expected to import goods carried from Spain in Spanish vessels. The
high cost of transport made many colonial agricultural products noncompetitive when
moved great distances from the point of production, but the necessities of frontier life
often led local artisans and landlords to ignore prohibitions on local industries or lim-
itations on the cultivation of particular crops such as grapes. Almost from the outset
smuggling played an important role in commerce both among the colonies and be-
tween the colonies and non-Spanish merchants. Chile could trade legally with Spain
only via the merchant fleet that came to Panama once a year or, sometimes, less often.
After sailing to Panama via Peru, Chilean merchants had to cross the isthmus on mules
to obtain merchandise from the annual fairs where Spanish merchants dictated the
prices. The Spanish merchants greatly overvalued their own merchandise. While they
sought profit margins that often reached over 500 percent, they paid poorly for colonial
commodities. The rigors of travel, the rigged markets, and the capital required severely
limited the access of Chileans to this commerce, and left most legal Chilean commerce
in Peruvian hands.
Resource allocation within the colonial economy did not occur as a result of the
functioning of a capitalist market. Official policy discouraged economic competition,
established publicly authorized monopolies, and, by the seventeenth century, created
a number of publicly owned haciendas and industries intended to supply food, cloth-
ing, shoes, and materiel to the Chilean frontier garrison. For all these economic activi-
ties, the labor force consisted largely of slaves, subjugated or tributary Indians, fixed-
term “indentured” laborers (asientos de trabajo), and agricultural tenants until well into
the eighteenth century. Even then the development of a wage proletariat came slowly
as class relations in the countryside moved toward tenant labor.
Three primary bases of wealth initially underlay the colonial economy: land, Indian
or Negro labor, and the authority to exploit them. To these were added commerce and
artisanship and, after 1600, the military situado. Always, however, the most important
“commodity” remained political authority: from government concessions, licenses,
HISPANIC CAPITALISM 77

grants, or official positions stemmed all economic opportunity, including land grants
(mercedes), mining concessions, and the right to exact tribute or exploit Indian labor.
In the early years of the colony, gold mining took first place in the incipient econ-
omy. The most fortunate of the conquistadors appropriated the mines and washings
worked by the Indians prior to the arrival of the Spanish, and obtained respectable
quantities of the yellow metal. At Marga Marga, near Valparaíso, mines that had sup-
plied the natives with the tribute for the Incas now passed into the hands of Pedro de
Valdivia and several of his companions. With the relatively simple techniques em-
ployed, gold production required large numbers of laborers. Estimates of the number
of Indians forced to work in the mines and gold washings are neither systematic nor re-
liable, but the contemporary chronicler Pedro Mariño de Lobera claimed that in 1553
more than 20,000 Indians worked the mines of Quilacoya alone. While this figure is
probably exaggerated, there can be no doubt that thousands of Indians were forced to
extract gold for the Spanish from La Serena in the north to the southern mines in Os-
orno and Valdivia.
Work in the mines was strenuous. The Indian labor force detested their virtual en-
slavement, the separation from their families, and the harsh working conditions. As
disease and overwork killed off Indian laborers, the Spaniards sought to replenish the
labor supply from the encomienda Indians (Huarpes) transported across the Andes
and with the captives from the war to the south.
In the mining process itself, groups of Indians dug the earth and put the excavated
material into tubs, or bateas. Other Indians then carried the dirt-filled tubs to the
water’s edge. Still other laborers, usually Indian women or Negro slaves, spent almost
entire days in water up to their knees washing the dirt in a procession of bateas until
only gold remained at the bottom. Along the streams and rivers the laborers also em-
ployed techniques similar to the gold-panning methods of the later California gold
rush (1849). Thanks to Indian and Negro labor, a few of the earliest conquistadors man-
aged to turn the dream of gold into reality in the Chilean colony.
Owing to the frontier conditions on the Chilean periphery of the Spanish Empire, it
is impossible to make accurate estimates of the quantity or the value of the gold ex-
tracted in the sixteenth century. As 20 percent of all gold mined (the quinto) belonged
legally to the royal treasury, there was, of course, no incentive for precise accounting by
the conquistadors. During the first few months following the settlement of Santiago,
the Spanish obtained some 7000 pesos’ worth of gold at Marga Marga, and in 1547
Pedro de Valdivia sent a large gold shipment to Peru. Royal officials estimated that to
that time the quintos equaled approximately 40,000 gold pesos. Taking into account the
inevitable losses to corruption and unreported gold, the Indians produced well over
200,000 gold pesos for the Spaniards at the mines from 1541 to 1547. While this was not
an inconsiderable sum, the Chilean mines could not compare with the incredible
wealth of the silver mines at Potosí in what is now Bolivia or with the mines of Mexico
later in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
In 1552 the most important mines were located at Quilacoya near the Biobío River.
The defeat at Tucapel (1553), where Valdivia died, took these riches from the Spaniards,
but new mines were discovered shortly thereafter at Osorno and Valdivia. The Jesuit
chronicler Diego de Rosales tells us, with obvious exaggeration, that in 1561 the Indi-
ans’ labor produced some 1.2 million pesos at the Madre de Dios mines near Valdivia
and in the mines at Choapa in Coquimbo. About Osorno, Father Rosales reported that
“the land has gold and silver mines, and it is taken in such abundance that with one or
two days’ work the Indians mine enough to fill their quota for the week; mining stones
so large that they break them into pieces and give them to the encomenderos [to pay off
78 CHILE

their obligations].” A less poetic account by Juan López de Velasco suggests that from
1542 to 1560 gold output in Chile reached more than 7 million pesos.
As the sixteenth century progressed, gold production dramatically declined. The
royal quintos went from 35,000–40,000 pesos in 1568 to 32,000 pesos in 1571 and 22,000
in 1583. By way of contrast, Potosí produced 170,000 pesos in quintos in 1570. Chronic
warfare in the southern territories limited output, and at the height of the Indian up-
rising in 1600 total royal income from Chile, including the quintos, amounted to only
3000 pesos. A royal official reported that “this is all the royal income there is here for
now, because the whole territory is so afflicted with war that the pacified Indians can-
not mine gold, because they are all employed in making supplies for the war.” Even be-
fore the uprising another report to the king (1594) had noted that “the Indians serving
in the cities of La Serena, Santiago, Concepción, and the others have so diminished in
number that gold is hardly mined in all the kingdom and their number [the Indians’]
is barely sufficient to sustain the cultivation of the haciendas and tend to the cattle of
the encomenderos.” Thus, with the possible exception of the mines at Andacollo, gold
mining had dropped off sharply by the last decade of the sixteenth century.
Despite this decline, the location of the mines had influenced substantially the sites
the Spaniards chose for the towns that were to become the cradles of European culture
in Chile. Though all of the first settlements were destroyed at least once by Indian attack
or by pirates and several times by earthquakes, tidal waves, or floods, each was re-
founded. Their names can be found on modern maps of Chile: La Serena, Santiago, Con-
cepción, Imperial (now Carahue, to the west of Nueva Imperial), Villarrica, and Val-
divia. In each town the settlers looked to the municipal council, or cabildo, to order
urban economic activity and also, initially, to establish regulations governing exploita-
tion of the mines, agricultural lands, and the cottage industries created in the towns and
encomiendas. These towns, however, remained little more than struggling villages with
one-story adobe or wooden houses roofed with tiles or straw. Only an occasional two-
story building or the larger constructions of the religious orders even hinted at the sky-
scrapers of later years. In Santiago most of the houses were built around patios—many
planted in gardens or fruit trees. Through the middle of the cobbled or dirt streets of the
town ran open sewers. The other towns were much smaller and even less prosperous.
In these towns soldiers with seigniorial aspirations formed households with Indian
women and servants. As the colony grew, the number of domestic servants increased;
the more held by a household, the higher its social status. As few skilled artisans
came to Chile in the early years, these households developed a sort of pioneer self-
sufficiency, until increased population permitted more economic specialization. For
those artisans who did set up shop in Santiago, the cabildo attempted, with little suc-
cess, to replicate the guild system of Spain. The cabildo regulated the quality and price
of almost all manufacturing services, and commodities, including such items as bread,
tools, clothing, and fish. As soon as brickmaking took on a commercial character, the
cabildo decreed official prices and established a fine of ten pesos in addition to forfei-
ture of goods sold in excess of these prices. To establish a brickyard required an official
permit, and at times a permit was denied if the proposed location posed environmen-
tal hazards to the town. As early as 1548 the cabildo approved official prices for differ-
ent types of clothing made by tailors and for the products of armorers, smiths, and car-
penters. Adjustments took place as business interests or consumers pressured the
municipal officers. Public policy in colonial Chile left no room for the “free competitive
marketplace,” and the tradition of government responsibility for regulating industry
and ensuring availability of basic commodities at reasonable prices survived even the
superficial imposition of liberal capitalist ideology in the nineteenth century. In at least
HISPANIC CAPITALISM 79

one case the cabildo even prevented a settler from leaving town lest Santiago lose its
only blacksmith.
The earliest colonial manufacturers met demands for food, shelter, clothing, and
armaments. The first recorded flour mills were established at the foot of Santa Lucía
by Rodrigo de Araya and Bartolomé Flores (Blumenthal). Other early enterprises in-
cluded shoemakers, smiths, armorers, tanners, and saddle makers. Pottery, textiles,
and cordage became important cottage industries. In the manufacture of textiles the
Spanish took advantage of the developed Indian traditions in weaving. Boatbuilding
also gained importance around Valdivia, Osorno, Concepción, and Valparaíso-Concón.
Some of the early manufactures testify to the entrepreneurial skill of the conquista-
dors. For example, Antonio Nuñez arrived in Chile shortly after Pedro de Valdivia and
acquired large rural estates near Santiago and Valparaíso. Nuñez built the first ware-
houses at Valparaíso, engaged in commerce between Peru and Santiago in his own
ships captained by his sons-in-law, established the boatbuilding works at Concón, and
negotiated a fishing concession with the cabildo at Santiago (1579). In a business trans-
action that could be understood by any modern Chilean capitalist, Nuñez offered to
bring fish to Santiago if the cabildo would fix a convenient price for a period of three years.
The cabildo agreed, but Nuñez recalculated his costs and, before delivering a single
fish, petitioned for an increase in price “due to the high costs of boats and nets, which
will be at least 500 pesos, and since seven or eight workers will be required to cast the
nets, in addition to three or four Indians.” Colonial entrepreneurs, like their modern
counterparts, sought monopoly market positions, guaranteed prices, captive markets,
and cheap labor in collusion with government officials. This tradition of Hispanic cap-
italist enterprise carried over from the conquest to become the prevailing spirit of the
colonial economy.
Whereas Spanish colonial towns were the centers of political authority and the be-
ginnings of urban culture and industry, most of the population lived in the countryside,
and the agricultural encomiendas, mines, and rural industries produced the bulk of
colonial commodities. The encomenderos and hacendados created textile sweatshops,
oil presses, wineries, tanneries, mills, rope and tool manufacturers and even, briefly,
sugar mills in Copiapó and Aconcagua, to process the produce of the land. At the end
of the sixteenth century Chile paid for its imports of European and Peruvian merchan-
dise with exports of tallow, hides and leather goods, sheepskins, wine, wood, apples,
hemp, salted meat, olives and olive oil, and copper. Despite recurrent warfare, the
Chilean economy produced a considerable surplus of food and agrarian products. Ex-
cellent yields in the territory’s virgin soil converted the river valleys into gardens,
while the proliferation of livestock made meat available to all classes. In 1565 shippers
charged 46 gold pesos a head to transport cattle from Callao to Valparaíso. The success
of the Chilean livestock industry meant that thirty years later 300 head of cattle sold for
450 pesos (1.50 pesos per head) in Santiago. Due to the unending Araucanian war, how-
ever, the encomenderos preferred to raise mules for trans-Andean transport, which the
royal governors would not requisition as they would horses. At the end of the century
a horse brought 150 pesos or more as compared with 1.50 pesos for a cow. A shortage
of horses led Governor García Ramón to prohibit further mule breeding (1607); and
when this measure failed, Governor Jaraquemada (1611) ordered the gelding of all
jackasses within twenty days, subject to a fine of 100 gold pesos per animal for non-
compliance. The extensiveness of the Chilean countryside and the value of mules for
transport and as export commodities to Potosí made this measure as unsuccessful as
the one decreed by García Ramón.
With the loss of all the southern towns and mines at the end of the sixteenth century,
80 CHILE

the Chilean economy was reduced to several regional economies centered upon the
small towns of La Serena (46 houses), Santiago (200 houses), Concepción (66 houses),
and Chillán (52 houses). Gradually the trans-Andean settlements of Cuyo were incor-
porated de facto into the economy of Río de la Plata, though Santiago continued to im-
port Huarpe Indian laborers from the encomiendas across the Andes. Though the foun-
dation of wealth and power throughout the colony remained control of land, labor and
commercial opportunities subject to the discretion of government decision makers, the
varied natural ecologies of these regions, and their location with respect to the battle-
fields contested by Spanish and Araucanians, led to distinctive patterns of social and
economic development. Thus an accurate portrayal of socio-economic evolution in colo-
nial Chile requires focusing some attention on the diversity of regional development
from the northern provinces to the central valley and then to the southern frontier.

In 1544 Pedro de Valdivia ordered Juan Bohon to found a city somewhere in the valley
of Elqui or Coquimbo as a way station between Peru and Santiago. After four years as
little more than an encampment, an Indian attack destroyed the settlement entirely.
With the arrival of reinforcements at Santiago from Peru, Valdivia sent Francisco de
Aguirre to refound La Serena. Aguirre chose the modern site some 2000 meters from
the sea. Valdivia gave all the land and Indians from the valley of Choapa to the valley
of Copiapó to only eight vecinos.* Unlike the rapid turnover among most of the Chilean
encomiendas and land grants in the early years, the northern encomienda grants often
remained in the same family for many generations. No better example of this could be
found than the Aguirre family whose descendants retained the encomiendas of Copi-
apó and Coquimbo until the abolition of all encomiendas in Chile in the late eighteenth
century (1791), and remained important landowners in the region into the twentieth
century.
The town of La Serena grew slowly. By 1610 nine square blocks contained a church,
Augustinian and Franciscan convents, and government buildings, surrounded by
fields and orchards. No more than one hundred Spaniards and mestizos and some
eight hundred tributary Indians resided in or about the town. Growth continued
slowly until 1680 when pirates led by Bartholomew Sharp sacked and burned the set-
tlement. Many of the principal vecinos abandoned the town and fled to their rural es-
tates. After another pirate attack in 1686 the cabildo attempted to prevent total aban-
donment of the city by decreeing heavy fines for those leaving without permission.
Increased wheat exports and mining activity in the last decade of the seventeenth cen-
tury brought renewed vitality to La Serena, while its port at Coquimbo became an im-
portant point of transshipment of copper to Peru. Copper smelters near Coquimbo sent
the elaborated red metal to Callao, and artisans sent their copper wares south to Santi-
ago as well as north to Lima. Nonetheless, in the first decades of the eighteenth century
the French engineer M. Frezier still remarked on the “scarcity of population, the rude-
ness of the streets without pavement, the poverty of the houses built of mud and roofed
with straw, which gives La Serena the aspect of a country village [campo].”
In the first decades of the seventeenth century the major export commodities from
the norte chico included, along with copper, tallow, hides, lard, and sheepskins. Small
amounts of wheat also went from the northern valleys to Peru or Potosí. Although data
on agricultural production and exports for the seventeenth century are incomplete, re-

*A vecino was a principal citizen in an urban center, a tax-paying property owner with a “voice”
in the cabildo; he was also often an encomendero.
HISPANIC CAPITALISM 81

cent studies suggest that between 1620 and 1690 agriculture gained in importance rel-
ative to livestock, and the norte chico became an important source of hemp, cordage,
aguardiente, pisco, wine, and wheat for the Peruvian market. By the beginning of the
eighteenth century the present-day agriculture-livestock-mining triad had already
emerged, along with the accompanying cycles of mining booms and depressions.
The regional economies of the norte chico between Copiapó and Quillota, furthest re-
moved from the Araucanian wars and closest to Peru, developed within a far more sta-
ble environment than did the regions south of Santiago. Indians imported from across
the cordillera along with Araucanian captives worked the gold mines, planted, tended,
and harvested crops, and labored in the limited number of artisan industries, or obrajes,
and mills. But the limited grain exports to Peru belied the delicate balance between pop-
ulation, agricultural potential, and food supply throughout the region. As population
increased in the late seventeenth century, hints of future regional grain deficits were ev-
ident. In 1695, in response to expanded Chilean wheat exports to Peru and the accom-
panying rise in local prices, the cabildo in La Serena ordered producers to sell one-tenth
of their output at a fixed price to the town’s bakers in order to ensure availability of flour
and bread below market prices. By 1724 more drastic measures prohibited export of
grain or flour outside the region, even to Copiapó or Illapel. These measures, adopted
also in modified form in central Chile, sought to guarantee local consumption at rea-
sonable prices. The need for those measures and others like them from 1692 to 1750
pointed to a basic conflict between participation in the international economy and the
provisioning of local markets at regulated prices. This conflict, which reappeared fre-
quently in the history of Chilean agriculture, inspired the age-old responses of smug-
gling, black market trading, and hoarding of commodities until more favorable prices
could be obtained. Thus, in 1747 the cabildo in Copiapó authorized the corregidor to
regulate producers in order to assure adequate supplies. Later it noted that a number of
vecinos had violated the decree, which established a maximum price for wheat and flour,
and had hidden away the wheat. As late as 1798 the cabildo complained about “manip-
ulation of grain prices by a small number of persons in times of scarcity.”
In the middle of the eighteenth century the region around Copiapó still was essen-
tially a mining district, producing silver, gold, and copper. The region imported food-
stuffs, such as wheat, jerked beef, lard, and livestock products, to support the mining
population, though it exported wine to Peru. This situation changed little in the rest
of the century. La Serena also experienced a renaissance of mining after 1735–40
but barely produced enough wheat to supply its own needs. Like Copiapó, the La Ser-
ena district imported tallow, lard, flour, and livestock, in contrast to its relative self-
sufficiency in these products earlier in the century.
These economic changes in the norte chico were accompanied by an alteration in the
composition of the population and the work force. The decline of encomienda Indians
throughout the seventeenth century coincided with an increase in mestizos, mulattoes,
and other ethnic mixtures, or castas, as the offspring of conquistadors, Indians, and Ne-
groes made the population more heterogeneous. Miscegenation and the urban popu-
lation increased more in the norte chico than further south—in large part because
the north avoided the costs and scars of the Araucanian wars which devastated the
Concepción-Biobío region. By the mid-eighteenth century the attraction of work in the
mines contributed to the growth of urban centers in the norte chico; between 1755 and
1778 Copiapó expanded from a settlement of 2900 to a small town of 5300, with a rate
of increase in excess of 3.5 percent per year.
Both natural increase and migration to the mineral districts added population to the
norte chico. Still, the encomenderos resisted employing mestizo, Indian, or casta free la-
82 CHILE

borers, preferring to rely on traditional labor arrangements with “their” encomienda

Indians. The mestizos, free Indians, and castas thus became a sort of underclass, pro-
hibited from occupying official posts, joining the priesthood, or obtaining the status of
master artisan. As the encomienda system declined, this underclass found its way into
the mines and haciendas as labor-rent tenants, renters, sharecroppers, or peons. Others
took up the life of vagabonds or criminals. Cattle rustling was so serious by the middle
of the eighteenth century that the hacendados received judicial authority within their
estates, which often covered entire regions; and punishments for robbery increased in
severity from floggings or banishment to prison sentences or, when a theft involved
more than five cows, death. In addition, the authorities attempted to force transients
into productive work. Local registers kept track of all those living within a district and
required “all vecinos to report vagabonds and all those entering or leaving the district
to present themselves to the corregidor.” Those who could not prove they had jobs
were assigned to public works.
The existence of a growing and mobile proletariat did not suit the needs and expec-
tations of colonial elites and threatened to “corrupt” the sedentary labor force. The con-
centration of agricultural lands into vast estates along with the political limitations on
creation of private enterprises prevented absorption of this underclass into the econ-
omy as small farmers, artisans, or merchants. Many could find no employment or
could do so only seasonally in the mines or at harvest time. In a report on the state of
Chilean agriculture, industry, and commerce at the end of the eighteenth century, a
royal official commented that “this lack of employment makes common the lamentable
use of certain modes of forgetting their plight, of removing the weight of such a sad,
languid existence; of those beverages with which the unfortunate, with the pretext of
enjoying their afflictions, seek a cure for living.” In the same report Manuel de Salas
noted the tendency of these vagabonds to remain single, to be promiscuous, and to
avoid the responsibilities of a family, thereby “becoming the fathers of a new genera-
tion of the underclass [miserables], vagabonds like their fathers, without homes and
with little more possessions than those sufficient to cover their bodies.” By the end of
the colonial period, the conditions leading to intergenerational “inheritance” of misery
had already taken shape in the norte chico.
From these transients or drifters sprang also in the period 1690–1750 an incipient
wage-labor force of peons, or gañanes, in the mines of the northern district. Often,
however, an advance loan of food, clothing, or tools reduced the peon to a sort of debt-
servitude, even though decrees at the end of the century prohibited advance payment
of more than one month’s salary to single workers or two months’ to married workers.
To obtain employment in the mines, workers had to have a document, or boleta, in
which the last employer confirmed that the worker owed no further debt. This system
of internal passports served to monitor the movements of thieves or other “undesir-
ables” as well as of indebted laborers who sought entry into a new mining camp. If an
Indian, a mulatto, or a Negro fled from the mines while he owed money, he could be
punished by a fine and by flogging “to serve as an example to the others.” Even the
worker with a boleta could not legally leave the mine without giving notice to his em-
ployer. In this manner debt-peonage and mining on shares replaced the encomienda.
In both cases Hispanic capitalism depended still upon an exploited but essentially pre-
proletarian labor force, though by the middle of the eighteenth century a true wage
proletariat was beginning to emerge in the mining districts of the north. Gradually this
mestizo and casta labor force replaced the dwindling numbers of encomienda Indians.
The miner worked from sunup to sundown with a noonday meal and rest period of
HISPANIC CAPITALISM 83

two hours. He received jerked beef and bread as food rations. With his earnings and
perhaps some minerals “stolen” from the mine owners, the miner could enjoy Sundays
or holidays at the combination store-saloons, or pulperías and bodegones, of the nearby
camps or villages. These pulperías served as social centers, gambling dens, dance halls,
and houses of prostitution. In 1781 fifty-two such pulperías could be found in Copiapó
and ten at the small settlement at Huasco.
Despite the increase in population in the norte chico, until the end of the seventeenth
century not a single new major city was founded—only a large number of mining
camps, trading centers, and small settlements. Indeed, at the end of the colonial period
La Serena with 5000 to 6000 residents still ranked as the largest urban center in the
north. Throughout the region the population was concentrated in the river valleys—
Elqui, Sotaqui, Salsipuedes, Andacollo, Limarí, Quillota, Aconcagua—and the mining
camps, as it is to this day. At the end of the colonial period the norte chico remained a
sparsely settled, agro-mining region which sent copper, silver, gold, and livestock
products, especially goatskins, to international and intercolonial markets.

In the early years Santiago and the central region served as a base camp for the enter-
prise of conquest. Rebuilt after an Indian attack that left the town in ashes a mere seven
months after its foundation, Santiago grew slowly during the first half-century of its ex-
istence. It suffered, nevertheless, from some problems common to most urban places.
In 1551, taking note of the frequent disorders and robberies at night, Lieutenant Gov-
ernor Rodrigo de Quiroga and the cabildo decreed that no one could go out of his
house at night after curfew under penalty—for Spaniards, of losing their weapons and
being arrested, and for the Indians or Negroes, of 100 lashes.
In addition to dealing with law and order, the cabildo had to provide essential pub-
lic works. The Mapocho River periodically inundated the town. Residents needed a
safe supply of potable water. Lack of bridges across the river impeded communications
and commerce. Dusty or muddy streets required cobbling. During the sixteenth cen-
tury the cabildo began to deal with the physical needs of the city. In 1578 water was
brought from the cordillera to the central plaza, but the service could not be main-
tained, and in 1588 Santiago residents again turned to water from the Mapocho. In 1578
the cabildo also cobbled a number of streets. By the first decade of the seventeenth cen-
tury, after a flood had destroyed the Hermitage of Saturnino and part of the lower sec-
tions of the town, construction began on the flood-control works. Notwithstanding
these improvements, the town continued to have a rural flavor: the cabildo prohibited
pigs from slogging around the water in the plaza and, while the public waterworks un-
derwent rehabilitation (1613), prohibited washing of clothes at certain points on the
river bank, under penalty of 200 lashes.
At the turn of the century 500 to 700 Spanish and mestizos and several thousand In-
dians resided in this village capital. Despite the frontier simplicity of the physical en-
vironment, the wealthiest residents imported luxury goods from Europe and China via
Peru. Merchants brought velvet, silk, and damask to a colony that often lacked muni-
tions, horses, and military supplies and whose very existence remained in jeopardy. In
the midst of frontier warfare a would-be aristocracy clung to its pretensions. Accord-
ing to one chronicler, “every Spanish woman wanted thirty Indian servants to do her
washing and sewing as if she were a princess.” Even in the face of the loss of the most
prosperous colonial towns (those south of the Biobío River) after 1598 and the threat to
Santiago itself, the conquistadors and their successors maintained the superficial forms
of a European nobility they wished to emulate.
84 CHILE

The elite of the new-society-in-formation consisted of encomenderos, public officials,

including religious functionaries, and merchants. After Pedro de Valdivia’s initial gen-
erosity, the relative scarcity of sedentary Indians in Chile forced the first governor to re-
duce the number of encomiendas granted to the vecinos of Santiago from sixty to ap-
proximately thirty between Copiapó and Maule. When Valdivia died in 1553, a very
small number of encomenderos, including his mistress, Inés de Suarez, had been
granted the natives in most of the territory of Chile. These grants served as the basis of
wealth and power over generations for certain of Chile’s colonial elite.
The abbreviated case history of the encomienda of the German-born conquistador
Bartolomé Flores is illustrative. To Flores, Valdivia commended “all the caciques and
principals, with their Indians, named below, to wit, Talagante, Mavellangai, Codamol-
calebi, Upiro, Lebalo, Guarcamilla, Acai, Nabalquivi, Conquemangui and Namarongo,
with all their Indians and subjects in the valley of Mapocho.” Flores consolidated these
grants into the two estates of Talagante and Putugán (Linares), where he raised horses,
chickens, and pigs and cultivated wheat, barley, beans, and corn. On these estates Flo-
res built the first oxcarts in Chile and taught the Indians certain manual skills. Flores
married the daughter of the cacique Talagante, and his heir from this union, Doña Ar-
gueda, married another German-born conquistador, Pedro de Lisperguer, who had ar-
rived in Chile with Governor García Hurtado de Mendoza (1557). Two other children
born in Peru also came to Chile and obtained encomienda grants through marriage.
These lands, and others conceded throughout the seventeenth century, remained in the
hands of Flores’ descendants until 1721–24. Many of the Indians from the southern
grant were transferred to the Santiago region, but as was typical of the encomiendas
during this period, decimation or flight reduced radically the number of tributary peo-
ples. In 1721 the Talagante grant had a mere fourteen tributary Indians. Nevertheless,
these estates and those of the other encomenderos played a significant role in the eco-
nomic development of the central region during the colonial period. At least twenty of
the original grants persisted intact until the final abolition of the encomienda in Chile
in 1791.
In Santiago and central Chile there was a rapid growth of livestock and agricultural
production, centered in the vast estates of the encomenderos and the hacendados. By
1571–74, according to a nineteenth-century historian, the Santiago regional economy
produced “a great quantity of wheat and barley, much wine, and all the other com-
modities, fruits, and livestock of Spain; there are also many orchards and gardens
within and without the city.” Commerce with Peru developed immediately, with the
arrival in 1543 of reinforcements for Valdivia and goods sent in exchange for the gold
dust collected by the settlers. The extent of this trade can be judged by the loot taken
by Sir Francis Drake when he sacked Valparaíso in 1578: 2500 to 3000 jugs of wine,
salted meat, flour, agricultural and livestock products ready for shipment to Lima and
Potosí.
In the first years a sea trip from Callao to Chile could take over a month. Maritime
communication was irregular; only 24 ships arrived from Peru between 1543 and 1556,
and seventeen sailed from Valparaíso to Callao-Lima, a trip that took three to four
months due to the southerly winds and the Humboldt Current. Six others were lost at
sea. A trip from Santiago to Madrid could easily take a year. Despite the difficulties and
perils of communication, the export economy developed steadily, and Valparaíso, with
only a handful of residents, began to serve as a port of commerce.
While the countryside produced most of the colony’s wealth, the principal benefici-
aries were colonial administrators and merchants in the towns. The colonial merchants,
who took great risks to bring goods to Chile and to send them from Chile to Lima or
Spain, charged prices that yielded enormous profits. A study of the wealthy residents
HISPANIC CAPITALISM 85

in Santiago and La Serena from 1567 to 1577 shows that only 15 to 25 years after the
conquest, merchants paid almost as much into the royal treasury on the gold registered
for payment of the quintos as did the encomenderos. The amount of smuggled or un-
registered gold acquired by merchants in urban shops or through trade with the Indi-
ans cannot be estimated. Some encomenderos also invested the gold “their” Indians
mined in commodities or merchant ventures; from the outset, merchant capital and en-
comendero interests formed an interrelated elite, rather than two distinct social groups.
Thus, trade and commerce took their place as integral elements in the colonial economy
even under the harsh conditions of sixteenth-century conquest.
Unlike the La Serena region, however, the vecinos of Santiago bore a heavy burden
in the Araucanian war. The military disasters of the sixteenth century threatened the
very existence of the regional economy as well as the maintenance of the Chilean
colony itself. The development and character of the economy of the central region at
that time depended substantially, therefore, upon the vicissitudes of warfare.
The monarchy’s response to the colony’s distress after the fiasco at Curalaba at the
turn of the century created a new source of wealth, which relieved the colonials of
much of the economic burden of warfare and also allowed them to pay greater atten-
tion to their economic enterprises. By decree of March 21, 1600, the Spanish monarch
authorized a yearly subsidy, or situado, of 60,000 ducats, or 82,500 pesos, from the royal
treasury in Peru for three years to assist the Chilean colony in its struggle to survive.
The new Chilean governor, Alonso de Ribera, received most of this subsidy in the form
of clothing and supplies for the troops en route to Chile. Ribera’s reports to the king on
the desperate conditions of the Chilean garrisons—“so poorly disciplined that their
style of warfare seems more like confusion and barbarism than like Spanish militia”—
persuaded the crown to create a permanent military establishment of 1500 soldiers
whose salary would be paid by the viceroy of Peru. Later this number was increased to
2000. In 1603 the crown raised the military budget to 140,000 ducats; and in 1606, to
212,000 ducats, or 293,000 pesos.
Thus to secure its Chilean outpost, the Spanish state took over the administration
and the financing of conquest, for which it utilized the wealth of the mines at Potosí
and the income of Peru. Ribera added to this subsidy the revenues obtained through
taxes on the sale of captive Indians, and also organized royal estates to provision the
troops with grain, beef, and livestock products. At Melipilla the governor established
royal textile workshops to supply clothing, blankets, and other goods to the garrisons.
These estates—Loyola, between Chillán and Concepción; Catentoa, between Maule
and Chillán; and Quillota—harvested 7410 fanegas of wheat, 500 of barley, and 200 of
potatoes in 1604. Large herds of sheep and cattle as well as hemp plantations at Quil-
lota provided part of the basic necessities for the army. In 1607 the Loyola estate earned
slightly more than 53,000 pesos, and the Catentoa estate, some 75,000 pesos. Ribera also
created a tannery in Santiago and a number of artisan industries in Concepción. Fol-
lowing Ribera’s example, his successor established a cordage industry at Quillota and
constructed a large number of oxcarts as baggage wagons for the military.
The military subsidy stimulated the colonial economy by increasing demand for
supplies and by largely freeing the settlers from the obligations of annual military
campaigns. It also brought a continual flow of Spaniards and mestizos as troops, espe-
cially to the Concepción region. But the purchase of many supplies for the army in
Lima limited the beneficial effects on the Chilean economy; and owing to the institu-
tionalized corruption at Lima, the Chilean army received silk stockings, damask, and
honey as well as a number of commodities available in Chile such as soap and oil. The
luxury items profited Chilean officials and merchants but did little to help the war ef-
fort. The Peruvian viceroys insisted that the major share of the subsidy be spent in Peru,
86 CHILE

which benefited Peruvian producers and merchants much more than the Chileans. Not
until 1685 did Governor José de Garro get authorization to have the subsidy sent in
money from Potosí. But, as noted in Chapter 2, at the end of the seventeenth century
the subsidy arrived late or not at all.
Throughout this century the royal situado and warfare against the Indians reinforced
the agro-commercial economy of the Santiago-central region. Loss of the agricultural
and livestock output between the Itata and Maule rivers after the uprising of 1655
forced the central district to supply most of the needs of the entire colony; and as the
century progressed, it had to respond to demands for grain from Peru, though the
quantities of grain sent to Lima remained paltry (9000 to 12,000 fanegas per year) until
late in the seventeenth century.
The Santiago-central region provided most of the wheat needed by the colony until
the 1680s without pushing prices over three pesos per fanega. Except under the ex-
treme conditions of warfare or siege, even the poorest Chilean produced enough to eat
or could purchase food at reasonably low prices, while animal products in particular
were available in abundance. Existing external markets did not permit a significant ex-
pansion of commercial agricultural production. In contrast, livestock products, such as
tallow, salted beef, lard, hides, and sheepskins, as well as wine could compete favor-
ably in the Lima-Potosí markets. At midcentury (1647) Martín de Mugica wrote to the
king that Chile exported 20,000 quintals of tallow to Peru (and internal consumption
amounted to about the same).
The livestock economy fit nicely with the social attitudes of the encomenderos and
hacendados who preferred the prestige of horses, cattle, or sheep to the plebeian tasks
of farming. As the livestock economy also required considerably less labor than cereal
production, there was also less need for Indian laborers whose numbers were declin-
ing in the encomiendas.
The perilous state of the Chilean colony at the end of the sixteenth century had in-
duced the viceroy to exempt Chilean products from the traditional import duties, or al-
mojarifazgo. From this time the number of land grants, or mercedes de tierra, around San-
tiago greatly increased in number; by 1604 most of the territory of modern Valparaíso
and Santiago provinces had been legally granted to Spanish owners. Important factors
in the rush for land, in contrast to the earlier desire for grants of Indians, included the
Peruvian demand for Chilean livestock products, the need for sheepskins used to
transport quicksilver from Huancavelica to Potosí, and the needs of the army to the
south.
Land grants varied considerably in size, but some exceeded 5000 hectares. Some-
times grantees sold portions of the land in order to obtain capital to purchase livestock
and initiate an agrarian enterprise; or the land grants emerged indirectly from previous
encomienda grants. In either case the land became valuable as the livestock-export
economy opened up business opportunities. Most of the large landowners or en-
comenderos were vecinos of Santiago, even when they held rural estates located in
Cuyo, La Serena, or Chillán. According to the audiencia in 1647, Santiago had 516 es-
tablished households with a total of almost 5000 residents. At least one-third of the ve-
cinos held encomiendas. Of a list of 164 encomenderos called upon by the governor for
aid in putting down the Indian rebellion of 1655, over one-third (59) were royal officials
or descendants of sixteenth-century encomenderos. The remaining two-thirds (105)
came from families that arrived in Chile in the seventeenth century or that had not ear-
lier obtained encomiendas. Increased land values, participation in commerce, and the
casualties of war made entry into the small Chilean elite relatively open for the able or
for those with “good” family connections.
HISPANIC CAPITALISM 87

In 1604, to safeguard their investments, and supposedly to protect the remaining In-
dian villages, the cabildo of Santiago commissioned a land survey and boundary mark-
ings by Ginés de Lillo. Lillo’s survey became the basis for the boundaries of many of
the Santiago region’s most important estates in the following centuries. From 1604 to
1620 merced holders attempted to acquire unclaimed lands near their properties
through grants of demasía which added “leftover” land to existing estates. By the mid-
dle of the seventeenth century the legal basis for the Santiago region’s vast haciendas
was firmly established. Concentration of landownership peaked in the period from
1670 to 1680. The extensive seigniorial estates precluded formation of a large class of
small independent farmers.
An earthquake at Lima in 1687 produced a crisis in the agricultural valleys that sup-
plied wheat to the Lima market. Destruction of irrigation systems left the lands “infer-
tile” for a number of years. Prices for wheat soared as high as 25 to 30 pesos per fanega,
ten times the normal price. Chilean and Peruvian merchants took advantage of the ca-
tastrophe and Chilean wheat was shipped to Lima. In the norte chico the Peruvian cri-
sis intensified already existing patterns of trade; for the Santiago region the opening of
the Lima market offered the chance for a radical transformation of its pastoral econ-
omy. At first, the limited grain surplus produced in the region permitted only a weak
response. Soon thereafter the valleys of Aconcagua, Mapocho, and regions to the south
were planted in wheat, and 150,000 to 200,000 fanegas were exported annually. In 1712,
though prices had returned to 2 to 3 pesos per fanega, the Santiago-central region sent
some 180,000 fanegas of wheat to the Peruvian market.
Land values increased with the expanding demand for wheat. Wheat cultivation
also required greater labor input than the livestock enterprise. In order to attract ten-
ants, the landowners offered rentals, or préstamos—land “loaned” with only a token
rent. As the encomienda Indians died off or fled, mestizo, casta, or even poor Spanish
workers replaced them as peons or tenants. Indians, slaves, indentured labor, “free” la-
borers, and tenants all played a role in the expanding agrarian economy. Even the in-
dentured or “free” laborer rarely obtained a money wage but rather received the
equivalent of 5 to 7 pesos a month (1685–1707) in food, clothing, and other payments
in kind. As these arrangements excluded from the money economy the great mass of
Chileans who worked in the countryside, the internal markets for manufactures were
exceedingly small.
As the eighteenth century progressed, the role of the encomienda Indians drastically
declined, while tenancies and the system of inquilinaje became more important. The ori-
gin of the inquilino laborer, who became the backbone of the rural labor force in Chile,
still stirs controversy among Chilean historians. A traditional interpretation has the en-
comienda Indian as the forerunner of the inquilino. More recent studies of several re-
gions in the central valley point to the arrendatario and the worker receiving préstamos
de tierra from the early eighteenth century onward. Of course, as wheat cultivation ex-
panded, many of the remaining encomienda Indians fled to other farms and/or took
on mestizo culture and were incorporated as peons or arrendatarios in the rural econ-
omy. Thus, the institutions of tenancy, as they evolved, allowed for absorption of the
Indian laborer, as well as the rural casta and mestizo, as inquilinos, while encomenderos
continued to exploit tributary Indians as long as possible.
In the large estates more tenants could be absorbed without seriously disrupting the
livestock economy, and the tenants produced an increasingly larger share of the wheat
of the central region. The préstamos de tierra, or rentals, consisted of variously sized
parcels, but as land increased in value, the token rental fees and commodity rents often
became labor rents, or the landlords required labor services in addition to commodity
88 CHILE

rents. As land became scarcer and its value increased, the hacendados required more
service from the tenants. Soon the landlords required individual inquilinos to provide a
worker year round for the agricultural labors of the estancia or hacienda. They also de-
manded additional labor at peak agricultural periods, such as planting, round up, or
harvest. In the later years of the eighteenth century, the term arrendatario was less used
and thereafter replaced by inquilino—the service tenant who predominated until the
mid-1960s in Chilean agriculture.
Lack of land outside the large estates made possible establishment of a service ten-
antry, and labor-rent obligations multiplied as internal and external demand for wheat
increased. However, if inquilinaje in Chile bore some resemblance to colono or service-
tenant labor systems in other Latin American nations, its origins and the predomi-
nantly mestizo composition of its work force distinguished it from the harsher arrange-
ments involving Indian labor in Peru, Bolivia, and Ecuador. Even when economic
conditions worsened, Chilean inquilinos as a class did not experience systematic cul-
tural and ethnic repression on the scale of the rural labor force in the Andes, nor did
debt-peonage typically restrict their mobility.
Neither external nor internal markets placed great demands on the Chilean land-
lords in relation to the territory’s agricultural potential. By mid-eighteenth century
Chile produced perhaps 400,000 quintals* of wheat on less than 50,000 hectares. Even
the largest rural estates rarely cultivated more than 100 hectares of wheat. Commercial
expansion of agriculture enriched a number of landowners and provided considerable
opportunities for improvement to a relatively small portion of the rural labor force who
succeeded at crop farming or stock raising as tenants. But even the “boom” after
1687 and continued expansion in the eighteenth century did not absorb the growing
numbers of floating population which squatted on “vacant” land, took up banditry,
or served the landlords as a pool of seasonal laborers. Labor surpluses made debt-
peonage unnecessary and, therefore, relatively rare.
The sharp increase in demand and massive exports of wheat to Peru (1687–1700) not
only influenced rural land-tenure and labor systems but also created serious problems
for local consumers. The Santiago cabildo first attempted to monitor the harvests and
retain a fixed proportion in the region in order to avoid scarcity or excessive increases
in price. Landowners registered only a fraction of the harvested grain to circumvent the
cabildo’s regulations. In response the cabildo in 1695 urged the governor to prohibit
wheat exports. With the audiencia’s approval the governor revoked all licenses for ex-
port of wheat. Opposition from landowners and merchants included the clever request
by the Jesuits—who owned many of the most important rural estates in Chile—for per-
mission to “transfer” 1000 fanegas of wheat from their storehouses in Chile to their col-
lege in Lima. The governor rejected this request and even forced a merchant ship at Val-
paraíso to unload wheat already in the ship’s hold.
In the following years the tension continued between the need to provision the local
market at reasonable prices and the economic opportunities of the Peruvian market.
Dual pricing schemes attempted to limit the price of wheat sold locally, but the rapid
expansion of commerce made effective regulation practically impossible. Increased
production, however, lowered prices substantially. In 1713 over 140,000 fanegas of
wheat left Chile for Peru in thirty ships; two-thirds of these embarked from Valparaíso
with wheat from the central region, seven from Penco-Concepción, and two or three
from Coquimbo.
The wheat trade also promoted the commercial and physical growth of Valparaíso.

*One metric quintal equals 100 kilograms.

HISPANIC CAPITALISM 89

A small group of merchants and warehouse owners soon controlled the wheat market
in the port. Despite the efforts of the cabildo to limit commercial corruption, this group
often defrauded producers with discounts for spoilage. As the years went by, the Lima
shippers also conspired to depress the price paid to Chilean wheat producers. The
wheat trade epitomized commerce in the context of Hispanic capitalism: a monopoly
or a small clique of suppliers colluded with government officials to fix prices and re-
strict supplies of basic commodities in order to guarantee “reasonable” profits. In the
context of Hispanic capitalism, doing business most always meant “doing politics.”
The most valuable commodities in this colonial system were government authority, fa-
vors, patronage, and concessions.
The end of the seventeenth century saw not only the transformation of agriculture
in the Santiago-central region but also a significant increase in contraband trade with
European powers. The succession to the Spanish throne of the French Duke of Anjou,
who governed Spain as Philip V, placed Spain alongside France in a long war against
England, Austria, Portugal, Savoy, and Holland. Unable to defend or supply its over-
seas empire, Spain authorized French vessels to maintain communications with its
colonies. Contraband trade mushroomed, and Chilean governors profited enormously
from new commercial ventures. When the French engineer Frezier arrived in Val-
paraíso in 1713, he commented on “the abundance of merchandise in the country when
we arrived and the low prices.” The limited market for European goods in Chile ruined
many merchants in Lima who could not compete with French manufacturers. The con-
traband trade also brought a reversal in trade patterns as merchandise arrived in Con-
cepción and Valparaíso from Europe and then was shipped to Lima. On a lesser scale,
merchandise also arrived via Buenos Aires and the base for contraband at the Por-
tuguese settlement of Colônia do Sacramento. In 1712 the Spanish crown worked out
an arrangement with the French King, Louis XIV, to halt the contraband trade. How-
ever, it had become so excessive that the Spanish waited seven years to re-establish the
fleets bringing merchandise to the “annual” fairs at Portobello (Panama) in order to
allow the surpluses from contraband merchandise to be absorbed. In 1724 the French
expeditions temporarily ended, but British merchants had by then replaced them.
The Treaty of Utrecht (1713), ending the War of the Spanish Succession, gave the
English a thirty-year monopoly on the slave trade with the Spanish American colonies;
during this time the English were to bring 144,000 Negroes to the Atlantic ports. Of
these, 400 could come yearly to Peru and Chile. Queen Anne of England granted the
slave monopoly to the South Seas Company, which established itself in Buenos Aires.
From 1715 to 1739, sixty-one ships brought over to Buenos Aires 18,000 Negroes, nearly
4000 of whom were shipped on to Chile and Peru. Since they were not as successful at
slaving as they had anticipated, the English turned to smuggling. On the pretext of
transporting necessities for the Negroes, all sorts of merchandise came into Buenos
Aires and from there via Mendoza to Chile. In return, the English took silver or gold in
payment. Traders loaded merchandise into oxcarts for the trip across the pampas and
in Mendoza transferred their goods to mules for the Andes crossing. Mendoza’s mer-
chants and cabildo identified so closely with the contraband trade that they banished
the new corregidor who had been sent from Santiago to stifle it.
By 1722 commercial reform allowed greater shipping activity through the so-called
“registered ships,” or navíos de registro. Direct trade between Europe and Buenos Aires
was extended overland to Chile. Protesting Lima merchants urged an end to this link,
but the Spanish fleets could no longer compete with the French and the English. In 1735
the merchants of Cádiz and Peru requested that no further fleets come to Panama until
they could dispose of the merchandise on hand. Nevertheless, a fleet arrived in 1739,
only to be re-routed to Cartagena due to the destruction of Portobello by an English
90 CHILE

squadron under Edward Vernon. This marked the end of the fleet system and forced
the crown to open a new Pacific route for the navíos de registro.
After two hundred years as a colony Chile could finally trade with Spain by sea, al-
though Callao remained an intermediary port of call. Due to the war with England,
however, French vessels contracted by merchants at Cádiz, carried out the first legal
trade between Chile and Spain. In the following three decades the Chilean market
never lacked for European manufactures; indeed the market was so glutted that prices
declined considerably for most imported merchandise, and many merchants, unable to
sell their goods, went bankrupt.
In the last quarter of the eighteenth century, new reforms further reduced commer-
cial restrictions. Prohibitions on much intercolonial trade disappeared in 1774; and
with the creation in 1776 of a new viceroyalty centered in Buenos Aires, trade restric-
tions were eliminated between Chile and Río de la Plata. Despite protests regarding the
coincident separation of the western Argentine province of Cuyo from Chile, the cre-
ation of the Río de la Plata viceroyalty benefited the Chilean economy. The initial mea-
sures of the viceroy encouraged Chilean commerce by opening the ports to European
goods destined for Cuyo. Lastly, the crown also removed Callao as a mandatory stop.
Between them these measures eroded Peruvian domination of Chile’s commerce.
Yet with all the commercial restrictions of the colonial period, it is difficult to point to
any that fundamentally impeded development of Chile’s agrarian economy. Inconve-
niences for merchants or small groups of elite consumers resulted from prohibitions on
bringing sugar from Mexico or trading directly with Buenos Aires and Potosí. But Lima
was the logical market for most Chilean products. In 1650, and even by 1800, there was
little European or North American demand for the commodities of Chile’s agrarian
economy, as there came to be in the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1788 the value
of all (official) Chilean exports (676,222.50 pesos) did not pay for Chilean imports of
sugar and yerba mate (684,617.04 pesos); total imports exceeded 2 million pesos.
Efforts by Captain General Ambrosio O’Higgins (1788–96) to stimulate expansion of
production, in part through import substitution, and to open new markets for Chilean
commodities met with little success. Sugar, cotton, and other tropical products, even
when the crops survived in Chile, could not compete with Peru or Mexico. Likewise,
Chilean industries could not compete with European or North American manufactures.
Imports of luxury goods—fine textiles, furniture, jewels—could only be paid for by
minting coins from the gold, silver, and copper taken from the earth and exporting
money to maintain the pretensions of the colonial aristocracy. European merchants
brought manufactured goods to the Chilean market and took gold, silver, or livestock
products in return, but offered no great prospect, at the time, of absorbing significant
amounts of rural Chile’s products. Chile’s economic development, given its agro-
mineral output, depended upon fluctuations in the international economy’s demand for
a range of primary or semi-elaborated products. This remained the case long after the
end of Spanish colonial domination. Mining booms in the norte chico in the eighteenth
century increased import capacity, but the concentration of wealth and the inability to
compete with imported manufactures stifled internal industrial development.
European manufactures entered Chilean markets throughout the late seventeenth
and the eighteenth centuries. At the end of the eighteenth century import duties
amounted to one-third those charged by the first national government after 1810. The
textile “factories” in Chile declined after 1650, as did the sugar mills. The only surviv-
ing industries were shipbuilding, cordage, foundries, and those processing products of
the agrarian economy such as tanneries, wineries, and flour mills. Perhaps more ex-
tensive commerce in mineral products with British and French merchants might have
HISPANIC CAPITALISM 91

allowed even greater imports of European manufactures, but this could not have ben-
efited colonial industrial development or altered the institutional structure of the agrar-
ian economy. Unlike the Spanish prohibitions on direct trade with Buenos Aires prior
to 1778 and the demands for “free trade” which inspired Argentine independence, freer
trade offered little benefit to overall Chilean economic development in the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries.
If Spanish commercial policy did less to shape Chilean development than is often
supposed, the internal dynamics and customs of Hispanic capitalism left an indelible
mark on Chilean society. It molded economic and social practices and expectations so
as to create numerous institutional obstacles to political and economic advancement
for the colony and the future Chilean nation. Much more important than the often-
evaded commercial regulations, the factors that impeded social and economic devel-
opment were the authoritarian, arbitrary processes of policy making, the bureaucratic
modes of implementation or circumvention, the use of public resources for private
profit, the mingling of public and “private” enterprise, the denigration of labor, and the
exploitation of the labor force. More important than any Spanish mercantile restrictions
as impediments to Chilean development were the institutions of enterprise which con-
demned the vast majority of laborers to a subsistence existence outside the money
economy. The encomienda system in Chile practically made slaves of the Indians. Ex-
treme concentration of land in the large estates condemned the mestizo rural laborers
to generations of exploitation. State-supported monopolies on commerce and the arti-
san trades limited opportunities for the evolution of a prosperous middle class. The
royal bureaucracy’s comprehensive regulation of prices and economic activity ensured
that private enterprise was never really a private matter—that public policy inhibited
operation of anything like a market economy. The combination of Spanish seigniorial
institutions, neofeudal labor systems, and monopolistic commercial enterprises cre-
ated a highly stratified society in the Santiago–central region, and the lack of effective
internal demand inhibited the development of domestic industry. Chilean elites main-
tained much of this legacy of colonialism long after they had rejected Spanish imperial
rule.
At the end of the eighteenth century the Santiago–central region was still an essen-
tially rural society. Only Santiago, of all the urban places, looked like a city. With a pop-
ulation of 25,000 in 1780, Santiago grew to an urban center of 34,000 to 40,000 in the first
decade of the nineteenth century. In a territory with between 500,000 and 750,000 in-
habitants outside of Indian territory, the urban centers contained barely 10 percent of
the population. While this was similar to general trends of urbanization in the Western
world, it meant that the daily existence of most Chileans consisted of toil from sunup
to sundown in the countryside or mines.
Between 1740 and 1754 governors Manso de Velasco and Ortiz de Rozas organized
and partially financed the foundation of new towns in the central region: San Felipe,
Los Angeles, Cauquenes, Talca, San Fernando, Melipilla, Rancagua, Curicó, Copiapó,
Florida, Casablanca, Petorca, Ligua. These towns, which would later become important
urban centers in the region, were still, in the words of Amunátegui Solar, “miserable
villages” at the end of the eighteenth century. Valparaíso, despite its importance as the
major port for the commerce of the central region, had a population of only 4500 as late
as 1808.
The relative smallness of the urban population belied the overriding concentration
of political and economic power in Santiago and Valparaíso. In the capital the cabildo
and royal officials determined the regulations that would affect the economic interests
of the colonial elites and granted the concessions, monopolies, and privileges that were
92 CHILE

the source of economic opportunity. Hispanic capitalism linked urban elites to the
landowners, miners, and merchants when they were not one and the same. Despite the
rural base of economic production, family connections, business partnerships, and
the politics of colonial society knit together the economic life of the colony in the major
urban centers. Unlike the dispersion of economic power and decision making charac-
teristic of European feudalism, Hispanic capitalism in Chile concentrated wealth and
decision making in urban centers even while feudal-like production generated the eco-
nomic surplus.
In the last quarter of the eighteenth century important public works enhanced the
city of Santiago. Under direction of the architect Joaquín Toesca, the city rebuilt the dikes
destroyed by the floods of 1783, and work on the new mint, La Moneda, was intensified.
In 1795 George Vancouver admiringly called the Santiago mint the “best building in all
the Spanish colonies.” Roads between Santiago and Valparaíso also received attention
made necessary by the expansion of commerce. Sidewalks on major streets and beauti-
fication projects testified to the fact that the town had become a city. Here lived the colo-
nial aristocracy, a mixture of landowners, merchants, and the growing number of royal
officials brought to the colony as a result of administrative and commercial reforms im-
plemented by the Bourbons in the late eighteenth century. A number of elite criollo fam-
ilies intermarried with the colonial administrators and the new arrivals from Spain. Be-
tween 1701 and 1810 some 24,000 immigrants came to Chile from Spain, including
numerous Basques. Arrival of these Basques at a time of commercial expansion altered
the composition of the Chilean elite. The Basques succeeded in commerce, bought rural
estates (including some of the estates confiscated from the Jesuits expelled from Chile
in 1767), and soon occupied official positions in the colonial administration.
Marriage of royal officials with the daughters of criollo elites, a violation of royal pol-
icy, created significant conflicts of interest. These led frequently to complaints by those
negatively affected as well as to injury to the public interest: “By their [the oidores] mar-
riages here, infinite [numbers of] relatives, the connections and haciendas that they
have, and by their maximum opposition to that which is . . . advantageous to royal
finances, all is reduced to becoming a [victim] of their passions.” Not only intermar-
riage but also expanding opportunity for criollos in the royal service created problems
for the crown. In 1759 six of the eight members of the audiencia were criollos and in 1776
all the oidores had been born in the colonies. This contrasted with general patterns of
peninsular dominance of high administrative and judicial offices throughout the Span-
ish Empire. Though decrees in 1776 purged criollos and their peninsular relations from
the audiencia to overcome their supposed opposition to fiscal reforms, in the last decade
of the eighteenth century criollos and peninsulares related to Chileans reassumed influ-
ence in the audiencia and in other official positions. Jacques Barbier’s study of colonial
elites in Chile confirms that from 1796 to 1810 there were always at least two Chilean
oidores in the audiencia. Still, tension existed between the aspirations of the colonial
aristocracy for control of the local society and the efforts of the crown to limit the cor-
rupting influence of family ties and local loyalties. Above all, however, the efforts by
the Chilean elites to influence or control royal officials merely point again to their own
awareness that in the context of Hispanic capitalism wealth, economic opportunity,
and status were ultimately linked to politics.
By the beginning of the nineteenth century the institutions of Hispanic capitalism
had shaped the Santiago–central region into a highly stratified socio-economic system.
A small elite lived well—if not as splendidly as the upper classes in Peru or Mexico—
from the returns on colonial commerce, the salaries of official position, and the corrup-
tion linking politics and business. Landowners reaped profits from agriculture and
HISPANIC CAPITALISM 93

livestock. Rural workers and tenants lived in misery. The economy grew, and the liv-
ing conditions of much of the rural population and the emergent proletariat worsened.
Economic growth within the context of Hispanic capitalism led to the development of
a society in which, as one royal official said, “nothing was more common in the coun-
tryside, where harvests had recently been taken in and sold for the lowest of prices,
than to see the hands that had recently harvested the crops extended for alms.” In San-
tiago the same official reported that he continually saw “similar conditions in regard to
the public works of the capital, where numbers of the unfortunate present themselves
seeking jobs, begging for admittance to work.”
The internal contradictions of Hispanic capitalism already constrained Chilean de-
velopment. In the words of Manuel de Salas, “the decadence of this kingdom was a
necessary result of its economic structure.”

Of all the Chilean territory, the Concepción–southern region offered the brightest pros-
pects to the conquistadors with Valdivia in the first years of conquest. Here could be
found gold mines, good land for livestock and agriculture, and large numbers of Indi-
ans for a potential work force. Some of the conquistadors gave up encomiendas in the
Santiago region in exchange for grants south of the Biobío River. But the defeat at Tu-
capel (1553) marked the first of many military disasters that thwarted Spanish dreams
of enrichment in what appeared to be the most attractive region of Chile. For the entire
colonial period this southern region was an open wound—an insecure frontier where
Spanish economic enterprise and urban culture barely managed to survive against the
Indians and the calamities of nature.
Valdivia’s forces first established the city of Concepción in 1550 near the site of pres-
ent-day Penco. The town was destroyed in 1554, symbolically refounded in 1555 and
abandoned then re-established again in 1558 when Hurtado de Mendoza arrived with
reinforcements from Peru. In recognition of the town’s role as the principal fort on the
Indian frontier, the crown created Chile’s first audiencia at Concepción in 1565. But in
the words of Carvallo y Goyeneche, “This had no purpose: all were military men and
a consejo de guerra would have been more appropriate than a legislature; pens were as
useless then as swords were necessary.” When an earthquake and tidal wave destroyed
the town again in 1570, a chronicler tells us that the residents “didn’t know what to do,
believing that the world was coming to an end, because they saw black water gush up
from the cracks in the earth, and a smell of sulphur that seemed like the inferno. . . .”
To the end of the sixteenth century Concepción remained a small military camp; only
after 1603 did it begin to take shape as a permanent town with the stationing there of
the large permanent military garrison.
The other settlements founded south of the Biobío River in the sixteenth century
constituted no more than small fortified encampments. Mining activity around Imper-
ial (present-day Carahue), Osorno, and Valdivia made them relatively prosperous,
though they were always menaced by the threat of Indian attack. In 1575 an earthquake
damaged the southern settlements, but the settlers rebuilt them; and in 1580 Governor
Martin Ruiz de Gamboa founded the city of Chillán during the annual military cam-
paign. These southern settlements developed around the prosperous livestock and
agricultural estates of the encomenderos as well as around gold mines.
The dispersion of the Spanish forces among so many small settlements left each
town extremely vulnerable to any large-scale Indian attack. Had enmity not existed
among various Indian groups, these southern outposts could not have survived at all.
For most of the last decade of the sixteenth century the Spanish lived as prisoners in
their own forts.
94 CHILE

Despite its insecurity, the southern territory developed important agrarian enter-
prises and sent large quantities of gold north to Santiago and Peru. The rural estates pro-
duced wheat, barley, oats, vegetables, and great quantities of apples, which in later years
became a major Chilean export. Abundance kept prices low. Livestock multiplied rap-
idly among the Spanish and also the Indians, who soon had large herds of sheep and
horses as well as lesser amounts of cattle. Southern industries included the well-known
textile workshops, or obrajes, at Osorno as well as mills, tanneries, crafts, and the mines.
The Osorno obrajes, utilizing local Indian labor, produced cloth that the chronicler Ma-
riño de Lobera compared favorably with the textiles of Flanders. Much of this produc-
tion found its way to Santiago, Lima, and even Europe. Indeed, Osorno, Valdivia, and
Imperial were the most prosperous settlements in Chile—until the military disasters
after 1598. In 1598 the town of Valdivia had 600 Spanish and mestizo residents, and over
60 percent of all Spanish and mestizo settlers in Chile lived south of the Biobío River. By
1600, 90 percent of all Chilean Indians also lived south of the Biobío, as disease, en-
slavement, and warfare radically reduced their population in the north.
In the years 1598 to 1604 the Araucanians erased all Spanish settlements south of the
Biobío River. Chile thus lost all the wealth of its southern economy. Unsuccessful mili-
tary campaigns (1603–12) followed by a policy of “defensive warfare” (1612–26) left
this territory in the hands of the Indians. After 1626 the crown ordered a return to ac-
tive efforts to reconquer the lands south of Concepción, but these efforts degenerated
into periodic pillage and slave hunts and proved ineffective. The only “products” har-
vested by the Spanish in these years were Indian slaves and concubines. Though able
to send military expeditions through Indian territory, the Spanish could not guarantee
the safety of permanent settlements. After years of raids, pillage, and occasional battles
the Chilean governor ordered resettlement of Angol in 1637. A fire reduced the fort to
ashes in 1638, and in the peace of Quillín (1641) the Spanish agreed to abandon Angol
and to establish the Biobío River as a frontier between the sovereign Indian people and
the Chilean colony.
In order to defend the Chilean colony against Indian and European adversaries, the
viceroy of Peru committed a large expeditionary force (12 ships, 1800 men, 188 artillery
pieces, as well as artisans) to the resettlement of Valdivia in 1645–46. For some years to
come Valdivia depended directly upon the viceroyalty instead of on the Chilean au-
thorities. It served as an isolated outpost in Indian territory, strongly defended and
communicating only by sea with Peru or Santiago.
North of the Biobío River, between the Maule and Itata rivers, the Spanish main-
tained ongoing rural enterprises even after the loss of the southern towns. This district
became the granary for the limited Concepción region; its wheat and livestock prod-
ucts fed the frontier garrisons and even provided a surplus for export. But the Spanish
slave raids and pillaging finally provoked the Indians into another large-scale uprising
in 1655 in which the Spanish lost the forts and fort-towns of Arauco, San Pedro, Col-
cura, Buena Esperanza, Nacimiento, Talcamávida, San Rosendo, Boroa, and Chillán. As
a measure of the impressive economic growth that had occurred in this region, Carvallo
y Goyeneche estimated that in sacking 396 rural estates, the Indians took 400,000 head
of livestock and occasioned losses amounting to over 8 million pesos—in addition to
capturing some 1300 Spaniards and over half the colony’s armaments. Also destroyed
were the entire farm infrastructure and small manufacturing enterprises such as mills
and tanneries, which had been established between 1603 and 1654, along with crops in
the cultivated fields and vineyards. The Spanish army lost some 900 men—over half its
effective strength—and the surviving settlers retreated to Concepción or dispersed
across the Maule River.
HISPANIC CAPITALISM 95

Two years later (March 15, 1657), with the Indian rebellion uncontained, an earth-
quake and tidal wave again utterly destroyed Concepción, the only remaining town in
the southern region. Casualties amounted to forty dead; the survivors faced a winter
without supplies or shelter. This tragedy, combined with the Indian threat, prompted
an official of the audiencia at Santiago to propose moving the frontier north to the Maule
River. Instead, the new governor, Pórter Casanate, led a successful campaign against
the advancing Indians, pushing them back across the Biobío. Slowly the Spanish rebuilt
Concepción, and by the 1670s the Maule-Concepción triangle regained self-sufficiency
in basic foodstuffs. By the end of the century both wheat and wine production had re-
covered to pre-1655 levels, and the region again sent livestock products, wine, and
wheat to Lima. The opening of the Lima market to Chilean wheat in the 1680s stimu-
lated the rural economy of the Concepción region as it had the central valley, but the
direct export trade remained relatively small; an average of only two to three ships a
year trafficked between Concepción and Callao during the last two decades of the sev-
enteenth century.
Delays in the arrival of the military subsidy between 1700 and 1717 seriously injured
the southern economy and debilitated the frontier garrisons. The crown reduced the
annual situado to 100,000 pesos after 1705; it actually arrived only in 1706 and 1717. By
the early 1720s the effective garrison consisted of about 700 soldiers instead of the au-
thorized 1500 to 2000. The reduced garrison found itself dispersed in a number of small
forts, including some south of the Biobío River. These served as centers of trade with
the Indians, but the abuses of soldiers and traders also provoked the Indians’ anger.
The Indians took advantage of the decline in colonial military capabilities and in a
general uprising in 1723 besieged and forced abandonment of the southern forts at Tu-
capel, Arauco, Colcura, and Purén. Raiding the haciendas between Laja and Chillán the
Araucanians took thousands of cattle (40,000 according to one estimate) and again dis-
rupted the rural economy. In a midcentury report to the king, a Jesuit urged a new fron-
tier policy. He also conveyed an idea of the character of the forts destroyed in the
1723–26 uprisings: “If the forts don’t defend us nor scare the enemy, what good are
they? They serve merely to conserve a few ‘ranchos’ covered with straw, for—with the
exception of Arauco, that is all they amounted to, in an area with few Spanish fami-
lies. . . . To defend so little did not justify provoking the Indians’ hostility.” An indi-
cation of the economic effects of this uprising was that the tithes, or diezmos, collected
by the Bishopric of Concepción declined from 18,000 pesos in 1717 to 7000 pesos in
1724. The same report tells us “in the year of 1738, the diezmos did not exceed 11,000
[pesos] because the Indians took over 100,000 head of cattle and again as much of
smaller livestock from 1724.”
Despite the intermittent warfare, cattle rustling, and minor incidents, the pastoral-
agricultural economy in the Maule-Concepción region survived. Some settlers, called
conchabistas, even carried out a good amount of trade with the Indians, exchanging
wine, hardware, and trinkets for Indian ponchos, textiles, and livestock.
Just as Concepción was recovering from military disasters and natural calamities,
still another earthquake and tidal wave (July 8, 1730) leveled most of the city. The
bishop wrote to the king that two-thirds of the principal buildings and houses of the
city, along with granaries, storehouses, and shops, had been destroyed. Emergency re-
lief and military supplies arrived from Santiago to avoid a military disaster while the
city recovered from the earthquake. The viceroy at Lima advanced 50 percent of the
next year’s subsidy, and the governor in Santiago contributed over 10,000 pesos to
the churches and residents. Twenty-one years later (1751) an even worse earthquake
entirely destroyed the settlement again; after struggles between the bishop and those
96 CHILE

wishing to relocate the town, Concepción was officially refounded in 1764 in the valley
of Mocha, between the Andalién and Biobío rivers.
Apart from Concepción, a city of perhaps 6000 residents by 1800, few significant
urban centers grew up in the southern district. At the end of the eighteenth century
Carvallo y Goyeneche reported 449 families at Chillán (also destroyed by the earth-
quake of 1751) living in small adobe houses. The plaza “which is 150 varas square lacks
the adornment of impressive buildings, with the exception of the house of the priest
. . . built in the style of the capital.” Other towns of the region, founded in the 1740s
and 1750s by administrative order of the governor, included Quirihue (1741) which
“merits not even the name of village with its five families”; Gaulqui, in the district of
Puchacai, where 14 families resided; San Luis Gonzaga (1766), in the district of Rere,
with 40 vecinos and a total population of 201; Los Angeles (1741), the most important
town in Rere with 159 vecinos (less than 800 residents). In a number of small forts hand-
fuls of soldiers also formed “urban” nuclei on the frontier. Farther south the colonial
authorities in Lima and Santiago financed the refounding of Osorno, in the last decade
of the century, with expenditures of over 30,000 pesos; in 1796 some 1,012 settlers (170
families) had established themselves in a region lost to the Spanish for many years. In
all, however, if we accept the estimates of Marcello Carmagnani, fewer than 8 percent
of the population in the southern region lived in “urban” situations near the end of the
eighteenth century, and most of these resided in Concepción.
Social structure and land-tenure patterns in this region differed from those in the
central valley and to the north of Santiago. Lack of security made maintenance of large
estates extremely difficult. Most of the Spanish and mestizos who wanted to farm had
access to parcels and could provide for their own sustenance. With a population com-
posed largely of soldiers, ex-soldiers, and the families of soldiers, racial and social strat-
ification was much less rigid than in other parts of the Chilean colony. Most of the in-
habitants led a life of subsistence scratched from the soil, or from the low military pay,
small mines, trade with the Indians, livestock and related manufactures, or pillage. In
the last decade of the eighteenth century Carvallo y Goyeneche described the region’s
pathetic state:
Almost all of its inhabitants are laborers, the only work available. With this they do
not want for food but they live a miserable life. Those who do not want to believe this
need merely enter the houses (or I should say, huts) and observe the rustic clothing,
food, and manners of the men, the weariness of the women and the nudity of the chil-
dren. . . . It is a cause for tears that a region so potentially rich, does not produce for
itself or for the peninsula Spain the immense wealth [which it could].
In the last half of the eighteenth century the rural economy of the region grew—but
not dramatically. From 1750 to 1778 no more than seven ships a year departed from
Concepción harbor with the tallow, hides, sheepskins, fruits, and wine from the rural
estates. In the last decades of that century and the first decade of the nineteenth, com-
merce and contraband increased with the appearance of whaling ships and smugglers
from the United States, Great Britain, and elsewhere. Nevertheless, the southern region
remained a real frontier, with the unconquered Indians south of the Biobío still outside
effective jurisdiction of colonial political authorities. Not until the 1880s did an inde-
pendent Chilean nation definitively incorporate this southern zone.

With regional variations Hispanic capitalism shaped colonial Chile. The sparsely set-
tled northern agro-mining district, the dominant Santiago–central region, and the Con-
cepción frontier territory had impressed upon them a common juridical mold, altered
HISPANIC CAPITALISM 97

in practice by local conditions, but uniform in its formalism and its flexibility of appli-
cation—at the discretion of government officials. Overt deference to authority com-
bined with systematic evasion of the law became the norm. Intermingling of private
and public business blurred the distinctions between corruption, “conflict of interest,”
and routine public administration. The war against the Araucanians conditioned eco-
nomic development while offering royal officials, soldiers, and merchants enormous
opportunities for profit, promotions, and patronage. Centralized, authoritarian, and
often arbitrary policymaking became the expected, accepted pattern of government.
Concentration of wealth, status, and real estate in the hands of a privileged few, deni-
gration of work, and exploitation of labor were all essential ingredients in the socio-
economic structure of the colony.
As long as the legitimating symbol of empire—the monarchy—remained intact, there
was only minor resistance to the institutions and processes of Hispanic capitalism in
Chile. Colonial elites made no significant attack on the legitimacy or fundamental char-
acter of Spanish rule prior to 1810. And even when events in Europe precipitated inde-
pendence movements in Spanish America, Chilean leaders ultimately re-established
political order by reaffirming the basic assumptions and institutions of the colonial era,
with the exception of submission to Spain and European monarchism. The Spanish
crown might lose its dominions in America, but Chile would retain the indelible mark-
ings of Hispanic capitalism.
4 Independence and the
Autocratic Republic

In the last decades of the eighteenth century administrative reorganization of the Span-
ish Empire left Chile an autonomous captaincy-general, no longer subject directly to
the viceroy of Peru. Until 1808 the colony was governed by a succession of capable, pro-
fessional administrators; its gradual material progress and the public sentiment of the
leading criollos gave little premonition of the violent movement for political indepen-
dence that occurred after 1810. Perhaps overstating the case, Manuel de Salas, the well-
known colonial administrator and intellectual precursor of independence, claimed that
Chileans “desired only to be good Catholics and good Spaniards, which they regarded
as the two inseparable conditions of their happiness.”
The last royal governors administered Chile with vigor and correctness. Ambrosio
O’Higgins—whose illegitimate son, Bernardo O’Higgins, would become the George
Washington of Chile—began his term of office (1788–96) with an extended tour on
horseback of the northern regions, visiting the towns and mining districts. Intent on
stimulating the Chilean economy and reducing its dependence upon imported com-
modities, O’Higgins attempted to introduce new crops and to reestablish colonial plan-
tations such as sugar, cotton, and rice as well as to encourage increased exports of min-
eral products, hides, and wool to Spain. He also sought to establish direct trade
between Chile, Guayaquil, Central America, and Mexico. To revive old trade patterns
between Chile and Charcas, O’Higgins helped form a commercial enterprise with an
eight-year monopoly to promote exports of copper, aguardiente, wine, and other prod-
ucts of the northern districts.
Though well-intentioned, this economic program (which anticipated to some extent
the policy of import-substitution by Chilean governments after 1930) brought very lim-
ited results. The tropical and plantation crops failed to survive in the difficult condi-
tions of northern Chile; the colony continued to import large amounts of sugar, cotton,
and rice from Peru or elsewhere in the empire. Exports expanded slowly, and local in-
dustry did not develop to provision local markets with substitutes for the luxury goods
imported from Europe, Lima, and Buenos Aires. Many of the structural constraints on
economic development that plagued Chile in the twentieth century were already evi-
dent in the obstacles facing Ambrosio O’Higgins’ economic program during the last
decade of the eighteenth century.
In the last days of O’Higgins’ administration the crown established a tribunal de con-
sulado in Chile. This was both a commercial court and an agency to promote economic
development. The royal decree creating the consulado assigned it responsibility for
“protection and stimulation of commerce . . . the advancement of agriculture, im-
provement in crops and commercialization of the fruits of the land, introduction of ben-
eficial machinery and implements.” Whatever the limitations imposed by colonial sta-

98
INDEPENDENCE AND THE AUTOCRATIC REPUBLIC 99

tus, the establishment of the consulado indicated that Spain was not entirely ignoring
the problems or the needs of the Chilean economy.
O’Higgins’ achievements and his rectitude as governor of Chile earned him promo-
tion to the Viceroyalty at Lima. His successor, Gabriel de Aviles y del Fierro, had
lengthy experience in the colonial bureaucracy and military establishment. Aviles con-
tinued in the footsteps of O’Higgins and supported public projects such as dikes, cob-
bling of streets, and beautification of Santiago. In cooperation with Manuel de Salas,
the syndic of the consulado, Aviles provided competent administration of the Chilean
colony during his short tenure (in 1799 he was promoted to the Viceroyalty at Buenos
Aires).
As the eighteenth century ended, Chile received a new governor with all the pomp
and ceremony that it could marshal, including bullfights, feasts, theatrical presenta-
tions, and other public festivities. Far from hinting at any desire for independence from
Spain, Santiago society welcomed the new governor with subservient splendor.
When the last of the royal governors assumed office in 1802, the colony remained
loyal to Spanish authority. A long-standing dream came to fruition with initiation of
work on the canal from the Maipo River to irrigate the land in the valley and augment
the water in the Mapocho. Public works in Santiago continued with the completion of
dikes and, also, after fifteen years, of the future presidential palace, La Moneda. When
the governor died at the age of seventy-three in February 1808, few Chileans could
have anticipated the juntas that would soon spring up throughout Spanish America to
cut the bonds linking it to Spain. Notwithstanding Bourbon efforts to implement ad-
ministrative reforms, no great change in internal administration or unusual abuses oc-
curred to anger the colonials; there was in Chile nothing like the Stamp Act or the tea
tax that incited the North American colonies to rebellion.
Though the colonials remained loyal to Spain, certain persistent complaints or dis-
satisfactions did exist. The criollos resented the preference given to native-born Span-
iards in royal appointments and also the condescending treatment they themselves fre-
quently received from Spanish officials or merchants. They also disliked certain of the
commercial regulations and taxes that burdened Chilean commerce, and the lack of
educational opportunities in Chile which necessitated travel to Lima or Spain for pro-
fessional training. A belief of many Chileans that Peru maintained a privileged position
vis-à-vis Chile—despite the favorable impact on Chile of certain of the Bourbon re-
forms—contributed to a resentment of royal policy. Geographical isolation and the evo-
lution of a distinctive Chilean culture had also eroded the allegiance of some colonial
elites to Spain. Finally, a very small minority of intellectuals, attracted by liberal, re-
publican ideology and propaganda, had come to blame Chile’s backwardness on Span-
ish imperial rule.
Even taken all together, however, these criticisms of the imperial system proved
mild in comparison with those in Buenos Aires, Guayaquil, Caracas, and Mexico City.
In the words of Chile’s well-known nineteenth-century historian, Barros Arana, “the
most advanced men were persuaded that the reform of a few laws, the growth of pop-
ulation, and the diffusion of useful knowledge would make Chile a region privileged
by her products and by the virile and enterprising character of her people.” Most elites
opposed Protestant or liberal doctrines imported from Europe, Britain, and the United
States in the increasing number of foreign ships in Chilean ports after 1790 (when the
Convention of San Lorenzo opened the South Pacific to European and North American
shipping). Deliberate ideological subversion of Spanish rule was clearly the goal of a
small number of North American merchants and seamen. Some of the 257 North Amer-
100 CHILE

ican ships that plied Chilean coastal waters between 1788 and 1810 carried copies of the
Declaration of Independence and the Federal Constitution. Nevertheless, while most
Latin American republics can point to at least one or two pre-revolutionary conspira-
cies of some import, no serious anti-Spanish conspiracies occurred in Chile prior to
1810.

Just as the conquest of Chile was an extension of the Pizarro-Almagro venture in Peru,
so the Chilean independence movement depended on events in Europe and other parts
of Spanish America. The movement for Chilean independence, like that of most other
Spanish American republics, originated in European politics and warfare. Napoleon
Bonaparte, in an effort to impose French hegemony in Europe, took his armies into Por-
tugal and Spain in 1807. Charles IV and his son, Ferdinard VII, yielded the Spanish
throne to Joseph Bonaparte. Spanish insurgents resisted his usurpation of the Spanish
crown. In the name of Ferdinand VII, a junta at Seville directed the struggle against the
Napoleonic armies; and in the Spanish American colonies, local juntas organized to de-
fend the legitimate king of Spain.
News of Napoleon’s invasion of Spain arrived in Santiago via Buenos Aires in mid-
1808. The French usurpation of the Spanish crown raised the issue of how best to ad-
minister the colony on behalf of the legitimate monarch and what to do if the French
occupation should become permanent. For a small minority of Chilean leaders this po-
litical dilemma provided an ideal context for pursuing complete independence from
colonial rule. The majority of Chileans, however, saw the events in Europe as a tempo-
rary interruption of legitimate Spanish domination. Nevertheless, confrontations oc-
curred between those professing to favor the temporary “nationalization” of authority
in a local junta and those favoring continued submissiveness to French authorities in
Spain. The former group found its principal leadership in the cabildo of Santiago, and
the latter in the governor, Francisco Antonio García Carrasco, and the audiencia.
Unlike the seasoned colonial administrators who had governed Chile ably in the late
eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, García Carrasco lacked administrative ex-
perience and political skills. He had assumed the governorship due to a reform that
left the office in the hands of the highest military official above the rank of colonel
in the case of the incumbent’s death. With the continual arrival of disturbing news
from Buenos Aires—especially reports of the revolt of May 22–25, 1810—the governor
decided to take repressive measures. His inept actions, including the arrest and depor-
tation to Lima of three prominent criollos on charges of subversion, increased the ten-
sions in Santiago. The audiencia attempted to restore calm by announcing García Car-
rasco’s resignation and his replacement by the aged Conde de la Conquista, Mateo de
Toro Zambrano, whose rank as brigadier of the royal armies gave him rightful claim to
the office. But this desperate effort to maintain legitimacy failed. On September 18,
1810, a cabildo abierto, or “town meeting,” convened in the tribunal de consulado in San-
tiago, accepted the resignation of the governor, and proclaimed the creation of a na-
tional junta.
For the next two decades a dizzy succession of juntas, assemblies, congresses, mili-
tary dictatorships, and supreme directors sought to impose their authority in Chile—
with a three-year interlude (1814–17) when Spanish royal authority reasserted itself. At
first the contending factions all proclaimed their loyalty to King Ferdinand VII or to
Spain. The national junta set up September 18, 1810, swore “to govern and to protect
the rights of the king during his captivity.” A leader of the Chilean independence
movement, José Miguel Infante, even justified establishment of the junta by citing
Spanish legislation in the principal preconquest codification of Spanish law, the vener-
INDEPENDENCE AND THE AUTOCRATIC REPUBLIC 101

able Siete Partidas. If, as was probably the case, a minority of Chileans who were bent
upon independence from the outset hid their motives behind the mask of loyalty to the
king, this mask was enough to gain recognition for the junta from the council of the re-
gency in Spain, making the Chilean junta the only one in Spanish America ever recog-
nized by that body.
The political history of these two decades (1810–30) is conveniently divided into
four main periods: (1) four years of civil war and uncertain advance toward indepen-
dence, 1810–14 (called the patria vieja, or “old fatherland”); (2) reimposition of Spanish
authority by the viceroy at Lima through force of arms, 1814–17 (called the reconquista,
or “reconquest”); (3) dictatorship of Bernardo O’Higgins, 1817–23; (4) a chaotic succes-
sion of governments proclaiming liberalism, federalism, and republicanism, 1823–30.
After 1830 the internal strife was stifled by a coalition of conservative business in-
terests, the clergy, and the landowner class—led by a businessman named Diego Por-
tales—which installed a unique political regime. Republican in form and authoritarian
in practice (thus the epithet “autocratic republic” some Chilean historians have given
to this regime), the new political order reconsolidated the Hispanic ideal of a strong,
centralized executive who imposed order through decrees and the necessary coercion
to ensure their implementation. A man who openly claimed he would have shot his fa-
ther if it were necessary for public order, Portales wrote bluntly: “Democracy, which
self-deceived men proclaim so much, is an absurdity in countries like those of Amer-
ica.” Agreeing with the criollo intellectual Mariano Egaña that liberal principles were
“the greatest enemies of America and would eventually bring her down to total ruin,”
Portales and his colleagues brooked no opposition to their programs and spared no ef-
fort to save Chile from the perils of imported liberal ideology. A great irony of Chilean
independence was that the political order devised by Portales, Egaña, and the three
presidents who served from 1831 to 1861 exhibited more than a passing similarity to
the autocratic tradition of colonial rule.
Even so, this authoritarian republic was only consolidated after three civil wars
(1829–30, 1851, 1859) and with the institutionalization of modes of political repression
that became routine Chilean practices: concession of emergency powers ( facultades ex-
traordinarias) to the presidents; periodic declaration of states of siege and suspension of
civil liberties and rights; subjecting civilians to courts-martial, military law, and sum-
mary execution; preventive detention, physical abuse, and exile of political opponents;
and censorship and closing of the opposition press. Congressional and presidential
elections, managed by the incumbent government through patronage and fraud,
brought political violence and the civil wars of the 1850s mentioned earlier. Chile’s ex-
ceptionalism, that is, its vaunted institutional stability, would have its price in political
liberty. For much of the nineteenth century liberal factions struggled to overturn this
“autocratic republic.”
Parallel to this struggle between conservative and liberal factions to control the gov-
ernment and its patronage, there developed a formalistic constitutionalism premised
on pragmatic repression and iterated amnesties and pardons that enshrined impunity
for rebels and government leaders alike after each major political rupture. Chilean po-
litical culture integrated the ritual of repetitive conflicts followed by amnesties that al-
most emulated the parlamentos and paces between Spaniards and Mapuches under the
colonial regime (see Chapter 2).

Independence liberated elite criollos from the restraints of Spanish authority and left
them free to exploit rural labor, miners, and urban shanty dwellers. It also opened Chile
to British, North American, and European merchants along with a few European set-
102 CHILE

table 4–1. political crises, pardons, and amnesties, 1814–1925

Major Political Crises and Civil Wars Political Pardons (indultos) and Amnesties*

1814 Reconquista, reimposition of Spanish 1814

authority
1817 Patria Nueva 1822 (new constitution)
1823 End of O’Higgins government 1826 pardon of army deserters (conditional
pardons)
1827 Constituent Congress dissolved (elec- 1827 (indulto general) 1828 (new constitution
tions for provincial assemblies) and political amnesty)
1829–30 Civil War
1836–39 War with Peru-Bolivia Confederation 1836 Freire sentenced to death; commuted from
Freire invasion from Peru to oust death to exile; President Prieto seeks recon-
Prieto; country ruled under state of ciliation with political opponents after Por-
siege tales’ assassination; selective pardons and re-
turn of exiles 1838, 1839
1839 End of war; return to constitutional Pardons for military deserters; 1/4 reduction in
“normalcy” sentences for all prisoners to celebrate the
victory at Yungay
1841 Manuel Bulnes presidency 1841, 1842 pardons and amnesty
1845–46 Electoral violence; coup threats 1846 (minister orders prisoner release, allows
exiles to return after elections)
1850–51 Civil war 1851–56 (selective pardons) 1857; conditional
amnesty
1858–59 Civil war 1861 general amnesty
1861–71 President J. Pérez (“government of all,
for all”)
1865 War with Spain 1865 “Talca” amnesty for national guard offi-
cers convicted of offending judges (officers
fighting against Spanish at the time)
1879–84 War of the Pacific (Peru, Bolivia)
1891 Civil war 1891–94 limited amnesties
1893–94 Failed rebellions; state of siege 1894 general amnesty; 1895 amnesty for crimes
under military jurisdiction during War of the
Pacific
1924 Military coup; 1925, second coup 1925 new constitution and general amnesty

*General amnesties for electoral law violations or for violations of obligatory military service not included.

tlers. It did not mean political, social, or economic improvement for the vast majority
of Chileans.
In the process of establishing the postcolonial order, political and constitutional con-
flicts developed which would recur often during the nineteenth and twentieth cen-
turies. These included disputes over the basic character of the constitution, especially
the balance of power between executive and legislature; over the relationship between
Church and State; over the inclusiveness of citizenship and civic participation, at first
limited to a small minority of wealthy Chileans; and over the scope of the state’s au-
thority to confiscate or expropriate private property in the public interest. This latter
issue emerged with particular intensity in political maneuvering over abolition of slav-
ery (1811–24) and elimination of titles of nobility and entailed estates (mayorazgos).
In the social and economic realm, the chaos of the years 1810–30 also raised critical
INDEPENDENCE AND THE AUTOCRATIC REPUBLIC 103

policy issues that would endure in Chilean national life. Domination of mining output
and commerce by foreign (mostly British) merchants and the Chilean government’s de-
pendence upon foreign loans, ships, armaments, and technicians to pursue the internal
war of liberation against the royalists and carry out the naval expedition to Peru, made
clear that shedding the colonialism of Spain would bring a more subtle informal eco-
nomic colonialism by Britain, the stronger European nations, and North Americans.
Lack of efficient internal taxing mechanisms and reliance upon revenues from foreign
trade, particularly import-export duties, made public finance highly vulnerable to fluc-
tuations in international trade and to the extensive smuggling and corruption at the
ports. Attempts to raise revenues through authorizations of exclusive commercial mo-
nopolies and special concessions continued colonial practices and set precedents for
policies that later surrendered Chile’s most important economic resources, especially
mineral wealth, to foreigners. Opening the ports to international shipping—but with
significant import duties—generated debates between free trade advocates and early
proponents of protection for Chilean industries. These debates set the tone for a per-
sistent conflict over this issue which carried over into the twentieth century—and dra-
matically re-emerged in the 1970s.
The independence decades also saw an initial statement by a handful of Chilean
elites of the need to attract immigrants from Europe in order to populate the country
with peoples they considered racially superior to the predominantly mestizo and casta
work force in the mines, countryside, and towns. The tendency for the most radical
criollo leaders to blame Spain for Chile’s backwardness added to the desire for Euro-
peanization (especially immigrants from England, Ireland, and northern Europe) of the
Chilean ethnic stock as well as for the Anglicization of Chilean institutions. This
propensity to disparage the mental and technical capabilities of the working classes
endured into the twentieth century; it reached its maximum expression in Francisco
Encina’s twenty-volume History of Chile to 1891. Over and over again Encina bemoaned
the debilitating effects of miscegenation. Critical of the economic effects of free trade,
Encina nevertheless emphasized the “precious gift of European blood” which the resi-
dent foreign merchants contributed to the “Chilean race.”
The independence movement used Negro and casta troops to expel the Spanish, and
decreed emancipation of the offspring of the approximately four thousand remaining
slaves as a wartime expedient; but it ended by reinforcing the tremendous social gap
between Chilean elites and the common folk. These class divisions would be the basis
for bitter confrontations later in the nineteenth century, even as the newly formed So-
ciedad de Fomento Fabril (Society for Industrial Development, 1883) repeatedly called
for European immigrants to replace the “lazy, shiftless, mongrel” Chilean laborers.
Independence brought a change in political form but not in social structure. While
the English and French displacement of Spanish or Peruvian merchants in Valparaíso
and Santiago after 1817 influenced furniture and architectural styles in the homes of the
wealthy, the dwellings of the rural tenant laborers typically remained little more than
straw-covered huts or, at best, small adobe ranchos. In the towns and cities, lower-class
residents could spend their leisure hours in the chinganas (these were a combination of
bar, dance hall, and brothel), which were increasing in number, or at horse races, but
they continued to live in “suburban” huts ringing the solid homes and commercial cen-
ters spreading out from the central plazas. As the towns and cities grew and became
more affluent in the later part of the nineteenth century, the fusion of liberal political
ideology with social Darwinism would both recall the racist sentiments of the early
proponents of European immigration in the independence decades and “justify” the
misery that modernization and “progress” brought to a growing proletariat after 1850.
104 CHILE

From 1810 to 1814—a period labeled patria vieja, or “old fatherland”—by Chilean his-
torians, the personalities and ambitions of those later enshrined in the pantheon of the
independence movement’s heroes determined the politics of Santiago and Concepción.
The national junta formed on September 18, 1810, largely dominated by Juan Martínez
de Rozas, was followed by experiments with a national congress and then gave way to
the dictatorship of José Miguel Carrera and his two brothers. Feuds between Carrera,
the prominent Larraín family, and Bernardo O’Higgins created an environment of in-
trigue and uncertainty. Jealousies between Santiago and the provincial junta at Con-
cepción further confused and debilitated political authority. In the meantime the
United States consul, Joel Poinsett, allied himself with the Carreras and promoted
Chilean independence.
Mindful that, despite protestations of loyalty, the Chilean situation was developing
into a full-blown separatist movement (as had already occurred in Venezuela in 1811
and in New Granada and Mexico shortly thereafter), the viceroy of Peru sent a military
expedition to restore order in Chile. The military force disembarked at the island of
Chiloé, which was still directly dependent upon the viceroyalty, and, after gathering
new recruits, proceeded to Valdivia, where royalists had already gained control. From
there the expedition went by sea to Talcahuano and captured Concepción, where a
great part of the garrison also took up the royalist cause. These events induced the
major southern cities to swear again their allegiance to Ferdinand VII.
Early in 1814 a second royalist expedition commanded by General Gabino Gainza
entered Chile. After a number of encounters with the military forces led by Carrera,
O’Higgins, and Juan Mackenna, the royalist armies captured Chillán and Talca in the
southern part of the central valley. Thereafter a stalemate occurred between the oppos-
ing movements. In 1814 British commodore James Hillyar mediated a treaty agreement
(Treaty of Lircay) that ended hostilities with Chile’s recognition of Ferdinand VII, an
exchange of prisoners, suppression of the Chilean national flag introduced in 1812, and
a promise by the Spanish-Peruvian forces to leave Chile within a month.
This treaty proved unacceptable to both the viceroy and prominent criollo leaders in
Chile. Carrera carried out still another coup in Santiago, banished his personal ene-
mies, and determined to carry on the war against the royalists. O’Higgins refused to
recognize Carrera’s authority. To complicate matters, the Peruvian viceroy sent a new
military expedition to Chile commanded by General Mariano Osorio. Osorio’s advance
from Talcahuano to Chillán brought Carrera and O’Higgins together again to meet the
royalist threat. At the battle of Rancagua (October 1–2, 1814), Carrera failed to reinforce
the besieged patriot army, and Osorio defeated O’Higgins. This ended the patria vieja.
The remnants of O’Higgins’ army as well as Carrera’s forces fled to Mendoza, accom-
panied by a mass exodus of prominent criollos from Santiago. In Mendoza, José de San
Martín, leader of the Argentine independence movement, welcomed O’Higgins. Plot-
ting began for the campaign that would liberate Chile and Peru from Spanish rule
(1817–25).
For three years Spanish officials sought to purge Chilean society of separatist senti-
ments. Secret police, courts-martial, and imprisonment of leading citizens alienated
even moderate criollos previously uncommitted to independence. Instead of ameliorat-
ing criollo resentment, the Spanish “reconquest” (1814–17) greatly intensified discrimi-
nation against native-born Chileans. Spanish army personnel received salaries up to
five times larger than those of criollos of the same rank; Chileans were denied govern-
ment appointments and were refused the economic concessions that stemmed from of-
ficial largesse. When Chileans complained of these conditions, the governor was re-
puted to have told his entourage: “I shall not leave to the Chileans even tears with
which to weep.”
INDEPENDENCE AND THE AUTOCRATIC REPUBLIC 105

Polarization of sentiment in Chile coincided with San Martín’s planning of an expe-

dition to oust the Spanish from all of the southern cone of South America and Peru.
While San Martín’s agents collected intelligence, and the general prepared his forces in
Cuyo, Manuel Rodríguez, former secretary to Carrera, carried out the guerrilla activi-
ties against the royalists which made him the hero of the independence movement most
acclaimed by leftists and revolutionaries in Chile in the 1960s and 1970s. In the mid-
1980s, the most prominent guerrilla opposition to General Augusto Pinochet would call
itself the Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front.
Crossing the Andes in early 1817, San Martín defeated the royalist army at Cha-
cabuco to the north of Santiago. Mobs in Santiago ransacked the houses and property
of royal officials and wealthy royalists; they also destroyed the portraits of royal gov-
ernors (back to Pedro de Valdivia) hanging in the government place. No longer did
those bent on independence mask their intentions. On February 14, 1817, San Martín
and O’Higgins entered Santiago at the head of the victorious army. After San Martín
declined the cabildo’s offer to become dictator of Chile, O’Higgins accepted the
“supreme directorship” of the colony.
During the ensuing year Spanish victories in the central valley again threatened San-
tiago until San Martín won the decisive battle on the plains of Maipo (April 5, 1818). By
mid-1818, therefore, despite continued royalist resistance in the south, Chilean terri-
tory from Copiapó to Concepción was free of Spanish authority. In 1820 the British
Lord Cochrane, lending his services to the rebels’ cause, returned from an unsuccess-
ful strike at Callao and captured Valdivia in a daring amphibious assault. Attention
then turned to the liberation of Peru—though not until 1826 did Chilean soldiers com-
manded by Ramón Freire wrest control of the island of Chiloé from the Spaniards.
Notwithstanding these military victories, the political chaos and economic costs of
more than a decade of civil war, together with continued instability, made political in-
dependence cause for less than unconditional jubilation even to the separatists. And
like many revolutions, the personal and ideological struggle within the circle of sepa-
ratist leadership took its toll among most of those later included in the pantheon of rev-
olutionary heroes: José Miguel Carrera, like his brothers earlier, executed in Mendoza;
Manuel Rodríguez, assassinated, seemingly with O’Higgins’ knowledge; O’Higgins,
exiled to Peru (1823), from whence he would never return to his native land.

Bernardo O’Higgins, though born in Chile, spent much of his youth in England and Eu-
rope. Despite a number of efforts to gain the approval of his father, the former gover-
nor of Chile and viceroy of Peru, the latter seems never to have responded to the desire
of his illegitimate offspring for formal recognition. In Europe, O’Higgins met Francisco
de Miranda, the leading Venezuelan proponent of Latin American independence, and
was influenced by Miranda’s zeal for liberation of the colonies from Spain. O’Higgin’s
returned to Chile as one of a small minority of criollos committed to independence even
prior to the Napoleonic invasion of Spain.
After leading separatist troops from 1813 to 1814 and fleeing to Mendoza when de-
feated by the royalists at Rancagua (1814), O’Higgins returned to Chile as a subordi-
nate of General San Martín in an army aspiring to liberate Chile and Peru from Span-
ish rule. O’Higgins also belonged to the secret revolutionary group called logia
lautarina. This lodge, dedicated to independence for the Spanish American colonies,
swore its members to secrecy on pain of death and required that members who gained
high position in any of the liberated colonies submit for prior approval the names of
those they would appoint to military, government, or other positions in the new
regimes. The lodge also sought to control government policy. Critics of the lodge saw
it as a group of anticlerical, masonic subversives bent on destruction of the old order.
106 CHILE

A modern biographer of O’Higgins even suggested, with obvious hyperbole, that “the
lodge controlled the new Chilean administration as completely as the Party controls
the government in a Communist state.” Due to his association with the lodge, a seg-
ment of Chilean opinion came to see O’Higgins as somewhat less than a truly national
leader and blamed him and the lodge for the executions of the three Carrera brothers
as well as for the assassination of Manuel Rodríguez.
O’Higgins believed that it was necessary, with a people like the Chileans, “to confer
good upon them by force” when other means failed. He promulgated a new constitu-
tion in 1818. The document called for a five-man senate with members elected from the
provinces. O’Higgins essentially handpicked the membership, as he also did later the
delegates to the constitutional convention of 1822.
Despite manipulation of government appointments, the O’Higgins government
lacked firm institutional supports. Conflicts with Church leaders over a variety of is-
sues—expulsion of a priest who asked the wife of an O’Higgins supporter to leave a
church because she was wearing an inappropriate low-cut dress; establishment of
Protestant cemeteries; and introduction of Protestant teachers to develop an anticleri-
cal educational system—weakened O’Higgins’ position. Confrontations with certain
aristocrats over elimination of titles of nobility, and efforts to abolish the entailed es-
tates, as well as strife with his “own” senate also created problems for O’Higgins. Fi-
nally, the implacable resistance of friends and supporters of the Carrera brothers, who
never forgave O’Higgins for the Carreras’ death, undermined his administration.
Financial difficulties associated with the war effort and corruption also contributed
to O’Higgins’ failure. Describing the situation in Chile in 1820, a sea captain wrote in
his journal:
No permanent System of Finance had yet been established whereby the Expenses of
the Government & of the War might be defrayed and on every emergency Recourse
was had to temporary loans and forced contributions. Nothing like a regular ap-
praisement of Land & other Permanent Property had yet been attempted, or any one
Species of Regular Taxation resorted to, and when arbitrary contributions were levied
the quotas were evidently determined by favoritism or Caprice.
In attempting to raise revenues, O’Higgins re-established the colonial tobacco monop-
oly, or estanco, only to suspend it for two years after protests by foreign merchants. At
the same time the Supreme Director’s confidant and finance minister and a prominent
merchant were apparently speculating in tobacco and other commodities. Furthermore
the finance minister, although a Chilean by birth, had sided with the royalists and even
accompanied one of the early Spanish expeditions from Peru which sought to recon-
quer Chile. These circumstances—in addition to the general amnesty for most former
royalists who had sworn loyalty to Chile, and the government’s attempts to return to
the royalists some property confiscated from them—provided effective ammunition
for those who wished to discredit O’Higgins. Resistance by merchants to new com-
mercial regulations, political intrigues surrounding a new constitution (1822), a debate
concerning a loan secured in London, failure to pay the fleet in Valparaíso, and a threat
to replace Ramón Freire, commander of the army at Concepción, all contributed to
O’Higgins’ downfall.
In 1822 two of the country’s five senators left on diplomatic missions. Another ex-
pressed a desire to leave public office. O’Higgins then suggested that the senate tem-
porarily suspend its sessions and transfer legislative authority to himself as Supreme
Director. The senators met this breach of the principles of liberalism with categorical
opposition. Ramón Freire led his forces at Concepción against Talca and threatened to
march northward. The city of La Serena followed Concepción’s lead, and O’Higgins’
INDEPENDENCE AND THE AUTOCRATIC REPUBLIC 107

opponents in Santiago adhered to the movement to oust him from office. With an emo-
tional farewell speech, O’Higgins surrendered the presidential sash and left for Peru-
vian exile, never to return to Chile. O’Higgins thus experienced what Chileans ironi-
cally call “el pago de chile,” that is, ingratitude, for his leadership and sacrifices during
the independence wars.
Political uncertainty followed O’Higgins’ abdication. A barrage of political slogans,
ideologies, and personalities accompanied a confusing succession of congresses, as-
semblies, interim supreme directors, presidents, and military rebellions. Ramón Freire,
who had led the Concepción forces, attempted to govern the country from 1823 to 1826
and returned to office several times between 1826 and 1829. Freire later attempted an
invasion of Chile from Peru (1836), after being forcibly exiled to the former viceroyalty.
Freire’s term in office and his interventions between 1826 and 1830 were associated
with superficial experiments with liberalism and federalism. Exponents of European or
North American liberalism sought to impose republican institutions and practices on
Chile’s traditional administrative, economic, and social structure. To many, liberalism
also meant religious toleration or anticlericalism. Implementation of liberal principles
implied confrontation with perhaps the most significant social institution and symbol
of Hispanic society: the Catholic Church. This alone assured bitter resistance to liberal-
ism by some prominent criollo families.
A small number of influential intellectuals and political leaders also proposed a fed-
eralist regime, with considerable regional autonomy. The schemes for decentralizing
political authority or copying North American federalism appealed to certain regional
interests seeking to cast off the economic and political domination of Santiago and Val-
paraíso as well as to those intellectuals who equated progress and freedom with emu-
lating the institutions of the United States. But neither liberalism, nor liberal principles
and a federalist constitution, corresponded to the socio-economic reality of Hispanic
capitalism in Chile after independence.
In 1824 the Freire government confiscated the possessions of the regular clergy. This
ruptured Church-State relations, including dismissal of the ex-royalist bishop, Ro-
dríguez Zorilla, whom O’Higgins had re-established in his office in an effort to negoti-
ate diplomatic relations with the Pope. Regional uprisings and Freire’s inability to or-
ganize effectively the national public administration resulted in continued intrigues,
polarization of sentiments by opposing forces, and ruin of the public finances. By 1825,
in the words of Chilean author Agustín Edwards, “Freire . . . distracted and impotent,
saw his authority being set at naught. Santiago alone recognized the Governing
Junta. . . . Meanwhile neither Concepción nor Coquimbo recognized either Freire or
the junta. The anarchy into which the country had fallen was reaching a climax; it was
under the rule of four governments.” Totally frustrated, Freire resigned from office. Per-
sonal ambitions combined with rabid commitments to misunderstood slogans threat-
ened to dismember the new nation.
After an enthusiastic speech by federalism’s most avid supporter, José Miguel In-
fante, in July of 1826, Congress formally approved a federal system for Chile. The leg-
islature then embarked upon a piecemeal program designed to define the nature of
Chilean federalism. Congress divided Chile into eight provinces, each of which would
have a provincial assembly and its own constitution. In addition, local government
would continue to exercise a broad range of authority in the municipios. In a country
lacking provincial political and administrative machinery, let alone provincial consti-
tutions, federalist ideology did not correspond to political reality, but it did intensify
regional conflicts that made effective national government illusory.
Meanwhile the army went unpaid, the public treasury remained empty, and presi-
dent succeeded president. Civil strife reached such a level that Congress requested
108 CHILE

Freire to reassume the presidency and impose order. After winning several battles
against opposing forces, Freire again resigned, to be followed in office by the vice-
president, Francisco Antonio Pinto. In August 1827 the country reverted to a unitary
form of government, ending its brief flirtation with federalism.
Pinto’s administration adopted a new constitution in 1828 that pleased neither ar-
dent federalists nor important liberal factions. Conservatives viewed the constitution
as an unrealistic document inspired by imported utopian ideology. By abolishing the
mayorazgos, the constitution generated opposition in the old aristocracy, while Presi-
dent Pinto’s anticlericalism disturbed a broader segment of “public opinion.” Conflict
and disputed elections after adoption of a new constitution in 1828 degenerated into
civil war (1829–30).
Led by the personalities who would dominate Chilean politics for the next two
decades—Diego Portales, Manuel Rengifo, Joaquín Prieto, and Manuel Bulnes—con-
servative forces defeated the remnants of the liberal army, commanded by Ramón
Freire, at the battle of Lircay in April 1830. The new government banished Freire to
Peru—just as Freire had earlier done to Bernardo O’Higgins.

Political activity in the post-independence decades took place within very restricted so-
cial circles. Intellectuals wrote constitutions and liberal legislation for a country unfa-
miliar with the practical meaning of federalism, inalienable rights, or effective limits on
government authority. Chileans understood the idea of benevolent despotism and the
practice of pragmatic despotism. Royal officials had implemented well-intentioned de-
crees as their consciences, local interests, “reality,” or corruption determined. Involve-
ment of “the people” in legislation or administration conformed neither to the theory
nor to the practice of Hispanic politics. It proved no surprise, therefore, that after inde-
pendence the emergence within elite circles of overlapping ideological factions and
personalist movements, such as those of O’Higgins, the Carreras, and Freire, antici-
pated the multiparty politics of later years without involving the masses except as can-
non fodder. Those who supported liberal and/or federalist principles were known as
pipiolos (“upstarts” or “novices”), and those defending more traditional principles, in-
cluding the existing privileges of the Church, as pelucones (“bigwigs”). But within these
two camps, factional disputes and personal loyalties prevented the development of
unified political movements, let alone political parties in the modern sense. The highly
partisan tabloid newspapers slandered the opposition at will. Political factions and
various governments stretched freedom of the press to its limits. No end seemed in
sight to the quick succession of presidents and constitutions which accompanied the
movement of armies, rebellions, and bandits across the country.
In these conditions public finance fell into a dreadful state. Tax farming on the colo-
nial model continued with respect to the tithes (diezmos) and the tolls paid by muleteers
and carters on the principal roads. Lack of respect for shifting government authorities
and knowledge that the tax farmers retained 30 to 40 percent of the taxes levied in-
creased still further the propensity to evade payment. This held true especially in the
case of the diezmos paid in kind by the peasantry. Corrupt administration of the customs
houses also kept needed revenues from the government. The observations of John
Miers, an English businessman more than disenchanted with Chile, summarize the de-
plorable state of affairs:
I have elsewhere alluded to the mode in which the duties upon the custom-house
were paid, and to the great extent of the contraband introduction of foreign goods. It
now remains to say a few words upon the mode of levying the customs. The duties
are always, after the Spanish system, estimated and levied at so much percent upon a
INDEPENDENCE AND THE AUTOCRATIC REPUBLIC 109

valuation, not determined by the market price of the articles, but by the arbitrary val-
uation of the vistas, or custom-house searchers: it is, therefore, impossible for a mer-
chant to calculate upon the actual cost of introduction of foreign goods; but, as the
government of Chile does not allow their officers a sufficient salary, they are obliged
to connive with the merchants, both in smuggling and in fixing undervaluations, re-
ceiving from the latter a proportionate bribe. Similar parcels of goods may at one time
be valued in the custom-house at 1000 dollars, at another 100 dollars, and the usual
tariff duties paid thereon accordingly; the difference is a robbery to the state, no ad-
vantage whatever results to the foreign manufactures, but goes entirely into the pock-
ets of the custom-house officers, merchants, and agents.
Miers concluded that “the foreign trade of Chile, like all matters in state, justice and po-
lice, is maintained by empino [sic] influence, intrigue and bribery.”
Ironically, however, it was the chaos of public finance that brought to the fore the
businessmen and military leaders who ended two decades of near anarchy with a con-
servative restoration. Led by Diego Portales, a merchant who had remained aloof from
the independence struggle, an alliance of the Concepción military elite, merchants,
prominent pelucón families, and the Church hierarchy established—at bayonet point—
a unique political regime in Chile. This regime set it apart from its sister republics as a
model of political stability and economic growth in the nineteenth century. So would
be born the cult of Chilean “exceptionalism.”

Diego Portales was born in 1793 in Santiago, the son of an influential royal official who
served as superintendent of the mint. Distantly related to two colonial governors, his
ancestry linked him to Chile’s Basque-Castilian aristocracy. After giving up his own po-
sition at the mint, Portales formed a commercial partnership with Manuel Cea in the
export-import trade, and moved to Lima. Failure of the joint enterprise brought both
partners back to Chile where in mid-1824 they contracted with the Freire government
to take over the state monopoly (estanco) on tobacco and certain other commodities in
exchange for servicing the loan contracted by Chilean agents in London in 1822.
The Portales-Cea Company obtained the estanco contract amidst rumors of impro-
prieties in the bidding process, including an allegation that a rival firm lost the contract
despite its higher bid. If these allegations were true, it proved fortunate for those who
lost the contract. Contraband imports of goods subject to the estanco, illegal tobacco
plantations, and the high price paid for the contract contributed to the enterprise’s
commercial failure. Portales and his partner attempted to enforce their monopoly
rights by destroying illegal tobacco plantations and seeking stronger intervention by
government authorities to stop the contraband trade. While personal enemies of the
partners and opponents of the government accused the firm of fraud and bribery, it
struggled unsuccessfully to meet its obligations on the British loan. In September 1826
Congress voted to liquidate the estanco concession and return the monopoly to the gov-
ernment. Though Portales bitterly resented the government’s failure to negotiate new
terms or even to allow his firm to administer the government monopoly on a fee basis,
the equitable manner in which Manuel Rengifo liquidated the estanco contract formed
the basis for the future cooperation between those two hard-headed businessmen who
would dominate Chilean political economy after 1830.
Many people believed Portales’ participation in politics stemmed from a desire for
revenge against those who had deprived him of the estanco contract. Others saw Por-
tales’ motivation in his distaste for liberalism and the continual disorder following in-
dependence. Whatever the motivation, Portales’ solution for political disorder, im-
posed in cooperation with conservative interests, the higher clergy, and the military
110 CHILE

forces of Prieto and Bulnes, emphasized restoration of legitimacy, law and order, and fis-
cal integrity. Implementation of this program required a strong, centralized govern-
ment which did not tolerate opposition or even criticism. Acting as President Prieto’s
chief minister and then as “informal” adviser, Portales cashiered the liberal officers of
the army, many of them “heroes” of the independence period, persecuted the opposi-
tion press, and controlled elections to ensure the victory of government candidates.
This was the beginning of the “autocratic republic” which one Chilean historian de-
scribed as “the last and most beautiful chapter of Spanish colonial history.” Less ro-
mantically, an English historian suggests that “the atmosphere in Chile after 1830 was
one of fear and trembling.”
Portales’ style and beliefs left little room for constitutions or formal principles. He
favored decisive, pragmatic action unconstrained by legal obstacles or constitutional
limits. While Portales concerned himself with action, however, other conservative lead-
ers and intellectuals felt the need for a constitution to define the nature of the new
regime, to formalize its structure, and to legitimize its practices. Portales played almost
no official role in elaborating the Constitution of 1833 which institutionalized what his-
torians have called the “Portalian state.” Nevertheless, the centralized, authoritarian
character of the constitution owed as much to Portales as to its principal author, Mari-
ano Egaña.
Both Portales and Egaña sought restoration of legitimacy, law and order, and public
morality. They recognized the critical need to build viable national political institutions
as instruments through which to govern effectively and stimulate economic recovery.
Above all, they sought to provide political stability. Both Portales and Egaña disdained
democracy, popular suffrage, and liberalism. Egaña called for establishment of an au-
thoritative centralized regime that did not allow “anarchy in the shadow or name of
popular rule, liberal principles, republican government.” Portales urged creation of a
“strong, centralizing government, in order to set the citizens on the straight path of
order and virtue.” The Constitution of 1833 formalized these authoritarian principles.
The new constitution created a strong executive with authority to declare a state of
siege in any part of the country when Congress was in recess. Declaration of a state
of siege entailed suspension of all constitutional guarantees in the affected territory.
In each province and administrative subdivision the president appointed intendants
and governors as his direct agents. All pretense of provincial initiative, let alone feder-
alism, disappeared. The power of Congress to approve annually the budget, taxes, and
the size of the military provided the basis, later in the century, for bitter executive-
legislative confrontations and even civil war (1891). But from 1831 to 1861 three strong
presidents each served two constitutional five-year terms, rigged congressional and
presidential elections, and efficiently suppressed opposition forces.
The 1833 constitution also maintained the Roman Catholic apostolic religion as the
state faith and excluded from “public exercise” all other religious doctrines. The
founders of the autocratic republic thus sought to transfer the privilege of appointing
Church officials, or patronato, from the Spanish crown to the new national regime—
though the Church did not concede that the republican government had inherited the
patronato from the empire. Summarizing the intent of the constitution, General Prieto
called it “a means of putting an end to the revolutions and disturbances which arose
from the confusion in which the triumph of independence left us. For this reason the
system of government to which the republic was subjected . . . may be called auto-
cratic in view of the great authority or power . . . concentrated in the hands of the cit-
izen elected as president.”
INDEPENDENCE AND THE AUTOCRATIC REPUBLIC 111

Executive control over distribution of certificates qualifying citizens to vote made ef-
fective challenges to the incumbent nearly impossible. This system of executive domi-
nance of elections was adroitly described by Chilean historian Luis Galdames:

The constitution permitted the re-election of the president to succeed himself for a sec-
ond period of five years, and while this provision remained in force all the presidents
availed themselves of it to have themselves re-elected. This meant, then, ten-year
presidential terms. Re-election was achieved without difficulty, owing to the irre-
sistible power placed by the constitution itself in the hands of the chief of state, who
named the mayors and members of the municipal councils, the governors, intendants,
and judges. . . .
In practice, the intendants and governors controlled the elections of senators and
representatives within their own jurisdiction. The chief of state and his ministers
made lists of the people who were to make up each chamber for a constitutional pe-
riod, and the elections were carried out according to these lists. It was rare that more
than three or five opposition candidates succeeded in defeating the government can-
didates in the different departments. The orders of the minister of the interior to the
agents of the executive were expressed more or less in these terms: “His Excellency in-
structs me to make known to you that Señor or Señores [here the names] should be
chosen in your department for the post of [here the name of a senator or deputy].” If
any candidate of the opposition attempted to electioneer at any point whatever in the
country, the respective government agent would receive from the minister of the in-
terior a communication like this: “Manage to prevent Don [name] from coming to
your department by advising him to refrain from presenting himself in it. If he insists
you can have him arrested as a disturber of the public peace.

Suffrage limitations restricted the vote through property or income qualifications

and literacy requirements. But lax enforcement and deliberate delays in implementing
the literacy requirement allowed land-owners to enroll their tenants as voters and com-
manders of the militia to do likewise with their troops. After 1840 the Congress allowed
those already registered to continue to vote despite efforts to impose the literacy re-
quirement on new voters. In this way the votes of the rural work force became a valu-
able asset of the owners of large rural estates and artisans serving in the militia served
as voting cattle for the incumbent government.
Along with electoral manipulation, the alliance of merchants, land-owners, clergy,
and military officers which restored law and order did not lose sight of Portales’ admo-
nition: “The stick and the cake, justly and opportunely administered, are the specifics
with which any nation can be cured, however inveterate its bad habits may be.” Thus,
Chile would largely avoid the chaos and instability of the rest of Latin America, despite
the brief civil wars in 1851 and 1859, by imposing a modified version of “benevolent”
despotism. Only later would incipient industrial groups and renewed anticlericalism
among prominent elite families upset the mutuality of interests shared by members of
the relatively small ruling class. The Constitution of 1833 provided a viable instrument
for maintaining existing class relations, including restoration of the mayorazgos and con-
solidating the political position of prominent criollo families. It also helped create a busi-
ness climate attractive to foreign capitalists and Chilean merchants alike.
At Portales’ urging, Manuel Rengifo served as Minister of the Treasury from 1830 to
1835. Rengifo reorganized the system of public finance, transferred the customs houses
to the ports, rationalized regulations and duties on the coastwise trade, and took a
112 CHILE

number of measures intended to increase fiscal revenues. Though some of Rengifo’s tax
policies drew criticism, the overall effect of his program was to establish a sound basis
for Chilean public finance and to inspire the confidence of domestic and foreign capi-
tal. Unfortunately Rengifo’s successes made him a likely presidential candidate for an
alliance of dissatisfied conservative elements and certain liberal fractions. Rengifo also
favored conciliatory policies and an amnesty for the liberal officers cashiered and ex-
iled after the Battle of Lircay in 1830.
In September 1835, Portales returned from his self-imposed “absence” from politics
and assumed the ministries of War and the Interior. Joaquín Tocornal, President Pri-
eto’s firm supporter and perhaps the most proclerical member of the government coali-
tion, replaced Rengifo as Minister of the Treasury. Despite Rengifo’s successful eco-
nomic policies, his spirit of political conciliation and his moderation on the
politico-religious issues of the times lost out to the expediencies of the presidential elec-
tion of 1835 and Portales’ intolerance of any drift toward liberalism. Under Portales’
leadership Prieto was re-elected—after the agitation and propaganda of the electoral
campaign had led to reimposition of government through “state of siege.” Notwith-
standing the considerable economic progress and improvement in public finance,
when Prieto began his second presidential term (1836–41), institutionalization of the
political system detailed in the Constitution of 1833 seemed far from certain.

A new constitution has nowhere guaranteed political stability. This is especially the
case in Latin America. It is important therefore to attempt to understand how the re-
pressive policies of the Prieto administration, a fortunate stroke of international poli-
tics—that is, a successful war against the Peru-Bolivia confederation—the “martyr-
dom” of Portales, and the character of Prieto’s successor, Manuel Bulnes, solidified the
“autocratic republic.”
In the wake of civil wars and clashes of personalist factions from 1810, numerous
Chilean émigrés found themselves in Peru, while Peruvian exiles went to Chile. Shortly
after Prieto’s re-election (1836) General Freire sailed from Peru with a military force,
landed in Chiloé, and moved to the mainland. Internal dissidents also threatened re-
bellion. Freire was captured and eventually exiled to Australia. But in response the Pri-
eto government broke relations with Peru.
Relations between Chile and Peru had been tense in any case, due to Peru’s failure
to repay the loan extended for the San Martín expedition (1820–22) and to disputes over
import duties that discriminated against Chilean merchandise as well as over goods
deposited in the warehouses at Valparaíso or ships landing in Chilean ports. General
Andrés Santa Cruz’s efforts to unify Peru and Bolivia and the Peruvian government’s
support for Freire exacerbated this tension.
Portales saw Santa Cruz’s policies and armies as a direct threat to Chile. He sent two
ships to Callao, which took the Peruvian navy, such as it was, by surprise. Santa Cruz
negotiated a settlement that left the Peruvian ships in Chilean hands, but Portales re-
mained unsatisfied because Santa Cruz refused to apologize for the imprisonment of
the Chilean chargé d’affaires. Bent upon war, Portales believed the judgments of the
numerous Peruvian exiles in Chile that large-scale rebellion against Santa Cruz would
result if a Chilean army merely appeared in Peru.
The Chilean Congress declared war and sent Mariano Egaña to Peru at the head of
a small squadron. The Chileans demanded (1) satisfaction for the injuries done to their
chargé d’affaires, (2) dissolution of the Peru-Bolivia confederation, (3) an indemnity for
the Freire expedition, (4) recognition of liability for the loan extended for the San
INDEPENDENCE AND THE AUTOCRATIC REPUBLIC 113

Martín liberation expedition, and (5) limitations on Peruvian naval forces. When Santa
Cruz rejected these humiliating conditions, the Prieto government prepared for war by
declaring a state of siege in all of Chile. With Portales exercising extensive emergency
powers, those who “disturbed public order” or were “disrespectful toward the gov-
ernment” faced banishment or execution at the hands of military tribunals.
Portales’ regime of terror incited rebellion. In June 1837 mutinous troops, led by
Colonel José Antonio Vidaurre, assassinated Portales. Government defeat of the rebel-
lious troops was followed by the execution of the assassins. Vidaurre’s head was ex-
hibited on a pike in Valparaíso. Now Portales became a martyr as the government tried
to link his assassins and the rebellion to General Santa Cruz’s agents in Chile.
During 1837 Chilean forces under Admiral Blanco Encalada faced defeat in Peru
from Santa Cruz’s armies. Surrounded and in despair, Blanco Encalada recognized the
Peru-Bolivia confederation and returned the ships earlier seized at Callao. The Chilean
government rejected these concessions, blockaded Peruvian ports, and dispatched a
new force commanded by General Manuel Bulnes, the victor at Lircay and Prieto’s
nephew. Accompanying this expedition were a number of Peruvian exiles, including
ex-President Agustín Gamarra and the future Peruvian caudillo Ramón Castilla. Troop
movements by both sides in and out of Lima and the interior culminated in early 1839
at Yungay, where Bulnes decisively defeated Santa Cruz and dissolved the Peru-Bolivia
confederation. He returned to Santiago a military hero.
The war against the Peru-Bolivia confederation united Chilean political elites. While
defeat, in Encina’s words, might have sent “leaders, government and order tumbling
to earth,” victory contributed to a new national pride. According to Barros Arana, when
Bulnes made his triumphal entrance into Santiago, “he was greeted by a fanfare un-
known until then in the celebration of public festivities.” For months after the victory,
Chile celebrated its new-found “greatness” with public festivities and theater produc-
tions that re-enacted the military glories of the Chilean armies.
Bulnes’ victory made him the perfect successor to Prieto and at precisely the right
time in the five-year electoral cycle. In control of the army, and enjoying popular ac-
claim, Bulnes then married the daughter of ex-President Francisco Antonio Pinto, his
principal opponent in the presidential race. For the first time in Chilean history a peace-
ful transition to the presidency took place with Bulnes’ inauguration in 1841. During
the next decade Bulnes’ great popularity, his support for the development of legislative
and judicial institutions, and his refusal to become a caudillo on the model of contem-
porary Latin American rulers, all served to solidify the “Portalian state.” Thus the for-
tuitous outcome of Chilean bellicosity provided the basis of solidarity and legitimacy,
as well as the leadership that spared Chile the political disorder and caudillismo com-
mon to Latin America in much of the nineteenth century. It also institutionalized a cen-
tralized autocratic regime that discouraged liberalization of Chilean politics.

Consolidation of the autocratic republic also depended upon the improved state of
public finance and of the economy in Chile after 1830. From 1810 to 1830 loss of per-
haps 15 percent of the male population in the 20-to-40 age group, in the military cam-
paigns in Chile, Río de la Plata, and Peru, caused a temporary scarcity of labor in the
northern mines and in the countryside. Marauding soldiers and bandits in the rural
areas discouraged agricultural production. In addition, Peru’s internal strife and fi-
nancial crisis disrupted Chile’s normal export trade in wheat, livestock products, and
other agrarian commodities.
Estimates for the value of agricultural and livestock production, by region, illustrate
114 CHILE

table 4–2. average annual value of agricultural

and livestock production (in pesos)

Years La Serena Santiago Concepción

1750–59 44,377 427,084 181,615

1760–69 41,409 461,086 189,530
1770–79 40,055 621,086 262,961
1780–89 33,543 551,441 270,669
1790–99 45,198 556,046 244,242
1800–09 84,296 885,292 425,376
1810–19 80,766 623,877 271,357
1820–29 76,156 824,439 187,740

Source: M. Carmagnani, Les mecanismes de la vie économique dans une société

coloniale, Le Chili, pp. 213, 235, 249.

the decline in output that accompanied the independence struggle.* Declines in the
northern region and even in Santiago were relatively moderate, with recovery begin-
ning after 1820. In the Concepción-southern region continued warfare and Indian prob-
lems contributed to a persistent decline in output until 1830; the absolute value of pro-
duction in 1830 failed to regain the level attained in the decade 1760–69.
The most serious decline in economic activity occurred south of the Maule River
where, in any case, Chilean agriculture was least secure due to the Indian frontier.
Short-term local food shortages resulted from the seemingly unending civil wars. In
1822 the cabildo at Concepción reported that “eleven years of a ferocious, devastating
struggle have reduced the province to the most extreme calamity in its history. Its res-
idents . . . have consumed whatever work animals or beasts of burden, not taken by
their enemies or their defenders, to keep themselves alive.”
In the La Serena–northern region the independence movements little affected agri-
cultural production. Free trade meant expanded demand for minerals and stimulation
of the northern economy. But migration to the north, due to the war and to the hope
for opportunities in the mines, placed increased pressure on the region’s limited food-
producing capabilities. In 1826 the provincial assembly of Coquimbo lamented that this
city “must buy everything, for it produces little but metals. Smaller animals are
brought from Chillán, more than six thousand animals come each year from the envi-
rons of Santiago; . . . tallow from Maule; flour and grain from Aconcagua, wood from
Chiloé, Valdivia, and Concepción.”
With the achievement of independence, the northern region’s mines provided the
primary source of the copper and silver that financed imports of European goods, paid
for military supplies, and attracted foreign investment. In the 1820s, however, many
foreigners who invested in mining enterprises lost their capital, as the cost of food, fuel,
and supplies and the lack of adequate transport undermined these speculative ven-
tures. Indeed, the prospectuses of some of these “mining” ventures seem to have de-
liberately misled British investors. For example, the Chilean Mining Association de-
clared that “few countries are so well watered as Chile, affording means of conveyance
by water to the ports of the Pacific.” This was true, of course, but the prospectus failed

*Naturally, given the internal situation, these estimates are more suggestive than definitive—
and the price inflation at the time probably leads to an underestimate of the decline in output.
INDEPENDENCE AND THE AUTOCRATIC REPUBLIC 115

to mention that there were no navigable rivers in the northern region, no coal, no lum-
ber, and that provisions had to be brought over a considerable distance from the south.
Despite the disappointments suffered by many speculative investments, new discov-
eries of copper and silver augured well for the development of mining in the northern
region. Gold production declined, but the mint in Santiago maintained the level of sil-
ver coinage achieved in the period 1790–1809, despite increased contraband and the
dislocation of war. In 1832 a silver strike at Chañarcillo created boom conditions in the
northern territory and brought also some of the earliest significant labor conflicts in
Chilean national history. Even at this early date the harsh conditions experienced by
the peons spawned an incipient militancy among the growing mining proletariat. A re-
bellion at Chañarcillo in 1834 foreshadowed hundreds of future confrontations be-
tween miners and mine operators in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Though the northern mining districts afforded the most glamorous economic po-
tential and paid for the bulk of imports, agriculture and livestock remained the foun-
dations of the economy. Based in the Santiago–central region—especially with the war
time dislocations in the south—agriculture continued to be extensive and backward.
Wooden plows pulled by teams of oxen broke the ground for sowing the traditional
colonial crops. Productivity declined with the spread of agricultural pests and the re-
duced fertility of the land. Threshing still depended on horses and was carried on dur-
ing extended fiestas and accompanied by considerable consumption of wine, chicha,*
or aguardiente. As in the rest of Latin America at this time, winnowing with wooden
pitchforks evoked images of biblical harvests.
Livestock production also remained primitive. No new breeds were introduced be-
fore 1830; animals took five or six years to “fatten” on natural pastures before slaugh-
ter. Even then they yielded only 60 to 70 percent of what cattle provided in Europe.
Nevertheless, hides and tallow contributed substantially to Chilean exports, as they
had since early colonial days. But while the Chilean countryside was admirably suited
to dairy production, the output of milk, cheese, and butter was quite low; to 1820, at
least, butter cost more in the Concepción region than in the United States. Although the
contesting armies of the independence decades provided markets for foodstuffs and
drove up prices, they also created conditions of uncertainty or devastation in which
Chilean agriculture barely held its own (in the central region) or retrogressed (in the
Concepción–southern territory).
Through all the strife, however, the large rural estates continued to dominate in the
countryside. Ironically, by 1827 the independent nations of Chile and Peru had re-
established the basic structure of colonial trade. Chile exported over 500,000 pesos of
wheat, flour, salted meat, tallow, barley, wood, and other agricultural commodities and
minerals to Peru. In exchange, Peru sent back almost 350,000 pesos of goods to Chile—
approximately half in sugar. The blood spilled to win political independence conse-
crated the reconfirmation of colonial patterns of commerce as well as colonial economic
institutions in the rural areas.
While internal productive activity stagnated, the arms trade, whaling and contra-
band of all sorts made Valparaíso an important Pacific way station to North America as
well as to western Spanish America and to British colonies in Asia. The port’s strategic
location brought increasing numbers of British, North American, and other foreign
merchants to Valparaíso, Santiago, and other principal towns. Some of these merchants
settled permanently in Chile, founding businesses and families which became fixtures

*Chicha is a hard cider made from grapes or apples.

116 CHILE

of Chilean high finance and Chilean society—including Waddington, Sewell, Walker,

Chadwick, Davies, Bunster, Clark, Gibbs, Lynch, and Eastman. Two future Chilean
presidents would descend from an Italian immigrant-merchant, Pedro Alessandri, who
arrived in Valparaíso in 1820.
Provisioning the army of liberation provided economic opportunities for colonial
merchants and public officials, much as had the royal situado in the past. In contrast to
Santiago, which changed little from 1810 to 1830, Valparaíso grew rapidly from a town
of 5500 to a city of almost 20,000. A floating population of several thousand from the
ships in the bay frequented the increasing number of shops, cafés, billiard parlors, bars,
and brothels. An underworld of muggers, thieves, and murderers preyed upon
drunken sailors and began to make Valparaíso the rough-and-tumble, bawdy Pacific
port for which it became famous.
By 1822 foreigners represented nearly one-quarter of the residents of the port and
virtually dominated commerce. Establishment of warehouses in which shippers could
deposit merchandise for a set fee helped increase mercantile activity. Chile’s merchant
marine grew from three ships, owned by Spaniards, in 1810 to well over seventy by
1830. Foreigners owned many of these, but native Chileans and naturalized citizens
also took part in the shipping trade. The dramatic growth of international trade also
reinvigorated the shipbuilding industry. Despite the great increase in shipping, how-
ever, port facilities remained exceedingly inadequate. No docks existed. Peons, up to
their waists in water, carried ashore heavy bundles on their backs from small boats sent
from the anchored wooden sailing vessels. From Valparaíso merchandise went over-
land on mules to Santiago or to the northern towns and mining districts. Not until sev-
eral decades later would railroads and steamships dramatically alter colonial modes of
transport and communication.
Expansion of commerce confronted Chile’s leaders with numerous political issues
related to domestic industrial development, public finance, and, in the short run, suc-
cessful completion of the war against Spain and achievement of diplomatic recognition
by England, the United States, the Holy See, and other European powers. Diplomatic
efforts by the Chileans to maintain the neutrality of England and, more important of
the British Pacific squadron, during the years of war against Spain made Chilean gov-
ernments cautious in dealing with powerful English merchants. The need to pay for
military supplies and to meet salaries of public personnel, along with the ascendancy
of English, French, and North American “free trade” doctrines, pushed Chile away
from protective tariffs and toward a commercial policy that emphasized revenue-
producing export and import duties.*
Chile had opened its major ports to trade with all friendly or neutral nations in 1811.
The decree authorized introduction of all commodities except rum, beer, wine, aguar-
diente, hats, and items subject to the government estanco (especially tobacco). Foreign
merchants could engage legally only in the wholesale trade; retail trade and coastal
navigation were supposedly reserved for Chilean citizens, but violations of these pro-
visions were common. From 1810 to 1830 import duties averaged 35 percent or more ad
valorem, but contraband or corruption in assessing the value of imported goods signif-
icantly reduced government revenues. Export duties varied considerably from product
to product, ranging from 6 to nearly 20 percent.
Government policies allowed low-priced imports to eliminate almost entirely the re-

*“Free trade” in this context meant opening ports to international commerce—not the elimina-
tion of import duties.
INDEPENDENCE AND THE AUTOCRATIC REPUBLIC 117

maining Chilean manufactures save for some household production, food processing,
mining and livestock-related artisan activities such as soap- and candle-making and
tanneries. These developments conflicted directly with the commitment of elites like
Manuel de Salas or José Antonio Rodríguez Aldea to stimulate industrial growth
through some form of protection for Chilean enterprises. Efforts to combine limited
protective tariffs with revenue-producing duties, and the repression of contraband,
which probably accounted for over half of Chile’s imports, displeased the merchant
community and contributed to O’Higgins’ ouster.
The penetration of the economy by foreign interests in the period between 1810 and
1830 paved the way for a much more serious domination of Chile’s economic develop-
ment by British and North American enterprises later in the nineteenth century. By
1849 some fifty British firms controlled most Chilean exports: nearly 50 percent of the
value of these exports went to England, and English goods accounted for 30 to 40 per-
cent of the value of Chilean imports. Reacting to these trends more than a century later,
historian Francisco Encina declared:

What resulted in these years was not, as usually suggested, an intensification of in-
ternational trade. Rather what occurred was an exploitation of the Chilean economy
by foreign interests. They traded 60 percent of their goods, at least, for silver, gold, or
copper . . . avoiding the customs house. . . . Luxury goods went down in price
while the price of articles of primary necessity which the country did not produce
went up. . . . Between 1823 and 1830 some three or four thousand foreigners . . .
sucked the blood from the Chilean economy . . . while 95 percent of the Chilean
people had retrogressed to the life style of the last third of the seventeenth century.

This view perhaps exaggerates the effects on Chile of the replacement of Spanish in-
fluence by that of England and North America. Chilean miners, landowners, small
manufacturers and merchants, sometimes in partnership with foreign investors, also
participated in the import-export trade. Likewise, Chilean policymakers and minor of-
ficials exerted their influence over (or exacted their price from) foreign businessmen
and merchant houses. However, lacking the basic financial infrastructure and eco-
nomic clout to compete in international markets, the Chilean economic elites, practi-
cally of necessity, allowed themselves to be incorporated into the web of international
commerce which the British spun throughout Latin America and elsewhere in the nine-
teenth century.

When installation of the “Portalian state” brought an end to the political chaos of the
independence movements, the Prieto government faced the enormous tasks of reor-
ganizing public finance, rationalizing commercial policy, and determining the direc-
tion of economic development. The government fulfilled these tasks by adopting strict
internal economies and by accepting Chile’s role as a supplier of raw materials to the
more developed capitalist economies and importers of manufactured goods. Public
personnel were dismissed, government expenditures on frills were reduced, and a
good climate was created for business. Emphasis was placed on honesty and efficiency.
This meant two things. First, law and order were re-established, and harsh penalties
were meted out to common criminals. Second, government sought to encourage pri-
vate enterprise. As Minister Rengifo put it in his report to Congress in 1835:

The measures which favorably affect the economy of a State may be reduced to two
types: First, . . . laws that remove obstacles to industry, that protect property and its
use, that reduce the costs of production, and that open free channels for the export
118 CHILE

[salida] of national products; second, . . . laws which regulate taxes with moderation
and discernment . . . and prevent expenditures from the public treasury for pur-
poses other than those of strict administrative necessity.

To attract foreign trade and shipping, a decree of 1832 established warehouses of de-
posit (almacenes francos de depósito) in Valparaíso; by 1835 the government was operat-
ing sixteen such warehouses and renting out another twenty-seven. Administrative re-
forms put the public treasury in order and established confidence in public credit.
Gradually the government attempted to pay off the public debt.
More than anything else, government policy aimed at stimulating production of tra-
ditional colonial commodities and incorporating Chile into the world capitalist econ-
omy. Summarizing this strategy, Chilean author Miguel Cruchaga tells us that “They
believed the country was not ready . . . for the development of manufactures, and
desiring to give it easy access to articles of consumption and easy export opportunities
for what was produced, they sought to facilitate commerce with the foreign countries
who could provision us at least cost.” This strategy suited the interests of the major eco-
nomic groups in Chile, landowners, mine owners, exporters-importers, and domestic
as well as foreign merchants. It allowed the upper classes to import luxury goods from
Europe, live the good life, modernize the cities, and maintain traditional social rela-
tionships and property institutions in the countryside. But it also contained serious in-
ternal contradictions which would become ever more evident as modernization of
transport and communication, along with economic growth in the nineteenth century,
created industrial and working class-interests for whom liberal political economy
meant ruin or deprivation. In the short run, however, the autocratic republic proved a
highly pragmatic reconciliation of the economic interests of the upper classes with both
the demands of foreign capitalists and the need for internal order. It restored central-
ized political authority, and maintained the social stratification of the colony, while al-
lowing “free trade” to cater to the tastes of the upper classes. This was the fruit of
Chilean independence in the 1830s.
5 Modernization and Misery

Consolidation of authoritarian government after 1839 gave Chile a truly national po-
litical system with administrative capabilities that paved the way for impressive eco-
nomic growth during the next three decades. Attracted by the relative political stabil-
ity, foreign investors brought the wonders of modern technology to Chile. The first
railroad, built between 1849 and 1851; connected the mining regions of Copiapó to the
port of Caldera; by 1863 another line linked Valparaíso to Santiago and was extended
south to San Fernando. The American entrepreneur William Wheelwright, who had in-
troduced steam navigation to Chile in the 1840s, directed construction of the telegraph
line between the capital and Valparaíso in 1851–52; twenty-five years later the tele-
graph provided communication to forty-eight Chilean towns as well as connections to
Peru and Argentina. Steamships and railroads permitted increased movement of prod-
ucts from the northern mines and the agricultural hinterlands of the central valley and
the Concepción region to the port cities and the exterior. From Talcahuano, Valparaíso,
La Serena, Caldera, and other legal and illegal points of departure, Chilean commodi-
ties left for North America, Australia, Asia, and Europe. An apparent economic mira-
cle quadrupled the value of Chilean exports between 1845 and 1875, while the number
of ships entering Chilean ports more than doubled in the decade of the 1860s alone.
Beginning with the discovery of silver at Chañarcillo in 1832, followed by strikes at
Tres Puntas to the north of Copiapó and at other mines in the mid-1840s, silver pro-
duction increased dramatically. After reaching an official level of 100,000 to 200,000
kilos annually between 1851 and 1856, recorded output hovered in the neighborhood
of 10,000 kilos a year until the 1870s, when the Caracoles mine came into production.
Copper production likewise expanded from a level of 8,000 to 10,000 metric tons a year
in the period 1844–50 to almost 35,000 metric tons in 1860. In that year the value of cop-
per exports exceeded 14 million pesos—double the national budget and approximately
56 percent by value of all Chilean exports. During the next decade annual average cop-
per production more than doubled again, with the principal center of production re-
maining at José Tomás de Urmeneta’s mine at Tamaya (see Map 10). To the south, in the
Concepción region, coal production also dramatically expanded from some 7800 met-
ric tons in 1852 to more than 186,000 metric tons in 1876.
From the outset mining and modernization took its environmental toll, especially on
the forests, streams, and desert soils. Charles Darwin wrote in his Journal during the Voy-
age of H.M.S ‘Beagle’ Round the World that the shortage of firewood and primitive smelt-
ing techniques made it more economical to ship copper to Swansea for refining than for
local processing. Claudio Gay, a French scientist working for the Chilean government,
delivered a report in 1838 lamenting deforestation in the norte chico. He recommended
establishing copper smelters in the southern provinces, where firewood was abundant.
By 1839 the government of president Joaquín Prieto ordered a study regarding the fea-
sibility of using coal to fuel mining operations as the mines in the north consumed the
region’s limited timber. According to Chilean historian Luis Valenzuela (Tres estudios

119
120 CHILE

sobre el comercio y fundición de Cobre en Chile y en el mercado mundial 1830–1880), fuel rep-
resented approximately 45 percent of the costs of smelting copper; deforestation raised
prices of firewood inordinately. In 1845 the Chilean congress eliminated tariff duties on
imported coal disembarked from Papudo to the north, encouraging conversion of the
copper smelters to coal from firewood.
Steam navigation encouraged the first important coal shipments from the Concep-
ción region (Lirquén and Coronel) in the 1840s. Matías Cousiño Jorquera, a miner from
the north, married into the fabulously wealthy Gallo family and initiated more exten-
sive coal mining operations at Lota and Coronel in 1852. This gave origin to the Com-
pañia Carbonífera de Lota—an enterprise whose history would be intimately con-
nected to the socioeconomic and political development of the country—and to its
literature, through Baldomero Lillo’s collection of short stories (Subterra)—until its clo-
sure in 1997. Bringing machinery and technicians from Europe and the United States,
Cousiño made a fortune in the coal industry, created hundreds of jobs, and incubated
a new working-class mining subculture. His enterprises in the region extended to cop-
per smelters, lumber, sawmills, agriculture, flour mills, glass, and porcelain, comple-
menting his mining and railroad investments in the north. By the late 1870s the local
coal mines finally overtook English coal imports as the major suppliers to the northern
mining districts.
The coal mines in the Concepción region, like the copper and silver mines of the
north, left their marks: deforestation, slag heaps, coal dust, water pollution, mine acci-
dents, and lung diseases among the workers. As in Europe and North America, mod-
ernization, incipient industrialization, economic internationalization, and growth had
their costs. Chile shared these costs with the rest of independent Spanish America in
the global economy of the nineteenth century. As Chilean historian Eduardo Cavieres
puts it (Comercio chileno y comerciantes ingleses 1820–1880),

Chile came into the world economy as a producer of primary products, being inte-
grated into the growing British copper industry. For decades copper was its main ex-
port and for decades copper exports balanced the value of imports and contributed to
internal growth. . . . Chile could not control the copper business and international
copper prices became a negative factor. . . . Chileans did not adopt policies to en-
courage economic diversification or to stimulate internal markets.

Agricultural production also grew significantly in the middle years of the nine-
teenth century. Cereal, livestock, and vineyard output increased to meet the demands
of the transitory foreign markets opened with the discovery of gold in California and
Australia. The growth of the northern mining economy, and the commercial expansion
of the principal towns and cities, further encouraged the agricultural economy. Be-
tween 1844 and 1860 the value of agricultural exports—led by wheat, flour, and bar-
ley—quintupled; between 1871 and 1876 the value of agricultural exports exceeded by
fifteenfold the levels attained in the mid-1840s. In the 1850s, complementing expanded
cereal cultivation, North American and British entrepreneurs sparked development of
a new flour-milling industry, which soon took second place only to copper as the major
industry in the Chilean economy. But as Cavieres indicates, agricultural cycles were
different from those in mining, especially after the mid-1850s, as more efficient pro-
ducers such as Argentina, Australia, and the United States not only replaced Chilean
wheat exports with local production but also entered international markets as com-
petitors. England, which accounted for over 50 percent of Chilean exports, continued
to import Chilean wheat, corn, barley, flour, and livestock products, such as hides and
MODERNIZATION AND MISERY 121

wool. Other significant markets for Chilean agriculture were the United States, Peru,
France, and Germany; only 6 percent of exports went elsewhere in the mid-1850s.
Shortly thereafter the first Chilean joint stock companies, banks, and credit institu-
tions took shape, and the Caja de Crédito Hipotecario, established in 1855, soon became
the most important mortgage bank in South America. The first joint stock companies in
commercial banking, which emerged in the early 1850s, allied Chilean, British, and
North American capital in insurance and railroad enterprises. Landowners, merchants,
and mining interests came together to capitalize new economic activities through the
modern financial institutions of Western capitalism—the corporation, or sociedad anó-
nima. Significantly, the Chilean government also participated in the financing of rail-
roads, setting an important precedent for “mixed” public-private economic ventures
linking an ever more integrated economic elite to the apparatus of the state.
Accompanying these trends came diversification of retail trade and an incredible
rise in imports of tropical commodities and manufactured goods by the wealthy resi-
dents of Valparaíso, Santiago, Tomé-Concepción, and the northern mining districts. In
a study published in 1874, entitled Our Enemy, Luxury!, a Chilean author captured both
the glitter of a superficial prosperity and the dangers of the preference by national elites
and foreigners for imported luxury goods.
Economic expansion created new economic interests, made social stratification
somewhat more complex, and exacerbated regional animosities as both the southern
and northern provinces sought to keep pace with the progress of Santiago, Valparaíso,
and the central valley. With some 115,000 residents, Santiago no longer seemed merely
a colonial administrative center. Connected by rail in 1863 to the port of Valparaíso,
which was itself a bustling commercial center of over 60,000 people, Santiago was be-
coming more and more a real urban capital in a growing new nation.
As the towns became cities, there developed an impressive liberal intellectual move-
ment. Made possible, in part, by the policies of President Bulnes and his minister,
Manuel Montt, favoring intellectual activities and expansion of the educational system,
the movement gave rise to the “Generation of 1842” led by Victorino Lastarria and to
the creation of the University of Chile. The new university began to function in 1843
under the direction of Andrés Bello, eminent Venezuelan philosopher, jurist, and
statesman, who wrote the Chilean Civil Code (1855), steeped in the Roman legal tradi-
tion, and dedicated his life to public service in Chile until his death in 1865. Soon after
a normal school was established, and in subsequent decades, the system of primary in-
struction expanded: the 1850s witnessed the creation of more than 500 public schools.
The Montt government (1851–61) also stimulated construction of libraries, technical
schools, and even special institutions for the deaf. By 1861 some 45,000 children at-
tended public and private institutions of learning, and several thousand were enrolled
in secondary schools. Nevertheless, the vast majority of the population—especially
those living in the countryside—still could not obtain even a minimal education for
their children. Like the superficial prosperity of the nation, the educational system re-
mained accessible primarily to the privileged few in the principal urban centers.
The intellectual movement of the 1840s combined the talents of Chileans with those
of expatriates from Argentina, Venezuela, and Colombia, who found refuge from
caudillismo and tyranny in an orderly Chile, whose authoritarian regime spared it from
the widespread anarchy characteristic of Latin America at the time. Although the
movement was made possible by Chile’s stability, it soon proved subversive to the in-
cumbent regime. Typifying the anti-Hispanic spirit of this movement was an article by
Francisco Bilbao that appeared in 1844 in a periodical called El Crepúsculo (“The Twi-
light”). This article, entitled “Chilean Society,” harshly criticized the colonial past, the
122 CHILE

Church, and most of the country’s political institutions. The government ordered the
burning of all copies of the periodical in which the article appeared. In September of
the same year José Victorino Lastarria delivered the first annual paper on Chilean his-
tory at the national university. Lastarría’s paper, called “Investigation into the Social In-
fluence of the Conquest and the Spanish Colonial System upon Chile,” blamed the His-
panic heritage and the Church for most of the nation’s problems. The government that
funded the National Institute at which Bilbao studied and created the University that
gave Lastarría a public forum could not tolerate a direct confrontation with the Church
or so bombastic a challenge to the social order. Government leaders viewed the Uni-
versity as a training ground for political and professional elites; the emergence of po-
litical opposition and challenges to the foundations of the Chilean society within the
University community set the stage for an ongoing drama of intellectual and political
ferment in Chile’s institutions of higher education. For the next two decades the intel-
lectuals of the “Generation of 1842” could be found at the forefront of social and polit-
ical movements that opposed the leadership and policies of the autocratic regime.
Despite criticisms by liberal intellectuals, Chile’s apparently impressive economic
growth and political stability temporarily overshadowed both the vulnerability of its
economic system and political frailties. Because it depended upon duties from interna-
tional trade for most of its revenues, the government tended to centralize power and
resources at Santiago and Valparaíso. Even though the northern mining districts and
the southern cereal-flour complex produced a disproportionate share of the nation’s ex-
ports, Chile’s political leaders made only marginal budgetary allocations to the north-
ern and southern provinces. As a result, considerable regional opposition arose against
the autocratic regime. Reflecting this provincial resentment, an editorial in El Curicano
in December 1858 decried the fact that
while the capital absorbs all the income, receives all the material improvements, con-
centrates all the benefits, the provinces . . . languish in misery and backwardness.
. . . Under the Spanish regime the provinces were exploited and paid heavy taxes to
support the Spanish court. Now, there is little difference. We pay heavy taxes and are
exploited in a thousand ways to beautify the court of Santiago. In our jurisdiction [de-
partment] the government does not invest a tenth of the funds we contribute to the
national treasury.
The growing ideological, political, and regional fragmentation of the Chilean elite
would lead to civil wars in 1851 and 1859 and to a gradual, but fundamental, transfor-
mation of the autocratic republic and its authoritarian underpinnings by the 1870s. In
1891 another civil war reaffirmed the victory of the oligarchic transformation of the
1833 constitution against a resurgent presidentialism.
Just as the apparent stability of the political system masked its gradual transforma-
tion, so, too, did favorable international economic trends disguise the fragility of the
Chilean economy. Temporary markets in California and Australia had stimulated agri-
cultural production, processing industries, and shipping from 1849 until almost 1860.
Soon, however, California wheat and flour competed favorably with the Chilean prod-
ucts even at Valparaíso.
Foreign and immigrant-owned commercial firms in Valparaíso controlled much of
the country’s credit system. Operating under a flexible option-buying scheme, these
merchant lenders loaned capital to mining and agricultural interests against future pro-
duction. They reserved the option to pay for agricultural commodities or minerals at
the market price current when credit was extended or at the market price at the time of
delivery. Under this system producers bore the risks of price changes, while lenders
MODERNIZATION AND MISERY 123

benefited from either a decline or a rise in market prices. Foreign investors also gained
control over much of Chile’s flour-milling industry, mining, shipping, and commerce.
Fluctuations in demand and prices for Chilean minerals and agricultural commodities
in the international marketplace produced periodic economic crises with serious polit-
ical implications.

Above all else, the mid-nineteenth-century Chilean economy continued to depend

upon mineral exports. Periodic discoveries in Chile’s northern provinces stimulated
the rise of mining towns and their accompanying ports throughout the norte chico from
1832 until the late 1870s. Export duties from the mineral sector provided the national
government with over 50 percent of public revenues during the entire period. Contin-
uing essentially colonial politico-economic relations, the central government siphoned
off most of the tax revenues from the mines without investing substantial resources in
the northern provinces.
The independence period commenced in 1811 with the opening of the Agua Amarga
silver mine south of Vallenar (see Map 10). This and other mines helped pay the costs
of the war for independence. Establishing a pattern later followed by other northern
regions, the area around Vallenar experienced rapid growth in population along with
increased cultivation of nearby agricultural land. Then, with exhaustion of the silver
veins, population in the zone decreased to perhaps 3500 by the early 1850s. Following
the Agua Amarga strike in 1825, the rich Arqueros discovery located inland from Co-
quimbo seemed so important that the Chilean government established a new mint at
La Serena. After Arqueros the next big silver strike occurred at Chañarcillo in 1832.
Chañarcillo reportedly yielded more than 12 million pesos’ worth of silver in less than
a decade, and the surrounding region, especially Copiapó, enjoyed boom conditions.
New discoveries in the late 1840s, in particular at Tres Puntas between Copiapó and the
“port” of Flamenco to the northwest, prolonged the silver fever. In 1843 the govern-
ment officially proclaimed Copiapó a city. Graced by this blessing, population in the
department of Copiapó mushroomed from 11,300 in 1843 to almost 65,000 in 1865.
Tres Puntas exemplified the difficulties facing the mining industry in Chile’s north-
ern provinces: poor roads, lack of water, and scarcity of almost all basic necessities in-
cluding food, fuel, and implements. Yet within five years a settlement of some 4000 res-
idents had sprung up around the mines. Despite the high cost of everything needed for
survival, Tres Puntas, like the other mining towns, grew and prospered as long as the
ore held out. As late as the mid-1860s mining activity persisted at Tres Puntas, and min-
ers still sent ore by mule and wagon to Flamenco over what a contemporary writer
called a “tolerable road.”
Other less significant silver discoveries kept the miners’ hopes alive until the next
big strike in 1870 at Caracoles (legally in Bolivia), located on the road between Antofa-
gasta and San Pedro de Atacama. Again the pattern of rapid urbanization occurred; by
1873 Caracoles had become a growing, prosperous town with more than 2500 resi-
dents. Commercial houses from the coast established branches, hotels opened, and the
usual proliferation of cantinas, houses of prostitution, billiard parlors, and retail shops
proclaimed the importance of the new northern mining district. This development took
place despite the total lack of nearby water sources, fuel, and local agriculture. Every-
thing had to be brought in from the coast or across the Andes. Carters and muleteers
charged twice as much to carry goods between Antofagasta and Caracoles than did
shipping companies to bring freight to Antofagasta from Europe. Nonetheless, miners
dug out the ore; more than 1200 carters and thousands of mules carried it to Antofa-
gasta—now, due to Caracoles, a growing Bolivian port city.
124 CHILE

Located in a region disputed by Chile and Bolivia, the Caracoles minerals renewed
a conflict only partially resolved in a treaty of 1866 in which the two nations set Chile’s
northern boundary at latitude 24° South and specified that the two countries would di-
vide equally revenues from guano and mineral deposits within the territory located be-
tween latitudes 23° and 25° South. Bolivia agreed to finance construction of a port at
Mejillones and to maintain a customs house with a monopoly for exacting export du-
ties on the minerals of the region. The 1866 treaty also promised Chile one-half the rev-
enue collected at Mejillones from export taxes on guano or minerals. This stipulation
gave Chilean agents the right to audit the accounts of the customs house, a provision
the Bolivians bitterly resented as insulting to national sovereignty. In time Bolivia ig-
nored the terms of the treaty by exporting minerals extracted from the shared territory
through the more northerly port of Cobija, and refused to pay Chile its share of the cus-
tom receipts. In 1871, shortly after the Caracoles silver strike, a new Bolivian govern-
ment disavowed all international agreements made by the previous administration.
Subsequent negotiations and a new treaty in 1874 failed to resolve the fundamental is-
sues. Less than a decade later Bolivia would lose all the territory and riches under dis-
pute, along with its access to the Pacific, when it was defeated by Chile in the War of
the Pacific (see Chapter 6).
Despite the great importance of silver to Chile’s northern provinces, copper mining
proved even more significant. Since colonial times Chilean copper had found its way
to Europe, Asia, and North America. In the 1830s British vessels carried the red metal
from Chile to India. British capitalists made significant investments in Chilean copper
mining from the mid-1830s and early 1840s when Joshua Waddington exploited mines
at Chañaral Alto in the department of Combarbalá. By the mid-1860s British interests
had invested more than 4.5 million pesos in the Caldera area alone, almost all of which
involved copper.
Although British and other foreign interests made substantial investments in the
copper industry, a small number of daring, persistent Chilean capitalists and adven-
turers played a key role in the northern copper business. Suggestive, if untypical, was
the eighteen-year quest of José Tomás de Urmeneta at Tamaya, northwest of Ovalle (see
Map 10): in 1852 he finally hit an incredibly rich vein. During the next eleven years the
Tamaya mine reportedly produced copper valued at 5 million pesos. Urmeneta subse-
quently established foundries at Guayacán and Tongoy on the coast and also con-
tracted with Henry Meiggs to build a rail line from the port at Tongoy to the mines.
Urmeneta expanded his investments to coal and railroads in the southern region, a fleet
of steamships purchased in Europe and public works in Santiago. He also acquired the
important Hacienda Limache near Valparaíso. An unsuccessful candidate for president
in 1871, Urmeneta was an extreme example of how the mineral wealth of the northern
regions filtered south to Santiago, Valparaíso, and beyond, incorporating a new com-
mercial and mining element into the Chilean agrarian elite. His career epitomized the
opportunities available to a favored few in the years from 1835 until the outbreak of the
War of the Pacific in 1879.
Copper mines also provided the rationale for the first railroads in Chile, built by
William Wheelwright between the copper-rich Copiapó littoral and the port of Caldera
to the northwest. Arrival of the railroad converted Caldera from a small settlement of
perhaps fifty residents in 1850 into a port town of 2,000 by 1853. The number of ships
putting in at the port increased from 160 a year in 1850 to more than 600 five years later.
In contrast, the previously favored point for copper shipment at Puerto Viejo, to the
southwest, was practically abandoned. Writing in the late 1850s, Vicente Pérez Rosales
MODERNIZATION AND MISERY 125

FPO

map 10: Major Mining Discoveries 1811–70, Atacama and Coquimbo

126 CHILE

noted that “the railroad to Copiapó brought gas, beautiful buildings, theater, conven-
iences, luxury, abundance of fuel and food, along with a spirit of enterprise, attracting
thereby numerous foreigners and Chileans to the city and the surrounding regions.”
Extension of the line to the mines near Púquios and around an irregular semicircle to
the northern Bay of Chañaral stimulated economic activity throughout the depart-
ments of both Chañaral and Copiapó. The region’s physical and economic subsistence
soon came to depend more upon steamships, steel rails, and locomotives than upon
mules, wagons, and the precarious river-valley agriculture of southern Coquimbo.
While copper deposits encouraged investments in modern transportation, the cop-
per mines themselves generally remained technologically backward. As in the case of
silver, the Chilean copper industry relied upon technology essentially unchanged from
colonial times until the introduction of the reverberatory furnace at mid-century. Min-
ers extracted only the richest ore and sold the slag to traders for delivery to more mod-
ern refineries in Germany, France, and England.
Technological modernization in copper mining took hold gradually from the 1840s
as the major foundries and smelters converted from firewood to coal. By the 1860s the
most important enterprises, like those of Carlos Lambert, Joaquín Edwards, and José
Urmeneta and Maximiano Errázuriz, had installed more modern reverberatory fur-
naces and used the updated “Napier methods” imported from England. Production
and exports were gradually concentrated in several major companies. According to
Luis Valenzuela, in the decade of the 1860s the firm of Urmeneta and Errázuriz, which
operated the country’s most important smelter at Guayacán, accounted for 25–50 per-
cent of copper bars and ingot exports. In 1859 Urmeneta and Errázuriz also acquired
the Tongoy smelter established by the British “Mexican and South American Smelting
Company” ten years earlier. In the words of Chilean historians Luis Ortega and Julio
Pinto, the Urmeneta and Errázuriz smelters and related mining industries were “truly
an industrial vanguard for their era.” Until the end of the 1870s Chile was the world’s
leading copper exporter.
As the copper industry expanded, it utilized British coal along with domestic sup-
plies shipped from the Concepción region. Higher-quality British coal made the
Chilean coal industry around Lota, Coronel, and Lebu in southern Chile vulnerable to
British oversupply of the copper districts. As late as 1862 a large importation of British
coal resulted in serious production cutbacks at Lota and Coronel. Fortunately for
Chilean producers, a combination of British and Chilean coal proved technically most
desirable; and consequently the foundries at Caldera tended to use a 50-50 mixture of
Swansea and Chilean coal. The overall share of the coal market in the copper districts
going to the British varied year to year from 25 to 50 percent.
In addition to silver and copper, a number of less significant mining activities, along
with extraction of guano and nitrates, hinted at Chile’s economic future by the end of
the 1870s. Like the silver mines and copper discoveries, exploitation of other mineral
resources encouraged related agricultural and commercial ventures. In the favored
river valleys of Coquimbo and Atacama provinces, crop cultivation and livestock hus-
bandry increased production to meet a part of the growing demand for food and ani-
mal products. Towns rose, stagnated, or declined with the fate of the mineral discover-
ies that had created them.
The sequence of mineral discoveries from the 1830s to the early 1870s brought waves
of fortune hunters to the provinces of Atacama and Coquimbo. The former province
tripled its population between 1843 and 1875, while the population of Coquimbo
province doubled. This contrasted markedly with the relatively stable population of
the predominantly rural departments of the middle central valley. By the mid-1870s
MODERNIZATION AND MISERY 127

most of the population of the northern provinces lived in “urban” settlements of more
than 2000 people, though overall population density of these provinces was much
sparser than those of the less urbanized middle central valley. The overwhelming in-
fluence of mining and the lack of large areas of cultivable land concentrated the popu-
lation of the north into ports, administrative centers, and mining districts.
The obvious physical and economic contrasts between the northern provinces and
the central valley lent a distinctive character to life in the north. Higher salaries, higher
costs of living, and the concentration of wage workers in isolated production centers
gradually forged a militant proletarian labor force. The great power of the mine own-
ers in association with government officials, also often on the payroll of the mining en-
terprises, and the dramatic ups and downs of the mining ventures encouraged the evo-
lution of a volatile political culture among northern workers. The agricultural export
boom of the 1850s, which so greatly benefited Valparaíso merchants and Chilean
landowners, meant higher food prices for the northern miners. Demands for higher
wages led to strikes, violence, and looting by miners during the civil war of 1851. Min-
ers, artisans, dockworkers, and muleteers in the norte chico, especially the region
around Copiapó, played an even more significant role in the subsequent civil war of
1859. In the railroad machine shops and foundries of Caldera, workers cast cannon to
use against government forces; in Chañarcillo, Copiapó, and other mining centers
workers formed battalions that helped make the norte chico a temporarily “liberated
zone.” If the motivation of the mining entrepreneurs for rebellion could be detected in
the decrees promulgated during this temporary “liberation”—for example, reduction
by 50 percent of export duties on minerals—the experience of armed revolt by thou-
sands of northern workers made the northern labor force more aware that government
authority and the interests of the propertied classes conflicted with their own. With the
War of the Pacific (1879–83) and the Chileanization of the nitrate fields, the northern
work force would expand even more dramatically, class consciousness would become
more acute, and class struggle would intensify. Soon thereafter the reality of the “social
question” and industrial conflict would sweep southward from the northern provinces
into Chile’s heartland.

Modernization and material progress in the middle decades of the nineteenth century
brought hard times to many of Chile’s people in the central valley. While acreage under
grain cultivation and production more than tripled between 1850 and 1875, thousands
of rural families migrated to Santiago, Valparaíso, or the northern mining districts or
looked for work in railway construction and public works projects. Whereas the popu-
lation for the entire country increased from about 1,000,000 in 1835 to 2,100,000 (out-
side of Indian territory) in 1875 and to over 2,700,000 in 1895, that of rural central Chile
had by 1895 barely changed from its 1865 level of 950,000.
Santiago, Valparaíso, and provincial capitals drew substantial population from the
rural areas (see Table 5–1). Between 1865 and 1875 alone, Santiago’s population in-
creased from 115,000 to more than 150,000, while Valparaíso grew from 70,000 to al-
most 100,000 (42%). Favored central valley towns such as Curicó also experienced dra-
matic growth in the decade 1865–75; this provincial town almost doubled its
population, growing from 5900 to 10,000, while the population of Curicó province re-
mained almost stable at 90,000.
Although immigrants played a relatively minor numerical role in the urbanization
process, at Valparaíso and in the northern mining towns a foreign presence was ever
more apparent. For the country as a whole, immigrants composed less than 2 percent
of the population in 1875; but in the province of Atacama they accounted for 11 percent,
128 CHILE

A horsedrawn street car (carro de sangre), the first tramway at Santiago Central Station,
1858. (Courtesy of Archivo Universidad de Chile.)

Santiago Central Station, 1886. (Courtesy of Archivo Universidad de Chile.)

MODERNIZATION AND MISERY 129

table 5–1. comparison of urban and rural population in

selected northern and central valley departments, 1875
Department, “Urban” Population
Northern Provinces Total Population as % of Total

Copiapó 31,877 68
Caldera 10,511 78
Vallenar 13,569 51
Freirina 15,541 53
Serena 29,057 67
Coquimbo 12,650 73
Elqui 12,147 52
Ovalle 39,567 32
Combarbalá 14,002 17
Illapel 32,011 41

Department, “Urban” Population

Middle Central Valley Provinces Total Population as % of Total

Melipilla 32,253 23
Rancagua 98,092 13
Caupolicán 75,186 15
San Fernando 72,668 15
Curicó 57,312 24
Vichuquen 35,546 8
Lontué 19,791 16
Talca 90,597 30
Loncomilla 31,689 21
Linares 53,420 14
Parral 33,652 16

and in the department of Copiapó, approximately 20 percent. More important than

their numbers was the financial and commercial power wielded by these groups.
The prosperity of foreign merchants at Valparaíso or in the mining districts con-
trasted sharply with the plight of the mass of rural laborers in the central valley. After
1860 wages in the countryside fell further and further behind the rising cost of food and
basic necessities. The conditions of the inquilinos worsened as landlords required the
service tenants to work more days, provide more family labor, or pay additional peons
to fulfill the family’s labor obligations. The tenants received ever smaller land allot-
ments and faced restrictions on pasture rights for their animals. By 1858 a Chilean
writer told his countrymen to “open your eyes and every day you see families leaving
their homes. . . . Their single purpose is to leave the place where they cannot earn a
living. . . . Travel our roads and you will see numerous families with all their be-
longings on their backs moving toward the capital to increase the existing pauperism.”
Rural banditry and cattle rustling, a problem from colonial times, persisted from the
1820s to the 1890s as the backside of agricultural commercialization and rural poverty.
Landowners, vigilantes, and police failed to curtail the banditry despite whippings,
beatings, and occasional executions. Repressive legislation against rustlers and horse
130 CHILE

thieves in the 1870s and the creation of a new Rural Police force in 1882 were symptoms
of the continuing affliction.
Between 1849 and 1855 Chileans went in search of gold in California or to work on
the railway under construction in Panama. The California census of 1852, which prob-
ably underestimates the Chilean presence, enumerates over 5500 in California at that
date. Railroad gangs constructing the Santiago-Valparaíso line occupied a work force of
9000 to 10,000 a year; railroad projects in Peru (1868–72), directed by American entre-
preneur Henry Meiggs, recruited 25,000 to 30,000 Chilean workers. Extension of the
Chilean line to San Fernando (1862), Curicó (1868), and Talca (1874) employed thou-
sands more. The Chillán-Talcahuano line (1869–74) provided jobs for over 9000 peons—
and yet the army of rural unemployed increased.
Despite complaints by hacendados that construction projects and Meiggs’ Peruvian
venture created a shortage of hands, Chilean agriculture in the central valley experi-
enced peak performance between 1868 and 1872. More important, except in critical pe-
riods of the agricultural cycle such as harvest, wages for rural labor failed to climb
above the typical 10 to 25 centavos a day plus meager food rations. Upset at the incon-
venience of competing for harvest labor with railroad crews, landowners filled the
country’s newspapers with exaggerated reports of the awful conditions and epidemics
suffered by Chileans in Peru. Meanwhile the tide of migration carried thousands out of
the rural districts as the rural poor sought better opportunities elsewhere.
The fact that a promise of a wage of 62 centavos a day plus food rations could move
30,000 Chileans to Peru indicates the plight of the Chilean rural lower classes. Thou-
sands of families endured precarious lives in squatters’ huts on marginal land along the
coast; thousands more lived an ambulatory existence following the crops from Acon-
cagua south. Still others turned to banditry and cattle rustling, making some of the
rural districts unsafe for travel. Official reports of the 1840s and 1850s contain many ref-
erences to the large “vagrant” population of the central valley. Under these conditions
hacendados in some areas could attract harvest labor by sponsoring a type of harvest
fiesta called mingaco, thereby “paying” the workers only with food and drink.
With the sweat and blood of these workers and that of their families, a small wealthy
elite initiated the physical modernization of Chile in the middle decades of the nine-
teenth century. Railroads built to carry minerals of the north to Caldera or the cereals
of the central valley to Valparaíso permitted Chilean and foreign entrepreneurs to live
an extravagant existence in the principal urban areas. Wealth accumulated in mining
and commerce bought land and social status. To the list of traditional landed families
like the Aguirre, Larraín, or Errázuriz, mining and commercial fortunes added British,
French, and German surnames along with those of newly enriched Chileans. The eco-
nomically integrated upper class that emerged treated the Chilean masses with con-
tempt. Railroad and mining interests bewailed the drunken orgies of their workers,
while landowners defended the practice of paying workers in company scrip on the
grounds that it spared them the temptation of “foolish” consumption outside the
haciendas.
Sumptuous houses and importation of luxurious European furnishings absorbed
many of the windfall profits associated with wheat and flour exports, commerce, and
mining. Santiago, Valparaíso, and even lesser central valley towns boasted new, lav-
ishly decorated edifices. Upper-class gentlemen emulated the life styles of European
capitalists and aristocrats. Prestigious social clubs and the National Agricultural Soci-
ety (1869) brought together sociopolitical elites to decide matters of state and economy
outside the public halls of the Congress. The best-endowed maintained haciendas
near Santiago or Valparaíso as recreational retreats with ornamental gardens and well-
MODERNIZATION AND MISERY 131

furnished residences, or casas de fundo. With the extension of the railroad south to Talca,
lesser properties, located farther from the capital, increased in value and, subsequently,
in the ornamentation of the landowner’s “big house.”
No less impressive than the sumptuous buildings in the cities, the gracious country
residences stood in stark contrast to the rude huts of the campesinos whose pitiful
wages barely provided subsistence. Low labor costs inhibited the same landowners, so
fond of modern urban convenience in their townhouses, from modernizing farm tech-
nology. Chilean landowners preferred labor-intensive, sickle-and-scythe harvesting of
cereals long after most of North America and Australia had mechanized the wheat har-
vest. A minority of Chilean landowners adopted machinery, new crops, and new
breeds of animals and pastures or began construction of irrigation canals; but the eco-
nomics of Chilean agriculture—cheap labor and vast rural estates with uncultivated
land—did not invite large-scale mechanization prior to the 1880s. The poverty of the
Chilean masses limited internal demand for agricultural products; and by the early
1870s Chile’s inability to compete with North American and Australian producers re-
stricted expansion of its output despite the importance of the British market. Under
these conditions, even without substantial mechanization, Chilean agriculture based
upon the large haciendas could not provide year-round employment to the growing
number of rootless rural laborers.
Industry offered no solution to the employment problem. Modernization and com-
mercial expansion brought little industry to Chile. An American naval officer visiting
the country at midcentury noted that Chile was “almost without factories of any de-
scription . . . dependent on foreign nations for every supply except food.” This de-
scription ignored the numerous small-scale producers of household goods, cordage,
rigging, tanneries, and the like, but it accurately portrayed the lack of any significant
manufacturing establishment, apart from flour mills and breweries established by Ger-
man immigrants in the south and the mining enterprises in the north. Major economic
interest groups such as landowners, merchants, and mine owners generally opposed
protective tariffs to encourage local industry. Dependent upon the export trade, albeit
in different ways, landowners did not wish to pay taxes on imported European goods.
Mine interests, closely linked to British firms, commercial houses, and shippers, sup-
ported “free trade”; merchants, like merchants everywhere, defended the right of the
consumer to buy quality goods at low prices. Occasional editorials in Santiago or re-
gional newspapers in the 1860s and 1870s supported, without notable success, some
form of protective tariff to encourage domestic manufacturers. Debates in the legisla-
ture resulted in new tariff laws in 1872 and 1878, but conflict existed between the pri-
mary goal of increasing government revenues from custom duties and any effective
tariff barrier to encourage Chilean industry. Protectionist sentiments existed but, with
some notable exceptions such as special duties on imported sugar and beer, did not
make significant gains until the tariff reforms in 1897. Even then, protectionism re-
mained controversial. In response to economic crises, labor conflicts, and urban riots in
the period 1903–07, President Pedro Montt led a movement to reduce tariffs on manu-
factured consumer goods and meat products. Not until the tariff reforms of 1928 would
industrialization through protectionism become a dominant economic policy in Chile.
In the mid-1870s the overwhelming majority of Chilean manufacturing establish-
ments were quite small, typically artisan producers of consumer goods or more durable
items such as carriages and wagons. Rarely did firms employ large numbers of workers
or operate anything like an industrial assembly process, although by 1874 some of the
Talca flour mills were utilizing imported steam-powered machinery. Even shipbuilding,
a likely enterprise given Chilean participation in the Pacific grain trade and the coun-
132 CHILE

try’s extensive mineral exports, experienced no significant growth. Of 259 Chilean-

registered ships in 1865, only twenty-six were constructed in Chile, and all but six of
these came from boatworks in the southern region. A brief war with Spain between 1864
and 1866 resulted in the loss of a number of these ships and a change in the registry of
others. The Spanish blockaded Chile’s main ports of entry, but lacked sufficient ships
and troops to make the blockade effective along Chile’s entire coast. Frustrated by the
stalemate and Chile’s refusal to provide the proper salute to the Spanish flag, the Span-
ish fleet bombarded Valparaíso, seriously damaging warehouses and port-works. Al-
though the blockade caused temporary disruptions of commerce, it did nothing to stim-
ulate Chilean shipbuilding even in the face of the obvious lesson of the nation’s
vulnerability to one of Europe’s third-rate powers.

With no significant industry to occupy a growing population, the central valley sent its
surplus labor into construction projects, the northern mines, or to foreign lands in
search of employment. Mining depressions, reduction of public works, or decline in
demand for the products of Chilean agriculture meant immediate crisis for the mass of
the population, just as it meant bankruptcy for overextended entrepreneurs, landown-
ers, or merchants. According to the census of 1875, more than 60 percent of the enu-
merated male labor force worked as unskilled laborers (gañanes) or “farmers” (agricul-
tores). Of the more than 300,000 women reported in the census, approximately 85

Valparaíso, 1866: Evacuation

before the Spanish Bombard-
ment. (Courtesy Archivo Uni-
versidad de Chile.) Drawing
by P. Blanchard.
MODERNIZATION AND MISERY 133

percent worked as cooks, servants, washerwomen, seamstresses, or weavers. These

figures obviously understate the contribution of women to the economy, especially in
agriculture, but do provide a revealing glimpse into the economic opportunities open
to most of Chile’s female population during these years. Women achieved access to
Chilean universities only after 1877, and as late as 1907, according to a group of Chilean
historians reporting on the rise of the middle class in the country, there were only
“3[women] lawyers, 7 doctors, 10 dentists, 10 pharmacists and 3980 school teachers.”
More generally, including the data for unskilled and semiskilled laborers in the coun-
tryside, construction crews, ports, and railroads, together with miners and various ar-
tisans (for example, 14,000 shoemakers, 250 candle and soap makers, etc.), the census
suggests that 85 to 90 percent of all actively employed Chilean males corresponded to
these working-class categories. Even with the most ample interpretation of comer-
ciantes, or “merchants,” of the professions, of industrialists of various sorts, of white-
collar and public employees, and of miscellaneous non-“working-class” categories,
substantially less than 10 percent of the enumerated actively employed corresponded
to an emerging “middle” stratum or to the numerically tiny economic elite.
Thus the economic progress of the middle decades of the nineteenth century quite
narrowly restricted wealth to an upper crust of society and allowed a thin veneer of or-
namentation and physical modernization to cover the major urban centers. This veneer
cracked with each economic recession or decline in prices for Chile’s principal exports.
Loss of the California and Australian markets after 1856, declines in copper prices, and
the switch to a gold standard by European nations in 1873 shortly after the rich silver
strike at Caracoles (1870), all drastically affected Chile’s prosperity.
The economic recession of 1857–58 brought widespread unemployment and bank-
ruptcies, followed by civil war in 1859. The worldwide economic depression of 1873 set
in motion a train of events that looked even more disastrous for Chile. The shift to a
gold standard by European powers was followed by a 50 percent drop in copper prices.
Bad weather ruined the Chilean wheat crop of 1876–77. Famine followed. The eco-
nomic depression seemed to climax forty years of economic “development.” Govern-
ment revenues, still dependent upon the devastated export sector, drastically declined.
Budget reductions exacerbated employment problems with a cutback on public works
and government personnel. Government borrowing to meet the crisis increased the fis-
cal deficit; in desperation President Pinto proposed direct taxation of income, real es-
tate, and capital. Finally, as a last resort, the government shifted to paper currency—
while the country now imported wheat to feed itself. Despite a favorable upturn in the
balance of trade in 1878, the bubble seemed about to burst. The limits of the export-
oriented economy had apparently been reached.
But then, much as the victory in the early nineteenth-century war against the Peru-
Bolivia confederation had helped to consolidate the Chilean polity, another war against
the same adversaries would now provide Chile with a new “golden goose”—the ni-
trate fields of the Atacama desert. As occurred with export booms throughout Latin
America in the late nineteenth century—whether they were based upon coffee, sugar,
wheat, minerals, or other primary commodities—exploitation of the nitrate fields
would provide Chile with extensive export revenues which financed public works and
modernization without coming to terms with the internal contradictions of the econ-
omy or the structural inequalities of Chilean society. At Santiago, Valparaíso, and other
central valley cities and in the central valley countryside, landowners could patch the
cracked veneer of prosperity and continue the beautification of their urban mansions
and country estates while they postponed confrontation with the reality of the coun-
try’s growing population of urban and rural poor.
134 CHILE

With increased migration to the towns and cities came crude working-class neigh-
borhoods, populated by “urban villagers,” and mounting pressures on public health,
education, police, and other urban facilities. Small shops, markets, service “industries,”
and bars, mostly without licenses, proliferated. Limited employment opportunities for
migrant women increased the number of washerwomen, seamstresses, domestic ser-
vants, small illegal cantina operators, and also the visibility of prostitution in Santiago,
Valparaíso, and provincial towns. Of 4158 female inmates in the Casa de Corrección
from 1852 to 1860, 2972 (71%) had been sentenced for “faltas al pudor”: theft, drunken-
ness, vagrancy, prostitution, adultery, concubinage, and “public scandal.” In a study of
prostitution in Santiago, historian Alvaro Góngora Escobedo (La prostitución en Santi-
ago 1831–1931) queried: “why did prostitutes (rameras) figure in the Anuario Estadístico
de la República Chile until 1865, when there was no law against prostitution during these
years? . . . Only after 1925, and then only briefly was prostitution criminalized.” In
fact, government authorities tolerated prostitution, then “regulated” the sex business
(authorities in Santiago implemented a law, in the name of public health, to control the
so-called “Casas de Tolerancia” in 1896). By 1879, when Chile went to war against Peru
and Bolivia, the Intendente of Valparaíso, Eulogio Altamirano, claimed that venereal
disease was a veritable “national calamity,” affecting more than half the “volunteers”
for military service. According to Altamirano, this incidence of venereal disease was
typical of the poorer classes (proles). Most Chileans were poor in 1879; could half the
young male adults be afflicted by venereal disease? No medical data are available to
answer the question, but Altamirano’s remarks reflected elite perceptions of the poor,
the other 90 percent of Chileans who, if not literally “infected,” constituted virtually a
“race apart’ from those who governed and those who controlled the country’s wealth.
From its third number, the Revista Médica de Chile, which began publication in 1872,
dealt with the scourge of venereal disease more than 250 times until 1930, emphasizing
from the earliest articles its devastating effects on public health and its origins in the
brothels, “coffee houses,” bar-dance halls (chinganas), and hotels that rented rooms by
the hour. Góngora’s study of prostitution in Santiago, replete with maps on the growth
and geographical dispersion of the sex business in the capital, makes clear that eco-
nomic modernization and the evolution of a more complex occupational structure from
the mid-nineteenth century incorporated thousands of young, illiterate, and barely ed-
ucated female migrants into the world’s “oldest profession.” The 1896 law regulating
the Casas de Tolerancia theoretically prohibited their operations within 150–200 meters
of schools, convents, churches, and military bases. Political influence, bribes, and in-
sufficient police personnel frequently made enforcement illusory. Not by chance, nov-
elist Joaquin Edwards chose the brothel as a metaphor for much of “modern” Chilean
society at the beginning of the twentieth century in his classic, El Roto. The architectural
facades and technological glitz of modernization went hand-in-hand with the misery
of the underclasses and the pervasive social malaise denounced by many Chilean in-
tellectuals as the country approached the centennial of its independence in 1910.

The agro-commercial expansion of the mid-nineteenth century took on a special mean-

ing for the population of the Concepción–southern region and the Araucanians to the
south. In the southern area traders, farmers, and speculators maintained contact with
local chieftains, but farms and settlements in the frontier territory remained subject to
periodic raids or even relatively large-scale uprisings that wrought considerable de-
struction of property and loss of life. Araucania remained outside the Chilean nation.
From the 1860s to the 1880s periodic military campaigns sought to “pacify” the terri-
tory of Araucanía, framed by debates that resonated of the colonial era over peaceful
conversion and evangelization versus military conquest.
MODERNIZATION AND MISERY 135

External demand for wheat, flour, and animal products made southern lands po-
tentially more valuable. Expanded cereal cultivation accompanied by the growth of a
prosperous flour-milling industry in the environs of Tomé put renewed pressure on the
Indian lands. Partly in response to these pressures, an Indian insurrection from 1859 to
1860 coincided with the civil war that pitted Concepción forces against the central gov-
ernment, and caused much destruction in the areas of Negrete, Nacimiento, and Los
Angeles. In April 1859 the periodical El Correo del Sur called in no uncertain terms for
violent repression and blamed the Indians and “Indian territory” for numerous real
and imagined evils:
The necessity, not only to punish the Araucanian race, but also to make it impotent to
harm us, is so well recognized that almost everyone desires that such measures be
taken as the only way to rid the country of a million evils. It is well understood that
they are odious and prejudicial guests in Chile. . . . The thousands of families that
today find themselves in misery; the innumerable robberies committed by these sav-
ages . . . are clamoring for prompt and extreme measures, since conciliatory mea-
sures have accomplished nothing with this stupid race—the infamy and disgrace of
the Chilean nation.
Once again the lure of quick profits and Indian land pitted the Araucanians in a strug-
gle for survival against the superior firepower of “civilization.” Now “odious guests”
in their own land, the Indians desperately attempted to maintain their land and their
autonomy against the encroaching outsiders.
The land rush occasioned by expansion of cereal cultivation—accompanied by gov-
ernment colonization schemes, legal chicanery, and corruption—necessitated troops to
enforce the “property rights” of Chilean landowners. A new Indian uprising, led by a
Frenchman who proclaimed himself King Aurélie Antoine I and swore to free the In-
dians from Chilean tyranny, spurred the government to renewed repression. Reminis-
cent of the military tactics of many colonial governors, the Chilean leaders established
forts at Mulchén and Angol in 1863 and then “defense lines” near Malleco (1867–68)
and Traiguén (1878–79), as troops drove the Indians further south and east. The official
frontier shifted to the Malleco River in 1866, and in 1875 Biobío became a new Chilean
province (see Map 11).
Chilean squatters, speculators, and would-be hacendados rushed to gain control of
“empty” frontier lands. From 1852 to 1866 the national government attempted unsuc-
cessfully to regulate land transactions in the southern territories. A ban on land deals
with Indians in 1858 failed to stem the tide. Legislation defining as “public” all frontier
lands that had not been “continually and effectively occupied for at least one year,” set
in motion thousands of legal conflicts between the government, Indians, squatters, and
land speculators. Many of the conflicts were resolved outside the courts by force; oth-
ers were decided by bribes or by influence exercised by powerful economic interests.
Finally in the mid-1870s Congress enacted a law that required public auctioning of
all contested lands in a region bounded by the Renaico River to the north, the Malleco
to the south, and the Vergara to the west (see Map 11). The down payments required
were so high that they practically excluded peasants, workers, and artisans from ac-
quiring these lands; incentives for private colonization companies to bring in “high
quality”—that is, northern European—colonists discriminated against Chilean settlers.
The government seldom sold properties of less than the legal maximum of 500
hectares. Instead of creating a frontier yeomanry, government policy allowed the fron-
tier territory to become another domain of the large hacienda. In imitation of the cen-
tral valley model, political and economic elites carved out new manorial possessions
upon which ex-squatters, landless peasants, and Indians became inquilinos or peons.
136 CHILE

FPO

map 11: The South-Central Biobío Region

(Source: John Whaley, “Transportation in Chile’s Biobío Region 1850–1915,” Ph.D. disserta-
tion, Indiana University, 1974.)
MODERNIZATION AND MISERY 137

Between 1850 and 1875 ex-presidents and future presidents of Chile, along with such
well-known entrepreneurs as Waddington, Bunster, Cousiño, and Smitmans, acquired
large rural estates in the southern provinces.
Passage of the 1874 public lands legislation coincided with the maiden journey of
the southern region’s new railroad from Concepción to Chillán. Since the 1850s local
elites in the frontier territory had struggled to obtain government support for a south-
ern railway. At midcentury the region contained only two important urban centers:
Concepción and Chillán. Agriculture and livestock entirely dominated the regional
economy, though an incipient coal industry and a few fishing villages along the coast
provided a hint of things to come. The gold strikes in California and Australia
that stimulated demand for Chilean wheat and flour encouraged the export trade at
Concepción-Talcahuano and brought notable growth to Tomé. Developing as the cen-
ter of the milling industry and recipient of foreign investment and technology, Tomé ac-
counted for more than 90 percent of the provinces’ reported 842,000 quintals of flour by
1855. Expanded production and commerce also benefited Concepción and Talcahuano,
which was the only legal port of entry for the entire southern region. But until railroads
began to operate after 1874, high freight rates and the constraints of transport by oxcart
seriously disadvantaged the southern region in relation to the central valley.
Loss of the California and Australia markets, economic depression in 1857, the
havoc of civil war, and Indian uprisings (1859–63, 1868), all represented setbacks for the
frontier provinces. With virtual completion of the Santiago-Valparaíso railroad in
the early 1860s and its connection to San Fernando, southern agriculture faced the
prospect of being unable to compete with the central valley. Until the early 1860s
the southern mill industry supplied most of the flour exported by Chile; thereafter the
southern share dropped off to somewhat less than 50 percent of the total, and what had
been a modern industry in the 1850s failed to keep pace with rapid technological inno-
vations in flour milling in the United States and Europe. By the late 1870s Chilean
millers could not compete effectively in the international market, though trade with
Peru, Ecuador, Argentina, and Brazil continued, along with less significant shipments
to Europe or North America. Moreover, the share of the export market accounted for
by shipments through Valparaíso rose from less than 25 percent between 1846 and 1850
to over 90 percent in 1880. Fortunately, after bumper crops in 1862–63 and a short-term
decline in prices, increased Peruvian demand for Chilean wheat and the growing
British market rescued the regional economy from disaster. Over the next ten years
British purchases of Chilean wheat increased from approximately 340,000 pesos in 1863
to more than 2 million pesos in 1874—when the railroad connected Talcahuano to
Chillán and the wheatlands of the interior.
Southern agriculture expanded by putting more and more land under cultivation by
means of slash-and-burn technology. With large tracts of land available, high yields on
virgin soil, and relatively cheap labor, southern agriculture could expand output with
small amounts of capital investment. Agricultural workers received low wages along
with food rations consisting of beans, potatoes, corn, and unleavened bread, or galleta.
Peons rarely ate meat. Agricultural implements generally remained primitive: wooden
plows, and weighted bramble-bush harrows. While labor supply remained plentiful
and secure, no need to mechanize existed. Into the 1870s most hacendados of the south
employed labor crews for the harvest, and paid temporary wages double or triple those
paid to the resident labor force. Significant mechanization would come only later in the
nineteenth century, when the supply of harvest laborers became less secure and work-
ers less compliant due to the possibility of other employment in railroad and public
construction projects or in the nitrate fields taken from Peru and Bolivia in the War of
the Pacific.
138 CHILE

Foreign markets for southern agriculture and the demand for coal by northern
mines also stimulated the growth of some of the cities and towns of the region. Near
Concepción the coal-mining enterprise of Matías Cousiño changed Lota from a rustic
village into a mining town of some 5000 by the mid-1860s. Shortly thereafter the gov-
ernment extended telegraph service to Lota and from there to Nacimiento on the Arau-
canian frontier. Copper foundries, a brick factory, and other associated commercial es-
tablishments contributed to Lota’s expansion. Coal mining also stimulated commercial
development around Lebu and Coronel between 1862 and 1874. From 1865 to 1875 the
population of Coronel increased from 2,132 to 5,568; by 1875 Lebu’s population ex-
ceeded 5700.
The mining proletariat created in the 1860s and 1870s would eventually make the
coal-mining region one of the most explosive areas of class conflict and union struggle
in Chile. In the short run, development of the Chilean coal industry meant that despite
the low quality of Chilean coal, the country could supply more than 50 percent of do-
mestic consumption. Perhaps even more significant, the coal trade along with lumber
and food exports expanded contacts between the two regions most hostile to policy
emanating from Santiago and between workers in the most dynamic sectors of the
Chilean economy.
By 1851 flour-milling and shipping activities at Tomé had transformed a tiny settle-
ment of a dozen shacks into a mushrooming town with some 2000 residents. Favored
by nearby sources of water power and an oxcart road connecting it to the wheat fields
of the interior, the population of Tomé more than doubled in the next decade, reaching
some 5300 in 1865. In contrast, Talcahuano’s population declined from 2500 to 2000,
and Concepción remained more or less stagnant, as Tomé took the fore in the cereal and
flour-based commercial boom. After 1877 this situation would reverse itself as the fa-
vorable freight rates on the rail line between Talcahuano and Chillán killed off the ox-
cart traffic between Tomé and the interior.
Intraregional rivalries between Tomé interests and those at Concepción made even
more discouraging the central government’s neglect of the southern region. Limited
economic progress, including the temporary booms of the early 1850s, did not fully in-
corporate the Concepción–southern region into the incipient process of modernization
experienced by the central valley. The Indian frontier continued to limit southern ex-
pansion, while Santiago politicians and speculators treated the region as a vast oppor-
tunity for economic exploitation. Complicating this situation, some foreign interests
even suggested that Chile had no effective control of or legal claim to Araucania. For
example, a report by a British representative in Santiago to the Foreign Office in 1875
stated this position explicitly: “It seems to me that the Chilean government cannot
claim any legal title to Araucania. It certainly has not had success in the conquest of this
territory nor has it acquired rights to this territory through any treaty.”
Only with the War of the Pacific and the nitrate boom of succeeding decades would
the full importance of southern agriculture become apparent to the national gov-
ernment. Only then were the Araucanians finally subjugated—though not fully incor-
porated—into Chilean national life. For the Araucanians and for numerous Chilean
landless peasants and squatters, the agro-commercial growth of the south in the mid-
nineteenth century meant still another confrontation, and eventual defeat, by the eco-
nomic and political forces associated with the expansion of Western European and
North American capitalism. For the Araucanians it meant a final death struggle to
maintain their land and autonomy. For most of the poor mestizo peasants and squat-
ters it meant loss of the last opportunity to escape the poverty and lack of mobility in-
herent in the social structure of the central valley latifundia.
MODERNIZATION AND MISERY 139

What most distinguished Chilean political development after 1830 from events in the
other Spanish American republics was a remarkable constitutional continuity. Four
elected presidents each served two consecutive five-year terms between 1831 and 1871.
Congressional elections occurred on schedule with the repeated return of representa-
tives of Chile’s elite families to the Senate and Chamber of Deputies. Presidents and
legislators of all political persuasions came overwhelmingly from a small number of in-
termarried, extended kinship groups with well-known surnames.
Oligarchy buttressed by endogamy and compadrazgo* preserved the basic solidarity
of a ruling elite whose economic interests extended from agriculture to mining, com-
merce, banking, and, later, industry. The geographical compactness of Chile’s central
valley—unlike the fragmentation or the greater size of Colombia, Mexico, Peru, or
Brazil—facilitated national unity and elite consensus on fundamental social and eco-
nomic institutions—even when philosophical disagreements or the clash of personal-
istic factions led to political conflict. To illustrate, a doctoral dissertation by Gabriel
Marcella completed in 1973 found that one extended family—the Errázuriz—con-
tributed four presidents and 59 parliamentarians from 1831 to 1927. On occasion as
many as six served in the same legislature. Overall, Marcella reported that among 599
deputies and senators (out of 782 for whom some quantity of kinship data was avail-
able) there appeared 98 sets of brothers, 61 sets of father and son, 57 sets of uncle and
nephew, 20 of cousins, 12 of father and son-in-law, and 32 of brothers-in-law. Moreover,
the influence of kinship in the legislature increased rather than decreased between 1834
and 1888. Chilean political stability from 1831 to 1891 depended more than a little upon
restricted suffrage, low levels of political participation, and maintenance of govern-
ment positions in the hands of a small, intermarried, social, and economic oligarchy.
Notwithstanding these oligarchical features and the relative political stability of
nineteenth-century Chile when compared with the rest of Latin America, there existed
underlying tensions between economic interests in the outlying provinces and Santi-
ago as well as between autocratic and oligarchic tendencies within the Chilean politi-
cal system. These tensions, along with conflicts over the relationship between Church
and State, fragmented the ruling elite. The Hispanic tradition of an authoritarian exec-
utive conflicted with the evolving desires of the leading families to rule Chile in their
collective interest and to protect themselves from an overzealous president or an ad-
ministration that took political debate outside the confines of salon, parliament, or the
prestigious Club de la Unión.
Application of certain provisions of the 1833 constitution—in particular those re-
quiring annual legislative action on the national budget, periodic approval of tax rates
and tax collection, authorizations to maintain military personnel and to station troops
within ten leagues of where Congress was in session—led gradually to an erosion of
presidential dominance between 1841 and 1891—when a bloody civil war would con-
firm the victory of Congress over the executive.
The autocratic interpretation and implementation of the 1833 constitution by Presi-
dent Prieto (1831–41) could not eliminate entirely the influence of imported liberalism
or the desire of certain Chilean elites to emulate British and Continental parliamen-
tarism. Nevertheless, the presidential regime provided no formal mechanism for chang-
ing executive leadership through parliamentary elections or votes of no confidence. In-
stead, gradually but insistently—using the leverage of Congress’ budgetary and tax

*Compadrazgo is a common form of fictive kinship prevalent throughout Spain and Latin Amer-
ica; literally “godmother” and “godfather” for baptism, marriage, etc.
140 CHILE

authority—the foes of presidential dominance imposed constraints upon executive ac-

tion and established the principle of ministerial responsibility to Congress. In the mean-
time, elections meant recurrent political violence and suppression of opposition news-
papers. In two cases, in 1851 and 1859, conflict over government succession precipitated
brief but bloody wars between the armies of rival factions, followed by elite political
pacts to “reconcile” the contending parties. Both times Congress eventually legislated
political amnesties (1857, 1861) in an effort to further “social peace.”
As early as November 1841, Congress agreed to suspend consideration of legislation
authorizing tax collection as well as the budget bill until the executive submitted an ex-
panded legislative agenda—including legislation aimed at extending congressional
oversight of public expenditures. Executive agreement to these demands meant de
facto abrogation of an exclusive constitutional prerogative of the executive: designa-
tion of matters to be considered in the extraordinary sessions of the legislature. More
important, President Bulnes’ acceptance of the congressional demands was an implicit
recognition of the legitimacy of legislative checks on government policy.
Influenced by Belgian procedures, legislators intent on asserting congressional au-
thority also introduced the practice of “interpellation”—a questioning period to hold
ministers accountable for their acts. Under this procedure individual deputies could re-
quest particular ministers to appear in the chamber to explain or justify government
policy. Combined with delays on critical legislation, the practice of interpellation
moved Chilean politics in the direction of quasiparliamentarism. Liberal intellectuals
such as José Victorino Lastarria argued that interpellation and censure of ministers
were rights inherent in the supervisory authority of Congress and served as guarantees
against executive irregularities and abuses.
After bitterly contested congressional elections in 1849, during which the Bulnes
government mounted a campaign of repression against the liberal forces, dissident
conservatives, and the opposition political groups based on family ties or personal
friendships, Lastarria submitted reform proposals to the new Congress. These propos-
als aimed to limit further presidential authority as well as to guarantee freedom of the
press and the right of assembly. Though Congress did not approve these reforms, the
attacks on executive dominance continued.
In 1850 a new political movement emerged called the Society of Equality. Headed by
Francisco Bilbao and a number of personalities like Santiago Arcos and the Matta
brothers who would play important roles as political reformers, the society held nu-
merous public meetings and demonstrations against the government. Influenced by
the revolutionary ideas and experience of France and Europe in 1848, as well as by
British liberalism, the Society of Equality directly challenged the autocratic regime in
the press and in the streets, copying to a certain extent the French Girondist tactics of
1848. It opposed the presidential candidacy of Manuel Montt, declaring that “pro-
claiming Montt as candidate for the presidency is authorization of revolution” and that
“Montt signifies burial of the Republic.” Attempting to forge an unlikely alliance be-
tween liberal patricians and the artisan community in Santiago, the Society of Equal-
ity’s leaders mobilized some artisans and members of the National Guard against the
government. These groups represented voters controlled by the government; they
were a key prop of presidential control of Congress and presidential succession.
A virtual armed insurrection by the Society of Equality’s “affiliate” in San Felipe in
November 1850 brought a declaration of “state of siege” for Santiago and Aconcagua
provinces, followed by full-on repression of the Society of Equality. The intendant of
Santiago prohibited further meetings and declared the society “dissolved”; all similar
organizations were outlawed. Government officials closed opposition newspapers,
and many of the leaders of the reform movement fled into exile.
MODERNIZATION AND MISERY 141

In April 1851 the government put down a military uprising in Santiago led by a lib-
eral officer supported by the capital’s pipiolos. The government election machine, based
upon control of the votes of the militia, provided more than sufficient votes to make
Bulnes’ chosen successor, Manual Montt, the next president—despite support by liber-
als and regional interests in Concepción and La Serena for Bulnes’ cousin and com-
mander of the army stationed in the southern provinces, José María de la Cruz. Since the
president appointed militia officers, and the officers handled distribution of the “cer-
tificates of qualification” that allowed the militiamen to vote, presidential intervention
in elections generally spelled defeat for the opposition. Officers could also withhold cer-
tificates from unreliable militiamen and give them to more “trustworthy” citizens. Al-
though this practice had become more or less expected, the increasing resistance to pres-
idential dominance and the frustration of important economic interests in the provinces
made it impossible for Bulnes’ opponents to swallow the election results.
Opponents of the regime contested the legitimacy of the rigged elections and broke
into armed revolt in Concepción and La Serena. Rebel forces in Coquimbo requisitioned
the British ship Firefly and extorted contributions from wealthy government support-
ers. Before the intervention of the British squadron—encouraged by the Montt govern-
ment—the northern rebel forces occupied the towns of Elqui, Huasco, Ovalle, Combar-
balá, and Illapel. Miners from the important El Tamaya mine marched on Ovalle, and
other groups occupied haciendas around Illapel. Miners, construction workers, and
peasants mobilized to the rebel cause in other northern towns—an event in which some
Marxist historians have discerned elements of an armed popular insurrection. Although
this interpretation is not entirely inaccurate, the basic struggle in the 1851 revolt pitted
the incumbent political machine against regional and liberal forces protesting the out-
come of the elections and the more fundamental subordination of the southern and
northern provinces to Santiago. Indicative of this underlying source of conflict was the
leadership of the Concepción rebel forces in 1851 by would-be railroad entrepreneur,
landowner, and liberal politico, Pedro Félix Vicuña. Vicuña’s proposal for government
subsidies of his project for a southern railroad had fallen upon deaf ears in Santiago
shortly before he led the Concepción forces in support of the defeated liberal candidate.
Vicuña also owned a major newspaper in the region and had himself named intendant
of the province by the rebel forces. Thus the desire for political reform and frustrated
economic interest, as well as personal ambition, motivated the rebel leadership in the
civil conflict of 1851.
As in the north, the Montt government availed itself of British support to help quell
the southern rebellion. In the words of the exiled Argentine Domingo Sarmiento, in a
pamphlet he wrote supporting the Montt government, “British capital needs the guar-
antee of peace . . . to invest millions in the interior and to stimulate the export of ce-
reals. . . . Montt is public tranquility, authority, good faith, and efficient administra-
tion.” Within three months the Montt government reasserted control in both the
northern and southern provinces.
Victory in the civil war in 1851, however, did not end the movement to put legisla-
tive checks on the presidency. President Montt’s refusal to support a general amnesty
for military and civilian adversaries in the recent war further embittered opponents.
Debates over this issue again in 1857 failed to convince the government, which, faced
with division among its supporters, ultimately accepted conditional amnesties. If the ex-
iles requested forgiveness and promised good behavior, the government would permit
their return to Chile on a case-by-case basis. Congress approved the amnesty law, but
most of the Liberal leaders in exile rejected the Montt government’s conditions. Con-
gressional elections in 1858 rekindled the embers of hatred and resentment, moving the
country toward another civil war in 1859.
142 CHILE

By 1857 not only government policy but also the very composition of the president’s
cabinet became hostage to congressional approval. In August 1857 Congress approved
an opposition senator’s motion to postpone consideration of the budget until the pres-
ident announced who would be appointed to the new cabinet. President Manuel Montt
reluctantly acquiesced and, at congressional insistence, even named members of the
liberal opposition to the cabinet. In effect this development put the Congress in control
of the cabinet, making the Chilean political system a curious mixture of parliamentary
and presidential government. The threat of congressional refusal to approve budget
legislation or other critical government programs gradually transformed the autocratic
presidential regime into a delicately balanced system of negotiation between govern-
ment and opposition forces. On any particular issue, government supporters could de-
fect and form an opposition majority to complicate further the life of the incumbent
executive. Thus, by 1861 the institutional foundations of the multiparty “parliamen-
tarism,” for which Chile became well known after 1891, had substantially modified the
autocratic regime installed by Portales and Prieto.
Erosion of presidentalism could not have occurred without a coincident ideological
and political fragmentation of the Chilean elite. Introduction of liberalism as a political
ideology in early nineteenth-century Chile threatened in two essential ways the hege-
mony of Iberian autocracy re-established by Portales: (1) rejection of Catholicism as the
exclusive moral underpinning of the state and (2) acceptance of social pluralism, in-
cluding freedom of association, freedom of the press, and the gamut of civil liberties as-
sociated with the British liberal tradition. As Chilean historian Cristián Gazmuri has
demonstrated in El ‘48’ chileno, the ideas and forms of collective action imported from
revolutionary forces in Europe in 1848 combined with the liberalism of the “generation
of 1842” to inspire the 1850–51 uprisings in Chile. The “spirit of 1848” also contributed
new forms of social organization (sociabilidad), ranging from the spread of masonic
lodges and volunteer fire departments (bomberos) to the establishment of the Radical
party (1863–64) and Reform Clubs (Clubes de Reforma) in the late 1860s. These groups,
often with overlapping memberships, typically included foreign merchants, bankers,
and industrialists as well as up-and-coming Chilean mining magnates, professionals,
and even military officers.
By the 1870s, what Gazmuri calls “the spirit of 1848” nourished a sort of political and
mesocratic counterculture from which emerged the liberal forces that would reform the
1833 constitution. A generation of patrician and bourgeois rebels and political exiles
forged in the conflicts bracketed by two civil wars, 1851 and 1859, would eventually
transform the autocratic republic. Along the way, however, the gunpowder liberals of
the 1850s would themselves be “renovated,” coming to value “order and progress”
much like Manuel Montt and Antonio Varas, their antagonists in the 1840s and 1850s.
The liberal factions preferred a shift of political authority to congress from the presi-
dent and diluting the influence of the Catholic Church in public affairs, but rarely went
beyond vague populist rhetoric regarding changing the country’s elitist political tradi-
tion and hierarchical social pyramid.
In the 1840s the “Generation of 1842” had arisen, as previously mentioned, from the
new (1842) University of Chile. This liberal movement, headed by José Victorino Las-
tarria, brought an immediate response from the Church, which opposed any hint of re-
ligious toleration. Among the partisans of the national coalition surrounding President
Bulnes (1841–51) as well as his successor, Manuel Montt (1851–61), were a number of
personalities who favored a dilution of the Church’s influence or at least a firmer exer-
cise of the patronato by the State over the Church. Their efforts, together with liberal at-
tacks on the Church and the intervention of foreign governments—especially the
MODERNIZATION AND MISERY 143

British—on behalf of foreign nationals resident in Chile, resulted in a series of laws of-
fensive to the Church and to devout Catholic politicians. Among other provisions,
these laws expanded the power of civil authorities to supervise the activities of parish
priests, and allowed non-Catholics to marry without conforming to Catholic ritual.
This politico-religious conflict divided the government coalition. Continued dis-
putes between the Bulnes and Montt governments and the Church gave rise, in 1857,
to the Conservative party, which gradually became the political voice of the Catholic
Church. This meant that an integral part of future electoral battles and parliamentary
debates would consist of issues related to the privileges and role of the Church in
Chilean society. In addition, the Conservative party, finding itself in opposition to the
incumbent executive, now supported the movement to shift the balance of power from
the president to party coalitions in the Congress—albeit for different reasons than the
liberals.
Approval of certain anticlerical measures by the Bulnes and Montt governments did
not mean acceptance of the secular implications of liberalism. In the short run, the sec-
ular conservatives now known as the “Montt-Varistas,” or the National party, contin-
ued to oppose social pluralism, unrestricted civil liberties, freedom of the press, and
elections uncontrolled by the national executive machine. The Montt government, in
particular, repressed opposition elements after facing civil war in 1851 and 1859.
Despite the outcome of the 1851 civil war, the formation of the Conservative party
in 1857 seriously weakened the antiliberal government coalition. Now both Catholics
and secular liberals favored further restriction upon presidential authority and institu-
tionalization of “parliamentary” government. The Catholics desired a stronger Church
role in government and society; the liberal program included expansion of the suffrage,
prohibition of presidential re-election, and reform of the restrictive press laws. To com-
plicate matters further, many liberals did not share the violently anticlerical positions
of Bilbao or Lastarria. Indeed many Conservatives and Liberals came to take a common
political stance against the incumbent regime.
Montt’s apparent intention to impose the forceful minister of interior, Antonio
Varas, as his successor, along with the government’s hesitancy in granting a complete
amnesty to those involved in the insurrection of 1851, pushed the Conservatives and
the majority of Liberals into a “fusion” that sought to prevent Varas’ election. A group
of intransigent liberal anticlericals rejected this fusion, but nevertheless joined the op-
position. Led by the future founders of the Radical party (1863), men like Guillermo
Matta and Justo and Domingo Arteaga Alemparte, as well as other opposition forces,
launched an antigovernment propaganda campaign across the nation.
The government response—declaration of a state of siege, arrests of prominent op-
position leaders, closure of opposition periodicals—moved Pedro León Gallo, a rich
miner and leader of the opposition in Copiapó, to send a private army against the gov-
ernment. As in 1851, the rebellion centered in the norte chico and spread to Concepción,
but outbreaks also occurred in Valparaíso and the central valley. While the government
eventually crushed the rebellion after both sides had sustained numerous casualties,
Varas withdrew his candidacy, and Montt named José Joaquín Pérez as the government-
supported candidate. Neither the moderate liberals nor the clericals in the Conservative
party had any serious objections to Pérez as Montt’s successor.
By 1861, therefore, the ruling elite had fragmented into at least four major groups:
National party, Conservative party, Liberals, and militant liberals, who eventually
formed the Radical party in 1863. The new President formed a cabinet composed of Na-
tionals, Liberals, and Conservatives. Soon after taking office he promulgated an
amnesty law for all political exiles. Despite Pérez’ effort to conciliate long-standing an-
144 CHILE

imosities, personal and political differences made the coalition ineffective. Pérez then
turned the cabinet over to the Liberal-Conservative “fusion” which gained a congres-
sional majority through the expected executive intervention in the 1864 congressional
elections. The National party (the party of Montt) and the Radicals now formed the op-
position. Pérez declared his government to be “of all and for all” political factions. He
governed for ten years without declaring a state of siege. At the end of his term in 1871
a constitutional amendment prohibited immediate presidential re-election.
During the next presidential term (1871–76) further legislative reforms consolidated
the congressional-oligarchic system. Control of elections passed to juntas, or commit-
tees of wealthy taxpayers—a reform that assured significant minority representation in
Congress, as well as the predominance of the landed elite in the central valley. It did
not, however, settle the ongoing “religious question” including controversies over sec-
ularizing cemeteries, civil marriage, public education, and, more generally, separation
of Church and State. This “religious question” remained the most prominent political
schism in Chile until 1891, nearly a decade after the War of the Pacific (1879–83), when
efforts by President Manuel Balmaceda (1886–91) to reverse the course of over half a
century of political evolution by reasserting executive dominance, led to a bloody civil
war. Indeed, the oligarchic “parliamentary” regime that had evolved between 1841 and
1876, and entrenched itself after 1891, would continue to wrangle over the “religious
question” into the twentieth century, long after the social and economic issues of in-
dustrialization, class conflict, and democratization seemed to portend more profound
and radical changes in Chilean politics and society.
In 1876 newly elected President Aníbal Pinto faced not only the “religious question”
but also the economic depression that had begun in 1873. Policies suggested to combat
the economic situation, such as working on Sundays and fiesta days, antagonized the
Church. Government attempts to exert control over public education and proposals to
secularize the cemeteries added fuel to the fire. The economic crisis heightened tem-
pers. Clericals promised rebellion if the religious reforms passed; anticlericals accused
priests of hoarding food while others starved. The death in 1878 of the conservative
archbishop Ramón Valdivieso further divided opposition forces when the president re-
fused to consult with the Church hierarchy before choosing Valdivieso’s successor.
When President Pinto selected a priest notorious for his illegitimate birth and liberal
politics, clerical forces successfully petitioned the Pope to oppose his appointment. The
issue remained unresolved for years.
Confronted by the mounting difficulties of the economic situation and the hostility
of the ultramontane opposition, Pinto’s situation seemed ever more impossible. While
prosperity could provide the grease to make the delicately balanced political machine
function, an end to the windfalls of the export economy and foreign investment typical
since the 1840s spelled disaster. Fortunately for Chile’s elites, Bolivia shortly provided
the Pinto government with a pretext for declaring war and for the subsequent annexa-
tion of the nitrate fields of the Atacama desert. The nitrate fields would provide the
means to nourish the Chilean economy and political apparatus for some years to come.
They would also spawn a militant proletariat and new political parties that would force
Chile to confront directly the “social question” and the politics of industrial class
conflict.
6 Nitrate

Plagued by economic difficulties and internal political dissensions, Chile faced the pos-
sibility of war with Argentina, Bolivia, and Peru. Owing to poorly demarcated bound-
aries in Patagonia, a territorial dispute with Argentina had simmered since Chile’s cre-
ation of the Punta Arenas colony in the early 1840s. A flare up of this dispute in the late
1870s menaced peaceful relations between the two nations. To the north, investments
of Chilean capital and the migration of thousands of Chilean workers to extract guano,
nitrates, copper, and silver from the Bolivian desert of Antofagasta created increasingly
tense relations between Bolivia and Chile.
Skillful negotiations avoided war with Argentina, but the vast economic stakes in
the north made a peaceful settlement with Bolivia impossible. A new Bolivian govern-
ment contravened the provisions of the 1874 treaty prohibiting Bolivia from increasing
export taxes on the Chilean nitrate operations for a period of twenty-five years, and
imposed a surtax on nitrate shipments of ten centavos per metric quintal (100 kg). The
Chilean government’s support of the Anglo-Chilean owned Antofagasta Railroad and
Nitrate Company (whose stockholders included Chilean congressmen and cabinet
members) in its refusal to pay the tax led ultimately to war.
In the course of the Chile-Bolivia dispute in the 1870s, Peru entered into a secret al-
liance with Bolivia in February 1873. The alliance provided for mutual guarantees of in-
dependence and territory against aggression by a third party. According to the terms of
the alliance, neither nation could conclude a peace, a truce, or an armistice without
prior approval of the other; nor could either cede territory or privileges that would re-
duce or limit independence or sovereignty. Peru’s interest in such a treaty stemmed
from its almost total economic dependence upon the export of guano and nitrates to
Europe. The expansion of European agriculture led to a spectacular increase in demand
for fertilizer, which, in turn, stimulated intensive economic activity in Peru’s southern
provinces, particularly Tarapacá, and in Antofagasta in Bolivia. This activity, on top of
the silver strike at Caracoles and the extensive copper mining in the 1870s, made the
Peruvian and Bolivian deserts suddenly highly prized economic assets.
Depletion of the guano deposits that had provided Peruvian governments with
most of their revenues between 1830 and 1870 led to increased emphasis on nitrates. In
contrast to the Peruvian government’s monopoly on guano, however, the nitrate in-
dustry developed under the control of private capital. Prior to the War of the Pacific
(1879–83) foreign interests (Chilean, British, German, and French) acquired almost 50
percent of the productive capacity of the Tarapacá nitrate fields. Perhaps just as impor-
tant, more than half the population of the province of Tarapacá consisted of foreigners
(57%); further south in the district of Iquique this figure reached almost 70 percent. In
the municipality of Antofagasta, Chileans constituted 85 percent of the population.
Thus, in the nitrate fields, Peru’s principal economic resource, both much of the own-
ership and the labor force owed their principal allegiance to other nations.
Responding to financial difficulties, the Peruvian government in 1875 decreed “na-

145
146 CHILE

tionalization” of many of the nitrate plants, or oficinas, issuing payment certificates re-
deemable in two years and bearing 8 percent interest. In reality this “nationalization”
was a mixed venture associating the Peruvian government and international finance
capital in an effort to create a nitrate monopoly. Unable to float bonds to finance pay-
ments, the Peruvian government failed to redeem the certificates. Eventually, many of
the certificates changed hands as speculators in Lima paid from 10 to 60 percent of face
value. Mismanagement by the Peruvian government, poor coordination between gov-
ernment and those operating the nitrate plants, coupled with a devastating earthquake
in 1877 that destroyed numerous coastal loading platforms, brought a 25 to 30 percent
decline in nitrate exports. Peruvian certificate holders and guano creditors put great
pressure upon Chile to annex Tarapacá, but the Chilean government made no effort to
contest Peru’s sovereign right to nationalize property within its territory.
New Bolivian taxes on nitrate exported from the province of Antofagasta proved to
be a different matter. Here a treaty protected Chilean economic interests, and most of
the population was Chilean. In Antofagasta a Chilean company produced all of the ni-
trate, and of the port’s 8000 inhabitants more than 75 percent were Chilean. When Bo-
livia ordered enforcement of the new nitrate tax in December 1878, and the Antofagasta
Company refused to comply, Bolivian officials ordered the arrest of the company’s
manager and seizure of company property sufficient to cover the debt owed for the
new tax. The manager took asylum with Chilean authorities. Relations between the
two countries deteriorated rapidly. In February, Bolivian officials notified the company
that its confiscated property would be auctioned to pay the nitrate tax; in the meantime
the captain of the port prohibited further nitrate exports, causing suspension of opera-
tion and unemployment for more than 2000 workers. In response to Chilean protests,
Bolivia revoked the company’s nitrate concession—putting the company out of busi-
ness—and then eliminated the nitrate tax.
After Bolivia rejected arbitration, a Chilean military expedition landed at Antofa-
gasta and took control of the city. Chilean forces also occupied Caracoles and Salar del
Carmen, while a warship went to Cobija to protect Chilean interests. Bolivia shortly de-
clared war upon Chile, decreed confiscation of all Chilean property, and gave Chilean
citizens ten days to leave the country. Peruvian diplomats hurried to Santiago in a final
attempt to prevent full-scale war, but public revelation of Peru’s secret alliance with Bo-
livia undermined the Peruvian role as mediator. In early April, Chile declared war
upon Bolivia and Peru.
None of the belligerent nations were prepared to go to war. The Chilean army, quite
small throughout the middle decades of the nineteenth century, numbered less than
2500 men, most of whom were stationed on the Indian frontier. Though somewhat bet-
ter equipped and provisioned than Bolivia’s or Peru’s forces, the Chilean army lacked
training in modern warfare, had no experience with large-unit maneuvers, and was
practically without auxiliary services. The national guard, even more so than the army,
had been seriously affected by the government’s recent economy moves. Never a well-
trained military organization, even the national guard’s significant political role seemed
threatened when the government in 1878 reduced it to approximately 7000 men—a 70
percent decline. Chilean naval forces, depleted by the sale of a transport and a corvette
for economic reasons, consisted of six ships—only two of which the director of arsenals
considered seaworthy. Although the addition of the merchant marine and vessels pur-
chased during the war would allow Chile to move troops by sea to the war zone, at the
outbreak of hostilities Chile’s naval posture was dismaying. Having closed the Naval
Academy and School for Mariners in 1876, the Chilean government had to hire foreign-
ers to man its tiny armada.
Peruvian and Bolivian forces, though they outnumbered the Chileans, suffered from
NITRATE 147

the effects of a half-century of political disorganization and internal strife. Neither Bo-
livia nor Peru were equipped to fight a modern war or to provision a large army over
any considerable period of time. Peru’s navy, relying upon two sound ironclads and a
number of far less seaworthy wooden and iron vessels, appeared to be a match for
Chile’s anemic fleet. Foreigners also manned the Peruvian navy, though their quality as
described by a contemporary—”the offscouring of the foreign merchant and naval
services”—left something to be desired.
Notwithstanding their lack of preparedness, both the Chileans and their adversaries
mobilized relatively large armies, reaching in Chile’s case over 45,000 men by the end
of the war. In the first months of the war Chilean forces successfully occupied most of
the Bolivian desert. Rugged terrain made it extremely difficult for Bolivia to send
troops across the Andes to Antofagasta. Following a series of Chilean-Peruvian naval
encounters, Chile dominated the seas by the end of 1879. When its armies took Pisagua
and Iquique, the resultant political disorders in Peru and Bolivia ousted the presidents
of both these nations. In early 1880 Chilean forces moved into Arica and Tacna. A
bloody battle, during which the opposing forces left 5000 casualties on the field, gave
Chile control of Tacna in May 1880. Twelve days later the port of Arica also fell to the
Chilean invaders.
After efforts by United States diplomats to mediate the conflict in late 1880 failed,
Chile sent an army of 25,000 men to Lima. Chilean soldiers crushed the Peruvian de-
fenders in mid-January 1881, and Lima became an occupied city. Though a guerrilla
campaign continued until 1883, Chile controlled Lima and Callao, confiscated consid-
erable Peruvian property, and levied taxes to support the army of occupation. The
Chileans also imposed port duties and encouraged increased production by the nitrate
industry.
The victorious Chileans dictated a harsh settlement to Peru and Bolivia. By virtue
of the Treaty of Ancón (October 23, 1883), signed by a president imposed upon Peru
by the Chileans, Peru ceded Tarapacá to Chile and agreed to a ten-year Chilean ad-
ministration of the provinces of Tacna and Arica. A plebiscite, which was never held,
was to decide which nation ultimately retained these territories. Of the fourteen arti-
cles in the peace treaty, nine referred in some way to guano or nitrates—a clear indi-
cation of the underlying issues of the “fertilizer war.” Bolivia, though not a party to
the treaty, eventually signed a truce with Chile in March 1884; it stipulated that con-
fiscated property be returned to Chilean citizens. Antofagasta passed into Chilean
hands, and Bolivia acquired access to the then Chilean-administered port of Arica.
Chile conceded to Bolivia 35 percent of the import duties on goods passing through
Arica destined for Bolivia. No peace treaty was signed between Bolivia and Chile for
twenty years, when Bolivia recognized Chile’s absolute and perpetual dominion of
Antofagasta.
The victor in the war that was ostensibly fought over a ten-centavo surtax on nitrate
exports, took as spoils the single most important source of Peruvian and Bolivian na-
tional wealth—the mineral-rich Atacama desert—along with Bolivia’s access to the Pa-
cific. For the next century this desert wealth would be the most important factor in
Chilean socio-economic and political development. The manner of its acquisition re-
mains a source of bitter resentment. Neither Peru nor Bolivia has forgotten their loss;
they remain unresigned to Chile’s “absolute and perpetual dominion” over the con-
quered territories. Numerous Peruvian generals still desire to recapture the battle mon-
ument at the Morro de Arica and redeem Peru’s national honor. Similar sentiments in
Bolivia have led the three nations to continue one of the most costly arms races in Latin
America and have led Chile to put mine fields in strategic northern areas.
The War of the Pacific enlarged Chilean territory by more than one-third. It also had
148 CHILE

Early nitrate works in Tarapacá, circa 1860. (Courtesy Archivo Universidad de Chile.)

Transport of coal to boilers at nitrate works, circa 1890.

(Courtesy Archivo Universidad de Chile.)
NITRATE 149

FPO

map 12: Chilean Expansion Northward

A. Original Chile-Bolivian boundary. B. Claimed by Chile in 1842. a. Established by treaty
in 1866, but in A-B nitrate revenues were divided equally. C. Original Peru-Bolivian bound-
ary. D. Boundary of Chile as a result of the War of the Pacific, 1883, with D-E to be occupied
by Chile ten years. d. Chile-Peruvian boundary by settlement of 1929. (Source: W. J. Dennis,
Tacna and Arica, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1931.)
150 CHILE

immediate and profound effects on Chilean national life. The war itself significantly in-
creased demand for foodstuffs and wine, thereby stimulating agriculture and livestock
production in the south, the central valley, and the norte chico. Coastal shipping dra-
matically expanded as merchants contracted to supply the army in the north. Industry
also responded positively to the war, particularly those firms producing foodstuffs,
beverages, tobacco, footwear and leather goods, and other materiel for the military. Ac-
cording to a report of the National Manufacturer’s Society (Sociedad de Fomento Fabril),
founded in 1883, more factories were founded between 1880 and 1889 than had existed
in Chile prior to the war. The enormous quantity of capital investment in the nitrate
sector and the gush of tax revenues flowing to the national government from the nitrate
companies helped to pull Chile out of the prewar economic stagnation. The merchant
marine quintupled in size between 1880 and 1883, and coastal shipping, or cabotaje, ex-
panded dramatically, since shipments to Antofagasta or Tarapacá had become domes-
tic commerce.
The Chilean victory not only provided an economic bonanza but added to the pan-
theon of national heroes military leaders such as Manuel Baquedano and Arturo Prat.
The war also reinforced the prevailing Chilean belief in the nation’s racial and cultural
superiority over its northern neighbors. Chile was special in Latin America, and after
the War of the Pacific, Chileans of all classes believed more than ever in their national
destiny.
With the end of the war a new spirit of nationalism contributed to renewed concern
for Chile’s lack of significant industry. In the first issue of its Boletín, the Sociedad de Fo-
mento Fabril proclaimed that “Chile can and should be an Industrial Nation.” The same
proclamation went on to say that “only by dedicating its energies to industrialization
will Chile achieve the stable base of political and economic equilibrium of the most ad-
vanced nations. . . . To contribute to this great objective, to make Chile an industrial
nation, the Sociedad de Fomento Fabril has been founded under the protection of the
government.” Committed to encouragement of Chilean industry through moderate
protective tariffs and government subsidies, the SFF represented a potential threat to the
economic policies favored by the integrated elite triumvirate of landowners, merchants,
and miners. In the short run, however, the fact that the act of foundation of the SFF oc-
curred in the principal salon of the National Agricultural Society, at the behest of a min-
ister of the national government, suggested that the new industrialists would not be far
removed from the traditional holders of power. The list of the officers and members of
the executive committee of the new industrial society revealed also the disproportion-
ate influence of immigrants and their offspring in Chile’s economic elite and its indus-
trial life. Only three Spanish surnames accompanied those of the other members of the
directorate: Edwards, Subercaseaux, Hillman, Tupper, Tiffou, Mitchell, Gabler, Lanz,
Klein, Muzard, Lyon, Bernstein Crichton, Osthaus, Stuven.
In addition to stimulating industry, the War of the Pacific also affected labor supply
throughout the republic. Military recruitment with appeals to patriotism, bounties, or
through impressment depleted the work force in the nitrate fields, the northern mines,
and the countryside. As the Chilean army moved north, desertions helped repopulate
the nitrate fields, and demobilization after the war let loose thousands of potential la-
borers for employment in the desert, the norte chico, or public works. Mobilization of
thousands of Chilean miners, campesinos, and laborers not only disrupted the labor
supply but also changed the world view and long-term aspirations of the war veterans.
Most had little inclination to return to the subordination of the central valley haciendas.
Some acquired land in the southern frontier regions, but those who did not increase the
ranks of vagabonds, beggars, and criminals sought their fortunes in the nitrate fields
NITRATE 151

and the booming towns of the conquered territory, or went south to Coquimbo, Val-
paraíso, and Santiago. Wartime experiences and the opening of the northern desert as a
Chilean mining region portended a radical transformation in the character of the Chilean
work force and the beginnings of a truly industrial wage proletariat.
Rapid military victories against Bolivia and Peru also made available a large army
capable of subjugating the people of Araucania. At the onset of the war some Indian
groups took advantage of troop movements to the north and carried off a small-scale
uprising in the region around Traiguén. In response President Pinto ordered the con-
quest of the Araucanians and the establishment of a new frontier line at the Cautín
River. Closing off the Andean passes that linked the Araucanians to their brethren in
Argentina, Chilean troops gained control of Indian territory in a concerted offensive.
Simultaneous campaigns against the Indians by Argentine troops, modern weapons,
and troop mobility resulting from the newly constructed southern railroad finally inte-
grated the frontier territory into the Chilean nation. Roads, bridges, telegraph lines,
and the army brought Carahue, Villarrica and Temuco—regions lost since the days of
Pedro de Valdivia—into the national patrimony. Reduced to wards of the Chilean state
on shrinking tribal lands, the Araucanians faced cultural and economic destruction at
the hands of corrupt government officials, traders, speculators, and Chilean settlers
seeking land to farm.
The national government tried to ensure orderly and rapid development of the fron-
tier territory by claiming the right to dispose of all the terrenos baldíos, or “vacant
lands.” Influenced by theories of racial superiority, some Chilean authorities looked to
northern Europe for colonists to populate the newly opened frontier territories. More
than 10,000 colonists from Germany, France, and Switzerland settled at Victoria, Ercilla,
Quillén, Temuco, Traiguén, Galvarino, Contulmo, and other frontier outposts in the
1880s. Instead of setting an example of European yeomanry, however, the colonists
took quick advantage of Chilean and Indian sharecroppers and rural laborers, adapt-
ing thereby to the convenience of Chile’s exploitive rural labor systems. The immigrant
colonists who prospered in agriculture found inquilinaje a useful device to promote
their interests, just as did the Chilean landowners in the central valley. Some colonists
also contributed greatly by establishing artisan manufactures and even some industry,
but most preferred towns or cities to the hardships of peasant pioneer farming in the
Chilean south.
In any case, the government was unable to compete with Argentina, Brazil, or
Uruguay in attracting the numbers of Europeans it desired to “upgrade” the Chilean
race. Instead, it fell back on public auctions to deliver the frontier lands into private
hands. Spontaneous colonization, squatting, and speculation continued as the major
instruments of settlement in the southern region.
Conquest of the Araucanians ended the most important pre-1879 rationale for main-
tenance of a standing army in Chile. The frontier had provided a genuine military mis-
sion for Chilean armed forces since the time of independence, making them a necessary
and valued element of national life. Acquisition through war of the northern territories
and the persistent Argentine border dispute now gave a new mission to the Chilean
military. The threat of conflict with Peru and Bolivia or with Argentina made military
preparedness a national concern. In 1885 the Chilean government contracted the Ger-
man lieutenant colonel Emil Körner to become subdirector of the Escuela Militar and
to direct the modernization of Chilean military education. In the same year a military
periodical first appeared, and shortly thereafter a military club, the Círculo Militar, was
established in Santiago. Both periodical and club received government subsidies.
Under Körner’s leadership Chile founded the Academia de Guerra, or War College,
152 CHILE

in 1886 with the stated purpose of improving the technical and scientific education of
army officers. The Academia de Guerra nurtured a new Chilean junior officer military
elite; critical of outdated methods, political patronage, and government inefficiency, it
would eventually (in the 1920s) challenge the traditional political parties for control of
the Chilean state. In the short run, only five years after establishment of the Academia
de Guerra, Körner and his small core of followers would play a key role in the Chilean
civil war of 1891. From the outset, therefore, the professionalization and modernization
of the Chilean military on the Prussian model entailed serious consequences for Chil-
ean politics—just as similar Prussian or French military missions soon affected civil-
military relations in Argentina, Bolivia, Peru, and other Latin American nations. The
War of the Pacific proved a turning point in Chile’s civil-military relations as well as
being the most important economic watershed in its history.

A mere seven years after termination of the War of the Pacific, Chile faced its most se-
rious and bloody civil war of the nineteenth century. Chilean historians still debate the
causes of this civil war, with explanations ranging from narrow political interpretations
to those that attribute it to President Balmaceda’s (1886–91) tragic confrontation with
British imperialism and its Chilean lackeys. Events in Chile between 1970 and 1973 led
many people to draw analogies between Balmaceda and President Salvador Allende as
nationalists and reformers who met defeat at the hands of foreign interests and the
Chilean oligarchy. As with most such historical controversies, there is evidence to sup-
port all versions of the conflict. No understanding of the civil war of 1891, however, can
ignore the complex relationships between the changes in Chile’s political economy
wrought by the War of the Pacific and the persistence of long-standing political issues,
such as the “religious question” and the constant tension between the Congress and the
executive.
The nitrate fields of the Atacama desert added an entirely new factor to Chilean po-
litical economy. Basic questions had to be answered about how to integrate the wealth
of the desert into the economy. Should the state operate the fields as a national indus-
try, as the Peruvians had attempted? Should private capital be allowed to exploit the
nitrate deposits and control the transportation networks, especially railroads, that
shipped the nitrates to the ports? To what extent should foreign capital be permitted to
invest in the nitrate industry?
Imbued with a fundamental commitment to liberal economic ideology, the govern-
ment of President Pinto set the direction for the next four decades of nitrate policy by
imposing an export tax of 40 centavos per metric quintal upon the nitrate company at
Antofagasta. After Chilean troops seized Tarapacá, thereby bringing the richest de-
posits of nitrate also within Chilean control, the government increased the tax to $1.50
pesos. Considering that the original dispute between the Antofagasta Company and
the Bolivian government—the dispute that precipitated war between Chile, Bolivia,
and Peru—had arisen over an additional 10-centavo levy by Bolivia on nitrate exports,
President Pinto’s policy hardly made the nitrate producers happy.
Meanwhile President Pinto created a commission to consider long-range nitrate pol-
icy. This commission recommended return of the nitrate concessions to the holders of
the Peruvian certificates, along with an export tax of $2.20 pesos per metric quintal.
This recommendation established the basis for Chilean political economy for the next
four decades. Private enterprise, foreign and national, would exploit the nitrate fields,
and export taxes on nitrate would constitute more than 50 percent of all Chilean gov-
ernment revenue.
The Chilean government’s decision to allow substantial foreign participation in the
nitrate industry and the sale of certain Chilean-held certificates to foreigners soon
NITRATE 153

placed thousands of Chilean workers in large nitrate complexes, or oficinas, controlled

by foreign administrators. By 1883 the work force in Tarapacá alone had increased to
7000, with similar increments in the ranks of dock workers, construction and railroad
crews, prostitutes, merchants, and industry related to nitrate production. Investments
in public services in Iquique and Antofagasta provided jobs for still more, as demobi-
lized troops returned from Peru. Nitrate mining depended upon pick and shovel; as the
industry expanded in the last decades of the nineteenth century, it required more and
more workers in the oficinas.
Caliche, the ore of the nitrate industry, consists of sodium nitrate and varying
amounts of potassium nitrate, trace metals, iodine, and insolubles. Variation in nitrate
content made some deposits more valuable, but the basic refining process was rela-
tively uniform. Found in deposits up to two meters thick, the ore was blasted from the
desert crust, crushed, and boiled in caldrons or dissolving tanks until it formed a solu-
tion and precipitated out impurities. When cooled, the evaporation formed salitre, or
nitrate crystals. In the 1850s and 1860s coal-fueled furnaces that piped steam to dis-
solving tanks began to replace the fire-heated caldrons, thereby increasing the effi-
ciency and scale of the oficinas. Mechanical ore crushers also made their appearance,
but the industry remained highly labor-intensive. Laborers blasted the desert crust,
crushed the caliche, loaded the ore for hauling, manned the catwalks over the open
tanks, cleaned the pipes and machinery, and performed numerous specialized jobs in
the production process. Women sewed the bags of fertilizer and served as cooks, laun-
dresses, and seamstresses. Nitrate companies took few safety precautions; workers fre-
quently suffered burns or mutilations by machinery. Amputees and otherwise disabled
nitrate workers became a common sight in Iquique, Antofagasta, and other nitrate
towns where displaced laborers drifted in search of subsistence.
Though the nitrate industry employed a large number of unskilled workers, the
market for nitrates proved extremely volatile. Producers responded to short-term con-
tractions in sales or declines in price by reducing output or laying off workers. Conse-
quently the labor force of the nitrate fields periodically faced unemployment, and the
Chilean government’s revenues, increasingly dependent on nitrate export duties,
could decline or increase precipitately over very short periods of time. In good times
the nitrate companies could not always count upon sufficient workers to meet de-
mands; in bad times thousands of displaced workers departed from the nitrate pampa
to the northern cities and south to Coquimbo, Valparaíso, and Santiago. Fluctuations in
international demand for nitrates, therefore, caused periodic political crises as Chile
struggled to manage the consequences of large-scale movements of unemployed work-
ers out of the nitrate fields into the ports, the norte chico, and the central valley.
The War of the Pacific also marked the onset of long-term price inflation. Paper
money issued to finance the war, and the usual rise in prices associated with the artifi-
cial demand of a wartime economy, introduced serious inflation as a permanent facet
of Chilean economic life. In the nitrate regions the companies controlled both the work-
ers’ income, usually paid in company scrip called vales or fichas, and the price of con-
sumer goods at the company store, or pulpería. Thus, inflation pitted workers against
the nitrate capitalists at the most basic level of subsistence. When labor was relatively
scarce, the companies could use “low prices” at the pulpería to attract workers; when
labor was more abundant or demand for nitrate slackened, the workers received less
favorable treatment by the companies. Payment in company scrip limited the workers’
ability to purchase consumption goods from independent merchants or peddlers. In
order to maintain the workers as captive clients of the pulpería, the nitrate companies
attempted to restrict independent traders from entering the nitrate oficinas. If a worker
wished to use the company scrip in the “outside” world, storeowners typically dis-
154 CHILE

counted the scrip 10 to 30 percent. Under these conditions there emerged among the
workers a sense of exploitation and a list of quite concrete demands for improvement
of their situation. The militant expression of these demands in a strike in 1890 would
play a key role in the civil war of 1891 when nitrate workers joined congressional forces
to defeat President Balmaceda.
In the decade after the War of the Pacific these conditions in the nitrate industry and
the industry’s sensitivity to the international market made themselves felt quite
strongly. By 1885 nitrate prices declined from their wartime high of 12 shillings to 5s.
4d. In an effort to control the decline in prices, the major nitrate companies formed a
“combination,” or cartel, assigning quotas according to installed capacity. This first of
several “combinations” (1884–86) over the next thirty years had some success in re-
versing the price trend; but as conditions improved, the more efficient producers relied
on their technological advantage or the richness of the deposits they exploited, and the
“combination” disappeared. Rapid increases in output and in exports—1886, 451,000
metric tons; 1887, 713,000 metric tons; 1890, over 1,000,000 metric tons—unaccompa-
nied by a corresponding increase in demand again placed pressure on the companies
to control the level of supply. Given the bulky nature of the “ore,” storage could quickly
become a problem if exports slackened off, leaving production shutdowns as the most
obvious instrument for dealing with the fickle market.
Limiting production or exports favored neither the Chilean government nor the
labor force. Government revenues were tied to the total tonnage exported—not to
price. Production cutbacks or shutdowns meant unemployment for the workers. Com-
plicating this picture further, enterprising British capitalists who had made a financial
killing by acquiring the Peruvian nitrate certificates, sought to consolidate control over
the industry, including the railroad networks that linked the pampa with the coastal
cities. The most ambitious, like John Thomas North, who became known as the “Ni-
trate King,” also invested in related commercial ventures. In North’s case investments
included a company that controlled the water supply at Antofagasta and the region’s
principal bank. Competition among foreign capitalists for control of the nitrate rail-
roads, for workers, for nitrate concessions, and for other favors from the Chilean gov-
ernment further enmeshed the evolution of the nitrate industry in Chilean politics.
Meanwhile a growing nationalist sentiment in Chile publicly condemned the increas-
ing foreign influence over the nation’s new economic resources.
Revenues from the nitrate fields permitted the Chilean government to embark on a
most ambitious program of public works, including impressive extension of the rail and
telegraph network as well as significant expansion of the educational system. In 1888 a
newly created Ministry of Industry and Public Works absorbed more than 20 percent of
the national budget, and investments in education accounted for another 15 percent of
government expenditures. Military spending also increased significantly. With in-
creased expenditures came new public jobs, and new opportunities for the national gov-
ernment to distribute patronage positions to its supporters. Control over government
contracts and over large deposits of government funds in private banks gave the presi-
dent increased leverage in national politics. More generally, as public resources ex-
panded, the role and perceived importance of the State grew immensely both in rela-
tionship to the economy and in regard to social and political opportunities within
Chilean society. Personal and party feuds over the spoils of the new wealth, job oppor-
tunities, and government contracts made nitrate prosperity almost as much a political
liability as an asset for the incumbent administration. At the same time, both the ad-
ministration and the Chilean economy faced extraordinary vulnerability to interna-
tional markets and prices for nitrates. Chilean politics and economy depended critically
NITRATE 155

upon foreign demand for fertilizer, upon foreign bond-markets, and upon decisions
made by foreign investors and commercial interests.
Nor did economic expansion eliminate fundamental conflicts within the Chilean
polity. President Domingo Santa María’s (1881–86) Liberal government steamrollered
anticlerical legislation through a Liberal-dominated Congress. Engineered through the
legislature by Minister of Interior José Manuel Balmaceda, laws establishing secular
cemeteries, civil marriage, and civil registry of births profoundly offended Conserva-
tive interests, now in a decided though still influential minority. The latter, losers in the
congressional debates, would not lose the opportunity to avenge themselves when Bal-
maceda took office as president and faced Chile’s worst political crisis of the nineteenth
century. Santa María’s government also extended the suffrage to all literate, adult
males—and then intervened in congressional elections in the most overt fashion to se-
cure a compliant legislature. In power, liberals like Santa María proved just as enam-
oured of presidential discretion and just as likely to abuse presidential power as any of
the Conservative or National party presidents of the mid-nineteenth century. Such in-
consistency between action and previously proclaimed principles divided the Liberals
into numerous factions and personalist cliques based upon animosity toward Santa
María, Balmaceda, or other government ministers, the desire for a public post, or ideo-
logical commitment to particular reforms.
Santa María’s choice of Balmaceda as his successor—and the knowledge that
through presidential intervention in the elections Santa María could impose his
choice—totally disrupted the Congress. An alliance of independent Liberals, or sueltos,
Conservatives, and Radicals tried to obstruct passage of the tax bill that permitted the
government to collect revenues to carry out its program. The opposition sought in this
way to persuade Santa María to withdraw his support for Balmaceda. Though they
failed to carry the day, this action set the tone for Balmaceda’s difficulties in his next
five years as Chile’s president. If Santa María’s own authoritarian bent as president
seemed to conflict with his liberal record in Congress, Balmaceda’s confrontation with
Congress would be even more ironic inasmuch as throughout his long and distin-
guished public career he had been a champion of the parliamentary system and espe-
cially of congressional checks on the executive.
President Balmaceda took office at a time when public revenues were increasing
dramatically as a result of the nitrate duties. Between 1886 and 1890 government rev-
enues rose from 37 million pesos to over 58 million. Although Conservatives criticized
the government for its failure to re-establish the convertibility of the Chilean currency,
Balmaceda’s policy of investing the windfall nitrate revenues in social and transport in-
frastructure, public works, and education produced quite positive results. Despite a
general prosperity and visible evidences of the government’s progress in realizing its
program, personal rancor and political infighting over ministries and patronage weak-
ened Balmaceda’s coalition. Formation of a new political party, the Partido Demócrata
(1887), to support artisan and working-class demands, and a wave of violent urban
protests in 1888–89 hinted at the intensification of the “social question” in the 1890s. At
the same time the President faced a number of issues concerning the financial manip-
ulations of John T. North and other entrepreneurs in the northern provinces.
From 1888 on Balmaceda delivered a number of ominous speeches hinting at an in-
creased state role in the nitrate industry or, at the least, at an effort to enlarge the role
of national producers in the nitrate regions. In March 1889, Balmaceda traveled to the
northern provinces. At Iquique the president publicly blamed foreign monopolists in
control of the nitrate railroad and nitrate production for difficulties in the industry. He
also stated that the state ought not to create an industrial monopoly but should prevent
156 CHILE

private monopolies from controlling production or restricting output. In short, Bal-

maceda sought to defend the government’s stake in the revenues of the nitrate indus-
try and to encourage further national investment without injuring the rights of foreign
investors. In addition, he sought to balance the conflicting pressures from a variety of
British firms and their Chilean supporters and retainers, including congressmen and
cabinet members seeking new nitrate, railroad, and commercial concessions.
Other voices in Chile called for more radical measures, including complete nation-
alization of the nitrate industry. But Balmaceda himself never made this proposal or
supported it. In his annual address to Congress in June 1889, Balmaceda proposed pub-
lic auctions of certain state-owned nitrate fields limited to Chilean bidders. The presi-
dent further recommended that foreign purchase of nitrate properties be limited to
one-half of new concessions. Though certainly nationalistic in orientation, this policy
proposal—never adopted by Congress—hardly constituted an attack on existing for-
eign investment in nitrates or exclusion of further foreign participation in the nitrate in-
dustry. And though certain historians see in Balmaceda a “decided antiimperialist,”
Balmaceda never took actions considered universally hostile to foreign investment in
Chile. Indeed, in a manner of questionable propriety, he supported the associations of
certain of his congressional adherents with foreign interests. On the other hand, Bal-
maceda’s commitment to a program of internal modernization and national develop-
ment depended upon a continuous flow of nitrate revenues, and he certainly opposed
any private program that might artificially restrict nitrate production and hence de-
crease the government’s ability to finance public programs. In this sense, the interests
of the large British investors sometimes directly conflicted with those of the Chilean
state and the policies of the incumbent government. Despite Balmaceda’s careful ac-
tions in regard to foreign investment, his public statements made British interests wary,
thereby creating powerful potential allies for the president’s domestic adversaries.
Toward the end of 1889 the nitrate industry again faced a situation of surplus; stock-
piling began, and prices declined. It looked as though another producers’ “combina-
tion” would form to withhold production until the adverse market reversed itself. Bal-
maceda’s government not only sought to avert this development and prevent layoffs,
but also moved against John North’s Nitrate Railway Company which monopolized
nitrate hauling in Tarapacá. The government correctly recognized the burden on the
industry of the monopoly prices charged by the Nitrate Railway, and therefore entered
into negotiation with other entrepreneurs for the construction of other nitrate lines. Sig-
nificantly, the greatest threat to North’s railway came from the potential competition of
other British investors, including the long-established commercial house of Gibbs and
Sons.
When the government canceled the Nitrate Railway’s monopoly concession, and
entered into negotiations with Campbell, Outram and Company to construct a railroad
from the oficina of Agua Santa to Caleta Buena, the Nitrate Railway interests appealed
the decision in an effort to preserve their economic dominance in the region. President
Balmaceda’s Council of State ruled against the Nitrate Railway. North’s company
claimed that the executive had exceeded his constitutional authority, in that appeal of
the monopoly concession was a matter for the courts. Influential domestic political op-
ponents of Balmaceda supported North’s constitutional arguments as further ammu-
nition in the struggle against the president, though this did not necessarily mean sup-
port for the Nitrate Railway’s monopoly. Nitrate Railway interests, playing on the
executive-legislative tensions to press their claims, sent a memorandum to the Senate
calling upon that body to hold Balmaceda accountable for violations of the constitu-
tion. Not only did this controversy intensify internal political dissension, but North’s
NITRATE 157

allies persuaded the British Foreign Office to raise the matter with the Chilean foreign
minister despite objections by competing British companies within Chile. British diplo-
matic pressure added to Balmaceda’s woes.
The complexity of the situation increased still further with the upcoming presiden-
tial elections of 1891, the spread of labor conflicts across the nitrate fields, and the de-
teriorating economic situation. Balmaceda, despite public disclaimers,seemed to favor
as his successor a personal friend and wealthy landowner, Enrique Salvador San-
fuentes. Despite election reforms in the 1870s, the overriding influence of the president,
in congressional elections as well as presidential elections, continued unabated. This
meant that presidential blessing and mobilization of the presidential electoral appara-
tus generally guaranteed victories at the polls. Illustrative is a letter to Balmaceda in
1890 from a would-be congressional candidate, cited by Harold Blakemore in his bril-
liant study British Nitrates and Chilean Politics 1886–1896.
I recollect that Your Excellency told me to write to you when I thought it was time for
my re-election to the Deputies, and since I think that time has now come, I take the lib-
erty of writing to Your Excellency to say that I wish to continue in my post as Deputy
for the next period, with the sole aim of serving Your Excellency’s policies at all times
and with the same loyalty as always and with the unshakeable resolve of not missing
a single day of the sessions.
Once elected, of course, the president could neither control the deputy’s actions nor
guarantee his loyalty—as Balmaceda discovered. Nevertheless, the president’s control
over elections through the cabinet, the intendants, and the governors, made selection
of ministers and administrative officials prior to elections of primordial political sig-
nificance. Since Sanfuentes counted numerous personal enemies among his Liberal col-
leagues, Balmaceda’s ministerial appointments from 1889 on were subjected to ever
more intense congressional scrutiny.
Partisan politics couched in the rhetoric of fundamental constitutional issues con-
cerning presidential authority polarized the opposing forces. Policy regarding the vola-
tile nitrate economy pushed the opposing factions toward violent confrontation. The
president came to view interpellation or censure of his ministers—a practice well-
established by this time and strongly supported by Balmaceda during his legislative ca-
reer—as antipatriotic or “political” attacks on his program for national development.
Gradually Balmaceda hardened his position against congressional manipulation, act-
ing ever less diplomatically toward the growing number of congressional critics. In
January 1890 the president closed the special session of Congress and appointed a new
cabinet without reference to party alignments in the legislature. Contrary to custom, he
refused to reconvene the Congress upon the appropriate request by the Comisión Con-
servadora of the legislature. When the next ordinary session of Congress convened in
June 1890, Balmaceda’s message to it focused mainly upon the need to reverse the trend
toward weakening of the executive authority by a “bastard parliamentary system” that
led to “the dictatorship of Congress.” These remarks and the particulars of the presi-
dent’s reform proposals represented a direct attack upon the very principles liberal
politicians, including Balmaceda, had fought for since the 1830s.
Three days later the Senate overwhelmingly censured Balmaceda’s cabinet, headed
by Enrique Sanfuentes; the Chamber of Deputies took similar action on June 7, 1890. In
a move totally without precedent, Balmaceda refused to accept the resignation of his
ministers, and Congress countered with the now traditional device of refusing to dis-
cuss the law authorizing tax collection until the president had appointed ministers ac-
ceptable to the legislature. Balmaceda persisted in his refusal, and tensions mounted.
158 CHILE

Only mediation by the archbishop of Santiago brought a temporary compromise in Au-

gust, with the appointment of a Supreme Court judge to head the cabinet.
Precisely as the political crisis heightened, a cyclical downturn in the nitrate indus-
try fueled discontent among workers in the northern provinces. Continued monetary
inflation reduced the workers’ real income as prices rose, and unemployment even
threatened subsistence. Isolated incidents of violence and work stoppages had re-
flected growing dissatisfaction among the workers between 1884 and 1889. In early
July 1890 a strike by dockworkers in Iquique spread to rail and foundry workers, the
mines at Huantajaya, throughout the nitrate pampa, north to Pisagua and south to
Antofagasta. The workers’ petitions varied from one work site to another, but typically
they demanded an end to payment in company scrip, monthly cash settlements in sil-
ver or the equivalent in currency, freedom of commerce in the nitrate fields and mining
camps (an end to monopolies by the company store), and elimination of the arbitrary
fines or discounts from their wages which the companies imposed. For the first time in
Chilean history workers carried off a “general strike” that threatened production from
Tarapacá to the coal fields of Concepción.
Balmaceda received urgent appeals from employers in Tarapacá to use troops to re-
store order. Initially hesitant to intervene and seemingly supportive of the workers’
demands in his public pronouncements, Balmaceda nevertheless dispatched warships
with troops to the north. Violence, looting, and repression by company police or sol-
diers in some oficinas left dozens of casualties; at other locations the strike evolved more
or less peacefully. Within ten days employers agreed to most of the workers’ demands,
thereby ending the strike—though in most of the oficinas and the cities employers failed
to live up to their promises. Having temporarily squelched the strike by agreeing to
meet the workers’ terms, the employers gained time for the troops to arrive and deploy
themselves. The presence of military units discouraged the workers’ further efforts to
revive the conflict, though it spread as far north as Arica and south to Valparaíso.
In the port of Valparaíso rioting and extensive looting brought harsh reprisals from
police and military units sent from Santiago. Other military units arriving from Con-
cepción stifled militancy in the coal mines, but lesser movements or isolated incidents
of violence occurred at Quillota, Los Andes, Santiago, and Talca. With the restoration
of order employers across the nation fired leaders of the strike movement and reinsti-
tuted the traditional practices on the work sites against which the workers had
protested. A glut of nitrate stocks in relation to world demand allowed employers to
rid themselves of “undesirable” laborers at the same time as negotiations continued to
establish another “combination” to depress output until market conditions improved.
The timing of the labor crisis—Chile’s first experience with a truly national, if spon-
taneous, labor movement—coincided exactly with the political crisis between Bal-
maceda and Congress. According to the 1833 constitution, Congress had to authorize
tax collection every eighteen months. Refusal to authorize tax collections left the gov-
ernment, in theory, without revenues to carry on its daily operations. Instead, Bal-
maceda responded by notifying banks with government deposits held at thirty days’
notice of intended withdrawal, to consider these accounts henceforth as “deposit ac-
counts on call.” This measure startled the financial community and escalated further
the conflict with Congress. Feelings were so polarized that it became difficult to re-
member that the supposed issue at stake remained Balmaceda’s refusal to accept con-
gressional demands that he appoint a new cabinet.
By this time the opposition attacked Balmaceda’s increasingly “dictatorial” and un-
constitutional behavior, while Balmaceda reacted with insults in kind concerning the
opposition’s lack of patriotism and their political motivation. Seeking to create a per-
NITRATE 159

sonalist political machine apart from the old Liberal party upon which he could no
longer rely, Balmaceda entangled himself in the jealousies and intrigues of local poli-
tics and patronage. Naturally the single most important issue continued to be designa-
tion of his successor, and this gave added importance to the distribution of patronage
around the country and the appointment of “reliable” administrators in the provinces.
Balmaceda proved unable to negotiate an acceptable compromise with the opposi-
tion. Progressively bitter charges of antinationalist, unpatriotic activities punctuated
the running battle with the growing legislative opposition. Throughout the entire year
of 1890, Congress refused to pass the budget bill or to authorize force levels for the mil-
itary. Undaunted, the president illegally decreed that the 1890 legislation would remain
in effect. In quick response to this overtly unconstitutional act, Congress called upon
capitán de navío Jorge Montt and the navy to support it against the president’s usurpa-
tion of power. The fleet sailed north to occupy Iquique and gain control of the nitrate
revenues for the congressional insurrectionists. Balmaceda, who had the loyalty of
most of the regular army, imposed a state of siege, instituted highly repressive policies
against the press, and suspended civil liberties in an effort to suffocate the rebellion.
Civil war continued for seven months with severe losses on both sides. Ultimately,
control of the nitrate revenues, financial and material support by British and other for-
eign interests, and the military advice of Emil Körner left congressional forces victori-
ous. Congressional agents successfully delayed arrival of two new ironclads the gov-
ernment had ordered from France, and obtained Mannlicher repeating rifles which
helped carry the day for the congressional army. Ironically, the nitrate revenues Bal-
maceda had counted on to carry out his development program bought arms and equip-
ment abroad for his enemies. The congressional army, recruited largely among the ni-
trate workers, received training under the direction of the Prussian officer contracted
by presidents Santa María and Balmaceda to modernize Chile’s army and defend the
newly acquired nitrate regions. Since railroad construction in the north had been dom-
inated by private interests, the civil war found Santiago unconnected to the north by a
longitudinal rail line. Defection of most of the navy, which had received large amounts
of money from the Balmaceda government for modernization, prevented Balmaceda
from transporting sufficient forces north to overcome the insurgents. After his army
was defeated at Concon and Placilla by an amphibious assault directed by Körner and
a number of Chile’s new professional, Prussian-trained officers, Balmaceda took refuge
in the Argentine embassy. He left in charge in Santiago General Baquedano, the hero of
the War of the Pacific, who had remained neutral in the civil war. The day after his pres-
idential term ended—September 19, 1891—Balmaceda shot himself. In October, Jorge
Montt was elected Balmaceda’s successor, and Chilean politics entered a new era of
congressional dominance.

The outcome of the civil war shifted the balance of Chilean politics from the executive
to the Congress but did little to change the nation’s dependence on nitrates. Population
in the northern provinces more than doubled between 1885 and 1907; workers traveled
from the norte chico, the central valley, and even further south to seek their fortune in
the nitrate fields. Average levels of employment in the nitrate fields jumped impres-
sively from nearly 6500 in the 1880s to almost 50,000 between 1910 and 1920. Cyclic
downturns continued to inflict periodic depression, shutdowns, attempts to form pro-
duction cartels, and massive unemployment. Economic depression between 1896 and
1897 saw nitrate production reduced to 40 percent of capacity. Large-scale unemploy-
ment followed. Financial panic associated with the government’s unsuccessful experi-
ment with a return to convertible currency (1895–98) and increased defense expendi-
160 CHILE

tures—25 percent of the budget—exacerbated the crisis, but still only provided a rela-
tively mild hint of the more severe crises that would occur during the next three
decades of nitrate dependence. As the labor force increased, the misery inflicted by the
downturns of the economy became more severe. Instead of 5000 jobless workers, the
nation now periodically faced the desperation of tens of thousands of laborers tem-
porarily without work, means of subsistence, or domicile. The workers retained by the
companies experienced wage cuts.
The linkage of the nitrate economy to the agriculture of the central valley and the
Concepción–frontier region further integrated the regional economies into a national
economy. Downturns in nitrate affected agriculture, coal mines, commerce, and a slowly
growing industrial sector. Led by food and primary product-processing firms—canner-
ies, flour mills, breweries, match factories, sugar refineries—along with foundries, ce-
ment, and even a nascent locomotive works, Chilean industry expanded during the last
decade of the nineteenth century and into the first years of the twentieth. Forty percent
of Chilean factories in 1895 dated from no earlier than 1890—almost 60 percent of these
were located in Santiago or Valparaíso. Imported technologies made some of Chile’s
new industries—for example, cement, modernized flour mills, and wineries as efficient,
by the first decades of the twentieth century, as any in the world. Increasingly integrated
in their economic relationships, domestic firms produced input—alcohol, wood, paper,
containers—for other national industries as well as consumer articles for the growing
cities and nitrate districts. Moderate protective tariffs adopted in the 1890s reflected the
effective lobbying by industrial interests like the SFF and the growing concern of certain
Chileans to make Chile an industrial country. The Errázuriz Echaurren administration
(1896–1901) also directed its ministries to give preference to Chilean manufactures in
public projects, so long as domestic manufacturers charged no more than 10 to 15 per-
cent more than foreign competitors.
Urbanization in the years after 1885 increased Valparaíso’s population to over
120,000 and that of Santiago to more than 250,000 by the turn of the century. Iquique
grew into a bustling nitrate port of 33,000 inhabitants, and Antofagasta’s population
rose to 14,000. Housing, sanitation, and public-health conditions in the growing urban
concentrations remained sorely inadequate. Feeble government responses to smallpox
epidemics in the early 1880s and to a catastrophic cholera epidemic in 1888, which ac-
cording to official estimates took over 30,000 lives, reflected both the sorry state of
public-health programs and the incapacity of the Chilean state to respond effectively to
the problems of an urbanizing, modernizing society.
To the south, rural migrants continued their exodus out of the countryside to Con-
cepción, Talcahuano, and Talca. By 1907 the Chilean census classified 43 percent of the
population as urban. Though the crude definition of “urban”—as concentrations over
1000—gives a somewhat misleading impression, it cannot be denied that ever more
Chileans were potential customers for Chilean agriculture and manufacturers as they
left the rural estates and settled in towns, mining camps, or nitrate fields. And it was to
this internal market that Chilean manufacturers largely dedicated their attentions. Of
the total value of exports in 1900 (162 million pesos), only 3.3 million corresponded to
manufactures—less than wealthy Chileans spent on imported perfume, jewelry, liquor,
and fine textiles.
If nitrates brought uncertainty to the Chilean economy and much of the labor force,
it also brought great wealth to a small number of capitalists and stock speculators. It al-
lowed Chilean governments to avoid serious examination of the internal tax structure
and to eliminate taxes on wealth or income. Balmaceda himself proposed abolition of
the income and inheritance taxes introduced in the late 1870s. Nitrate financed public
NITRATE 161

works, railroad construction, private mansions, and construction of irrigation canals

for Chile’s agricultural heartland. The nitrate industry’s expansion generated second-
ary and support industries in the north and in the central valley and also provided a
market for Chilean agriculture and coal mines while stimulating coastal shipping.
More than anything else, however, the nitrate industry altered the character of the
Chilean labor force. The conditions in the nitrate fields spawned an increasingly mili-
tant labor movement which carried its struggle against exploitation south to the coun-
tryside and the cities. The plight of the northern work force became a platform for po-
litical reformers and a school of leadership for a new generation of labor leaders.
A select group of Chilean intellectuals joined the battle with short stories, novels,
and plays depicting the misery of Chile’s masses in contrast to the decadence and
pedantry of the nation’s political elite and the splendor of the manor house on the ha-
cienda or the urban mansion of the northern mining magnates. Publication of Casa
Grande in 1908—by a member of Chile’s oligarchy who scathingly attacked the charac-
ter of his brethren—and of Sinceridad: Chile íntimo en 1910—by a schoolteacher writing
under the pseudonym Dr. Julio Valdés Cange—focused attention in Chile upon the re-
ality of what became known as the “social question.”
The “social question” or “workers’ question” by any other name still meant indus-
trial class conflict combined with serious concern by some Chilean leaders with mass
poverty, educational backwardness, and the whole range of issues associated with so-
cial and economic development. The War of the Pacific and the nitrate economy had
ushered Chile into the industrial age. Unfortunately the civil war of 1891 reaffirmed the
oligarchic tradition of Chilean politics, even reinvigorated the power of central valley
landowners with legislation granting municipal autonomy and extending responsibil-
ity to local government for administration of congressional and presidential elections.
The contradiction between the politics of parliamentary stalemate, and the evolution of
an industrial labor movement influenced by imported socialist and Marxist ideology,
would undermine the political system created by the 1833 constitution and radically
alter class relations. Finally, in the 1920s this process would culminate in a military
coup d’état when Chilean parliamentary government would prove unable to confront
head on the reality of twentieth-century industrial society.
7 Politics, Labor, and the Social Question

In 1927, thirty-six years after congressional forces imposed parliamentary government

upon Chile, José Manuel Balmaceda’s son presented the presidential sash worn by his
martyred father to an ambitious military officer named Carlos Ibáñez. Balmaceda’s son
delivered an emotional speech, claiming that Ibáñez represented the “perfect incarna-
tion” of Balmacedismo—the principles for which his father had died.
Whether or not Ibáñez rightfully belonged to the tradition of Balmaceda or sympa-
thized beyond convenient political rhetoric with Balmaceda’s programs of the late
1880s, he explicitly rejected the interminable, parliamentary squabbles and the restric-
tions on executive authority that had frustrated his predecessors. More than had any
Chilean president since the era of Portales, Ibáñez returned to Hispanic authoritarian-
ism and condemned the imported liberalism that dominated Chilean political life in the
late nineteenth and early twentieth century.
A prominent military officer trained in the Prussian tradition established in Chile by
Emil Körner, Ibáñez led a new generation of Chilean military officers who despised
parliamentary practices, politicians, and, above all else, politics. They blamed politics
for Chile’s economic problems, for the increasing class conflict, for the corruption and
venality of public life, and for all else that ailed the nation. These views were epito-
mized in 1924 by a Chilean officer writing to a civilian government minister:
Even though you, at this time and place, represent for us the most disgusting element
in our country—politicians—that is, all that is corrupt, the dismal factional disputes,
depravities and immoralities, in other words, the causes of our national degeneration,
we recognize that you, despite the fact that you must defend sinecures, hand out
public posts, and support avaricious ambitions, that you are one of the few honest
politicians.

If the sentence was long, the sentiments it expressed reflected the frustration of the pro-
fessional military with more than three decades of congressional neglect of Chile’s
most pressing problems. It also expressed the utter contempt for politics and politicians
held by the military and by Chile’s growing class of technicians and professional peo-
ple. The professional military nurtured by Balmaceda’s successors through the first
decade of the twentieth century (and then neglected, to the Congress’s ultimate regret)
would no longer tolerate the sterile politics of salon, intrigue, and immobility that had
both weakened the military institution and made the armed forces shock troops for oli-
garchical repression.
Whatever the objections to Ibáñez’ dictatorial regime, it is easy to understand the
disdain of a moralistic professional soldier for the type of political system that func-
tioned in Chile after 1891. Even apart from the immediate issues of 1924 prior to the
September 5 coup that brought the military into the government—Congress’s decision
to pay its representatives a salary contrary to constitutional prohibitions, while salaries
due civil servants and military personnel were in arrears; its constant meddling in mil-

162
POLITICS, LABOR, AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION 163

itary personnel matters; its failure to pass social legislation in the midst of growing
labor conflict—Ibáñez and his followers could no longer brook the political charade
called parliamentary government in Chile.
Manuel Rivas Vicuña, one of the country’s most respected politicians—and eventual
political enemy of Ibáñez—captured the fundamental character of the Chilean political
process during the post-1891 years. He described his “Election Memories of 1918”:
Would I again have a seat in Congress? We could hardly wait for the train to arrive in
Curicó.
What happened here?—I asked the first person I encountered in the station.
The same as usual, patrón, the bosses [ futres] got together and stole the money sent
by the government for the elections.
Afterward I found out from my friends that an agreement had been reached. My
name and that of the Conservative candidate had triumphed without opposition; they
had made no use of the blank check that I left in the event of an electoral struggle, and
they had made only small payments to the voters.
The bosses had stolen the money sent by the government for the elections.
I’ve been lucky to avoid the necessity of buying votes for my campaigns. I’ve had
no competition the four times I was elected deputy, and my friends generously took
care of my electoral expenses.
The general rule, I’ve been assured, is the opposite and reveals that from the
worker to the great proprietors, all believe that elections are a business that provide
those elected not just with honor but also with [material] benefit.
Vote buying [cohecho] is a habit so deeply rooted it will be very difficult to eradi-
cate.
The men who acquired offices in the Congress through vote buying debated inter-
minably while Chilean society underwent profound socio-economic changes. In 1915
an ex-president of the Federation of Chilean University Students gave a funeral oration
for the nation’s political leaders—at the end of a presidential term in which President
Ramón Barros Luco told his compatriots that “there are only two types of problem:
those without solution and those that solve themselves.” The military intervention of
1924 and Ibáñez’ authoritarian regime (1927–31) were reactions to this type of political
thinking and to the politics of parliamentary stalemate.
Ibáñez’ usurpation of presidential authority and subordination of Congress also
temporarily halted more positive trends during the parliamentary period—institution-
alization of respect for civil liberties and political liberalization in the Chilean polity.
Whatever the defects of the parliamentary period, it had allowed for the evolution of
freedom of the press, for a growing, if not complete, recognition of the legitimacy of op-
position movements and parties, and for a formal respect for the procedures of liberal
democracy. Despite electoral corruption and empty political rhetoric, along with Con-
gress’s failure to deal with pressing social issues, the country’s political institutions
permitted expanded suffrage and a more open pattern of recruitment to public office.
The military intervention of 1924 and the subsequent Ibáñez administration not only
temporarily ended this trend toward political liberalization, but it represented a resur-
gence of the traditional Hispanic intolerance for liberalism, intensified by a military
ideology of national regeneration.

In 1887 the recently organized Partido Demócrata brought a new political ideology and
style into Chilean politics. Led by Malaquías Concha, the party proclaimed as its ob-
jectives “political, economic, and social liberation of the people [pueblo]” and proposed
164 CHILE

numerous reforms, including direct election of the president, municipal administration

of the departments (eliminating the presidentially appointed governors), taxes on land
and capital, compulsory public education, and support for industrialization through
protective tariffs. Appealing especially to artisans and the lower middle class, the party
also promoted policies designed to improve the lot of the urban poor.
The Partido Demócrata evolved as Chile’s first populist political party, electing its
first deputy to Congress in 1894. By 1903, it had obtained representation from Val-
paraíso, Santiago, and Concepción. The most progressive elements within the Partido
Demócrata later emerged as leaders of the ever more militant labor organizations of the
cities, the nitrate and mining camps, and the southern coal mines, as well as of the So-
cialist Workers Party (POS) formed in 1912. The party sponsored mass rallies, sup-
ported the workers’ press and cultural centers, and generally provided a legitimate
voice of political opposition on behalf of the working classes. Though it never became
a truly proletarian-based organization and continued to recruit its leadership from ar-
tisans and the middle class, the Partido Demócrata nevertheless challenged the as-
sumptions and policies of the landowning, commercial, and industrial interests that
dominated Chilean politics.
The hypocrisy and the contradictions of the parliamentary era permitted greater lat-
itude for political and social organization by workers and the urban poor than could
have occurred under a more authoritarian civilian regime or a military government.
Chilean elites believed themselves to be progressive. With the exception of the Conser-
vatives who insisted still on the prerogatives of the Church or opposed universal edu-
cation, they identified with the civil libertarian tradition of Britain. After all, Congress
had only recently won a victory for liberty against the threat of executive tyranny! The
constant changeovers of cabinets, punctuated by acrimonious debates in the legislature
and the press, provided a milieu in which the political system could usually tolerate the
worker press and even moderate representatives of the working class. This did not
mean acceptance of all elected representatives of the working class. The Congress re-
fused to seat Luis Emilio Recabarren, the most important labor leader in the country,
after his electoral victory in 1906, on the pretext that he refused to swear the customary
oath. One deputy commented that “even if it were not strictly in accord with justice to
expel Mr. Recabarren from the Chamber, it would be necessary to do so for social
morality . . . since it is not tolerable that the ideas of social dissolution sustained by
Mr. Recabarren be represented in the Chamber.” Nevertheless, the parliamentary sys-
tem did allow increased political influence for middle-class and provincial interests.
Before the parliamentary era ended (1924), Recabarren and other self-declared revolu-
tionaries had also gained seats in the Congress.
Parliamentary politics tended to diffuse and weaken governmental authority. The
multiplicity of political parties and factions and the electoral reforms that placed su-
pervision of elections and registration in the hands of 267 “autonomous” municipal ad-
ministrations, decentralized national politics. The Congress became a creature of local
political machines which were frequently dominated by landowners, mining interests,
or industrialists in accord with the economy of each congressional district. Executive
intervention through use of the police or military could still influence electoral out-
comes, but generally money to buy votes became much more important than naked
force. In these respects the Chilean political system shared the corruption that accom-
panied expansion of the suffrage and democratization throughout most of the Western
world, though expansion of the suffrage came much more slowly in Chile than in the
United States or Argentina. As late as 1920, only 5 percent of the population cast ballots
despite electoral reforms in 1874 and 1888 that removed property qualifications and ex-
POLITICS, LABOR, AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION 165

tended the vote to adult, literate males. Still, dishonesty in public life and patronage as
a principal instrument of assembling and maintaining local political machines reached
no more distressing levels in Chile than it did in the United States or Argentina during
the same period.
Unlike the United States, in Chile no wave of immigrants served the elite as urban
“voting cattle”; government remained largely in the hands of a small clique of “politi-
cal families” with aristocratic pretensions and a political base in the countryside—in an
increasingly complex urbanizing society. Overt military intervention in Chilean poli-
tics in 1924 and the subsequent Ibáñez dictatorship (1927–31) meant, above all else, an
end to an era in Chilean national life when socio-economic changes moved the country
rapidly into the twentieth century, yet political leaders clung to a bastardized version
of imported nineteenth-century liberalism.

No other problem so dominated Chilean development after 1891—and received so lit-

tle meaningful attention by Chilean political leaders—than the continued growth of the
urban and industrial proletariat and the intensified struggle between labor and capital
called the “social question.” Modest but persistent industrial growth in Chile from the
1890s until the world depression of the 1930s gradually increased the number of work-
ers employed in factories, workshops, construction industries, and other urban man-
ual jobs. This urban working class remained unprotected by social legislation or a
strong labor movement.
Liberal philosophical and economic doctrine current in Europe and transplanted to
Chile condemned associations of workingmen that attempted to negotiate collective
agreements with employers as contrary to “liberty” and the “right to work.” In Eng-
land, where the Industrial Revolution first made itself felt and gave rise to the social
question, laws against workers’ “combinations” and repression of labor organizations
were the common reaction by government and employers to labor activism. Only after
years of organized struggle, protests, violence, and the resultant political reform did
the English working classes obtain legislation that limited the duration of the work day,
protected child labor, set minimum wages, or guaranteed the right of organization.
As the industrial age advanced, the same type of struggle eventually developed in
the rest of Europe, the United States, and Latin America. Thus the social question in
Chile, as in the rest of the Western world, consisted of political, social, and economic is-
sues derived from the technological and demographic effects of industrialization dur-
ing the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Prior to 1924 Chilean laws provided no institutionalized procedure for dealing with
conflicts between worker and employer. In theory a worker sought employment from
an individual employer and came to an agreement concerning wages, conditions of
work, and length of employment. Each worker had to reach his or her own agreement
with the employer. No collective agreement or written contract existed, and prevailing
custom defined as subversive strikes or work stoppages. According to this classic lib-
eral interpretation of the worker-employer relation, the worker could freely come and
go as he or she pleased, and could work or not work, depending upon the attractive-
ness of the employment offered. Likewise employers, competing for workers in the free
labor market, would offer conditions of work and sufficient pay to attract and retain
workers.
In reality, of course, this highly idealized conception of the labor market—imbued
with the legitimacy of prevailing law and enforced as necessary by the police or the
military from country to country—ignored the tendency for industrial ownership to
become gradually more concentrated, for owners of factories to cooperate in holding
166 CHILE

down wages, and for the threat of unemployment in the cities to pose a life-and-death
dilemma for the growing proletariat.
This liberal formulation also failed to recognize that the extensive political influence
of the propertied classes had shaped the laws restricting labor organization but allow-
ing employers’ associations that effectively lobbied legislatures and administrators in
their own behalf. For example, the Sociedad de Fomento Fabril (SFF) in Chile, which
opposed labor organizations and collective labor agreements, attempted to protect its
own interests with constant lobbying for protective tariffs. Its members also were sent
to Congress, staffed government bureaucracies, or acted as ministers of state. Between
1883 and 1930, 36 percent of the association’s executive council members served as con-
gressmen, senators, or ministers of state. During the same period the monopolistic or
oligopolistic structure characteristic of Chilean industry in the 1990s had begun to
emerge. By 1918, 3.3 percent of all manufacturing firms employed 43.2 percent of man-
ual workers in industry. A small number of firms dominated most of the important
manufacturing sectors, including textiles, sugar, breweries, wineries, foundries, to-
bacco, cement, paper, glass and bottles, chemicals, vegetable oils, and coal. Collusive
marketing and supply agreements reinforced the lack of competition as the larger firms
attempted to freeze potential competitors out of the market. In a fashion compatible
with both Hispanic and the liberal capitalism of the late nineteenth century, Chilean en-
trepreneurs sought to eliminate competition throughout the economy except in the
labor market. Here they enthusiastically accepted the principles of British liberalism
long after the advent of labor legislation and the recognition of the legitimacy of labor
organizations in Britain. Although the industrialists strongly supported protective tar-
iffs, government subsidies, monopoly profits, and influential industrial associations
working closely with the government, they staunchly opposed organized collective ac-
tion on the part of workers to improve their living conditions or to demand higher
wages.
Likewise, Chile’s wealthiest landowners, organized in the National Agricultural So-
ciety (SNA) since 1869, actively lobbied to restrict the negative effects of “free trade” on
cattle interests. Highly influential in Chilean politics—from 1873 to 1901, 25 to 33 per-
cent of the members of Congress belonged to the SNA—the landowners sponsored leg-
islation in 1888 to establish a protective tariff on imported cattle. Landowners thus
hoped to insulate Chilean cattle producers against the more modern cattle industry of
Argentina. The proposed legislation indirectly provided incentives for landowners to
revert land to pasture, even as the country proved unable to supply sufficient food-
stuffs at reasonable prices to feed the growing cities and northern mining districts.
The cattle tax issue infuriated the leadership of the newly formed Partido Demó-
crata and became a symbolic rallying point for lower-class protests against the general
inflation which was eroding an already precarious standard of living. Landowners re-
sponded that the lower classes ate little meat anyway and that in any case beans were
healthier. A wave of protests and strikes in Santiago and the provinces, along with the
other issues facing the Balmaceda government in 1888–89, led to withdrawal of the pro-
posed cattle tax by its sponsors. A decade later, however, the landowners successfully
put through legislation that imposed a duty on imported cattle in conjunction with the
protective tariffs supported by the SFF for manufactured goods. Meat prices rose con-
siderably from 1897 to 1902 amidst continual political conflict over a “tax on poor peo-
ple’s stomachs.” Finally, in late October 1905, urban unrest related to the spiraling in-
flation culminated in two days of mob violence, looting, and destruction. This period,
known since then as the “Red Week,” found the army out of Santiago on maneuvers.
To put down the violence the government and private groups distributed arms to
POLITICS, LABOR, AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION 167

members of Chile’s most prestigious social club, the Club de la Unión, and to youths
from elite families. These white guards massacred hundreds of people in the streets of
Santiago. The SNA and other social leaders blamed the riots on agitators “stirring up
class hatred.” In reality, as the movement developed, usurious merchants, retail shops,
and other symbols of the exploitation and deprivation of the poor, all felt the sponta-
neous wrath of the urban underclass.
Despite the events of October 1905, the cattle tax remained in effect until the eco-
nomic crisis of 1907, when the government “suspended” its operation for two years.
Congress reinstituted the cattle tax in December 1909, and it remained in effect until
1918—when almost 50 percent of all congressmen owned large haciendas. Whatever
the real contribution of the cattle tax to increasing food prices and the widespread nu-
tritional deficiencies among the urban poor, its survival until the end of World War I re-
flected the influence of the SNA and the ambiguity of the Chilean elite’s commitment
to the “free market” of liberal doctrine. Though seasonal competition between agricul-
ture, public works, and the nitrate producers sometimes forced employers to sweeten
the pot, only the labor force was truly expected to compete in the “free” market—for
jobs!
By 1920 more Chileans worked in manufacturing than in the mining sector. Other
urban employment, in construction, commerce, services, on the docks, and in trans-
port, further enlarged the non-rural work force. It also added to the number of Chileans
out of the immediate influence of the owners of large rural estates. Manufacturing it-
self had achieved moderate diversification, although it still lacked heavy industry and
a significant capital goods sector. Diversification meant specialization of the work force
and a growing pool of skilled laborers. Urban life for these workers pitted them against
the continual inflation and periodic recessions generated in great part by the country’s
vulnerability to fluctuations in the nitrate market. These business cycles subjected
much of the labor force to a grinding poverty that contrasted markedly with the pros-
perity and economic modernization that surrounded them.
Workers saw the palatial mansions of Santiago politicians and their extended fami-
lies, along with the evident affluence of the new industrial elites. Technological inno-
vations brought streetcars, automobiles, electric lights—even airplanes—to a nation
where the best urban transport only a decade earlier consisted of elegant horse-drawn
carriages. Workers could also not fail to notice the overwhelming influence of immi-
grants and their offspring in the nation’s new factories, for by the outbreak of World
War I foreign-born industrialists owned slightly more than half of all the country’s
manufacturing establishments, and foreigners filled more than half of the technical po-
sitions in industry.
Unlike the situation in neighboring Argentina, European immigrants did not swell
the ranks of Chile’s working classes. Whereas by 1914, some 40 percent of Argentina’s
agricultural labor force and 60 percent of the urban proletariat had been born abroad,
in 1907 only 1 percent of Chile’s rural labor force and fewer than 4 percent of industrial
workers were foreigners. This meant that before World War I the labor movement in
Chile was influenced far less by immigrant leadership and imported ideology than its
counterpart across the Andes. Chilean authorities and political leaders did sometimes
blame the labor agitation prior to the 1920s upon “waves of human scum thrown upon
our beaches by other countries,” but such hyperbole could not deceive government of-
ficials and employers who knew that the flow of immigrants to Chile hardly reached
“wave” proportions. Only after the Russian Revolution of 1917 did Chile pass a Resi-
dence Law (1918) allowing the government to forbid entry into the country or to deport
“foreigners who preached violent change in the social or political order.” In contrast,
168 CHILE

Argentina passed much harsher legislation in 1902 in response to a more serious par-
ticipation by immigrants in a growing labor movement. Even in 1918, however,
Chilean leaders, who wanted to use the immigrants as scapegoats for mounting social
tensions, had to admit that the leadership and the rank and file of the Chilean labor
movement, as well as of the socialist-oriented political movements, consisted over-
whelmingly of Chileans.

Historical treatments of the origins, character, and evolution of the Chilean labor move-
ment in the early nineteenth century remain fragmentary. Historian Sergio Grez’s
monumental study (De la ‘regeneración del pueblo’ a la huelga general, Génesis y evolución
histórica del movimiento popular en Chile, 1810–1890) of popular movements, social
protest, and labor conflicts lists numerous collective efforts by fisherman, artisans and
craftspeople, port workers, miners, peons, and other “workers” of many sorts to im-
prove working and living conditions through protests, strikes, “uprisings,” and even
minor rebellions from 1810 to 1890. Grez indicates that his list is “surely incomplete”
and suggests that until 1859 the most important movements involved miners, often in
“violent rebellions.” Artisans and craftsmen engaged in urban protest movements, de-
manding tariff protection against imported manufactures. Although rare, urban strikes
also occurred and increased in number from the 1860s. Violent protests and strikes in
the ports, mines, and sometimes other sectors typically elicited energetic government
repression, including deployment of military units and police as strike breakers and to
“restore order.”
These patterns persisted until the 1890s. Railroad construction and nascent indus-
trialization added railway and factory workers to the list of strikers and organized
labor. Typographers, tailors, carters, workers in the urban tramways and slaughter-
houses, and many others organized in mutual aid and artisan associations (organiza-
ciones mutualistas, sociedades de artesanos) and guilds (gremios) from the 1850s into the
1880s to defend their collective interests. These organizations became forerunners of a
modern labor union moment.
Incipient industrialization also incorporated women into the labor force, particu-
larly but not exclusively in the textile sector. Women also organized separate mutual
aid societies (sociedades obreras) in the major cities from the 1880s that eventually gave
rise to organizations dedicated to defending women’s rights and seeking to improve
their working conditions.
Efforts to identify the first strike by Chilean workers face insurmountable obstacles.
Chilean historians often cite the rebellion of miners at Chañarcillo in 1834 as a starting
point in the story of the Chilean labor movement, but this rebellion certainly had an-
tecedents in the northern mining camps of colonial times and the early national period.
Whatever the specific chronology of significant events in labor history, the sporadic,
spontaneous protests, rebellions, and strikes prior to the 1880s clearly preceded the
more integrated, politically significant movements of the parliamentary era. A study
published in 1971 by Manuel Barrera documented 299 strikes in Chile’s first century
(1810–1910) in addition to numerous other “movements, rebellions and incidents.” Of
the 299 strikes, only 42 occurred before 1890, while the remainder took place between
1901 and 1910. Even if this study underestimates the number of strikes before 1890, the
Chilean labor movement as an organized, militant, national socio-political force dates
essentially from the last decade of the nineteenth century.
Beginning with the general strike of 1890, described in Chapter 6, the Chilean labor
movement developed impressively, if unevenly, until World War I. A heterogeneous
collection of mutual aid societies, cooperatives, anarchist-oriented resistance societies,
and brotherhoods, or mancomunales, of the nitrate regions brought together thousands
POLITICS, LABOR, AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION 169

of workers in a struggle to better living conditions, to provide minimal levels of secu-

rity, or to petition Congress for legislation improving their lot. Tactics and objectives
varied from one organization to another. Many of the mutual aid societies limited their
attention to self-help efforts, such as burial expenses, and temporary relief in time of
unemployment, sickness, or disability. Sometimes, however, an organization that
began as a mutual aid society or a cultural group evolved into a more militant labor or-
ganization or engaged in explicitly political activities. In this sense, workers’ organiza-
tions constituted an extremely diversified agglomeration conforming to no unified
ideological, political, or social pattern. Paternalistic Conservative politicians, following
in the steps of the earlier Catholic workers’ circles of the 1870s, patronized the forma-
tion of Catholic workers’ clubs while anarchists, socialists, and Democrats spread con-
tradictory reformist and revolutionary propaganda among the workers.
The disunity of the workers’ organizations and their geographical separation did
not prevent the evolution of an increasingly hostile attitude among laborers toward
capitalists and landowners. Shortly after the civil war of 1891, with the general strike
of 1890 still fresh in mind, the leader of congressional forces and new Chilean presi-
dent, Vice Admiral Jorge Montt proposed legislation outlawing strikes and other dis-
ruptions of economic activity. In justifying the legislation to Congress, its authors noted
that “strikes promoted in the name of freedom to work are often the pretext adopted
by demagogues to disturb order, cause injury or ruin to industry and misery to the
workers.” Significantly, the Congress did not pass this legislation, perhaps indicating
an authentic commitment to freedom of association by certain parliamentary leaders,
despite their abhorrence of movements menacing the flow of nitrate revenues or pub-
lic order.
More important than legislative proposals, the Montt government moved to enlarge
the army and intensify the German-oriented modernization begun before the civil war.
In 1895 General Körner contracted thirty-six foreign officers (33 Germans, 2 Swedes,
and 1 Dane) to serve as instructors in the Chilean army. Supported by calls from the
most influential newspapers to expand the armed forces in the nitrate districts to con-
vince the capitalists that the government would defend their property, as well as by the
still more reactionary attacks on the very legitimacy of any political party representing
lower-class interests, the Montt government acquired modern military hardware and
made clear its commitment to law and order. If border disputes with Argentina or
threats of renewed conflict with Peru and Bolivia were the main stimulus for modern-
izing the armed forces, in practice the Chilean labor movement became the principal
target of military operations.
Successive governments through the first decade of the twentieth century main-
tained this commitment; by 1902 the permanent army had grown to 17,500, compared
with its theoretical size of 2500 in 1879. The combination of a rapidly developing labor
movement, the resistance by the government and ruling classes to acknowledge the le-
gitimacy of such a movement, and a larger, modernizing military set the stage for a se-
ries of well-remembered tragedies that became symbols of struggle and forged a her-
itage of martyrdom for the modern Chilean labor movement. These include the
maritime strike in Valparaíso in 1903, the dockworkers’ strike in Antofagasta in 1906,
and the massacre of workers at Santa María de Iquique in 1907. Both the army and the
navy became instruments of repression of the labor movement.
Labor conflict and political crisis followed trends in the nitrate economy. Following
the general strike of 1890 and the subsequent civil war, the cyclic depressions of the ni-
trate industry, upon which the Chilean state increasingly depended for revenues, led to
the periodic unemployment of thousands of workers in the northern deserts. In turn,
the nitrate recessions caused economic downturns throughout the Chilean economy.
170 CHILE

table 7–1. workers in the nitrate industry

Year Workers Employed Year Workers Employed

1895 22,485 1923 41,099

1896 19,345 1924 59,649
1897 16,727 1925 60,785
1898 15,955 1926 38,118
1907 39,653 1927 35,788
1908 40,825 1928 59,963
1909 37,792 1929 58,493
1912 47,800 1930 44,464
1913 53,161 1931*
1914 43,979 1932 8535
1915 45,506 1933 8486
1916 53,470 1934 14,133
1917 56,378
1918 56,981
1919 44,498
1920 23,542
1921 33,876
1922 25,462

*No data for 1931.

Source: Laurence Stickell, “Migration and Mining: Labor in Northern Chile in the Ni-
trate Era, 1880–1930,” unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Indiana University, 1978.

As the size of the nitrate work force and the level of production increased from decade
to decade, so did the human misery occasioned by recessions. Table 7–1 illustrates the
cycles of boom and bust in the nitrate fields as reflected in the variations in the num-
bers of workers employed in the oficinas.
Until the disastrous depression of the 1930s, the nitrate industry expanded continu-
ally, with periodic depressions (1896–98, 1907, 1909, 1914–15, 1919–20, 1922, 1926–27)
which inflicted unemployment upon the northern workers and forced them to migrate
out of the nitrate camps to the ports and toward the central valley. Government com-
missions routinely documented the plight of the workers and urged reforms, but offi-
cial action before 1924 consisted of minor social legislation—a workers’ housing bill
in 1906, a law establishing Sunday as a day of rest in 1907, and a law establishing a
mandatory scheme for insuring against industrial accidents in 1917. Meanwhile, the
level of conflict, the strength of organized labor, the spread of working-class militancy,
the diffusion of anarchist and socialist ideology, and a mushrooming worker press
turned the “social question” from the paternalistic concern of a select number of benev-
olent intellectuals into the most critical political issue confronting the country. Table 7–2
indicates the mounting participation of workers in strikes between 1911 and 1920,
though official statistics clearly underestimate the size of the organized labor force and
the number of strikes that occurred.
Not only the northern mining districts and urban centers experienced the effects of
labor conflict. In 1911 the Boletín de la Oficina del Trabajo—the official organ of the Labor
Office created in the first decade of the century to collect and publish labor statistics—
recorded for the first time a strike in the countryside by forty rural workers. Earlier
labor conflicts between landowners and rural workers had certainly occurred in the
nineteenth century, but now an official government publication noted the emergence of
POLITICS, LABOR, AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION 171

table 7–2. strikes in chile, 1911–20

Year Strikes Workers Involved

1911 10 4762
1912 18 11,154
1913 17 10,490
1914 5 829
1915*
1916 16 18,523
1917 26 11,408
1918 30 24,392
1919 66 23,529
1920 105 50,439
*No data reported for 1915.
Source: Boletín de la Oficina del Trabajo, No. 18, 1922, p. 263.

class conflict in the rural sector. By 1921 the SNA was so concerned by the possibility of
the organization of rural workers and inquilinos that it sent a letter to the Chilean pres-
ident, Arturo Alessandri, urging him to take vigorous action to prevent further labor
disturbances in the countryside and to protect private property.
In great part the extension of class conflict to the countryside responded to the ef-
forts of the Chilean Workers’ Federation, or Federación Obrera de Chile (FOCH). In-
deed, the history of the Chilean labor movement to this day is heavily influenced by the
origins, development, political alliances, and ideological orientation of FOCH prior to
1927. Founded in 1909 among the railway workers of Santiago under the aegis of a
Conservative lawyer, FOCH gradually evolved into a radical, militantly anticapitalist,
working-class organization. Under the influence of Luis Emilio Recabarren, who ini-
tially charged the organization with being an instrument of the bourgeoisie but helped
to wrest it away from more moderate leadership, FOCH linked sympathizers of the
Partido Demócrata and the Partido Obrero Socialista (POS), socialist, anarchists, and
syndicalists.
Intra-organizational struggles for power eventually forced reformist elements to
leave the movement; by 1921 FOCH had affiliated with the Red International of Labor
Unions (RILU), and in 1922 the POS became the Chilean Communist Party. Overlap-
ping membership and leadership between FOCH and the Communist party divided
the labor movement as non-Communist Marxists, socialists, and reformers left both the
POS and FOCH. Combined with the economic crisis of the early 1920s, these internal
divisions reduced FOCH membership from 60,000 to perhaps 30,000 in 1922. Weaker in
Santiago and Valparaíso than the anarchists, FOCH continued to be a major force
among the nitrate, copper, and coal miners, as well as among the maritime workers,
tram workers, and rural labor in certain regions.
In addition to FOCH, anarchists and anarcho-syndicalists played a highly signifi-
cant role among the Chilean work force through the mid-1920s. Especially influential
on the docks, among artisans, and in the construction trades, the anarchists also com-
peted for workers’ loyalty in the coal mines, the nitrate fields, and other industries. Re-
jecting compromise with the capitalist state, the anarchists identified government,
church, and capital as the principal enemies. Anarchists played a key role in the for-
mation of “resistance societies” and fomented strikes with varying degrees of success
in the first decades of the twentieth century. In 1913 anarchist-inspired labor organiza-
tion and job actions led to a general strike involving railway workers, port workers,
172 CHILE

construction and metal workers, tram workers, foundrymen, and workers in the Viña
del Mar sugar refinery and the Chilean Tobacco Company. From 1913 to 1921, anarchist
unions, mutualist societies, and resistance societies participated in the ebb and flow of
labor’s efforts to improve working conditions and to challenge antilabor legislation
and policies. In addition, they encouraged tenant organizations in their struggle
against the rising cost of housing. In the period 1917–20 they also joined in a wave of
strikes and, allied with FOCH and other working-class organizations, in the Workers
Assembly on National Nutrition (AOAN). AOAN demanded that President San-
fuentes introduce property and income taxes, free meals for schoolchildren, minimum
wage legislation, and government regulation of food prices. When AOAN pressed its
demands and strike activity continued, the Congress first passed a residence law aimed
at the anarchists and then granted the president emergency powers. The president de-
clared a state of siege in Santiago and Valparaíso, the first use of the state of siege au-
thority since 1894.
In Magallanes, the rapid expansion of the meat-packing and sheep-ranching indus-
try after 1910 had been accompanied by episodic violent protests and labor conflicts.
Confrontations between workers and employers in Puerto Natales in 1919, character-
ized as an “occupation of the city” by government authorities, left numerous dead,
wounded, and jailed among the workers. Business interests organized vigilantes
(guardias blancas) to restore order. Coal miners in the region also declared strikes, exac-
erbating the tension between government authorities and the labor movement. Into
1920 the Federación Obrera de Magallanes continued the battle for higher wages and bet-
ter working conditions on the Patagonian pampa and southern islands. The year began
with a strike of port workers in Punta Arenas, followed by another strike at the Loreto
coal mine, then by workers at the Calcutta and Fariña noodle factory. Conflicts per-
sisted through May in various sectors; in July 1920, troops in Punta Arenas shot down
striking workers after first setting fire to their union building, giving title to Carlos
Vega Delgado’s detailed account of this tragedy in La massacre en la Federación Obrera de
Magallanes. Worsened by a lengthy strike in the coal fields near Concepción, the politi-
cal and economic situation seemed on verge of breakdown.
Throughout the country, security forces attacked union headquarters, arrested labor
leaders, and shut down worker newspapers such as Verba Roja and Acción Directa. Par-
ticular attention was focused on the IWW headquarters in Valparaíso, where police ar-
rested some 200 people. Government-encouraged crowds also attacked the headquar-
ters of the Chilean Federation of Students (FECH), known for its pro-labor stance.
While other labor groups and working-class parties (FOCH, POS) also experienced the
repression, the elite newspapers and the government highlighted the “antipatriotic”
and “subversive” character of anarchism. Viewed as an even more serious threat to es-
tablished order than FOCH, the anarchists suffered serious repression at the hands of
government and were again a special target of the Ibáñez regime from 1927 to 1931.
The anarchists emphasized direct action and rejected alliances with politicians or
political parties—in marked contrast to FOCH. They also violently opposed the al-
liance between FOCH and the Communist party, arguing that the labor movement
should not be dependent on any political party or any government. The anarchists’ mil-
itancy and competition with FOCH or workers’ groups supporting the Partido
Demócrata occasionally led to physical confrontations and even murder within the
labor movement. The coal mines of Lota, in particular, were the scene of bitter conflicts
among opposing labor factions.
Unrelated to any of the larger labor organizations, there also developed a “socialist”
movement in the far southern province of Magallanes among the workers of the enor-
POLITICS, LABOR, AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION 173

mous cattle and sheep ranches and meat-processing plants dominated by British capi-
tal. Here migrants from Argentina played an important role in the battle against em-
ployers, making the Punta Arenas labor organizations in part an extension of the Ar-
gentine socialists. Nevertheless, both the Radical party and the Partido Demócrata
exercised a certain influence in Magallanes, as did FOCH and to a lesser extent the an-
archists. With time the unions in Magallanes ranked among the most aggressive in the
Chilean labor movement and were brutally repressed by British firms and Chilean au-
thorities on more than one occasion in the decade 1910–20.
The evolution of a militant labor movement in the context of a political system cater-
ing to the aristocratic tastes of Santiago high society had produced an intolerable situ-
ation by the early 1920s. Congress repeatedly refused to adopt labor legislation or even
to enact piecemeal reforms to ameliorate the worst abuses of labor contractors and un-
scrupulous employers. Meanwhile, the Chilean economy continued to depend upon
export and import duties, particularly revenues from nitrate. Inheritance taxes, as well
as taxes on land and capital had practically ceased to exist. A study published in the Re-
vista Chilena by Alberto Edwards in 1917 concluded that taxes on land, capital, and in-
come had declined from 18 percent of government revenue in 1880 to almost nothing
in 1913.
The economic crisis precipitated by the outbreak of World War I led to reintroduc-
tion of a small “temporary” income tax on public employees and to an inheritance tax.
These measures raised the proportion of government revenue derived from internal
taxes to almost 10 percent. As soon as new economic relations with the Allies, espe-
cially the United States, produced an economic upswing in 1916, property tax rates de-
clined, and Congress deleted the income tax on public employees; only 4 percent of
government revenues came from internal taxes, while 89 percent originated in export
taxes (61.5%) and import duties (27.1%). Five years after publication of Edwards’ study,
Raul Simón, later an Ibáñez adviser, concluded in an article entitled “Our Financial Sit-
uation” that “the war of [1879] gave us a military victory that subsequent governments
converted into a diplomatic and financial defeat.” Noting the debilitating inflation that
devalued Chilean currency by more than 70 percent between 1880 and 1922, Simón
called for new taxes on imports and proportionate increases in other taxes to replace
the disproportionate dependence on export duties. But the Congress had no more in-
tention of taxing landowners, industrialists, and property owners to finance the na-
tion’s development than it did of dealing effectively with the social question. Yet unlike
the political conflicts and civil wars of the nineteenth century, the political strife of the
1920s would not be limited to intra-elite factionalism, nor could temporary political
pacts resolve the pressing socioeconomic and political exigencies. Still, the dominant
political parties and most important social institutions, including the Catholic Church,
avoided addressing directly the profound changes occurring in Chilean society.
With the exception of a small number of progressive churchmen, the leadership of
the Catholic Church reinforced the prejudices of conservative interests. In the first
decade of the century the Chilean archbishop even attacked popular education and
universal suffrage, while senators blamed the tide of labor protests upon “the cam-
paign for compulsory public education that represents the wave of socialism threaten-
ing to overwhelm us.” These attitudes hardly portended great hope for the future in a
country barely 38 percent literate and where, in the capital city, fewer than one-third of
the population aged five to fifteen were enrolled in schools.
Despite the poverty and illiteracy of the masses, the physical modernization and
beautification of Santiago, Valparaíso, and other leading cities allowed the well-to-do
to immerse themselves in a charming, comfortable, even pretentious lifestyle. The
174 CHILE

modernity and elegance of certain parts of Santiago, Valparaíso, or Viña del Mar con-
trasted markedly with the continued backwardness of much of the country and the
squalor of urban slums, or conventillos. Social life for the wealthy centered in the aris-
tocratic social clubs, the racing season, the opera, weekly or biweekly strolls along the
Alameda between Cochrane and Ejército streets, or outings in fancy carriages in the ex-
clusive Parque Cousiño. In the words of one Chilean historian of the period, “These
outings represented an imitation of the customs of the times of the Spanish nobility in
El Retiro, the French in the Bois de Boulogne or the wealthy bourgeoisie in Buenos
Aires in the wide Avenida Alvear.” For a theatre-box (palco) at the teatro municipal the
affluent paid 1000, 5000, even 20,000 pesos. These palcos served as meeting places of the
political factions, for as much political activity went on at the theater, the opera, and
the social clubs as in the Congress, which often simply formalized decisions made at
social affairs.
The “good families” were few, and for them Santiago was a small world turning on
the axis of the “high life.” The society pages of the newspapers avidly reported the vida
social of the elite and the goings and comings of the guests at the artistic or literary cir-
cles patronized by aristocratic women of the capital. Chile was governed by gentlemen
who valued civility, tradition, and lineage—but who could also accept new blood and
new money into their ranks when need be. Summer vacations at a country estate or
near Valparaíso, trips to Europe where their sons and daughters were educated, and
competition among the damsels to stay abreast of European fashions rounded out the
good life for the masters of Chile.
For most Chileans another reality prevailed. More than half of all deaths recorded in
1913 were of infants and children under five years of age. The infant mortality rate
more than tripled that of the United States, or the United Kingdom, and significantly
exceeded the rates in Egypt, Mauritius, Japan, Argentina, and even Mexico. Children
from eight to fifteen years old represented from 10–40 percent of the workers in many
of the industries established since the 1880s. They labored under apalling health and
safety conditions for meager pay. Historian Jorge Rojas Flores describes in Los niños
cristaleros, for example, “the glass dust, the faulty ventilation, the humidity, the heat,
the accidents (cuts, burns, mutilation by machines), and the dehydration . . . that put
the children at risk” in Santiago’s National Glass Factory and other glass manufactur-
ers, where children made up 25–30 percent of the labor force from the early 1900s until
1930. Despite Chile’s participation in the International Labor Organization and signing
the conventions on child labor after World War I, in 1936 a worker delegate to the
Pan American Labor Conference would still reveal that “to the venomous lead fumes
are added the infernal heat in the factory, the fans don’t function; they are for show
when the labor inspectors appear. . . . [W]ater is not brought to the workers and the
youngsters must put up with heat and thirst for eight hour shifts. If they can’t resist and
leave work, they are beaten by the foremen. . . . If they complain their wages are re-
duced or they are fired.” Conditions in breweries, sugar and textile industries, mines,
and the nitrate fields were no better. The “social question” was not abstract; mangled,
broken, ill, and desperate discards of the incipient industrial age added pressures for
government regulation of industrial relations, for social security and industrial safety
legislation, for protection of child and female workers, and for industrial accident
insurance.
The oligarchy that dominated Congress responded minimally to these demands be-
fore the 1920s. Revolutionary labor organizations and political parties would up the
ante after World War I. Chile was not alone with its child labor force in the dawning of
the industrial age; European and North American factories and mines had set the ex-
POLITICS, LABOR, AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION 175

ample. Even so, photos in the worker press of children and women strikers who had
joined anarchist and communist-oriented labor organizations added a special dimen-
sion to the struggle for “social laws” that only bore fruit after the military coups of
1924–25 and implementation of the Labor Code imposed by decree in 1931.

The emergence of the social question as Chile’s most pressing national problem coin-
cided with truly dramatic demographic, technological, and economic changes in
Chilean society. Population movements to the south and north and out of the rural
areas into the cities intensified the trends initiated in the middle decades of the nine-
teenth century. From an essentially rural nation of 2 million people in 1880, Chile be-
came an increasingly urban country of over 3.7 million in 1920 and of 4.2 million ten
years later. Santiago’s population mushroomed from 275,000 residents in 1900 to
700,000 by 1930, while Valparaíso reached a population of 200,000 in the same year. By
1930 almost one-fourth of Chile’s population lived in Santiago or Valparaíso.
More important even than the advancing urbanization of the population, Chilean
society and the economy became truly national with the extension of rail lines, tele-
graph networks, and steamship service and the evolution of a national labor market.
Not only did the population of the provinces of Tarapacá and Antofagasta, which more
than doubled between 1885 and 1920, became increasingly Chilean,—in 1885, 40 per-
cent “foreign”; in 1920, 11 percent; in 1930, 8 percent—but the mobility of labor also cre-
ated a nationally integrated labor market. The periodic ups and downs of the nitrate in-
dustry, with the associated ebbs and flows of workers between the northern deserts,
coastal towns, and southern provinces, contributed to increasing articulation between
the country’s regional economies. In a sense, though the patterns of trade characteris-
tic of the mid-nineteenth century still prevailed, regionalism itself declined as a mean-
ingful political force. In search of relief or work, workers shifted from southern agri-
culture to the northern mines or nitrate districts, then with recessions in the north,
migrated to the ports of the norte chico, Valparaíso, Santiago, or into the central valley
and beyond.
The longitudinal railroad that by 1915 connected Puerto Montt to Coquimbo linked
the urban markets and the northern mineral districts to the central valley and southern
producers. Steamship lines and the transverse, privately owned railroads of the nitrate
regions made Chile’s most dynamic economic sectors, along with the urban centers, the
most important markets for Chilean agriculture and industry. With the exception of the
northern railroads and the trans-Andean line, the Chilean state controlled the railroad
system and deliberately extended it north and south with strategic and developmen-
tal, rather than strictly commercial, objectives in mind. Cheap freight rates subsidized
Chilean agriculture. In particular the railroad’s penetration south allowed greatly
expanded shipments of cattle, wheat, wine, lumber, and processed goods from the
southern provinces to Santiago, Valparaíso, and north by ship to the nitrate and min-
ing districts. This encouraged increased cultivation and modernization of southern
agriculture, even as the seasonal competition for labor and hints of labor activism mo-
tivated southern landowners to mechanize the harvest.
The government also used the railroad, in times of recession, as a safety valve to fun-
nel unemployed workers south or, in good times, to siphon labor north to nitrate and
copper production centers. Fearing the concentration of unemployed workers in the
northern ports, authorities issued free rail passes so that the unemployed could seek
work or temporary quarters with relatives in other parts of the country. This policy
somewhat ameliorated the immediate danger of a large-scale uprising, but it also
spread throughout the entire country, in extremely visible human terms, the effects of
176 CHILE

each nitrate recession. Creation of the government employment service (Servicio de

Colocaciones), in response to the recession at the outset of World War I, further nation-
alized the labor market. In its efforts to place unemployed nitrate workers in agricul-
ture, public works, or industry, the Servicio de Colocaciones soon found that landown-
ers often rejected nitrate hands who, in any case, resisted the low wages and poor
working conditions on the haciendas. Labor Department officials became accustomed
to seeing complaints by landowners that nitrate workers placed in agriculture “stirred
up” the inquilinos, refused to eat the food provided by the farm’s administrator, or sim-
ply ate a meal and left. Thus, integration of the labor market began to erode the exten-
sive traditional authority of the hacendados.
Unlike a true economic enclave, the nitrate economy spurred national economic in-
tegration. Though foreign investors remitted many of the industry’s profits abroad, op-
eration of the industry created markets for Chilean agriculture and lumber, coal, and
processing industries and induced development of service and support activities. In
turn, Chilean industries developed product lines intended as inputs for other domes-
tic manufacturers as well as supplying consumer demands. Coastal shipping greatly
expanded to provision the northern districts, while tax revenues from exports and im-
ports yielded resources for extensive public works, modernization of the military, pub-
lic education, and other government expenses. In addition, after 1900 Chilean capital
made steady gains in the nitrate industry, and by 1920 national capital controlled over
50 percent of the nitrate sector.
If an enclave could be said to exist in the Chilean economy in the mid-1920s—in a po-
litical and social sense, only agriculture would qualify. The extreme concentration of
good agricultural land, especially in the central valley, kept 60 to 75 percent of the re-
gion’s rural labor force culturally isolated on the vast haciendas that dominated the
countryside. In 1924 only 2,650 rural estates (2.7% of all farms) contained almost 80 per-
cent of the agricultural land in the central valley. On these large estates the resident labor
force remained at the mercy of the landowners for access to land, housing, and daily sus-
tenance. Their votes belonged to the landowners who used them to install themselves
in the Congress and to maintain the prevailing system of rural land tenure as well as to
exert their influence more generally on Chilean national life. Congressmen from the
provinces depended for their election upon landowners who mobilized their peons to
vote and controlled the counting of ballots in the municipality. Frequently the most im-
portant landowners of a district virtually “owned” its congressional seat. In the 1920s
the initial penetration by FOCH or political agents into the rural areas challenged this
arrangement, but not until the 1950s and 1960s would political reforms destroy the ha-
cienda as a political enclave that separated tenant labor from the national community.
In economic terms, however, the Chilean haciendas did not constitute an enclave
but had participated in international commerce ever since the colonial era. The eco-
nomic evolution of Chile from the late nineteenth century through the depression of the
1930s more completely incorporated agriculture into the national economy. Domestic
markets became the primary consumers of the countryside’s wheat, livestock, dairy
products, lumber, fruits, and processed foodstuffs. This meant that domestic economic
conditions, rather than European, North American, or Australian markets, became the
primary determinants of economic opportunities for Chile’s agricultural interests.
Rapid urbanization and the population growth in the northern provinces also pushed
food prices upward. Higher food prices exacerbated the social question facing the
country and created pressures for political regulation of the prices of food and basic ne-
cessities to mitigate the decline in real wages received by urban labor between 1890 and
1914. After 1932 efforts to retain the hacienda system and at the same time to pacify the
POLITICS, LABOR, AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION 177

urban labor force by regulating retail food prices would produce a curious political
“arrangement” (see Chapter 8), which ensured the continued exploitation of the rural
labor force. Such efforts did nothing, however, to increase production and productivity
in Chilean agriculture.

National economic integration accompanied by political immobility and the intensify-

ing social question concerned not only Chilean intellectuals but also leading Chilean
military officers. The army’s professionalization under Prussian leadership instilled in
it a new sense of nationalism and a belief that its duty included regeneration of the
country. Military writers like Carlos Soto Alvarez (1905) and Jorge Boonen Rivera
(1917) emphasized the role of the armed forces in teaching patriotism and acting as
agents of order and progress. Boonen Rivera went so far as to suggest that the army
should be directly responsible for the revitalization of the nation. Two years later Cap-
tain Tobías Barros claimed that the army was the personification of the national ideal
and that through active political intervention it must act to prevent further disintegra-
tion of the national situation. By 1921–22 some military leaders argued that the army
should participate in all government policymaking. In 1922 an army captain published
a speech delivered at the military club, in which he urged the army to exercise political
influence to unify the diverse forces of the nation, to restore morality to public life, and
to end the parliamentary chaos and immobility. According to this officer, the army
alone of all Chilean institutions could rise above petty self-interest to save the nation.
The army had every reason to be concerned with Chile’s social crisis. Political lead-
ers had constantly called upon the armed forces to repress the mounting number of
strikes and demonstrations during the first two decades of the twentieth century. A
compulsory military service law (1900) brought large numbers of illiterate recruits to
both army and navy, since the well-to-do generally managed to avoid the draft. Both
services created primary schools to provide instruction to their personnel. Military ser-
vice brought thousands of Chileans into a national institution, instructed them in the
military’s view of patriotism and national history, deployed them in regions far from
their homes, and even provided training that could serve them when they left the ser-
vice. Military schools for machinists, telegraphists, blacksmiths, construction workers,
and miners as well as military participation in public works and disaster relief—for ex-
ample, after the 1906 earthquake at Valparaíso—further engaged the army in “nonmil-
itary” projects.
Military dissatisfaction with the politics of the parliamentary period and with
Chile’s seeming economic decline manifested itself early in the twentieth century. In
1907 officers of the Santiago garrison established a “Liga Militar” as a lobby to secure
better conditions and benefits for the army. Four years later leaders of the Liga Militar
broached the subject of a military coup with Gonzalo Bulnes Pinto—son, grandson,
and nephew of former presidents. Bulnes refused to go through with the plans for such
a golpe, but not before the Liga Militar had expressed its opinions on matters ranging
from government corruption, public education, crime, and economic policy to the need
for increased benefits for the armed forces. Another abortive military movement in
1915, aimed at placing in power “a strong government able to end the political anarchy
preventing the progress of the nation”; and in 1919 still another conspiracy among
high-ranking officers to “avoid political chaos” and end the “dangers of communism”
failed to end the parliamentary regime.
Especially disconcerting to the new generation of professional officers was the
continual intervention by congressmen in the process of military promotions and as-
signments. Likewise, the apparent congressional favoritism of the more aristocratic,
178 CHILE

British-influenced navy over the middle-class officer corps of the army created inter-
service rivalries and frustrations. Gradually the military, and especially a group of pro-
fessionally oriented army officers, resolved to end the regime of politiquería which they
believed was debasing the army and weakening the fatherland.

World War I set in motion economic and political forces that doomed the parliamentary
regime in Chile and ushered in the revival of copper as a principal source of foreign ex-
change and government revenues. It also shifted Chile’s international economic orien-
tation toward the United States and away from Britain and Germany. Between 1900
and 1914, American investments in Chile increased from approximately $5 million to
almost $200 million—almost two-thirds the value of British investments in Chile. In
particular, American investors acquired nitrate and mining properties, especially cop-
per and iron. By the end of World War I (1918) American investors controlled over 87
percent by value of Chilean copper production, which increased fourfold from 31.4
million pesos to 132.8 million pesos during the course of the war. Modern technology,
which allowed economic mining of low-copper content ore at El Teniente in Rancagua
and the giant open-pit mine at Chuquicamata in Antofagasta province, along with
other deposits in the environs of Copiapó and near Santiago, resulted in good profits
from the Chilean mines for the Chile Exploration Company, American Smelting, Ken-
necott Copper, and Braden Copper Mining, among other companies. United States
Steel and Bethlehem Steel also established themselves in Chile prior to World War I and
expanded operations during the war. For the first time commerce with the United
States exceeded 50 percent by value of Chilean foreign trade; by 1930 United States cap-
ital would account for some 70 percent of all foreign investment in Chile.
This fundamental reorientation of the Chilean economy toward the United States in-
cluded large-scale introduction of American technicians, capital, machinery, and cul-
tural influence into a country where North Americans had previously exerted little in-
fluence. Indeed, support by American diplomats for President Balmaceda during the
civil war of 1891 and, earlier, Secretary of State Blaine’s inept efforts to mediate the War
of the Pacific had made Chile’s relations with the United States less than cordial. Now
the rapid “Americanization” of critical sectors of the economy, the intensified economic
relations with the United States, and the latter’s role in the termination of World War I
meant the gradual replacement of British dominance of Chile’s economy by that of the
United States. It also brought a pervasive influx of North American consumer goods,
popular culture, and prejudices.
The outbreak of the European war brought disaster to the Chilean economy, as it pit-
ted Chile’s two leading trading partners, England and Germany, against each other. Dis-
ruption of shipping lanes and diversion of British and German shipping to wartime du-
ties drastically reduced nitrate exports in 1914 and early 1915. Thousands of workers
lost their jobs; subsequently nitrate companies and the railroads cut wages between 10
and 15 percent. Government subsidies to finance stockpiling allowed continued pro-
duction at a reduced level, and thus avoided a complete collapse. Nevertheless, nitrate
production declined by 60 percent, and in Tarapacá alone over half of the 23,500 nitrate
workers lost their jobs. In the city of Antofagasta ollas del pobre, the equivalent of soup
lines, fed more than 4,500 people a day. By late 1914 more than 48,000 people had left the
nitrate region. Many Peruvians and Bolivians returned to Tacna or farther north to their
native lands; Chileans dispersed southward. In the rest of Chile bankruptcies, runs on
banks, and economic contraction resulted from the nitrate depression. In addition, the
early war years led to shortages of consumer goods and raw materials for Chilean in-
dustries resulting in a reduction in economic activity and generalized price increases.
POLITICS, LABOR, AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION 179

Quickly, however, Allied control of the seas permitted Chilean minerals to reach Eu-
ropean and United States markets. Demand in the United States for Chilean nitrate and
copper contributed to an economic upswing. American bankers followed United States
investors. With official American entry into the war in 1917, demand for Chilean raw
materials, especially nitrate, more than doubled from the 1915–16 levels. Though Ger-
man development of synthetic nitrates during the war presaged even worse problems
for Chile at the war’s termination, a temporary boom permitted a renewed splurge of
public works, road construction, port modernization, and political patronage. Taking
advantage of wartime demand, selected Chilean industries such as cement, textiles,
and sugar refineries responded well to opportunities for import substitution. At the
war’s end, however, traditional industries still accounted for most of the value of in-
dustrial production, with food (44%), beverages (5.2%), textiles (4.7%), tobacco (4.7%),
clothing and footwear (18.7%), and wood and wood products (6.5%) contributing over
80 percent by value of industrial output.
The temporary wartime boom ended almost as quickly as it began. German policy-
makers prohibited imports of Chilean nitrate to protect the manufacturers of synthet-
ics. American and European markets found themselves with a temporary overstock—
and a developing synthetic nitrate industry of their own. Though prices for copper
remained high for another year, by 1919 the nitrate industry had entered another severe
depression. For the second time in five years massive unemployment threatened the
northern regions, and the economic side effects afflicted the rest of the country.
During the wartime prosperity Minister of Interior Eliodoro Yáñez decreed the cre-
ation of a voluntary conciliation and arbitration system to deal with labor conflict. With
the authority of this decree the government intervened “informally” in several strikes
to procure negotiated settlements between 1918 and 1920. The Yáñez decree repre-
sented an important recognition by the Chilean government of the necessity for estab-
lishing a system for managing industrial relations, but government authority remained
quite limited due to the Congress’ refusal to legislate in the field of industrial relations.
As labor conflict intensified during 1919 and 1920, along with the postwar national de-
pression, the social question became the major national issue before the presidential
elections. With a paragon of the old elite opposing a self-declared reformer for the pres-
idency, with strikes breaking out all over the country, and with electoral violence at a
new peak, Chile appeared headed for another civil war—this time an explicit con-
frontation between the political and economic oligarchy and the supporters of reform.
The events following the 1920 elections, however, made the frustrations and aspira-
tions of the Chilean military, rather than the new President or the Congress, the real key
to Chilean development in the next decade.

Amidst the post–World War I economic crisis, Chile faced a presidential election in
which one of the candidates, Arturo Alessandri Palma, proclaimed “I want to be a
threat to the reactionary spirits, a threat to those who resist all just and necessary re-
forms.” His opponent, Luis Barros Borgoño, represented the tradition of Santiago’s po-
litical families. Alessandri, an upper-middle-class lawyer who had considerable polit-
ical experience in the Congress and the Senate, carried his campaign to “the people.”
His incendiary speeches attacked the oligarchy and promised to alleviate the misery of
the working classes. Accompanied by a high level of violence and intimidation, the
election results proved so close that Congress turned the matter over to a “tribunal of
honor” to sort out the charges of fraud and to verify the credentials of electors as well
as vote totals. As Alessandri’s supporters feared that Barros Borgoño might “steal” the
election in Congress, they carried out demonstrations in Iquique, Antofagasta, Santi-
180 CHILE

ago, Valparaíso, and Concepción, despite Alessandri’s agreement to accept the decision
of the tribunal of honor.
Three weeks after the election the war minister, Ladislao Errázuriz, mobilized the
armed forces and sent army and navy units north to meet a supposed threat from Bo-
livia. The mobilization itself proved to be a greater threat to the soldiers than the illu-
sory Bolivian invasion. Disease spread among ill-fed troops who lacked munitions and
other supplies. Rumor suggested that the war minister and his associates were profi-
teering in provisioning the troops. Others believed that the mobilization was a politi-
cal move to attempt to divert national attention from the recent presidential elections
or even to remove military officers who supported Alessandri from Santiago. Although
the electoral tribunal gave the election and the presidency to Alessandri, anger over
their role as political pawns further heightened the professional officers’ discontent
with parliamentary politics.
President Alessandri governed Chile from 1920 to 1924 in the face of hostility and
obstructionism from the Congress. Ministerial changes, threats to delay budget and tax
bills, and failures to authorize the military garrison to remain in Santiago—in short, all
the now traditional parliamentary practices for the frustration of presidential pro-
grams—continued despite the economic crisis and the spread of labor conflicts. Con-
gress refused to pass the paternalistic social laws sponsored by the Conservative party
or those introduced by the Alessandri administration. And only forty days after as-
suming office, the president, notwithstanding his proclaimed commitment to reform
and social justice, used troops brutally to repress workers’ movements. At the nitrate
oficina San Gregorio a massacre of workers in early 1921 added still another group of
martyrs to the northern proletariat’s struggle for decent treatment by the nitrate in-
dustry and recognition of labor rights by the Chilean state.
Even when the president managed to obtain a Liberal majority in the congressional
elections of 1924, he could not unite his supposed supporters or persuade them to act
on the critical legislation delayed for over four years. Alessandri’s use of police and
military at the polls to “maintain order” marred the legitimacy of the electoral victory
in any case. At the same time it further involved the armed forces in immediate politi-
cal questions. By mid-1924, with government salaries in arrears, a mounting budget
deficit, rampant inflation, and failure to deliver on even the most modest of his cam-
paign promises, Alessandri supported legislation to provide a salary for congressmen.
In August 1924 Congress dropped its consideration of urgent legislation for creation
of a national bank, for social welfare laws, for military appropriations, and for other
pressing matters, in order to deal with what many judged to be an unconstitutional
proposal for it to vote its members a salary, or dieta. On an afternoon in early Septem-
ber when Congress appeared ready to approve the particulars of the salary measures,
a group of more than fifty junior officers filed ominously into the gallery of the Con-
gress. Newspapers in the capital the next day reported that the government intended
to discipline the officers, though no regulation prohibited military personnel from at-
tending congressional sessions. In support of their colleagues a larger group of officers
attended an evening session of the Senate, where they heard legislators criticize their
behavior and then were asked to leave the building by the minister of war.
Agitation within the army led high-ranking generals to inform President Alessandri
that any disciplinary action taken against the junior officers might lead to a collective
reaction by the army. Alessandri downplayed the incidents, draping them in the letter
of the law that allowed military personnel to attend congressional sessions except
when military matters were being debated. The matter could not be disposed of so eas-
ily. On September 4, 1924, some 400 lieutenants and captains gathered at the Club Mil-
itar, to “strengthen the unity and comradeship among the elements of the army in these
POLITICS, LABOR, AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION 181

difficult times the armed forces are experiencing.” The officers roundly attacked the
minister of war, present at the meeting, and applauded General Luis Altamirano’s
words of support for the junior officers.
The next day high-ranking military officers presented a list of “petitions” to Presi-
dent Alessandri. These included action on the budget, social security laws, income tax
legislation, social laws, payment of back salaries to public employees, and reformed
pension, salary, and promotion schedules for the military. In addition the officers
demanded the ouster of three ministers who had insulted them publicly in the Con-
gress. According to one account, Alessandri had met the night before with certain
officers and told them: “Request in writing the dispatch of specific projects [de tales
y cuales proyectos]; I will sponsor them in Congress and close the Congress if they do
not approve them.” Alessandri’s brother subsequently denied this account; but what-
ever the precise details, President Alessandri knew in advance about the military
movement and had met with representatives of the protesting officers during the
evening of September 4. On September 7, Alessandri vetoed the congressional salary
bill and invited General Altamirano to head the cabinet; one day later Congress passed
all the laws contained in the military petition. The military junta, though its petitions
had been approved, refused to disband. A week later Alessandri resigned and left for
Italy.

Prior to September 5, 1924, senior officers of the Chilean army and opposition politi-
cians had seriously considered a coup against Alessandri who, according to the con-
spirators, had unconstitutionally intervened in the March 1924 elections, usurped
power by dictatorial means, and dishonored the army. This conspiracy, organized by a
secret society called TEA (tenacity, enthusiasm, abnegation), involved certain conser-
vative elements of the armed forces in alliance with the opposition to Alessandri. When
the movement of September 5, 1924, occurred, however, junior officers precipitated an
essentially leaderless protest that evolved into a military coup. The more conservative,
high-ranking officers—such as Luis Altamirano and Juan Pablo Bennett, who ulti-
mately appeared as the leaders of the government junta—supported the junior officers
in their professional demands such as for an improved salary schedule, for broadening
of promotion opportunities, and for less political meddling in internal army affairs.
They did not, however, support entirely the rest of the petitions on the list the younger
officers presented to President Alessandri.
President Alessandri’s resignation left the junta with no constitutional authority; the
officers decided to request that Alessandri ask Congress for permission to absent him-
self from the country, and to accord him full presidential honors on his departure. When
the President sought asylum in the American embassy, the junta faced the dilemma of
devising an interim instrument for governing the country. Congress refused to accept
Alessandri’s resignation but voted him permission to leave the country for six months.
The military junta then closed Congress and accepted Alessandri’s resignation with the
expectation of forming a provisional government. Behind the scenes, divisions within
the armed forces made consolidation of the military government an impossibility. The
junta announced a return to civilian politics and seemed to support the candidacy of
Ladislao Errázuriz, the ultraconservative minister who had sent the armed forces on a
wild goose chase to the northern deserts in 1920; but a group of officers headed by Ibáñez
and Marmaduque Grove led a coup to “show . . . that the oligarchs are not masters of
Chile.” The golpistas called upon Alessandri to return and reassume the presidency. As
a condition for his return, Alessandri demanded a return to civilian government, cre-
ation of a constituent assembly to consider constitutional reform, and return of the
armed forces to their normal duties.
182 CHILE

Alessandri returned to Santiago in March 1925 and resumed the duties of the presi-
dency. Bowing to the influence of the armed forces and especially his war minister, Car-
los Ibáñez, he failed to reconvene the Congress. In April, Alessandri named a commis-
sion to develop procedures for selecting members to a constitutional convention. When
no satisfactory solution emerged, Alessandri commissioned a subcommittee to write a
draft constitution for subsequent approval by plebiscite. From late May to July 22, the
subcommittee worked on the constitutional proposal; in August a national plebiscite
approved the new constitution under which Chile would be governed until 1973.
The new constitution shifted the balance of power from Congress to the executive.
Included among its reforms were direct popular election of the president, an inde-
pendent electoral tribunal to review election results, and prohibitions against con-
gressmen serving as ministers or government employees. The presidential term was
extended to six years with no immediate re-election permitted. Congress retained im-
portant budgetary authority and could override vetos, but it lost the traditional instru-
ments used during the parliamentary era to immobilize executive policymaking—such
as control over the cabinet, authority to prevent collection of taxes, and refusal to enact
an annual budget.
Notwithstanding a shift of authority toward the executive, the new constitution of-
ficially recognized the role of political parties in national politics. By providing that the
president and members of the House of Deputies and the Senate had overlapping
and different terms of office, the constitution practically assured that no president
could come into office in control of the legislative branch of government. Another pro-
vision in the constitution assigned the Congress the responsibility to choose the presi-
dent “from among the citizens who have received the two highest relative numbers
of votes”—if no candidate received a majority of the popular vote. In Chile’s multi-
party system, this provision gave Congress considerable leverage in “preconfirmation”
bargaining with the two candidates who got the most votes in presidential elections.
This leverage would prove significant time and time again in constraining or compro-
mising the action of in-coming Chilean presidents. Thus while the 1925 constitution did
decrease congressional authority and remove some of the traditional instruments
whereby the Congress had controlled executive initiatives, it did not emasculate the
Congress or eliminate its critical role and that of the political parties in Chilean politics.
Shortly after Alessandri returned to Santiago, he presided over still another mas-
sacre of northern workers. At La Coruña, in June 1925, soldiers machine-gunned
hundreds of workers, destroyed their living quarters with field artillery, and brutally
murdered a number of prisoners and wounded. A leading socialist, historian, and
politician, Alejandro Chelén Rojas, coldly notes that “San Gregorio in 1921 and Coruña
in 1925 stamped with workers’ blood the administration of the caudillo who [instead
of] a ‘threat to reactionary spirits’ was [a threat] for the dispossessed that had so many
hopes for his government.” Other historians have noted that Alessandri attempted to
prevent Ibáñez from using force against the workers, but Ibáñez ignored Alessandri’s
orders, just as he had rejected the president’s order to resign his ministerial post before
the presidential elections. This interpretation ignores that Alessandri had close rela-
tions with British diplomats in Chile who heavily influenced the decision to send
troops to confront the labor unrest and strikes in the nitrate region in 1925. It also ig-
nores that Alessandri enthusiastically congratulated General Florentino de la Guarda
immediately after repression of the workers and the “clean-up” operation that fol-
lowed. In the words of Chilean historian Alejandro Soto Cardenas, in a study based on
exhaustive research in British archives (Influencia Británica en el salitre, Origen, naturaleza
y decadencia):
POLITICS, LABOR, AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION 183

[T]he Chilean government, headed until October of 1925 by Arturo Alessandri, did
everything possible to satisfy British demands tending to impose law and order in the
nitrate camps in 1925. It closed the worker press, it detained labor leaders in the ni-
trate works and the ports, in Santiago and Valparaíso, it sent a regiment and various
warships to the nitrate ports; it approved the military action taken at La Coruña, that
ended in spilling blood and the embarkation of workers in Chilean warships who
were thrown into the sea near the Juan Fernández Islands.

When Ibáñez published a public letter to Alessandri on October 1, 1925, explaining

his refusal to resign, including his role as “chief of the revolution,” Alessandri resigned
the presidency for the second time. Before resigning, he appointed Luis Barros Bor-
goño—his opponent in the presidential elections of 1920—minister of the interior, and
thus Barros Borgoño was the vice president after Alessandri’s departure.
In the face of Alessandri’s resignation, Ibáñez declared he would renounce his own
candidacy if the major parties could agree upon a compromise candidate and avoid the
spectacle of a complete return to politics as usual. The labor movement and leftist par-
ties refused to comply, fomenting strikes and supporting their own candidate for the
presidency, José Santos Salas. The traditional parties selected Emiliano Figueroa La-
rraín, a nondescript politician from a good family.
Figueroa Larraín easily won the election but failed to implement the spirit or the let-
ter of the new constitution. Sensing his inability to deal with the realities facing the
country or to control the minister of interior, Carlos Ibáñez, Figueroa Larraín requested
permission to take a leave of absence from the country. This left affairs of state in the
hands of Ibáñez. In May 1927, Figueroa Larraín officially resigned, whereupon Ibáñez
had himself elected president in a carefully controlled election. Ibáñez obtained more
than 222,000 of the slightly more than 230,000 votes cast.
Ibáñez’s assumption of the presidency was blessed with far more auspicious eco-
nomic developments than those confronting Alessandri in 1920. By 1924–25 interna-
tional demand for nitrate had again strengthened. An all-time employment record,
with more than 60,000 workers in the nitrate fields, brought renewed prosperity to the
Chilean economy. Despite a recession in 1926–27 that briefly interrupted recovery, the
final years of the decade saw a major boom in Chilean nitrate exports. Indeed, Ibáñez
and his chief economic adviser, Pablo Ramírez, could take credit for the economic re-
covery that put most of the 70,000 unemployed in mid-1926 back to work by 1928. In
the meantime, police monitored political and union activity and reported to Ibáñez and
his ministers on the speeches or meetings of congressmen, politicians, and union lead-
ers who seemed to oppose the regime. Reorganization of the national police (cara-
bineros) under the minister of defense provided Ibáñez with a new, direct instrument
for control of the opposition and a counterpoise to would-be challengers within the
army.
Expanded production of copper added to the government’s sources of revenue and
to the economic recovery. So, too, did a large-scale influx of foreign capital in the form
of private investment and loans. Total foreign investment in the country increased from
$723 million in 1925 to more than $1 billion in 1930—exceeding domestic investment in
both mining and industry. Taking advantage of increasing government revenues and
the inflows of private foreign capital, the Ibáñez government embarked upon the
largest public works program in Chilean history. Docks and port works, roads, sewage
systems, water systems, and irrigation projects dotted the landscape from north to
south. Construction of public buildings and paving of urban streets altered the faces of
the nation’s principal cities and employed thousands of workers. Impressive expan-
184 CHILE

sion and reform of the educational system meant that in a decade Chile’s schools had
doubled their capacity. In an effort to encourage industry, the government pushed pro-
tective tariffs through Congress and founded the Institute for Industrial Credit. Previ-
ously the emphasis upon real estate as collateral for loans had seriously restricted ac-
cess by domestic industrialists to investment capital. Industry responded to the new
incentives with increased output and even some diversification.
This flurry of economic activity distracted most Chileans from the political repres-
sion of the Ibáñez regime. Also obscured was the growing indebtedness as a result of
the large loans the government had contracted to finance the expansion of public sec-
tor activity. After years of sterile parliamentary debate and indifference, Ibáñez even
managed to squeeze legislation on agricultural colonization and “land reform” out of
the Congress in 1928. Establishment of the Caja de Colonización Agrícola as an agency
to administer land purchases and subdivision of large estates marked an important
first step, at least symbolically, in dealing with the structural defects of the Chilean
agrarian economy. Despite the Caja’s limited activity, even this innovation was rabidly
denounced by leading Chilean landowners.
In additional ways also the Ibáñez government represented a break with the parlia-
mentary era. Explicit concern with a positive role of the state in encouraging industri-
alization, technological progress, and administrative reforms to consolidate and regu-
larize procedures in the public administration evidenced the passage from a
predominantly rural, oligarchical society to a modernizing urban polity. Educational
reforms, including establishment of national standards for professional and technical
degrees from the private and public universities, indicated the gradual emergence of
nonaristocratic, universalistic norms in recruitment to an expanding civil service. Tech-
nicians and middle-class professionals staffed growing ministries and public agencies
previously manned overwhelmingly through political patronage by the traditional
parties. A growing middle class challenged the traditional “political class” for control
of the state; the “social question” and a changing socio-economic structure made
restoration of the parliamentary republic unlikely. In 1931 intellectuals and profes-
sional administrators in the Labor Department produced the Labor Code which incor-
porated the “social laws” of 1924 and created an elaborate framework for a modern in-
dustrial relations system. The Labor Code of 1931 served as the foundation for Chilean
industrial relations for the next four decades.
Adoption of the “social laws” of 1924 regulating unionization, labor contracts, co-
operatives, and social security had been followed by confusion. Following civil code
tradition, all legislation required implementing provisions. These came slowly. Gov-
ernment officials and employers interpreted the laws pushed through Congress by the
military coup quite differently from place to place. The Labor Code of 1931 consoli-
dated existing legislation, including the “social laws” of 1924, and added regulations
concerning agricultural workers and domestics, both of whom had been excluded from
the earlier legislation. The code also established a national system of labor courts, as
well as institutions to administer mandatory collective bargaining and arbitration (jun-
tas de conciliación).
In general the Labor Code created a highly paternalistic and authoritarian system of
government-worker relations. The code limited worker petitions and strikes to indi-
vidual firms and restricted severely the activity of union federations. It gave authority
to the government to order a “return to work” whenever a strike or lockout endangered
public health or the economic or social life of the nation. Any labor conflict that failed
to meet the rigorous requirements specified in the code could be declared illegal, and
the unions were liable for any damages or losses under such circumstances. In practice
POLITICS, LABOR, AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION 185

these restrictive regulations meant that from 1932 on, illegal strikes outnumbered legal
ones by a wide margin.
Notwithstanding the Labor Code’s defects from the perspective of labor, it repre-
sented formal recognition by the Chilean state of the right of workers to organize, to
petition employers for improved working conditions, to strike, and to have the work
place regulated by an official agency—the Labor Department. Employers now had the
obligation to enter into written contracts with workers, to bargain with unions, to obey
labor legislation and social security laws and, more generally, to adopt a more limited
view of the privileges of proprietorship. The Labor Code ended the classical liberal
view of unrestricted property rights. The resistance of employer associations and
landowners to the code’s provisions testified to their awareness of its profound impli-
cations. Above all else, the Labor Code meant that the state recognized its role as an ac-
tive agent in regulating class conflict and in institutionalizing procedures for managing
the social question.
Ibáñez did not undertake these reforms out of benevolence or a desire to win the sup-
port of the labor movement. As with labor codes in Brazil under Vargas or later in Per-
onist Argentina, the Labor Code was seen as a means to control the labor movement, to
subordinate it to the state, and to cleanse it of leftists and Marxists. Ibáñez used the po-
lice and army to persecute FOCH, the Communist party, and the anarchists. He also ex-
iled leaders of the major political parties who objected to his restriction of civil liberties,
to his intimidation of the press, his overt manipulation of Congress, and his disdain for
the old politics. Many conservative Chileans, to whom the fascist-corporative govern-
ments of Primo de Rivera in Spain or Benito Mussolini in Italy seemed to offer a wel-
come relief from liberal democracy, fully supported Ibáñez’s repression of popular
movements and organizations. They applauded government officials who praised fas-
cism in Italy and the ability of fascist regimes to direct economic growth and to curtail
the corruption of liberal democracy. They also appreciated the regime’s emphasis on
work, order, and discipline. Ibáñez seemed to offer a version of the Portalian state
adapted to the conditions of the twentieth century. Initially, many middle-class reform-
ers also supported Ibáñez due to his emphasis on economic modernization, industrial-
ization, agricultural colonization, and labor legislation.
An explicitly authoritarian, corporative orientation combined with a commitment to
reform the apparatus of the Chilean state led both to significant policy innovations and
lamentable abuses. Ibáñez transformed Congress into a captive, generally compliant
assembly, thereby eliminating the central axis of traditional politics. He also created a
government-controlled organization, the Republican Confederation for Civic Action,
or CRAC, to replace existing labor organizations and the multiplicity of political par-
ties of the pre-1927 period and thus sought to eliminate the influence of traditional and
reformist political parties and to control the labor movement in an authoritarian style
which later became common among the populist regimes in Latin America. In this ef-
fort Ibáñez ultimately failed, but there can be no question that his presidency repre-
sented a brief return to the ideals and methods of Portales—a swing of the pendulum
away from liberalism and constitutional government. Eschewing “politics” and con-
centrating upon “cleansing” Chile by “cauterization,” in both economic and political
policies he established a precedent for another military dictatorship—much more bru-
tal—in the mid-1970s. Like his successors in the 1970s, Ibáñez rejected liberal democ-
racy, detested radicalism, and blamed politics for Chile’s decadence.
If in many respects Ibáñez broke with the old order, the dependence of his govern-
ment programs upon nitrate and copper revenues, along with increased levels of for-
eign investment and loans, made the regime as vulnerable to fluctuations in interna-
186 CHILE

tional markets as any Chilean administration since 1879. The stock market crash of 1929
soon paralyzed Chile’s finances and wreaked havoc on the economy. Government ef-
forts to form a new cartel called the Compañia de Salitre de Chile, or COSACH, in co-
operation with the Guggenheim interests, brought criticism from economic nationalists
and opponents of the government. It also failed to stem the effects of the depression.
The value of copper and nitrate exports declined from over 200 million pesos in 1929
to 18.1 million in 1932; over 50,000 workers lost their jobs in the nitrate fields alone. Im-
ports declined by over 75 percent in the same period, making Chile in this respect the
country most seriously affected by the international depression. The government could
not service outstanding loans or obtain new lines of credit. In February 1931, Congress
extended Ibáñez’s emergency powers to deal with the economic crisis; in May, Ibáñez
declared he would maintain order by force of arms. Wage cuts for government person-
nel and the military followed, along with new income taxes, an increase in inheritance
taxes, a moratorium on public works, and dismissals of public employees. These econ-
omy moves simply worsened the effects of the depression and added to unemploy-
ment. In July the government suspended service on the foreign debt in foreign cur-
rency—since the country’s reserves were practically depleted. The Ibáñez government
would fall a month later, but poor harvests in 1931–32 added to the misery.
By late 1931 government programs to disperse the northern unemployed in the agri-
cultural regions or to shelter them in temporary barracks called albergues in the urban
areas seemed a dreadful failure. The nation simply did not have the resources to pro-
vide relief for the thousands of unemployed and their families. Illustrative is the fol-
lowing excerpt from a report by the intendant of Talca to the minister of interior in Jan-
uary 1932:

Apprised of government plans to begin shortly the distribution of 2000 families of un-
employed workers throughout the central and southern provinces, I hasten, with all
due respect, to make the following observations. . . .
In Talca, without counting those unregistered by the Secretaría de Bienestar Social,
there are more than 5000 unemployed, of which more than 700 along with their fam-
ilies are in the albergues; others are camped in emergency shelters along the roads and
at the sites of public works, living off the small amount that good-hearted people can
supply.
In the countryside the poverty is much worse. The landowners have cut back their
work to the minimum. . . . With the lack of capital, poor harvests, and drastic de-
cline in prices, agriculture faces a total collapse. Many have no way to pay salaries,
but they give their inquilinos milk in the morning and hot meals at noon, though they
don’t work.
. . . I visited nearby zones some days ago and saw tragedies of hunger and mis-
ery that can’t be described.
. . . For this reason it seems unlikely to me that the efforts by the government to
place the unemployed in agriculture will have any success.

By the end of 1931 the director of the Labor Department reported to the minister of so-
cial welfare that “The situation of the unemployed is simply terrible in Iquique, Co-
quimbo, Ovalle, Calera, Santiago, Talca, and Talcahuano. . . . The city of Santiago is
so congested with unemployed—that, with all the efforts we have made, there are an
enormous quantity of families that, as in the rest of the Republic, have been violently
evicted from their dwellings and live in unhealthy makeshift shelters [ranchos].” In the
same letter the director noted that the government’s cutbacks in public works and rail-
POLITICS, LABOR, AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION 187

Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, president 1927–1931, 1952–1958. (Courtesy of Chilean Army.)

road activity aggravated the crisis; the latter decision also negatively affected coal pro-
duction in the Lota region.
The concentration of unemployed in urban areas not only stretched government re-
lief efforts but also threatened public order. Intermittent attempts by the government
to eradicate particular albergues and disperse more workers into the rural regions met
stiff resistance. In turn, industrial and commercial interests in some cities petitioned the
government for more protection against “ill-intentioned individuals [maleantes] who
sought to subvert public order.”
Civilian and military opposition to the Ibáñez regime became bolder with the gov-
ernment’s apparent weakness. In late July 1931 a “general strike” by professional asso-
ciations, white-collar workers, and students demanded a return to constitutional gov-
ernment. As the cabinet decided to close all banks to prevent conversion of money into
foreign currency and to impose controls on foreign exchange, doctors in Santiago went
out on strike and vowed not to resume practice until Ibáñez resigned. Violence in the
streets, resurgence of political opposition in all sectors including the military, and the
insoluble economic dilemma forced Ibáñez to resign from office on July 26, 1931.
The Congress “elected” under Ibáñez’s tutelage next organized an acusación consti-
tucional, a combination impeachment proceeding and public trial that denounced the
abuses of the dictatorship. The acusación constitucional procedure dated from the period
after independence and had roots in the colonial residencias that examined the perfor-
mance of colonial officials after they left office. Over the years, this procedure came to
188 CHILE

be used to impeach incumbent ministers, to obstruct government policy initiatives, and

as a way to exact political judgment against ex-presidents and government officials. In
his defense Carlos Ibáñez sent Congress a letter from his Argentine exile. He told the
legislators:
When misgovernment, anarchy and corruption had led to national stagnation, when
the people, defrauded and abandoned, was the constant victim of professional politi-
cians and agitators, when those responsible for the destiny of la patria, . . . justified
inaction with the appearance of respecting the Constitution, . . . the youth of the
Armed Forces, supported by the good citizenry of this country, put an end to a period
of national history that I need not further characterize. Whether I did well or badly,
history will judge, and that judgment will not be twisted by the campaign of hate and
falsehoods, that with obvious [political] motivation seeks to besmirch the regime I
served.
Ibáñez told the Congress that he had saved the country from anarchy; he should be ap-
plauded, not maligned. Congress disagreed, approving the acusación constitucional with
the ex-president in exile. Like others before him and after, Ibáñez soon benefited from
political amnesty. He would play an important role in Chile politics into the 1950s
when the voters returned him to the presidency (1952–58).
For the seventeen months following Ibáñez’ resignation, the country suffered
through several civilian and military governments of varying political tendencies, in-
cluding the famous “100 days” of a Chilean “Socialist Republic,” under the alternating
leadership of Marmaduque Grove, Carlos Dávila, and an alliance with the newly
formed socialist movement called Nueva Acción Pública, or “New Public Action.” In-
ternational economic conditions put unmanageable strains on any national govern-
ment, while lack of political consensus denied all the military and civilian-military
coalitions sufficient support to impose order or to direct economic recovery. In Sep-
tember 1931 conservative civilian politicians and the commander of the Chilean armed
forces requested military assistance from the United States in order to put down a naval
mutiny supposedly inspired by “communistic” elements. In conversations with the
American ambassador, the Chilean commander emphasized the serious nature of the
“imminent danger of social war” and referred to the continental, rather than local, char-
acter of the communistic activities that he believed threatened the nation. Handcuffed
by a 1922 treaty limiting transfer of naval armaments, the United States nevertheless
expressed a willingness to supply other materiel should the Chilean government make
a formal request. United States representatives also expressed their “appreciation of the
desires of the Chilean government to maintain order and stable institutions and to pro-
tect American interests in Chile. . . .”
Using airpower to defeat the naval mutiny, the Chilean government withdrew its re-
quest for American military assistance but, according to the American ambassador,
subsequently asked for “a specialist in communistic propaganda and activities in order
to assist in ferreting out the ramifications and origins of the movement in Chile.” The
State Department replied that “this Government regrets that there is not available in
the Government service a specialist whose services it could offer.”

The confusion following Ibáñez’s ouster ultimately produced a significant realignment

of political forces on an explicitly Left-Right ideological continuum. Small socialist
movements merged to form the Socialist party (1933); a split between Trotzkyists and
Stalinists divided the Communist party; splinter groups from existing parties created
the Radical Socialist party (ex-Radicals), the Democrat party, or, Partido Democrático
(ex-members of the Partido Demócrata), and the center-right Agrarian party (ex-Liber-
POLITICS, LABOR, AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION 189

table 7–3. politics, amnesties, and pardons: 1925–42*

Amnesty Law or
Political Chronology Year Other Policy President

Break in constitutional stability 1924–32

Military coup (September) 1924
Labor laws 1924
Military coup (January) 1925
Alessandri returns from exile, resumes 1925
presidency (March)
New Constitution (September) 1925 Decree Law 535 Alessandri
Alessandri resigns (October) 1925
Interim government 1925–27 Emiliano Figueroa
Ibáñez dictatorship 1927–31
Ibáñez ousted (July) 1931
Acusación Constitucional against
Ibáñez approved in Senate
Montero presidency (five months) 1932 Law 4977 Montero
Montero ousted by coup 1932 (4 June coup, “Re-
pública Socialista”
proclaimed)
Various military and civil-military jun- Decree Law 23 Military Junta
tas
Decree Law 75 Dávila
Decree Law 180 Dávila
Decree Law 437 Dávila
Decree Law 504 (res) Dávila
Arturo Alessandri reelected 1932
(governs with periodic use of facul- 1933–36
tades extraordinarias, state of siege)
Massacre at Ranquil 1934 Law 5483 (covers Alessandri
coup of 4 June
1932, Ranquil, etc.)
Railroad strikes 1935–36
State of siege 1936 Law 5950 Alessandri
Popular Front created 1936
Law of Internal Security of the State 1937 Law 6.026
Massacre at Caja de Seguro Obrero 1938
Pedro Aguirre Cerda elected president 1938
Acusación Constitucional against 1939 Pres. Aguirre Cerda
Alessandri (fails in House of pardons persons
Deputies) involved in events
at Caja de Seguro
Obrero
Failed coup by Gen. Ariosto Herrera 1939
(25 August)
1941 Law 6885 Aguirre Cerda
1942 Law 7159 Méndez (interim
president)

*All laws and decrees listed in this table are amnesties for events related to political conflicts from 1925–42;
amnesties cover a variety of “political crimes,” including violation of the Law of Internal Security of the State.
Amnesties for failing to vote or complying with obligatory military service are excluded.
190 CHILE

table 7–4. political amnesties in chile, 1943–78*

Political Chronology Year Amnesty Laws

Death of President Ríos

Interim presidency, A. Duhalde
1943 Law 7.425 (collective pardon)†
(List of prisoners in Temuco jail)
“Massacre” at Plaza Bulnes 1946
1946 Law 8.526
Persons processed or sentenced for viola-
tions of Law 6.026, 1937 (Internal Secu-
rity of the State) and Decree Law 425,
1925 (“abuses of media,—basic censor-
ship law)

President González Videla 1946–52

New law on peasant unions 1947
Wave of strikes in mines, farms
Communist party outlawed
Law for Permanent Defense of Democ-
racy (Law 8.987) 1948
1950 Law 9.611
Persons charged with crimes due to the
strike of public health workers
1950 Law 9.665
Persons charged with crimes due to the
strike of postal and telegraph workers
Presidential elections 1952 Law 10.957
Persons processed or sentenced for crimes
against the internal security of the state,
under the law for the permanent de-
fense of democracy, under the law
against “abuses of the media” DL 425,
election law; those sentenced or pro-
cessed as a consequence of work stop-
pages or strikes, until 3 September 1952
(and various others, with exclusions
stipulated)
Reconfiguration of party system
End of Radical party presidencies
(1938–52)

Carlos Ibáñez 1952–58

Molina peasant strike 1953
Labor and peasant activism 1953–57
Coup plotting and scandals
Debates on repeal of Law 8.987
Thousands of pardons granted
Urban “insurrection” April 1–2, 1957
(continued)
POLITICS, LABOR, AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION 191

table 7–4. political amnesties in chile, 1943–78* (continued)

Political Chronology Year Amnesty Laws

1955 Law 11.773

Persons responsible for any crimes or in-
fractions sanctioned by Law 8.987 (Law
for Permanent Defense of Democracy)
[lists certain exclusions, e.g., homicide];
persons processed or sentenced for “de-
sacato” by provoking a duel and those
who served as seconds; also for various
public sector workers (e.g., railroad
workers, for missing work or strikes).
1956 Law 12.004
Persons responsible for crimes or infrac-
tions under Law 8.987, committed prior
to 18 October 1955 [excludes homicide,
arson, and several crimes specified in
article 480 of the Penal Code]; also cov-
ers government workers and workers
in autonomous and semi-autonomous
agencies; eliminates also administrative
sanctions for the same violations (essen-
tially illegal work stoppages or strikes,
forbidden under Law 8.987).
1958 Law 12.886
Persons responsible for crimes or infrac-
tions committed before December 1,
1957, under Law (8.987), and for all in-
fractions or crimes committed “for po-
litical reasons;” prior to the same date;
for those processed or sentenced, and
those responsible for crimes under DL
425 (censorship law); specifies that cov-
erage extends to members of the armed
forces, police, and “investigations”
(civilian political police) for crimes
committed to repress acts against public
order and social peace, committed prior
to December 1, 1957; to persons who
participated in the strike in December
1957, in the provinces of Tarapacá and
Antofagasta and the Dept. of Chañaral;
persons who engaged in illegal work
stoppages from the Ministry of Agricul-
ture and the Consejo de Fomento e In-
vestigaciones Agrícolas, on February 7,
1958; government workers, and work-
ers in semi-fiscal agencies, municipal,
maritime, and railway workers, etc.,
who received administrative sanctions
for the events of April 1–7, 1957.
(continued)
192 CHILE

table 7–4. political amnesties in chile, 1943–78* (continued)

Political Chronology Year Amnesty Laws

Electoral reform (Australian ballot) 1958

Derogation Law 8.987
Allende and leftist coalition almost win
presidency; Jorge Alessandri assumes
presidency

Jorge Alessandri 1958–64

Economic austerity, IMF model, return 1961 Law 14.629
of inflation Persons charged in process 2419 in the ju-
risdiction of the Naval courts-martial of
Valparaíso, related to indiscipline,
“sedition,” and “insurrection” of per-
sonnel at the Escuela de Ingeniería
Naval in May 1961.
Congressional elections; first time politi- 1963 Law 15.576
cal right loses veto (1/3 + 1) over con- Persons processed or sentenced for crimes
stitutional reform; realignment with committed within national territory
Radical party, Liberals, and Conserva- covered by DL 425 and Title I of Law
tives Moderate agrarian reform law 12.927 (updated Internal Security of the
Pressures by Alliance for Progress State Law); Title II, Section III of the
Christian Democrats and left organize Military Code of Justice; and Title I of
in countryside Section II of the Penal Code, committed
prior to June 1, 1963; all those benefit-
ting by this amnesty have their pension
rights reinstated
“Ley Mordaza” (reformed censorship 1964 Law 15.632
law: Law 15.576) Persons charged or sentenced for crimes
covered by Title III of Law 12.927, com-
mitted prior to 6 August, 1964 (Delitos
contra el orden público)

Eduardo Frei M. 1964–70

“Revolution in Liberty” Peasant unions 1965 Law 16.239
organized Agrarian reform Political Journalists processed or sentenced for vio-
mobilization lations of Law 15.576, 1964
1965 Law 16.290
Persons processed or sentenced for viola-
tion of the Law of Internal Security of
the State (excludes persons involved in
an explosion at the Brazilian Embassy
in Santiago)
1966 Law 16.519
Persons responsible for violations of Law
15.576 committed prior to June 21, 1966.
Includes also civil liability for these vio-
lations (excludes civil law suits by party
parties)
(continued)
POLITICS, LABOR, AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION 193

table 7–4. political amnesties in chile, 1943–78* (continued)

Political Chronology Year Amnesty Laws

Law 16.604
Amnesty for mayors and municipal coun-
cilpersons for unauthorized use of
funds (wrong budget categories) prior
to July 1, 1966 (excludes personal en-
richment and corruption)
Socialist party declares itself in favor of 1967–69
violent revolution; Splits in Christian
Democratic Party; MIR and socialists
carry out land occupations and first
“armed expropriations” of banks
Government called on to use police
and armed forces to remove illegal oc-
cupants of land
1968 Law 16.975
Amnesty for Intendentes and Gober-
nadores who refused to use force to ex-
ecute court orders against illegal occu-
pants of public and private property;
journalists responsible for crimes cov-
ered by Law 12.927 (Internal Security of
the State); restores worker benefits, de-
nied due to the circumstances of the
strike in 1966 at Potrerillos, El Salvador,
Barquitos y Chuquicamata
“Massacre” of urban squatters in Puerto March 1969
Montt; Acusación Constitucional June 1969
against Interior Minister E. Pérez Zu-
covic
1969 Law 17.234
Amnesty for mayors and city council per-
sons, ex-mayors, and ex-municipal em-
ployees who illegally transferred funds
from one budget category to another
prior to June 30, 1969. Eliminates civil
liability in the same cases
Presidential elections: Salvador Allende September 4,
wins plurality with Unidad Popular 1970
coalition

Salvador Allende 1970–73

Allende grants pardons to various 1970
Miristas
Ex-minister E. Perez Zucovic assassi- 1970
nated
Proposed political amnesty laws fail 1970–71
(continued)
194 CHILE

table 7–4. political amnesties in chile, 1943–78* (continued)

Political Chronology Year Amnesty Laws

1971 Law 17.553

Mayors, city councilpersons and munici-
pal employees, and ex-officials who
have illegally transferred funds from
one budget category to another prior to
July 1, 1971; includes municipal and
provincial treasurers (excludes cases of
personal enrichment and corruption)
Political polarization/military coup September 11,
1973

Military government 1973–90

Decree Law 2.191 (April 1978)

*Excludes periodic amnesties for draft evaders and for violations of election laws (mandatory voting require-
ments) and individual amnesties (amnesties not involving at least two persons). Does not include thousands
of individual pardons (indultos).
†
Collective pardon (indulto general) requires legislation; individual pardon by presidential decree, Ministry of
Justice.

als and Radicals). These divisions and realignments introduced new personalities and
new energy into Chilean politics while setting the stage for political struggle during the
next four decades.
In the short term, however, six different governments “controlled” the country
within a 101-day period in 1932. Each government promulgated amnesty decrees and
pardons in an effort to restore stability and to “reconcile” the antagonists of recent con-
flicts, just as had occurred from the late 1820s until 1925. Indeed, the nineteenth-
century pattern of cyclic political violence and political ruptures followed by amnesties
and other policies of “reconciliation” was converted into a common political tactic that
would characterize Chilean politics from 1932 to 1973. The routinization of this pattern
of political conflicts followed by pardons, amnesties, and other modes of “political rec-
onciliation” is illustrated in Tables 7–3 and 7–4.
Seeking to end the chaotic situation—and with much of the officer corps disillu-
sioned with the military role in politics—General Bartolomé Blanche assumed provi-
sional executive authority and scheduled the presidential election for October, 1932.
Contested among candidates representing the spectrum of political opinion, the presi-
dential elections restored civilian government to Chile and returned Arturo Alessandri
to the presidency. Alessandri obtained 184,754 of the 339,709 votes cast, while 20 per-
cent of the electorate supported the socialist (Marmaduque Grove) or the Communist
(Elías Lafertte) candidate. Subsequently the Left pressed Alessandri for social reforms,
thereby restoring the social question to center stage in Chilean politics. In turn the
Right sought restoration or reaffirmation of their status and privileges—which had
been challenged by certain policies of the Ibáñez administration as well as by the “So-
cialist Republic.”
POLITICS, LABOR, AND THE SOCIAL QUESTION 195

At the depths of the depression and in the midst of political uncertainty, no one
could have forecast that for the next forty years Chile would be the only Latin Ameri-
can nation without illegal changes of government. Neither could anyone have pre-
dicted, despite increasing American economic interest in Chile, the major role United
States policy would play in Chile’s internal political development over the next four
decades.
8 Chilean Democracy

Chile’s political instability between 1920 and 1932 gave way to four decades of legally
elected civilian governments. From 1932 until September 1973 Chile was the only Latin
American nation in which competitive party politics, uninterrupted by coups, assassi-
nations or revolutions, determined the occupants of the presidency, Congress, and
higher policymaking positions in the national bureaucracy. The same political parties
competing at the national level also vied for control of local government institutions
and for influence in national and regional student federations, labor unions, and other
community or class organizations. Direct election of the president according to the pro-
visions of the 1925 constitution made the selection of the chief executive a truly national
event.
Incorporation of women (1949) and illiterates (1970) into the electoral registers in-
creased by more than 30 percent the population eligible to vote. Improved literacy rates
(50%, 1939; 75%, 1960), increased political awareness among working classes, and
mandatory registration and voting did much to increase the number of voters in na-
tional elections. Important electoral reforms in 1958 and 1962 liberated the votes of
rural workers from the control of landlords and reduced the possibility of vote buying
and election fraud, thereby extending effective suffrage to practically the entire adult
population.
The Chilean political system during these years combined multiparty politics with
presidential government. Unlike a parliamentary system, governments did not “fall.”
Presidents served six-year terms, and during these six years cabinet shifts could reflect
new party alliances or an executive decision to govern with a “nonpolitical” cabinet of
technical experts or even a cabinet of personal loyalists. But the extreme fragmentation
of the party system made it difficult for presidents to control legislative action or even
to maintain the total support of their own party. Congressional and municipal elections
which did not coincide in time with presidential elections added to legislative inde-
pendence and to the unlikelihood that presidential electoral coalitions could be trans-
lated into majoritarian governing coalitions. Thus despite the increased authority of the
president under the 1925 constitution, the old tensions between the legislature and the
executive characteristic of the parliamentary period still played an important role in
national politics.
Political tension between the president and the Congress did not mean total stale-
mate, but it did impose a certain constraint on the ability of presidents to implement
the electoral platform upon which they campaigned. Since presidential electoral plat-
forms generally contained more “Left” or populist planks than the Congress would ac-
cept, the growing frustration among leftist members of presidential coalitions meant
their eventual collapse, and a gradual drift of policy toward the Right during each pres-
ident’s term of office. Thus Congress allowed Conservatives, Liberals, moderate and
traditional Radicals, and certain middle-class business interests to limit the reformist
projects of presidential coalitions.

196
CHILEAN DEMOCRACY 197

Ceremony celebrating women’s suffrage in national elections, 1949.

(Courtesy Archivo Universidad de Chile.)

Control over the votes of rural labor assured the Conservative and the Liberal par-
ties, along with some Radicals, of enough congressional seats to retain important veto
power over presidential programs. The “stability” of Chilean formal democracy, there-
fore, depended on considerable political bargaining, the use of political patronage, and
shifting government coalitions undergirded by the continued dominance of the
landowners over the votes and the political activity of their farm work force. This dom-
inance, in turn, depended upon maintenance of the hacienda system through the pre-
vention of rural unionization and the exclusion of outside political influences.
Recurrent challenges to the hacienda system after 1930 threatened to upset Chile’s
political stability. The urban labor movement and Marxist political parties made peri-
odic efforts to encourage agricultural unionism and to wrest control of rural votes from
the landowners. Every national administration, however, relied upon a complex sys-
tem of economic and political subsidies to the landowners, including the repression of
the rural labor movement, in order to install and preserve Chilean formal democracy.
And, much to their later, self-confessed distress, Communists and Socialists colluded
in elaborating an “arrangement” that made maintenance of the hacienda system and
exploitation of rural labor the cornerstone in the edifice of Chilean formal democracy.

The world depression of the early 1930s marked the beginning of a period in Chilean
history when even more than before internal developments responded to international
economic and political movements. Disruption of foreign trade radically reduced the
nation’s import capabilities. According to League of Nations’ estimates, no other nation
in the world suffered a more severe impact from the international economic collapse
than Chile. By 1932, imports, in real terms, stood at only one-sixth their 1929 levels. The
Chilean government declared a moratorium on debt repayments and adopted a series
198 CHILE

Vote-buying (cohecho), 1946. Buying votes influenced elections into the 1950s.
(Courtesy Archivo Universidad de Chile.)

of policies intended to alleviate the consequences of the abrupt decline in government

revenues from taxes on exports, an extreme balance of trade deficit, lack of foreign
credits, and a deterioration in the terms of trade (36% from 1929 to 1932). With imports
down in real terms by over 80 percent (1929–32) and gross domestic product reduced
in real terms by almost 40 percent during the same period, Chilean manufacturers re-
jected liberal economic principles in regard to international trade and urged upon the
government policies to encourage local production. Import quotas, licenses, tariff bar-
riers, currency devaluation, and a complicated system of multiple exchange controls
discriminated against foreign commodities.
These conditions accelerated greatly the uneven process of industrial development
that had been under way since before World War I. Led by the textile sector, Chilean
manufacturers of chemicals, metal products, machinery, furniture, paper, non-metallic
minerals, along with current consumer goods, achieved a significant increase in output
and, by 1940, had altered the structure as well as overall contribution of industry in the
national economy. Import-substitution industrialization reduced manufactured goods
from 50 percent of the value of Chilean imports in 1925 to only 16 percent in 1969—with
imports in the later year largely capital goods and high technology items.
In the years after 1930, utilizing imported foreign technology, capital goods, and pri-
mary or semiprocessed inputs for industry, Chile created a significant industrial sector,
whose structure and composition altered as the predominance of agricultural-based
firms (60 percent of total manufacturing income and 47 percent of employment in 1938)
ended. Growth of the textile, chemical and petrochemicals, cement, and metal sectors—
among other non-agricultural-based manufacturers—reduced the employment share
CHILEAN DEMOCRACY 199

table 8–1. growth of voter participation in

presidential elections, 1925–70

Percent of
Population
Total Voters Registered Population
Year Votes Cast Registered to Vote Total

1925 260,895 302,212 7.4 4,073,000

1927 233,103 302,142 7.2 4,188,000
1931 285,810 388,959 8.8 4,429,000
1932 343,892 429,772 9.0 4,495,000
1938 443,898 503,871 10.2 4,914,000
1942 466,507 581,486 11.1 5,244,000
1946 479,019 631,527 11.2 5,643,000
1952 955,102 1,105,029 17.6* 6,303,000
1958 1,250,437 1,521,272 20.8 7,316,000
1964 2,530,697 2,915,121 34.3 8,503,000
1970 2,954,799 3,539,747 37.0 9,566,000

*Including women for the first time in a presidential election.

Source: Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas, Demografía, Chile, 1969; and Fernando Silva Sánchez,
Los Partidos Políticos Chilenos, Viña del Mar, Chile: Imprenta Lourdes, 1972. After Edward W.
Glab, Jr., “Christian Democracy, Marxism and Revolution in Chile: The Election and Overthrow
of Salvador Allende,” unpublished doctoral dissertation, Northern Illinois University, 1975, p.
148.

of the agricultural-based firms to 35 percent in 1961. Overall, though the employment

share of industry rose only from 17 percent in 1940 to approximately 20 percent in 1970,
the absolute number of workers in industry almost doubled. By 1970 more than 560,000
Chileans earned their living in industrial employment, and this industrial labor force
was becoming more significant in Chile’s political life.
Government measures to stimulate industrialization led also to a significant in-
crease in the size of the state bureaucracy. New credit institutions, exchange control
commissions, and boards to regulate agricultural exports and establish retail price con-
trols, added a network of governmental intervention in the national economy. Creation
of a national development corporation (CORFO) in 1939 and the subsequent establish-
ment of public and mixed-venture enterprises, as well as semi-autonomous “decen-
tralized” public agencies in housing, school construction, agricultural extension, and
social security entailed an even more significant amplification of the role of the state in
defining the direction and character of national economic development.*
Not only did new state institutions indicate the changing role of national govern-
ment in Chilean society, but they also created new employment opportunities for a
growing group of salaried professionals and white-collar workers. The political impli-
cations of thousands of attractive government jobs were not lost on the political parties
in their efforts to capture legislative majorities or to form government coalitions. By the
early 1940s the public sector accounted for more than 50 percent of all internal invest-
ment capital, and in the years 1930–49 public employment more than doubled—a rate

*Between 1942 and 1952 these semi-autonomous, decentralized agencies gradually acquired
their own legal identity and varying incomes derived from their own activities, apart from ad-
ditional appropriations from the national budget.
200 CHILE

of increase twice that in mining or agriculture and 32 percent above even industry and
construction. These developments provided the basis for the consolidation of a bu-
reaucratic “middle class” associated with an interventionist state. It would mean that a
large proportion of the middle groups in Chilean society, both civilian and military,
would support a further expansion of public activity in welfare, health care, education,
and government-owned enterprises. If government activism meant marginal benefits
for the working classes, it meant employment for the graduates of secondary schools,
technical schools, and universities. Employment in the central administration more
than tripled between 1925 and 1965, while national population barely doubled; this 300
percent increase in public employment did not include those holding positions in the
semi-autonomous public enterprises such as the national airline (LAN) or national pe-
troleum industry (ENAP).
In contrast to the aspirations and predictions of Chilean proponents of industrial-
ization, however, significant industry did not mean increased economic independence.
Wars in Europe, Korea, and Vietnam, international business cycles, and a complex, so-
phisticated network of multinational enterprises operating within a still more compli-
cated international metals market limited Chilean economic performance. American,
European, and multinational financial institutions determined the availability of credit
and foreign investment for Chilean development.
Foreign corporations owned the principal enterprises that earned foreign exchange
for the nation. Since intricate bargaining procedures among industrial consumers, the
copper firms, and the United States government fixed the prices for these companies’
copper output, production of increasing quantities of manufactured consumer goods
did little to alter the historical reliance by Chile upon the export of one or several min-
erals. Indeed the combination of copper dependency and dependence upon foreign
technology, capital goods, credit, investment funds, and technicians to carry out the
process of industrialization made Chilean domestic development ever more vulnera-
ble to external economic forces and to foreign manipulation.
Meanwhile, the policies that encouraged import-substitution industrialization
through protective tariffs and nontariff barriers to imports both subsidized and en-
couraged the inefficiency of Chilean manufactures. These same policies created jobs for
a labor force that was organized largely by leftist unions and political parties. Thus
Chilean political economy gradually created a network of inefficient firms, to the detri-
ment of consumers, and of domestic enterprises forced to suffer monopoly pricing for
oftentimes lesser-quality inputs. It also nurtured a politically mobilized labor move-
ment whose members owed their jobs to these government policies and to the expan-
sion of the government bureaucracy. This volatile policy concoction generated cycles of
inflation and political conflict, subject to the overall dependency of the economy on in-
ternational prices and on the decisions made by foreign private investors and foreign
governments. U.S. firms and government officials had largely replaced the British in-
vestors, merchants, bankers, and consuls of the nineteenth century. But Chile still
gouged its lands; polluted its rivers, streams, and air; depleted its forests; and exploited
its people to export minimally processed natural resources—even as its leaders sought
to overcome this historical pattern with the schemes for industrialization.
Not only economic dependence increased in the period after 1930. International
power struggles and ideological divisions conditioned Chilean politics. In the early
1930s a clear Left-Center-Right system of political cleavage replaced the old politics of
factions, personalist cliques, and traditional party alignments. Marxism, liberalism, so-
cial Catholicism, and fascism all had supporters in Chile. The popular front, the Span-
ish Civil War, and nazism all influenced Chilean politics in the 1930s and 1940s. After
CHILEAN DEMOCRACY 201

table 8–2. employment in public sector,

central administration

Year Number

1925 32,877
1935 41,266
1945 59,645
1955 75,542
1965 109,699

Source: Germán Urzúa Valenzuela and Ana María García

Barzelatto, Diagnóstico de la burocracia Chilena 1818–1969,
Editorial Jurídica, Santiago, 1971.

World War II the so-called Cold War drew United States agents and diplomats directly
into Chilean politics in efforts to influence elections, manipulate labor organizations,
disseminate American policy perspectives, and defend American investments. Like-
wise, the Soviet Union and Eastern European nations contributed funds and ideologi-
cal orientation and direction for the country’s Marxist parties and labor organizations.
Although Soviet expenditures and influence in Chile never approximated that of the
United States, the effects of Cold War rhetoric and the global confrontation between
capitalist “free world” nations and the Soviet bloc gradually permeated Chilean soci-
ety at all levels.
If the process of industrialization between 1932 and 1964 did not free Chile from de-
pendence upon copper exports, foreign investment, or the fluctuations in the interna-
tional economy, it did accelerate the trends toward urbanization and rural stagnation
evident in the first decades of the twentieth century. Employment opportunities in in-
dustry attracted migrants from the countryside to major manufacturing centers in San-
tiago, Valparaíso, Concepción-Talcahuano, and other provincial centers such as
Temuco and Talca. Even more than expanded economic opportunity in industry, how-
ever, the worsening conditions of labor in Chilean agriculture motivated rural workers
and youths to flee the countryside. Real wages for rural workers declined by approxi-
mately 18 percent between 1940 and 1952 and by another 38 percent between 1953 and
1960. Tenant agricultural laborers (inquilinos) suffered a decrease in quantity and/or
quality of land allotments and other non-cash perquisites such as rights to pasture ani-
mals, firewood, and food rations. Landlords supplied a lesser share of seed, fertilizer,
or other inputs. In the period 1940/44–1950/54 the real earnings of sharecroppers and
tenants declined by 27 percent, while landowners achieved a real gain in earnings of 33
percent. Indeed, the price of labor in agriculture declined relative to all other inputs be-
tween 1940 and 1960. Combined with the declining real income of agricultural labor,
the rising real wages of blue-collar workers in manufacturing during the same period
(1940/44–1950/54) accelerated the exodus from the countryside. Whereas total popu-
lation approximately doubled from 1920 to 1960 (see Table 8–2), rural population in-
creased by less than 18 percent. By 1960 more than half of all Chileans lived in cities of
20,000 or more, well above the comparable figures for all major world areas except
North America and Oceania.
Underlying these demographic and economic trends could be found a complex,
contradictory set of political arrangements that permitted the most traditional social
and economic institutions in the nation, the large rural estates, to survive intact through
202 CHILE

table 8–3. demographic changes in chile, 1920–60

1920 1930 1940 1950 1960

Total population 3,785,000 4,365,000 5,063,000 6,295,000 7,628,136

Rural population 2,185,800 2,421,300 2,530,400 2,650,500
Population in cities, 20,000 plus, 28 32 35 43 51
as percent of total population
in Chile
Population in cities, 20,000 plus, 14 17 20 25 33
as percent of total population
in Latin America

four decades of dramatic social change and economic modernization. To a great extent
the survival of the hacienda system and its extensive subsidization by the state repre-
sented the trade-off between Marxists, reformers, and traditional political interests that
permitted the establishment and maintenance of Chile’s vaunted “stability” and “de-
mocracy.” Whenever this trade-off was threatened, political toleration ended. When
the large estates finally faced their demise in the period after 1964, so too did Chilean
formal democracy. For Chile in the 1960s, agrarian reform would imply not only dra-
matic social and economic change, but also destruction of the long-enduring political
arrangements that underpinned the country’s record of institutional stability.

Arturo Alessandri returned to the presidency in 1932 determined to implement the

1925 constitution, to establish the legitimate prerogatives of the presidency detailed in
that document, and to carry out the main provisions of the Labor Code. In contrast to
his earlier administration, Alessandri now eschewed incendiary rhetoric in favor of ap-
peals to national unity. He appointed ministers without the traditional overriding con-
cern with party coalitions and managed to retain key ministers for four or five years of
his six-year term—a feat almost unheard of in the days of parliamentary government.
The emphasis on national unity, order, economic recovery, and constitutional rule grad-
ually pushed the president into an ever more explicit alliance with the Right—the
forces that had the most to gain from “law and order.”
Faced with the depression-induced unemployment crisis, the continual threat of
new military intervention, and the growing militance of socialist and communist
movements, Alessandri allowed, even encouraged, the activity of white guards, called
the “Republican Militia.” According to the United States State Department files, in May
1933 President Alessandri personally reviewed a public parade of forty-two regiments
of well-armed and equipped militiamen as it passed La Moneda, the presidential
palace. As both a temporary counterbalance to the military and a threat to leftist move-
ments, the militia played a significant role in polarizing Chilean politics until 1936
when the president ordered its dissolution. By then, the president’s trusted military
commander, General Oscar Novoa, had crushed an attempted coup in December 1933
and, through careful duty assignments and retirement of officers deemed too “politi-
cal,” had gradually brought the officer corps under presidential control.
Neutralizing the military threat eliminated one of the most difficult problems facing
the administration. An upturn in the international economy and cautious domestic pol-
icy ameliorated the economic situation. Notwithstanding the government’s extremely
conservative fiscal policies, greater demand for copper and nitrates, the surge of in-
dustrial growth, and incentives to the private construction industry pulled the country
CHILEAN DEMOCRACY 203

out of the depths of the depression. Under the direction of arch-conservative Minister
of Treasury Gustavo Ross, the administration reduced expenditures upon public works
by almost 50 percent from 1932 to 1934; nevertheless official unemployment had prac-
tically disappeared by the end of 1935. In response to legislation passed at the end of
1933 allowing tax exemptions for a period of ten years on all buildings initiated before
December 1935, construction increased by 40 percent in 1934 alone. This incentive not
only balanced the deflationary effect of reduced public works but also renewed confi-
dence in the private sector concerning the government’s attitude toward private in-
vestment. Following on this legislation, a new public works program in 1936, focusing
especially upon construction of roads, hospitals, and schools, accelerated economic re-
covery. Combined with construction in industry and the upturn in the export market,
these projects alleviated most of the unemployment existing when Alessandri took of-
fice in 1932.
Inflation accompanied recovery. Price increases seemed to outpace salary gains, and
a government freeze on salaries in the public sector alienated public employees. Fail-
ure of agriculture to provision adequately the urban centers and mining regions
confronted the government with a dilemma that would underlie the contradictions
in domestic political economy for the next forty years. With an ever more politicized
and expanding urban labor movement, rising food prices spelled trouble for the in-
cumbent government. Efforts to control food prices without a significant per capita in-
crease in agricultural production required administrative controls on retail prices. De-
cree Law 520 of August 1932 created the General Commissariat of Subsistence and
Prices, or Comisariato General de Subsistencia y Precios. Although this decree was
promulgated during the brief reign of the “Socialist Republic,” its major provisions re-
mained in effect into the 1970s. It gave the General Commissariat authority to set prices
for a wide range of goods considered of “basic necessity.” It also extended authority to
the General Commissariat to take charge of distribution of basic commodities, to ex-
propriate or intervene in the administration of firms that refused to cooperate with
government economic policies, to requisition production under specified conditions,
and otherwise to regulate the operation of private firms. The more drastic provisions
of this decree rarely were utilized from 1932 until the 1970s—when the Unidad Popu-
lar government, headed by President Salvador Allende, resorted to the terms of the
1932 decree to accelerate a program to transform Chile into a socialist society. From
1932 on, however, the government’s authority to regulate the price of basic necessities
created an expectation among the population that incumbent governments would con-
trol the rate of inflation.
Along with the General Commissariat, the Junta de Exportación Agrícola was cre-
ated to promote agricultural exports and otherwise to benefit producers; it also soon
came under pressure from urban political forces. In times of rising prices and “food
shortages” the labor movement and leftist political parties demanded restrictions on
exports of agricultural commodities, much as had occurred in colonial Chile when
short-term grain shortages raised prices and royal officials sought to control prices in
Santiago and other towns by prohibiting exports to Peru. In addition, the Junta de Ex-
portación Agrícola, theoretically taking into account changing production costs, set
floor prices for wheat. Inevitably, decisions on wheat prices were reflected in the price
of bread—the basic food of the Chilean working classes. This made every price deci-
sion by the junta critical politically: it angered either producers or consumers.
Meanwhile, the increasing strength of the Socialist, Communist, and Radical parties
and the growth of the labor movement during the second Alessandri administration
made it politically impossible to ignore entirely pressures for price controls in urban
areas. President Alessandri strongly favored the development of the legal union move-
204 CHILE

table 8–4. legal and illegal strikes in chile,

1932–57

Personnel/ Personnel/
Legal Workers Illegal Workers
Year Strikes Involved Strikes Involved

1932 3 500* 3 100*

1933 7 648 3 100
1934 2 100 11 3000
1935 10 1197 20 4236
1936 4 4781 16 2977
1937 4 460 17 2569
1938 6 7954 9 3419
1939 20 5674 6 5249
1940 20 8235 25 10,576
1941 15 2041 16 890
1942 7 671 12 2062
1943 26 1897 101 46,832
1944 38 14,039 53 17,249
1945 36 32,334 112 66,612
1946 27 18,262 169 76,475
1947 37 17,887 127 51,652
1948 20 7172 6 1203
1949† 23 6533 24 8711
1950 28 12,058 164 41,833
1951 30 12,718 150 47,443
1952 45 28,073 156 89,566
1953 60 54,628 148 68,480
1954 61 25,009 247 49,687
1955 62 23,062 212 104,370
1956 25 5138 122 95,300
1957 12 8722 68 17,616

*Approximate figure.
†
Year after implementation of Law for Permanent Defense of Democracy.
Source: Chilean Labor Department, Annual Report 1948, and yearly, 1949–
1958.

ment under the terms of the Labor Code, since he saw the code as a major result of his
own zeal in the 1920s. Accordingly the administration supported efforts by the Labor
Department to encourage the organization of legal unions. The unions in turn pressed
for lower food prices. This meant a clash with agricultural interests.
Successful implementation of price controls and a restrictive agricultural export pol-
icy depended upon artificial depression of producer prices for agricultural commodi-
ties. Only gradually did succeeding administrations elaborate a complex array of direct
and indirect subsidies to the landowners—including negative interest rates on credit,
low freight rates on state railroads, exemption from import duties on farm machinery,
export bounties, and exceedingly low tax rates on land and income. However, the most
important trade-off in the arrangement that came to reconcile the conflicting interests
of industrialists, urban workers, salaried middle-class groups, and landowners
emerged quite soon after Alessandri assumed office. Discrimination against the rural
CHILEAN DEMOCRACY 205

labor movement and repression of agricultural unionism would allow a superficial rec-
onciliation of the contradictory interests of urban labor, reformist political movements,
and the traditional landed elite.
From the end of 1932 until December 1938 the number of legal unions in Chile more
than doubled, and membership rose from 54,000 to more than 125,000. At the same
time, industrial relations gradually conformed to the provisions of the Labor Code as
the technocrats of the Labor Department successfully channeled class conflict within
the institutions established by the code. An exception to this trend, the predominance
of illegal strikes over legal strikes, reflected the overly restrictive nature of the legis-
lation regulating work stoppages; this exception did not prevent effective institution-
alization of the procedures for labor disputes. Whereas prior to 1924 labor disputes
represented a revolutionary challenge to the parliamentary system, the Alessandri ad-
ministration (1932–38) most effectively established administrative capabilities for rou-
tine handling of worker-employer collective bargaining. The underlying revolutionary
issues of the social question seemed to evaporate as unions and their political allies ac-
cepted the legitimacy of the juntas de conciliación and the labor courts.
Only in agriculture did employers en masse refuse to recognize the legitimacy of
unionization and the very applicability of the Labor Code. In sharp contrast to his gen-
eralized commitment to implement the Labor Code, President Alessandri also dis-
couraged agricultural unionization. Unfortunately for Alessandri, leading officials
within the Labor Department, among them some who had helped to write the Labor
Code, attempted to fulfill their duty by applying the terms of the code in the country-
side. This included efforts to force landowners to introduce written contracts with all
their workers, to pay social security taxes as the law required, and, most significant, to
unionize agricultural labor.
The implications of a unionized agricultural labor force associated with reformist
and Marxist political parties threatened not only the economic basis of Chilean agri-
culture but also the control of landowners over the votes of their agricultural tenants,
sharecroppers, and resident laborers—votes that guaranteed the presence of rightist
forces in the Congress.
The response to this threat by the Alessandri administration and the National Agri-
cultural Society (SNA) provided the foundation for the political “solution” to the prob-
lems posed by rapid urbanization, industrialization, growth of the urban labor move-
ment, and inflation. If rural labor could be forced to bear most of the costs of price
controls discriminating against agriculture, and if landowners could be spared the in-
convenience and cost of compliance with labor laws—while maintaining political con-
trol over the rural work force—then political “stability” could be maintained and the
threat of discontent or violence in the cities could be reduced.
In response to initial unionization efforts in vineyards in Talca province and a small
number of farms near Santiago in 1932 and 1933, the SNA protested to the Labor De-
partment and to President Alessandri that the unionization provisions of the Labor
Code did not apply to agriculture. Significantly, both the Labor Department and the
Consejo de Defensa Fiscal, a kind of administrative supreme court, ruled against the
landowners. The Labor Department concluded that “there is no doubt that the agricul-
tural worker has the complete right to unionize.” Taking its case directly to President
Alessandri, however, the SNA secured a reversal of the Labor Department’s decision in
the form of an ambiguously worded telegram sent to all the department’s offices:

This Department, in conjunction with the government, is studying activities related to

the unionization of workers in rural properties. Since there exist complex difficulties
206 CHILE

in carrying out these legal provisions, this Department orders you to refrain from as-
sisting in the constitution of organizations of this type until you receive definite and
precise instructions.

Since formation of a legal union required the presence of a labor inspector, this
telegram effectively prevented organization of legal agricultural unions. No “definitive
and precise” (or any other) instructions were forthcoming. True to the declarations
made in his first presidential term (1920–24, 1925) when he noted the disadvantages of
agricultural unionization, Alessandri’s decision launched four decades of administra-
tive, legislative, and physical repression of rural labor by successive national adminis-
trations. This repression served as the foundation of the political economy of Chilean
formal democracy.
In June 1934—as if an omen of the future—carabineros massacred more than one
hundred peasants protesting their eviction from their land in the frontier region of the
upper Biobío. Rising in armed rebellion, the peasants of Ranquil looted stores and
threatened landowners before the national police murdered the movement’s leaders
and restored order. Shortly thereafter the Alessandri administration urgently requested
Congress to approve new legislation on agricultural colonization, but the events at
Ranquil and the earlier action on rural unionization made clear the government’s com-
mitment to maintenance of the existing order in the countryside.
With the shift of the Alessandri government toward the Right, the most important
reformist, middle-class party in Chile, the Radicals sought alliances with the Socialists
and the Communists. At the urging of an agent of the Comintern, sent to Chile by the
Soviets to influence the ideological orientation of the Chilean Communist party, the
Chilean Communists adopted a popular front strategy. Comintern’s new policy, enun-
ciated in August 1935, told communist movements around the world that “the forma-
tion of a joint People’s Front, providing for joint action with Social Democratic parties
is a necessity. . . . Comrades, you will remember the ancient tale of the capture of
Troy. The attacking army was unable to achieve victory until, with the aid of the Trojan
Horse, it penetrated to the very heart of the enemy camp. We, revolutionary workers,
should not be shy of using the same tactics.”
In line with this new tactic Chilean Communists sought contacts with the ideologi-
cally divided Radical party, made efforts to reduce tension between themselves and the
Socialists, and worked to form a united front against the Alessandri government. In De-
cember 1936, the Communists supported the formation of a unified national labor or-
ganization, the Confederación de Trabajadores de Chile (CTCH), headed by a Socialist
secretary general, with a Communist serving as assistant secretary general. According
to the agent sent by Moscow to Chile to direct the formation of the popular front move-
ment, small favors and promises of support to selected leaders of the Radical party
gradually created a nucleus of Radicals willing to include the Communists in a coali-
tion aimed at capturing the presidency in 1938.
President Alessandri, governing with emergency powers (facultades extraordinarias),
hardened his line toward the Left, declared a state of siege, and harshly repressed rail-
road strikes in 1935 and 1936. A growing willingness among leftist elements in the
splintered Partido Demócrata, among Trotskyists, and other leftist fragments to oppose
the government, produced a skeletal popular front executive committee in March 1936.
Ideological diversity and the underlying distrust by Socialists and Radicals of the Com-
munists dictated a mild declaration of objectives: restoration of democratic liberties,
economic nationalism, socio-economic justice for the middle and working classes.
Nevertheless, the alliance of organized labor with the popular front parties seriously
CHILEAN DEMOCRACY 207

table 8–5. elections, chamber of deputies, 1937

Party Deputies Elected Votes Percent of Total Vote

Conservador 35 87,845 21.3

Liberal 35 85,515 20.8
Demócrata 7 20,026 4.9
Agrario 3 9721 2.3
Socialista 19 46,050 11.2
Radical 29 76,941 18.7
Nacista 3 14,564 3.5
Democrático 5 18,676 4.5
Independientes 3 17,040 4.0
Acción Rep. 2 9802 2.3
Comunista 6 17,162 4.2
Sin representación — 9217 2.3

Totals 147 412,812 100.0

Source: Germán Urzúa Valenzuela, Los Partidos Políticos Chilenos, Editorial Jurídica, Santiago, 1968, p. 81.

threatened the political position of the Alessandri administration. One month later, by-
elections for a vacant Senate seat from the provinces of Biobío, Malleco, and Cautín
gave a surprising victory to the candidate of the Radical party.
Although the new senator was one of the wealthiest landowners in the region, na-
tional political analysts interpreted his victory as an initial indication of the viability of
the popular front strategy. Despite continued reservations by more traditional leaders
of the Radical party, including the party’s eventual presidential candidate of 1938,
Pedro Aguirre Cerda, most of the party’s regional leaders sought to strengthen the pop-
ular front coalition. With upcoming congressional elections in March 1937, majority el-
ements in the Radical party hoped through the popular front tactic to increase Radical
influence. However, an intervening by-election in the northern provinces of Atacama
and Coquimbo gave an unexpected victory to the Alessandrista candidate after a cam-
paign that depicted the popular front as “a consortium organized by Moscow-bought
Communists.” Shortly thereafter, Radicals opposed to the popular front accepted min-
isterial posts in the Alessandri government.
The congressional elections of 1937 maintained rightist control in the legislature,
though certain electoral trends encouraged supporters of the popular front. Both the
Conservatives and the Liberals obtained higher vote totals than the Radicals, who
again obtained approximately 19 percent of the ballots cast. The Communists polled
only slightly more votes than the Chilean Nazi party. However, while the hold of the
rightist parties over the rural districts combined with vote buying and coercion guar-
anteed their continued dominance in Congress, significant gains by the Socialist party
helped persuade many Radicals to maintain the popular front for the up-coming pres-
idential elections of 1938.
At Alessandri’s request, Congress enacted a law to protect the internal security of
the state (Ley de Seguridad Interior del Estado, Law 6.026). Modified on various occa-
sions from 1937 into the 1970s, this law, modeled on decrees enacted in the 1931–32 pe-
riod, would be the permanent basis for repression of leftists, journalists, and other dis-
sidents declared “enemies” of la patria. The law’s provisions were so ample, and so
ambiguous, that anyone “who propagates by word of mouth, in writing, or any other
208 CHILE

medium, whether in the country, or outside the country, tendentious or false informa-
tion tending to destroy the republican democratic regime, or to perturb the constitu-
tional order, the security of the country, the economic or monetary regime, price stabil-
ity [etc.] or spreads such information outside the country” would be guilty of a crime
against the “internal security of the state.” Henceforth, illegal strikes, subversive prop-
aganda, revolutionary rhetoric, leftist political movements, indeed, criticizing the gov-
ernment while visiting a foreign nation, might be crimes against internal security pun-
ishable by imprisonment or exile. The new law contained a list of many more such
crimes (among them, insulting the flag; slandering, defaming, or libeling the president,
ministers, judges, senators, or deputies in Congress; and vandalism or damage of pub-
lic property). In some cases, those charged with violating this law were subjected to
military tribunals rather than civilian courts.
As the presidential election of 1938 approached, the Right chose as its standard
bearer Alessandri’s ex-treasury minister, Gustavo Ross Santa María. No doubts existed
concerning Ross’s ideological or political orientation; he represented the interests of the
propertied classes. He was reputed to have answered an appeal for legislation to ben-
efit the middle class with “for me there are but two classes, upper and lower. To the first
belong those who have gotten ahead in life; to the latter, those who, for whatever rea-
son, have been failures.” Ross’s candidacy made clear the issues at stake in the 1938
election. An editorial in a leftist paper, Claridad, declared: “No one hates the people as
he [Ross] does; no one is more likely to implement a ‘strong’ government, a govern-
ment of hunger and the lash. . . . In choosing Ross, the Right has declared war on the
Chilean masses.” Not unexpectedly Ross’s supporters compared him to Portales; the
candidate’s campaign slogan “Order and work” supported the historical parallel.
Divisions within the popular-front parties appeared to preclude their choosing a
single candidate to contest the election against Ross. The Radical party claimed the
“best right” to select a popular-front candidate; Socialists asked the front to support
Marmaduque Grove, one of the leaders of the short-lived “Socialist Republic” of 1932.
In a convention arranged through tough bargaining, each party nominated its candi-
date: Radicals, Pedro Aguirre Cerda; Socialists, Marmaduque Grove; Communists,
Elías Lafferte; Demócratas, Juan Pradenas Muñoz. Six ballots later the convention ap-
peared deadlocked. The next day, April 16, 1938, the Demócratas shifted their support
to the Radical candidate; and early on April 17 the Socialists withdrew Grove, and the
convention unanimously nominated Pedro Aguirre Cerda. A leader of the Radical
party’s anti-popular-front faction, ex-minister of interior under Alessandri in the 1920s,
wealthy landowner, experienced politician—Aguirre Cerda now found himself the
presidential candidate of the antifascist, popular-front movement he had originally op-
posed. His reluctance to accept Communist support consoled the moderate elements of
the Radical party who hoped that his victory would allow them to increase their share
of congressional representation and would give them access to public employment.
A bitter, violent, shrill electoral contest gave the popular-front candidate a narrow
victory. Only when key military leaders and the commander of the national police
(Carabineros) informed Ross that he could not count on their support in preventing
Aguirre Cerda’s inauguration did the rightist candidate concede victory. The distribu-
tion of votes in the election revealed the basic sources of rightist political and economic
power, as well as the critical role that continuation by the supposedly leftist govern-
ment of the repression of rural labor would play in maintaining “social peace” during
the next ten years. The rightist candidate defeated Aguirre Cerda overwhelmingly
throughout the agricultural heartland of the central valley. Importantly, however, Com-
munist and Socialist agents in the countryside broke enough votes away from the land-
lords to reduce the Right’s expected margin of victory in Talca from 10,000 votes to less
CHILEAN DEMOCRACY 209

table 8–6. presidential election, 1938

Province Aguirre Cerda Ross Santa María

Tarapacá 6164 4162

Antofagasta 11,339 4984
Atacama 4834 2580
Coquimbo 10748 7874
Aconcagua 4001 7474
Valparaíso 22667 19,105
Santiago 64297 50,998
O’Higgins 7091 11,095
Colchagua 2542 9789
Curicó 1950 4805
Talca 5717 8485
Maule 1934 4817
Linares 3592 8764
Nuble 7813 13,853
Concepción 17,417 9734
Arauco 2481 2318
Bío Bío 6054 6797
Malleco 5978 7929
Cautín 13,125 12,228
Valdivia 12,982 10,811
Llanquihue 2854 5784
Aisén 412 440
Chiloé 2513 3257
Magallanes 4215 526

Total 222,720 218,609

Source: Germán Urzúa Valenzuela, Los partidos políticos Chilenos, Editorial Ju-
rídica, Santiago, 1968, p. 83.

than 3000 and to achieve victory in Cautín. In the major cities and mining districts the
popular-front candidate emerged victorious with the support of middle- and working-
class voters. Radical party and Demócrata votes in parts of the frontier provinces and
the lake district provided a slim margin of victory for Aguirre Cerda or prevented a
landslide for Ross. Significantly, the base of Radical power in the south consisted of
landowners, industrialists, bureaucrats, and their clientele. Loss of these essentially
conservative voters by the popular front, and others like them throughout the country,
would have spelled defeat. To maintain their support the government would be forced
to make important concessions in contradiction to its own populist rhetoric during the
next three years.
Even more important, in the short run, the victory of Aguirre Cerda owed much to
the unlikely last-minute support of Chilean Nazis and ex-dictator Carlos Ibáñez. In the
1938 presidential election Ibáñez again attempted to regain the presidency, railing
against politicians and disorder. Supported by the Chilean Nazi party (Movimiento Na-
cional Socialista de Chile), Ibáñez never adopted Nazi rhetoric or uniform but could eas-
ily accept the Nazi vision of a strong state that ruled a disciplined people for the “com-
mon good.” Among the Radicals and the Socialists, minority factions still remembered
the Ibáñez presidency fondly. This meant that the popular-front candidate could lose
enough votes to Ibáñez to permit the election of Ross.
210 CHILE

Salvador Allende in uniform of Socialist

Militia. (Photo courtesy of Baltazar
Robles, gift to author, 1971.)

Events leading up to the election produced an unlikely, indeed unique, alliance be-
tween the Nazis and the popular front. Disorders at the Congress when Alessandri
read his last state of the union message were punctuated by shots fired toward the pres-
ident by Nazi leader and deputy González von Marées. When the government applied
an internal security law against the Nazis and other demonstrators, the Ibáñez forces
and the leftists united in attacking Alessandri and the Ross candidacy. Meanwhile,
Ibáñez attempted to secure popular-front support for his candidacy and the with-
drawal of Aguirre Cerda.
Unable to undermine Aguirre Cerda’s candidacy and equally unable to muster
widespread popular support for the Ibáñez candidacy, the Nazis decided to overthrow
the Alessandri government with a coup. Nazi plans called for occupation of key build-
ings in Santiago, support from sympathetic army units, and the assassination of both
rightist politicians, including Alessandri and Ross, and leaders of the popular front.
Facing imprisonment by September 8, 1938, on conviction for his role in the shooting
incident in Congress, the Nazi leader set September 5 as the day for the coup. Nazi
youths occupied the university and seized the Social Security building.
Now after six years of constitutional government, Alessandri faced still another
threat to his overriding objective: institutionalizing the 1925 constitution and main-
taining political order. He responded harshly, authorizing the use of artillery against
the occupants of the university. Soon after, the Nazi youths in the Social Security build-
ing surrendered to carabineros—who killed them with submachine guns and small
arms. More than sixty bodies were later removed from the building. A week later
Alessandri requested authority from Congress to impose a state of siege for the re-
CHILEAN DEMOCRACY 211

mainder of his term. Ibáñez, who apparently had not actively participated in the coup
attempt, surrendered almost immediately to army units and was jailed.
A week later Congress authorized President Alessandri to impose a state of siege
and newspaper censorship and to employ other “extraordinary powers” to maintain
public order. Prevented from carrying on his campaign, and promised influence in a
popular-front government by Aguirre Cerda, Ibáñez withdrew his candidacy two
weeks before the election. From his jail cell González von Marées endorsed the candi-
date of the popular front. Thus a popular front proclaiming its antifascist inspiration
received part of its margin of victory from supporters of ex-dictator Carlos Ibáñez and
from Chile’s Nazi party.
The heterogeneous electoral support that gave Aguirre Cerda the presidency, in-
volved political contradictions incapable of resolution within the framework of formal
democracy. Ibáñistas, Nazis, Communists, Socialists, and Radicals could not ultimately
agree upon general policy or political methods.
President Aguirre Cerda faced several immediate crises shortly after assuming of-
fice. In January 1939 a disastrous earthquake in south-central Chile devastated Chillán,
Concepción, and the neighboring provinces. Official reports counted over 50,000
deaths and many times that number of casualties. Aguirre Cerda reacted quickly, de-
claring martial law in the affected provinces and organizing relief efforts. International
assistance from Europe, the United States, and neighboring countries permitted quick
restoration of basic services and transport. A week later, taking advantage of the urgent
need to provide for reconstruction, the president presented Congress with a six-year
plan for national development and reconstruction.
The enormous amount of money Aguirre Cerda indicated would be necessary to
carry out the popular-front program along with the costs of reconstruction after the
earthquake frightened the rightist majority in Congress. Conservatives and Liberals
recognized the need to provide for reconstruction, but the remainder of Aguirre
Cerda’s ambitious program for national development, including large sums for low-
cost housing and stimulation of industrial development, portended accelerated infla-
tion, higher taxes, and expansion of the state bureaucracy. Congressional rejection of
the development program, despite support for a massive reconstruction appropriation,
sent Aguirre Cerda on a speaking tour to the devastated provinces to rally popular
support.
In an effort to achieve a compromise, the president’s minister of finance, Roberto
Wachholtz, devised a new package for Congress, which proposed two separate agen-
cies—the Relief and Reconstruction Corporation to deal with the immediate problems
occasioned by the earthquake, and the National Development Corporation (CORFO)
to carry out the longer-term economic objectives. In addition, the new proposal called
for heavy reliance upon foreign loans instead of internal financing of the development
projects. To prevent the popular-front parties from using CORFO for political advan-
tage, its board of directors would represent producer groups as well as government of-
ficials; a single representative of the Chilean Workers Confederation (CTCH) would be
included to make known labor’s views.
This new plan angered many of the government’s leftist supporters, particularly So-
cialists, whom the President mollified with promises of more patronage. In March 1939,
after overcoming the rightist opposition through pressure on selected congressmen
from the devastated provinces, Aguirre Cerda won a narrow victory for his develop-
ment and reconstruction legislation. After further jockeying between the president and
Congress, Law 6334 went into effect in late April 1939. This victory for Aguirre Cerda
and the popular front would provide the basis for greatly expanded state intervention
212 CHILE

in national development. It also subordinated Chilean economic policy to the main

source of capital for CORFO—the United States Export-Import Bank (Exim Bank).
While Aguirre Cerda was fighting for approval of the reconstruction and develop-
ment program, his popular-front allies, especially the Socialists and Communists, car-
ried out a national campaign among urban and rural workers to mobilize support for
the government. Labor conflicts, strikes, unionization efforts, and industrial violence
created an atmosphere bordering on insurrection. For members of the President’s own
party, as well as for the Conservative-Liberal opposition, the most serious threat to
maintenance of the fragile social order came from the massive wave of labor conflict
and unionization in the countryside. An extension of the electoral campaign in the
countryside directed by Communist functionaries, rural conflict and unionization in
the first months of the popular front administration reached alarming levels. In 1939
the Labor Department officially registered 170 labor petitions from groups of rural la-
borers and inquilinos—compared to six the previous year. During the same period
campesinos organized more than 200 agricultural unions.
The National Agricultural Society and local groups of landowners appealed directly
to President Aguirre Cerda to halt rural unionization and labor conflict in agriculture.
In the middle of March 1939 some of the country’s most influential landowners in-
formed the president that they confronted “the initial elements of a state of revolu-
tion . . . produced under the pretext of the right of rural workers to organize.” In
agreement with all the parties of the popular front and the CTCH, President Aguirre
Cerda illegally ordered suspension of rural unionization, using the same administra-
tive device employed by President Alessandri in 1933. Despite the supposedly “tem-
porary” nature of this suspension, it remained in effect until 1946.
Taking advantage of the vulnerability of agricultural workers, and of the willingness
of popular-front parties to trade the welfare of the campesinos for “social peace” and
support of the government’s reconstruction and development legislation, landowners
carried out a purge of union leaders and evicted large numbers of “troublemakers”
from their tenancies. By the time the CTCH and the Communist party had repudiated
this sacrifice of the rural work force to political expediency, Aguirre Cerda’s new min-
ister of interior, Arturo Olavarría Bravo, had already devised his system of “judgment
day,” or juicio final, to deal with rural militancy. As described by Olavarría himself,
A group of carabineros [police] would arrive at a farm accompanied by a convoy of
trucks. When the inquilinos were assembled in the area, the carabinero officer would
order those who wished to continue the strike to stand on his left. The officer would
then order that the strikers gather their families, cats, dogs, chickens, and belongings
and get in the trucks to be evicted. . . . This tactic I converted into a system. General
Oscar Reeves Leiva, Director General of Carabineros, called it el juicio final, as the good
ones went to the right and the bad ones to the left, as it is hoped will occur one day in
the valley of Jehosaphat. Of course, I did not have to use the juicio final many times.
Only the Trotskyists rejected Aguirre Cerda’s sacrifice of the rural work force. In par-
ticular, Emilio Zapata, the leader and organizer of Chile’s first national peasant league,
Liga Nacional de Defensa de Campesinos Pobres (“National Poor Peasants League”),
protested the government’s acquiescence to landowner demands. Zapata delivered
an angry critique of the government in the Congress and gradually broke with the
popular-front coalition. Recalling the situation of 1939, Zapata remarked in 1971:
What Aguirre Cerda had to do was tell the patrones that they couldn’t use lockouts or
sabotage production, and that they couldn’t throw people off the land in political
reprisal. . . . Neither Aguirre Cerda nor his ministers were responsive. They were
CHILEAN DEMOCRACY 213

walls without ears. . . . Although they possessed the legal means to prevent it, they
did nothing while the landowners threw the campesinos “into the streets” for the
crime of voting for Aguirre Cerda or for joining ligas or unions.
Rural workers had no means to resist landowner reprisals. The popular-front govern-
ment provided police to enforce court orders for evictions, to break the newly formed
unions, and to allow the landowners to retain control of the countryside. This was one
of the costs Aguirre Cerda was willing to pay to gain support for the rest of his program
in Congress and to maintain “social peace.” Socialists, Communists, and the CTCH
likewise agreed to the terms of the bargain. In exchange, the industrialization program
emerged from Congress, and the Socialists occupied high-level administrative posts.
Aguirre Cerda’s concession to the landowners did not end the Right’s campaign
against the government. Neither did it prevent Emilio Zapata’s National Peasant
League from carrying out its “First National Congress of Chilean Peasants” in Santiago
in April 1939. Rejecting the popular front’s policies, leaders of the Trotskyist-oriented
organization called for intensification of class struggle and the end of the latifundia.
Two months later the Communists sponsored a highly visible “First National Congress
of Rural Unions,” preceding the National Congress of the CTCH. In the meantime (late
April) Socialist leaders called for a purge of the bureaucracy of all “traitors,” so that the
public administration could be put completely at the service of the masses.
Tensions increased as rumors circulated that Socialist leader Marmaduque Grove
had prepared a May Day speech calling for dissolution of Congress, recognition of the
Socialist militia as an official arm of the government, and other revolutionary mea-
sures. The rightist press, in a fashion remarkably similar to the campaign that would
later precede the military coup of September 1973, emphasized the precarious nature
of Chilean democracy, the growing Communist threat, and alluded to the military role

Emilio Zapata (center) leading procession of peasants and farm workers, Santiago, 1939.
(Photo courtesy of Baltazar Robles, gift to author, 1971.)
214 CHILE

in preventing leftist extremists from destroying constitutional government. Aguirre

Cerda responded by applying the internal security law against a leading rightist paper,
El Diario Ilustrado, thereby preventing the paper’s circulation outside of Santiago. Con-
gress, in turn, censured the minister of the interior for violating freedom of the press in
the El Diario Ilustrado case.
In the annual military parade honoring Arturo Prat, Chile’s naval hero of the War of
the Pacific, the Right found its military sympathizer when, according to the rightist
press, General Ariosto Herrera Ramírez jumped from his horse to order removal of a
Communist banner from a balcony of the presidential palace. In early July El Diario
Ilustrado published a supposedly confidential circular detailing plans by the Socialists
for an internal coup, or autogolpe, including provisions for formation of a red army,
elimination of opposition politicians, and infiltration of the armed forces. (Again, we
have a striking parallel with the “white paper” and the so-called plan zeta denounced
by the Chilean Right and the military in 1973.)
In turn, the government announced discovery of a plot to oust the President. The
rightist press made light of the government’s claims, but investigations led Aguirre
Cerda to request General Ariosto Herrera to resign. Herrera refused, and his military
colleagues elected him president of the Club Militar in August 1939. Emerging as a hero
of the Right, Herrera also supported the officers punished by the government for their
supposed participation in the plot of early July. Ignoring orders from the minister of de-
fense, he overtly insulted Aguirre Cerda with a decision to reinstate the officers in ques-
tion. Thereupon the government relieved him of his command and asked him to resign
his commission. On August 25, 1939, instigated by comrades of the second division he
commanded and by the rightist press, General Herrera led an abortive coup attempt,
in which the ever present hand of Carlos Ibáñez again was apparent. With the move-
ment’s quick collapse, Ibáñez sought asylum in the Paraguayan embassy.
The abortive coup passed the initiative back to the popular-front government. Con-
gress allotted the president state-of-siege authority for a period of twenty days, during
which time Aguirre Cerda purged the military of conspiratorial officers. Now, how-
ever, the latent divisions within the popular front itself surfaced with vengeance. Com-
petition between Socialists and Communists to gain control of student movements
and the CTCH exacerbated the traditional hostility between the country’s two major
Marxist parties. Internal divisions within the Socialist party, between those favoring
the moderate policies of Aguirre Cerda and the more militant inconformistas and ex-
Trotskyists, led to a party split and formation of the Socialist Workers party (PST) in
1941. Aguirre Cerda’s own party remained divided between the would-be populists
and the more conservative advocates of middle-class-oriented reform.
By the end of 1939 Congress passed only two major pieces of legislation, including
the reconstruction-CORFO package; by early 1940 Aguirre Cerda reorganized the cab-
inet, relying upon wealthy, respected, personally loyal appointees rather than de-
signees of the popular-front parties. In July 1940 the president publicly announced that
labor conflicts in the countryside could not be tolerated, because they diminished agri-
cultural production. A month later the minister of the interior instructed the carabineros
to repress the activity of “professional agitators who provoke problems in the country-
side and industrial centers.” The president’s effort to conciliate the rightist parties co-
incided with mounting conflict between Socialists and Communists, as well as with the
internal split in the Socialist party. Communist attacks upon the Socialist minister of de-
velopment, who negotiated for loans in the United States, increased the level of conflict
and precipitated a rupture in the coalition.
In January 1941, Socialists demanded the ouster of the Communists from the popu-
lar front; refusal by the popular-front executive committee to expel the Communists led
CHILEAN DEMOCRACY 215

to Socialist withdrawal. The CTCH, divided between Communists and Socialists, also
voted by a narrow margin to leave the popular-front government. Finally, after an im-
pressive victory of popular-front parties and Socialists in the congressional elections of
1941, the president’s own Radical party withdrew its support from him when he re-
fused to accept party dictates in regard to ministerial appointments and patronage. To
embarrass the president, his party colleagues now opposed legislation that he sent to
the Congress. This opposition destroyed Aguirre Cerda’s power, and he died, a broken
man, in late 1941. In his own words, “the Chilean working classes were just as poor
. . . and just as miserable as when I became President.” True to his own democratic
principles, however, Aguirre Cerda vetoed legislation passed by Congress that out-
lawed the Communist party.
Two Radical presidents and one interim president followed Aguirre Cerda. Juan An-
tonio Ríos, who had been a critic of Aguirre Cerda’s cooperation with the Communists,
served from 1942 to 1946, when he, too, died in office. Ríos renewed Radical contacts
with Conservatives and some Liberals as the Right recognized the benefits of state sup-
port for private industrial enterprise. They also appreciated Ríos’ anticommunist posi-
tion and his decision to sustain the administrative order against rural unionization.
Rapprochement between moderate Radical party factions and the Right coincided with
a growing middle-class conservatism; at the same time the Radicals were trying to rec-
oncile their own internal cleavages with the shifting trends in national politics. Posi-
tioned in the center of the political spectrum, the Radicals opportunistically entered in
alliances with the Left or the Right, as expediency required, in order to retain their hold
on the presidency and the patronage of a growing bureaucracy.
A new, most unlikely, coalition of Radicals, Communists, and Liberals brought Rad-
ical leader Gabriel González Videla to office in 1946. The policies of industrialization
through CORFO loans to private investors and heavy borrowing from the Exim Bank
continued. Shortly after González Videla assumed office, the Communist party un-
leashed a campaign of labor conflict and strikes even more extensive than the move-
ment of the first years of Aguirre Cerda’s presidency. During the 1946–47 harvest, rural
workers engaged in more than 650 labor conflicts and formed more than 300 agricul-
tural unions. Again, organization of rural labor threatened to destroy the underlying
trade-off reconciling the socio-economic consequences of urbanization and industrial-
ization and the political power of the landowners.
Fulfilling a campaign promise, González Videla rescinded the order issued by
Aguirre Cerda in 1939 to restrict rural unionization. Quickly, however, the new presi-
dent also fulfilled a bargain made with his rightist supporters in the Liberal party, and
supported new legislation (Law 8811) that made agricultural unionization practically
impossible. In contrast to the Labor Code regulating the majority of Chilean workers,
the new law outlawed agricultural strikes and severely limited the rights of rural work-
ers to present labor petitions and to engage in collective bargaining. Now, instead of
an illegal administrative order, congressional legislation sanctified the arrangement
whereby rural labor bore a disproportionate share of the costs of Chilean industrial-
ization and continued to serve as “voting cattle” for the owners of the large rural es-
tates. This legislation remained in effect until 1967.
In contrast to their performance in 1939, Communist leaders in 1946 and 1947 per-
sisted in their unionization efforts and in their leadership of industrial conflicts despite
the opposition of the president. From their ministerial positions in González Videla’s
government, the Communists refused to acquiesce in the renewed repression of rural
labor. They carried the struggle to the mines and the cities, and thus incited fierce right-
ist opposition while also alienating themselves from the president. As landowners and
industrialists called for cooperation with the president, to “extirpate the Communist
216 CHILE

President Juan Antonio Ríos and vice president Alfredo Duhalde, 1945.
(Courtesy Archivo Universidad de Chile.)

President Arturo Alessandri and President-elect Pedro Aguirre Cerda, 1938.

(Courtesy Archivo Universidad de Chile.)
CHILEAN DEMOCRACY 217

Arturo Alessandri and Presi-

dent Gabriel González Videla,
1946. (Courtesy Archivo Uni-
versidad de Chile.)

menace,” Congress first extended González Videla’s extraordinary powers to deal with
subversion (Law 8837) and followed, in 1948, with the so-called Law for the Permanent
Defense of Democracy (Law 8987). This legislation outlawed the Communist party, ex-
cluded its members from participation in the labor movement, and set up zones of ban-
ishment or “relegation” for subversives. This temporary elimination of the Commu-
nists from overt political activity and a “cleansing” of the labor movement restored
political stability. It also reflected the integral relationship between the Cold War,
American foreign policy, and Chilean domestic development.

American investment in Chile during the 1930s increased, as did Chilean awareness of
the significant impact of foreign control over the copper and nitrates that provided
most of the country’s foreign exchange. Leftist political movements sought continually
to undermine the position of United States firms, attacking the exploitation of Chilean
resources by international monopolies and imperialism—already, by then, a synonym
for the United States. The advent of a popular-front government with Marxist partici-
pation presented American interests with a delicate situation. To finance development
projects the Chilean government needed resources; higher taxes on the copper indus-
try appeared the most likely source of such capital. Further, the initial outline of the
CORFO project, whether under Marxist or nationalist direction, threatened to expand
218 CHILE

significantly the state sector of the economy, to the detriment or even the elimination of
American investments in oil, public utilities, mining, and basic industry.
The political compromise that had allowed the popular-front government to create
CORFO shifted emphasis from internal to external financing for economic moderniza-
tion and industrialization. Rather than greatly increased taxes on wealth and income in
Chile, or taxes on the copper firms which would discourage further investment, mod-
erate Radicals and industrial leaders opted for loans, credits, and foreign private
investment as the source of risk capital. United States diplomats in Santiago and Wash-
ington, D.C., saw that it was possible to protect American interests through a care-
ful lending policy and, at the same time, to support the anti-Marxist elements of the
popular-front coalition; they developed a highly successful cooperative strategy for
dealing with Aguirre Cerda’s government. Despite Chile’s hesitance to declare war
against the Axis powers, the initial success of the policy American interests had elabo-
rated gradually subordinated both Chilean economic policy and domestic political
events to American needs during the Second World War and, in the aftermath, the Cold
War.
Recognizing American credit policy’s potential for influencing the popular front
government, an embassy official made the following assessment of the alternatives
open to United States policymakers:
If we negotiate with Wachholtz [the moderate, Radical minister of finance in the first
Aguirre Cerda cabinet] . . . we will strengthen the moderate elements in the popu-
lar front here; whereas if we deferred the negotiations in the expectation that the dis-
sensions in the popular front here would come to a head we would be taking a long
chance.

By the end of 1940 the United States Export-Import Bank had arranged credits totaling
$17 million for CORFO—to be used exclusively to pay for materials, machinery, tech-
nical assistance, or consultants from the United States. During the next eight years
Exim Bank and other American-dominated financial institutions continued to bankroll
CORFO’s large-scale investment program in housing, industry, agriculture, and com-
merce. Whereas CORFO’s policies directly threatened the position of selected Ameri-
can firms, its overall effect was to greatly expand the market for imports of United
States capital goods, in addition to placing Chilean policymakers in a vulnerable posi-
tion vis-à-vis decisions made in Washington, D.C.
World War II raised international prices for copper. Practically all of Chile’s copper,
however, was marketed through subsidiaries of United States copper firms established
in Chile—for whom the Allied governments fixed a ceiling price upon copper products
during the course of the war. Different Chilean sources estimate that the loss Chile sus-
tained by its “contribution” to the Allied war effort was between $100 million and $500
million. Further, Chilean dollar reserves accumulated from exports to the United States
during the war were unfrozen at a time when postwar inflation substantially reduced
their purchasing power. Moreover, in the United States recession of 1949–50 production
by American copper firms in Chile was reduced after four years of deterioration in the
terms of trade. When the outbreak of the Korean War quickly snapped the United
States out of the recession, the American government and the copper companies reim-
posed price controls on copper.
American control of Chile’s principal economic resources accompanied intensified
involvement in Chilean politics. Cold War intrigue made post-World War II Chilean
politics a confrontation zone for “Communism” and the “Free World.” American
policy-makers considered the presence of Communist ministers in the González Videla
government to be dangerous, and so allied with the Chilean Right in an active cam-
CHILEAN DEMOCRACY 219

paign to weaken, then destroy, Marxist political parties and the labor movement. Si-
multaneously the United States provided financial support for Socialist factions of the
CTCH which opposed the rapidly increasing Communist influence. The United States
gave badly needed financial assistance to the Chilean government on the condition that
the Communist menace be eliminated. A split in the labor movement and the breakup
of the CTCH were preliminary successes; a mounting anticommunist campaign by the
rightist press and eventually by the González Videla government further heartened
American diplomats and business interests.
Doubt still remained that González Videla would totally break his alliance with the
Communists. Communist control of the labor movement, especially in copper and the
coal mines, made any frontal offensive quite risky. Communist-inspired mobilization
of rural labor and hundreds of agricultural labor conflicts in the 1946–47 harvest threat-
ened the very foundation of the political arrangement elaborated by Aguirre Cerda and
his Radical successors. Labor conflict in the northern provinces and a crippling coal
strike panicked the Radical administration. In the meantime a representative of the
Chilean government sought further economic assistance from the Exim Bank and the
International Bank to bolster the Chilean economy. For, despite increased copper pro-
duction, the declining terms of trade between Chile and the industrial nations signifi-
cantly reduced the nation’s import capabilities, even as the industrialization process
necessitated greater quantities of capital goods, high technology, and raw materials.
Chile’s suspension of foreign debt payments after the earthquake of 1939, com-
plaints by American businessmen that Chile’s request for loans to finance hydroelectric
development threatened American private interests, and rumors of nationalization of
American oil and power companies, all delayed approval of the requests for new as-
sistance. Despite the secret assurances by González Videla’s special emissary to the
State Department that the Chilean president did not favor communism and would op-
pose Argentine President Juan Perón’s efforts to undermine American influence in the
southern cone, no quick commitment on financial assistance was forthcoming. To the

table 8–7. net terms-of-trade relations:

price index for chile (1938 = 100)

Exports Imports Terms of Trade

1936 100.5 88.5 113.6

1937 129.7 96.9 133.8
1938 100.0 100.0 100.0
1939 107.5 94.7 113.5
1940 105.4 104.2 101.2
1941 109.2 113.1 96.6
1942 118.4 150.1 78.9
1943 120.9 168.7 71.7
1944 125.6 179.6 69.9
1945 129.7 183.2 70.8
1946 151.1 200.6 75.3
1947 201.1 245.4 81.9
1948 221.1 250.8 88.2
1949 220.3 246.1 89.5
1950 222.1 237.0 93.7
1951 279.4 276.9 100.9

Source: Theodore H. Moran, Multinational Corporations and the Politics

of Dependence, Copper in Chile, Princeton University Press, 1974, p. 71.
220 CHILE

contrary, the State Department officials involved in the negotiations made clear the de-
partment’s concern that Chile “adjust its debt situation” and improve the tax situation
of the American copper companies.
Disappointed by the results of the economic mission to the United States, González
Videla reportedly threatened the American ambassador with a deterioration in
Chilean-American relations. In response, Ambassador Claude Bowers cabled a confi-
dential message to the secretary of state, noting that “Chile is [a] key country in the
struggle against Communism, and I feel that we should make every effort to overcome
present impasse.” As the Communist campaign of labor agitation mounted, so also did
American concern with Chile as a Cold War battleground. Accounts of the rising Com-
munist menace dominated correspondence from the American embassy in Santiago to
Washington, D.C., from May 1947 on.
Anticipating a showdown with his ex-political allies, President González Videla re-
quested an emergency shipment of coal from the United States in case of Communist
shutdowns of the coal mines. Ambassador Bowers recommended to the secretary of
state, “I suggest situation set forth above [reference to a general strike scheduled for
late June 1947] be taken into consideration in connection with Chile’s request for coal
stockpile in its struggle to combat Communism.” In September 1947, Bowers reported
to Washington that González Videla was gradually eliminating Communists from the
administration, and on October 6, 1947, the ambassador cabled that “González Videla
declared war on Communism as a result of what he claims is a Communist plot to over-
throw the Government and obtain control of the production (in order to deprive the
United States of the use in an emergency) of strategic raw materials, namely copper and
nitrates.” Despite heavy commitments to Europe and other Latin American nations, the
United States assured the Chilean president that emergency coal shipments would be
available. Three days later Ambassador Bowers cabled: “Our war with Communists is
on two fronts, Europe and South America.” After another four days had passed, the
ambassador added: “The issue is clear as crystal—Communism or democracy.”
With American assurances of coal shipments to break the coal miners’ strike, the
government moved in police and military units to restore order and terminate the labor
conflict. Subsequently Chile broke off diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union, Yu-
goslavia, and Czechoslovakia, nations that the Chilean president accused of engineer-
ing political chaos through their domestic agents, the Chilean Communist party. The
Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy, passed in 1948, outlawed the Commu-
nist party, eliminated almost 30,000 voters from the electoral registers, provided au-
thority to purge the labor movement, and allowed the president to restore “democracy”
to Chile. Implementation of Law 8811 on agricultural unionization, along with the Law
for the Permanent Defense of Democracy, destroyed the impressive network of rural
labor unions created from 1946 to 1947 and ended the threat to the hegemony of the po-
litical Right in the countryside. Thus the “arrangement” initiated by Alessandri and
elaborated by the popular-front government could remain intact.
Appropriately, González Videla called upon Jorge Alessandri, the ex-president’s
son, to act as his finance minister. Anaconda announced plans for an additional $130
million investment in their copper properties at Chuquicamata. And despite the effects
of the United States recession on a worsening Chilean economy, Exim Bank and the in-
ternational lending agencies agreed to provide substantial economic assistance to the
Chilean government. In the next four years Exim Bank not only financed the creation
or expansion of a large number of Chilean industries, it also ensured, through its lend-
ing policies, that American machinery, technology, and patent holders participated in
the process of industrialization. Exim Bank loans required the exclusive use of United
States purchased capital goods for the Chilean industries receiving Bank credits and
CHILEAN DEMOCRACY 221

even that American carriers ship the goods to Chile. Further, whereas the Chilean gov-
ernment guaranteed the loans and even provided much of the capital, Exim Bank de-
manded that only private investors hold a majority of the industries’ voting stock.
American influence in the development policies of the Chilean government bene-
fited Chilean private investors as well as United States interests. Credit to agricultural
and industrial interests from CORFO often entailed negative real interest rates; that is,
inflation more than counterbalanced the interest rates, making credit a subsidy to
debtors. Externally financed economic modernization was oriented toward importing
capital goods for industry and labor-saving farm machinery and thereby strengthened
the position of employers, especially in agriculture, vis-à-vis the labor force. Moreover,
private investors achieved a dominant voice in the three major industrial complexes
originating from CORFO initiative—the Pacific Steel Corporation (CAP), the National
Petroleum Corporation (ENAP), and the National Electric Corporation (ENDESA).
Key stockholders included Kennecott Copper Corporation and influential members of
the National Society of Manufacturers. Even enterprises in which CORFO had a ma-
jority interest acted more like private firms than public enterprises, since entrepreneurs
and bankers on the various government policymaking agencies assured a favorable at-
titude toward private business.
The growing economic, political, and cultural influence of the United States in Chile
in the early post-World War II years did not eliminate certain basic contradictions be-
tween Chilean national interest and the interests of American companies or foreign
policies dictated by the Cold War. Among some Chilean leaders and businessmen there
developed a conscious awareness of the disadvantages of subordinating Chilean cop-
per policy, industrialization, and domestic politics to changes in United States policy.
Efforts to establish particular industries through CORFO brought Chilean officials and
industrialists into direct conflict with U.S. corporations. Economic assistance condi-
tioned with requirements to buy higher-priced American products or to ship in costlier
United States carriers provided obvious examples of differences in American and
Chilean national interests. Most of all, the disparity between what copper exports
might bring the nation and what they actually provided in foreign exchange led groups
on both the Right and the Left to resent, if not attack openly, the American copper firms.
Notwithstanding increased taxation of the copper industry in the early 1950s, pres-
sures to exact greater benefits for Chile from the country’s most valuable natural re-
source increased gradually in that decade and resulted, in the 1960s, in policies to na-
tionalize the major United States copper companies. The Chilean Right gratefully
accepted American support for an anticommunist campaign, credits for industrializa-
tion, cooperation in infiltrating the Chilean labor movement with “responsible” union-
ists, and educational exchanges, but they remained in their own way Chilean national-
ists. This nationalism and their anger with American support for agrarian reform would
ally them in the 1960s and early 1970s with middle-class and leftist political parties in
efforts to eliminate American control over Chilean copper.

During three Radical administrations (1938–52), the combination of deficit-financing of

industrialization, real salary gains for middle-class groups without proportional in-
creases in internal taxation or government revenues, and the stagnation of agriculture
heightened inflationary pressures. Despite government promises of progressive in-
come redistribution and better educational opportunities, most urban workers along
with the rural labor force actually lost ground in real income from 1938 to 1952, and
more than one-third of the school-age children did not attend school. Worse, rather
than gaining the “economic independence” promised by González Videla, the country
had become increasingly dependent upon private foreign capital, loans, and marketing
222 CHILE

decisions made by the United States copper firms. Most strikingly, it had become more
dependent upon imports of food. Domestic agricultural production did not keep pace
with population growth and fell even further behind a rate of urbanization more than
double that of population increase. Poor performance by agriculture necessitated a
growing quantity of foreign exchange to feed Chile’s people. It also meant further in-
flationary pressure added to currency emissions, deficit financing, and growth of the
government bureaucracy.
Inflation meant frustration for the salaried middle classes and government employ-
ees even when periodic upward wage adjustments somewhat ameliorated the full im-
pact of the price increases that caused suffering for most blue-collar workers and the
rural labor force. By the 1952 presidential elections, with renewed labor agitation and
González Videla’s vacillating application of anticommunist and internal security legis-
lation, Chile had a highly fragmented, weary, and frustrated electorate. Carlos Ibáñez
took advantage of the population’s exasperation with party politics and again emerged
as an authoritarian, “above politics,” antiparty candidate for president. Supported by
a heterogeneous coalition of Socialists, middle-class groups, dissident Radicals and
Conservatives, and the ascendant Agrarian Labor party (Partido Agrario Laborista), and
also by a newly organized “Feminist Party,” in the first presidential election after ex-
tension of suffrage to women in national elections in Chile, Ibàñez swept into office
with a broom as a symbol of his intensions to “clean house.” Promising electoral re-
forms, an end to corruption, and eventual elimination of the anticommunist legislation,
the ex-dictator overwhelmingly defeated the divided opposition.
As in the 1927–31 period, Carlos Ibáñez’ lack of commitment to formal democracy
or to the Chilean party system made his second administration highly personalistic, au-
thoritarian, repressive—and in some ways quite innovative. As in his earlier adminis-
tration (1927–31), Ibáñez sought to utilize the state apparatus to encourage industrial-
ization and to stimulate national development. Creation of the Banco Central, through
consolidation of existing credit institutions, and support for public enterprise and
semi-autonomous entities in various sectors of the economy, such as IANSA (sugar),
CAP (steel), ENDESA (energy), and ENAP (petroleum), reaffirmed Ibáñez’ activist,
technocratic vision of the state. Loyal to neither party nor ideology, Ibáñez filled gov-
ernment posts with upwardly mobile politicians from splinter parties or ethnic mi-
norities, such as Arab-Chileans. Indifferent to the long-term strength of the traditional
parties, the president cooperated with the Falange (later Christian Democrat) deputy,
Jorge Rogers Sotomayor, in adopting a far-reaching electoral reform (1958) that would
drastically curtail the power of the landlords in Chilean politics. Further, after using
Law 8811 and the anti-communist legislation to repress agricultural unionism and the
urban labor movement throughout his term of office, Ibáñez fulfilled his campaign
promise to eliminate the Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy prior to leav-
ing office. This paved the way for consolidation of a new electoral coalition between So-
cialists and Communists, the Popular Action Front (FRAP), which almost captured the
presidency in the 1958 elections.
The electoral reform of 1958 introduced an Australian ballot (a single official ballot)
and increased penalties for electoral fraud and bribery. A public ballot meant that
landowners could no longer effectively control the votes of rural workers through dis-
tribution of party ballots and monitoring of the polls to assure that workers voted “cor-
rectly.” In addition, the new election law made voting compulsory and provided for jail
terms or fines for nonvoters. This inducement to electoral participation combined with
the official secret ballot ended the hegemony of the landowners in the rural districts. It
also meant that the cornerstone of Chilean political stability, the hacienda system,
would come under mounting pressure from 1958 on as the availability of rural votes
CHILEAN DEMOCRACY 223

table 8–8. presidential election, 1952

Candidate Vote Totals

Carlos Ibáñez 446,439

Arturo Matte (Liberals & Conservatives) 297,357
Pedro E. Alfonso (Radicals & Falange) 190,360
Salvador Allende (Socialists & Communists) 51,975

Total 954,131

sent Marxists, Christian Democrats, Radicals, and other smaller political parties into
the countryside in search of rural votes.
If the eventual political consequences of the Ibáñez administration proved beneficial
to rural workers and eroded the power of the Right, the immediate results of the ad-
ministration’s political and economic policies gravely affected the urban and rural poor
throughout the nation. The end of the Korean War, and with it the plunging demand
for Chilean copper, reduced Chile’s import capabilities by almost 30 percent in 1953. At
the same time, the country approached the limits of easy import-substitution industri-
alization. Investment as well as growth in economic output declined. In turn, govern-
ment revenues decreased, but a system of automatic readjustment of salaries in re-
sponse to inflation inhibited cutbacks in government expenditures. Stagflation that
brought the annual inflation rate (86% in 1956) to the highest levels in Chilean history
(before 1970–73) and international pressure on the government concerning debt pay-
ments moved the government to call in an American economic mission to design a pro-
gram of stabilization. Hoping that the good relations between the Klein-Saks Mission
and the International Monetary Fund would reopen international lines of support for
the Chilean economy, the Ibáñez government attempted to implement the mission’s
recommendations.
The Klein-Saks recommendations conformed closely to what now is considered con-
ventional, hard-line, antiflationary policies favored by the International Monetary
Fund: elimination of “excess demand” through wage controls, restrictions on credit,
cutbacks on government expenditures, elimination of subsidies by public services such
as water and transport, reduced currency emissions, replacement of multiple exchange
rates for a single “floating” rate, and removal of price controls except for “essential
commodities.” This program entailed suspension of automatic wage readjustments
and efforts to ensure that wage increases did not exceed the rate of inflation. In addi-
tion, the administration adopted a generally favorable attitude toward development
through incentives to private domestic investors and the American copper companies.
So-called New Deal, or nuevo trato, legislation (1955), intended to attract further in-
vestment through “profit stimulus,” reduced effective tax rates on Anaconda and Ken-
necott, as well as providing the companies with a number of commercial, accounting,
and exchange control benefits.
The Copper Department created as part of this legislation eventually gave the
Chilean government much-needed technical capabilities to monitor the copper indus-
try; but the immediate effect of the nuevo trato was higher profits for Anaconda and
Kennecott without the desired further investments by the companies in Chile. Worse
still, from the Chilean perspective, Chile’s share of the world market barely remained
stable and the percentage of copper refined in Chile by the companies actually declined
from a high of 89 percent in 1951 to merely 45 percent in 1958. In practice, the copper
224 CHILE

companies profited and private businesses adjusted to the inflationary situation, while
salaried and wage-earning Chileans bore the brunt of the government’s program. The
administration imposed readjustments in remuneration substantially below the rate of
inflation to “depress demand.” Workers and salaried employees consequently found
themselves with less money to spend on food, clothing, and shelter. To carry through
on the program, the Ibáñez government was forced to deal harshly with the resultant
labor agitation (1955–57) and rioting in Santiago (1957); among other measures labor
leaders and “communists” were confined in detention camps under the terms of the
Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy.
Inflation rates declined; so did the standard of living of the majority of Chileans.
When restrictions on credit and subsidies to industrialists and landowners also an-
gered the groups who, with the middle classes, had helped bring Ibáñez to power, the
government lost the base of support it had briefly captured in the years from 1952 to
1955. As the 1958 presidential elections approached, unification of the leftist parties and
total rejection of Ibáñez policies by the mass of the Chilean electorate set the stage for
another close contest in which the Socialist-Communist candidate, Salvador Allende,
fell just short of victory.

table 8–9. presidential election, 1958

J. Alessandri
(supported by Zamorano Frei
Liberals and Bossay (“leftist” Allende (Christian
Province Conservatives) (Radical) priest) (FRAP) Democrat)

Tarapacá 3558 3859 529 8299 4922

Antofagasta 5670 5866 1083 14954 6567
Atacama 2533 5423 247 6167 3621
Coquimbo 10,460 8886 1280 14,283 7952
Aconcagua 10,018 4233 1530 7290 5953
Valparaíso 35,680 17,192 5727 26,611 29,913
Santiago 151,797 51,984 11,194 121,452 91,305
O’Higgins 16,753 4517 2175 14,537 8426
Colchagua 13,556 3435 477 6190 4379
Curicó 6509 2458 704 6067 3107
Talca 9763 4163 7206 8584 6377
Maule 5823 4551 830 2749 3375
Linares 10,674 4044 4156 7927 5912
Ñuble 11,988 11,164 811 10,947 11,290
Concepción 17,418 13,091 624 34,594 18,154
Arauco 1932 3125 61 6258 1616
Biobío 7660 4670 200 7360 3611
Malleco 10,133 5592 187 7485 4951
Cautín 21,228 8979 920 11,921 12,587
Valdivia 12,387 6791 637 11,559 7545
Osorno 8318 5524 156 5542 2770
Lianquihue 7430 4304 219 4056 6075
Chiloé 6146 4621 157 3689 1559
Aisén 1229 1027 44 1261 953
Magallanes 1285 2791 151 6708 2857

Total 389,948 192,110 41,305 356,499 255,777

CHILEAN DEMOCRACY 225

The presidential elections of 1958 brought to office Jorge Alessandri, son of ex-
President Arturo Alessandri and an experienced conservative economic minister. Hav-
ing won the presidency with a scant plurality over Salvador Allende, Alessandri could
not count upon a docile Congress or even the temporary popular base achieved by
Ibáñez in 1952. A year after he took office, the Cuban Revolution injected a whole new
concern into Chilean politics and American foreign policy. In an effort to counteract the
appeal of the Cuban Revolution throughout the rest of Latin America, the United States
proposed the Alliance for Progress, which included commitment to agrarian reform—
the single policy most bitterly resisted by the Chilean Right during the previous thirty
years. Although Alessandri attempted to maintain the essential administrative and leg-
islative impediments to agricultural unionism and rural labor conflict, he found him-
self under rapidly mounting pressure from Marxist and Christian Democratic political
organization among the rural labor force.
The electoral successes of the FRAP coalition in the countryside in the 1958 presi-
dential election and the disappearance of the Law for the Permanent Defense for
Democracy renewed interest among Socialists and Communists in political mobiliza-
tion of rural workers. In addition, the growing strength of the Christian Democratic
party in the early 1960s sent groups of Catholic organizers to rural areas to compete
with the Marxists. Penetration of Marxist parties and Christian Democrats into the
countryside, combined with the electoral reform of 1958, produced a fundamental al-
teration in Chilean politics in the 1961 congressional elections. For the first time in the
twentieth century the Conservatives and the Liberals failed to gain one-third of the
seats in Congress. FRAP obtained more votes than any other single party list and con-
trolled 27.5 percent (40) of the seats in the Chamber of Deputies and elected thirteen
senators (of a total of 45). The Christian Democrats, originally a small group that had
broken away from the Conservative party in the late 1930s, for the first time polled
more votes than the Conservatives.
The outcome of the 1961 congressional elections left the incumbent Alessandri ad-
ministration dependent upon the Radical party. The Radicals, hoping to win back the
presidency in 1964, demanded ministerial participation in exchange for support of the
government in the legislature. In addition, the Radicals now became advocates of “land
reform.” United States diplomats also put pressure on the Alessandri government to
adopt a land reform program as part of the Alliance for Progress.
Alessandri, a firm believer in the benefits of private enterprise and diminishing gov-
ernment “interference” in the economy, opposed the reformist elements that demanded
sweeping social and economic changes in Chilean life. However, loss of congressional
influence by Conservatives and Liberals, along with pressures from the Alliance for
Progress and mounting Marxist/Christian Democratic political activity, forced certain
changes upon the administration. In defense of their political base in the countryside,
Conservatives and Liberals attacked the Alliance for Progress and argued that increased
Chilean participation in the profits of the copper industry would do far more for the
country than land reforms, tax reforms, or other redistributionist measures sponsored
by the Alliance. In language that would become more familiar after the military coup of
1973, one Conservative senator cautioned that the potential for demagoguery in the Al-
liance for Progress threatened the basic values of the “Western and Christian world.”
Attacked by both the Left and the Right, the American copper companies felt the
impact of the first tentative measures that ultimately resulted in nationalization. Taxes
on the industry increased by 10 to 15 percent, and a Conservative minister proposed a
plan whereby the companies would be forced to raise production considerably as well
as to increase drastically (to 90 percent) the amount of copper refined in Chile. Al-
though this plan was blocked through cabinet reshuffles and negotiations between the
226 CHILE

table 8–10. summary overview of landowner-government

response to rural labor activism in chile, 1932–57

Presidential Election Landowner Reaction

1932–33
Presidential election (1932). First legally organ- Pressure from SNA and other landowner associ- Circular
ized rural unions formed in Chile; several ations on President Alessandri, claiming union
rural labor conflicts. unionization in countryside not legal.

1938–39
Popular-front candidate Pedro Aguirre Cerda Landowner associations publish numerous edi- Minister
elected. torials railing against communist agitation rural
send letters to Pedro Aguirre Cerda. (Exam- 1946.
First large wave of rural unionization, labor con- ple: Landowners of Pirque claim: “Profes-
flicts. sional agitators have created discontent * Clearly
among workers and are forming unions, incit-
ing social indiscipline. We have initial stages
of a State of Revolution. Request that the gov-
ernment suspend for now all procedures lead-
ing to rural unionization.”)

1946–47
Gabriel González Videla elected President with Numerous editorials in SNA journal, El Law 881
Communist support. Campesino, denouncing agitations in the coun- outlaw
try. (Examples: November, December, 1946; union
Communists occupy ministries; massive wave March, 1947). Law 898
of rural (and urban-mining) labor conflicts, Move in Congress to pass “special law” to regu- Demo
strikes, unionization. late rural labor—with support of Gabriél labor
González Videla. organ

1952–53
Carlos Ibáñez elected President with support of Calls for government intervention; application Applica
Socialists; campesino strike at Molina; march of Law 8987. Molin
on Santiago; isolated conflicts elsewhere.
 CHILEAN DEMOCRACY 227

Government Responses Landowner Follow-up

er associ- Circular 4060-4061 “temporarily” suspends rural Workers involved in first legal unions around
ing unionization; remains in effect until 1937–38. Molina (Talca Province) dismissed and
evicted; workers presenting labor petitions
(1934–35) arrested, dismissed, evicted.

ous edi- Ministerial Order 34* “temporarily suspends” Intendente of Curicó: “Due to labor petitions
ation rural unionization; remains in effect until presented by agricultural workers, the ma-
Exam- 1946. jority of affected land-owners in this
ofes- province are dismissing workers who partic-
nt * Clearly illegal, unconstitutional. ipated. Workers whose families have lived
ons, incit- on these farms for generations being forced
l stages to leave.”
the gov-
ures lead- Intendente of Linares:
“Landowners have organized movement to
evict on a massive scale rural workers from
farms in this region.”

Law 8811 (1947) restricts rural labor conflicts; Labor Department receives communications
he coun- outlaws strikes in agriculture; makes rural from all over the country reporting massive
, 1946; unionization almost impossible dismissals and evictions of rural workers—
Law 8987 (Law for the Permanent Defense of especially those active in labor conflicts or
to regu- Democracy) outlaws Communists; “cleanses” labor leaders.
riél labor movement—destroying most rural labor
organizations.

lication Application of Law 8987 against leaders of Dismissal of labor leaders in Molina farms—
Molina strike; eventual negotiated settlement. but during 1953–57 conflicts continue, in
gradually reduced number.
228 CHILE

companies and Alessandri, the political position of both the American copper compa-
nies and the Chilean landowners seemed ever less tenable.
The growing need to import food, inflation, and a mounting press campaign by left-
ist and reformist newspapers and intellectuals isolated the landowners politically and
identified them in the public mind as the group largely responsible for Chile’s social
and economic backwardness. Intensified organizational activity by Marxists and Chris-
tian Democrats in the countryside reminded landowners of the labor crises and union
struggles of 1939–41 and 1946–47. Once again editorials appeared in the major SNA
publication warning of the threat of communism and anarchy if rural workers were al-
lowed to unionize. Now, however, landowners lacked the political strength in Con-
gress and the urban alliances necessary to prevent the first step toward transformation
of the Chilean countryside.
In 1962, the year after the Right lost its veto power in Congress, and under pressure
from Alliance for Progress officials who controlled the American “foreign aid” pro-
gram, Chile adopted an agrarian reform law that began a decade-long assault upon the
hacienda system. Law 15020 created three government agencies to administer pro-
grams of land reform, agricultural extension, and agricultural planning. Though under
the Alessandri administration the government failed to carry out extensive agrarian re-
form, the legislation did provide a legal basis for more extensive transfers of land from
large estates to small holders. In addition, two of the new government agencies—the
Agrarian Reform Corporation (CORA) and the Institute for Agrarian and Livestock
Development (INDAP)—would later play a revolutionary role in transforming Chilean
agriculture and Chilean politics. In the short run (1962–64), the Alessandri government
carried out what many Chileans called a “flower pot reform” (reforma de macetero), con-
verting 60,000 hectares of public lands and well-recompensed private estates into small
and medium-size farms.

By the end of the Alessandri administration a three-way battle was shaping up for the
1964 presidential election. FRAP again supported the candidacy of Salvador Allende.
The Christian Democrats, who obtained extensive financing from covert American
sources, offered Eduardo Frei. The Right (Frente Democrático) presented Julio Durán, a
member of the conservative wing of the Radical party. In March 1964 a congressional
by-election to replace a popular Socialist congressman in Curicó was interpreted by the
three contending forces as a barometer of electoral strength for the upcoming presi-
dential elections. However accurately the Curicó by-election reflected national politi-
cal sentiment, FRAP’s decisive victory disheartened the Right which finished third be-
hind the Christian Democrats. The Frente Democrático dissolved and, in an effort to
prevent a “communist” victory, threw its support to Eduardo Frei.
In the presidential campaign that followed both the Christian Democrats and FRAP
promised agrarian reform, rural unionization, and enforcement of labor law in the
countryside. Both Marxists and Christian Democrats courted rural votes, supported
rural strike committees, helped organize rural unions, and promised an end to the ha-
cienda system. To the landowners the Christian Democrats were the lesser of two evils.
When the Christian Democrats won the presidential election, and found themselves
in competition with the Marxists for rural votes in the upcoming congressional elec-
tions of 1965, the viability of the new government came to depend upon greatly in-
creasing party representation in Congress. To achieve this, some Christian Democratic
candidates adopted the most drastic tactics previously used by Marxists in the rural
sector, including sponsorship of illegal agricultural strikes and land occupations. The
rural votes that had guaranteed the political power of the hacendados in national pol-
CHILEAN DEMOCRACY 229

itics now provided the impetus for a frontal attack on the hacienda system by the Chris-
tian Democratic administration, as well as by the Marxist opposition.
This attack on the hacienda system would first erode the political and economic
arrangement that had held the Chilean party system together between 1932 and 1964,
and would then intensify polarization of political conflict and so bring to an end Chile’s
vaunted political stability and to its special version of democracy.
9 Christians and Marxists

Competition for the presidency in 1964 pitted against each other the Christian Demo-
crats and the Marxist Frente de Acción Popular, both of which rejected the basic as-
sumptions of capitalist liberal democracy. The Marxist-dominated FRAP coalition of-
fered the ultimate prospect of creation of a socialist society in Chile. The Christian
Democrats proclaimed that Chilean society required fundamental, even revolutionary,
changes, but that these changes could be carried out through legal, peaceful means. To
emphasize the difference between themselves and the Marxists, they adopted as the
slogan of their program, “Revolution in Liberty.”
The Christian Democrats criticized the evils of capitalism and materialistic socialism,
offering in their stead a vaguely defined “communitarian” society or Christian social-
ism. Based upon writings of the French philosopher Jacques Maritain and upon Catholic
social doctrine, a communitarian society would supposedly end class conflict through
new types of “worker enterprises” that harmonize labor and capital. It would combine
social pluralism and civil liberties with a just redistribution of wealth and income. But
just as Marxist-Leninists lack any detailed description of the works of a truly commu-
nist society, Christian Democrats had various visions of a communitarian society.
Marxist parties had played an active role in Chilean politics since the second decade
of the twentieth century. Communists, Socialists, and Trotskyists could trace their an-
cestry to the labor movement of the late nineteenth century, the Partido Demócrata
(1887), and the Partido Obrero Socialista (POS) led by Recabarren and his comrades after
1912. Although the Communist party dated only from 1922 and the Socialist party from
the early 1930s, an indigenous Marxist movement linked to international Marxism had
struggled for at least half a century to reform or destroy Chilean formal democracy.
In the labor movement the Marxists had created a firm base of popular support. Just
as some families passed Catholicism from generation to generation, so other families
transmitted loyalty to the Communist or the Socialist party. Party-oriented youth
movements, retail shops, sports clubs, doctors, and even barber shops allowed most of
such people’s daily lives to go on within a network of party loyalists. Of course, not all
party members or sympathizers so restricted their lives or committed themselves to
party work, but both Communists and Socialists had established strong roots in
Chilean soil.
The FRAP coalition’s presidential candidate in 1964, Salvador Allende, was a savvy,
well-known politician. During the popular-front years Dr. Allende served as minister
of health and subsequently gained valuable political experience in the Congress. In
1952 and 1958, respectively, Allende lost presidential elections to Carlos Ibáñez and
Jorge Alessandri. The slim margin of his loss to Alessandri in 1958 badly scared the tra-
ditional political parties, the Catholic Church, and policymakers in the United States.
In contrast to the Marxist parties, the Christian Democrats could trace their official
existence back only to 1957. Prior to that time, however, the ideological and organiza-
tional evolution of Christian Democracy stemmed from Catholic social doctrine and

230
CHRISTIANS AND MARXISTS 231

from dissident and more progressive elements within the Chilean Conservative party.
In particular, the papal encyclicals Rerum Novarum (1891) and Quadragesimo Anno
(1931) established the foundations of official Catholic response to the dilemmas of in-
dustrial society and the international challenge of Marxism. Pope Leo XIII noted in
Rerum Novarum that the process of industrialization and capitalist development con-
centrated production and wealth into the hands of “a small number of opulent and
wealthy men and put upon the innumerable multitude of proletarians a yoke that dif-
fered little from slavery.” Without organizations to defend them the workers found
themselves “alone and defenseless . . . against the inhumanity of their masters.” This
critique of capitalist development did little immediately to influence the Latin Ameri-
can or Chilean Catholic hierarchy, but nonetheless provided doctrinal justification for
initial efforts by progressive Catholic laypersons and clerics to improve the lot of the
working classes.
Forty years later, at the depths of the world depression, Pope Pius XI reconfirmed
the Church’s concern for the plight of the working classes in a harsh attack on capital-
ism and international imperialism. Pius XI’s Quadragesimo Anno went further than Leo
XIII and specifically referred to the misery of the landless laborers of the countryside,
indirectly placing the Church on the side of those advocating agrarian reform to bring
about social justice.
These encyclicals and other doctrinal statements placed the Church in opposition to
the economic and political liberalism upon which the institutions of Western capitalist
democracy rested. Progressive Catholic social theorists rejected the legitimacy of labor
market determination of wages, insisting upon a just wage sufficient to guarantee a de-
cent standard of living for the worker and the worker’s family. The Church also offi-
cially recognized the importance of workers’ organizations—not as vehicles of class
struggle, but as “instruments of concord and peace,” guided by Christian principles in
the solution of the social question. Despite this pacific orientation, Rerum Novarum rec-
ognized that harsh working conditions, long hours, and low pay sometimes justified
workers in resorting to strikes or other forceful means to better their conditions.
In the first two decades of the twentieth century a small number of Catholic politi-
cians and churchmen in Chile responded to the social question with proposals for
reform inspired by the social doctrines elaborated in Rerum Novarum. Based in the Je-
suit college of San Ignacio, Father Fernando Vives Solar and Father Jorge Fernández
Pradel influenced a group of future political leaders, priests, and bishops who later
played a leading role in the development of Chilean Christian Democracy. By 1917 Fa-
ther Vives and his colleagues had established a “Social Secretariat” and were engaged
in unionization efforts among small numbers of workers in industry, transport, and
commerce in Santiago. Objections by leading Conservative politicians undermined
these first efforts and periodically forced the temporary European exile of controversial
clerics.
Against the background of the post-World War I economic crisis in Chile, and the
growing sentiment favoring separation of Church and State, the Chilean archbishop
and prominent historian Crescente Errázuriz delivered a pastoral message entitled
“On Social Action.” Archbishop Errázuriz took note of the misery of many Chilean
workers and, in particular, of the lamentable condition of the campesinos. Speaking
several years before the military coup of 1924 forced the “social laws” upon a recalci-
trant Chilean Congress, the archbishop accepted the necessity of workers’ organiza-
tions in order “to obtain for the workers the benefits to which they have a right.”
Coincident with the Church’s increased concern with the plight of Chilean workers
and campesinos after World War I, it also faced pressures for separation of Church and
232 CHILE

State. In June 1923 President Alessandri proposed legislation to Congress intended to

protect religious freedom for all Chileans and to insulate the Catholic Church from its
traditional role in partisan politics. Quoting Bishop Valdivieso (1859), the president
pointed to the dangers associated with linking the “future of the Church, the most pre-
cious interests of religion, . . . to the fortunes of a [political] party.” Negotiations be-
tween Church officials and the Alessandri administration assured the former title to its
extensive property holdings, financial assistance, and the right to maintain or expand
its role in education, public health, and charitable activities. Thus, when the Constitu-
tion of 1925 officially separated Church and State, the archbishop of Santiago could
comment in his pastoral that “It is just to note that the authorities in Chile, in estab-
lishing this separation, have not been motivated by the spirit of persecution which
characterizes other countries where Catholicism has been attacked. . . . The State is
separated from the Church; but the Church is not separated from the State, and will al-
ways be ready to serve it.”
Archbishop Errázuriz’ effective leadership in the Church-State separation matter
left the Church in a relatively unblemished political position. He averted direct con-
frontation between Liberals, Radicals, and Conservatives, thereby allowing these
groups, along with the Church, to focus upon the threatening implications of the social
question.
Pastoral messages and other doctrinal statements on the social question by leading
intellectuals of the Chilean Church derived both from a real concern for the condition
of the Chilean poor and also from the growing Marxist influence among the country’s
working classes. Catholic leaders, grounded in the Church’s philosophical and theo-
logical rejection of “individualistic liberalism,” attempted to forge a response to the so-
cial question that would be an alternative to the millenarian Marxist vision of a class-
less society. Indicative of this anti-Marxist motivation for part of the Church’s concern
with the social question, the bishop of Temuco in 1933 presented a paper at the Third
Congress of Catholic Men entitled “A Study of the Practical Manner of Combatting
Communisn in Chile.”
Anticommunism and sincere commitment to Catholic social doctrine provided the
foundation of the education received at San Ignacio and Santiago’s Catholic University
by the generation of students in the late 1920s and early 1930s who would become the
principal leaders of Chilean Christian Democracy. These young progressive Catholics—
Bernardo Leighton, Manuel Garretón, Ignacio Palma, Radomiro Tomic, Eduardo Frei—
served their political apprenticeship in the youth movement of the Conservative party.
They became so active in carrying out the social doctrine of the Church that finally the
Conservative party could not tolerate them, and in 1938 they broke away to form a new
party, the Falange Nacional.
In the year that the Falange emerged as an independent political party, the Catholic
Church created the Secretariado Nacional Económico Social (National Economic and
Social Secretariat) in response to the social agitation associated with the growing
strength of the Chilean popular front. Under the direction of Oscar Larson, who had
previously worked with the Catholic Students Federation (ANEC), the Secretariat
moved into direct social action, including organization of rural workers. Emilio Tagle,
later the archibishop of Valparaíso, and Oscar Larson supported the formation of the
Unión de Campesinos among rural workers in the region around Buin (Santiago
province). By 1941 this Catholic rural labor union was reported to have 300 members
in twelve rural estates. It was hardly a massive organizational drive, especially when
compared with the national effort to unionize rural workers by Communists and So-
cialists from 1939 to 1941. Nevertheless this first Catholic support of rural workers’ or-
CHRISTIANS AND MARXISTS 233

ganizations infuriated the Conservative party, traditionally the Church’s closest politi-
cal ally.
In Fundo Huelquén, owned by a deputy of the Conservative party, a Falange lawyer
and clerics assisted the workers in presentation of a labor petition to the landowner.
The landowner attacked the clerics who participated in the workers’ movement, sug-
gesting that they leave determination of the workers’ salaries to God and the con-
science of the patrón. Subsequently the Conservative party demanded that the efforts
of Larson, Tagle, and their colleagues be stopped and that the Unión de Campesinos be
disbanded. The Church hierarchy acquiesced; Larson left for missions outside of Chile.
Despite their immediate victory, the landowners recognized the threat of social move-
ments inspired by Catholic social doctrine. They complained that “the falangistas are
worse than the Communists, since we know how to defend ourselves against the
Communists, but not so against the falangistas. . . .”
During the next decade the Falange remained a small, elitist social Christian party
with a populist orientation. Occasionally Falange deputies made the critical difference
in forging electoral or legislative coalitions or gave dramatic speeches in the Congress.
For example, in 1947 Falange deputy Jorge Rogers Sotomayor bitterly denounced the
rural unionization law (Law 8811) that reaffirmed the repression of rural workers.
From time to time also, Falange leaders served in cabinet posts, beginning with
Bernardo Leighton’s brief stint as minister of labor (1938) in the second Alessandri ad-
ministration. Progressive elements within the Church also continued with small-scale
leadership-formation programs among workers and youth organizations. Neither in
the political nor labor arena, however, did these progressive Catholics gain a mass fol-
lowing or exercise great national influence.
Complicating further the evolution of social Catholicism as a political force, new di-
visions within the Conservative party led to the foundation in the 1940s of the Partido
Conservador Social Cristiano (Conservative Social Christian party). Somewhat more
conservative than the Falange, and led by more established ex-Conservative politi-
cians, the Conservative Social Christian party outpolled the Falange in national and
local elections into the 1950s. The eventual dissolution in 1957 of the Partido Conser-
vador Social Cristiano, however, united most progressive Catholics, along with ex-
members of the Agrarian Labor party, into the Christian Democratic party (PDC) in an-
ticipation of the 1958 presidential election.
After World War II a concern on the part of the Holy See and the United States about
the advance of Marxism in Chile gave new impetus and financial support to Catholic
organizations among workers, students, women, and peasants. Middle-class reform-
ers, professionals, and technicians found in the Falange an alternative to the unmoving
conservatism of the traditional parties and to the opportunism of the Radicals. With a
heterogeneous base, the Falange developed as a multiclass movement under the con-
tinued direction of the generation of leaders who had founded it in the late 1930s.
Slowly the Falange gained in national prestige and visibility, as it advocated extensive
reforms consistent with the social doctrine of the Church.
Before 1953 the Falange was more active in urban areas and universities than in the
countryside, but it would be the rural organizing activity of the Falange and Catholic
labor leaders that did the most to boost the political credibility of the Catholic reform-
ers. In 1952 Falange politician Emilio Lorenzini began to organize rural labor around
the town of Molina in Talca province with the Federación Sindical Cristiana de la
Tierra. The vineyards of the Molina region had seen a number of rural labor conflicts
between 1919 and 1952. As late as 1946–47 headline-making legal strikes occurred in
the region’s farms—before Law 8811 and the Law for the Permanent Defense of
234 CHILE

table 9–1. electoral evolution of falange nacional,

partido demócrata cristiana, chamber of deputies

Percent of Number of
Year Total Votes Electorate Deputies Elected

1941 15,553 3.5 3

1945 10,527 2.2 3
1949* 18,221 3.9 3
1953 22,353 2.8 3
1957 82,710 9.2 17
1961† 213,559 16. 23
1965 989,626 41.6 82

*In 1949 the Social Christian Party polled 2,018 votes without electing a deputy.
†
Christian Democrats.
Source: Adapted from Germán Urzúa Valenzuela, Los Partidos Políticos Chilenos, Santiago, Ed-
itorial Jurídica, 1968, pp. 124–25.

Democracy suppressed the rural labor movement. It was ironical that in applying the
latter law the government had banished Communist leaders, such as José Campusano,
to the Molina district. Tense cooperation in the fields between Falange and Communist
cadres set the stage for fierce competition in later years.
Emilio Lorenzini affiliated the Federación Sindical Cristiana de la Tierra with the
major Catholic labor organization, Acción Sindical Chilena (ASICH). Formed in 1947
under the leadership of Jesuit Alberto Hurtado—after special authorization by the Je-
suit general and Pope Pius XII—ASICH was a thorn in the side of both the Marxists and
the traditional political parties in Chile. In the rural district around Molina, supported
by Bishop Manuel Larraín (an early colleague of Father Hurtado in the awakening of
the Catholic labor movement in the 1920s), ASICH and the Federación Sindical Cris-
tiana de la Tierra provided campesinos with legal services, literacy and leadership
training, and assistance in labor conflicts.
In October 1953, Lorenzini organized the Primer Congreso Sindical de los Obreros
Campesinos de Molina, where rural workers and union leaders drew up labor petitions
to present in the vineyards of Molina in November (prior to the harvest). When the
landowners refused to negotiate in good faith with the workers, the campesinos de-
clared a strike. Illegal under the terms of Law 8811, the strike brought government re-
pression. Lorenzini and other union leaders went to jail for offenses specified in the
Law for the Permanent Defense of Democracy; the government dealt with progressive
Catholics by applying legislation intended to control “communist” activities.
Unwilling to accept defeat, ASICH organized a march to Santiago by the Molina
campesinos. The political effect of this march in the early days of the new Ibáñez ad-
ministration forced the government to release Lorenzini and other union leaders as
well as to pressure the landowners to negotiate with the farm workers—despite the fact
that the strike was clearly illegal. For both the numbers of workers involved and its
psychological impact on national politics, the Molina strike is generally cited as the
most important rural labor conflict in Chile prior to 1964. More important in the long
run, however, were the campesino leaders who emerged in the Molina region, and the
spread of the Catholic rural labor movement throughout the central valley, which pro-
vided Falange and Catholic reformers with a growing base in the Chilean countryside.
In addition, after years of sporadic Marxist political and labor activity in the rural dis-
CHRISTIANS AND MARXISTS 235

tricts, the Church, Falange politicians, and Catholic-oriented rural labor unions had
carried out the most important agricultural strike in Chilean history. The Molina strike
and the subsequent activism of Catholic rural organizations gave credibility to Falange
claims that they favored land reform, social justice, rural unionization, and sweeping
social change.
Only four years after the Federación Sindical de la Tierra emerged in Molina, the Je-
suit general in Rome, at the request of the Chilean Church, sent to Chile the Belgian Je-
suit and social scientist, Roger Vekemans. The Chilean Church wanted help in the bat-
tle against communism; Vekemans would spearhead the anticommunist offensive for
the next decade. Vekemans recruited Belgian businessman J. N. A. Sierens to begin so-
cial research in Chile. Sierens put together a systematic survey of Chilean institutions,
with special attention given to “communist penetration.” Noting the slim defeat of Al-
lende in the 1958 presidential elections, Sierens recommended coordinated action by
the Church to prevent a potential Marxist victory in 1964.
Vekemans, at the head of the Centro Bellarmino, directed an intellectual, organiza-
tional, and political campaign under the aegis of a “research and development foun-
dation,” called by its acronym DESAL. Large grants from Western European govern-
ments, private foundations, and Christian Democratic parties, as well as funds from
the United States Central Intelligence Agency, via the conduit of the International
Development Foundation, funded DESAL and other Catholic intellectual and organiz-
ing efforts. Vekemans, along with Father Mario Zañartu (affiliated with the University
of Notre Dame in the United States) and other Jesuits, gave doctrinal direction to the
campaign against Marxism in Chile. A thorough study of this international politico-
religious penetration of Chilean politics by David E. Mutchler* documented an intri-
cate web of financial arrangements and organizational ties emanating from Vekemans
and his colleagues. In this web were entangled the mass media, labor, business, the
American AID mission, CIA, Western European governments, political parties, and
private foundations.
Complementing its research activities and elaboration of a new “development ide-
ology,” the Catholic Church’s anti-Marxist offensive resulted in the creation of numer-
ous neighborhood organizations, unions, farm committees, discussion groups,
women’s organizations, and quasi-political groups that could be mobilized for the 1964
election campaign. In the meantime, ASICH formed the Unión de Campesinos Cris-
tianos in 1960 to unite isolated farm unions and worker’s committees and to expand
the rural labor movement. Moreover, parallel operations by Acción Católica Rural
(Rural Catholic Action) and the Institute for Rural Education (IER)—also partially fi-
nanced with American funds and partially staffed with Peace Corps volunteers—gave
rise to the Asociación Nacional de Organizaciones Campesinas (ANOC), or the Na-
tional Association of Campesino Organizations. After completing their training at the
IER, ANOC leaders received salaries from the institute while they led rural labor con-
flicts, created Christian-inspired rural organizations, and opposed communism in the
countryside.
These Catholic-oriented rural labor leaders mobilized thousands of Chilean cam-
pesinos into new organizations and inspired a growing rural activism. Though some
leaders of the movement may have understood the international and the national po-
litical implications of their ties with IER, ACR, and the Christian Democrats, later
events would demonstrate that many participants were more independent and more

*The Church as a Political Factor in Latin America (New York: Praeger, 1971).
236 CHILE

militant than their unknown patrons desired. Internal debates and conflicts over strat-
egy and direction of the movement in the mid-1960s and after made clear that these
campesino organizations were far more complex and less manipulable than their early
directors had imagined. In the short term, however, these organizations proved an im-
portant resource in the campaign against Marxism in Chile.
As the political situation of the Alessandri government deteriorated after 1961, the
rising Catholic rural labor movement, in alliance with the newly founded Christian
Democratic party, represented a major alternative to the Marxist-dominated FRAP
coalition of Communists, Socialists, and smaller reformist parties. The most prominent
Christian Democratic leaders, including Eduardo Frei, had been schoolmates of impor-
tant officials of Vekemans’ Centro Bellarmino. Personal ties reinforced doctrinal and
ideological connections between the Christian Democrats and the Jesuit intellectuals.
In 1962 the Chilean bishops entrusted Vekemans and Renato Poblete, an old school-
mate of Eduardo Frei, with preparation of a “pastoral plan” that would help Frei
against Allende in the 1964 election. Also in 1962 the Chilean bishops initiated their
own land reform experiments, anticipating the legislation passed by the Alessandri
government later that year. Almost simultaneously the Church distributed a pastoral
letter entitled “The Social and Political Duty.” This pastoral made clear that “commu-
nism deprives man of his liberty, suppresses all dignity and morality of the human per-
son; it denies to the individual all natural rights. . . . Communism destroys any bond
between mother and child.” During the 1964 election campaign Christian Democrats
distributed thousands of copies of this pastoral letter and papered the walls of Chile
with posters depicting the foreheads of Chilean children being branded with the ham-

Political rally for Eduardo Frei Montalva, Curicó, 1964.

(Courtesy Archivo Universidad de Chile.)
CHRISTIANS AND MARXISTS 237

mer and sickle. The international Catholic offensive (1957–64) thus contributed to the
domestic political campaign against the Marxists.
Meanwhile, Fidel Castro’s sister, Juana Castro, came to Chile to tell the Chilean peo-
ple, especially Chilean women, of the horrors of communism in Cuba. These develop-
ments combined with the psychological effect of the by-elections of Curicó—that
prompted support by the Right for Frei’s candidacy—and with millions of dollars in
covert campaign contributions from American agents and European Christian Demo-
crats, to give the Christian Democrats the presidency in 1964.
If anticommunism was the rationale for massive U.S., West German, and Church
support for Chile’s Christian Democrats, there existed within the Christian Democra-
tic party many sincere reformers and even a small number of committed revolutionar-
ies. President Frei’s call for “Revolution in Liberty” was not empty rhetoric. The Chris-
tian Democrats intended to alter dramatically the very foundations of Chilean society,
to redistribute income and wealth, to improve the living standards of, and to broaden
opportunities for, the nation’s workers and peasants, and to democratize the country’s
political and social life.
Faced with the many social and economic problems inherited from the process of
economic development after 1930 and the historical legacy of a highly stratified class
society, the Christian Democratic administration attempted to carry out a sweeping re-
form program encompassing every area of Chilean life. All the persistent problems of
the Chilean economy received government attention—including efforts to control in-
flation, to improve the nation’s balance of payments through stimulation of exports, to
carry out large-scale agrarian reform, to enact meaningful tax reforms, and to make sig-
nificant investments in public health, education and vocational training, and to expand
the services of the Labor Department.
Almost every aspect of the government’s program threatened either the political
and economic privileges of the traditional elite or menaced leftist influence over or-
ganized labor and the urban and rural poor. No way existed for the Christian Demo-
crats to implement their program without alienating the support of the rightist parties
whose votes had elected President Frei. Similarly, no matter how successful the gov-
ernment was in implementing social and economic reforms, the FRAP parties could
urge more rapid or more extensive changes, pointing to areas of policy failure and push
working-class and peasant organizations into direct action that impelled the adminis-
tration to move either faster than it desired or to use police to halt illegal land occupa-
tions or strikes.
Unfortunately for the Christian Democratic government, official policymakers
clearly and precisely outlined the administration’s short- and long-term goals in overly
optimistic terms. Even with the Christian Democrats’ stunning victory in the 1965 con-
gressional elections, which gave them majority control of the House of Deputies, FRAP
and rightist representatives in the Senate still managed to delay passage of key legisla-
tion. Every major component of the government’s program—“Chileanization” of the
copper industry, agrarian reform/agricultural unionization, tax reform, wage-price
stabilization, and proposals to stimulate industrial growth—faced the scrutiny and ob-
structionism of the opposition. This was, of course, merely a new version of the histor-
ical struggle between executive coalitions and Congress that had characterized Chilean
politics in the parliamentary period and also after 1932—complicated now by the facts
that a single party rather than a coalition controlled the executive and that traditional
political forces considered some Christian Democrats prepotentes, or uncompromising.
Only in 1966–67, after considerable negotiation and compromise, did the copper leg-
islation, agrarian reform, and agricultural unionization legislation clear the Congress.
Predictably, the Marxists opposed any effort by the government to restrain inflation
238 CHILE

through limitations on wage readjustments. The Right, enraged at the government-

sponsored mobilization of rural workers into unions and cooperatives as well as at the
prospect of a real agrarian reform, held hostage the copper legislation in an effort to
weaken the administration’s agrarian program. The Right also exacerbated relations
with the United States by joining the Marxists in a call for outright nationalization of
the copper industry instead of the acquisition by the Chilean government of majority
interest in the companies that the government called “Chileanization.” Only half face-
tiously, leading Conservative and Liberal politicians suggested compensating the com-
panies just as the United States-approved agrarian reform would compensate Chilean
landowners for their expropriated holdings—with government bonds payable in thirty
years.
The ambitious scope and the specificity with which the Christian Democrats set
out their program made its effective implementation through legal means in a six-year
period a practical impossibility. Notwithstanding greatly increased copper prices,
due in part to the war in Vietnam, and substantial assistance from the Alliance for
Progress, internal political opposition and the structural constraints of the Chilean
socio-economic situation prevented total success. Thus, even the sometimes impressive
accomplishments of the regime fell far short of its publicly announced objectives.
Moreover, the severe drought of 1967–68 disrupted agricultural production, thereby
adding to the nation’s economic difficulties. The discrepancy between stated objectives
and actual attainment allowed both the rightist and the FRAP opposition to point to the
failure of the Christian Democratic administration.
In one area, especially, Christian Democratic policies led to dismal failure. Rather
than decreasing Chile’s economic dependence and reducing the influence of foreign
capital on its economy, the Frei government created numerous incentives to attract for-

table 9–2. comparison of policy objectives and performance of

“revolution in liberty”

Policy Objectives Time Frame Targeted Increase Actual Increase

Retail prices 1965 25% 29%

Retail prices 1966 15% 23%
Retail prices 1967 10% 18%
Nonagricultural prices 1965 Less than 20% 28%
Money supply 1965 25% 65%
Real GNP 1964–70 23% 30%
Exports 1964–70 94% 94%
New farm ownerships 1964–70 100,000 28,000
New housing units 1964–70 360,000 260,000
Copper output 1964–70 90% 10%
Real GDP 1965–70 31% 18%
Per capita real GDP 1965–70 20% 5%
Gross investment 1965–70 70% 22% (through 1969)
Domestic saving 1965–70 100% 52% (through 1969)
Exports 1965–70 55% 68%
Copper exports 1965–70 70% 107%
Imports 1965–70 31% 63%

Source: After Thomas L. Edwards, Economic Development and Reform in Chile: Progress Under Frei, 1964–1970,
Latin American Studies Center, Michigan State University, 1972, p. 50.
CHRISTIANS AND MARXISTS 239

eign investors and subordinated public policy to conditions imposed by United States
and international lending agencies. The incentives to foreign capital included generous
profit-remittance arrangements and liberalized import regulations for firms establish-
ing themselves in Chile. Promise of tax stability and exchange-control advantages also
served to encourage foreign investment. In response to these incentives multinational
enterprises substantially increased their investments in Chile, especially in the indus-
trial sector. By 1970 over one hundred United States corporations had investments in
Chile, among them twenty-four of the top United States-based multinationals.
Foreign investment brought with it high technology, capital-intensive production
units that made little contribution to the government’s efforts to reduce unemploy-
ment. Indeed, for the decade 1960–70, industry provided an average of only 15,000 new
job opportunities per year—nowhere near enough to absorb the continuing tide of mi-
grants from the countryside to the urban areas. This migration enlarged the rings of
misery surrounding Santiago and other major cities, as the shantytowns and squatter
settlements (callampas, or “mushroom towns”) grew at alarming rates. In Santiago
alone the callampas and squatter settlements sheltered nearly one-half million people,
or 20 to 25 percent of the city’s population.
Living conditions in these urban settlements varied from poor to deplorable. Most
lacked basic urban services and amenities, including sewers and potable water. Un-
employment levels ranged well above the official national figure of 8 percent, and un-
deremployment disguised the desperate situation of families without any steady, de-
pendable source of income. As in the rest of Latin America, these urban poor lacked
meaningful unemployment insurance or welfare services that might guarantee even a
“floor to misery.” They endured a daily struggle for survival. Lacking also the protec-
tion of unions or private charitable relief, thousands of slum dwellers and residents of
the shantytowns of Santiago received the political messages of the “Revolution in Lib-
erty” without obtaining the material benefits it promised.
When the government did respond to the physical needs of the urban poor with self-
help housing projects (operación sitio), encouragement of centros de madres (“mothers’
centers”) or juntas de vecinos (“neighborhood councils”), construction of waterworks or
installation of electric lines, there always remained those who felt left out. The admit-
tedly partisan process that determined which groups of urban poor would benefit from
government programs, whether because of party affiliation or the high visibility of po-
litical mobilization in particular settlements, further undermined the government’s ef-
forts. For every successful program there were more people left out than included. The
backlog of need and poverty made even significant improvements in the living condi-
tions of some groups of the urban poor a political defeat for the incumbent adminis-
tration, just as distribution of land to some 30,000 campesinos alienated many times
that number who did not receive land from the government program.
In part, the extremely favorable treatment afforded the multinationals by the Frei ad-
ministration, and the constraints on the government’s program of reform, stemmed
from the negotiated “solution” to Chile’s immediate balance of payments crisis facing
the Christian Democrats when they came to office. Chile’s accumulated international
obligations in 1964, over $1 billion, required almost 40 percent of copper export earn-
ings for debt service alone. To support the Frei government’s “Revolution in Liberty,”
the United States and ten other creditor nations agreed to a “rollover” or credit relief
plan of approximately $100 million for a two-year period and a grace period that al-
lowed for a five-year repayment schedule beginning in 1968. Chile pledged in exchange
to facilitate transfer of payments on the renegotiated debt and also to relax controls on
foreign exchange for purchase of certain types of imports. In turn, USAID provided
240 CHILE

large loans and other assistance to the Chilean administration; in 1964–65 USAID ac-
counted for almost 15 percent of Chile’s national budget. Thus the financial feasibility
of the Christian Democratic reforms depended not only upon the hope for better cop-
per prices, but also upon the good will of U.S. policymakers and the cooperation of the
multinational enterprises. Touting the “Revolution in Liberty” as a positive alternative
to the Cuban revolutionary model, United States policymakers sought to buttress the
Christian Democrats as well as to support American business interests in Chile. This
strategy, reminiscent of the American decision to underwrite the initial CORFO projects
in 1939 and 1940—only now on a much grander scale—entangled the Christian Demo-
cratic administration in the web of American foreign policy, including the war in Viet-
nam. It also exacerbated the internal divisions within the government party as the Chris-
tian Democratic youth movement and the more populist elements of the party rejected
any identification with foreign capital, imperialism, the American embassy, or the Viet-
nam War.
Apart from its uneven record with respect to its announced social and economic ob-
jectives, the Christian Democratic government mobilized hundreds of thousands of
women, students, workers, and campesinos into new unions, cooperatives, and com-
munity organizations. These organizations depended upon government encourage-
ment or subsidies and came to expect continual economic benefits or expanded gov-
ernment services. Distribution of consumer goods, credit, agricultural inputs, and jobs
through political agencies like Promoción Popular (Popular Promotion) and INDAP
created a vast network of patronage and spoils tying bureaucrats, party hacks, slum
dwellers, and campesinos to government pursestrings. Immediate benefits such as
new sewing machines for a centro de madres or seed and fertilizer for a campesino co-
operative helped convince the underclasses of the government’s concern for their
plight. Accompanied by promises of increasing material benefits by government en-
thusiasts who staffed the mushrooming public sector, these initial spoils of reform also
created high expectations of rapid, often unobtainable, changes in lifestyle and of eco-
nomic opportunities.
To a great extent the Christian Democratic program of political mobilization and de-
liberate “consciousness raising” (concientización) made impossible the attainment of its
other major economic objectives such as control of inflation, increases in productivity,
and higher levels of domestic savings and investment. With their hopes aroused by
both the government’s propaganda and the even more alluring Marxist vision in which
redistribution of wealth and land would greatly improve the lot of the masses, Chilean
workers and peasants could hardly be expected to accept government proposals for
wage restraints, forced-savings plans, and moderation in labor disputes.
Moreover, as the government generally refused to use police or the military against
slum dwellers, organized labor, or campesinos, illegal land occupations and even
worker-declared “expropriation” of farms and factories occurred more frequently.
Whereas the leftist press indignantly publicized the small number of cases in which the
government did use force to halt labor conflicts or to remove trespassers—especially
when workers died or were injured as in Puerto Montt in early March 1969—the polit-
ical Right noted the government’s reluctance to guarantee private property rights and
organized white guards to defend its interests. No administrative decree or govern-
ment policy could effectively limit popular mobilization once set in motion; only police
or the military sufficed. With its unwillingness to adopt clearly repressive tactics, espe-
cially given the numerous divisions within the Christian Democratic party itself, the
government found a lawful “Revolution in Liberty” to be illusory. If the government
chose to uphold the law, it necessarily employed force against workers, peasants, and
students acting illegally to accelerate the program of reform.
 table 9–3. distribution of labor force by economic sector, 1960–70 (1000s)

1960 1961 1962 1963 1964 1965 1966 1967 1968 1969 1970 Percent

Agriculture 711.1 668.6 687.7 704.0 680.8 709.8 717.7 750.0 736.4 731.7 738.0 24.2
Mining 92.5 94.9 91.7 88.7 91.7 93.4 93.6 94.0 94.5 97.7 99.2 3.3
Industry 412.6 1439.7 450.4 464.5 477.9 506.7 527.7 534.4 544.6 550.7 562.9 18.8
Construction 130.5 135.6 158.6 158.5 188.8 183.1 186.3 169.0 168.5 172.0 177.5 6.0
Electricity, gas, and 10.8 11.0 11.1 11.8 12.3 12.5 11.9 11.9 11.8 11.8 11.8 0.3
water
Commerce 260.3 265.5 279.0 294.1 311.1 330.0 351.0 375.0 1404.2 428.5 451.5 15.1
Transport 121.2 126.0 135.0 139.0 143.8 148.0 149.5 156.2 161.8 167.4 175.6 5.9
Services 578.0 587.6 592.5 613.6 630.9 640.0 665.0 721.4 757.5 761.3 777.7 26.0
Total 2317.0 2348.9 2406.0 2474.2 12546.3 2623.5 2702.7 2811.9 2879.3 2921.1 2994.2 100.0

Source: Odeplan, Chilean Planning Agency.

241
242 CHILE

table 9–4. illegal strikes, urban land invasions,

factory seizures, and farm seizures, 1966–1970

1966 1967 1968 1969 1970

Urban land invasions 13 8 73 220

Factory tomas n.d. n.d. 5 24 133
Illegal strikes 936 878 901 771* 1085
Farm tomas 36† 9 27 148 271

*First nine months only.

†
1960–66.
Source: Chilean Labor Department Annual Report for each year; Solon Barraclough and J. A. Fernández, Diag-
nóstico de la reforma agraria Chilena, Mexico, Siglo Veintiuno, 1974; Walden F. Bello, “The Roots and Dynamics
of Revolution and Counterrevolution in Chile,” unpublished doctoral dissertation, Princeton University, 1975.

The Marxist parties, recognizing this dilemma, lost no opportunity to exacerbate it

by proclaiming their support for land occupations, farm seizures (tomas), and wide-
spread illegal strikes. If in order to demonstrate its commitment to reform, the govern-
ment invariably refused to halt these activities, then legal reform would have given
way to an uncontrolled and uncontrollable revolutionary situation. Just as the leftists
deliberately confronted the government with this choice between suppression of pop-
ular movements and chaos, so the rightists challenged the legality of the agrarian re-
form process and organized sometimes violent resistance to the government’s legal
reforms.
Complicating this situation, a minority element within the Christian Democratic
party encouraged mass mobilization and political activism beyond the limits officially
set by the Frei administration. In particular, Jacques Chonchol, director of INDAP, be-
lieved it necessary to go beyond the bounds of existing law in the unionization of rural
labor and in support for agrarian reform. While the government sought to squeeze new
legislation out of Congress (1964–67), Chonchol, via INDAP, promoted large numbers
of agricultural labor conflicts and organized multifarm unions in direct violation of ex-
isting legislation. Not to be outdone, Communist and Socialist organizers competed
with INDAP in the effort to mobilize the rural labor force against the landowners and
to accelerate agrarian reform.
These efforts overwhelmed the Labor Department, which lacked sufficient person-
nel and resources to administer properly the mounting number of requests to form
agricultural unions or to process efficiently the hundreds of agricultural labor disputes.
After frequent appearances in its offices of INDAP organizers (promotores) representing
campesino groups, the Labor Department ruled that INDAP officials “do not have the
legal right to intervene in the presentation of labor petitions and in the process of ne-
gotiation of labor conflicts in the agricultural sector.” In response, INDAP personnel re-
ceived instructions to limit their intervention in rural labor conflicts to “informal” sup-
port or assistance. In addition, the new peasant organizations and even the Catholic
rural labor movement, generated by ASICH and the Institute for Rural Education, pres-
sured CORA, the agency responsible for implementing land reform, to speed up the ex-
propriation and redistribution of agricultural land. Administrative inability to keep
pace with the tide of popular mobilization and rising expectations made the govern-
ment appear unwilling to fulfill its promises to the urban and the rural poor. It also
made credible Marxist attacks on the government for failing to carry out completely its
CHRISTIANS AND MARXISTS 243

promised program. Added to criticism from the Right, united in the Partido Nacional
after merger of Conservatives and Liberals in 1965, the dissident Christian Democrats
and Marxist swamped the government reform program in sectarian politics and
obstructionism.
The debate within the Christian Democratic party over the pace, character, and ob-
jectives of agrarian reform typified the basic contradictions that eventually proved fatal
to the “Revolution in Liberty.” The essential constraints on Chilean development could
not be overcome without both improved distribution of wealth and income and in-
creased production of goods and services. If redistribution occurred at the cost of cur-
rent investment and reduced productivity, then any gains to the workers and peasants
could only be temporary. Rising demands for goods and services without concomitant
expansion of domestic production and export earnings could only lead to a renewal of
the inflationary spiral. Under these conditions an ever more militant, politicized rural
labor force became a serious obstacle to the government’s overall economic program at
the same time as it was a major social and political accomplishment of governmental
policy.
More than any other aspect of the government program, official encouragement and
often subsidization of the formation of thousands of organizations among Chile’s
urban and rural poor upset the equilibrium of Chilean society. It also created political
forces that the government could not or would not control. Consistent with the ambi-
guity that characterized its reform program, the government sometimes did and some-
times did not call in police to squelch illegal rural labor conflicts, strikes in the cities or
mines, or land occupations; sometimes it used a labor conflict as a pretext to place one
of its representatives (interventor) in the farm where the conflict was taking place and
to organize the campesinos for eventual expropriation of the property.
Thus the “Revolution in Liberty” proved to be neither a revolution nor entirely law-
ful. It also failed to solve the fundamental economic problems the Christian Democrats
themselves had identified in 1964: slow economic growth, instability of prices (infla-
tion), dependence upon foreign markets and capital, and unequal distribution of
wealth and income. Nevertheless, it did improve the living conditions of thousands of
rural workers, tenants, and other beneficiaries of land reform; it did enact critical po-

table 9–5. christian democratic agrarian reform:

expropriations, 1965–july 14, 1970

Area in Hectares
Number of
Year properties* Irrigated Unirrigated Total Area

1965 99 41,260.1 499,923.0 541,183.1

1966 265 57,877.4 468,326.0 526,203.4
1967 (Law 15.020) 131 20,141.8 115,155.4 136,297.2
1967 (Law 16.640) 86 30,443.1 119,285.4 149,728.5
1968 223 44,681.1 612,566.3 657,247.4
1969 314 54,478.8 807,361.8 861,840.6
1970 (to July 14) 201 30,986.6 604,181.5 635,168.1†

Total 1319 279,868.9 3,128,919.4 3,408,788.3

*Some asentamientos (land reform settlements) were formed by combining two or more properties.
†
Error in original reads 535,163.1.
Source: CORA, Reforma agraria chilena, 1965–1970, Santiago, CORA, 1970, p. 36.
244 CHILE

litical and administrative reforms; it instituted a tax system that generated substantial
internal revenues; and it spread the belief that the Chilean state could offer real hope
for improvement of the lot of the poor. In the areas of education and public health the
Frei government also made impressive gains. Primary school enrollment increased by
46 percent, university enrollments doubled, and matriculation in technical schools
quadrupled. Public health programs that established numerous rural clinics and
trained community health leaders cut Chile’s atrocious infant mortality rate and also
bettered other general health conditions.
The reformist legislation of the Frei years and the massive organizational drive en-
couraged by the Christian Democratic administration provided substantial leverage
for further fundamental reforms in Chilean society. In this sense the Christian Demo-
crats definitively destroyed the cornerstone of Chilean formal democracy as it had
functioned since 1932, without providing anything but the vaguely conceived notion
of a “communitarian” society to replace it.
As the 1970 presidential elections approached, the Unidad Popular coalition, with
Salvador Allende as its presidential candidate, offered a “transition to socialism” as
their answer to this dilemma. The Christian Democratic candidate, Radomiro Tomic,
urged an intensification of the “Revolution in Liberty.” Jorge Alessandri, now an old
man running as an “independent,” appealed to the old elites and alienated middle-
class sectors with the prospect of restoration of law and order.
From the perspective of the political Right the drastic nature of the Christian Dem-
ocratic reforms between 1964 and 1970 prevented them from again supporting the
Christian Democratic candidate as the lesser of two evils. In any case, most political an-
alysts, including those in the American embassy in Santiago, predicted a victory for
Alessandri. When Salvador Allende emerged with a slim plurality, Chile plunged into
three years of dramatic change, punctuated by increasing polarization, political vio-
lence, and American intervention in Chilean politics. Christian Democracy’s broad-
front reformist projects proved to be both too much and too little of what Chile required
to become a more Christian and more democratic society.

In the last year of the Christian Democratic administration political tension mounted.
A “strike” (the so-called tacnazo, because it involved the Tacna regiment) among the of-
ficers and men of the Tacna and Yungay regiments of the army resulted in demands for
the ouster of the minister of defense and for better pay and materiel for the armed ser-

table 9–6. growth of campesino cooperative movement, 1965–70

Cooperatives Confed- Federations

Year Number Members Federations Affiliated erations Affiliated

1964 24 1718
1965 43 3204
1966 84 7802
1967 123 11,452
1968 171 18,456
1969 222 30,034 7 51
1970* 250 37,675 9† 81 1 9

*To October 22.

†
Does not include five federations in formation which would include 45 affiliated cooperatives.
Source: INDAP, 1964/1970, n.p.
CHRISTIANS AND MARXISTS 245

table 9–7. union membership in chile—1964 and 1970

1964 1970

Number Members Number Members

Industrial or plant unions 632 142,958 1437 197,651

Professional or craft unions 1207 125,926 2569 239,323
Agricultural unions 24 1863 510 114,112

Totals 1863 270,542 4006 551,086

Source: Chilean Labor Department Annual Report for each year.

vices. Led by retired general Roberto Viaux, this military movement temporarily con-
trolled the main arsenal, the non-commissioned officers’ school, and the principal re-
cruiting station; it reminded many Chileans of the events of 1924. Though the move-
ment sputtered and dissolved after the resignation of the defense minister and
government promises to attend to the military’s economic demands, there was talk of
a possible Viaux presidential candidacy after his incarceration—in striking parallel to
the 1934 Senate campaign of Marmaduque Grove when the campaign slogan “From jail
to the senate” inspired the Chilean Left. Members of the Socialist party took the op-
portunity to support military aspirations for improved pay and materiel despite their
distrust of the reactionary tendencies of Viaux and his comrades.
Shortly thereafter the government pushed legislation through Congress to pacify
the military. Even so, on November 19, 1969, the government felt compelled to issue an
official declaration threatening severe sanctions against anyone seeking to subvert the
discipline of the armed forces. The declaration also emphasized that the commanders
of the armed forces and carabineros had reaffirmed their loyalty, discipline, and respect
for democratic institutions. To confirm this, President Frei declared a “state of emer-
gency” under the questionable authority granted to the executive in cases of “public
calamity.” This decree allowed the commander of the armed forces to take action to
“prevent the commission of crimes or the occurrence of events affecting the security of
the state.”
At the same time that the Frei government was facing Chile’s first major breach of
military discipline since the popular-front period, revolutionaries and pseudorevolu-
tionaries incited an already highly politicized population to take matters of economic

table 9–8. improvements in public health during

the frei administration

1964 1969

General mortality (per 1000) 11.1 8.9

Infant mortality (per 1000 births) 102.9 79.0
Measles (per 100,000) 38.6 3.5
Typhoid fever (per 100,000) 2.1 0.9
Tuberculosis (per 100,000) 48.8 29.6

Source: Presidential message to the National Congress, Santiago, May 21, 1970; Sergio
Molina, El Proceso de Cambio en Chile, Santiago, Editorial Universitaria, 1972, p. 89.
246 CHILE

and social change into their own hands. The Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria
(MIR), or Left Revolutionary Movement, a relatively new revolutionary organization
which rejected electoral politics, spread its inflammatory ideology among the Mapuche
and the campesinos of southern Chile and into the callampas and campamentos of the
urban centers. Favoring direct action, MIR cadres, often university students from the
University of Concepción, joined with the Mapuche in land “recuperation” movements
that were met, not unexpectedly, by landowner resistance. Elements of the Socialist
party and MAPU (a radical splinter group from the Christian Democratic party) and
even certain Communists also turned to overt attacks on the rights of landed propri-
etors, industrial enterprises, and owners of urban land and housing projects.
Part of this mass mobilization owed its inspiration to the usual prepresidential elec-
tion rhetoric and vote seeking of the Marxist parties and the Christian Democrats. The
Marxists, now in alliance with most of the Radical party and with a number of smaller
parties, had again chosen Salvador Allende as their presidential candidate and formed
a new version of the popular front called unidad popular (UP), or “popular unity.” The
popular unity electoral program called for revolutionary change. In the introduction to
the UP electoral program, the parties of the coalition told the Chilean people that:
Chile is a capitalist country, dependent on the imperialist nations and dominated by
bourgeois groups who are structurally related to foreign capital and cannot resolve
the country’s fundamental problems—problems which are clearly the result of class
privilege which will never be given up voluntarily.
The program criticized the Christian Democratic government as “nothing but a new
government of the bourgeoisie, in the service of national and foreign capitalism, whose
weak efforts to promote social change came to a sad end in economic stagnation, a ris-
ing cost of living, and violent repression of the people.” According to the UP parties,
the results of the Frei government demonstrated that reformism could not solve the
problems of Chile’s people.
To solve Chile’s problems, the UP coalition proposed a peaceful transition to social-
ism. This required replacement of Chile’s existing political institutions with a unicam-
eral legislature, or people’s assembly, to root out the evils of presidentialism and par-
liamentarism; reorganization of the judiciary and educational system; and greatly
increased participation of workers and peasants through union and community organ-
izations in national and local policymaking. Further, the program called for restructur-
ing the economy by greatly increasing the scope of the “social” or public sector, by ex-
propriating all agricultural estates of more than the equivalent of eighty hectares of
irrigated land, and by nationalizing the financial system (banks and insurance compa-
nies) as well as “all those activities which have a strong influence on the nation’s social
and economic development.” This last category seemed to open the door to a broad pro-
gram of socialization of the means of production and of distribution channels. The UP
indicated that with the dominant “social” sector of the economy there would coexist a
“mixed” sector in which enterprises would combine public and private capital; and that,
at least in the short run, small private firms could continue to operate. However, uncer-
tainty among the country’s small businesses concerning the eventual limits of the UP
program, and the coalition’s inability to reach internal agreement upon such limits,
would produce serious political problems for the UP government (1970–73).
Opposing the UP coalition in the 1970 presidential election, the Christian Democrats
chose as their candidate Radomiro Tomic. Tomic, ex-Chilean ambassador to the United
States and one of the founders of the Falange, was considered an uncompromising left-
ist by the Chilean Right. Whereas other potential Christian Democratic candidates
CHRISTIANS AND MARXISTS 247

might have been able to reconstruct the alliance between the Partido Nacional, other
conservative forces, and the Christian Democrats who elected Eduardo Frei in 1964,
Tomic declared his unwillingness to cooperate with either the Right or the Radicals
who refused to participate in the UP coalition. In a seeming attempt to appear even
more revolutionary than Allende, Tomic highlighted his campaign with promises to
complete agrarian reform by expropriating all the large rural estates “from the Andes
to the sea” (desde la cordillera hasta el mar). Repeatedly Tomic emphasized that a victory
in coalition with the Right was a victory for the Right. In contrast to his harsh attacks
on the Partido Nacional and its candidate, Tomic’s campaign speeches treated the pos-
sibility of an Allende victory as an alternative opportunity for progressive forces in
Chile to unite and carry out fundamental social change.
If the Tomic candidacy, rather than that of a more moderate Christian Democrat,
made rightist support for the Christian Democrats impossible, political polls showing
ex-President Jorge Alessandri the likely victor in a three-way race for the presidency in
1970 whetted the appetite of the Chilean law-and-order forces for a return to “the stick”
that Portales had once recommended to cure a nation’s “bad habits.” The combined
support of the Partido Nacional, alienated middle-class groups, and a large number of
urban and rural workers still attracted by the appeal of Alessandri’s name, made his
candidacy appear destined for success. Unfortunately for Alessandri and his support-
ers, his age and lack of vitality became embarrassingly evident in Chile’s introduction
to television politics. The image of a tired, inarticulate politician broadcast via televi-
sion to many of the nation’s voters reinforced the outhouse humor of UP election
posters that caricatured Alessandri on a toilet with the caption “NICA” or Ni cagando,
politely translated as “No way!”
Alessandri’s weakness as a campaigner and the Christian Democratic decision to go
it alone split the vote three ways. Salvador Allende received a slim plurality. Notwith-
standing the addition of Radicals and other small parties to the old FRAP coalition, the
UP’s share of the vote actually decreased slightly from that achieved by FRAP in the
1964 election. More than a mandate for Allende or for revolutionary change, the elec-
tion clearly demonstrated the extreme political divisions within Chilean society in
1970, with the “centrist” candidate finishing last.
According to the Chilean constitution, when no presidential candidate received a
majority of the votes, Congress could choose as president one of the two candidates
with the highest vote total. Since the Christian Democrats controlled the deciding votes
in Congress, Alessandri proposed to exchange an immediate resignation for congres-
sional designation of him as president. This would have allowed Eduardo Frei, ineligi-
ble to succeed himself immediately, to enter new elections and refashion a Rightist-

table 9–9. presidential elections, 1964 and 1970

1964 1970

Political Parties and Candidates Total Percentage Total Percentage

FRAP/UP (Salvador Allende) 977,902 39.5 1,070,344 36.3

Christian Democrats (Eduardo Frei, 1964 1,409,102 55.5 821,801 27.8
Radomiro Tomic, 1970)
Julio Durán* 125,233 5.0
Jorge Alessandri 1,031,159 34.9

*Durán withdrew his candidacy before the election but still received 5 percent of the vote.
248 CHILE

Christian Democratic alliance to prevent Allende from becoming president. While this
plan attracted some Christian Democrats, most of the party’s congressional represen-
tatives and Radomiro Tomic opposed it firmly. Instead, they demanded passage of a
package of constitutional guarantees with UP support prior to the congressional vote
on Chile’s next president: among these, guarantees of the multiparty system, mainte-
nance of civil liberties and freedom of the press, access by all parties to government-
controlled TV stations, protection for the armed forces against political purges or the
creation of militia, continued existence of, and public subsidies for, the private educa-
tional system, autonomy of the university system, protection for government employ-
ees—many added during the Frei administration—against dismissals or political per-
secution. In short, the Christian Democrats sought to buttress with constitutional
amendments Chile’s existing political system against the in-coming Allende administra-
tion’s plans for a new institutional order. The Christian Democrats insisted that only
approval of these amendments with the votes of UP deputies and senators would allow
them to vote for Allende as president.
As the Christian Democrats bargained with the UP parties for constitutional amend-
ments to limit the future course of an Allende government, Right-wing extremist
groups, such as Patria y Libertad (“Fatherland and Freedom”), and United States busi-
ness and diplomatic groups plotted to prevent Allende’s inauguration. International
Telephone and Telegraph, one of the largest American-based multinationals with in-
terests in Chile, took the initiative in approaching the CIA with a plan to destabilize the
Chilean economy through international economic pressure, delays, or cancellation of
loans and credits, and by fomenting panic among Chile’s private businesses. Covert ef-
forts to bankrupt savings banks and to induce unemployment also figured in the Amer-
ican scheme to prevent Allende’s confirmation by the Chilean Congress. Later, con-
gressional hearings in the United States made clear that President Nixon and his closest
foreign policy advisers, including Henry Kissinger, played an active role in this effort
to subvert the work of Chile’s Congress.
Despite the behind-the-scenes machinations of ITT and American policymakers, the
UP bargain with the Christian Democrats on the package of constitutional amend-
ments seemed to assure an Allende victory in the congressional voting. Two days be-
fore the Congress was to decide on Chile’s next president, extreme right-wing groups,
allegedly with CIA backing, made a desperate effort to kidnap the commander-in-chief
of the Chilean army. Apparently they hoped to cast the blame for the abduction on MIR
or on the UP—and thereby change the Christian Democratic votes in the Congress or
provoke military intervention. This ploy backfired. General Schneider resisted his as-
sailants, and they mortally wounded him in an exchange of gunfire. Schneider died on
October 25, 1970, the day after the Chilean Congress confirmed Salvador Allende as
Chile’s next president.
Proclaiming that with him the people (el pueblo) of Chile entered into the presiden-
tial palace, Salvador Allende received the presidential sash on November 3, 1970. Less
than three years later Allende’s body would be carried from La Moneda, testimony to
his unsuccessful struggle to take Chile down the peaceful road to socialism.

Salvador Allende inherited the political mythology and constitutional legitimacy of a

system no longer viable without substantial modifications. The increasing violence, in-
cluding political terrorism and “expropriation” of money from banks by Miristas, as
well as the challenge to civilian authority represented by the tacnazo in the last year of
the Frei administration, reflected the decomposition of the political arrangements that
had held together the old order. President Allende lacked a revolutionary army to carry
CHRISTIANS AND MARXISTS 249

out his will; he headed a precarious multiparty coalition lacking both internal cohe-
siveness and underlying agreement on the pace and character of change to be imple-
mented by the unidad popular government. Like all reformist Chilean presidents in the
twentieth century, President Allende faced a hostile Congress and entrenched bureau-
cracy. And, with less than 37 percent of the vote, he lacked even the popular mandate
President Aguirre Cerda had achieved after the election won by the popular front in
1938.
Worse still, Allende was a Marxist whose program evoked the intense hostility of the
majority of the Chilean electorate as well as the uncompromising and active opposition
of the United States. From the outset, American foreign policy, both covert and diplo-
matic, sought to disrupt the Chilean economy, to cut off or stifle credit from interna-
tional lending agencies, to provide financial and moral support for the regime’s oppo-
nents—and to maintain friendly relations with the Chilean military. Viewed as a “test
case” of the viability of elected Marxist governments not only in Latin America but also
in Western Europe (especially France and Italy), the Allende government potentially
threatened the integrity of the NATO alliance as well as the southern cone of South
America. Friendly and expanding relations with Cuba and Eastern Europe, when
added to the government’s eventual expropriation of American copper companies and
other foreign investments, persuaded hard-line American officials that every effort be
made to “destabilize” the Chilean economy and oust the UP government. The concen-
tration in Santiago of numerous leftist intellectuals and political exiles from other Latin
American countries made the Chilean capital a center of revolutionary activity, closely
scrutinized by secret police and military intelligence agents from Brazil, Bolivia,
Uruguay, and Argentina.
Ironically, the very successes of certain of the UP government’s programs, and the
economic consequences of these successes, so polarized Chilean society that less than
three years after Allende’s inauguration (August, 1973) the congressional opposition
called upon the military to re-establish the “rule of the constitution and the law.” In a
setting quite different from the confrontation between President Balmaceda and Con-
gress before the civil war of 1891, the confrontation between the UP coalition and the
old order nevertheless adopted the familiar rhetoric and charges of Chilean politics: the
president had violated his constitutional authority, and Congress sought to uphold its
constitutional mandate, to assure respect for the constitution, and to prevent executive
tyranny. Censure of government ministers and impeachment proceedings (acusaciones
constitucionales) in Congress, so reminiscent of the structure of political conflict since
the parliamentary period, now served as a reminder that the effort to implement so-
cialism through legal means faced the challenge of the numerous checks and balances
inherent in the Chilean political system. Less than three weeks after Congress appealed
to the armed forces to preserve Chilean democracy from presidential excess, a military
coup on September 11, 1973, splattered the peaceful road to socialism with blood.

The Popular Unity government’s short-term economic policies attempted to effect a

massive income redistribution program through differential wage and salary readjust-
ments to benefit the poorest sectors of Chilean society. In marked contrast to the stabi-
lization schemes of the Ibáñez or Alessandri periods, the UP policymakers hoped to
stimulate demand by providing significantly higher-than-inflation salary increments
to the urban and rural poor. Added to increases in real income for the mass of Chilean
workers, impressive increases in government expenditures and monetary expansion
stimulated the stagnant economy. The administration’s policymakers expected these
meaures to increase effective demand and, thereby, to convince Chilean entrepreneurs
250 CHILE

to utilize the excess capacity that idled numerous workers. Thus, through a combina-
tion of income redistribution, increase in effective demand, and reduction of unem-
ployment, the UP government hoped to bring the country out of the economic reces-
sion inherited from the Frei government and to increase popular support for the
Allende coalition.
Unfortunately for the government, the monopolistic structure of Chilean industry,
rapidly expanding demands by workers for expropriation of farms and factories, and
the corresponding distrust by private investors of the government’s ultimate intentions
toward private firms, all militated against substantial new private investment. This
meant that despite short-term improvements in industrial production and in worker
consumption, the UP’s programs of income redistribution in the context of a “transi-
tion to socialism”—with capitalist owners still making investment decisions—led to
shortages, rising prices, and black markets. Instead of investing for the future, private
entrepreneurs sold off their inventory at speculative prices or, in agriculture, disposed
of farm machinery and cattle herds. They invested in dollars, German marks, or other
hard currencies. Under these conditions rising demand, escalating emissions of cur-
rency, and deficit spending fueled inflation. By mid-1973 the annual rate of inflation ex-
ceeded 300 percent and reduced the real income of workers and salaried employees to
levels below those of late 1970 when the UP had taken office.
Every short-term success of government policy involved contradictions that led
ever more rapidly to political and economic disaster. In part, this resulted from the
disunity of the UP coalition. Acting as if the coalition were simply another executive-
electoral alliance, each party demanded its share of the spoils. The government filled
important administrative posts through an elaborate quota system which assigned per-
sonnel designated by the political parties to positions throughout the administration.
Employment opportunities in the firms nationalized, “intervened,” or requisitioned by
the government became plums with which to reward party stalwarts or to combat un-
employment. These difficulties led to precipitate declines in productivity throughout
the economy.
In the rural sector, debate over the types of agricultural production units to establish
on the expropriated farms created uncertainty among the campesinos and smallhold-
ers. Attacks on the asentamiento system introduced by the Christian Democrat admin-
istration alienated the beneficiaries of the Frei agrarian reform, while experiments with
variations on collective farms, state farms, and regional production units resulted in
virtual disorganization of the agricultural economy. After a good harvest in 1970–71,
agricultural production declined seriously. As a result the government was forced to
use scarce foreign exchange to import foodstuffs needed to meet the increased demand
occasioned by higher worker incomes and to make up for the reduction in domestic
production.
The government’s methods for dealing with shortages, carrying out agrarian re-
form, and constructing the “social” or public sector of the economy exacerbated polit-
ical tensions and intensified the economic crisis. In an attempt to minimize the prob-
lems of urban supply, the government organized public entities to compete with the
private sector in wholesale and retail distribution. DINAC, a public enterprise consti-
tuted by the amalgamation of several large distribution agencies acquired by CORFO,
made efforts to gain control of wholesale distribution, while thousands of private sup-
ply and price committees juntas de abastecimiento y precios (JAP) were organized to co-
operate in local distribution of articles of consumption to urban neighbor-hoods. These
JAP committees assisted inspectors from DIRINCO, the agency charged with enforcing
price controls, in their efforts to prevent private retail merchants from evading such
controls. Subsequently, the supply of “people’s marketbaskets,” or canastas populares, to
CHRISTIANS AND MARXISTS 251

table 9–10. the agrarian sector: export of goods and agricultural

imports 1965–70 (yearly average), 1971, and 1972 (millions of dollars)

1965–70 1971 1972

Total exports $939 $964 $836

Agricultural exports $ 24 $ 29 $ 19
Agricultural imports $184 $311 $468
Agricultural imports as percentage of total export earnings 19.6% 32.2% 56.0%

Source: Stefan de Vylder, Allende’s Chile, Cambridge University Press, 1974, p. 202.

the JAP for distribution to the people of the shantytowns and worker neighborhoods
directly threatened the viability of Chile’s more than 125,000 retail merchants and un-
counted ambulatory vendors. The JAPs also served as a potential organizational mech-
anism for administering a direct, mandatory system of rationing as well as for moni-
toring the activities of opposition elements at the local level. None of these implications
were lost upon the opposition which attacked the inefficiency, corruption, and “politi-
cal criteria” with which the JAPs distributed the canastas populares.
Ideological and political fragmentation within the UP government heightened the
economic uncertainty. Unable to control the activities of MIR, certain members of his
own Socialist party, and the militant Mapucistas, President Allende failed to halt the ac-
celeration of farm and factory seizures and illegal strikes in which workers demanded
nationalization or expropriation of the enterprises where they were employed.
In the first eighteen months of the UP government, campesinos temporarily or per-
manently occupied some 1700 rural properties. In Article 171 of the agrarian reform
law enacted by the Christian Democratic government, the Allende government found
a legal mechanism to convert farm seizures or illegal strikes into de facto transfers of
managerial responsibility for rural estates. Article 171 provided that “in case of lock-
out or illegal work stoppage that, for any reason, suspends exploitation of a rural en-
terprise, the President of the Republic can order resumption of labors [reanudación de
faenas] with the intervention of the civil authority . . . and the support of police if nec-
essary.” The law gave the government official [interventor] assigned to “intervene” the
farm “all the prerogatives necessary to continue operation of the enterprise.” With this
authority government interventores could hire new personnel, incur new liabilities or
pay old debts, and decide what crops to plant or animals to sell. A short period of in-
tervention could easily bankrupt any farm or at least make most owners quite willing
to sell their farms to CORA on favorable terms. Thus, Article 171 of the agrarian reform
law could be used by the Popular Unity government as a flexible legal tool to speed up
the agrarian reform process—if only campesinos intensified the process of illegal farm
occupations or strikes. In practice this tactic was used on so many farms that the ad-
ministration soon ran out of party loyalists in the agrarian bureaucracies to assign as
interventores.
In the urban sector the government resorted to application of the all-but-forgotten
Decree Law 520, a vestige of the “Socialist Republic” of 1932. As indicated in Chapter
8, this decree law allowed the government to requisition, intervene, or expropriate any
private enterprise that failed to comply with laws regulating price controls, specula-
tion, stockpiling in anticipation of increases in official prices for particular commodi-
ties, interruption of production, or refusal to utilize efficiently installed capacity when
the government decided there existed a “shortage” of a particular commodity. Legisla-
tion against lockouts also gave the government leverage in labor conflicts. As in the
252 CHILE

table 9–11. requisitions and interventions,

november 1970–november 1972

Period Interventions Requisitions Total

November–December 1970 37 1 38
January–February 1971 23 – 23
March–April 1971 1 5 6
May–June 1971 12 12 24
July–August 1971 9 6 15
September–October 1971 24 7 31
November–December 1971 21 9 30
January–February 1972 13 6 19
March–April 1972 14 7 21
May–June 1972 16 3 19
July–August 1972 7 18 25
September–October 1972* 23 48 71
November 1972 2 4 6

Total 202 126 328

*During the October strike a large number of enterprises were subjected to intervention or req-
uisition for participation in the general lockout. Most of these companies were later returned
to their owners.
Source: Based on Instituto de Economía, La Economía Chilena en 1972, pp. 116ff. After Stefan de
Vylder, Allende’s Chile, Cambridge University Press, 1974, p. 146.

agricultural sector, requisitions or interventions in industry could quickly bankrupt the

legal owners and facilitate transfer of the affected industry to the public sector.
Under these conditions the predictions made in 1938 by Polish economist Oscar
Lange proved entirely accurate. Indeed Lange’s analysis is perhaps the most appro-
priate epitaph, as well as explanation, for the domestic economic failures of the UP
government.

An economic system based on private enterprise and private property of the means
of production can work only as long as the security of private property and of income
derived from enterprise is maintained. The very existence of a government bent on in-
troducing socialism is a constant threat to this security. Therefore, the capitalistic
economy cannot function under a socialist government unless the government is so-
cialist in name only.
. . . Owners threatened with expropriation have no inducement to make the
necessary investments and to manage them efficiently. And no government supervi-
sion or administrative measures can cope effectively with the passive resistance and
sabotage of the owners and managers.

No administrative device adopted by the government could cope with the resis-
tance of the opposition. Black markets, shortages, and rampant inflation undermined
confidence in the government and hardened the opposition forces against the de facto
socialization of the economy. At the same time that the activities of MIR and the most
radical members of the government coalition convinced the government’s enemies that
CHRISTIANS AND MARXISTS 253

table 9–12. industrial establishments controlled by the chilean state

November December December May

Form of Control 1970 1971 1972 1973

State ownership* 31 62 103 165

Under intervention or requisition – 39 99 120

Total 31 101 202 285

*Both social and mixed areas and including six new industries that were created by the Chilean state after No-
vember 1970.
Source: Stefan de Vylder, Allende’s Chile, Cambridge University Press, 1974, p. 145.

only violent resistance could halt consolidation of a new political reality, the Commu-
nists and Allende sought to negotiate a de-escalation of conflict with the Christian
Democrats in exchange for clearly defined limits on the extent of socialization in in-
dustry and agriculture. Neither those who believed that socialism could be established
only through force and popular mobilization, nor the Partido Nacional and the grow-
ing movement of economic and professional associations (gremios) committed to vio-
lent counterrevolution, gave any breathing room to the government’s efforts to arrive
at a pacific resolution of the crisis.

As the political and economic situation deteriorated, supply and distribution problems
in the urban areas sent into the streets thousands of women from upper-, middle-, and
even working-class homes, banging on pots and pans to symbolize the government’s
inability to resolve the economic crisis. In response, organized workers and their fam-
ilies facetiously offered to share their food with the momios (literally, “mummy,” a term
UP sympathizers applied to the supporters of the old order) if they were really unable
to feed themselves. Moving their struggle against the government to the streets, lead-
ers of the major trade associations and economic interest groups such as the SNA and
the SFF allied themselves with extreme right-wing political organizations such as Pa-
tria y Libertad, PROTECO, and Soberanía, Orden y Libertad (SOL). These recently or-
ganized movements established white guard vigilantes to resist farm and factory
seizures and to recover occupied private property in retomas. By mid-1972 the opposi-
tion had united in a so-called gremialista movement. A massive strike in October of 1972
mobilized shopkeepers, professional and economic associations, bank clerks, students,
and even certain working-class and campesino groups in an effort to shut down the
Chilean economy. The strike was precipitated by the demand of the 40,000 members of
the independent truckers’ association that the government suspend its plans to create
a state-owned trucking enterprise, but it quickly became openly political and directly
challenged the UP government and its program.
Recognizing the critical political moment, ex-President Eduardo Frei personally in-
fluenced the Christian Democratic party to support the strike and mobilize its follow-
ers in opposition to the government. On October 15, 1972, the party’s secretary general,
Renán Fuentealba declared that the government was “acting openly in defiance of the
constitution and the laws, as well as of fundamental human rights,” and that this cir-
cumstance was “dangerous for all our citizens.” In light of this danger, Fuentealba af-
firmed the Christian Democrats’ adherence to the truckers’ movement. Predictably, the
254 CHILE

Partido Nacional aggressively supported the strike, maintaining that only organized
civil disobedience could overcome the government’s effort to impose communism on
Chile.
Faced with a situation bordering on insurrection, the UP government declared a par-
tial state of emergency. In resorting to this traditional use of regimes of exception to
counter the opposition and appealing to the armed forces and police to uphold the con-
stitution, the Popular Unity government followed the examples of Portales, Montt, Bal-
maceda, Ibáñez, Alessandri, Aguirre Cerda, and Frei. Chile had been governed under
regimes of exception for much of its early history, and frequently from 1932 to 1970. The
Popular Unity government was also typically Chilean in stretching the law to its limits
and beyond for its own ends (what Chileans call resquicios legales and Americans call
taking advantage of legal “loopholes”). This meant that military officers took over the
responsibility for maintaining order, for enforcing temporary censorship on the oppo-
sition media, and, in effect, for shoring up the UP coalition’s fragile position. By Octo-
ber 21, the newly created comando gremial confronted the government with a sweeping
set of demands that, if accepted, would have amounted to abrogation of the UP pro-
gram. Despite the serious economic effects of the strike (the government later esti-
mated the loss to the country at almost $300 million), continued production in the fac-
tories and support by UP loyalists prevented a complete economic shutdown. The
gremialista movement failed to win a definitive victory. In addition, the emergence of
new working-class organizations, or cordones industriales, among the factory workers in
Santiago’s “industrial belts”—such as Los Cerrillos, Puente Alto, and Vicuña Mac-
Kenna—threatened the development of real popular militias and institutions of “par-
allel power.” Pursuing a more revolutionary course than the leadership of the CUT, the
Communist party, or President Allende, a nucleus of revolutionary workers in the cor-
dones industriales began preparing for armed confrontation.
All the major parties of the Popular Unity coalition made some, generally haphaz-
ard, efforts to train armed cadres for the eventual confrontation. Cuban military advis-
ers and other foreign sympathizers provided arms and training to some of these
groups. Army, Navy, and Air Force intelligence services, aware of these initiatives, and
perhaps overestimating the leftist cadres’ military capabilities in 1972–73, took coun-
termeasures, including purges within the armed forces themselves to eliminate leftist
sympathizers. Formation of armed groups, stockpiling weapons, and training at iso-
lated sites in the countryside and mountains seemed to validate beliefs by the opposi-
tion parties that the Popular Unity eventually intended to resort to force to impose its
program. For the Christian Democrats, the National party, and the military institutions
this belief would, by itself, justify the ouster of President Allende less than one year
later, although this outcome was arguably still avoidable in late 1972. At the least, Pres-
ident Allende acted as if he believed a military coup could be prevented and took mea-
sures intended to prevent that outcome. These included renewed efforts to negotiate an
overall compromise with the Christian Democrats on constitutional and economic is-
sues and inviting military participation in the Cabinet.
Coincident with the October strike, the opposition moved on the legislative front to
impeach four of Allende’s ministers. Faced with a loss of key advisers and the resur-
rection of the political tactic of censure and impeachment of ministers, President Al-
lende made a critical political decision. He invited the army commander-in-chief, Car-
los Prats, to serve as minister of interior while at the same time continuing in his army
post. The president also included an air force general and an admiral in his new cabi-
net. Jacques Chonchol, the ex-Christian Democrat who served as Allende’s minister of
agriculture and was probably the member of the Allende ministerial team most hated
CHRISTIANS AND MARXISTS 255

by the opposition (because of his leadership in the agrarian reform process), left the
cabinet.
Inviting the military officers to participate as ministers in the cabinet, and particu-
larly the appointment of Army Commander, Carlos Prats, as Minister of Interior, emu-
lated the repeated use of military officers as government ministers in times of crisis
since the early twentieth century. Despite the Popular Unity government’s revolution-
ary program, most of its leaders shared the perception, cultivated since the 1940s, that
when civilian political parties and movements reached an impasse that threatened in-
stitutional breakdown, the armed forces were an acceptable temporary arbiter. By “de-
politicizing” the government with military ministers, Allende signaled his desire to
achieve a political truce, with all sides theoretically confiding in the integrity and pa-
triotism of the armed forces as guarantors of any agreements negotiated between the
government and opposition parties. Implicitly, Allende and the opposition recognized
the historical importance of the armed forces as occasional political arbiters—and of
course this role had been formalized in the 1941 legislation assigning to the armed
forces control and supervision of national elections.
Declaring their full confidence in General Prats, the leaders of the truckers’ strike ne-
gotiated a settlement in early November that included promises by the government to
return enterprises occupied by workers during the strike and also not to nationalize the
transport and wholesale trade sectors of the economy. Although the government did
not entirely fulfill these promises, the October strike had made the military the arbiter
of the nation’s political conflicts.
General Prats emphasized that the two most important tasks facing the new cabinet
consisted of restoration of order and administration of peaceful, honest congressional
elections in March 1973. In the aftermath of the truckers’ strike, however, speculation
abounded about the extent of American financial support and CIA involvement in the
events of October. Meanwhile the opposition looked to the March 1973 elections as an
opportunity to win the two-thirds majority in the Congress that would permit Al-
lende’s impeachment. The presence of General Prats in the interior ministry seemed to
guarantee the integrity of the March elections, but it also inspired harsh condemnation
from those on the left who proposed “getting on with the Revolution.”
Concentrating their efforts on the upcoming elections, the Christian Democrats, the
Partido Nacional, and other opposition forces forged an electoral alliance called the
Democratic Confederation, or CODE. The results of the March elections, however,
proved a victory for no one. CODE obtained 55 percent of the votes but actually lost
seats in the Congress to the UP coalition. The opposition was a majority, but it now
faced three years of the Allende administration before the presidential elections sched-
uled for 1976. Notwithstanding the veracity of CODE’s claims of electoral fraud and
the abnormal delay in reporting the election returns, there could be no doubt that the
UP coalition retained significant popular support. Despite the economic crisis, short-
ages of consumer goods, and the opposition’s media offensive against the government,
the UP coalition still could count on more than 40 percent of Chile’s voters—an increase
over its electoral support in the 1970 presidential elections.
Between March 1973 and September 1973, intensified militancy by MIR and certain
elements within the UP coalition, as well as public threats by Socialist leader Carlos Al-
tamirano to infiltrate and subvert the armed forces, were juxtaposed to counterrevolu-
tionary economic sabotage and terrorism. The galloping inflation rate increased the
number of strikes, including an extremely costly work stoppage by the miners at the El
Teniente copper mine in Rancagua. Workers who in the past had looked to Marxist
union leaders now followed a Christian Democrat in a strike condemned by the UP
256 CHILE

government. Lasting more than two months, the strike drew support from thousands
of university students and members of the Federation of Secondary Students in Santi-
ago. It also directly pitted the UP government against an important group of organized
workers—not against momios.
Amidst rampant inflation, political and economic crises, and the rising pitch of gov-
ernment and opposition rhetoric, unsuccessful negotiations between the government
and the Christian Democrats continued—even after an abortive coup d’état by the sec-
ond tank regiment in Santiago in June 1973. The quick defeat of this tancazo seemed to
reaffirm General Prats’ commitment to defense of the constitutional government.
Gradually, however, Prats’ apparent political ambitions, rumors that he would emerge
as the UP presidential candidate in 1976, and an incident in which he reportedly threat-
ened a woman driver with death for sticking out her tongue at him as he motored
through Santiago, all combined to erode his support among fellow officers.
The political situation grew even worse in late July with new strikes by the truckers
and the gremialista movement. After a temporary absence, representatives of the armed
forces again returned to the cabinet to restore order (August 9, 1973). Now all three ser-
vice commanders, as well as the commander of the national police force (carabineros),
occupied ministries. Intensified implementation of the provisions of the gun control
law, passed in 1972, sent military units to factories and shanty towns to disarm work-
ers and forestall a popular insurrection. These searches for arms, or allanamientos, also
served to collect intelligence on the quantity of arms available in the cordones industri-
ales, and to train army units in tactics for confrontation with the civilian population at
factory work sites, union halls, party offices, and in the poblaciones. The number of alla-

Demonstrations in favor of President Allende after failed coup of June 29, 1973.
(Courtesy of LOM Publishers.)
CHRISTIANS AND MARXISTS 257

namientos increased gradually after early 1973. Less attention was given to the armed
vigilantes organized by the gremialista and right-wing political movements. In July
1973, according to pro-unidad popular sources, only two of twenty-four allanamientos in-
volved “groups of armed fascists”; all the rest were directed against factories, offices of
unidad popular parties, government offices, or other supporters of the Allende govern-
ment. By the first part of August, when the new military-based cabinet was organized,
the allanamientos were coordinated operations of army, air force, and naval units mov-
ing against leftists throughout the nation.
In the meantime the gremialista strike movement continued, supported by the entire
political opposition and students at the Catholic University. Unable to negotiate an end
to the trucking strike and annoyed by obstacles put in his way by Allende’s civilian
supporters, air force General César Ruiz Danyau abruptly resigned from the cabinet
only days after accepting the portfolio of transport and public works. President All-
ende’s quick acceptance of Ruiz’s resignation as minister and as air force commander-in-
chief provoked a new political crisis, involving agitation among the general’s air force
colleagues.
Violence in the streets of Santiago, political terrorism by leftists and rightists, and an
imminent state of political chaos elicited a call by the majority opposition in the Chilean
Congress for the military to intervene to guarantee institutional stability, civil peace, se-
curity, and development. The same day, hundreds of wives of military officers gathered
outside of General Prats’ residence to demand his resignation. Prats resigned the next
day and was followed by his military colleagues General Guillermo Pickering and
Mario Sepúlveda (commander of the Santiago garrison). Now President Allende was
at the mercy of General Augusto Pinochet Ugarte.
On September 11, 1973, General Pinochet and his fellow service commanders led a
well-coordinated, brutal, and highly successful military movement that ended the UP
government and resulted in the death of President Salvador Allende. According to the
military, Salvador Allende committed suicide after surviving aerial bombardment of
the presidential palace.
More has been written about Chile between 1970 and 1973 than about all the rest of
Chilean history. The unidad popular experience raised important theoretical questions
for socialist intellectuals and politicians concerning the viability and correct tactics of
the “peaceful road to socialism.” These leftists who believe(d) in the possibility of such
a process have sought to determine where the Allende government went wrong, how
the process could have been salvaged, how European Communists and Socialists can
prevent the “fascization” of the middle class which was the social base of the counter-
revolution in Chile.
Congressional investigations in the United States have made available incontro-
vertible evidence of extensive U.S. efforts to undermine the Allende government. De-
classified government documents made public in 1999, although still heavily censored,
revealed more fully the depth and range of covert operations by U.S. intelligence and
military personnel in a plot to “neutralize” Army Commander General René Schneider
in order to prevent Allende’s inauguration as president. Handwritten notes, taken by
CIA Director Richard Helms, recorded the orders of President Richard Nixon to foster
a coup in Chile (September 15, 1970). The declassified documents confirm the Nixon
administration and Secretary of State Henry Kissinger’s instructions to CIA personnel
to promote a coup in Chile: “It is firm and continuing policy that Allende be over-
thrown by a coup” (October 16, 1970). After Allende took office, U.S. policies, both
covert and overt, contributed significantly to the government’s economic woes and to
the political polarization that eventually culminated with the military coup on Sep-
258 CHILE

La Moneda palace, rocketed by Air Force planes, September 11, 1973.

(Courtesy of LOM Publishers.)

tember 11, 1973. U.S. military and intelligence personnel maintained contacts in the
Chilean armed forces and with their intelligence “assets” and employees in Chile.
Speculation that U.S. military and civilian personnel assisted in planning, coordinat-
ing, and even effecting the 1973 coup never entirely ended. Whether or not further de-
classification of U.S. government documents or personal testimonies will eventually
clarify the full extent of U.S. involvement in the overthrow of the Unidad Popular gov-
ernment, U.S. operations were one key factor of many in the tragic outcome of Chilean
politics from 1970 to 1973.
Nevertheless, from the first moments after the coup, many Marxists insisted that the
“real” key to the failure of the UP administration was the activities of the ultra-leftists.”
Typical in this respect, an article in World Marxist Review (July 1974) noted that “the
working class was gradually forced into isolation and the intermediate strata became,
objectively, allies of the country’s enemies. . . . The Chilean experience has reaf-
firmed anew that ultra-leftism is a boon for imperialism and reaction.” In the year after
the military coup, leaders of the Chilean Communist party who escaped the military
intelligence’s dragnet, still claimed that “at times of crisis we worked in alliance with
the patriotic part of the Army faithful to the constitution and this played a decisive role
in suppressing the October 1972 conspiracy [the truckers’ strike]. This alliance could
have developed were it not for the spread of ultraleftism.”
CHRISTIANS AND MARXISTS 259

In contrast, Trotskyists and other militant revolutionaries have seen in the Chilean
experience new evidence that there can be no peaceful road to socialism. They argue
that Allende should have armed and unleashed the workers and peasants in a violent
revolutionary movement to destroy Chile’s liberal democracy and the capitalist state.
How the military would have reacted to such a move by President Allende in 1970 or
1971—and the inevitable massacre that would have occurred—is usually omitted from
these “revolutionary” postmortems.
For the Right and the Christian Democrats, of course, there was little interest in ex-
plaining why Allende failed to take Chile down the peaceful road to socialism. Like the
Marxists and other UP supporters, however, they found soon enough that the military
coup that ousted President Allende brought neither relief from economic crisis nor
restoration of constitutional order. Instead, the Chilean military imposed a highly au-
thoritarian, repressive political regime that effectively eliminated every basis of civil
liberty and political freedom stipulated in the Chilean constitution of 1925.
The ultimate tragedy of unidad popular, then, was that President Allende lost the op-
portunity to carry out important social reforms while maintaining the political liberty
that had evolved in Chile after 1932. United States diplomacy, economic pressure, and
covert subversion of Chile’s domestic politics played an important role in the failure of
the UP coalition. However, American or other outside pressures could not by them-
selves have ensured this failure. Short of military intervention, the United States did
not have enough leverage, even with the variety of economic and political screws it
tightened, to guarantee Allende’s failure. Whereas the Agency for International Devel-
opment (AID), the Export-Import Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, and
the World Bank rejected Chile’s requests for credit during 1971 and 1972, short-term
credits from Western Europe, the Soviet Union, and the Socialist bloc more than made
up for the withdrawal of financial support by the United States. A large foreign ex-
change surplus inherited from the Frei government even allowed temporary increases
in imports to buttress the government’s short-term emphasis on improved consump-
tion for the working classes. This was so despite declines in copper prices that por-
tended extreme balance-of-payment problems in 1971. By the end of 1971 the govern-
ment’s principal economic strategist, Pedro Vuskovic, alleged that lack of foreign
exchange constituted the main constraint on further realization of the UP program.
This constraint originated not in a net decrease in available foreign credits, but rather
in circumstances occasioned largely by the government’s own economic policies.
Whatever the full extent of United States complicity in the tragedy of September
1973, and whatever the impact of international economics, the most critical factor of all
in the failure of the Allende administration was bad politics and unrealistic economic
policies. Lacking internal cohesion, the support of the majority of the electorate, con-
trol of Congress, and the sympathy of most bureaucrats, judges, police, and military of-
ficers and confronted by a hostile administration in the United States, the Popular
Unity government embarked on revolutionary socioeconomic and political initiatives.
Bad politics—the spouting of revolutionary rhetoric without the force to impose a rev-
olutionary program—produced a politico-economic crisis. Bad politics prevented con-
ciliation and compromise with the Christian Democrats, the small shopkeepers, the
truckers, the beneficiaries of the Frei agrarian reform—in short, with all the elements of
the middle strata, working class, and peasantry who had nothing to lose and much to
gain by an attack on economic monopolies and foreign corporations. President Allende
failed because he lacked the power to impose a revolutionary socialist regime yet
insisted on employing the rhetoric of revolution. He also failed because, unlike a tran-
sition to social democracy, there is no peaceful road to the socialism envisaged by
260 CHILE

Burning “subversive” books, Santiago, September 1973. (Courtesy of LOM Publishers.)

Marxist-Leninists; Lenin’s political vision, as he proclaimed, was always antagonistic

to constitutional democracy. By aggressively pursuing an illusion dreaded and resisted
since the 1930s by Chilean anti-Marxists and by threatening the basic values, beliefs,
and interests of broad sectors of the population, President Allende’s Unidad Popular
coalition set the stage for a military government and counterrevolution.
For the opponents of the Popular Unity government, September 11, 1973, was a day
of liberation; for most its supporters it was a day of grief and fear. For others it was a
day that began an era of persecution, martyrdom, then disillusionment.
10 Dictatorship

Not even the shrillest political rhetoric of leftists and rightists between 1970 and 1973
prepared Chileans for the ferocity of the military coup of September 11, 1973. Accus-
tomed as they were to the gross hyperbole of propaganda from all political parties and
movements since the early 1930s, most Chileans did not really believe that a military
Putsch would occur; fewer still anticipated installation of a military-dominated gov-
ernment that would become the longest-lived administration in Chilean history.
Called upon by opposition groups in the Congress to restore the constitutional order
purportedly violated by the Popular Unity government, the military leadership instead
closed the legislature, curtailed activities by political parties, and outlawed the politi-
cal organizations that had supported the government of President Allende. Press cen-
sorship, suspension of civil liberties, and fierce repression of leading politicians, labor
leaders, academics, and other supposed Marxist sympathizers merged into a “holy
war” against what the military called the “Marxist cancer.”
Initial resistance to the coup in factories, workplaces, homes, and in the streets
proved hopeless against the overwhelming power and brutality of the military forces
which hunted down and attacked Allende supporters and other “subversives.” Ac-
counts of torture in the improvised detention centers that held thousands of Chileans
and hundreds of foreign “subversives” throughout the nation became so widespread
as to be routine.
The military junta directed its avenging wrath not only at political leaders but also
at symbols of the cultural and institutional foundations of Chilean democracy. When
Chilean Nobel prize-winning poet and Communist party activist Pablo Neruda died of
cancer—and grief—twelve days after the coup, his house was ransacked and the li-
brary vandalized. Though his funeral procession became a spontaneous protest against
the junta, the circumstances of his death also symbolized the junta’s determination to
eradicate all vestiges of the political left. Literature, sculpture, painting, and even pop-
ular songs now became targets of the junta’s violence. The murder of intellectual and
folksinger Victor Jara after detention and torture at the Estadio Chile—which, like the
Estadio Nacional and soccer stadiums in the provinces, was turned into a makeshift
prison, torture, and murder center—initiated an era in which listening to records or
tapes by “subversive” artists would be quiet acts of resistance.
General Augusto Pinochet justified the coup and the new government’s repressive
measures in part by alleging that the Allende coalition had a plot (plan zeta) to murder
military and civilian opposition leaders in order to impose communism definitively
upon Chile. Moreover, the general maintained:
The greatest possible enforcement and highest respect for Human Rights implies that
these must not be exercised by those individuals who spread doctrines or commit acts
which in fact seek to abolish them. This makes it necessary to apply restrictions as rig-
orous as the circumstances may require to those who defy the juridical norms in

261
262 CHILE

Funeral for Pablo Neruda, September 25, 1973. (Courtesy of LOM Publishers.)

force. . . . Our attitude must necessarily remain inflexible for the good of Chile and
its people.

In addition to justifying its violent extirpation of subversives, the Chilean junta pointed
to the international significance of its victory over communism. Reminding Chileans of
the glories of independence, General Pinochet declared that “Chile was one of the first
countries in the world to abolish slavery. Now our country has broken the chains of to-
talitarian Marxism, the great Twentieth-Century Slavery, before which so many bow
their heads without the courage to defeat it. We are thus once again pioneers in Hu-
manity’s fight for liberation.”
The military pioneers in “Humanity’s fight for liberation” did not limit their attacks
to supporters of the Allende government. Once the initial campaign of terror and as-
sassination gave way to gradual institutionalization of a military-police state, the
regime’s leaders made clear that they intended to write the final epitaph for Chilean
democracy and to transform the moral and intellectual foundations of Chilean life. Mil-
itary rectors replaced academic administrators in the universities; Chilean higher edu-
cation faced a thorough pogrom which practically wiped out departments and schools
in the social sciences, philosophy, education, and other disciplines touched by Marxist
or liberal influences. Social and ideological pluralism disappeared.
In a fashion reminiscent of the military’s heroes—Portales and Ibáñez—the junta de-
clared its contempt for “old style” democracy, for politics, and for politicians. Rekin-
dling the embers of the military movement of 1924 and Ibáñez’ theme of anti-politics
in the 1952 election, the junta replaced Ibáñez’ symbolic broom with torture and
death—and promised to end forever the immorality, corruption, and ineptitude of
DICTATORSHIP 263

civilian democratic politics which had allowed the assumption of the Popular Unity
government.
As the initial fury of September 11, 1973 subsided, the military junta turned to the
task of imposing a new social and political order upon Chile. In retrospect, it is possi-
ble to identify several overlapping stages in the evolution of the policies of the military
junta and its civilian supporters in their efforts to carry out a thorough “moderniza-
tion” and “cleansing” (depuración) of the Chilean polity. In the first stage, the govern-
ment implemented essentially ad hoc measures of political repression and economic re-
trenchment to establish political control and achieve economic stabilization.
The military junta based its legitimacy in the “natural right of rebellion against
tyrannical government,” that is, the alleged tyranny of Allende’s Popular Unity gov-
ernment. On this foundation, the junta initially ruled the country with military edicts
(bandos militares) for the “duration of the emergency.” On September 18, 1973, the junta
decreed a state of siege throughout the country; Decree Law No. 5 (September 22, 1973)
stipulated that the state of siege should be understood as if the country were “in a state
or time of war.” The prior publication of Decree Law 4 (September 18, 1973) had pro-
claimed a “state of emergency,” thereby conferring authority on Military Zone Com-
manders to issues bandos militares, essentially the equivalent of government under mar-
tial law. This decision subjected civilians to courts-martial, rather than ordinary courts,
and eliminated due process and the possibility that higher tribunals review the deci-
sions of the rapid military “trials.” For disobeying military orders, the penalty could be
summary execution. Military and police personnel killed many prisoners “attempting
to escape.” Some were buried in mass graves, unidentified and unseen by next of kin.
Previous governments, including those of Eduardo Frei and Salvador Allende, had
declared “states of emergency” and used constitutional regimes of exception to con-
front strikes, disorders, and other “emergencies.” These political customs in Chile
made the military junta’s resort to emergency powers seem “natural”—even legally
plausible. Nonetheless, the 1925 constitution did not authorize the junta to close Con-
gress. Moreover, Decree 521 (1974), which officially created the new secret police
agency (DINA), had secret articles conveying draconian authority for clandestine op-
erations. In practice, the DINA had operated extra-officially from late 1973, directly re-
sponsible to the Junta de Gobierno as its instrument for “eradication” of leftist political
parties and movements. There followed widespread detentions, arrests without war-
rants, torture, and murders. Prisoners “disappeared”; government officials denied
knowledge of their whereabouts. In addition, the secret police and clandestine opera-
tions by other repressive agents of the government, such as the “Joint Command” (Co-
mando Conjunto), confiscated money, jewelry, automobiles, real estate, and other prop-
erty of their targets—an ironic feature of a government that proclaimed its commitment
to “saving the country from communism” and protecting private property rights.
To the surprise of many Chileans, the Supreme Court and other tribunals denied re-
quests for writs of habeas corpus (recursos de amparo) from the small number of lawyers
willing to defend these persons’ rights. According to a report in the last issue of Soli-
darity (N. 300, May 1990), the magazine published by the Vicaría de Solidaridad, the
first recurso de amparo was presented on September 14, 1973, by telephone. Christian
Democrat Bernardo Leighton sought to protect three cabinet ministers and other offi-
cials of the Allende government arrested by military authorities. (Two years later a
failed assassination attempt in Rome, Italy, against Leighton and his wife left both po-
litical exiles seriously injured). Three Supreme Court judges denied the request the
same day. In the years after the military coup, judges typically accepted at face value
the word of government officials that the “disappeared” were not in custody. Of some
264 CHILE

2500 recursos de amparo presented by the human rights organization Comité para la Paz,
from September 11, 1973, until October 1975, the courts approved one. The government
responded to the court by issuing a detention order against the person that the court
intended to rescue.
Opposing the military regime in Chile or in exile could have high costs. Lawyers,
employees, and collaborators of the Vicaría de Solidaridad, created on January 1, 1976,
by Cardenal Raúl Silva Henríquez as an institutional effort by the Catholic Church to
defend human rights in the country, risked imprisonment and exile: José Zalaquett was
exiled in April 1976; Hernán Montealegre was detained seventeen days at the Cuatro
Alamos interrogation center, then sent to Tres Alamos prison camp until the end of the
year; medical doctors Manuel Almeyda, Patricio Arroyo, and Pedro Castillo were ar-
rested in May 1981; and José Manuel Parada was assassinated in 1985 after receiving
information from an ex–Air Force soldier who detailed for the Vicaría the clandestine
criminal operations of the Comando Conjunto.
Fear, concerns for career and advancement in the court system, an initial disposition
to believe the denials of government ministers and military officials, and, in some cases,
an enthusiastic willingness to collaborate in the task of “extirpating the marxist cancer”
all contributed to the inefficacy of the judicial branch in protecting civil liberties and
rights. In retrospect, some critics compared the Chilean judiciary after 1973 to the Ger-
man judges who applied, with professional literalism and diligence, the Nuremberg
Laws and other juridical atrocities under Nazism. Others, more generous in their eval-
uation, pointed to a tradition of lethargy, conservatism, and hierarchy amongst Chilean
judges that made them, and the judicial system itself, ill-suited to resist the dictatorship.
In the several well-publicized instances when judges finally (in the 1980s) challenged
the military regime, demanding to know the whereabouts of the “disappeared” or seek-
ing to indict military and police personnel for crimes against citizens, the Supreme
Court disciplined the dissenting magistrates and cases were switched from civil to mil-
itary jurisdiction, thus assuring their dismissal by military judges ( fiscales militares).
To “disappear” became an active verb with a direct pronoun object: “They disap-
peared him (her); “lo desaparecieron.” Most of the “disappeared” never reappeared; their
murders by death squads and agents of the military junta, if not the whereabouts of
their remains, would be confirmed by a “Truth Commission” organized after termina-
tion of the military regime in 1990.
By 1975, a second stage began as the regime institutionalized the new security ap-
paratus and intensified repression against the leadership of the targeted leftist parties
and movements. When the limited success of the economic measures became evident,
the junta adopted a more drastic economic “shock treatment.” This second stage—con-
solidation of General Pinochet’s control through the secret police and security appara-
tus and adoption of the shock treatment—brought a radical application of orthodox
monetary and fiscal policy combined with a number of politically motivated cuts in
particular government agencies and public enterprises.
During these first two stages in the evolution of military policy, key leaders began
to enunciate a longer term program for political and economic transformation of Chile.
First, in a “Declaration of Principles of the Government of Chile” (1974), the junta pro-
claimed its intention to “take upon itself the historic mission of giving Chile new gov-
ernmental institutions that [would] embody the profound changes occurring in mod-
ern times.” In order to do this the government “guided by the inspiration of Portales,
. . . [would] energetically apply the principle of authority and drastically punish any
outburst of disorder or anarchy.” Anticipating later policies, the “Declaration of Princi-
ples” also emphasized the task of “reorganizing the economy, destroyed to its very
DICTATORSHIP 265

roots by Marxism,” and “imposing authority and discipline in production and labor
relations.”
Further elaborating on these themes in 1975, the government published National Ob-
jectives of the Chilean Government. Once again emphasizing the linkage of its political vi-
sion with Chile’s Portalian legacy and the country’s national heritage, the junta de-
clared that a new political system would require “formation of new generations
steeped in the concepts of love of God, the Fatherland and the family.” This declaration
hinted at the strong push for a new curriculum that the junta would later introduce into
the nation’s primary schools, emphasizing patriotism, morality, and anti-communism.
The new political system would also involve a strengthening of presidential authority
and a “rationalized, modern and functional public administration purified of all polit-
ical and party influence.” Without specifying further the precise character of this new
political system, the government made clear that it would be depoliticized, technocratic,
efficient, and free from Marxist influence.
A third phase in the development of the military junta’s political objectives began al-
most simultaneously with implementation of the “shock treatment.” No longer satis-
fied with emergency decrees, and seeking to create an apparent juridical legitimacy, the
junta introduced a series of “constitutional acts,” which amended or eliminated certain
parts of the Constitution of 1925—without fully replacing it. Lacking any legal basis,
these “constitutional acts” proved of little use in legitimizing the military dictatorship.
In a 1977 speech, General Pinochet announced the so-called “Chacarillas Plan”: his in-
tentions and a general itinerary for institutionalizing “authoritarian democracy” with
a new constitution and complementary legislation to transform permanently Chilean
government and society. Appointment of Sergio Fernández as the military govern-
ment’s first civilian Minister of Interior (1978), rescinding the state of siege (although a
state of emergency remained in effect), and announcement of the “seven moderniza-
tions” (1979) set the stage for a plebiscite on the new constitution in 1980.
Changing economic and political conditions within Chile from 1976 to 1980 led, in
1980, to a fourth stage of post-1973 institutional development: a national plebiscite on a
new constitution and its implementation in 1981. In the period after 1981, the govern-
ment sought to institutionalize the program of socio-economic and political transfor-
mation initiated with the coup in 1973. This included the so-called seven moderniza-
tions announced in 1979 (see below) and implementation of the new constitution. In this
stage General Pinochet sought to manage a resurgence of political opposition amidst an
economic recession (1981–84) and then to complete the presidential term which ended
in 1989 according to the 1980 constitution.
Though recognizable in retrospect as overlapping stages in the development of
post-1973 Chile, the contradictory tendencies within the military government, among
both military and civilian elites, as well as the concerted struggle of opponents against
the dictatorship, made the everyday history of this evolution far from inevitable. Fol-
lowing that process in some detail provides a framework for understanding the con-
flictive, polarized society that emerged in Chile in the late 1980s.

In 1973 no fundamental consensus existed within the military regarding the appropri-
ate duration of military rule or upon a comprehensive alternative political regime.
Civilian supporters of the military government also disagreed as to the type of politi-
cal system that ought to follow military rule. Some preferred a relatively quick restora-
tion of civilian government under a more restrictive liberal democracy which excluded
Marxist and leftist participation. Others favored replacing liberal democratic institu-
tions with a more corporatist system based on functional representation through occu-
266 CHILE

pational associations or gremios. (The term gremio in Chile was used broadly to refer to
professional and occupational associations as diverse as truckers, white-collar em-
ployees, and retail merchants. Gremios had constituted the main social base of opposi-
tion to the Popular Unity government.)
Despite lack of agreement on the type of political system with which to replace that
established under the Chilean constitution of 1925, a general consensus within the mil-
itary blamed “politics” and the “political class” for the crisis of 1970–73 and for the eco-
nomic disaster the country had experienced. According to this view, the defects of Chil-
ean democracy and the unpatriotic, self-interested maneuverings of politicians had
permitted the penetration of Marxism into Chilean national life. This threatened the na-
tion’s historical traditions as well as its national security and sovereignty. The junta
leadership and its supporters viewed the military coup as the beginning of a salva-
tional crusade to wrest la patria from the abyss.
A narrower, technocratic critique of Chilean development from the 1930s until 1973
emanated especially from a group of economists influenced by conservative academ-
ics in the United States. Many of these Chileans had received advanced professional ed-
ucation at the University of Chicago or studied in Chile under Chicago-influenced pro-
fessors as part of an exchange program with the Catholic University established in the
1950s. In Chile they were soon nicknamed “the Chicago Boys” or, more generically, the
neo-liberal economists. These economists focused upon the inefficient allocation of re-
sources that resulted from politicization of the economy, overregulation, excessive pro-
tectionism, and the burden of unprofitable public enterprises. Underlying these defects
was a political system that spawned irresponsible demands and demagogic promises.

In the short run, a melding of anti-political sentiment, anti-Marxism, and the techno-
cratic orientations of the junta’s policy advisers led to a combination of ferocious re-
pression of the opposition and, by 1975, to economic shock treatment.
In the period 1973 to 1975, the junta seemed to have the support of a majority of
Chileans in the effort to restore political order and reconstruct the economy. Profes-
sional organizations, the gremios, a number of women’s organizations sharing the ban-
ner of poder femenino, and the major non-Marxist political parties—in short, the social
base of the opposition to the Popular Unity government—viewed the military junta as
the only short-term solution to the political and economic crisis facing the nation. Even
most religious leaders initially supported the military intervention. The hierarchy of
the Catholic Church, at odds with the Popular Unity government over proposed edu-
cational reforms, called upon the Chilean population to cooperate with the new regime
in restoring order, even though the Permanent Committee of the Episcopal Conference
lamented the violence and bloodshed of the coup. In a 1975 study done by researcher
Brian Smith, almost all of the bishops of the Chilean Catholic Church indicated that
they believed the coup had been necessary.
Only slowly and with painful moderation did the majority of Chilean social and po-
litical groups begin to challenge even the most extreme measures of the military gov-
ernment. MIR, which had predicted a coup all along and criticized the naiveté of a
“peaceful road to socialism,” declared that socialism had not been defeated, but rather
that a “reformist illusion” had come to an end. The military security apparatus made
MIR activists a special target; penetration of the organization by military security, tor-
ture of captured Miristas, and murder of many militants significantly weakened the
MIR organization by 1976. Likewise, the government targeted the Communist party
leadership as well as party-affiliated labor union, student, and community organiza-
tions. Systematic persecution resulted in the deaths of many Communist party mem-
bers and the capture of almost the entire internal leadership in 1976. By then, however,
DICTATORSHIP 267

the party had created a clandestine apparatus within Chile. It had also created a paral-
lel party organization in Europe, with the Central Committee leadership operating in
the Soviet Union. Thus, the Communists, albeit with difficulty, maintained contacts
with worker, peasant, student, and community organizations.
Divided even before the military coup, the Chilean Socialist party fragmented fur-
ther after 1973. Debates over the cause of the coup and proper goals for the party under
the dictatorship left two major factions—one supporting an alliance with the Commu-
nists and another favoring a more moderate role in alliance with non-Marxist Leninist
democratic parties. In many ways, in the initial periods after the coup, the Socialist
party suffered the most serious disintegration and divisions of all Chilean political
movements.
In contrast to the leftist parties and movements, a majority of Christian Democrats
initially approved of the military ouster of President Allende. While expressing their
regret for the departure from Chile’s constitutional traditions, party leaders neverthe-
less laid blame for the coup on “the economic disaster, institutional chaos, armed vio-
lence and the profound moral crisis to which the deposed government led the nation.”
Christian Democratic leaders called upon their supporters to “contribute to the new
government their technical, professional, or functional cooperation.” The Christian
Democrats expected a brief military interlude and then elections which would allow
ex-President Frei to assume again the executive office.
In its 1974 “Declaration of Principles,” however, the military leaders affirmed that
“it is imperative to change the mentality of Chileans. . . . The Government does not
intend to be a mere caretaker. . . . The Government of the Armed Forces aspires to ini-
tiate a new era in the national destiny.” This declaration and subsequent actions taken
against Christian Democratic leaders and party members destroyed the illusions of
Christian Democrats who had supported the coup. It also vindicated the judgment of
a minority of Christian Democrats who denounced the coup from the first instance.
Christian Democratic leaders finally understood that it would be impossible to imple-
ment their own programs through the junta, or to convince the military leaders to step
aside. Gradually, the full scope of the military repression and the realization that
democracy would not be restored pushed most of the Christian Democrats into active
opposition to the military government. In turn, General Pinochet felt entrenched
enough to dispense with the façade of a legal political party opposition. By 1977 the
military would no longer tolerate Christian Democratic or other organized opposition
and decreed the “dissolution” of all political parties.
Meanwhile, some groups and individuals within the Catholic Church also opposed
and confronted military repression. In October 1973 the Committee of Cooperation for
Peace (COPACHI) began to provide legal services, food, medical assistance, and sanc-
tuary to victims of the persecution unleashed by the military and the new security ap-
paratus, Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia (DINA). Gradually a national network of safe-
houses and underground resistance emerged, oftentimes using Church buildings or
the homes of courageous Chileans willing to risk their lives to save others from death
or torture. With the Church and Chilean Catholics sorely divided, however, some reli-
gious leaders withdrew from COPACHI after evidence surfaced of its linkages to clan-
destine activities. Under pressure from conservative Catholics and from General
Pinochet, Cardinal Silva agreed to the dissolution of COPACHI in 1975.
Almost immediately Cardinal Silva Henríquez established the Vicariate of Solidar-
ity, which from 1976 onwards became the single most important source of moral op-
position to the dictatorship. At the same time, it provided a partial umbrella of protec-
tion for numerous community organizations, research institutes, and human-rights
defense groups. In particular, small groups of women, partially sheltered against the
268 CHILE

regime’s wrath by the moral umbrella of the Church and partially protected by their
status as “women, mothers, and wives,” became visible leaders in the struggle against
human rights abuses. In practice, neither the moral umbrella of the Church nor the sup-
posedly elevated role of mothers and wives in a society which the military and their
civilian allies claimed was based on the privileged place of the family, entirely pro-
tected human rights activists and other women viewed as subversives from hideous
psychological torture, rape, and worse in the regime’s detention centers. Nevertheless,
the permeable umbrella of the Church permitted some protection against the systematic
campaign of political repression. The Vicariate also extended material support to the
urban and rural poor, provided technical assistance to small farmers, published maga-
zines for popular education, maintained records on political detainees and “disap-
peared” persons (people killed or detained and unaccounted for by the government),
and offered legal services to families of the detained and disappeared.
Consolidation of the military junta’s political power occurred simultaneously with
the gradual evolution of a program of economic stabilization and deregulation. In the
first eighteen months, economic policy, like the government’s political initiatives, had
an “emergency” character. Bringing a halt to hyperinflation along with deregulating
the economy and reducing the entrepreneurial role of the state (thereby reducing the
large losses in public enterprises) received primary attention. To achieve these objec-
tives the government devalued the Chilean currency, removed price controls from al-
most all commodities (October 1973), postponed scheduled wage increases (and then
adjusted wages in relation to a doctored consumer price index), freed interest rates for
capital market transactions, and modified taxes. To encourage investment the govern-
ment eliminated capital gains taxes and reduced taxes on corporate profits. A new
value-added tax of 20 percent was introduced to raise revenue. In addition, the gov-
ernment returned to private ownership more than two hundred firms incorporated
into the public sector under the Popular Unity government. The junta also took initial
steps to liberalize trade and capital flows by reducing tariff barriers and passing a new
foreign investment law (Decree Law 600, 1974) that gave foreign investors equal treat-
ment with domestic investors. Reduced tariff barriers were supposed to make im-
ported goods less expensive for the Chilean consumer and also to encourage efficiency
and modernization of Chilean industry. Perhaps most importantly, the junta drastically
reduced government expenditures and employment in the public sector.
Unfavorable international economic trends, including increasing prices for im-
ported oil, sharply falling prices for Chilean exports, especially copper, and rising in-
terest rates limited the success of the junta’s economic policies. The unfavorable inter-
national trends, combined with the government’s focus on reducing public sector
expenditures, led to dramatic increases in unemployment, which exceeded 14 percent
of the labor force by official estimates in 1975. Real wages declined sharply as did
labor’s share of gross domestic income. Inflation, though reduced, continued at levels
over 300 percent per year in 1975. While still blaming the difficult economic situation
on the legacy of the Popular Unity government, the military leadership and a group of
civilian advisers decided to shift from its “gradualist” approach to the earlier men-
tioned economic “shock treatment.”
In previewing the shock program, Minister of Economy Sergio de Castro declared
that the misery and suffering experienced by Chileans in the period 1974–75 “[was] the
result of the years of demagogy and erroneous economic policies, the consequence of
an exaggerated statism, the result of exaggerated protectionism that guaranteed mo-
nopoly profits . . . the result of policies made to benefit special interest groups to the
detriment of the majority of the population.” The shock treatment was intended to
DICTATORSHIP 269

eliminate inflation and institutional barriers to economic growth quickly and dramati-
cally through intensification of the stabilization program already in place and the ad-
dition of new more radical policies. Minister of Finance Jorge Cauas, in announcing the
shock program in April 1975, told the nation:
The President of the Republic and the Honorable Government Junta have asked me
to design and carry out an economic program with the fundamental purpose of erad-
icating the inflation that has affected our country for more than seventy years and
which recently has become extreme as a result of the demagogical economic policy
carried out by the former government.
. . . The main objective of this program is, as we have already stated, to put a
brake on inflation by the end of this year. For this reason, certain basic measures have
been approved. Although these measures imply continued sacrifice on the part of the
community in the coming months, the compensations will be economic stability
which will permit adequate economic development. This will mean that in the not too
distant future poverty will be stamped out and all Chileans will be able to benefit from
the advantages of the modern world.
. . . The way to recovery, although it is short and well known, is fraught with sac-
rifices and denials.
What followed included reductions of between 15 to 25 percent in government ex-
penditures and large decreases in the size and role of the public sector; a temporary 10
percent increase in income taxes; a series of tax revisions to increase government in-
come; and tightened monetary policy. Approximately 80,000 government employees
lost their jobs and unemployment grew throughout the economy, while industrial out-
put dropped 25 percent in 1975. However, inflation declined precipitously (from over
300 percent per year in 1974 to 84 percent in 1977) and the government deficit practi-
cally disappeared by the end of 1975.
In many respects these government policies achieved their short-term objectives.
Declines in the rate of inflation, improvement in government revenue collection, and
elimination of large government deficits all encouraged government policymakers.
Hyperinflation disappeared, but inflationary expectations lingered. In 1976 the gov-
ernment resorted to revaluation of the Chilean peso by 10 percent, with subsequent
pre-announced exchange-rate adjustments to convince the Chilean people that infla-
tion was truly under control. Though very impressive improvement did occur, infla-
tion remained above 30 percent per year.
Numerous technical critiques of the shock treatment emerged among opponents of
the military government as well as among some supporters who disagreed both with
the severity of the economic measures and with the impact these policies had on key
sectors of the economy. The most evident and widespread impacts involved massive
unemployment, reaching approximately 20 percent of the labor force, and a steep de-
cline in gross domestic product—down officially by 13 percent in a single year. Grim,
desperate impoverishment afflicted millions of Chileans.
The recession and unemployment also began to induce a restructuring of the labor
force. More and more poor Chileans performed occasional services (“guarding” cars,
wiping windshields, shining shoes, working as domestic servants) and/or became
itinerant vendors (ambulantes) of combs, gum, candy, pens, foodstuffs, or other low
value commodities. Increasing participation in small-scale commerce and services cre-
ated a more isolated, disorganized labor force, while contributing to feelings of social
dislocation and to a preoccupation with survival on a daily basis. Reinforced by the po-
litical repression, secret police raids on homes and poblaciones, and the intensity of gov-
270 CHILE

ernment efforts to eradicate community, student, and labor organizations, these condi-
tions cast a pall of despair over the urban shantytowns and small provincial towns.
Restitution of farmland to former owners and dismantling of the agrarian reform co-
operatives (see Chapter 1) pleased many recipients of the new farm properties, but also
left 35,000 to 40,000 landless workers who failed to qualify for the military program of
land parcelization. Scattered makeshift settlements or villorrios in the rural areas
cropped up around the country, and rural-urban migration accelerated without pro-
viding either jobs or solace to the migrants.
As a result of the desperate economic situation, the growth of the informal and ser-
vice sectors, and the loss of jobs in certain parts of the industrial sector of the economy,
labor force participation by women—and particularly poor women—greatly in-
creased. The recession made working outside the home a necessity for survival. This
trend, which would continue after economic recovery later in the decade, contributed
to a further breakdown in traditional family patterns, both by inducing an increased
“independence” of many women and by eroding the self-esteem of men unable to per-
form their expected role of “protectors and providers” in the nuclear family. Thus,
while the military government proclaimed its intentions to reaffirm and support the
traditional patriarchal family as the basic unit of Chilean society, government policies
and the economic crisis confronted many Chilean women and the families they sus-
tained with quite another reality.
In efforts to palliate the urgent situation of hundreds of thousands of Chilean fami-
lies, the military government introduced a program of make-work public works proj-
ects and miscellaneous jobs called the Programa de Empleo Mínimo (PEM). Initiated in
March 1975 with some 19,000 participants, it had grown to over 150,000 by late 1976
(over 5 percent of the economically active labor force). These workers received small
“salaries” and, in about 30 percent of the cases, food rations (funded by the U.S. AID
program and Catholic Relief—Caritas) for janitorial, service, maintenance, reforesta-
tion, and construction jobs. They were not counted among the officially unemployed.
For hundreds of thousands more Chileans the recession induced by the shock treat-
ment allowed not even the meager buffer of PEM.
Economic stabilization, reducing the role of the public sector, deregulation, and
“opening” of the economy merged gradually into a coherent neo-liberal program for
restructuring the Chilean economy. Policies utilized to achieve these ends included
monetary restraints, budget reductions, and privatizing public assets (selling most of
the 492 firms owned by CORFO and almost all the previously nationalized banks as
well as much publicly held agricultural land). Inasmuch as the divestiture program oc-
curred in a depressed economic environment, a select group of national and foreign
firms acquired these enterprises at very favorable prices. The process also led to con-
centration of financial and productive assets in the hands of a small number of new di-
versified financial groups such as Grupo Vial, Grupo Cruzat-Larraín, Grupo Yarur,
Grupo Matte, Grupo Puig, and Grupo Edwards.
Implementation of the economic program and consolidation of the regime’s political
control brought efforts to legitimize the junta’s authority with something beyond the
original emergency decrees. By 1975 the junta and its civilian collaborators were actively
planning a “new institutional order” to replace the outmoded institutions of Chilean
democracy. Four “constitutional acts” adopted between December 1975 and September
11, 1976, moved Chile in the direction of a constitutional military dictatorship.
The apparent contradiction of this three-word characterization will not surprise
readers familiar with Alice in Wonderland or George Orwell’s 1984. Only by reading
these constitutional acts can one appreciate fully the unintentional irony promulgated
DICTATORSHIP 271

into law by Chile’s military dictators. To illustrate, Constitutional Act Number 3 (Sep-
tember 4, 1976) stipulated, among other intriguing provisions:

Article 1. Men are born free and equal in dignity. This constitutional act guarantees all
individuals:
11. Liberty of conscience, and expression of all creeds and free exercise of all reli-
gions, as do not violate moral principles, good behavior or public order . . .
12. Freedom of opinion and information, in all ways and by all means, without
prior censorship, notwithstanding responsibility under the law for offense or abuse as
may be committed in use of these freedoms. However, the courts may prohibit publi-
cation or circulation of opinions or information affecting moral principles, public
order, national security or the private life of individuals.
. . . Individuals who may have been at any time convicted or found guilty of
threatening the institutional order of the Republic may not own, direct, or manage
mass communications media, nor may they in any way participate in functions con-
nected with the publication or broadcast of opinions or information.
Article 2. No individual may invoke any constitutional or legal precept whatsoever
to violate the rights or freedoms established hereunder, or to threaten the integrity or
operation of the state of law or the established regime.
Any act of individuals or groups directed to disseminate doctrines which threaten
the family, or which promote violence or the concept of a society based on class strug-
gle, or as may be otherwise contrary to the established regime or the integrity or op-
eration of the state of law, is illicit and in violation of the institutional organization of
the Republic.

If these sections read like a tongue-in-cheek Orwellian invention, Constitutional Act

Number 4 (promulgated at the same time as the act above) seems to go further than
even Orwell. To combat “latent subversion,” this act authorized the president of the re-
public to declare “a state of defense against subversion.” Under such conditions, the
president “may only restrict personal freedom, freedom of information, and the right
of assembly.” If the president declared a state of “internal or external war” or a “state
of internal commotion,” his authority was still greater, including the power to deprive
Chileans of their citizenship and “to suspend or restrict all of the rights or guarantees
set forth in Constitutional Act Number 3. . . .”
By the end of 1976 the Chileans were living in a juridical Wonderland; but the en-
forcement mechanisms of the military junta could hardly be characterized as a house
of cards. And no Chilean could merely wake up to escape the nightmare. Moreover, the
reach of state terrorism extended to Europe and the United States as the Chilean gov-
ernment joined other military regimes in Argentina, Uruguay, and Paraguay in “Oper-
ation Condor.” As revealed in declassified U.S. government documents, this “South
American joint intelligence operation” was designed “to eliminate Marxist terrorist ac-
tivities” with ‘special teams which travel anywhere in the world’ . . . to carry out
sanctions up to assassination against terrorists or supporters of terrorist organiza-
tions.” The Chilean military junta defined “terrorists or supporters of terrorist organi-
zations” rather broadly; assassins killed ex–Army Commander General Carlos Prats
and his wife in Buenos Aires (1974), attacked Christian Democratic leader Bernardo
Leighton and his wife in Rome (1975), and murdered ex–Unidad Popular cabinet min-
ister Orlando Letelier in Washington, D.C. (1976). Agents of Operation Condor hunted
down, interrogated, tortured, and murdered leftists and other regime opponents
throughout Latin America and elsewhere—sometimes with specialized collaboration
272 CHILE

from U.S. police and intelligence agencies, including surveillance and interrogation of
subjects within the United States.
The “constitutional acts” remained emergency measures rather than a legitimate
foundation of a new political order. With growing Church denunciations of the activi-
ties of DINA and the new focus of U.S. foreign policy under President Carter on human
rights, supporters of the military government engaged in internal discussions con-
cerning the desirability and need to establish a more permanent alternative political
system. Within the military government, and among its civilian supporters, disagree-
ment existed over the precise features of a new institutional order. Nevertheless, con-
solidation of the regime, weakness of the opposition (including abolition of all political
parties in March 1977), and pressure for moderation of the repressive policies from the
United States as well as some European nations, made expedient a vague commitment
to a transition to a new constitutional order. Meanwhile the political architecture of
the authoritarian regime left a complex structure of military edicts (bandos), decree
laws, decrees, and “secret laws” that constituted an impressive, if surrealistic, juridical
tyranny from 1973 to 1981. After implementing a new constitution in 1981, the military
government defined its legislation as laws, rather than as decree laws, and began num-
bering the laws from the numeration existant in 1973. Table 10–1 summarizes the major
“legal” foundations of the military regime from 1973 until 1985.
From 1973 onward, government-sponsored constitutional study groups and official
agencies had debated a new institutional order, but General Pinochet had made no
specific commitment to adopt a new constitution nor to a timetable for military with-
drawal from a tutelary role in national politics. In July 1977, General Pinochet an-
nounced the “Chacarillas Plan,” promising movement toward a new system of “pro-
tected democracy.” Apparently acting without full consultation with other junta
members, General Pinochet provided in the Chacarilla Plan a framework for gradual
transition from military rule to a new political system. During a lengthy transition pe-
riod basic legislative reforms in the areas of labor, social welfare, education, and pub-
lic administration would provide the foundations for the new political order, while the
military and selected civilian leaders would share responsibility for policymaking. Ul-
timately, the new system would use a restrictive and indirect system of electing a new
president, and reserve to the armed forces the mission of protecting, guaranteeing, and
supervising national security and modernization.
Shortly after announcing the Chacarillas Plan, General Pinochet abolished the
DINA. This action served as a symbolic indication that the “emergency” situation of
1973–76 had ended and that the regime was moving toward institutionalization of a
new political system. In addition, abolition of the DINA served to mollify critics in the
United States and Europe, where this agency had carried out assassinations and attacks
on prominent Chileans. In its place, however, Pinochet created the National Informa-
tion Center (CNI), an agency with the same general purpose and practices—but now
with formal, rather than secret, authority and jurisdiction.
The outlawing of the political parties, unilateral announcement of the Chacarilla
Plan, and reorganization and institutionalization of the secret police all evidenced
General Pinochet’s emerging predominance within the junta. By combining political
adeptness and skillful manipulation of internal incentives within the armed forces, he
gradually achieved control over the junta, the security apparatus, and the main ad-
ministrative centers of power. With the national budget as an instrument for policy ini-
tiatives, and for rewarding supporters, especially the armed forces which had long felt
neglected and unappreciated by civilian politicians, General Pinochet astutely modi-
fied spending priorities and the perquisites of armed service personnel.
DICTATORSHIP 273

table 10–1. “legal” foundations of military rule, 1973–87

DL 3 September 11, 1973 State of siege, defined initially as “state of internal war”
DL 4 State of emergency in provinces and regions
DL 5 Interpretative decree regarding Code of Military Justice,
affirming the existence of a “state of war”
DL 8 Delegation to military authorities of power to rule
through military edicts (bandos militares) and to exercise
judicial authority over civilians (jurisdicción militar)*
DL 81 Authority to expel (banish) persons from country during
the state of siege (which lasted until 1978 and was
reimposed several times thereafter)
DL 521 June 14, 1974 Official creation of the DINA (secret police, accountable
to General Pinochet, which already functioned extraof-
ficially in late 1973). This decree has “secret” provisions
detailing the secret police’s “authority”
DL 527 June 17, 1974 Charter of the military junta (Estatuto de la Junta de
Gobierno)
DL 604 August 10, 1974 Prohibits entry into country of persons who spread or
support doctrines that threaten national security or
who are known to be “agitators of activists”
DL 640 September 2, 1974 Regulations defining the various “regimes of exception”
DL 788 December 4, 1974 Provides that the “decree laws” of the military junta have
the effect of amending the 1925 constitution
DL 922 March 11, 1975 State of Siege Decree
DL 1.008 and 1.009 May 8, 1975 Increases period during which detainees may be held
“incomunicado” in cases involving crimes against the
security of the state (arrestees cannot see lawyers or
obtain habeas corpus writs)
DS 890 (M. Interior) August 26, 1975 Modifies the Law of State Security; greatly restricts civil
rights and liberties (garantías constitucionales) and due
process.
DL 1.281 December 11, 1975 Authorizes Military Zone Commanders to censure or
suspend publication of up to six editions of magazines,
newspapers, and other media
Constitutional Acts
DL 1.319 January 9, 1976
DL 1.551 September 11, 1976 “Essential Foundations of Chileanism”
DL 1.552 September 11, 1976 “Constitutional Rights and Duties”
DL 1.553 September 11, 1976 “On Regimes of Exception”
DL 1.877 1977 Modifies Law 12.927 (Internal Security Law), increased
authority of the president during states of emergency
DL 1.878 August 13, 1977 Creates CNI (new secret police to replace DINA) and de-
tails its authority
April 19, 1978 State of siege ends; country remains in “state of emer-
gency”
DL 3.168 February 6, 1980 Authorizes internal exile (relegación) for persons who
alter or seek to alter public order, for up to three
months (Modification of DL 81 and DL 1.877, Internal
Security of the State)
Plebiscite for new September 11, 1980 Occurs under “state of emergency” Constitution adds a
Constitución new regime of exception, “state of perturbation of in-
ternal peace,” with special powers for president when
such a circumstance occurs
(continued)
274 CHILE

table 10–1. “legal” foundations of military rule, 1973–87 (continued)

Article 24 (“transitory article”) provides that until full im-
plementation of constitution (in practice, this would be
after 1989), president has virtually unlimited authority
to assure internal security by suspending civil liberties
and rights; declaring appropriate regime of exception,
etc.
DL 3.451 1980 Extends to 25 days the period during which detainees
may be held in centers “other than jails” when certain
crimes against internal security are being investigated
DL 3.645 1981 Clarifies the application of transitory Article 24, regard-
ing expulsion of citizens and foreigners; also regulates
labor unions
1981–84 Country under state of emergency (Transitory Article 24)
Ley 18.015 July 27, 1981 Details infractions covered by Transitory Article 24; mod-
ified by Law 18.150, July 30, 1982
1984 (November) Country declared under state of siege (7 months) and
also state of emergency
Ley 18.313 1984 Law on “Abuses of the Media” (Sobre abusos de la Publici-
dad) amended; further restrictions on media
Ley 18.314 May 14, 1984 New “Antiterrorism Law” greatly broadens the defini-
tion of “terrorism” and increases penalties
Ley 18.415 June 15, 1985 New Law on “States of Exception”
DS 324 June 15, 1985 New Law on press censorship and rules governing the
mass media
June 1985 Country declared in state of siege
Ley 18.667 November 27, 1987 Modifications to the Military Code allow maintaing se-
cret documents that might affect the security of the
state

*The junta ruled initially with an uncoordinated raft of military edicts (bandos) whose legal status was, at the
least, questionable. See Manuel Antonio Garretón, Roberto Garretón, and Carmen Garretón, Por la fuerza sin la
razón, Análisis y textos de los bandos de la dictadura militar, Santiago: LOM Publisher, 1999.

In the first two years of the military junta, with public expenditures declining by
some 40 percent, military expenditures increased by over 30 percent. Officers achieved
great economic gains and privileges, while the national police (carabineros) gained in
status and benefits with their transfer from the ministry of interior and “elevation” to
co-equal participants in the junta with the other armed forces. International disputes
and the potential for armed conflict with Bolivia and Peru in the mid-1970s and, later,
with Argentina, focused national concern on re-equipping and modernizing the armed
forces while providing narrow professional national defense missions for the military
commanders. The government also encouraged development of a more diversified
Chilean arms industry to protect the country against the vagaries of international sup-
plies. In this context, the intelligence branches and Investigaciones assumed a more im-
portant role in domestic politics and came to serve as a key source of power and con-
trol for General Pinochet. The dictatorship became less a government of the armed
forces and more a regime of military leaders and civilian technocrats, led by General
Pinochet, supported by the armed forces. In this arrangement the security apparatus
gained autonomy and became a key element in assuring political control.
Over time, however, disagreements within the military institutions over govern-
DICTATORSHIP 275

ment policy and professional issues came to the surface. In 1973 the coup leaders had
purged high ranking officers who appeared most likely to resist the coup and a num-
ber of others were killed, imprisoned, tortured, and retired. Enlisted personnel who re-
fused to participate in the coup also suffered execution, incarceration, or other punish-
ment. Later, General Prats, ex-commander-in-chief and a potential challenger to
Pinochet’s control, was assassinated in Buenos Aires.
Consolidation of General Pinochet’s hegemony through the operations of DINA
and, later, the CNI alienated certain sectors within the armed forces, but modifications
of the career and promotion system in the army made officers increasingly reliant upon
the patronage and good graces of Pinochet himself. Nevertheless, some officers resis-
ted the neo-liberal economic program, favoring a more nationalist and populist alter-
native to resolve the country’s crisis. Disproportionately large increases in expendi-
tures for internal security and the army distressed some navy and air force officers.
Before 1976–77, however, this distress did not translate into open challenges to General
Pinochet or the military junta.
Announcement of the Chacarillas Plan opened the door to debate concerning the
character of the regime, timing of movement to an alternative political model, and the
role of political parties, labor, and other organizations in the new political system. This
debate eventually involved high ranking military officers and even members of the
junta. Conflicts with Air Force General Gustavo Leigh over the pace of political “nor-
malization” and the process of junta decision-making resulted in the latter’s removal
from the junta and, in 1978, a number of forced retirements within the air force.
Meanwhile Chilean exiles around the world continued to wonder if they could ever
return to their homeland, or if Chile would ever again be free of military rectors in the
universities, military censors over the media, military masters over a civilian popula-
tion. In the face of a United Nations charge of human rights violations in Chile, Gen-
eral Pinochet called a national referendum in the first week of 1978, in which Chilean
citizens were asked to vote “no” or “yes” on the following resolution:

In the face of the international aggression unleashed against the government of the fa-
therland, I support [General] Pinochet in his defense of the dignity of Chile, and I reaf-
firm the legitimate right of the republic to conduct the process of institutionalization
in a manner befitting its sovereignty.

With the opposition repressed and the mass media muffled, the government claimed
that more than 75 percent of the electorate had expressed support for Pinochet. Based
on this overwhelming “mandate,” General Pinochet announced that there would be no
further elections for a decade, and he told Chile’s politicians, “It’s finished for you.”
In response to the consolidation of the regime’s position as well as to apparent sup-
port reflected in the January 1978 plebiscite, General Pinochet lifted the “state of siege”
in March and replaced it with the somewhat less restrictive “state of emergency.”
Under the “state of emergency,” the military tribunals were theoretically subject to re-
view by the Supreme Court, and civil liberties were partially restored. The following
month Pinochet announced a general amnesty in the name of political reconciliation.
The April 19, 1978, amnesty decree (Decree Law 2.191) responded to international and
bilateral pressures: investigations in the United States regarding the assassination by
DINA agents of Orlando Letelier, ex–cabinet minister in the Allende government and
leader-in-exile of the opposition to the military dictatorship; threats of a boycott of
Chilean products by port workers and organized labor in the United States and Europe;
the announced on-site visit of a United Nations commission investigating human
rights violations in Chile; and growing concern about the possibility of war with Ar-
276 CHILE

gentina over unresolved border disputes. The amnesty decree also emerged from the
immediate political conjuncture in Chile: the recent referendum (consulta nacional) that
overwhelmingly supported Pinochet’s rule; the incessant denunciations of human
rights violations by spokespersons of the Catholic Church; inquietude in the armed
forces regarding the possible loss of impunity for the repressive measures taken after
September 11, 1973, if political conditions changed; and the appointment of the first
civilian Minister of Interior since 1973, with the self-proclaimed mission of consolidat-
ing a new institutional order.
The new Minister of Interior, Sergio Fernández, declared that the amnesty should be
understood as a measure to promote “social peace” and “reconciliation.” It covered
“political crimes” (and others as well, due to careless drafting) between September 11,
1973 and March 10, 1978, but specifically excluded persons involved in the Letelier
case. Article 1 of the decree extended amnesty to all persons (authors, accomplices, or
those who concealed crimes [encubridores] who had engaged in criminal activity dur-
ing the state of siege in effect from September 11, 1973, to March 10, 1978, unless cur-
rently charged or sentenced. Article 2 amnestied those persons who at the time the de-
cree law took effect had been sentenced by military tribunals since September 11, 1973
(thus those charged but not “sentenced” were excluded; likewise those in prison or
clandestine detention centers without charges against them). Article 3 excluded from
the amnesty many “common crimes,” such as parracide, infanticide, armed robbery,
drug trafficking, corruption of minors, rape, and others. Imperfections in composing
the list of exclusions produced some amusing categories of amnestied felons, whose
amnesty the government left intact rather than “undo” it once conceded. As a result of
promulgating the amnesty, according to the semi-official historian of the military gov-
ernment Gonzalo Rojas Sánchez (Chile escoge la libertad, La presidencia de Augusto
Pinochet Ugarte 11.IX.73-11.III. 1990): “after completing five years in power, Pinochet
could assure that his measures had continued a consistent and permanent line in the
gradual reestablishment of the exercise of the rights of persons, . . . which revealed
the success achieved by the authorities and the citizenry in their common efforts to se-
cure social peace against those who sought to menace it.”
In practice, Decree Law 2.191 was also a “self-amnesty” for crimes committed by
agents of the government, both civilian and military, including the illegal detentions,
torture, murder, and “disappearances” since the 1973 coup. From the time of its pro-
mulgation the amnesty would be controversial. Although initially hailed by Church
leaders as an olive branch extended by the junta, human rights activists quickly re-
jected any possibility of amnesty for “crimes against humanity,” for torture covered by
international treaties, and for state terrorism. Within the armed forces and hardline po-
litical right, the amnesty also provoked dissent. How could Marxist “terrorists” be
amnestied after driving the country to ruin, attacking, kidnapping, and killing police
and military personnel? Why had the government seemingly eroded the country’s sov-
ereignty by bowing to foreign pressures? The junta and its ministers denied that for-
eign pressures had influenced the decision to decree an amnesty. Such denials con-
vinced few Chileans, who expressed their opinion with traditional clichés: “If the river
resounds, it’s because there are rocks in it”; “where there’s smoke, there’s fire.”
On March 21, 1978, General Pinochet had accepted ex-DINA Commander General
Manuel Contreras’ resignation from the Army. In early April the Chilean government
expelled Michael Townley, a U.S. citizen working for the DINA and involved in the
Letelier assassination. He left the country in FBI custody. Shortly thereafter the United
States formally requested the extradition of Contreras; Colonel Pedro Espinoza, the
second ranking officer in the DINA; and lieutenant Armando Fernández Larios. The
DICTATORSHIP 277

president of the Chilean Supreme Court later rejected the extradition request, but in
April 1978 the military government sought to soften its international image and pro-
mote internal “reconciliation.”
To provide a political opening for the new cabinet, the government had declared an
end to the “state of siege” (but not to the “state of emergency”) and authorized return
of high-profile Christian Democratic exiles Jaime Castillo and Bernardo Leighton. In
addition, various persons processed by military tribunals received pardons in early
April. Sergio Fernández believed that such measures might pave the way for approval
and implementation of a new constitution to give more permanence and legitimacy to
“authoritarian democracy.” According to the Minister Secretary General of the Gov-
ernment, General René Vidal, the government hoped that “along with the general
sense of pacification given by the amnesty, pardon and ‘forgetting’ (el olvido) would de-
finitively calm the spirits, extinguishing hatreds and resentments.” In addition, the
growing threat of armed conflict with Argentina made urgent the quest for “national
unity.”
Que Pasa, a generally pro-government magazine, editorialized: “Hopefully, the re-
cent amnesty decreed by the Military Junta will be the road to normalization.” How-
ever, the editorial warned that the amnesty did not signify “a diminultion in vigilance
of public order” and warned that the amnesty “should not allow resurgence of terror-
ism and violence.” In any case, the government quickly clarified that the amnesty did
not permit the return of exiles without specific authorization by the proper authorities.
Such permission could only be obtained on a case-by-case basis.
On April 23, 1978, El Mercurio’s editorial, titled “In the National Tradition,” listed
various previous amnesty laws from 1857 until the 1950s, connecting the military
junta’s 1978 amnesty with Chile’s patriotic tradition of seeking national unity after in-
ternal conflict. The declared spirit of reconciliation, nevertheless, had its limits. The
“political recess” remained in effect; party activity was still banned, and press censor-
ship and intimidation continued. Moreover, the official translation of Pinochet’s an-
nouncement distributed by the Chilean embassy in Washington, D.C., made clear the
general’s firm intentions to prevent renewed political opposition:
I wish to announce tonight that I have decided to pardon prison sentences or com-
mute them to exile—that is, abandonment of the country—for all persons sentenced
by military courts for crimes against the national security committed before or after
September 11, 1973.
Although it is entirely improper to refer to persons found guilty of a crime as po-
litical prisoners, now, as a result of the amnesty decree which is inspired by humani-
tarian motives, no one will be able to say that there are persons deprived of their free-
dom in Chile because of political happenings.
I hope that this decision by my Government will be understood as a sign of pacifi-
cation and not one of weakness, for anyone who falls into error in that respect runs
the risk from now on of suffering full application of the law.
As General Pinochet secured his control over the country, the economic shock treat-
ment gave way to impressive economic growth based upon improved international
prices for Chilean products, increases in agricultural, industrial, and mining exports,
and large inflows of foreign investment and loans. A rush of financial and real estate
speculation generated enthusiasm in elite circles in Santiago, Valparaíso, and other
urban centers. New office buildings and shopping centers dotted both downtown San-
tiago and the fashionable neighborhoods of the capital. Luxury condominiums deco-
rated the coastline at Valparaíso and Viña del Mar. Road and highway construction,
278

table 10–2. availability of goods and services per 10,000 population, 1970–81

1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981

Automobiles 189 203 223 228 216 251 253 279 313 354 413 494
Television sets 138 186 197 129 242 167 139 418 435 459 477 454
Refrigerators 72 68 64 52 39 27 31 49 72 132 156 171
Washing machines 52 61 58 53 64 46 43 48 69 100 127 150
Telephones 415 438 455 461 466 466 475 483 523 536 541 555
Residential electricity consump- 988 1077 1269 1376 1397 1366 1344 1380 1476 1546 1625 1709
tion (thousand kilowatts)
Liquefied gas 302 345 370 387 395 379 393 415 413 411 412 413

Source: Bela Balassa, “Policy Experiments in Chile 1973–1983” in Gary M. Walton, ed., The National Economic Policies of Chile, Greenwich, Conn., 1985,
pp. 222–23.
DICTATORSHIP 279

port modernization, improvements in bus and rail transport, all seemed to justify the
confidence of the junta and the neo-liberal economic team in the correctness of their
program and in Chile’s future. Import duties, initially reduced to an average of 15 per-
cent, and then to 10 percent in 1979, spurred a consumption frenzy among Chileans
able to purchase imported goods previously exorbitantly expensive due to tariff pro-
tection. Improving economic conditions reaffirmed support for the military govern-
ment despite stories of torture and international criticism. Television sets, calculators,
stereos, computers, and more esoteric imports were justification enough for many
Chileans of the overthrow of the Popular Unity government.
Selected macroeconomic indicators also affirmed the government’s success: infla-
tion reduced from over 600 percent per year to 30 percent in 1979; solid growth of do-
mestic production after 1977; dramatic decreases in budget deficits; impressive expan-
sion of non-traditional exports to a diversified list of European, Asian, and Western
Hemisphere markets; positive balance of payments after 1978; and increasing levels of
foreign investment and international confidence in the Chilean economy.
With the economic recovery Chile’s affluent and middle-class sectors enjoyed what
came to be called “the Chilean Miracle.” Boasting of its success in Chile, 1980 Economic
Profile, the government declared: “Five years ago Chile boldly embarked on a course to
revitalize its weakened economy, replacing protectionism with free-market poli-
cies . . . the average GDP growth rate over the last five years has been 7.3%. . . .
A diversified economy capable of functioning at an internationally competitive level
has now been established, thereby assuring economic stability and offering excellent
opportunities for domestic and foreign investors.”
In contrast to the government’s pride in “the miracle,” a number of dissident intel-
lectuals, artists, and writers such as Fernando Alegría, Poli Délano, Ariel Dorfman, An-
tonio Skármeta, and Hernán Valdés produced work with subtle ironies and/or horrific
detail which focused on the human cost of the supposed economic miracle. In the
press, magazines, and dramatic presentations seemingly innocuous messages encoded
scathing critiques of the military dictatorship, as regime opponents attempted to walk
the precipice between the wrath of censors and secret police and the temptations of
self-censorship. In some cases folk art in the poblaciones or provincial towns served both
to earn a survival wage for artisans who created decorative appliqué and embroidered
pieces (arpilleras) while expressing resistance to the government’s programs. In a less
subtle effort, Chilean writer Pablo Huneeus published “The New Economist’s Creed.”
This satirical spoof offended some readers with its seeming parody of religious beliefs,
but it also reflected the cynical claims by the Pinochet government of defending the
“Western-Christian Tradition.” The “New Economist’s Creed” read, in part:

I believe in the all powerful dollar, creator of heaven and earth;

I believe in Milton Friedman, His only son, our God, conceived by the grace of the
University of Chicago;
Born of the Stock Market . . . expropriated, died and buried;
Descended into the hell of Socialism;
In the Third Year, returned to life, ascending the 11th [day of the military coup in
September 1973]
I believe in the Holy Spirit, sacred private enterprise and Japanese cars;
I believe in the capital markets, the financieras and Pierre Cardin shirts;
I believe that Adam Smith lives, Keynes is dead, and Marx was a nightmare
280 CHILE

Viviana Díaz, daughter of a “disappeared”

person, chains herself to the Tribunals of
Justice, 1979. Díaz became president of the
Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos De-
saparecidos in 1999 with the death of long-
time leader Sola Sierra. (Photo courtesy of
Archivo Vicaría de la Solidaridad.)

I believe in selling the factories, mines and forests of the country

I believe there are too many journalists and public opinion counts for nothing
I believe that sociologists are a plague and the poor a necessary evil
I believe in tennis, long lunches and comparative advantage;
I believe in international prices, domestic salaries and Argentine shoes;
I believe Carter is a communist, the Cardinal is a communist and the communists
are communists;
I believe in the communion of the market, forgiveness for our sins, the appearance
of the “disappeared” [unaccounted for political prisoners] and in the eternal
Junta.
Amen.

Opponents and critics of the military government pointed out that while the so-
called miracle amounted to economic recovery, it was a recovery in which unemploy-
ment remained over 15 percent, the gains in consumption were concentrated among
the top 20 percent of income earners in the country (though real wages were improv-
ing), and the foreign debt was burgeoning. Wild financial and real estate speculation
 table 10–3. selected economic indicators, 1973–82

Year 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 x73–81 1982

Growth rate real GDP (%) –5.6 1.0 –12.9 3.5 9.9 8.2 8.3 7.8 5.7 2.6 –14.3
Inflation (%)* 508.1 375.9 340.7 174.3 63.5 30.3 38.9 31.2 9.5 156.5 20.7
Government deficit as % of GDP 24.7 10.5 2.6 2.3 1.8 0.8 –1.7 –3.1 –1.7 4.0 2.3
Exports FOB (millions of dollars) 1309 2151 1590 2116 2185 2460 2835 4705 3836 2687 3706
Imports FOB (millions of dollars) 1288 1794 1520 1473 2151 2886 4190 5469 6513 3032 3643
Commercial balance (millions of 21 357 70 643 34 –426 –355 –764 –2677 –344 63
dollars)
Balance of payments (millions of –21 –55 –344 414 113 712 1047 1244 67 353 –1165
dollars)
Long- and medium-term foreign 3261 4026 4267 4274 4510 5923 7507 9413 12,553 6193 13,815
debt (millions of dollars)

*Change in Consumer Price Index (INE), December–December each year.

x = average, 1973–81.
Source: Banco Central de Chile, Informe Económico de Chile, 1983, p. 46.
281
282 CHILE

provided a façade of “boom” while portending disaster. The traditional industrial sec-
tor, battered by competition from imports, failed to recover its vigor despite stimula-
tion of export-oriented industries such as wood and paper products, fishmeal, miner-
als, and processed fruit. With financial intermediation between the domestic economy
and foreign commercial banks among the most profitable of enterprises, real interest
rates remained very high while domestic investment stayed very low. Indeed, the most
profitable sector of the economy seemed to be in the ever more complex pyramid of fi-
nancial speculation which utilized paper assets as security for secondary and tertiary
credit lines. The same financial groups at the center of the speculative boom also con-
trolled over 60 percent of total private exports by 1980. Critics also pointed to the grow-
ing foreign indebtedness—particularly short-term loans attracted by the high real do-
mestic interest rates—and the increased vulnerability of the economy to fluctuations in
the international marketplace. And although the military regime emphasized private
enterprise, it benefitted considerably from the previous nationalization of the major
copper enterprises (the gran minería del cobre). In 1976 the junta decreed the Ley Reser-
vada del Cobre, allocating 10 percent of the value of copper exports (in dollars) directly
to the armed forces for arms purchases and other items. A minimum level for these
funds was established; if copper prices declined the national treasury would cover the
difference. In 1987 the floor level for these funds was linked to the consumer price
index in the United States. In practice, approximately 42 percent of the increase in value
in the Chilean economy from 1970 to 1990 originated in copper exports (and 75% of that
amount from the gran minería del cobre). Obviously the military regime and its civilian
allies and advisors did not entirely trust “the market” to protect their own vital inter-
ests. As economist Patricio Meller facetiously commented in Un siglo de economía política
chilena (1890–1990):

From the standpoint of microenomic or macroeconomic rationality, it is not obvious

that Chile should spend more on armaments whenever the price of copper goes up.
Or, will our “enemies” have a greater incentive to attack us when this occurs? What
would a private entrepreneur opine if taxes on his business were linked to sales, in-
dependent of profit or loss? Why did none of the pro-government economists ques-
tion the rationality of the Ley Reservada del Cobre? In synthesis, the benefits result-
ing from the nationalization of the GMC [gran minería del cobre] by the Popular Unity
government were perceived during the military government.

In 1980, however, this list of defects in the economic model paled in comparison with
the highly visible “miracle.” As economic growth and the glitter of new construction
and public works bolstered the government’s confidence and base of support, General
Pinochet announced further institutional initiatives. In September 1979 he declared
that the government would adopt a program of national modernization, involving rad-
ical changes in the areas of labor policy, education, social security, health, regional de-
centralization, justice, and agriculture. What came to be called “the seven moderniza-
tions” paved the way for the eventual institutionalization of the authoritarian system
in a constitutional plebiscite in 1980.
Most important of the seven modernizations was the 1979 “Labor Plan.” The culmi-
nation of a six-year attack on organized labor, the new labor plan focused on perma-
nent depoliticization and demobilization of labor in Chilean society. From an economic
standpoint, the neoliberal model prescribed “labor flexibility,” that is, an end to job se-
curity and to government “overregulation” of working conditions. In the first months
after the coup, the military government had banned strikes, prohibited collective bar-
DICTATORSHIP 283

gaining, and suspended the processing of all labor petitions. It outlawed the CUT, pro-
hibited union elections, and assigned military officers to mediate labor disputes be-
tween workers and employers. Other measures barred union meetings held without
prior approval by the police.
From the outset, the military junta defined these innovations as “emergency mea-
sures” that would be revised as the regime developed a program to modify the old
Labor Code. The Minister of Labor declared in 1976 that “it is not possible to introduce
a new industrial relations system until the evils that brought us to this social crisis are
extirpated. For this reason collective bargaining and union elections have been sus-
pended.” The emergency measures remained in place until the Labor Plan of 1979.
Organized labor’s initial responses to the military government involved primarily
non-Marxist groups which the junta allowed to function as evidence that government
policy was not antilabor, but rather anticommunist and antipolitical. In 1974, public
employees, maritime workers, bank employees, health workers, and even some mem-
bers of the metallurgical federation, who were affiliated with the National Workers’
Central (CNT), attempted to obtain government recognition as the official voice of
labor. The CNT, which included Christian Democrats and gremialistas, failed to achieve
any immediate mass support. It also failed to reconcile the conflicts between those who
wholeheartedly supported the junta and those who preferred the role of “responsible”
(versus Marxist) opposition. The existence of the CNT initially served the govern-
ment’s need to establish alternative procedures for industrial relations and to demon-
strate to the International Labor Office that labor rights and interests in Chile were
being respected. In addition, the junta’s second labor minister, Air Force General
Nicanor Díaz, and some of his colleagues sought to put into place a corporatist and
populist model of industrial relations rather than merely repress labor for the benefit
of employers.
Meanwhile, the CUT constituted an external directorate in Paris and made efforts to
maintain clandestine contacts with the outlawed political parties and their supporters
in the workplace. Illegal strikes in 1974, by both ex-Popular Unity supporters and more
conservative workers, challenged the military’s policies but they also provoked harsh
reactions against union leaders and rank and file. Speaking at the May 1, Labor Day cel-
ebration in 1975, the minister of labor proclaimed that “September 11 detained Marx-
ism, it did not destroy it; we must now destroy Marxism.”
In June 1975 a group of labor federations previously affiliated with the CUT, in-
cluding Christian Democrats who rejected collaboration with the military regime, cre-
ated a loosely organized alternative to the CNT which they called the National Union
Coordinating Committee (CNS). The government, however, viewed the CNS as an ef-
fort to resurrect the politicized, leftist labor movement of the past; its leaders suffered
periodic arrests, harassment, and sometimes death or “disappearance.”
Toward the end of 1975, a so-called Group of Ten, predominantly Christian Demo-
cratic labor leaders, also became active. This group included relatively moderate labor
opponents to the military regime, and even some personalities whom the dictatorship
had designated to represent Chile at International Labor Organization (ILO) meetings
outside the country. In May 1976 the Group of Ten published an open letter criticizing
the government’s labor policies, and in 1977 took the lead in rejecting General Pino-
chet’s proposals for a “protected democracy” in the Chacarillas Plan.
In response to the renewed activism of labor, and emulating in some ways the labor
policies of General Ibáñez’s first administration (1927–31), the junta attempted to es-
tablish a heterogeneous base of gremios in a new National Gremialist Secretariat (1976)
and a National Unity Labor Front. It also sponsored parallel unions within firms or eco-
284 CHILE

nomic sectors where labor opposition existed, for example, among copper and port
workers and within the National Electricity Industry (ENDESA). Most of these efforts
fell short of government aspirations, although certain labor leaders and workers re-
peatedly manifested support for the junta. Finally, in 1978, the military government at-
tempted to create a new officialist labor organization called the National Union of
Chilean Workers (UNTRACH), but this organization could not garner any mass sup-
port despite its moderate criticisms of government policy.
Renewed strike activity from 1977 to 1978, including job actions, absenteeism, and
hunger strikes in the copper mines, ports, and among textile, chemical, metallurgical,
and transportation workers, was met with a variety of repressive measures. Authori-
ties arrested numerous labor leaders, fired participants in the job actions, sentenced
some activists to internal exile (relegación), and dissolved seven union federations affil-
iated with the CNS. Not only did these measures fail to end the strikes before the work-
ers attained some of their goals, but, more importantly, the high visibility of the strik-
ers and of the government response focused international attention anew on Chilean
politics and provoked both official and grass roots support for the opposition in Europe
and the United States. President Carter’s emphasis on human rights in U.S. foreign pol-
icy collided directly with the Chilean government’s practices, and the possibility of a
boycott by the AFL-CIO in the United States threatened the very basis of the export-led
economic recovery promoted by the government.
Inability to control workers in government-owned copper mines, together with the
threat of isolation from U.S. markets by refusal of American workers to offload Chilean
cargoes, pushed the Pinochet government toward new labor policies. Beginning with
an abrupt call for union elections in 1978 and Decree Law 2200, the Chilean military
regime redesigned the Chilean industrial relations system. Thus, the Labor Plan, her-
alded as one of the seven modernizations initiated in 1979, represented the Pinochet
government’s efforts to clarify and codify the role and limits of labor in the evolving
system of “protected democracy.”
The new labor regimen legalized a system of collective bargaining and guaranteed
yearly wage readjustments tied to the official rate of inflation. Union organization and
bargaining between employers and workers were recognized as basic to modern in-
dustrial relations. However, the new regulations limited collective bargaining and strike
action to individual plant unions or, in agriculture, to unions in individual farms. Strikes
were limited to sixty days, after which time employees who refused to return to work
“are considered to have resigned . . . but will be eligible for unemployement subsi-
dies.” (This provision led eventually to a number of 59-day strikes, followed by brief in-
terludes and then subsequent return to strike action.) In contrast to previous legislation
which allowed for federations and confederations to act at regional or national levels,
the new labor laws forbade these types of organizations from participating in collective
bargaining and a number of other “political” activities. To avoid the possibility of si-
multaneous labor disputes or strikes, the new regulations specified a timetable for labor
negotiations in particular firms or sectors of the economy, and published a long list of
firms and sectors where strikes were prohibited. The laws authorized the government
to dissolve labor organizations for participating in “monopolistic practices” (presenting
similar labor petitions in several firms at the same time), engaging in “political” activi-
ties, or carrying out activities beyond the scope of “union functions.”
In the case of agricultural unions this meant the loss of all the gains achieved during
the Christian Democratic and Popular Unity administrations. Permitted to organize
unions only in farms with fifteen permanent workers (or nine in some special cases),
farmworkers faced restrictions on organization more severe than those enacted in 1947
DICTATORSHIP 285

and were subject to layoff at the whim of the employer. Simply by refusing to hire more
than fourteen full-time workers, agricultural employers could avoid unionization. As a
result, in 1981, agricultural workers unions claimed fewer than 30,000 members na-
tionwide—approximately 15 percent of the membership they had at the end of 1973. In
addition, agricultural policies which both reversed the agrarian reform and added to
rural unemployment made the plight of rural labor and the problems of the rural labor
movement even more difficult. Indeed, no group of workers suffered more, or lost
more, under the military regime than the Chilean campesinos.
Supplementary labor decrees allowed work days of up to twelve hours, without
overtime scales, so long as total hours worked per week did not exceed forty-eight. The
government also eliminated the traditional system of labor courts and even abolished
the old colegios profesionales, essentially professional associations of doctors, lawyers,
pharmacists, or journalists, and replaced them with gremialista associations. Officially,
these policies were adopted to eliminate restraints on the market and inefficiencies in
the economy; in practice they coincided with the government’s ongoing efforts to de-
politicize Chilean society by fragmenting organized labor and professional associa-
tions and limiting their activities to narrow, geographically specific actions.
In addition to the “Labor Plan,” the other “modernizations” also had both economic
and political objectives. Modernization of the educational system involved decentral-
ization of educational administration by placing the primary schools under the direc-
tion of municipal authorities. The national government retained supervisory control
over the content of education—emphasizing basic skills, Chilean history and geogra-
phy, and civic duties and responsibilities. This emphasis had emerged early in the mil-
itary administration with declarations in the Objetivo Nacional del Gobierno de Chile
(1975) that “education should strengthen and transmit love for la patria and national
values, . . . appreciation of the family as the basic cell of society, acceptance of the
idea of national unity.” Constitutional Act No. 3 (1976) had also emphasized “promot-
ing among students a sense of moral, civic, and social responsibility, love of la patria
and its fundamental values . . . and the spirit of brotherhood among people and
among nations.” This emphasis on morality and national values carried forward to the
announced plan for educational modernization, set forth in the “Presidential Directive
for Education” (March 5, 1979).
Beginning in 1980–81, municipal governments took over responsibility for adminis-
tering the public primary schools, with curriculum and budgets supervised by the
Ministry of Education. The government emphasized the need to strengthen primary
education where, in 1973, fewer than 60 percent of the students enrolled in grade
one completed grade eight (the last year of public, obligatory education). In addition,
expanded preschool and day-care programs, coordinated with nutrition programs,
greatly improved the situation of young children and some working mothers. The gov-
ernment also emphasized the need to expand technical and vocational education.
Transfer of responsibility for school administration to the municipalities practically
destroyed the enormous political and social influence of the 90,000-member National
Teachers Union (SUTE). Bargaining over salary and working conditions became essen-
tially “local” matters, with teachers subjected to personnel policies at the municipal
rather than the national level, as well as regulated by national labor law prohibiting
strikes in the public sector.
Established in 1970 after many years of organizational development in the educa-
tional sector, SUTE affiliated teachers and administrators employed by the Ministry of
Education. It had obtained legal recognition from the Popular Unity government and
had participated actively in formulating educational policy. After the coup of 1973,
286 CHILE

General Pinochet declared that it was necessary to purge public education of subver-
sive elements. To achieve this objective new policies eliminated most of the employ-
ment security won for teachers over the last fifty years. In December 1973 the govern-
ment ended payroll check-offs for SUTE and froze the union’s funds. A year later, both
SUTE and smaller teacher organizations lost their legal status (Decree Law 1284) and
recognition.
To replace SUTE and other teacher organizations the government created a new as-
sociation called the Colegio de Profesores (Decree Law 678, 1974). This organization
would supposedly register all teachers in the public and private sector, regulate pro-
fessional and ethical conduct of teachers, and set standards for teacher preparation and
licensing. It would also assist in the government program to depoliticize the teaching
profession in Chile. Many of the old headquarters and social centers of SUTE were
transferred to the new Colegio. The Colegio de Profesores was itself subsequently dis-
solved when the government decreed abolition of all the professional colegios in 1981.
Though the Colegio was replaced in late 1981 by a new Chilean Educators Gremialist
Association (AGECH), teachers lost control over professional standards and national
educational policy, while at the same time they faced a fragmented, localized labor
market that fit the model of the economy favored by neo-liberal policymakers.
In the areas of secondary and university education, reforms introduced by the mili-
tary government emphasized rationalization of the national system to eliminate com-
peting and overlapping programs, more specialization, and reduction of subsidies for
higher education. A decree law in December 1980 redefined the functions of Chilean
universities, including the types of degrees they could award, while allowing other ed-
ucational institutions, such as centros de educación superior, to offer programs previously
reserved to the universities. Subsequent decrees refined and elaborated the new edu-
cational policies, with the general thrust toward self-financing and a relative shift of re-
sources from higher education to primary and technical education prevailing. In 1974
higher education absorbed 47 percent of the national education budget. This share fell
to 33 percent in 1978, 27 percent in 1980, and 20 percent in 1982. Thus, the corollary of
the government’s commitment to allocate increasing resources to preschool and pri-
mary education was the relative decline in support of higher education. In many ways
this policy represented a highly positive redistribution of opportunities in favor of
poorer sectors of the population; yet the increased fees at the level of secondary (and
university) education frustrated the ambitions of those with lesser means as they grad-
uated from the eighth year of free public education. Encouraging the proliferation of
private educational institutions, institutes, and technical training, the government re-
duced expenditures on the university system, made fewer openings available to entry-
level students, and gradually increased the extent to which student fees accounted for
university income. By 1982, some 18 percent of university income came from student
fees, which averaged over $1300 per year. Moreover, the technical universities, prima-
rily catering to lower income students in the past, also raised fees to levels ranging from
$600 to $1200 per year. These fees made higher education inaccessible to many thou-
sands of students. The previous commitment to free or low-cost higher education had
disappeared.
The military program for modernization of education entailed a fundamental con-
tradiction between a long overdue focus on more resources for primary and technical
education and a contraction of opportunities in the system of higher education. Edu-
cational “modernization” represented not merely a technical, rationalizing effort but
also an integral part of the military government’s move toward a new political order.
An expanding system of preschools allowed the government to establish a presence in
DICTATORSHIP 287

numerous neighborhoods and communities, as well as to deliver nutrition and health

services, along with its political message, to thousands of poor families. In the primary
schools, an emphasis on “basics,” and also on morality and patriotism, clearly coin-
cided with the regime’s self-defined mission of preparing new generations of Chileans
“steeped in a love of the fatherland.” Military administrators in the universities, purges
of the faculties and student bodies, more competitive admission policies, and increases
in student fees all evidenced the concern with depoliticizing university life and refo-
cusing student efforts on narrow professional and vocational goals. The “moderniza-
tion” of the educational system, along with the political purges, also significantly re-
duced the traditional participation by students in national and university politics. Only
after 1984, with the brief political opening or apertura tolerated by the government, did
students re-emerge, along with labor and party activists, as a vocal force in opposition
to the government.
Educational reform measures coincided with other policy initiatives in health and so-
cial security in shaping the social framework for “protected democracy.” Modernization
of the health care and social security systems also emphasized privatization and ra-
tionalization. Worker pension payments were shifted from a large number of special-
ized public funds to a relatively smaller number of private companies called pension
administration funds (Administradoras de Fondos de Pensiones or AFP). The law re-
quired worker contributions, but allowed freedom of choice regarding where they de-
posited their money. Lacking good information about the new system and the compa-
nies involved, most participants chose the new large financial conglomerates which also
managed pension funds. Older workers and the infirm remained under public plans,
thus taking paying members of the system to the private sector and leaving the public
sector saddled with already incurred obligations. Several public agencies retained re-
sponsibility for licensing and regulating the AFP; limited public liability existed in case
of bankruptcy of the insurance companies or in cases when pensions did not amount to
a legislated minimum. The pension system reform added greatly to concentration of fi-
nancial assets within the economy. After two months of operation of the system the two
largest financial conglomerates controlled 75 percent of the pension assets.
In the area of health policy, the military government inherited a relatively sophisti-
cated National Health Service which paralleled a good quality system of private health
care. To make the National Health Service (SNS) more efficient, the government
adopted Decree Law 2763, “Restructuring of the Health Sector.” This administrative re-
form created twenty-seven regional agencies, with directors appointed by the presi-
dent, and with a mandate to reduce costs and to improve service. Priority was given to
programs of maternal and infant care, along with nutrition education and feeding pro-
grams. Inasmuch as the new social security and pension system allowed workers to
choose private health care providers under private insurance schemes, the SNS would
become a provider of services to those least able to provide for their own health ser-
vices—a provider of last resort.
Although the majority of doctors in Chile initially seemed to favor drastic reform
of the National Health Service and the move toward privatization, some doctors and
medical students protested the new system. These protests, along with the technical
and administrative barriers to complete evisceration of the SNS, spared the health
system total dismantlement. Public investment in new health facilities dropped as
did refurbishment of old installations. Nevertheless, the SNS and other government
agencies carried out effective programs of prenatal and postnatal care, as well as nutri-
tional supplement programs, which allowed the country to reduce infant mortality and
malnutrition-related disease. Redirection of health priorities toward these objectives by
288 CHILE

the military government, and the generally high quality training and performance of
Chilean health professionals, overcame many of the constraints imposed by budget re-
ductions. This was achieved despite economic conditions that might have led to in-
creased malnutrition and nutrition-related disease among infants and young children.
In the area of judicial and criminal justice administration, the government also
moved forward with “modernization.” This program included building a number of
new combination court-penal facilities, appointing large numbers of new judges, im-
proving judicial compensation, and liberalizing rules of evidence to “allow all sorts of
evidence useful in establishing the truth . . . photos, tapes, films, cassettes, videos,
etc.” New provisions regarding civil procedures, juvenile justice, and legal assistance
also were implemented from 1981 to 1983. In 1983 the government claimed that 30 per-
cent of all courts ever created in Chile had been established since 1973. The government
also proudly displayed similarly impressive statistics for new offices of Civil Registry
and Notaries which it claimed made civil and criminal justice administration more ef-
ficient and more accessible to the Chilean population.

With the “seven modernizations” under way and the economic recovery in full swing,
General Pinochet moved toward the fourth stage of post-1973 development: efforts to
legitimize both the political and economic initiatives of the regime through the adop-
tion of a new constitution. Heralded as the “Constitution of Liberty,” after the book
written by the neo-liberals’ intellectual hero, conservative economist Friedrich Hayek,
the constitutional project enshrined the notion of “protected democracy” and gave con-
stitutional protection to the basic features of the “seven modernizations.” The govern-
ment submitted the constitution to plebiscite on September 11, 1980 (the seventh
anniversary of the coup of 1973) amidst forceful publicity campaigns and severe re-
strictions on opposition organization and access to the media. Claims of vote fraud and
intimidation by opponents did little to mitigate the impact of the apparently over-
whelming acceptance of the new constitution. The government reported that with 93
percent of Chile’s eligible voters participating in the plebiscite, more than two-thirds of
the voters had given their approval. The government also noted that some 30 percent
of the voters rejected the new constitution, an indication that opposition claims of in-
timidation and fraud had not prevented large numbers of Chileans from voting against
the government’s proposal.
While it was impossible to know with certainty the extent of fraud or intimidation
involved in the plebiscite, the size of the negative vote gave seeming credibility to the
government’s victory. General Pinochet and his advisers had either achieved an im-
pressive electoral affirmation of their policies or they had proven themselves extraor-
dinarily astute politicians in their reporting and manipulation of the plebiscite out-
come. It was even possible that the government had both won the plebiscite and
skillfully fabricated the reported results to enhance the credibility of the plebiscite
process.
Most importantly, the new constitution marked the end of the ad hoc emergency de-
crees, defined the institutional character of “protected democracy,” and established a
new juridical framework for national life. Government policy now derived from a con-
stitutional process apparently sanctioned by a majority of the Chilean electorate. Fu-
ture changes in process or policy depended upon modification or elimination of this
new legal system. The constitution also legitimized the continuation of General Pino-
chet’s personalist administration until 1989, with the possibility of his re-election to a
new term of office lasting until 1997.
Decree Law 1150 (October 21, 1980) promulgated the new Political Constitution of
 table 10–4. nutrition, health, and education indicators, 1970–82

1970 1971 1972 1973 1974 1975 1976 1977 1978 1979 1980 1981 1982

Nutrition
Calorie consumption per capita 2282 2645 2819 2642 2243 2290 2565 2511 2603 2634 2655 2675 2627
Protein per capita (grams) 67.1 73.8 78.8 70.7 64.3 62.7 66.3 65.8 67.8 68.6 65.5 68.5 70.2
Health
Physicians per 1000 population 75 76 77 78 80 83 85 90 92 94 95 97 n.a.
Hospital beds per 1000 population 3.8 3.8 3.9 3.8 3.8 3.8 3.6 3.6 3.5 3.6 3.4 3.3 3.3
Medical visits per capita 1.08 1.22 1.14 1.03 0.92 0.88 1.05 1.07 1.09 1.13 1.13 1.14 1.19
Adult visits per capita 0.99 1.12 1.00 0.87 0.73 0.70 0.86 0.87 0.89 0.93 0.93 0.93 n.a.
Pediatric visits per child 1.04 1.22 1.16 1.09 1.08 1.01 1.15 1.18 1.22 1.26 1.26 1.30 n.a.
Obstetrical visits per woman of child 0.26 0.26 0.33 0.31 0.27 0.27 0.27 0.33 0.35 0.35 0.35 0.36 n.a.
bearing age
Crude death rate per 1000 8.9 8.8 9.0 8.2 7.8 7.3 7.8 7.0 6.7 6.8 6.7 6.2 6.1
Infant mortality rate per 1000 82.2 73.9 72.7 65.8 65.2 57.6 56.6 50.1 40.1 37.9 33.0 27.0 23.6
Life expectancy (years) 64.2 64.5 64.8 65.1 65.4 65.7 65.9 66.2 66.5 66.7 67.0 67.3 67.5
Education (per age group)
Preschool (%) 11.8 13.9 16.0 16.6 19.9 20.0 21.7 23.8 25.3 25.2 26.8 26.5 26.7
Primary school (%) 107 114 117 120 121 119 117 118 119 120 118 115 111
Secondary school (%) 39.6 46.3 49.4 50.9 50.1 48.0 48.9 50.5 52.5 54.9 55.3 56.9 54.8

Source: Bela Balassa, “Policy Experiments in Chile, 1973–1983,” Gary Walton, ed., The National Economic Policies of Chile Greenwich, Conn., 1985, pp. 222–23; INE, Com-
pendio Estadístico, 1984, 1985.
289
290 CHILE

the Republic of Chile. Implementation began in 1981. Much of the language of the con-
stitution, as well as the basic concepts, had been drawn from the “Declaration of Prin-
ciples” (1974), the National Objectives of Government (1975), the “Constitutional Acts”
(1976), the decrees concerning regional administration, the Labor Plan, and the other
“modernizations” undertaken in the late 1970s. Matters of continuing controversy
within the government, or areas of implementation which required additional legisla-
tion or regulations, were treated in “interim provisions.” For example, all political party
activity remained outlawed until an “organic constitutional law” regulating party activ-
ity could be adopted. (No law appeared until 1987.)
The 1980 constitution institutionalized “protected democracy” and the new socio-
economic order. Chile was officially “modern,” but even to 2000 it remained the only
country in the Western Hemisphere without a divorce law. The patrimonial, even me-
dieval, foundations of some aspects of family and property law continued in some re-
spects to make women second-class citizens. The new constitution reaffirmed tradi-
tional Hispanic values and practices and explicitly emphasized the role of the
patriarchal family as the basic unit of a hierarchically organized society. It did this in
the name of Western-Christian values, patriotism, and national security, echoes of
the Spanish conquest and the nineteenth-century wars to conquer and “civilize” the
country’s indigenous population. Every citizen was obligated to “honor the fatherland,
defend its sovereignty, and contribute to the preservation of national security and the
essential values of Chilean tradition (Art. 22). The same section of the constitution
made military service obligatory and provided for mandatory firearms registration
with the military authorities. While the constitution also provided a long list of civil
rights and liberties of all Chileans (Art. 19), these were limited by the requirements
of national security. For example, the right of free association was subject to the provi-
sion that “all groups contrary to morality, public order or security of the State are
prohibited.”
The Constitution nowhere specifically defined “national security,” but the text as-
signed the armed forces the mission to “guarantee the institutional order of the repub-
lic” (Art. 90). Indeed, the new constitution officially made the armed services a domi-
nant political force in Chile. This constitutional development paralleled the growth in
personnel of the armed forces (especially the army) and their growing share of gov-
ernment expenditures. In addition, a National Security Council, responsible for a num-
ber of advisory and policymaking tasks (Arts. 95–96), inserted military officers into leg-
islative and administrative functions. Each of the armed services received direct
representation on the regional development councils which appointed mayors, thereby
controlling or monitoring both municipal administration and the reformed educational
system. Provision for eventual election of a new Congress, after adoption of a law reg-
ulating political parties, also included designees of the National Security Council as sen-
ators (ex-commanders of each of the three military branches and the carabineros). In
short, the new constitution provided for permanent militarization of Chilean politics.
The constitution also ratified the social and economic initiatives of the period
1973–81. Article 19 required special legislative approval for the state to engage in en-
trepreneurial activities. Article 62 reserved to presidential initiative any law to impose,
eliminate, or reduce taxes, or to create new public services or new positions in the pub-
lic administration. This provision was intended to limit severely the role of a “political”
legislature and also to focus attention on any efforts to increase the size or expand the
functions of the government. The president also had such authority with respect to de-
termination of remuneration in the public sector and in the contracting of foreign loans
by any public entity. These provisions, along with a number of others, greatly enhanced
the authority of the president and emasculated the legislative branch—a further irony
DICTATORSHIP 291

of the military government since the overthrow of President Allende, like that of Pres-
ident Balmaceda in 1891, had been carried out partly in the name of limiting executive
abuse of authority and re-establishing the balance between Congress and the president.
The constitution also reaffirmed and institutionalized the labor and social security
“modernizations.” Articles 8, 15, 16, and 19 prohibited “propagation of any doctrines
that . . . advocate violence, or a conception of society or of the state, or of the juridi-
cal order of a totalitarian character, or founded on the idea of class conflict”; made un-
constitutional all movements, organizations, or political parties that advocated such
ideas; outlawed all political party participation in union affairs; and outlawed partici-
pation in political parties by labor leaders. In addition, any future congressman or sen-
ator who attempted to influence labor negotiations, administrative proceedings, or
labor court cases could be removed from office.

The period between approval of the new constitution and March 1981 marked a high
point in General Pinochet’s administration. Economic expansion, political institution-
alization, and the advent of the more supportive administration of President Ronald
Reagan in the United States, all seemed to favor the continuity and the strengthening
of the Chilean regime. Instead, between March 1981 and the end of the year a combi-
nation of international and domestic developments brought economic collapse and fi-
nancial panic, erosion of political support both among the government’s staunch sup-
porters and the social base of the regime, and renewed pressures for rapid transition to
a less authoritarian political system.
A complex interaction of international economic trends and internal economic de-
velopments provoked the worst economic depression in Chile since the early 1930s. Re-
cession in the United States and Europe, along with tightened monetary and credit
policies and sky-rocketing interest rates all affected Chile drastically. Chilean firms and
private parties had contracted large amounts of dollar-denominated loans at a fixed ex-
change rate. Short-term foreign indebtedness more than tripled from 1979 to 1982;
medium- and long-term debt doubled in the same period. Even more importantly,
while public foreign indebtedness had represented more than 50 percent of such obli-
gations in 1979, the private sector indebtedness reached more than 66 percent of the
more than 17 billion-dollar total foreign debt by 1982. Since consumption, speculation
in real estate, financial pyramids, and flight capital accounted for considerable portions
of this private debt, investment and increased productive capabilities grew much too
slowly to finance the growing interest payment burden. Shifting government policies
on exchange rates (devaluation of 18 percent in June 1982, subsequent pre-announced
mini-devaluations, until September 1982, with a floating exchange rate thereafter) ex-
acerbated the crisis, with the result that the Chilean private sector all but collapsed.
According to the government’s orthodox policymakers this collapse should have
been allowed to “correct itself.” Indeed, many of the doctrinaire “Chicago Boys”
blamed the financial collapse to a great extent on the government’s failure to imple-
ment more fully the neoliberal reforms. These critics pointed out that as early as 1976
the government had rescued the Bank of Osorno, rather than allowing bankruptcy,
thereby undermining the discipline of the market in rationalizing the economy. More-
over, according to this viewpoint, fixing the exchange rate in 1979 discriminated
against Chilean exporters (since internal inflation exceeded international inflation) and
overvalued the Chilean peso. This made Chilean agricultural and industrial products
uncompetitive. Further, indexing wages to the consumer price index in the new labor
legislation had prevented Chilean employers from “bargaining freely” concerning the
cost of labor. Thus, according to the neo-liberals, the reforms had neither been carried
far enough nor implemented thoroughly enough.
292 CHILE

Others pointed out that lack of careful regulation of the financial activities of the
major conglomerates had allowed accumulation of an immense private foreign debt,
secured only with fragile, sometimes clearly fraudulent, paper assets. Rising interest
rates and drastic reductions in the inflow of foreign loans and investments that had
fueled the financial “boom” made it impossible to continue the debt service. Declining
prices for Chilean exports as a consequence of the international recession (including a
decline in copper prices of over 40 percent from its peak in early 1980 to mid-1982) and
a growing balance of payments deficit (15 percent of gross domestic product in 1981)
contributed to the debacle. Tariff reductions that had practically eliminated protection
for Chilean industries and agriculture allowed consumer goods to flood the country
from nations whose industries received a variety of tariff and non-tariff protection from
their own governments.
The highly visible sugar firm, Compañía Refinería de Azúcar de Viña del Mar
(CRAV), part of the financial empire of a prominent businessman, collapsed in May
1981. A seemingly isolated event, this business failure was a warning of things to come.
In mid-1981 the Pinochet government began responding to certain portents of the com-
ing crisis. In part these responses stemmed from concern for illegal, corrupt financial
practices and in part from the resurgence of a type of “interest group” politics in which
sectors of industrialists, agricultural interests, and others lobbied for more favorable,
special treatment. First, a new banking law prohibited loans by banks to their owners
and affiliate firms; eliminated common stock as an acceptable part of bank capital, and
otherwise sought to regulate the rash of financial pyramiding and Ponzi schemes. Too
late to prevent the coming collapse, these new laws at least pointed at one source of the
impending disaster. Meanwhile, four banks and finance companies went bankrupt in
November 1981. The government responded by arresting the principals for financial ir-
regularities and assumed control of the banks.
A largely symbolic change in finance minister, followed by further devaluation of
the peso, did nothing to arrest the downward economic spiral. Significantly, the gov-
ernment directed the national sugar enterprise, IANSA, to adopt new price and sub-
sidy policies for sugar-beet growers and imposed tariffs on specific goods to protect
Chilean firms from “dumping” by foreign competitors. Agriculture and mining, in se-
lected regions, also received energy subsidies.
In January 1983 the crisis forced the government to “intervene” (take over manage-
ment and operations of) the largest private banks in the country, assume responsibility
for privately contracted debt, and begin a public rescue of the mangled private sector.
General Pinochet lamented his failure to deport the speculators and corrupt bankers
whom he called “paper emperors,” but it would be the hundreds of thousands of un-
employed and homeless Chileans who would pay the highest price for the gigantic
swindles.
The Chilean economy declined in gross domestic product by over 14 percent in 1982;
unemployment rose to over 20 percent with an additional 450,000 Chileans participat-
ing in two government make-work programs—PEM, and the newly created Job Pro-
gram for Heads of Household, or POJH. By the end of 1983 over 500,000 Chileans de-
pended upon PEM or POJH for subsistence. With the interest burden of the debt almost
50 percent that of the value of annual exports, and rising, General Pinochet and his ad-
visers called upon the people of Chile to tighten their belts and to make even more sac-
rifices for the future of their children and their nation. The private debts which had
served to enrich small numbers of Chileans would now be collectivized. The nation
would renegotiate the debt with international bankers and international financial or-
ganizations. Government control over the country’s credit system, the “intervened”
DICTATORSHIP 293

table 10–5. foreign debt, debt as percent of exports of goods and services,
and ratio of interest payments to exports of goods and services

1981 1982 1983 1984 1985 1986*

Debt (millions of dollars) 15,591 17,159 18,037 19,669 20,413 20,690

Interest payments/exports of goods and 38.8 49.5 38.9 48.0 43.5 39.2
services (%)
Debt as percent of exports of goods and 311 370 390 438 454 426
services

*Preliminary estimate.
Source: CEPAL, “Preliminary Review of the Latin American Economy,” 1986.

table 10–6. workers inscribed in pem, pojh

POJH Percent of
PEM (begins Oct. 1982) Labor Force

1975 72,695 2.3

1976 157,836 5.0
1977 187,647 5.9
1978 145,792 4.2
1979 133,933 3.9
1980 190,673 5.2
1981 175,607 4.9
1982 225,290 102,772 (Dec.) 9.0
1983 (Oct.) 286,751 225,264 14.0

Source: Jaime Ruiz-Tagle and Roberto Urmeneta, Los trabajadores del programa
del empleo mínimo, 1984, pp. 24, 168; Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas, Com-
pendio Estadístico, 1984.

(bailed out) banks, and major firms associated with financial conglomerates, along
with continued government operation of public enterprises in the copper, petroleum,
coal, and other sectors, the ports, telecommunication, transportation, and international
trade, was a further irony of a program dedicated since 1973 to emphasis on market
decision-making and privatization.
Mockingly, opponents of the Pinochet government, and even ex-supporters, termed
this process the “Chicago road to Socialism.” Government policymakers, in contrast,
claimed that the interventions would be temporary and looked forward to “reprivati-
zation.” In reality, the extent to which government policymakers had determined the
character of economic opportunities in the private sector, together with the official and
unofficial participation of representatives of the major economic groups in making pub-
lic policy, resembled much more closely the customary patterns of Hispanic capitalism
in Chile than any brand of socialism. As in the past, private enterprise and profit de-
pended upon government policies which allowed coercion of labor, concentration of
wealth in a limited number of firms and families, and collusion between government
authorities and a small number of private actors in managing the economy. Admittedly,
the government had declared its intent to liberalize the economy, just as Chilean Con-
servatives and Liberals had done during the nineteenth century. In both cases, however,
294 CHILE

economic liberalism coincided with political authoritarianism and elitist processes of

policymaking. General Pinochet, pragmatically repressing or sometimes co-opting op-
position, imposed his policy initiatives in collaboration with civilian advisers and tech-
nocrats, while denying the value and denigrating the legitimacy of democratic institu-
tions. As particular policies failed or proved defective, whether neo-liberal or otherwise,
these could be dropped or modified. But as in colonial Chile, access to government of-
ficials determined economic opportunities. The military regime’s not-so-invisible hand
favored its supporters and also some officers and their family members in more than
questionable economic ventures. Even the privatization of government enterprises, a
key feature of the neoliberal economic plan, offered private benefits to “lucky” investors
and bidders for public assets transferred to the private sector. As in the past, government
authority remained the single most important commodity in Chile.
Beginning in late 1981, the collapse of the economic “miracle” precipitated wide-
spread political realignment. Gremialistas—old-time members of the National party,
middle-class professionals, and an array of small businessmen—suffered the conse-
quences of the depression and expressed open, if cautious, opposition to government
policies. Groups which had railed vociferously against President Allende, and which
had been closely associated with the junta in its early years, now called the Pinochet
regime “the worst government in the country’s history.” Prominent leaders of the
truckers, Chamber of Commerce, retail merchants, and professional organizations ver-
bally attacked General Pinochet in harsh, even insulting language. Some went to jail
and others suffered harassment and beatings by unidentified “civilians.” Still violently
anti-Marxist and unwilling to form a coalition with Communists and Socialists, even
for the limited and temporary purpose of ousting Pinochet, these groups now called for
a change in government policies—and sometimes for a more rapid transition to democ-
racy. However, many of these groups still preferred authoritarian government to the
threatened “return to chaos” which the government-controlled media and propaganda
constantly assured Chileans would follow if the military government passed from the
scene. Although the occasion of ex-President Eduardo Frei’s death in 1982 sparked a
massive demonstration against General Pinochet’s regime, it also underlined the lack
of viable civilian opposition leadership with which to replace him.
With the political parties still outlawed and traditional political leaders unable to as-
semble an effective opposition movement to confront the dictatorship, organized labor
took a new and central role in seeking to reactivate and mobilize opposition forces. The
most important group of organized workers in Chile, the Copper Workers Confedera-
tion (CTC), notwithstanding internal divisions and parallel government unions within
its membership, confronted the Pinochet regime head on in 1981. A lengthy strike at the
El Teniente mine in Rancagua created extremely tense relations with the government.
In 1982, copper workers joined with the Coordinadora Nacional Sindical (CNS), the
Confederation of Private Sector Employees (CEPCH), and the independent Catholic-
inspired Unitary Workers Front (FUT) in sending a letter to General Pinochet request-
ing modification of the Labor Plan and many of the government’s economic policies.
The Copper Workers Confederation threatened the government with another strike
and even discussed the possibility of a call for a general strike in May 1983. After re-
consideration, the CTC instead joined forces with other labor organizations, commu-
nity organizations, and professional groups in sponsoring a national day of protest
(May 11, 1983). All over Chile, and especially in Santiago, Chileans kept their children
home from school, absented themselves from work, and—as the opposition had done
in the time of protests against the Popular Unity government—banged on pots and
pans, while screaming insults at Pinochet and calling for his ouster.
DICTATORSHIP 295

Following the success of this day of protest, labor made another effort at achieving
a loose unity in the creation of a National Workers’ Command (CNT). Though unable
to overcome long-standing ideological and organizational conflicts, a broad spectrum
of workers’ organizations, ranging from the National Association of Public Employees
(ANEF) to the Maritime Confederation and the Confederation of Private Sector Em-
ployees united in public opposition to the Pinochet government. In the process, some
labor leaders suffered incarceration or even assassination, for example, Tucapel Jimé-
nez, a leader of ANEF.
A second national day of protest on June 14, 1983, proved even more successful, but
a national strike called for later in the month failed to achieve the desired impact. Re-
peated “days of protest” followed these initial acts of mass public opposition. Each
protest left a small toll of dead and many injured in confrontations between civilians and
the security forces. In August 1983, General Pinochet deployed thousands of troops in
Santiago to control a mass demonstration called by a coalition of labor organizations and
the outlawed political parties. Pobladores lit fires and built barricades in the shantytowns;
the armed forces invaded neighborhoods of the poor, made mass arrests, and attacked
protesters, while demonstrators in middle-class neighborhoods experienced the indis-
criminate use of tear gas and random shooting. In addition to the mass demonstrations,
small groups of Chileans organized numerous quick, mobile protests at designated
times and places, with participants arriving on pre-arranged schedule and rapidly dis-
persing to avoid detention by carabineros.

Protesta Nacional, Plaza de Armas, 1983. (Courtesy of Archivo Vicaría de la Solidaridad.)

296 CHILE

Having taken the initiative in 1983, labor organizations continued to resist govern-
ment policy. In 1984 ten leaders of the CNT signed an open letter to Pinochet calling for
a return to the constitution of 1925, repeal of the Labor Plan, and reversal of the gov-
ernment’s economic policies—in short, a comprehensive change of regime and policy.
Thus, the government’s effort to depoliticize labor had actually resulted in an admit-
tedly divided labor movement assuming a central role in national politics previously
performed by the now outlawed political parties. As in the case of economic policy, the
results of government labor policy proved in many ways contrary to government
objectives.
As mounting public protests against the government occurred in 1984–85, labor
groups played a key coordinating role. At the plant level, individual unions refocused
their energies on demands for improved wages and working conditions. Outside the
organized labor movement, which had lost many members to unemployment and re-
pression, a variety of women’s groups, local committees, agricultural cooperatives, and
ad hoc shantytown associations carried on self-help and anti-regime activities all over
Chile. Many of these groups maintained some connections with clandestine party net-
works, Church-related organizations, and labor unions. In other cases they operated in
relative isolation, attempting to feed the hungry, hide the persecuted, improve local
distribution of consumer goods, and maintain community or local solidarity.
Aware of the mounting frustration and, in some cases, political organization of hun-
dreds of thousands of shantytown dwellers, the government carried out recurrent
night-time raids to demobilize anti-government groups active in the poblaciones. The
urban poor had long constituted a dilemma for Chilean political leaders, but now the
cumulative effects of the military government’s economic and internal security policies
had the effect of radicalizing many shantytown dwellers, particularly the young and
unemployed. The extreme social segregation between the urban poor and the residents
of middle- and upper-class neighborhoods of Santiago made the apparent radicaliza-
tion of these groups of great concern to many elements in the capital. Lack of knowl-
edge and contact among rich and poor reached levels never before experienced in
Chile, producing an eerie if imperfect analogue to racial ghettos in the United States.
The fear of unleashing the stored-up hatred of the pobladores limited the willingness of
many opposition groups with middle-class constituencies to adopt an insurrectionary
style in efforts to replace General Pinochet with a more moderate administration.
At the same time, contradictory as it might seem, a significant minority of pobladores
continued to support General Pinochet, whether because they had benefited directly
from the government’s public works and housing programs, or their children had re-
ceived nutritional and day care services, or because they remembered negatively the
intense politicization of daily life from 1970 to 1973. Support for the government within
the poblaciones and elsewhere also resulted, in part, from General Pinochet’s successful
efforts to transform the pre-existing network of mothers’ clubs (centros de madres) into
a clientelistic base of support. Affiliated nationally in an organization called CEMA,
headed officially by General Pinochet’s wife (CEMA had customarily been headed by
the wives of Chile’s civilian presidents), CEMA provided an instrument for mobilizing
a feminine social base for the regime. Wives of military officers were assigned to coor-
dinate local groups, distribute patronage, carry out educational programs, and enlist
women in the crusade to purify the nation and to restore the order and harmony so nec-
essary for family life. These appeals to morality, patriotism, and feminine virtue, along
with material benefits customarily distributed through the CEMA network since the
1960s, garnered significant, if minority, support for the regime from women of all so-
cial classes.
Differences of opinion within the poblaciones, as well as among women’s organiza-
DICTATORSHIP 297

tions and community groups, were symptomatic of persistent political and ideological
cleavages within Chilean society. The wave of protests initiated in 1983 eventually gave
rise to the resurgence of the three major political blocks characteristic of Chile since the
1930s. On the political right, a so-called Group of 8 allied a range of gremialista, “na-
tionalist,” and more traditional conservative politicians who provided a civilian face
for the social base of the Pinochet government. Eventually some of these groups would
seek to distance themselves from the government and form a new united rightist po-
litical party (in 1987) so as to appear as likely participants in a transitional coalition
when Pinochet passed from the scene. In the short term, however, the political right
supplied ministers and advisers to the junta.
In 1983, in an effort to contain the wave of mass protests and demonstrations, Gen-
eral Pinochet appointed the ex-leader of the National party, Sergio Onofre Jarpa, as
minister of interior. Feigning a willingness to negotiate with the “responsible” (non-
Marxist) opposition, General Pinochet deftly utilized the rightist politicos as shills in a
so-called political opening, or apertura. In reality, Jarpa had no power and certainly no
ability to meet the most important demands of the opposition: General Pinochet’s res-
ignation and the immediate return to democracy. Nevertheless, the participation of
civilian politicians from the rightist parties and movements as figureheads of the ad-
ministration gave a veneer of legitimacy and a hint of flexibility to the Pinochet gov-
ernment. It also served to reinforce divisions between centrist and leftist opponents of
the regime inasmuch as the government seemed to accept the existence of the Christian
Democrats and their allies de facto, if not de jure, so long as the left remained excluded
from dialogue or participation in the political process.
The political center, including the Christian Democrats, Social Democrats, Radicals,
part of the Socialist party, and other smaller groups united in the Alianza Democrática
(AD). The Alianza repeatedly called for Pinochet’s resignation and favored rapid tran-
sition to a more democratic system. However, it rejected the use of violence to oust
Pinochet and opposed a coalition with Marxist parties and movements in any transi-
tional government alternative to the junta. With a diverse and multi-class social base,
the parties and movements of the Alianza occupied a tenuous, shifting middle ground
between the junta’s program of anti-politics and their own desire to limit leftist influ-
ence in Chile while, at the same time, restoring most civil liberties, electoral politics,
and a set of government initiatives closer to the developmentalist and redistributionist
policies of the 1960s. Frustrated in its negotiations with Minister Jarpa, the parties and
movements which had made up the Alianza Democrática, and particularly Christian
Democrats, continued to view themselves as the obvious successors to Pinochet in any
transition from authoritarian rule—either within the bounds of the 1980 constitution or
through a return to the constitution of 1925.
On the left, the Communist party, MIR, and a part of the Socialist party identified
with ex-Popular Unity Minister, Clodomiro Almeyda, formed the Movimiento Demo-
crático Popular (MDP). The MDP called for all forms of resistance against the dictator-
ship and still insisted upon the ultimate goal of a socialist society in Chile. Operating
both clandestinely and also “above ground,” when conditions permitted, the MDP’s
revolutionary objectives and declarations gave credibility to General Pinochet’s re-
peated warnings to Chileans of a “return to chaos” should his administration succumb
to the demands of the politicians for a return to the past. Likewise, the MDP’s tactics
and strategic objectives separated the left from the political center just as had been the
case since the 1930s. Between the MDP and the AD, a “Socialist bloc” (some socialists,
left Catholics, and other smaller groups) represented an ideological transition between
the revolutionary Marxist left and the political center.
After more than a decade of a dictatorship dedicated to depoliticizing Chilean soci-
298 CHILE

ety, the major ideological and organizational tendencies—which had emerged in the
1930s, dominated national life from 1930 to 1973, been blamed by the military and its
supporters for the crisis of 1970–73, and suffered concerted attacks since 1973—sur-
vived, reasserted themselves, challenged the regime, and continued unable to draw
forth a consensual basis for Chilean politics and society. Even among the groups firmly
opposed to the new Constitution and to the thrust of government policies, historical
animosities and basic disagreements over an alternative to the Pinochet government
prevented formation of a unified opposition movement. General Pinochet well under-
stood and skillfully utilized these divisions amongst the opposition to maintain him-
self in power.
To some extent, the new constitution assisted Pinochet in this effort, as did changes
in internal politics and the foreign policies of the United States. United States policy to-
ward Chile had shifted considerably from President Nixon’s support and assistance in
the early years of the military government—juxtaposed to congressional legislation re-
stricting military and other aid—to President Carter’s public condemnation of human
rights abuses, to President Reagan’s reemphasis on anti-communism. Never, however,
had U.S. foreign policy prevented General Pinochet from obtaining private foreign
loans or investments. This had proved especially important during the height of the
economic “miracle,” and it proved critical once again in the mid-1980s.
In particular, United States support for millions of dollars’ worth of credits, loans,
and loan guarantees by the World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and large
syndicates of private commercial banks helped to buffer Chile’s debt burden and fi-
nanced public works, new investments, and palliative make-work programs. The
earthquake of 1985 (see Chapter 1) complicated the country’s economic recovery, but
also justified major new loan programs from international agencies for reconstruction
of ports, highways, bridges, housing, and other physical infrastructure. All these proj-
ects helped to alleviate social and economic pressures. They also allowed General
Pinochet to claim the confidence of the international banking community in his efforts
to maintain himself in power and to institutionalize the new political order.
Dramatic declines in oil prices, plunging international interest rates, and economic
recovery in the United States and Europe in the mid-1980s also provided breathing
space for Pinochet by bolstering the Chilean economy. Economic recovery, again based
on export expansion and imported capital, allowed unemployment to drop to “only”
10 percent in 1987. As the value of exports climbed to over $4 billion and the country
achieved a trade balance of approximately $1 billion, enthusiastic government policy-
makers reaffirmed the validity of the export-driven model of economic growth. Stimu-
lation of nontraditional exports reached new “highs” in late 1986 when the government
announced that “a company that markets bathroom fixtures under the Fanaloza trade
mark, has just shipped a trial order of 2,175 toilet-and-tank units to the United States.
. . . The company’s general manager said that this is one of Fanaloza’s most exciting
export operations since it started shipping yacht bathroom fixtures in 1984.” Exports of
toilet tank units aside, the gradual diversification and expansion of manufactured ex-
ports and services would be a hallmark of the military government’s economic policies
that drove economic growth into the 1990s.
Along with renewed export growth, an innovative debt-equity conversion scheme
enhanced the regime’s international credibility. This scheme permitted investors to pur-
chase government “foreign debt notes” at a discount, outside of Chile, and to exchange
them at full face value in pesos to pay debts, acquire stock or fixed assets, or assets re-
ceived in payment of foreclosure, or to finance new investments in Chile. The debt-
equity conversion process which, according to official estimates, involved $1.96 billion
DICTATORSHIP 299

from mid-1985 to June 1987, both helped to retire some of the 20 billion-dollar foreign
debt and to reprivatize assets obtained by the government as a result of the collapse in
the early 1980s. Hailed by officials of the United States Treasury and by international
lenders as a model of innovation for other Latin American debtors, the Chilean govern-
ment also persisted in its efforts to attract new foreign investment and to revitalize the
private sector of the economy. Indeed, CORFO sold stock in government-owned com-
panies to foreign investors and to the major private pension funds in order to raise
money and to renew the divestiture program. Significant new investments from private
companies and banks from Canada, New Zealand, Australia, West Germany, France,
Spain, the United Kingdom, and the United States, together with new credit lines from
the World Bank, InterAmerican Development Bank, and private foreign financial insti-
tutions, added to the Pinochet administration’s optimism about the economy. Though
a new United States ambassador to Chile openly discussed with members of the oppo-
sition the possibility of General Pinochet’s departure from government, public and pri-
vate economic policymakers in the United States provided encouragement and sub-
stantial leverage for General Pinochet in his efforts to survive the challenges to his
administration.

By the time General Pinochet had successfully orchestrated the constitutional plebiscite
of 1980, frustration and desperation had already led to escalation in the tactics used by
some elements of the opposition in efforts to rid the country of an ever more personal-
ist dictatorship. The evident ineffectiveness of the centrist and rightist opposition,
along with the need to re-establish its own credibility, led the Communist party of Chile
to call publicly for the use of all types of struggle against the dictatorship. A commit-
ment to armed struggle, as a part of an overall resistance to the Pinochet government,
allied the Communists with MIR and certain sectors of the Socialist party. The 1979 vic-
tory of the Sandinistas in Nicaragua against the Somoza dictatorship gave this tactic
some credibility, despite the obvious differences between Nicaragua and Chile. In ad-
dition, the new Reagan administration in the United States shifted emphasis in U.S.
policy away from a focus on human rights issues and clearly supported the Pinochet
government in international forums. Lack of viable internal alternatives to Pinochet,
and the loss of hope for U.S. pressures on the regime for changes in policies, made the
new Communist tactic understandable, if very unlikely to achieve success. However, it
also made it practically impossible for Christian Democratic leadership or other dem-
ocratic movements to join in a unified opposition coalition even for the limited purpose
of ousting General Pinochet.
Lack of unity did not prevent growing levels of opposition among all strata of the
Chilean population after the collapse of the “miracle” in 1981. Reversals of economic
policy and disputes among diverse entrepreneurial groups over corrective measures
fragmented the “nonpolitical” social base of the government. The resurgence of labor
protests and strikes, calls both for Pinochet’s resignation and for restoration of democ-
racy from all the old political parties (theoretically nonexistent under the new consti-
tution), and increasing numbers of “days of protest” all raised the hopes of opposition
forces that General Pinochet’s regime had run its course. By mid-1984, expectations
were high for a quick end to the dictatorship. Daring headlines in opposition newspa-
pers even declared in bold print: “He doesn’t want to leave”—and in smaller print—
“We’ll have to throw him out.” A year later, in August 1985, a temporary opposition
coalition hammered out a “National Accord for Transition to Full Democracy.” This
Acuerdo called for immediate termination to the states of “constitutional exception”
(state of siege, state of emergency, state of internal commotion, etc.), restoration of uni-
300 CHILE

versity autonomy, an end to political banishment and exile, and constitutional reforms
that eliminated the main elements of the “Constitution of Liberty.” The Acuerdo also
called for programs of economic reactivation, abandonment of the neo-liberal policies,
creation of jobs, and an active role for the state in reshaping the Chilean economy. In short,
the opposition asked General Pinochet to surrender both his office and the major
changes he had introduced since 1973.
Surrender was not acceptable. Instead, Pinochet announced that the 1980 constitu-
tion would remain in effect, that he would complete his term of office scheduled to end
in 1989, and that he had not yet decided whether he would be a candidate, as the con-
stitution allowed, for the term which would end in 1997. Opposition newspapers, mag-
azines, and other publications, which had appeared in the “political opening” allowed
by Pinochet from 1983 to 1984, again were censored or closed down. Selective detentions
and harassment reminded the opposition of the limits to the general’s tolerance. On the
political left, declarations that the Acuerdo was no substitute for armed struggle rein-
forced General Pinochet’s determination and frightened many middle- and upper-class
Chileans who were bombarded with the threat of “Cubanization” and “Nicaraguaniza-
tion” of Chile. In fact, small groups of military cadres were being trained in Cuba,
Nicaragua, and elsewhere for eventual return to Chile to fight against the dictatorship.
Although never a military threat to the junta, the existence of these cadres and the pub-
licized operations they carried out unintentionally served the military regime’s pur-
poses by demonstrating that “terrorists” and “guerrillas” were not merely an invention
of government propagandists. Groups which preferred some measure of liberalization,
without Marxist participation in Chilean politics, saw no obvious alternative to Pinochet’s
continuation in office. Christian Democratic, social democratic, and more conservative
political groups found themselves without a concrete program for temporary or long-
term replacement of Pinochet and the new system of “protected democracy.” Nor could
they patch together a workable formula for accommodating the reality of the persist-
ence of the left in Chilean society and politics. General Pinochet had not succeeded in
depoliticizing Chile, but the perpetuation and intensification of political polarization
served his interests in the mid-1980s, if only by preventing the opposition from uniting
effectively against him.
A key to General Pinochet’s political survival remained his control over the military,
and especially over the army and the internal security forces. Through manipulations
of command assignments, modification of the career and retirement system, and per-
sonalist patronage, General Pinochet had established a base of support in the army. As
commander-in-chief of the armed forces, he relied upon respect for hierarchy and mil-
itary discipline to maintain formal control over the other services. Certain elements
within the military had adopted a radical anti-Marxism as a collective political com-
mitment, and this base of ideologically oriented officers provided further support for
General Pinochet’s stance against a return to the past. Further, Chilean sociologists Ar-
turo Chacón and Humberto Lagos reported, in a study called La Religión en las Fuerzas
Armadas y de Orden, that by 1986 some 15,000 members of the Chilean armed forces had
joined evangelical churches, and become “zealous proselytizers, anti-Catholic, anti-
communist and anti-Marxist.”
These new trends within the military institutions after 1973 also introduced contra-
dictions which led to difficulties for the Pinochet government. Disagreements over
economic policy and over the permanent political role of key officers, if not the en-
tire armed forces, under the new constitution, bothered some Chilean military profes-
sionals who still preferred a narrower focus on external defense, force modernization,
and professional careers apart from responsibility for policymaking. Other officers re-
DICTATORSHIP 301

sented the personalization of the government, the relative dominance of the army and
security forces, and the civilian population’s understandable antagonism for what ex-
gremialista leader, Orlando Sáenz, now called Chile’s military institutions: “an occupy-
ing force.” A number of officers even held a real preference for civilian, democratic
institutions, though most shared concern about the participation of the left in a demo-
cratic system.
By the early 1980s some officers were well aware of the advantages to the armed
forces of negotiating some sort of extrication from the military’s political role at mini-
mal damage to the military institutions. But with whom could military officers negotiate
such an extrication? And who could guarantee their lives and careers against revenge
for the years of repression if the government changed? (These fears would be dramat-
ically reactivated in 1999, when a renovated Supreme Court somewhat “reinterpreted”
the 1978 Amnesty Decree and charged high-ranking officers for crimes against human
rights.) No civilian coalition or political force had emerged that could effectively chal-
lenge General Pinochet, present an alternative program widely enough shared to offer
some chance of success, or, most importantly, comply with any agreement negotiated
with the military as a way to initiate a transition to a more democratic, civilian gov-
ernment. The profound ideological and organizational divisions of the Chilean polity,
the lack of any obvious personage (after the death of Eduardo Frei in 1982) with whom
to replace General Pinochet, and the lack of effective guarantees against persecution,
trials, and loss of career (as occurred in some cases in Argentina after restoration of
civilian government in 1983), all restrained the efforts of military officers who might
otherwise have sought a gradual process of accommodation with certain civilian par-
ties and movements. Nevertheless, dissent within the air force and navy took the form
of public criticisms, leading to forced retirements and changes in command assign-
ments. This public criticism continued even after an assassination attempt against Gen-
eral Pinochet in early September 1986 in which a number of his military escort were
wounded or killed.
Responding to the assassination attempt, to dissent within the military institutions,
to the discovery of a large Cuban-supplied arms cache in northern Chile, and to civilian
calls for his ouster, General Pinochet unleashed a new campaign of repression, murder,
and detentions against targeted civilians. He replaced the army member of the junta
with the director of the secret police and forced a number of generals into retirement.
General Pinochet reiterated his intention to remain in office until 1989 and to institu-
tionalize the new political order. Providing a symbolic gesture to domestic and external
critics, he ended the “state of siege” (reduced to a “state of emergency”) and promul-
gated a new law on political parties in early 1987—with the expected limitations on
party functions and the exclusion of Marxist and other “subversive” organizations.
Ultimately, only military acquiescence in the removal of General Pinochet, or an un-
expected problem with his health, appeared to offer any chance of cutting short the
constitutionally prescribed term ending in 1989. In a further irony of the military
regime, civilian politicians once again looked to the military to remove a president by
other than constitutional means, in order to achieve the objective they believed would
be attained in 1973: restoration of democratic government with exclusions on partici-
pation by Marxists and the left. However, democracy without the participation of more
than 30 percent of the Chilean population remained as much a contradiction in 1987 as
it had forty years earlier with adoption of the “Law for the Permanent Defense of
Democracy” in the administration of President González Videla.
Unable to unite, unable to provide the military with assurances of institutional in-
tegrity and immunity from prosecution for abuses of human rights, and unable to
302 CHILE

agree upon a formula for short-term transition or for a new political system, the oppo-
sition to General Pinochet was openly discouraged at the beginning of 1987. Groups on
the political right sought to find some new common ground in anticipation of the pol-
itics of succession in 1989; the center continued criticizing government policies and
seeking new temporary coalitions and agreements as a basis for restoring democracy,
though the Socialist party withdrew from the Alianza Democrática at the end of 1986.
The left, divided as always, gave some support to the centrist projects while the more
revolutionary groups advocated political mobilization and, where possible, armed re-
sistance against the regime.
An historic papal visit to Chile in early April, 1987, preceded by unprecedented lev-
els of political posturing and maneuvering by government and opposition forces, fo-
cused the world’s attention once again both on the abuses of the Pinochet government
and the divisions among the opposition to the regime. At the behest of John Paul II, op-
position forces from left to right, including the Communist party, signed a vague
pledge to work for a peaceful transition to democracy and met together to consider the
possibilities of the political moment. However, this unusual meeting of leaders from
Chile’s fragmented opposition had much less impact than the fierce military and police
repression against regime opponents who defiantly protested government policies
during a papal mass attended by hundreds of thousands of Chileans in Santiago. Tele-
vised around the world, the violent disruption of the papal ceremony symbolized the
stalemate of Chilean politics in 1987. General Pinochet blamed the violence on Com-
munist agitators; the opposition took heart from the Pope’s message of peace and soli-
darity with those who suffered from injustice, unemployment, and misery, but were
unable to agree on the “true” message of the Pope or to translate the Pope’s spiritual
solidarity into political power. Thus, in the short term, the Pope’s visit to Chile did lit-
tle to change the reality of the dictatorship’s hold on the country.
By mid-1987, government and opposition preparations for the plebiscite to select a
president for the term 1989–97, as required by the 1980 constitution, took center stage

Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos, Patio of the Vicaría de la Solidari-

dad, 1987. (Courtesy of Archivo Vicaría de la Solidaridad.)
DICTATORSHIP 303

in Chile’s political drama. Even as destructive storms ravaged central Chile in July
1987, leaving a toll of human death and injury as well as extensive damage to roads,
bridges, farms and housing, opposition groups debated the most effective tactics for
confronting the dictatorship in the upcoming plebiscite. Some favored refusal to regis-
ter, abstentionism, selection of an alternate candidate to oppose whomever the gov-
ernment selected (despite constitutional provisions for a single candidate in the 1988
plebiscite), or pressuring the government to allow “free and competitive elections.”
Others dismissed the feasibility of electoral opposition and urged continued armed
resistance.
While the moderate opposition discussed electoral tactics, and the Manuel Ro-
dríguez Patriotic Front carried out a variety of armed actions against the government,
General Pinochet insisted upon compliance with the transitory provisions of the 1980
constitution. This meant exclusion of Marxists and other “subversives” from the polit-
ical process and institutionalization of the authoritarian political order. In October 1987
the dictatorship again made clear its commitment to these objectives in new repressive
legislation. In an obvious effort to limit political debate and bulwark the regime against
a new wave of protests and labor activism, the military junta sought to bar employment
of “Marxists” in education and journalism, provided for fines against news media
which propagated “Marxist” ideas, and even threatened penalties against groups and
individuals who cooperated politically or proposed coalitions with Marxist move-
ments or parties.
In these circumstances, the insights reportedly offered by President Salvador All-
ende to opposition leader Orlando Sáenz, about a month before Allende’s death,
seemed ever more prophetic:

Let me tell you something. . . . You are looking for a military dictatorship. And from
somewhere, not that I believe there’s anything after death, but still, if there is, I shall
look down on you all and find you all together, casting about for ways to get out of
power the military man you replace me with. I shall see you all there, plotting and
planning it, but with a great deal more difficulty than you are having now, how to get
rid of the soldier you put in my place. Because it won’t cost you much to get him in.
But by heaven, it will cost you something to get him out.

If these words were Allende’s prophecy, he proved clairvoyant. Fifteen years had
passed since September 11, 1973; the military junta still controlled the country.
The plebiscite provided for in the 1980 constitution to allow popular approval or re-
jection of the military junta’s candidate for president from 1989 to 1997 created an op-
portunity for voter rejection of Pinochet. In February 1988, most of the opposition
groups agreed to work together in the plebiscite in the form of a Concertación de Par-
tidos por la Democracia; several months later the Communist party and some other
leftist factions joined the anti-Pinochet electoral strategy to oust the dictator. Pinochet’s
advisers had convinced him in 1980 to accept the constitution to legitimate the new po-
litical order. Now the charter for Chile’s Alice in Wonderland potentially threatened the
reign of the Queen of Hearts. It also offered the possibility of changing the new politi-
cal system within the law. Thus the opposition turned the plebiscite, intended as an in-
strument to perpetuate the military regime, into a device to defeat the dictator in an in-
ternationally observed electoral event and to initiate a year-long interim period before
holding competitive presidential and congressional elections.
On August 30, 1988, the military junta named Pinochet the candidate for president,
subject to voter approval in the plebiscite scheduled for October 5. The government
ended the state of exception and allowed most exiles to return to the country. Under in-
304 CHILE

ternational scrutiny, the pre-plebiscite campaign enrolled 92 percent of eligible voters.

More spectacularly, the government provided fifteen minutes per day for Pinochet and
anti-Pinochet political spots on national television. The television campaign became an
artistic, musical, testimonial, and commercial contest awaited every evening by mil-
lions of Chileans. The Concertación attempted to persuade voters that they had noth-
ing to fear, that change was possible, that finally they could restore democracy to Chile.
Television spots for the “No” campaign became so popular that a videocassette of the
best segments was distributed and marketed throughout the country. The political jin-
gle, “La alegría ya viene” (“Happy times are coming”) was so contagious that Minister
of Interior Sergio Fernández complained that even government supporters were “hum-
ming it despite themselves.”
Pinochet’s “Yes” campaign (yes to Pinochet for eight more years) emphasized the
achievements of the military regime, that Chile was a successful nation (un país
ganador), and that the supporters of the “No” campaign, if victorious, would take the
country back to the horrors of political polarization of 1970–73. Televised images of
strikes, riots, police with clubs and tear gas, and food lines told voters to vote Yes, to
reaffirm Pinochet’s and the military’s salvation of the country from chaos and interna-
tional Marxism. The Yes campaign’s initial television spots lacked polish; responding
to the No campaign’s sophisticated political advertising, the Yes spin-masters belatedly
delivered more effective Madison Avenue–style political spots.
The No campaign succeeded. Fifty-five percent of voters rejected another eight
years of Pinochet, but even after seventeen years of dictatorship some 43 percent of the
electorate favored continued authoritarian rule. Chileans held their breath to see if
Pinochet would accept the voters’ decision. After the three other junta members re-
fused his late-night request for them to sign a decree granting him “extraordinary pow-
ers” and deploying the army in Santiago’s streets, Pinochet reluctantly acknowledged
the opposition’s victory. It remained to be seen if the general would respect the 1980
constitution, govern for an interim year as the law specified, then call elections and
hand over the presidential sash to his successor in March 1990.
After defeat in the plebiscite the military government turned its attention to re-
designing the election system and gerrymandering electoral districts to suit their pur-
poses before the 1989 elections. The new election law reduced the number of deputies
in the Chamber of Deputies from the 150 in Congress prior to 1973 to 120 and created
60 electoral districts, each sending two deputies to Congress. This binomial (two seats
per district) system would use a special version of proportional representation that al-
lotted one seat in Congress to parties or coalitions that obtained the highest number of
votes in the district, and the other seat to the second finisher, unless the winning party
or coalition doubled the second finishers vote total. In practice, this meant that the
rightist parties could elect a congressmen in each district where they obtained 33.4 per-
cent of the vote. Indeed, the binomial system was designed to provide the rightist mi-
nority a long-term guarantee of overrepresentation in Congress. It also put internal
stress on the Concertación because only two candidates could be presented in each dis-
trict from the variety of parties that made up the coalition. Pre-election bargaining and
horse-trading for future candidacies and government patronage were necessary to
hold the coalition together. In contrast, the political right consisted essentially of two
major parties, Renovación Nacional (RN) and Unión Demócrata Independiente (UDI),
both of which could present one candidate in each electoral district and allow the vot-
ers to decide directly which party would send their candidate to Congress.
The 1989 elections gave the Concertación coalition 72 seats versus 48 for the pro-
Pinochet parties. With their nine designated senators and sixteen elected senators,
DICTATORSHIP 305

however, the rightists had a majority in the Senate (25–22), providing an insurmount-
able obstacle to constitutional reform and an effective brake on numerous policy ini-
tiatives contained in the Concertación program.
Before Aylwin was inaugurated and the new Congress began to function, the mili-
tary government and the Concertación negotiated constitutional reforms, approved by
plebiscite (July 1989). Among the some fifty reforms, approval of the 1989 constitu-
tional plebiscite reduced the term of office to four years for the president who would
take office in 1990, made subsequent constitutional reforms slightly easier (two-thirds
in both legislative bodies instead of three-fifths in two consecutive congresses), and
increased the number of elected senators (but retained nine senators designated by
the president and representatives of the armed forces). In a free and fair election on
December 14, 1989, the Concertación candidate, Christian Democrat Patricio Aylwin
(who had bitterly opposed the Unidad Popular program in 1970 and had initially sup-
ported the military coup in 1973), garnered 55 percent of the vote against Pinochet’s
ex–Minister of Economy Hernán Büchi and the independent rightist candidacy of
Franciso Javier Errázuriz.
The Concertación’s slogan in the 1988 plebiscite, “happy times are coming,” echoed

table 10–7. congressional elections

(cámara de diputados), 1989

Votes Percent*

Christian Democrats 1,766,347 26.74

Party for Democracy (PPD) 890,947 13.48
Socialist Party 210,918 3.19
Radical Party and PRSD 369,703 5.59
Other Concertación† 273,580 4.1

Total Concertación 3,511,495 53.1

Renovación Nacional 1,274,298 19.29

UDI 685,911 10.38
IND 194,911 2.95
INDPS 171,229 2.59
Total “Democracy and Progress” coalition 2,326,349 35.21

Other Parties (Non-Coalition)

LIBSOC 206,138 3.12
U. Dem. 360,597 5.45
AL Centro 177,942 2.69
INDEP 127,941 1.93
NAC 53,819 0.81
Del Sur 47,387 0.71

Total valid votes 6,605,530

Source: Germán Urzúa Valenzuela, Historia política de Chile y su evolución electoral (desde 1810
a 1992), Santiago: Editorial Jurídica, 1992, p. 76.
*Percentages do not add to 100 because of rounding.
†
The Concertación included seventeen parties, movements, and political groups. Small par-
ties and movements included, among others, Humanists, Social Democrats, PADENA,
USOPO.
306 CHILE

table 10–8. presidential elections, december 14, 1989

Valid Votes Percent

Patricio Aylwin 3,850.023 55.2

Hernán Büchi 2,051,975 29.4
Francisco Errázuriz 1,076,894 15.4

Total 6,978,892 100.0

Source: Germán Urzúa Valenzuela, Historia política de Chile y su evolución elec-

toral (desde 1810 a 1992), Santiago: Editorial Jurídica, 1992, p. 763; Que Pasa, De-
cember 16, 1999; p. 11.

the slogan of President Pérez in 1861 (see Chapter 6) as he inaugurated his “govern-
ment of all, for all” in the transition from the Montt-Varas authoritarian regime to a
more liberal polity (1861–71). The Socialist party’s motto, “a Chile for all [Chileans]”
(“un Chile para todos”) came even closer to Pérez’s “un Chile de todos, para todos.” But just
as Pérez was constrained by the 1833 constitution and the political coalitions that con-
trolled the Congress from 1861 to 1871, the Aylwin coalition government came to office
by accepting the legitimacy of the 1980 constitution—which many of the parties and
spokespersons for the Concertación had previously rejected. Rumors had it that many
“informal” guarantees had also been afforded to General Pinochet and the armed
forces regarding the 1978 amnesty decree, respect for the relative autonomy of military
institutions, and promises not to pursue the human rights issue too vigorously—de-
spite the official Concertación program’s call for “truth and justice.” Accepting the 1980
constitution meant, at least for the interim, accepting “protected democracy.” This po-
litical reality provided the political right, the armed forces, business groups, and for-
eign investors with normative force to accompany their political and economic power.
The constitutional and legal constraints on the incoming government reinforced the ef-
fects of the economic reforms that had divested the national government of most pub-
lic enterprises through accelerated privatization from 1986 to 1988.
Major economic producer associations (fruit, mining, forestry, and fisheries, along
with the traditional associations such as the SNA and SOFOFA) had become ever more
important participants in policymaking and in determining the course of the economy.
Creation of an independent Central Bank, on the model of the U.S. Federal Reserve,
took monetary policy away from presidential control. And although the Concertación
had gained a majority in the Chamber of Deputies, the nine designated senators gave
veto power in the Senate to the major rightist parties, Renovación Nacional, and UDI
(the party of Jaime Guzman, principal architect of the 1980 constitution).
In some ways General Pinochet (and, indirectly, foreign investors and domestic en-
trepreneurs) snatched victory from defeat. Pinochet would become the father of Chile’s
new “democracy,” the army commander in the new civilian administration, the guar-
antor that the Concertación government would abide by the political formula that the
junta and its supporters had imposed. He had the electoral system redesigned and as-
sured himself and his allies veto power in the Congress and the continued tenure in of-
fice for the judges, bureaucrats, and military officers he had appointed. He had accepted
the results of the 1988 plebiscite in an emotional televised address to the nation. He like-
wise accepted the 1989 constitutional reforms and the voters’ verdict in the 1989 elec-
tions. He scoffed at those who called him “dictator,” asking rhetorically, “What sort of
DICTATORSHIP 307

dictator allows himself to be voted out of office, accepts constitutional reforms through
plebiscite, and respects the outcome of presidential and congressional elections?”
Like Ibáñez from 1927 to 1931, Pinochet claimed that he had heard his nation’s call,
responded as a patriot, and rescued la patria from irresponsible and corrupt politicians,
subversives, and international communism. He had saved the country from the Marx-
ists; now he was orchestrating the return to democracy. As he put it, more than once,
“Mission Accomplished” (misión cumplida).
On the anniversary of the 1973 coup, September 11, 1989, General Pinochet told
Chileans: “The armed forces have reconstructed authentic democracy. They have de-
finitively carried out their mission. . . . I love this country more than life itself.” In the
days before General Pinochet left office the military junta issued a spate of new decrees
and “organic laws” (leyes orgánicas) further constraining the policy initiatives of the in-
coming government and protecting the armed forces, police, judiciary, and bureaucrats
appointed by the military from dismissal by the new president. General Pinochet would
bequeath not only his political system but also his political appointees throughout the
government to the next administration.
The Concertación labeled these last-minute decrees leyes de amarre (“laws that
bind”). General Pinochet proclaimed that he would leave the Concertación govern-
ment “todo atado y bien atado” (“tied up, and well tied up”). The dictatorship was end-
ing, but the “authentic democracy” bequeathed by the military junta and its civilian
allies was on a very short tether. President Aylwin would take power with less consti-
tutional authority to control the armed forces than any president in Chile’s history. And
the government coalition would be tightly bound by the new institutional order, by the
leyes de amarre, and by the fear of an authoritarian resurgence during the next four
years.
11 Concertación
THE PAST IN THE PRESENT

On March 11, 1990, Patricio Aylwin took office as Chile’s first elected president since
1970. His Minister of Justice, Francisco Cumplido, had written in 1983: “The Constitu-
tion of 1980 does not meet, in its elaboration or the manner in which it was ratified, the
essential conditions required by constitutional doctrine for the existence of a legitimate
political order based on the rule of law.” Aylwin, in a speech closing the meeting of the
Grupo de Estudios Constitucionales in 1984, had insisted that “[following] the proce-
dures for transition in the 1980 Constitution will only serve to consolidate a regime of
permanent dictatorship. . . . On this road democracy is not reached. Accepting it is
accepting the actual dictatorship and the authoritarian regime to which it leads. Doing
this means renouncing the reestablishment of democracy.” Aylwin continued: “We
comply with this Constitution as part of the current reality. . . . We comply with it de-
spite the fact that it is repugnant to us.”
In 1990, Aylwin, Cumplido, and the rest of the cabinet, the newly elected legislators
of the Concertación coalition, swore an oath to uphold the 1980 constitution and the po-
litical order that they had rejected as repugnant and illegitimate. They paid this tactical
price for peaceful transition from military regime to elected civilian government.
Viewed retrospectively, the decision to pay such a price was consistent with Chilean
political history. The victors at the Battle of Lircay (1830) overturned the 1828 constitu-
tion to impose, in 1833, an autocratic republic. From 1833 presidents routinely re-
pressed political opposition, imposing regimes of exception and using “extraordinary
authority” ( facultades extraordinarias). Press censorship emulated the practices of the
colonial Inquisition; censors burned banned books in public to mid-century.
Until the 1870s, when they finally managed to implement constitutional reforms, the
factions defeated in internecine strife alternately struggled against and swore alle-
giance to the 1833 constitution. Writing in 1860, liberal politician and revolutionary
Federico Errázuriz denounced the 1833 constitution as the foundation of tyranny. In
1871, as the newly elected president Errázuriz swore to uphold it until reforms were
possible. In 1874, forty-four years and two civil wars after the battle at Lircay, constitu-
tional reforms somewhat liberalized the 1833 charter. Even so, many of the authoritar-
ian legacies dating from colonial times and the autocratic republic, both institutional
and cultural, persisted into the 1890s.
In 1891 blood spilt in another civil war reaffirmed the liberal victory but also the au-
thoritarian past. After a series of political amnesties from 1891 to 1894, the defeated ad-
vocates of presidentialism (the Balmacedistas) swore their loyalty to a system that they
had spent the lives of thousands to overturn. The Balmacedista political party (Liberal
Democrats) took center stage in political bargaining, coalition management, and the
distribution of political patronage. Balmacedistas served in Congress, in presidential
cabinets, in the judiciary, and in the armed forces. In 1915 a Balmacedista president took
office without a hint of constitutional crisis.

308
CONCERTACIÓN: THE PAST IN THE PRESENT 309

By the 1920s different social forces, including a modernized and more professional
army officer corps and a rising labor movement, challenged the reformed 1833 regime.
Bayonets once again imposed a new constitution. A military coup in September 1924
(and a second coup in January 1925) precipitated an end to the “parliamentary repub-
lic.” Some months later, after first orchestrating a plebiscite to legitimate the work of an
ad hoc constitutional commission, the government promulgated the constitution of
1925, a constitution no more legitimate in its manner of elaboration or its manner of
approval than its predecessors of 1828 and 1833. After the brief presidency of ex-
Balmacedista Emilio Figueroa Larraín (December 1925–April 1927), Carlos Ibáñez del
Campo, the most prominent military officer in the 1924–25 military movements,
arranged his own “election” to the presidency, receiving approximately 98 percent of
the votes cast.
Ibáñez governed as virtual dictator until 1931, when the world economic crisis pro-
voked economic collapse in Chile and he was forced from office by student demon-
strations and strikes by white-collar professionals, including doctors and bureaucrats.
During his presidency Ibáñez enjoyed the support of key civilian technocrats and of
many politicians from the centrist and rightist political parties. Congress continued to
function after legally avoiding elections by handpicking a “consensus slate” of legisla-
tors at the Termas de Chillán. In the tradition of Bernardo O’Higgins’ abdication in
1823, Ibáñez chose resignation and exile in 1931 rather than unleashing the army
against the civilian population in Santiago.
After an interval of political chaos and military unrest (1931–32), the 1925 constitu-
tion became effectively the law of the land. The country experienced almost four
decades of institutional stability. From 1932 to 1970 Chile was the only Latin American
country without a single irregular presidential succession. Elections occurred as sched-
uled, supervised after 1941 by the armed forces as stipulated in the election law ap-
proved by the congress. But always there were significant minorities who rejected the
legitimacy of the 1925 constitution and the existing political order, who called for an end
to capitalism, “formal democracy,” and social injustice. As in the past, those who called
for an end to the existing regime served in Congress, the bureaucracy, the judiciary, the
armed forces, and government agencies. They swore loyalty to the constitution and
promised to uphold the laws, even as they sought to overturn them: a Socialist colonel,
Marmaduque Grove, led the battle in 1932 to establish a “república socialista”; in the late
1930s a Nazi congressmen called for an end to the corrupt liberal regime from his seat
in the legislature, then headed a coup attempt in 1938; in the 1940s and 1950s, Falangist
and Christian Democratic deputies and senators denounced the injustices of capitalism
and promoted creation of a “communitarian society.” Communists, Socialists, Trotsky-
ists, and others elected to Congress, appointed as cabinet ministers and judges, and
teaching in the country’s schools proclaimed the need for revolution, while they worked
within the system to destroy it.
By the 1960s the leading political figures in Chile openly called for an end to the ex-
isting socioeconomic regime and for political revolution, whether accomplished peace-
fully or with violence. Forty years after the 1924 military coup, recently inaugurated
President Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964–70) proclaimed a “Revolution in Liberty” that
he hoped would create, through peaceful reforms, a more just social order. This effort,
and the ensuing Popular Unity government (1970–73) with its “Chilean way to social-
ism” provoked another violent rupture in the body politic.
On September 11, 1973, bayonets prevailed. The victors imposed another constitu-
tion (1980); the vanquished, even another decade later (1990), could only return to the
political arena by promising to respect the constitutional order imposed by the military
310 CHILE

junta at the same time that they proclaimed its illegitimacy and their intentions to “re-
form” it. So began the transition from military to civilian government in 1990, much as
had the battle to liberalize the autocratic regime from the mid-1830s until 1874.

The Concertación’s electoral slogan in the 1988 plebiscite campaign that defeated Gen-
eral Pinochet was “la alegría ya viene” (“happy times are coming”). An end to routine re-
pression, to pervasive fear, to the arbitrary brutality of the military government under-
standably inspired joy in the majority of Chileans. So too did the return to electoral
politics, congressional debate, and legislation instead of decrees by a military junta, a
chance for a freer press and to exercise the rights of freedom of association, movement,
and speech. Chileans could celebrate a government that would rule according to law
and without regimes of exception—even if “the law” still meant the 1980 constitution.
Aylwin’s inauguration in 1990 was a time of hope, of great expectations—perhaps of
too much hope and too many expectations. The pent-up frustrations and demands of
almost seventeen years of dictatorship could hardly be satisfied in a four-year presi-
dency, particularly since the military government and its civilian supporters had in-
stalled a political system intended to impede “a return to the past” and to provide them
with a range of vetoes over institutional reform and policy initiatives for the future.
Beyond the constitutional and institutional constraints on the Aylwin government,
the explicit threat of “another September 11” framed the newly elected government’s
policymaking. The armed forces’ commanders, the armed services’ representatives in
the senate, and the right-wing political parties took seriously the military’s role as
“guarantors of the institutional order”; General Pinochet declared at the end of 1990
that if the circumstances demanded it, he would lead another “September 11.” Aylwin
sincerely desired to restore civilian rule and to redress the “social debt” left by the dic-
tatorship, but his number one priority was to prevent such an authoritarian reversion
and to assure that after four years Chileans would elect his successor.
The Concertación’s official program was an eclectic wish list written by committees
of intellectuals, politicians, and activists from political parties and the multifarious
nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) (known by the acronym “ONGs” in Chile)
that had served as a surrogate political opposition and acted clandestinely in the 1970s
and 1980s when the military government outlawed even non-Marxist political parties
(1977). The program served various purposes: creating a viable electoral coalition in
1989 by establishing a minimal list of shared objectives for parties and movements that
had, both from 1970 to 1973 and during the dictatorship, often been at odds; persuad-
ing independent voters and the undecided that a Concertación government would not
be too great a risk that socialists, Christian Democrats, Radicals, and assorted Catholic
reformers would not provoke a “return to chaos”; and providing a minimal consensus
for policy initiatives during Aylwin’s four-year presidency.
Among many other initiatives, the Concertación program proposed constitutional
and legal reforms to democratize the 1980 constitution; human rights policies that in-
cluded overturning the military’s 1978 self-amnesty and initiatives to assist victims of
state terrorism from 1973 to 1990 and their families; and extensive reforms of the judi-
cial system, penal code, military code of justice, election law, national security and arms
control laws, and the quasi-constitutional provisions (organic laws) regulating the
armed forces and police. Rewriting the military regime’s health, social security, pen-
sion, forestry, and foreign investment laws was also on the agenda. In addition, the
Concertación promised to enact legislation to assure the “full incorporation of women”
into society; protect families and guarantee equal opportunity for females in the work
force; protect the environment; enhance educational opportunities, reduce “extreme
CONCERTACIÓN: THE PAST IN THE PRESENT 311

poverty,” and overcome the “social debt” of the dictatorship; redemocratize municipal
government; reform the dictatorship’s labor code; and create an ombudsman (defensor
del pueblo) to represent persons claiming abuse by government authorities.
As with most electoral platforms worldwide, the Concertación made many more
promises to voters than would likely be achieved, especially given the special circum-
stances of Chile in 1990 and the last-minute shortening of Aylwin’s term from eight to
four years. By publicly accepting the 1980 constitution as the legal foundation of the
transition, the Concertación also acknowledged the political reality that further de-
mocratization depended on negotiating piecemeal agreements with the pro-Pinochet
opposition. One of President Aylwin’s key advisers, Eduardo Boeninger, repeatedly
warned of the dangers of moving too fast, offering too much, and mobilizing social
movements to push forward the program: “The main threat is populism, by which I
mean the danger of responding to widespread social demands by making promises
that outstrip the resources available to fulfill them.” Indeed, Boeninger and other key
policymakers in the presidential inner circle decided, sub rosa, to suppress or postpone
many of the most sensitive policy initiatives in the Concertación program, especially in
the area of human rights, constitutional reform, and changes in legislation affecting the
armed forces.
Others in the coalition, including some congressmen, objected that this approach
conceded too much to the political right, the military, and private business interests;
underestimated the government’s ability to mobilize support for its program; and al-
lowed the legacy of fear to limit unnecessarily the Concertación’s policies. This objec-
tion certainly applied to civil-military relations and human rights concerns but over-
looked one of the most important changes in Chile since 1973: many activists and
members of the Socialist party, the Party for Democracy (PPD), and the Christian Dem-
ocratic party had been transformed ideologically and now accepted much of the
neoliberal economic program. Indeed, hardly anyone in Chile offered an alternative to
continuing the overall economic policies of the military government. Moreover, they
valued decision-making by consensus to avoid the polarization of the past. Political
learning by party and union leaders (others called it recantation of their values and
submission to military threats) had largely removed revolutionary rhetoric and objec-
tives from public discourse.
Aylwin’s cabinet included ex-revolutionaries who now expressed more concern
about maintaining macroeconomic equilibria and promoting foreign investment and
export earnings than about promoting any sort of social utopia. The military regime
had not only imposed its version of “protected democracy,” but had also largely won
the battle of ideas, especially in the economic realm, epitomized by what was referred
to in Chile as the “renovation” of socialists (renovación socialista). Thus the leyes de
amarre and the 1980 constitution that impeded implementation of the Concertación
program were reinforced by the changes wrought by the dictatorship in everyday po-
litical discourse and public opinion regarding possibilities for the future. Other laws
adopted by the military government in 1989 assured tenure for bureaucrats appointed
before March 1990. Pinochet bequeathed not only the system of “protected democracy”
to the Aylwin government but also most of its administrative and judicial personnel. In
many government offices after 1990, policymakers viewed their secretaries, office
workers, and even custodians with suspicion. More than 40 percent of the electorate
had favored Pinochet in the 1988 plebiscite and over 40 percent had voted against the
Concertación in 1989. Significant social support remained for the authoritarian neolib-
eral regime, impressive evidence that the military government from 1973 to 1990 nei-
ther existed in a vacuum nor imposed itself without deep roots in civil society. Pinochet
312 CHILE

and the military junta had not invented authoritarian institutions and political prac-
tices in Chile.
In an imaginary letter from Pinochet to a Chilean psychiatrist, written by Sergio
Marras (Carta apócrifa de Pinochet a un siquiatra chileno)—really a response to an open let-
ter written previously by a Chilean psychiatrist, Marco Antonio De la Parra, to Pinochet
(Carta abierta a Pinochet: monólogo de la clase media chilena con su padre)—the “fictional”
Pinochet tells “the doctor”:

I am the continuation of the authoritarian vein bequeathed to us by Mapuches and

Spaniards, of this inevitable insanity of being democrats on the surface (de la boca para
afuera). Where do you think I found my authoritarian vein if not from the atavistic les-
sons of this country? . . . I have not been the Teacher, as you suggest. I am simply
the Good Student. . . . Mine was not the first dictatorship in this country, nor will it
be the last in which bodies are hidden. . . . Neither me, nor my work, has been ex-
tinguished. And they shall not be extinguished. You all carry me [and my work] in-
side yourselves like Captain Riley and the Alien embryo. . . . You [all] have been de-
feated and you remain defeated. You live with my legacy [bajo mi herencia]. But when
I die things won’t change much.

Sergio Marras’ apocryphal letter angered many Chileans and saddened others.
Pinochet did not respond, not even a lawsuit against the author for defamation of char-
acter. When Marras published the book in June 1998, four years after Aylwin left office,
he could not know that only months later Pinochet would be arrested in London, at the
request of a Spanish judge, on charges of violation of human rights. Still less could the
policymakers in the Aylwin government have imagined such a scenario. Pinochet’s
presence as army commander and defender of his legacy dominated Chilean politics
and newspaper headlines from 1990 to 1994.
Perhaps nothing more clearly illustrated the constraints facing the Aylwin govern-
ment than General Pinochet’s continued command of the army. Some commentators
compared this circumstance to an imaginary, if imaginable, political transition in Spain
without General Francisco Franco’s death in 1975. What would a “transition to democ-
racy” have been like if Franco had stepped down as head of state but continued to
command the Spanish army for the following decade? Pinochet not only continued as
commander of the army; he and the other armed services’ commanders could not be
removed by the elected president as a result of the Organic Laws of the Armed Forces
decreed by the outgoing military junta in 1989. And the Concertación lacked sufficient
votes in the senate to reform these laws owing to the designated senators and the bi-
nomial district electoral system that overrepresented the political right in Congress.
In August 1990, celebrating Bernardo O’Higgins’ birthday, president Aylwin ex-
tolled the example of the independence hero’s patriotic abdication of the “Supreme Di-
rectorship of the Nation” in 1823, rather than provoking civil war and rejecting the will
of the people (voluntad de su pueblo). Aylwin reminded Chileans that Captain General
Bernardo O’Higgins had gone into voluntary exile to spare his country further grief.
This less than subtle appeal to Pinochet went unanswered. Other informal spokesper-
sons reminded the country that ex-general Carlos Ibáñez, serving as “elected” presi-
dent in 1931, had done the same, taking flight to Buenos Aires rather than turning the
army on demonstrators in the streets of Santiago who demanded his resignation from
the presidency. In case Pinochet did not understand the hints: the father of the nation,
O’Higgins, and the country’s greatest military “antipolitician” before 1973, Ibáñez, had
both sacrificed their personal position for the good of the nation.
CONCERTACIÓN: THE PAST IN THE PRESENT 313

And what about Captain General Augusto Pinochet in 1990? Pinochet left the pres-
idency as stipulated in the 1980 constitution, proclaiming that he had saved the nation
from communism: “mission accomplished.” Still, he insisted that there was danger of
a leftist resurgence, of vengeance against the armed forces, of backsliding toward so-
cialism, of efforts to dismantle the new institutions. Pinochet could leave the presi-
dency, but regarding the command of the army he was unmoved and unmovable. In
any case, Pinochet told Chileans on the anniversary of his appointment by president
Salvador Allende as army commander-in-chief that he had been called to that position
“by divine providence.” In 1990, on the anniversary of the September 11, 1973, coup,
Pinochet proclaimed, “If the conditions of 1973 were to occur again, I would act in the
same fashion.” The message to the Concertación government and to the nation was
clear: Chile still needed his guiding presence, just in case.
In practice, by 1994, the Aylwin government had accomplished almost none of the
promised constitutional and institutional reforms. It proved impossible to change
the constitutional provisions affecting the armed forces, the designated senators, or the
electoral system. The 1978 amnesty (Decree Law 2.191), which the Concertación pro-
gram promised to derogate, remained in place. Indeed, the Concertación leadership de-
cided not to ask Congress to derogate the amnesty for fear of provoking a violent re-
sponse by the armed forces. For the moment, the armed forces’ de facto veto held the
government hostage.
Between 1990 and 1994, the army’s “Advisory Committee to the Commander in
Chief” (CAS), created several years before by Pinochet, became a virtual shadow gov-
ernment. Headed by General Jorge Ballerino, the CAS carried out political intelligence,
coordinated communications campaigns (anti-government media programs) to
counter government initiatives, and negotiated in private with designated government
officials when displeased with the formal decisions of the Minister of Defense. Military
spokesmen made known their views both behind the scenes and in several overt chal-
lenges to government authority, most notably in the so-called “security, readiness and
coordination exercise” (operación de enlistamiento y enlace) in December 1990 and the
boinazo of 1993, when combat-ready troops wearing black berets (boinas, thus the name
given the operation) backed by armored vehicles deployed in downtown Santiago
while President Aylwin traveled in Europe. This operation coincided with a “routine”
meeting of army generals with Pinochet, emphasizing the armed forces’ displeasure
with various government policies and with the “inefficiency” of the Defense Ministry
in processing promotions, duty assignments and other matters of professional concern.
Congressional debates and press coverage regarding human rights policies, investiga-
tions into corruption in the armed forces, conflicts over budgets, scandals regarding
arms sales to Croatia, military intelligence’s tapping of phone lines and surveillance of
prominent politicians, and congressional investigations affecting members of General
Pinochet’s family all contributed to the periodic flare-ups in civil-military relations.
According to presidential adviser Edgardo Boeninger, who had direct contacts with
General Ballerino during the ejercicio de enlace episode, “the [December 19, 1990] ejerci-
cio de enlace was a threat. And while there was a general discontent that framed it, the
principal detonator was the case of the checks [involving Pinochet’s son].” When Gen-
eral Ballerino made this known, the Concertación government and the investigating
committee in Congress “deactivated the ‘pinocheques’ scandal.” Put another way, the
government decided to suppress investigation and prosecution of General Pinochet’s
son in the name of social peace.
The boinazo of 1993 took place after the semi-official newspaper La Nación headlined
“Check case against Pinochet’s son reopened,” with another headline reading “Eight
314 CHILE

generals subpoenaed to testify before Court [regarding violations of human rights].”

With Aylwin out of the country, and Pinochet refusing to negotiate with the Defense
Minister, an “informal” meeting with the Minister of Interior at General Ballerino’s pri-
vate residence (May 30, 1993) began to defuse this new threat to political “normality.”
Pinochet wanted a “ley de punto final” (an end to the human rights issue and to judicial
investigation of the cases involving “the disappeared”), better treatment for himself and
the army, and definitive suppression of the financial scandal (the pinocheques case) in-
volving his son, among other concessions. Presidential advisers sought also to influence
the content of the headlines in La Nación the next day to lower the political temperature.
To quell the virtual military sedition, the government again promised to drop the
check case and to attempt a more global “solution” to the human rights issue. It also
agreed to personnel changes in the Defense Ministry and to work toward more “effi-
ciency” in processing army requisitions, promotions, and duty assignments, as well as
to arranging less onerous (less public) circumstances for military personnel testifying
in ongoing court investigations. The government also gave up on its behind-the-scenes
efforts to encourage Pinochet’s early resignation as army commander. Aylwin pro-
posed a modified ley de punto final, a law intended to end judicial processes and inves-
tigations of the military government’s abuses. The government partially disguised the
proposed punto final law as judicial and penal code forms.
Opposition to the proposed law from within the Concertación coalition and from
human rights organizations eventually forced its withdrawal from congressional con-
sideration. Opponents asked how the government could support still another amnesty
law when it had promised to derogate the 1978 amnesty decree. Unable to provide a
punto final to the human rights issue, the government nevertheless made repeated ef-
forts to appease the armed forces until 1994. Meanwhile, nonstop headlines regarding
civil-military relations in the press and attention to pronouncements of active-duty and
retired officers on radio and television highlighted the ongoing battle over the control
by civilian authorities of the armed forces. Retired military officers, obvious surrogates
for their active-duty brethren, repeatedly complained that the press was subjecting
them to a “campaign intended to erode their prestige.” They also objected to the “con-
stant parade” of officers called to testify in the courts.
Tensions in civil-military relations remained a permanent topic in the press and tele-
vision news throughout the Aylwin presidency. No amount of pressure, however,
forced General Pinochet or the other armed services commanders to resign before they
were ready to do so; no threats of impeachment (acusación constitucional), investigations
into corruption, or even the graphic revelations of massive human rights violations re-
moved the tether placed on the government by the legacy of the military regime. Gen-
eral Pinochet and the armed forces made clear for all Chileans from 1990 to 1994 that
they had not accepted subordination to the Minister of Defense nor did they intend to
resume the military’s pre-1973 lower profile role in Chilean politics. When Aylwin left
the presidency in 1994, Pinochet remained as the Commander of the Army—a poignant
symbol of the limits of a transition constrained by the 1980 constitution and the armed
forces’ more prominent role in national politics.
General Ballerino would pay a price for his role as the army’s most visible political
operative, failing to succeed Pinochet as army commander and retiring to a private
conservative think tank. But despite the personal price by Ballerino, from 1990 to 1994
his work in the CAS effectively limited the Concertación government’s policy initia-
tives, especially in the area of human rights, military budgets, and other policies per-
ceived as affecting the armed forces’ institutional interests, including defense of Gen-
eral Pinochet’s image and that of his family. (After General Pinochet retired as army
CONCERTACIÓN: THE PAST IN THE PRESENT 315

commander in 1998 the new commander quietly folded the CAS into another intelli-
gence and research agency; it lost its high political profile and virtually disappeared
from the mass media).
President Aylwin failed to achieve the constitutional reforms promised by the Con-
certación program, just as president Pérez’s “government of transition” had failed to
extrude constitutional reform from the congress in the decade of 1861–71. With the ex-
ception of the Organic Law of Municipalities (Law 18.695), which replaced appointed
mayors with elected councillors (concejales) and mayors, no significant constitutional
reform passed during Aylwin’s presidency. Like Pérez in the 1860s, however, Aylwin
attempted to promote a politics of consensus that gradually made other political ini-
tiatives feasible, from tax reform and social programs focused on reducing poverty to
creation of new government agencies to promote policies ostensibly favoring environ-
mental protection, improvement in the conditions of indigenous peoples, and an end
to gender discrimination.
Despite the veto power of the political opposition, Aylwin duly sent proposed leg-
islation to Congress to implement much of the Concertación program, including pro-
posed constitutional reforms, modification in the laws regulating the armed forces and
national police (leyes orgánicas de las Fuerzas Armadas y de Orden), changes in the Mili-
tary Code of Justice, and proposals to restrict the jurisdiction of military tribunals over
civilians. He created a National Commission on Truth and Reconciliation in 1990 (nick-
named the Rettig Commission, for its director, longtime Radical party politician Raúl
Rettig) to investigate human rights abuses during the dictatorship and to achieve “jus-
tice, within the possible.”

President Patricio Aylwin (far right), with members of the Agrupación de Familiares de
Detenidos Desaparecidos, announces creation of Rettig Commission, January 1990.
(Courtesy of Archivo Universidad de Chile.)
316 CHILE

The Rettig Commission delivered its report to Aylwin in February 1991. It validated
the victims’ claims of abuse and state terrorism in agonizing detail and provided the
rationale for reparations. During the commission’s investigations, newspapers re-
ported on discovery of mass graves of victims of the military regime; gruesome photos
of the mummified bodies shocked even supporters of the military government.
After reviewing the report for almost a month, Aylwin addressed the nation on
March 4, 1991. He apologized to victims on behalf of all Chileans, offered moral and
economic reparation, and “solemnly appealed to the armed forces and police, and all
those who participated in excesses committed to acknowledge the pain they caused
and make efforts to lessen it.” In Rancagua assassins killed an army doctor and his wife;
he had been accused by the FPMR (Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front) of collaborating
with the secret police and monitoring victims during torture sessions. El Mercurio fea-
tured a picture of General Pinochet at the funeral for the army martyr juxtaposed to a
story on Aylwin’s message to country regarding the Rettig Report.
General Pinochet, who had referred to the Rettig Commission as a “sewer,” declared
that there was nothing to ask pardon for, that the armed forces had saved the country
from terrorism and international communism, and that the Army rejected the funda-
mental findings of the commission and its premises. The Navy took a similar, if less of-
fensive tack; the National Police and Air Force Commanders expressed somewhat
more conciliatory responses. Some leaders on the political right sarcastically referred to
the “Commission on Resentment and Revenge” (a play on the “Truth and Reconcilia-
tion” in its official name). On the other side of the political spectrum, the Communist
party newspaper, El Siglo, headlined: “Rettig Report: Crimes without Punishment?”,
and the Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos-Desaparecidos (family members of the vic-
tims) objected to the “one-sided” (sesgado) report that ignored the thousands of torture
victims, political prisoners, and exiles and underestimated the number of human rights
violations that resulted in death: 2279, including 132 members of the armed forces and
security services.
Shortly after public release of the Rettig Commission report (an instant best-seller),
assassins killed Senator Jaime Guzmán, a principal author of the 1980 constitution
and Pinochet confidant, near the Oriente campus of the Catholic University in Santi-
ago. The Rettig Commission report passed from front-page news; the war against
terrorism and violent crime replaced the military regime’s human rights violations
in public discussion. Periodically the human rights issue resurfaced, when authorities
announced the discovery of newly found human remains in mass graves, when victims
and family members protested government policies, when congressmen made
speeches denouncing the military regime’s crimes in the legislature, when the govern-
ment could not avoid an issue that it wished to bury permanently with a law specify-
ing a statute of limitations for prosecutions for crimes committed after 1970 (a so-called
ley de punto final). Divisions within the Concertación prevented passage of such a law
during Aylwin’s presidency; a minority of Christian Democrats and many Socialists
and PPD leaders made clear that approval of such a law, as had occurred in Argentina,
would risk dissolution of the coalition and affect chances for a single Concertación can-
didate in the 1993 presidential elections. Nevertheless, with some important excep-
tions, such as the ex-commander and second-in-command of the DINA, the military
successfully resisted trials during Aylwin’s presidency. Congress killed the govern-
ment’s proposals for constitutional reforms and amended other legislative proposals
beyond recognition.
In contrast to the failures of the Aylwin government in the area of constitutional re-
form, the politics of consensus permitted numerous policy initiatives whose long-term
impacts would go far beyond Aylwin’s four-year term, among them:
CONCERTACIÓN: THE PAST IN THE PRESENT 317

• An increase in the value-added tax (IVA) that accounted for approximately 40 per-
cent of government revenue, from 16 to 18 percent, with additional revenue to be
used for social programs
• Creation of a national environmental commission, the Comisión Nacional de
Medio Ambiente, CONAMA (1990), and promulgation of a comprehensive law
on the protection of the environment (Law 19.300, 1994)
• Establishment of the Fondo de Solidaridad e Inversión Social, FOSIS, a Fund for
Solidarity and Social Investment to fight poverty through grassroots develop-
ment projects, often by subcontracting with municipal governments and hun-
dreds of the NGOs that had been key elements in the campaign against the dicta-
torship); FOSIS operated within the newly created Ministry of Planning and
International Cooperation, MIDEPLAN (Law 18.989, 1990)
• Creation of the Agency for International Cooperation, AGCI, to coordinate inter-
national and private development assistance with the hundreds of NGOs operat-
ing in the country (1990)
• Creation of a ministerial level agency dedicated to “women’s issues” and legal re-
forms to promote more gender equality and erase gender discrimination, the Na-
tional Women’s Service, SERNAM (Law 19.023, 1991)
• Reform of labor laws to provide slightly better job security and severance pay
(Law 19.010, 1990) and liberalized requirements for unionization and collective
bargaining (Law 19.049, 1991; Law 19.069, 1991)
• Creation of the Corporación Nacional de Reparación y Reconciliación to carry out
the recommendations of the Rettig Commission regarding human rights and vic-
tims of the dictatorship (Law 19.123, 1991)
• Creation of the National Indigenous Development Commission, CONADI, to
promote integration and development of Indian peoples under the new Indige-
nous Peoples Law (Law 19.253, 1993)

In addition, the Aylwin government committed new resources to health services,

housing subsidies, and income supplements for low-income households, created Ser-
vicio País (a sort of Chilean domestic peace corps employing recently graduated pro-
fessionals in development projects), and established the Integral Health Provision Pro-
gram, PRAIS, to provide health services to victims of human rights abuses.
The verdict remained uncertain on the long-term impact of these and numerous other
policy initiatives. Initial assessments ranged from complaints about favoritism, corrup-
tion, inefficiencies, and “political manipulation” in FOSIS, CONADI, and CONAMA
operations to highly favorable evaluations of the extent to which careful program tar-
geting reduced poverty and indigence. In most areas the record was mixed; costly en-
vironmental investments in ENAMI’s Ventanas facilities made after 1992, for example,
significantly reduced air and water pollution in the Punchuncaví region that had been
afflicted by toxic clouds and soil and water pollution for many years. Emissions of sul-
phur had been reduced by 1998 to “only” 28,000 tons. In other northern mining regions,
however, levels of contamination increased and accidental chemical spills dumped tox-
ins into rivers that flowed to the sea. Similar stories could be told for the Santiago met-
ropolitan area, the major ports, the internal waterways, and lakes. Gradual implemen-
tation of an environmental review system and the action of courts in the environmental
sphere significantly delayed major public works and industrial projects and made en-
vironmental concerns a more routine aspect of policymaking. On balance, however, the
bulldozer of “progress” still carried more weight than arguments about mitigating en-
318 CHILE

vironmental externalities. Poorer urban neighborhoods were particularly affected by air

pollution and environmental contamination, as evidenced by casual reading of any of
Santiago’s newspapers. Wealth and income “trickled down” to the underclasses much
more slowly than did the environmental hazards and filth of the “economic miracle.”
In retrospect, the quantity and diversity of the Aylwin government’s social and en-
vironmental policy initiatives were impressive, creating enough new government
agencies and the corresponding alphabet soup of acronyms to remind observers in the
United States of Franklin Roosevelt’s “New Deal” in the 1930s. Denied the possibility
of enacting constitutional reforms, the Aylwin government nevertheless took many ini-
tiatives to overcome what was called the “social debt” of the military regime and
worked to liberalize the political ambience. Perhaps most importantly, Aylwin sought
to restore decency, civility, and morality to public life; his supporters and leftist critics
hoped that the institutional reforms they sought would not require the forty years that
liberals had fought to modify the 1833 constitution or even the fourteen that passed
from initiation of the Pérez transition government to the constitutional reforms of
1874.
In other areas the Aylwin government also made strides: gradually pardoning, on a
case by case basis, the some 400 political prisoners left by the dictatorship; providing
health care, pensions, and scholarships for families of torture victims and political ex-
iles; enacting labor reforms that somewhat loosened restrictions imposed by the mili-
tary government on union organization, collective bargaining, and strikes; and, per-
haps most important in terms of negotiations with the political right and sustaining the
elected government, establishing competent management of the economy by the ad-
ministration’s economic team. Indeed, spokespersons for the political opposition
and ex–cabinet members in the military regime repeatedly applauded the technical ca-
pacity and performance of the Aylwin economic team headed by Finance Minister Ale-
jandro Foxley. Foxley proved an able administrator of the neoliberal model; he insisted
on the need to avoid a return to “populism” and the importance of macroeconomic
stability.
Like president Pérez (with the legacy of the 1859 civil war discussed in Chapter 5),
Aylwin faced the legacy of the 1973 military coup and the repression that followed, di-
viding the country into bands of “enemies.” In 1861 Pérez confronted the legacy of the
traumatic civil war of 1859, government repression of the liberal opposition, the mem-
ory and living reminders of dead and wounded of the opposing armed forces, and the
flight of numerous political exiles. Pérez began his presidency with a general amnesty
approved unanimously in Congress. Aylwin’s task in 1990 was much more arduous
than had been Pérez’s in 1861. Agreements among elites reached in semi-private nego-
tiations (what Chileans call the política de cúpulas) no longer could ensure social peace
and political reconciliation. There would be no “ample amnesty” in 1990; it would not
be possible to “erase the memory” of past convulsions. At the end of the twentieth cen-
tury Chile was a much more complex, heterogeneous, and internationalized society
than it had been in 1861; the Internet, international law, human rights organizations,
and CNN beamed through the “weight of the night” that Portales and the Conserva-
tives had relied on to maintain their hegemony until the 1870s. Moreover, the number
and variety of political actors made it impossible to arrange a quick deal in Congress
among the “political class,” as had occurred in 1861 and again from 1891 to 1894.
New economic realities also influenced politics and policymaking, most especially
the enormously increased de facto power of foreign investors, international consortia,
and the influence of the major economic groups that controlled the key sectors of the
Chilean economy. Opening Chile’s economy as a primary strategy to promote eco-
CONCERTACIÓN: THE PAST IN THE PRESENT 319

nomic growth had been enormously successful. It also made the economy extremely
sensitive to decisions by actors from Asia to northern Europe, from Africa to Oceania.
Once “open to the world,” lack of control over the influences that entered made the
country and its government ever more vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the interna-
tional political and economic systems.
Added to the power of foreign investors, the dictates of the international economy,
the scrutiny of international communications networks, and the demands of interna-
tional human rights organizations, Aylwin encountered the challenge of coalition man-
agement. The various political parties that constituted the Concertación disagreed on
many policy issues. Internal divisions and personalist factions within the parties fur-
ther complicated the president’s task, as did the almost constant jockeying for position
by party leaders for the upcoming 1993 legislative and presidential elections.
The first strictly political test of the Aylwin government’s performance came in the
1992 municipal elections which gave the Concertación 53 percent of the vote, the polit-
ical right (UDI, RN, UCC) 37 percent, and the newly relegalized Communist party 6.6
percent of the vote, a surprise to many in the Concertación and a mild concern to the
political right. Abstention combined with null and blank ballots cast reached almost 20
percent of the 7.8 million registered voters. The Communists and others who rejected
the government’s hesitant human rights policies, its failure to achieve significant labor
reforms, and its perpetuation of the military regime’s economic policies called for more
rapid and comprehensive implementation of the Concertación electoral program.
Congressional elections in 1993 slightly reduced the Concertación’s delegation in the
Chamber of Deputies (from 72 to 70) and in the Senate (from 22 to 21). Thus from 1989
to 1993 the historical “three-thirds” pattern of Chilean elections (right, center, left)
reemerged, albeit with a much more moderate left (at least within the Socialist party and
the PPD), a much less influential Radical party, and a weaker “revolutionary” left, un-
represented in Congress (Communists, MIR), complemented by a smattering of environ-
mentalists, “humanists,” and independent leftists. Unlike the highly politicized and
partisan past of Chilean politics, however, more Chileans declared themselves “inde-
pendents” or refused to register. Under the new election laws, voters who refused to reg-
ister were not required to vote; those who registered and did not vote potentially faced
fines. Disaffection with “politics” and the political parties more generally, manifested
by low voter turnouts and deliberately spoiled ballots, distinguished the post-1990 sys-
tem from pre-1973 patterns despite the apparent similarities in vote distribution.
Before the 1993 elections the political right agreed to a reduction in the term of the
next president from eight to six years (thus returning to the presidential term fixed in
the 1925 constitution). Everyone recognized that the Concertación candidate, Eduardo
Frei Ruiz-Tagle, son of ex-President Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964–70), would be the vic-
tor. On December 11, 1993, Frei and the Concertación obtained 58 percent of the vote;
the leading rightist opposition candidate was Arturo Alessandri Besa, the nephew of ex-
president Jorge Alessandri (1958–64) and the grandson of two-time president Arturo
Alessandri (1920–24, 1924–25; 1932–38). Frei took office in March 1994. Not only was the
political rights’ historical one-third of the electorate approximately replicated, but so too
was Chile’s tradition of political families, of sons and grandsons following their parents
and extended family members into the presidency, the Chamber of Deputies, the Sen-
ate, the judiciary, and the government bureaucracy. Nepotism rivaled clientelism and
political patronage as a dominant factor in the 1990s. A “political class” still ruled Chile,
although its aristocratic origins and patrician habits had somewhat altered.
Congressional elections in 1997 again reaffirmed the same pattern: Concertación
over half of the votes; rightist parties and independent rightist candidates from 36 to 40
320 CHILE

table 11–1. presidential election, december 11, 1993

Candidate Party/Coalition Votes Percent

Eduardo Frei Ruiz Tagle Christian Democrat, Concertación 4,008,654 58.0

Arturo Alessandri Besa RN/UDI/UCC (led by Errázuriz) 1,685,584 24.4
José Pinera Echenique Non partisan 427,286 6.2
Mafredo Max-Neef Independent/environmentalist 383,847 5.6
Eugenio Pizarro Poblete Communist party, but not party member 324,121 4.7
Cristián Reitze Green party 81,905 1.2

Total 7,314,890

Source: APSI December 13–26, 1993. Percentages rounded; total does not equal 100%.

percent, depending on how individual independents were characterized on a left-right

spectrum, with a slight gain for the Communist party and other ideological leftists, at
close to 10 percent. The binomial system again slightly overrepresented the right and
discriminated against the left parties and movements not included in the Concertación
coalition. The Communists and other non-Concertación leftists, despite obtaining 7
percent of the vote, elected not a single deputy because of their exclusion from either
major coalition. In contrast, the Concertación allocated four seats to the PRSD (which
obtained fewer votes than the Communists), and the Unión por Chile allocated seven
seats to independents and a regional rightist party, the Partido del Sur, which, together,
obtained 5 percent of the votes.
Overall, electoral trends since the 1988 plebiscite lost by General Pinochet confirmed
that more than half of the electorate favored the Concertación parties and that 35–40
percent supported the political right. The Communist party, despite garnering 5–8 per-
cent of the vote, by its exclusion from either coalition lacked any representation in the
congress from 1989 to 2000. Neither the Socialists (PS) nor the Party for Democracy
(PPD) represented, by themselves, 15 percent of the electorate (although together they
closely approximated the historical voting strength of “socialists”), and support for the
Christian Democrats (DC) had slightly eroded by 1997. Moreover, shifts within the
Concertación and the opposition parties, especially the loss of support by Christian
Democrats by 1997 and the candidacy of Ricardo Lagos against the UDI’s populist
Joaquín Lavín made the outcomes of the 1999 presidential and legislative elections less
certain. Nevertheless, in certain respects the historical “three-thirds” distribution of the
electorate had survived. The vote of the rightist parties (UCC, RN, UDI) and “inde-
pendent” rightists in municipal, legislative, and presidential elections from 1989 until
1997 varied from 35 to 42 percent of the electorate; the rightist presidential candidate in
1970, Jorge Alessandri, had obtained 34.9 percent. Likewise, the Christian Democratic
party presidential candidate, Radomiro Tomic, had received 27.8 percent of the vote in
1970; Christian Democrats within the Concertación coalition received 23–29 percent of
the votes in the period 1989–97. Although more difficult to “track” because of the cre-
ation of new small parties and fragmentation of the “old left,” a rough tally of the votes
of the groups that more or less corresponded to the parties of the Popular Unity coali-
tion, including the Communist party and the PRSD, yields 30–38 percent of the elec-
torate from 1989 to 1997, compared with the Popular Unity vote of 36.3 percent in 1970.
These calculations are inherently imperfect. The “same” groups espoused different ide-
ologies and occupied different places in the political coalitions of 1997 than in 1970.
Comparing political party percentage of votes in presidential, congressional, and mu-
CONCERTACIÓN: THE PAST IN THE PRESENT 321

table 11–2. elections: chamber of deputies, december 11, 1997;

senate, december 11, 1997*

Deputies (120)

Deputies, Senate, 20/38 †,

Coalition Party % Votes 1997 % Votes 1997/Total

Concertación Christian Democrats 23.0 39 29.2 10/14

Party for Democracy (PPD) 12.6 16 4.3 0/2
Socialist Party 11.1 11 14.6 1/4
Radical Social Democrats (PRSD) 3.1 4 1.8 0
Nonpartisan 0.8 70 – 0
Total (Concertación) 50.6

Unión por Renovación Nacional 16.8 23 14.8 2/7

Chile Unión Demócrata Independiente 14.4 17 17.2 7/9
(political Partido del Sur 0.4 1 – –
right) Nonpartisan 4.7 6 4.6 0/1
Total (UPC) 36.3 47

Left Communist Party 6.9 0 8.4 0

Nueva Alianza Popular 0.2 0 – 0
Nonpartisan 0.5 0 0.2 0
Total (Communist/left) 7.6 0

Chile 2000 Humanist Party 2.9 0 2.0 0

Unión de Centro Centro Progre- 1.2 1 0.4 0/1
sista
Nonpartisan 0.9 0 2.2 0
Total 4.3

Nonpartisan candidates, no coalition 0.7 2 – 0

*In 1997 the Senate consisted of 48 members, 38 elected and 9 “designated” as stipulated in the 1980 constitu-
tion. Senators were elected for eight-year terms from two-seat (binomial) constituencies, half the seats re-
newed every four years. The designated senators included 4 ex–commanders in chief of the armed forces and
police (one each branch); 1 ex–comptroller general, 2 ex–Supreme Court Justices, 2 ex–university presidents.
Former presidents who filled that position for six uninterrupted years were ex–oficio senators for life (vitali-
cios). General Augusto Pinochet became a senador vitalicio en 1998.
†
The numbers in the last column of the table refer to senators elected in 1997/total number of elected senators,
by party. The Chamber of Deputies consisted of 120 members, elected in two-seat constituencies for a four-
year term. The Chamber of Deputies was renewed in entirety every four years. Due to the allocation of seats
within coalitions and the mechanics of the Chilean D’Hondt electoral system in binomial districts, parties that
obtain lesser vote percentages may obtain seats in the legislature, while other parties unaffiliated with coali-
tions receive none. This occurred with the Communist party in 1993 and 1997.

nicipal elections is in some ways misleading. Nonetheless, despite different voting

laws, changes in party ideology and coalitions, and different political circumstances,
certain underlying patterns in distribution of voter preferences are striking.
The Left Revolutionary Movement (MIR) had called on its supporters and on the
“real left” to cast spoiled ballots (votos nulos) in the 1997 elections as “the only useful
and dignified vote for workers and popular sectors,” proclaiming further that “only
political and social organization and spoiled ballots are an alternative to the political
322 CHILE

table 11–3. electoral trends, by party and by coalition,

1988–97, percent of vote*

1988 1989 1992 1993 1996 1997

Party Plebiscite (leg) (mun) (leg) (mun) (leg)

DC 26.19 29.03 27.20 26.66 22.98

PRSD 4.35 5.34 3.77 6.58 3.12
Ind (PDC-PR) 2.59 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.79
PPD 16.94 9.48 12.01 12.28 12.55
PS 0.09 8.80 12.44 11.13 11.10
PC 5.35 6.56 6.36 5.97 7.48
PHV 0.94 0.82 1.41 1.60 2.91
RN 19.24 17.60 17.64 18.74 18.82
UDI 15.22 11.23 15.07 13.08 17.06
UCC 2.64 8.26 3.78 2.80 2.14
Indend. 1.90 2.62 0.10 0.84 0.70
Others 4.56 0.24 0.20 0.32 0.36

Total 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0

Coalition
Concertación 55.98 51.10 53.49 55.42 56.65 50.55
RN-UDI/Opp. 44.02 39.02 29.06 36.70 32.14 36.24
PC 5.35 6.56 6.36 5.97 7.48
PH – – 1.41 1.60 2.91
UCC 2.64 8.26 – 2.80 2.14

*mun, municipal elections; leg, congressional elections.

Source: The Electoral Websites (Elections in Chile):
www.agora.stm.it/elections/chile.htm; www.elecciones. gov.cl (Ministerio del Interior).

right and the Concertación!” MIR declared that “the votes of thousands of citizens are
worth less than a group of military officers who impose designated senators. . . . The
principal human rights victimizer [General Pinochet] is being imposed as a senator for
life.” On its Internet Web site and in its publications MIR urged “the return [from the
hands of foreign investors and the Chilean economic groups, obtained via privatiza-
tion] of our mineral, maritime, forestry and agricultural wealth, that cost so many gen-
erations to accumulate. . . . We have joined together to initiate an alternative political
road, truly democratic, constructing the ideas and the force for a more just society.”
In addition to MIR, this manifesto was also sponsored by a collection of tiny leftist
groups and dissidents, dissatisfied with the human rights, economic, and social poli-
cies of the Frei government. In October 1997 MIR denounced the “Concertación’s poli-
cies of collaboration with the political right, the armed forces, and the ruling classes.”
In large block letters it urged: VOTO DIGNO = VOTO NULO. POR UNA VIDA
DIGNA PARA TODOS LA LUCHA CONTINUA (A dignified vote is a spoiled ballot;
The struggle continues for a dignified life for all [Chileans]). The Humanist party also
called for “a social revolution that drastically changes the lives of the people, a politi-
cal revolution that changes the structure of power, and a human revolution that creates
new paradigms to replace the reigning decadent values.”
The Socialist Party Web site, in contrast, proclaimed its program of “Chile para todos”
(“A Chile for all [Chileans]”) and told voters that the Socialists promised “to continue
CONCERTACIÓN: THE PAST IN THE PRESENT 323

working alongside President Frei and the future government [referring to the year
2000] that we hope will be presided over by Ricardo Lagos [Socialist party leader, min-
ister in the Aylwin and Frei cabinets].” The Socialists offered twelve proposals as their
agenda; most were recycled from the moribund Concertación platform of 1989, begin-
ning with an end to the designated senators and other reforms of the 1980 constitution.
Other proposals included reforming the labor code; educational and university re-
forms; better health care; improved social programs; more attention to youth and in-
fants; support for policy initiatives to stimulate music, film, and audiovisual projects;
eliminating the sales taxes on books; improving opportunities for women; protecting
citizens against abuses by public officials; upgrading the National Environmental
Commission (CONAMA); and developing a fairer and more efficient tax system. No
part of the program proposed establishing socialism in Chile; to the contrary, the So-
cialists seemed to support the neoliberal economic model, with some adjustments to
achieve a more “just and equitable” society. Within the Socialist party, some activists re-
tained their commitment to prosecuting military personnel guilty of human rights vi-
olations or, at the least, “discovering the truth” before applying the 1978 amnesty in ac-
cord with the Supreme Court’s repeated rulings that upheld the validity of Amnesty
Decree Law 2.191 for most of the crimes committed between 1973 and 1978.
For MIR, the Communist party, and other small leftist groups the Socialist, Christian
Democratic, and PPD programs amounted to “selling out” (entreguismo) to the armed
forces, the political right and the weight of the authoritarian past. It also meant that the
Concertación offered no real alternative to the neoliberal model, no end to the ex-
ploitation of natural resources and the labor force. They asked, rhetorically, why they
had all struggled against the dictatorship only to accept its constitution, its laws, its
economic model, its “protected democracy.” After all the spilt blood, the torture, the
years of exile, the humiliation and sacrifice, how could this facade democracy be the
fruit of “victory” in 1988 and 1990?
With the votes counted in the 1997 elections, the Humanist party declared: “In 1993
the Concertación obtained the vote of 3,733,276 Chileans and the Right the vote of
2,255,150. On December 11, 1997, the Concertación obtained 2,898,362 votes and the
Right 2,077,442. Thus 900,000 Chileans less supported the Concertación and nearly
200,000 less supported the Right.” According to the Humanists’ calculations, more than
50 percent of the potential electorate “voted” against the Concertación and against the
Right, that is, against the existing political order: 1,600,000 potential voters who did not
register, 1,000,000 who abstained, 300,000 who voted blank ballots, and 950,000 who
spoiled their ballots, combined with the votes obtained by the Humanists (2.91%) and
the Communists (7.48%). The Humanist manifesto claimed that only by eliminating the
“institutional straitjacket” imposed by the Right and the Military junta and managed
by the Concertación could the discontent be overcome.
The Humanists proclaimed that

a constitutional convention and a new constitution are the only option. . . . [contin-
ued application of] the neoliberal model will only deepen the problems in health care,
education, housing, work, and nutrition of the majority of Chileans. We will also see
the further deterioration of our environment and our personal liberties. . . . This
system is not fixable (perfectible), only its replacement with one that makes human be-
ings and not money the central value . . . will permit overcoming this situation.
. . . There is nothing worse than a people with no future.

The Humanist party criticisms were also reminiscent of the literature of national de-
cline so evident in Chile in the early 1900s: the Humanists seemed to echo Enrique Mac-
324 CHILE

Iver’s memorable “Speech regarding the moral decline of the Republic” delivered at
the Club Ateneo in August 1900. Mac-Iver began: “It seems to me that we are not
happy; one notes a malaise not limited to a particular class nor to particular regions of
the country, but which extends to the entire country and to all who inhabit it.” After
consideration of the reasons for the widespread discontent, Mac-Iver asked in 1900,
“What are we today?” The answer: “I think the best answer is silence,” for what most
contributed to this dismal situation is “lack of public morality, what others might call
public immorality.”
The Humanist party in 1997 represented the electoral choice of a tiny minority of
Chileans; it nevertheless expressed the social discontent, the frustration, the disap-
pointment, and the impatience of many Chileans with the course of the political tran-
sition after 1990. The evident cynicism of some Concertación leaders, the permanent in-
ternal wrangling of both major coalitions, the public insults traded by politicians and
military officers, the barely disguised jockeying for position in the next congressional
and presidential elections—all these features of daily life had corroded the spirit of sac-
rifice and enthusiasm of the 1988–90 campaigns to oust General Pinochet.
In 1990 there had been a change of government but not of the political regime. The
1980 constitution, the electoral system, and the other leyes de amarre (“laws that bind”)
decreed by the military government remained in place. The Concertación leadership
administered the economic system and political order inherited from the military gov-
ernment, the very economic and political order that it had resisted since 1981. But it did
not do so entirely by choice; nor did many of its supporters give up on the possibility,
in the longer term, of creating a more democratic and justice society. State terrorism had
ended; the numbing chill of fear that cut to the quick for so many years was wearing
off, although it was still not entirely overcome by 1994 or even 1999. It was too much to
expect that the new programs initiated by the Aylwin government would eliminate the
legacy of centuries of impunity for the powerful, social inequalities, and environmen-
tal degradation, but they definitely set a new tone, whether to be followed, altered, or
scrapped by those who followed. Chileans chose their national legislators and munic-
ipal councilors in free and fair elections (even if the operation of the electoral law
slightly distorted representation). Human rights violations dramatically declined;
press censorship was less heavy-handed. For all its limitations, the Aylwin government
made important changes for the better in the lives of millions of Chileans.

As expected, the Concertación candidate had easily won the presidential elections in
December 1993. Inaugurated in 1994, president Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle called for fur-
ther modernization of the state; consolidation of the economic model, labor, health
care, and educational reforms; and increased “insertion” into the world economy. Frei
and his advisers lowered the profile on demands for constitutional reform and democ-
ratization; human rights virtually disappeared from the official public agenda. Frei
sought unsuccessfully in 1995 to negotiate among the political elite a ley de punto final,
disguised as an omnibus reform package, to “finish” with the human rights issue. In
this effort the Frei government, like its predecessor, failed. The victims’ families,
human rights organizations both in Chile and internationally, cadres of lawyers, jour-
nalists, medical professionals, religious leaders, journalists, student leaders, the Com-
munist party, and a minority of dedicated politicians in the Socialist and Christian
Democratic parties resisted the government’s efforts to negotiate a legislated amnesia
and impunity.
Like the Aylwin government, Frei could not put an end to the human rights issue.
Memories of the victims’ anguish and current evidence of the victimizers’ lack of con-
CONCERTACIÓN: THE PAST IN THE PRESENT 325

trition, even their publicly expressed pride in the inquisitorial salvation of the patria
after 1973, impeded “turning the page” before the full story had been told. Beginning
with the initial civil-military tensions in 1990 and the initial efforts by Aylwin to pro-
mote national reconciliation through “truth and justice”—to the extent possible—the
Concertación governments failed in this endeavor. For four years (1994–98) Frei used
private and public channels, dinner parties, meetings with Church officials, quiet ne-
gotiations with the opposition parties, and conversations between the defense minister
and armed forces’ political liaisons—all to no avail. The military and its civilian allies
could not make the demands for “truth and justice” disappear as they had the bodies
of the victims.

In March 1998 General Pinochet stepped down as army commander and took his seat
in congress as “Senator for Life” (vitalicio). For some Chileans, Pinochet’s investiture in
the senate was an important reaffirmation of the institutional framework imposed in
1980. For others, Pinochet’s entry into the senate was an intolerable reminder of his
(and the military regime’s) impunity for crimes against humanity. Shortly thereafter a
group of Concertación legislators presented an acusación constitucional against Pinochet
for “gravely compromising the honor and security of the nation” during his tenure as
army commander. In accord with the 1980 constitution, if the Chamber of Deputies ap-
proved the acusación and the Senate upheld it, Pinochet would lose his congressional
privilege (fuero), exposing him to criminal and civil prosecutions in a variety of cases.
Fearful that such an outcome would destabilize the political system and discredit the
previous administration, the Frei government opposed approval of the acusación.

General Augusto Pinochet in his last year as commander of the army.

(Courtesy of Archivo Vicaría de la Solidaridad.)
326 CHILE

The Chamber of Deputies acrimoniously debated the acusación for almost a month.
Congressmen supporting the accusation against Pinochet presented numerous
“proofs” of the charges, ranging from the numerous skirmishes between the armed
forces and government during the Aylwin government to Pinochet’s use of the “illegal”
CAS to engage in political operations regarding the economy, diplomacy, and social
policy. They also recalled his speech to the Rotary Club in 1990, in which he said that
the German Federal Republic’s army was full of “long-haired, marijuana-smoking ho-
mosexuals” (“un ejército de marihuaneros, o sea, drogadictos, melenudos, homosexuales”).
That Congress could openly debate a constitutional accusation against general
Pinochet indirectly confirmed the gradual resurgence of civilian political institutions
even without modification of the 1980 constitution. Such a debate would have been
risky in 1990. Nevertheless, in a highly divided and divisive vote (62–55), the Chamber
of Deputies rejected the acusación. Many Concertación congressmen defected; had the
government not controlled key Christian Democratic legislators the Chamber of
Deputies might have approved the accusation against the ex–army commander, al-
though its defeat in the Senate was assured. Ex-president Aylwin, in words that may
have influenced some of the key votes (and which he later claimed to regret), declared
that Pinochet had never really constituted a threat to the institutional order from 1990
to 1994. To the contrary, Aylwin suggested that Pinochet had helped to smooth over
some situations in which the true military hardliners might have upset the consolida-
tion of democratic government. Some Aylwin supporters believed that approval of the
acusación would be viewed as a backhanded acknowledgment of the chilling effects on
policymaking of Pinochet’s threats and pressures from 1990 to 1994, thus criticism of
Aylwin’s emphasis on “prudence” and “moderation.”
Pinochet retained his seat in the Senate. He could not ensure that September 11, the
day of the military coup in 1973, remain a national holiday. Shortly after the debates on
the acusación constitucional, Senator Pinochet agreed to replace the annual celebration of
the 1973 coup with a face-saving “day of national unity” to be celebrated the first week
of September each year. Pinochet and the Frei government acclaimed the agreement as
an “historic accord”; some groups on the political left characterized it as a “day of na-
tional shame rather than national unity.” Cartoonists drew caricatures of a calendar
with September 11 missing, and the Communist newspaper, El Siglo, featured pictures
of Pinochet and Andrés Zaldivar, Christian Democratic president of the Senate and po-
tential presidential candidate, with the headline: “The coupmakers [of 1973] reunited”
(“Se vuelven a juntar los golpistas”). Whatever the subplots and notwithstanding the crit-
icism from the political left, the main storyline was that the country would no longer
officially celebrate the day that Air Force planes rocketed the La Moneda palace. No
one could predict whether the “day of national unity” would catch on as an annual
event, or even be celebrated.
Andrés Zaldívar, like Patricio Aylwin, had initially supported the military coup in
1973. Many of their now-coalition partners from the Socialist party and Party for
Democracy (PPD) had been arrested, brutalized, and exiled. (Zaldívar had also been
temporarily forbidden reentry into the country). The Communists’ criticisms struck a
nerve in the coalition. Pinochet, the Christian Democrats, and the “renovated” Social-
ists seemingly had agreed to bury memories of the 1973 coup and the crimes of the dic-
tatorship under a tombstone reading: Day of National Unity. A Communist party
spokesperson put it simply: “The marriage of Zaldívar and Pinochet confirms that the
model of the Concertación differs hardly at all from that imposed by the dictator-
ship. . . . It demonstrates that they share the political project that subjects the country
and its people to instability and misery.”
No such “marriage” or shared project existed in practice. The Communists and the
CONCERTACIÓN: THE PAST IN THE PRESENT 327

radical political left exaggerated the Concertación’s affinity with supporters of the mil-
itary regime. But the Concertación government had postponed, if not largely aban-
doned, its own programs of 1988 and 1989. And the Frei government was looking for
almost any way to resolve politically, rather than through the court system, the legacy
of human rights violations. Government leaders remained unsure if the political sys-
tem would resist the hundreds of trials of retired and active duty officers implied by
the demands of the human rights organizations and the agrupaciones of the victims’
family members.
On September 11, 1998, the country commemorated the twenty-fifth anniversary of
the 1973 military coup and the death of Salvador Allende. Diverse public ceremonies
and private social gatherings reflected the persisting antagonisms amongst those who
had supported the coup and the military government and those who came to oppose
it. The country witnessed processions to the nation’s cemeteries, masses in the
churches, protest marches, vandalism, violence, sabotage against public utilities,
power outages, bonfires, and barricades in the streets, leaving a toll of dead, wounded,
and incarcerated. Most of those participating in the violence were less than twenty
years old; they had not been born on September 11, 1973. A small group of Miristas
(Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria) enacted a midday ceremony at the Monu-
ment to the Detained, Disappeared, and the “Executed for Political Reasons” (Ejecuta-
dos Políticos). A speaker at the ceremony asked for a moment of silence for the “dead,
disappeared, and absent.” After an extended silence he added: “None of them or us
was innocent. We all knew the risks and we decided to fight against repression and
death, not only for an ideal, but ‘for la patria.’ Across town, at small gatherings and din-
ner tables, similar discourse among military comrades and civilian supporters of the
military government justified the repression against the “subversives” that had “saved
la patria” from international communism.
A bit more than a month later the country was shocked by Senator Pinochet’s arrest
in London (October 17, 1998) and the request by a Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzón, for
his extradition to Spain. Pinochet’s arrest and the subsequent international press cov-
erage rekindled the embers of moral outrage against the military regime for events
after 1973. The international media and the proceedings in the British House of Lords
upset the Concertación’s continued efforts to gradually negotiate pacts with center and
right-wing parties to consolidate the transition to civilian rule. Santiago’s political cli-
mate altered dramatically; pro- and anti-Pinochet rallies resurrected the battle lines and
rhetoric of the late 1980s. Debates over how to return Pinochet to Chile, how much ef-
fort to make on his behalf, to what extent Chilean sovereignty was at stake—and the
obvious glee of human rights groups and some members of the Concertación coalition
that justice might finally be done, even if by foreign courts—reinforced the fundamen-
tal distrust across the country’s main political divide.
Pinochet’s fate, and the exposure of the armed forces to future censure, or even tri-
als for hundreds of retired and active-duty officers, again became a critical concern for
the armed forces and, potentially, an important issue in the presidential elections
scheduled for December 1999. Which other Latin American officer corps, besides Ar-
gentina and Guatemala, had high-ranking officers who could not travel to Europe or
the United States for fear of arrest on charges of human rights violations? For how long
would officers be called before Chilean courts to testify about “the past?” When would
the “vanquished” finally accept the permanence of the 1980 constitution, the armed
forces’ “guardianship” over Chile’s “protected democracy?” When would the Con-
certación party leaders finally express gratitude to the armed forces for having saved
the country from the clutches of international communism in 1973? Helpless against
the British Law Lords, a Spanish judge, the denunciations of international human
328 CHILE

rights organizations, and now, it seemed, the independence of several Chilean judges,
the armed forces and the political right threatened, cajoled, bargained in private, and
appealed to Chilean sovereignty and to nationalism. Joaquín Lavín, the presidential
candidate of the political right, counted a distant cousin among the “disappeared”
killed in 1973. He preferred to distance himself from the unsavory emotional and moral
legacy of the military junta, but would not, and could not, abandon his party’s identi-
fication with the 1980 constitution and the construction of “protected democracy.”
The Chilean military and the rightist parties persuaded the Frei government to ob-
ject to Pinochet’s arrest on grounds that it violated Chilean sovereignty and Pinochet’s
supposed diplomatic immunity. Chile’s foreign minister, a political exile during the
Pinochet government, argued this case in England, Spain, and elsewhere. For many
Chileans the world seemed topsy-turvy; in the words of Colombian novelist Gabriel
García Márquez in One Hundred Years of Solitude, it seemed that “the liberals and ma-
sons were defending the Church, the Catholics burning it down.” By August 1999, as a
visibly aged and infirm Pinochet languished in England, almost thirty criminal and
civil lawsuits had been filed against him in Chile (This number would increase to over
140 by mid-2000.) Prospects increased for reopening “closed” cases and investigating
the murders and widespread torture after 1973. Newspaper headlines, magazine arti-
cles, and television talk shows returned to the crisis of 1973—and before. Why was
there a coup in 1973? What was the role of the United States? (Declassification of thou-
sands of documents by the Clinton administration on the 1970–78 period during the
U.S. summer of 1999 added fuel to the fire.) Was there a “war” or “civil war” in 1973
and after? Or did the military regime target opponents in extermination operations,
like “hunting rats”?
In late July 1999, the Chilean Supreme Court, with a newfound independence, ruled
that retired and active duty officers could be tried in cases involving “kidnaping” (se-
cuestro calificado) from the pre-1978 period, where the kidnaping had not resulted in
death or where there existed no definitive evidence that the victim was deceased. Ac-
cording to the court, since the crimes were “ongoing,” no amnesty could be applied.
This legal theory had been advanced in the early 1990s but had usually been rejected
by military courts, appeals courts, and by the Supreme Court, which applied the
amnesty decree to “close” the cases that came before it (sobreseimiento) or rejected the
human rights organizations’ legal pleas (recurso de casación, recurso de queja, recurso de
inaplicabilidad) to reopen cases on procedural grounds. Almost all Chileans believed
that the “disappeared” were dead; the legal theory resurrected by the Supreme Court
in 1999 invited the armed forces to acknowledge the crimes and, most importantly, in-
dicate what had happened to the victims’ bodies.
Five high-ranking officers who had been direct subordinates of General Pinochet in
1973 were charged in the so-called “caravan of death” case. Hundreds of other military
personnel potentially faced testifying or being charged with human rights violations in
other cases. On the other hand, the court had upheld the validity of the amnesty decree
in cases of “extrajudicial execution,” murder, torture resulting in death, and so on. The
ruling reaffirmed the legitimacy of the 1978 amnesty and that only the “ongoing crime”
of secuestro calificado was not covered by the amnesty. Human rights organizations still
objected to this interpretation. It meant that crimes that had been the result of state ter-
rorism, defined as crimes against humanity by international law, would be perma-
nently amnestied.
Military commanders organized “private retreats” to consider the consequences of
the Supreme Court’s decision. After a three-day meeting with thirty-seven of the forty-
one active-duty army generals at a resort hotel in Pichidangui, Commander Ricardo
CONCERTACIÓN: THE PAST IN THE PRESENT 329

Izurieta made public the army’s concerns regarding the “new interpretation” of the
amnesty law and the reopening of the human rights violations cases. He again ex-
pressed indignation over the ongoing “kidnapping” of Pinochet in England and re-
asserted the need for increased salaries and resources for the armed forces. El Mercurio
reported, menacingly, that during this three-day retreat, “extra-official sources sug-
gested that the army generals reflected on their role as the guarantors of constitutional
order, and whether these legal actions [by the Supreme Court] against military person-
nel to some degree affected this constitutional role.”
Glaring headlines on the same day in the afternoon tabloid, La Hora, proclaimed:
“ONE THOUSAND BODIES THROWN INTO THE SEA”—reporting an interview
with the son of ex DINA commander General Manuel Contreras. The milder version in
La Tercera headlined: “Contreras’ son reveals abuse of the ‘disappeared’” (detenidos-des-
aparecidos), but also reported that Contreras had revealed that after Aylwin took office
in 1990 “some bodies in mass graves were dug up, so that they could be made to dis-
appear into the sea.” The next day La Tercera’s Internet edition headlined: “Connection
between DINA and Pinochet Demonstrated.” Lawyer Carmen Hertz, representing vic-
tims in the “caravan of death” case, made public a document signed by Pinochet as
president of the government junta, dated January 5, 1974, months before DINA’s offi-
cial creation. The document informed government agency heads, “the DINA has been
created with personnel of the armed forces and police. . . . [I]t will advise the junta
on all matters regarding internal and external security, and will depend exclusively on

La Hora, July 23, 1999. [Ex-

commander of DINA’s son
claims,] “One thousand bod-
ies thrown into the sea.”
330 CHILE

the junta, over which I preside.” Pinochet had ordered as early as January 1974 that
government agencies provide full cooperation with the DINA and that they “maintain
the maximum secret (sigilo) regarding DINA activities.” Hertz claimed that this docu-
ment demonstrated that DINA had operated prior to its official creation, that it was
clearly an instrument of the government, that Pinochet had instructed other agencies
of government to cover up the DINA’s operations. Further, that since DINA’s crimes
had been “organized and perpetrated by agents of the State,” international law re-
garding crimes against humanity “prohibited application in such cases of amnesty
laws.” Finally, it seemed, a smoking gun had been put in Pinochet’s hand, and all this
with the Senador Vitalicio still in England, awaiting a decision regarding his extradition
to Spain for trial on charges of crimes against humanity.
Chilean politics was trapped in the recent, and not-so-recent, past, even as actors
from left to right of the political system sought some way to “finish” the current story.
In retrospect, conflictive civil-military relations and the living phantoms of the tor-
tured, murdered, and disappeared, interspersed with efforts to “close the book” on a
past that operated in the present, were the most indelible features of the 1990–2000
decade. (Table 11–4 lists the most important “moments of conflict” in civil-military re-
lations from 1990 to 1999. Most of them focused at least partially on the legacy of
human rights violations after 1973).
In late July the government and the political opposition continued maneuvering in
hopes of negotiating some sort of punto final. But as political cartoonist Guillo so dev-
astatingly depicted, neither the armed forces, the rightist parties, nor the government
could find the right people with whom to negotiate such a “finish” to the human rights
questions. Meanwhile Pinochet’s health declined and he hinted that he would accept
release from Britain on “humanitarian grounds.” He now claimed that while he could
accept “political responsibility” for any “excesses” that had occurred during the mili-
tary government, he had no criminal responsibility because such things “happened be-
hind my back.” Once again Guillo’s political cartoons satirized Pinochet’s claims of “ig-
norance” regarding human rights violations. This was the same Pinochet who had
boasted as the country’s ruler that “not a leaf moved in the country without his knowl-
edge” (or in some versions, his permission). (Cartoons available at www.guillo.cl; scroll
to N.62 and 63.)
CODEPU (Corporación de Promoción y Defensa de los Derechos del Pueblo), an
NGO dedicated to defending human rights cases throughout the dictatorship, declared
publicly in mid-August 1999 that the human rights violations in Chile had not been lim-
ited to the “disappeared” and that resolution of the human rights question could not be
limited to the “archaeological quest” for human remains. According to CODEPU, jus-
tice must be sought for the thousands of political executions, for the hundreds of thou-
sands of tortured, for almost a million political exiles, for the crimes against humanity
committed by the military regime, “which have no statute of limitations nor are they
subject to amnesty” according to international law. The CODEPU proclamation contin-
ued: “We reject any effort [by the government, the political right, and the armed forces]
to mount a political operation to impose a ‘punto final.’ In Chile, resolving the pending
human rights issues requires justice. . . . Independent and autonomous courts must
investigate, process, and judge, in accord with the law, and in these cases, specifically,
justice requires application of the principles of international human rights law.” After
almost ten years of “political transition,” hundreds of military personnel still faced the
threat of prosecution for crimes against humanity–among them Senator-for-Life Au-
gusto Pinochet, still under house arrest outside London. Pinochet’s arrest in London had
inalterably changed the short-term course of Chilean politics and, perhaps, even the
long-term course of efforts to promote respect for human rights in the international com-
table 11–4. major episodes and tension points in civil-military relations,
1990–2000
Attack on ex–junta member General Leigh March 21, 1990
Human remains discovered in Colina, fundo Las Tórtolas, until March 21, 1990
1980 an army firing range; remains identified as those of three
“disappeared” Communist party members
Aylwin publicly names members of “Truth and Reconciliation April 24, 1990
Commission, created by Supreme Decree 355 April 29, 1990
Pinochet meets with Aylwin at La Moneda; protestors shout insults May 3, 1990
as he arrives; Pinochet complains about treatment by Minister of
Defense and concerns about Rettig Commission
Retigg Commission begins to function May 9, 1990
Colonel(r) Luis Fontaine, ex–director of Dicomar, assassinated (ac- May 10, 1990
cused of responsibility for 1986 “degollados” case); understood
as vigilante justice by FPMR
More human remains located: Pisagua, Chihuío, Tocopilla June and ongoing in the
months while Rettig Com-
mission was functioning
“Secret” meeting of Pinochet’s Political Advisory Committee (CAS) August 6, 1990
and several Deputies from Concertación at a dinner at the home of
President of House of Deputies
Pinochet gives interview critical of the Rettig Commission created August 19, 1990
by government to investigate human rights violations
Aylwin speech on O’Higgins birthday; reminds country of Captain August 20, 1990
General O’Higgins patriotic sacrifice in abdicating power (insinu-
ating Pinochet should follow the example)
Funeral of ex-president Allende September 4, 1990
Pinochet insults the German army with comments about “long- September 5, 1990
haired, marijuana-smoking homosexuals” in speech at the Club
de la Unión; story breaks on pinocheques case involving General
Pinochet’s son
Pinochet publishes his “autobiography,” Camino recorrido, memorias September 6, 1990
de un soldado; calls Allende an incarnation of the devil
Pinochet affirms that if the occasion arose, he would do the same as September 11, 1990
he had on September 11, 1973
Retired General Alejandro Medina Lois detained and charged with September 14, 1990
“defamation” (injuria) against Pres. Aylwin
Minister of Defense notifies Pinochet that Army must return the September 14, 1990
“Pharaonic House” at Lo Curro to the Presidency
Aylwin orders Pinochet to meet with him the following week at the September 14, 1990
Palacio Moneda
Publicity on pinocheques case involving multimillion-dollar transac- September 16, 1990–
tion between Army and General Pinochet’s son, Augusto
Pinochet H.; 51 deputies ask information from Defense Minister
on case.
Aylwin insulted at annual Military Parade; Aylwin later (Novem- September 19, 1990
ber) rejects promotion of General Carlos Parera, who had not
asked permission to begin the parade, as required by protocol
Pinocheques case involving one of Pinochet’s sons; financial scan- December 19, 1990
dal involving Pinochet’s daughter, Lucia; “Cutufa” case (Ponzi
scheme in army); Minister of Defense Rojas tries to negotiate
with General Ballerino, Pinochet’s representative, his early retire-
ment as army commander (suggests 4 months). Results in “Op-
eración de enlistamiento y enlace” (“coordination exercise,” no com-
munication to Defense Ministry, Army in barracks; Santiago
fearing a coup (continued)
table 11–4. major episodes and tension points in civil-military relations,
1990–2000 (continued)
Leyes Cumplido (3 laws that reform Penal Code, Law of Internal January 1991
Security of the State, Military Code of Justice, Arms Control law)
Aylwin presents Rettig Commission Report publicly; next several March 4, 1991
weeks armed forces respond formally, rejecting findings and reaf-
firming their salvation of la patria in 1973 and after
Jaime Guzman assassinated April 1, 1991
Cristián Edwards, son of owner of El Mercurio, kidnapped (re- September 7, 1991
turned after ransom payment, February 1992)
Aylwin proposes reforms in civil-military relations allowing presi- November 1991
dent to force retirement of officers; Congress considers army in-
telligence (DINE) budget (reform proposal rejected)
Law 19.123 creates Corporación Nacional de Reparación y Reconci- January 3, 1992
liación
Aylwin proposes “double dependency” for Carabineros (Min. De- January 1992
fense and Interior); reform proposal rejected
Retired army general in charge of Investigaciones (civilian secret po- March 1992
lice) fired; Army complains that he was “spying” on military per-
sonnel
Government proposes reform of Organic Law of the Armed Forces March 1992
and Carabineros, including modification in regulations regarding
promotions, appointments, and retirements
Army infiltration of Investigaciones denounced; calls for ouster of
Army intelligence chief General Eugenio Covarrubias
Aylwin proposes constitutional reforms, including modification in June 1992
National Security Council and authority to fire armed services
chiefs (rejected)
Public revelation of Army telecommunication office surveillance of August, 1992
civilian politicians and phone taps; includes potential RN presi-
dential candidate, Sebastián Piñera; tapes leaked to national tele-
vision and played on the air; case goes to Supreme Court but
transferred to military justice system and later quashed
Aylwin proposes reforms in military justice system; (proposal never November 1992
moves out of congressional committee)
Security Council meets at request of Pinochet, Navy commander, November–December 1992
and Supreme Court justice; topic: acusacion constitucional against
three members of Supreme Court and the Army General Coun-
sel; acusación constitucional against one supreme court justice ap-
proved with support of 3 senators from Renovación Nacional—
provokes concern among military institutions because neither the
Supreme Court nor the National Security Council remain secure
bastions
Supreme Court, for first time, accepts the theory that the 1978 December 30, 1992
amnesty does not apply to the “disappeared” because the crime
is “ongoing” (secuestro—kindnapping); also accepts the doctrine
that the amnesty does not impede investigation into human
rights cases—though the amnesty would ultimately apply to per-
petrators.
Rockslide kills over 100 persons in Santiago; Aylwin refuses to de- May 1993
clare “state of catastrophe” to avoid military control over affected
part of city as as stipulated in 1980 constitution
Genaro Arriagada denounces “lack of control over intelligence May 1993
services,” reveals hidden microphones discovered in government
offices; Army charges Arriagada under Article 276 of Military
Code of Justice for “revealing information that affects troops atti-
tudes toward service”; charges later dropped (continued)
CONCERTACIÓN: THE PAST IN THE PRESENT 333

table 11–4. major episodes and tension points in civil-military relations,

1990–2000 (continued)
Army criticizes delays in processing promotions, duty assignments, May 1993
salary increases, foreign travel requests, etc.; accuses Defense
Ministry of deliberate bureaucratic harassment
Council of Generals meeting in Santiago; La Nación headlines re- May 28, 1993
opening of pinocheques case; pressure for Pinochet to resign; Ayl-
win traveling overseas; boinazo occurs in downtown Santiago;
Krauss seeks to manage crisis; fear of military coup; Army pres-
ents lists of concerns, ranging from the pinocheques case to a punto
final on the human rights issues to informal government commit-
tee
Aylwin develops plan for law of punto final; requests press to exer- May 28, 1993–mid-June
cise restraint in covering civil military relations and human rights
issues; seeks to prevent airing on television of interview with
Michael Townley regarding Letelier case June–August 1993
Aylwin withdraws ley Aylwin from congressional consideration September 1993
Supreme Court opens case against General Manuel Contreras, ex- November 1993
chief of DINA for Letelier case
Frei assumes presidency March 11, 1994
Judge Milton Juica convicts 17 carabineros in degollados case; impli- April 1994
cates General Stange as derelict in case; government requests
Stange’s resignation as Carabinero commander; Stange refuses;
given administrative leave two weeks later
Frei refuses to process Carabinero promotion list 1994–1995
Supreme Court upholds convictions of Manuel Contreras and May 30, 1995
Pedro Espinoza; Contreras resists incarceration, goes to naval
hospital in Talcahuano; Espinoza goes to the Army’s telecommu-
nication headquarters in Santiago, Army negotiates with Defense
Minister; Espinoza goes to Punta Peuco prison;
Contreras appeals to court in Concepción to be allowed to remain June 1995
“imprisoned” in Naval hospital; Military “protests” regarding
Contreras case
Frei orders the Consejo de Defensa Fiscal to cease further investiga- July
tion into pinocheques
Courts apply 1978 amnesty to cases involving 22 officers July 1995–January 1996
Concepción Court rules against Contreras; Army insists his condi- August 1995
tion fragile, appeals to Supreme Court; meanwhile Pinochet sug-
gests transferring the Punta Peuco prison to Army control and
raising army salaries 14 percent
Frei proposes change in National Security Council and designated August 1995
senators, to increase civilian role; modified in October (proposal
rejected April 1996)
Frei proposes ample accord in name of “national reconciliation”: September 1995
changes in organic laws, increased presidential authority to fire
armed services commanders, and a punto final to human rights
issues; armed forces oppose change in organic laws
Minister of Defense Pérez Yoma announces his resignation for fail- September 1995
ure to end stalemate; Army accepts “mixed custody” and given
an 8 percent raise
General Stange agrees to retire October 1995
(continued)
334 CHILE

table 11–4. major episodes and tension points in civil-military relations,

1990–2000 (continued)
Eight carabineros convicted in degollados case; army major and sub- November 1995
oficial convicted in murder of bus driver
Army captain sentenced to 600 days jail for the caso de los quemados, January 1996
burning to death one person and maiming another
Argentine police announce arrest for murder of General Carlos January 1996
Prats (Buenos Aires, 1974)
Contreras interred in Punta Peuco; 23 army officers assigned to spe- April 1996
cial duty as prison guards; no civilians in ostensibly civilian
prison; Senate rejects Frei’s reform proposals regarding National
Security Council and elimination of designated senators
Army captain sentenced to 6 years for homicide June 1996
Army launches Internet Web site; first Latin American army to ap- September 1996
pear in cyberspace
Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez assaults high security prison; December 1996
liberates “political prisoners” with helicopters, including assassin
of Jaime Guzmán
Air Force launches Internet Web site December 1996
Frei forced to call meeting of National Security Council to discuss January 1997
terrorism
Christian Democratic deputies propose reforms of military justice July 1997
system, limits on jurisdiction of military tribunals; military resists
and reforms “postponed”
Frei rejects promotion to Brig. Gen of Jaime Lepe, ex-functionary of November 1997
DINA, linked to murder of Spanish diplomat Carmen Soria;
army officially objects
Deputies announce constitutional accusation against Pinochet; he January 1998
postpones retirement until March 10, last possible day as stipu-
lated in constitution
Army names Pinochet “Commander-in-Chief Benemérito”; does
not inform Ministry of Defense
Constitutional accusation presented; Frei government argues March 11, 1998
against it, but some Christian Democrats and most Socialists
favor approving the accusation; Minister of Defense Edmundo
Pérez Yoma resigns; divisions in Concertación threaten coalition
Acusación constitucional fails in secret vote, 62–55, 1 abstention April 9, 1998
Pinochet arrested in England October 1998
Army Commander makes various speeches complaining about April–May 1999
government’s lack of energy in defending Pinochet; pushes for
higher salaries and more resources and organizes seminars in the
Escuela Militar and bases throughout the country on the “real his-
tory” of 1973–90; sparks “conversations” with Minister of De-
fense
Supreme Court rules that officers involved in “Caravan of Death” July 1999
in 1973 can be prosecuted for “kidnapping” (secuestro calificado) as
an ongoing crime, not for murder and illegal execution, crimes
covered by 1978 amnesty; Army holds special “retreat” with 37 of
41 generals, expresses concerns to Minister of Defense; Navy, Air
Force, Police, and Army commanders meet with Minister of De-
fense to seek punto final, request higher salaries, and demand
more effort to obtain Pinochet’s release from England and return
to Chile (continued)
CONCERTACIÓN: THE PAST IN THE PRESENT 335

table 11–4. major episodes and tension points in civil-military relations,

1990–2000 (continued)
Defense Minister Pérez Yoma organizes a national roundtable (mesa August 1999
de diálogo) in effort to find a way to achieve “national reconcilia-
tion”
Mesa de diálogo meets with individual presentations September 1999
First “Day of National Unity” Holiday, marred by protests, vio- September 6, 1999
lence, “acts of repudiation”
After 25 years, Sept. 11 no longer a national holiday September 11, 1999
British judge rules Pinochet should be extradited to Spain October 8, 1999
Pinochet returned to Chile for “humanitarian reasons”, too ill to March 4, 2000
stand trial
Richard Lages inaugurated as president March 11, 2000
Santiago Appeals Court removes Pinochet’s congressional immu- June 5, 2000
nity (Lawyers appeal)
Monument to Salvador Allende inaugurated in Plaza de la Consti- June 23, 2000
tución
Ex-dictator potentially faces 140 criminal proceedings July 2000
Pinochet supporters attempt to place black wreath on monument July 16, 2000
Supreme Court strips Pinochet of Congressional immunity in August 8, 2000
“caravan of death” case

munity. At the least, few Chilean officers who served in the military government in the
1970s and early 1980s were planning international travel.

During the course of his presidency Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle came more and more to
be viewed as a technocratic administrator of the legacy bequeathed by the dictatorship,
albeit with some commitment to reducing poverty and providing enhanced opportu-
nities for working people and the middle class. From 1996 leaders of the Socialist party
and the Party for Democracy, publicly and in private, asked themselves whether their
continued participation in the Concertación was justified—and what alternatives
might exist. The Christian Democrats, apparently decided on another of their own in
the 1999 presidential race, flirted with the idea of a center-right coalition, with Reno-
vación Nacional, and resisted the efforts by Ricardo Lagos, the most prominent Social-
ist presidential contender (and Minister of Public Works) to get agreement on his can-
didacy for the next go-around. Party politics and personal ambition took precedence;
the crusading spirit of 1988–89 had given way to political horse-trading, patronage,
and everyday politics. Sociologist Tomás Moulian’s best-selling Chile Now: Anatomy of
a Myth (Chile Actual: Anatomía de un Mito) captured the generalized disappointment
with the moral and cultural defects of the “new Chile.” Asked about his book, Moulián
commented, “It’s a book that tries to understand how we came to this mockery, this
sham democracy (simulacro de democracia), this ever more depoliticized society, this ever
more individualist society. . . . This is a society with more comfort than before, but
with much less felicity and happiness than before.”
Even some businessmen read Moulián’s book, but consistently good economic
growth (until the 1998–99 recession), low inflation and unemployment rates, and an
orgy of public and private construction projects seemed to make the low level of polit-
ical debate and the social malaise less important. Like the weather, everyone com-
plained about the politicians, about the superficiality of modernization, and about the
“culture of silence” and rampant individualism, but few Chileans did anything about
these complaints. Notable exceptions existed, of course: students protesting and strik-
336 CHILE

ing against government policies; health workers and government employees opposing
privatization (ENAMI, CODELCO, ENAP, EMPORCHI); and environmentalists and
Indian peoples resisting the forestry and energy megaprojects in the northern deserts,
the southern coastal mountain regions, and the Andes cordillera.
At the beginning of 1997 Minister of Finance Eduardo Aninat boasted of sustained
positive growth for the last ten years, the lowest inflation rates in the twentieth century
(1994–96, single-digit inflation), historic levels of domestic savings (25%), thousands of
new jobs created, decline in the percentage of the population in poverty (down to 27%),
exports at over 16 billion dollars—in short, perpetuation of the “miracle.” By 1998 the
government pushed forward with privatization of services in the major ports, seeking
bids by concessionaires who would modernize these doors to the international market,
increasing the efficiency of container unloading to match that in neighboring Ar-
gentina, the United States, and Europe. Bids from private investors in 1999 for the port
concessions exceeded greatly the government’s projections, and despite major strikes
by port workers in July and August 1999, the privatization schemes moved forward.
Flies in the ointment annoyed the government: auxiliary health care workers virtu-
ally shut down the public hospitals at the end of 1996 (they were earning less than
$175/month). During 1997 the Copper Workers’ Federation threatened nationwide
protest movements if the government decided to privatize the publicly owned mining
and energy sectors; in the major universities the Communists made gains in student
elections. A year later Mapuche representatives at the United Nations denounced the
Frei government’s violation of indigenous rights and violation of its own environmen-
tal and Indian people’s legislation. In July 1998 Pehuenche Indians, environmentalists,
students, and sympathizers blocked roads in the Alto Biobío region to stop work by
ENDESA subcontractor Besalco on initial stages of the controversial Ralco Hydroelec-
tric project. Violent confrontations between Mapuche protesters, private security
guards, and police multiplied from the end of 1998 to mid-1999. The most militant In-
dian groups demanded restoration of ancestral lands lost after the military campaigns
of the 1880s and some form of political autonomy. Police arrested and jailed activists
who damaged the property of forestry and energy firms.
These signs of social movement resurgence were dramatic but limited. The govern-
ment closed the coal mines at Lota in 1997 despite violent protests in Santiago and the
Concepción-Talcahuano region. It proceeded with port privatization despite resistance
that required police intervention in Valparaíso, San Antonio, and elsewhere. Triumph-
alism remained the dominant sentiment of the governing parties until 1998, despite in-
ternal frictions within the coalition. The political right, ever wary of any backsliding
toward “socialism” or “statism,” urged “finishing” the privatization process, less bu-
reaucracy, less regulation, and more market-oriented policies, except where particular
economic groups had created their own special subsidies: forestry, fisheries, mining,
and traditional agricultural producer groups. And, despite the low incidence of taxes
on profits, they demanded further reduction of the tax burden.
The Asian economic crisis hit Chile in 1997, put a crimp in economic expansion, and
forced the government to announce some belt-tightening. The crisis also made clear,
again, the vulnerability of “the miracle” to international market conditions and deci-
sions of foreign investors. Few Chileans wished to resurrect the critique of capitalism
made by “dependency” theorists, a discarded concept associated with the “old left”
and the nationalist policies that rejected an open economy with massive foreign in-
vestment. But Chile was still a highly dependent economy: dependent on fluctuations
in prices for its exports, especially copper; dependent on foreign sources for oil, coal,
and natural gas to fuel the economy; dependent for its competitiveness, in part, on
nonenforcement of environmental regulations, insecure working conditions, and low
CONCERTACIÓN: THE PAST IN THE PRESENT 337

wages for its labor force; dependent on decisions made by international consortia and
transnational financial conglomerates; and dependent on actions by policymakers in
Asia, Europe, and the United States.
There were, of course, some important differences in the “new Chile”: Technologi-
cal innovation; entrepreneurial initiative; a more highly qualified and internationalized
professional, business, and academic community; and an active government role in
promoting Chilean exports distinguished the Chilean economy in 2000 from the Chile
of thirty years earlier. Shifts in employment patterns also reflected the economic trans-
formations of the last three decades. Agriculture now employed approximately 15 per-
cent of the labor force versus almost 25 percent in 1970; the service sector, including fi-
nancial services, had expanded from 25 percent to almost 35 percent. Female labor
force participation rates had increased significantly, jumping from perhaps 25 percent
in 1970 to almost 40 percent by 1999.
Government statistics in the late 1990s demonstrated that poverty and indigence
was on the decline, that living conditions and opportunities were improving, and that
the country continued on the path of modernization and development. The United Na-
tions Development Programme’s Report on Human Development, published annually
since 1990 to measure comparative socioeconomic opportunities around the globe,
seemed to confirm Chile’s progress, ranking it higher on its summary measure of
“human development” than all other Latin American countries (31 of more than 170
countries included in the study). Due to “technical adjustments” in calculation Chile
fell to number 34 in 1999, but it still remained highest on this indicator of all Latin
American countries. On some other measures Chile still lagged behind other Latin
American countries, especially in reducing social and economic equalities. In particu-
lar, Chilean women saw less improvement in their economic opportunities and politi-
cal participation than their counterparts in many countries of Latin America. Accord-
ing to the United Nations Development Programme, several Latin American countries
scored better both on the “gender-related development index” and the “gender-
empowerment index,” imperfect but suggestive measures of improvement in “human
development” for females around the globe. In short, Chile ranked higher on the over-
all “human development index” than for both of these summary measures of gender-
related development and opportunities.
Major marketing firms offered a slightly different perspective on Chile in 1999. A
special report by Sandra Novoa in the June 27, 1999, Sunday edition of El Mercurio de-
tailed the discussions at a marketing conference in Santiago two weeks earlier. Adver-
tisers, market research firms, and academics specializing in business administration
agreed that the old indicators used to target consumers—having a phone, television,
automobile, and even a small house, were no longer useful in characterizing Chile’s
socioeconomic map. The advertisers required a different “socioeconomic alphabet”
(abecedario socioeconómico) for better identifying target markets in the new consumer so-
ciety. Based on survey research, the marketing firm ICARE argued that “due to the eco-
nomic and political changes in Chile during the last twenty years that have modified
life style and values, the old tools for segmenting markets are obsolete.” The doubling
of incomes and the higher educational levels in the 1990s had changed consumer tastes
and opportunities. Cable and color television, household telephones, automobiles, and
other items previously limited to high income groups were now common “even in
lower strata household.” While the marketing firms disagreed about which of the more
discriminating variables were most useful in “modern” Chile, the schematic “socio-
economic alphabet” presented by the Adimark-J. Walker Thompson study was a re-
vealing snapshot of Chile, 1999.
According to this marketing snapshot, after more than a decade of sustained eco-
338 CHILE

table 11–5. human development index (hdi), 1998,

united nations development programme

Combined first-,
second-, and Real Ad
Adult third-level GDP
Life expectancy literacy gross enrollment per capita p
at birth (years) rate (%) ratio (%) (PPP$)
1995 1995 1995 1995

High human development 73.52 95.69 78.68 16,241

1 Canada 79.1 99 100 21,916
2 France 78.7 99 89 21,176
3 Norway 77.6 99 92 22,427
4 USA 76.4 99 96 26,977
8 Japan 79.9 99 78 21,930
11 Spain 77.7 97.1 90 14,789
30 Korea, Rep. of 71.7 98 83 11,594
31 Chile 75.1 95.2 73 9930
34 Costa Rica 76.6 94.8 69 5969
36 Argentina 72.6 96.2 79 8498
38 Uruguay 72.7 97.3 76 6854
45 Panama 73.4 90.8 72 6258
46 Venezuela 72.3 91.1 67 8090
49 Mexico 72.1 89.6 67 6769
53 Colombia 70.3 91.3 69 6347
62 Brazil 66.6 83.3 72 5928
63 Belize 74.2 70 74 5623
Medium human development 67.47 83.25 65.61 3390
65 Suriname 70.9 93 71 4862
66 Lebanon 69.3 92.4 75 4977
72 Russian Federation 65.5 99 78 4531
73 Ecuador 69.5 90.1 71 4602
84 Jamaica 74.1 85 67 3801
85 Cuba 75.7 95.7 66 3100
86 Peru 67.7 88.7 79 3940
88 Dominican Republic 70.3 82.1 73 3923
91 Paraguay 69.1 92.1 63 3583
100 Guyana 63.5 98.1 64 3205
111 Guatemala 66.1 65 46 3682
114 El Salvador 69.4 71.5 58 2610
115 Swaziland 58.8 76.7 77 2954
116 Bolivia 60.5 83.1 69 2617
119 Honduras 68.8 72.7 60 1977
Low human development 56.67 60.85 47.09 1352
131 Myanmar 58.9 83.1 48 1130
138 Pakistan 62.8 37.8 41 2209
139 India 61.6 52 55 1422
159 Haiti 54.6 45 29 917
174 Sierra Leone 34.7 31.4 30 625
All developing countries 62.2 70.44 57.49 3068
Least developed countries 51.16 49.2 36.42 1008
Industrial countries 74.17 98.63 82.81 16,337
World 63.62 77.58 61.59 5990
 CONCERTACIÓN: THE PAST IN THE PRESENT 339

Human Real
Real Adjusted real develop- GDP per
GDP GDP ment capita
per capita per capita Life index (PPP$) rank
(PPP$) (PPP$) expectancy Education GDP (HDI) minus HDI
1995 1995 index index index value 1995 rank

16,241 6193 0.8087 0.9002 0.9809 0.8966 –

21,916 6230.98 0.9008 0.9933 0.987 0.96 10
21,176 6229.37 0.8948 0.9567 0.987 0.946 12
22,427 6231.96 0.8758 0.9667 0.987 0.943 5
26,977 6259.29 0.8562 0.98 0.992 0.943 –1
21,930 6231 0.9142 0.92 0.987 0.94 2
14,789 6187.12 0.8783 0.9473 0.98 0.935 19
11,594 6139.72 0.779 0.9298 0.972 0.894 6
9930 6115.55 0.8355 0.8765 0.968 0.893 9
5969 5968.72 0.8603 0.8613 0.945 0.889 28
8498 6090.16 0.7938 0.9045 0.964 0.888 11
6854 6048.8 0.7943 0.9016 0.958 0.885 14
6258 6022.74 0.8065 0.8439 0.954 0.868 14
8090 6081.66 0.7885 0.829 0.963 0.86 2
6769 6045.81 0.7853 0.8213 0.957 0.855 5
6347 6027.8 0.7557 0.8389 0.954 0.85 4
5928 5928.15 0.693 0.795 0.938 0.809 1
5623 5622.82 0.8198 0.7119 0.889 0.807 1
3390 3390 0.7078 0.7737 0.5297 0.6704 –
4862 4862 0.7657 0.8566 0.767 0.796 9
4977 4977.44 0.7377 0.8644 0.785 0.796 7
4531 4530.9 0.6745 0.92 0.713 0.769 5
4602 4602.45 0.7415 0.8359 0.725 0.767 3
3801 3800.69 0.8183 0.7909 0.596 0.735 9
3100 3100 0.8448 0.8592 0.483 0.729 18
3940 3939.71 0.7117 0.8567 0.618 0.729 2
3923 3922.62 0.7542 0.7906 0.615 0.72 1
3583 3582.6 0.735 0.8248 0.561 0.707 5
3205 3204.74 0.6423 0.8665 0.5 0.67 1
3682 3682.08 0.6842 0.5854 0.577 0.615 –16
2610 2610.09 0.7397 0.6686 0.404 0.604 –2
2954 2954.33 0.5628 0.7697 0.46 0.597 –10
2617 2616.72 0.5918 0.7834 0.405 0.593 –6
1977 1976.99 0.7298 0.6855 0.302 0.573 7
1352 1362 0.5278 0.496 0.2032 0.409 –
1130 1130.24 0.5645 0.7129 0.166 0.481 22
2209 2209.13 0.6295 0.3887 0.34 0.453 –16
1422 1421.99 0.6098 0.529 0.213 0.451 1
917 917.38 0.4932 0.3967 0.132 0.34 3
625 624.85 0.1622 0.3089 0.084 0.185 –3
3068 3068 0.62 0.6612 0.4778 0.5864 –
1008 1008 0.436 0.4494 0.1462 0.3439 –
16,337 6194 0.8195 0.9336 0.9811 0.9114 –
5990 5990 0.6437 0.7225 0.9482 0.7715 –
340 CHILE

table 11–6. trends in human development,

1998 united nations development programme
Infant Infant Popula-
Life Life mortality mortality tion with t
expectancy expectancy rate (per rate (per access to a
at birth at birth 1000 live 1000 live safe water s
(years) (years) births) births) (%)
HDI rank 1960 1995 1960 1996 1975–80 1

High human development 55.91 70.15 97.87 29.28 58.71

23 Cyprus 68.64 77.22 29.8 9 –
24 Barbados 64.22 76.01 74 11 –
25 Hong Kong, China 66.2 79.04 43.4 – –
28 Singapore 64.49 77.12 35.65 4 –
30 Korea, Rep. of 53.89 71.74 85 6 66
31 Chile 57.13 75.13 113.65 11 –
32 Bahamas 63.22 73.17 49.65 19 –
34 Costa Rica 61.6 76.62 84.5 13 72
36 Argentina 64.9 72.63 60.05 22 –
38 Uruguay 67.71 72.66 50.45 20 –
45 Panama 60.65 73.39 68.8 18 77
46 Venezuela 59.5 72.31 80.9 24 79
49 Mexico 56.86 72.12 94.75 27 62
53 Colombia 56.54 70.34 98.7 26 64
62 Brazil 54.67 66.58 115.65 44 62
63 Belize 61.42 74.19 73.5 36 –
Medium human development 47.09 67.47 145.24 40.42 –
Excluding China 47.11 65.95 138.66 42.53 –
65 Suriname 60.13 70.94 69.85 25 –
73 Ecuador 53.07 69.49 124.3 31 36
84 Jamaica 62.73 74.1 62.85 10 86
85 Cuba 63.82 75.69 64.65 10 –
86 Peru 47.71 67.7 142.15 45 –
88 Dominican Republic 51.76 70.25 124.85 45 55
91 Paraguay 63.86 69.1 66 28 13
111 Guatemala 45.61 66.05 125.05 43 39
114 El Salvador 50.47 69.38 129.85 34 53
116 Bolivia 42.67 60.51 166.65 71 34
119 Honduras 46.28 68.79 144.7 29 41
126 Nicaragua 47.04 67.53 141 44 46

Low human development 42.15 56.67 167.13 90.02 –

Excluding India 40.01 53.18 169.55 102.11 22.38
131 Myanmar 43.74 58.87 158 105 17
159 Haiti 42.14 54.59 182 94 12
174 Sierra Leone 31.5 34.73 218.8 164 14

All developing countries 46.04 62.2 148.92 64.76 –

Least developed countries 39.06 51.16 170.21 109 –
Industrial countries 68.57 74.17 39.16 13.03 –
World 50.22 63.62 128.6 60 –
 CONCERTACIÓN: THE PAST IN THE PRESENT 341

a- Popula- Under Under- Gross Gross

th tion with weight weight Adult Adult enrolment enrolment Real Real
to access to children children literacy literacy ratio for ratio for all GDP GDP
ter safe water under age under age rate rate all levels levels (% per capita per capita
(%) five (%) five (%) (%) (%) (% age age 6–23) (PPP$) (PPP$)
80 1990–96 1975 1990–97 1970 1995 6–23) 1980 1996 1960 1995

1 82.66 20.96 11.5 76.42 89.51 58.3 69.59 1944 7835

– – – – – – – 2039 13,379
– – – 92.1 97.4 67 76 – –
– – – 78.7 92.2 59 72 2323 22,950
– – – 74 91.1 53 72 2409 22,604
93 – – 86.7 98 66 82 690 11,594
– 2 1 87.7 95.2 65 72 3130 9930
– – – 94.8 98.2 70 75 – –
96 10 2 87.7 94.8 55 68 2160 5969
– – – 92.6 96.2 65 77 3381 8498
– 6 7 92.5 97.3 63 75 4401 6854
93 14 7 79.1 90.8 66 70 1533 6258
79 14 6 76.4 91.1 58 68 3899 8090
83 19 14 74.7 89.6 68 66 2870 6769
85 19 8 80.8 91.3 53 70 1874 6347
76 18 6 68.4 83.3 54 72 1404 5928
– – – – – – – – –
– 29.54 19.4 53.35 80.57 50.7 64.44 864 3355
– 36.18 23.2 56.51 79.04 51.9 64.96 1172 3945
– – – 81.8 93 – – 2234 4862
68 20 17 74.7 90.1 69 72 1461 4602
86 14 10 69.6 85 67 65 1829 3801
– – – 81.7 95.7 72 63 – –
– 17 8 71.3 88.7 65 81 2130 3940
65 17 6 67.9 82.1 60 68 1227 3923
60 9 4 81 92.1 49 62 1220 3583
77 30 27 43.8 65 35 46 1667 3682
69 22 11 56.3 71.5 47 55 1305 2610
63 17 8 58.2 83.1 54 66 1142 2617
87 23 18 54 72.7 47 60 901 1977
61 20 12 57.3 65.7 53 62 1756 1837

– 59.67 45 30.99 50.85 37.1 47.09 657 1362

8 54.76 44.49 37.3 27.21 49.41 33.5 39.47 717 1296
60 41 43 71.6 83.1 39 48 341 1130
37 26 28 23.8 45 – – 921 917
34 22 29 12.9 31.4 30 28 871 625

71 40.21 30.3 47.73 70.44 46.5 57.49 915 3068

57 – 39 29.68 49.2 31.6 36.42 562 1008
– – – – 98.63 – 83 – 16337
– – 30 – 77.58 – 62 – 5990
342 CHILE

table 11–7. chile 1998 and the united nations development programme:
gender empowerment measure

Gender Seats in Female Female Women’s

empowerment parliament administrators professional share of
measure held by and managers and technical earned GEM
(GEM) rank women (%) (%) workers (%) income (%) value

High human – 14.1 – – 35 –

development
1 Canada 7 21.2 42.2 56.1 38 0.72
2 France 31 9 9.4 41.4 39 0.489
3 Norway 2 36.4 31.5 61.9 42 0.79
4 USA 11 11.2 42.7 52.6 40 0.675
8 Japan 38 7.7 8.9 43.3 34 0.472
11 Spain 16 19.9 31.9 43 30 0.617
18 Denmark 3 33 19.2 46.8 42 0.739
19 Germany 8 25.5 25.8 49 35 0.694
31 Chile 61 7.2 20.1 53.9 22 0.416
34 Costa Rica 28 15.8 23.4 45.4 27 0.503
36 Argentina – – – – – –
38 Uruguay 59 6.9 28.2 63.7 34 0.422
45 Panama 44 9.7 27.6 49.2 28 0.46
46 Venezuela 62 6.3 22.9 57.1 27 0.414
49 Mexico 37 14.2 19.8 45.2 26 0.474
53 Colombia 41 9.8 31 44 33 0.47
62 Brazil 68 6.7 17.3 62.6 29 0.374
63 Belize 40 10.8 36.6 38.8 18 0.471

Medium human – – – – 36 –
development
65 Suriname 53 15.7 12.1 61.8 26 0.434
73 Ecuador 69 3.7 27.5 46.6 19 0.369
84 Jamaica – – – – – –
85 Cuba 25 22.8 18.5 47.8 31 0.523
86 Peru 54 10.8 23.8 41.3 24 0.433
88 Dominican 58 10 21.2 49.5 24 0.424
Republic
91 Paraguay 67 5.6 22.6 54.1 23 0.374
100 Guyana 39 20 12.8 47.5 27 0.472
111 Guatemala 35 12.5 32.4 45.2 21 0.479
114 El Salvador 34 15.5 25.7 44.1 34 0.48
116 Bolivia 65 3.7 28.3 42.2 27 0.393
159 Haiti 71 3.6 32.6 39.3 36 0.356
All developing – 8.6 – – 32 –
countries
Least developed – – – – – –
countries
Industrial countries – 15.3 – – 37 –
World – 11.8 – – 33 –
CONCERTACIÓN: THE PAST IN THE PRESENT 343

nomic growth, almost half of Chilean households had average monthly incomes of
U.S.$ 600/month or less in 1999, although the government, using official definitions of
poverty and indigence, classified only 27 percent of households as “poor” or “indi-
gent.” Automobiles, most household appliances, and consumer durables cost more in
Chile than in Europe or the United States. Credit was much more costly, if gradually
more available to middle- and lower-income groups. Many government subsidies for
health, education, and transportation had been eliminated after the military govern-
ment’s “modernizations” and privatization of most of the social security and public
health systems.
A growing number of households had two wage earners, and Chileans now work
much longer hours than they did in the 1960s. In 1997–99, the Asian crisis and rising
unemployment levels threatened to erode “the miracle.” Chileans of all socioeconomic
strata were experiencing the stress of modernization. Rising use of drugs, higher levels
of street crime, and a feeling of hopelessness and alienation among low-income youth
marred “the miracle,” emulating a pattern familiar in more developed capitalist soci-
eties, including Great Britain and the United States, as well as in much of Latin Amer-
ica in the 1990s.
Electrical power rationing imposed in 1999 by the multinational firms that now con-
trolled the energy sector, when drought reduced the availability of hydroelectric
power, added to the economic woes, angered all political sectors, and worried the gov-
ernment as the country approached the primary elections organized by the Con-
certación to select a candidate for the presidential elections of December 1999. For the
first time since 1990, public opinion polls showed less than 50 percent support for the
incumbent president. The Ministry of Planning (MIDEPLAN) periodic survey on social
and economic conditions (Encuesta Casen) in 1998 highlighted one overriding trend: de-
spite declines in the incidence of indigence and poverty since 1990, the degree of in-
come inequality had slightly increased.
According to MIDEPLAN, results of the Encuesta Casen demonstrated a significant
decline in the levels of indigence and poverty from 1990 to 1998. This positive trend–at
the beginning of the decade the Casen survey classified almost half the population as
poor or indigent–stalled after 1996. The incidence of poor and indigent households re-
mained higher in rural areas (23% of all poor and indigent households), but since ap-
proximately 85 percent of the population resided in urban places, most poor and indi-
gent households were urban.
With careful macroeconomic management, the neoliberal “trickle down” model had
generated increased employment and real income as long as there existed favorable ex-
ternal conditions. Even under these circumstances, however, no improvement oc-
curred regarding income distribution. The ratio between the top 20 percent of income
earners and the bottom 20 percent remained at about 14:1 (see Table 11–11). If not for
government income transfers and subsidies to low-income families, income concentra-
tion would have been slightly worse. Thus despite robust economic performance and
well-intentioned social policies, the Concertación governments from 1990–2000 failed to
improve the patterns of social and economic inequality inherited from the military
regime. Some observers argued that, indeed, intensification of the neoliberal policies,
especially privatization; deemphasis of public health and education; and weak regula-
tory policies worsened the tendencies engendered by the dictatorship.
The chasm separating upperclass Chileans from those at the bottom of the social hi-
erarchy remained the principal feature of the social topography. The top 10 percent of
households accounted for a bit more than 41 percent of income; the bottom 30 percent
344 CHILE

table 11-8. chile 1998 and the united nations development

programme gender-related development index
Combined
Gender- first-,
related Life Life secondary-
develop- expectancy expectancy Adult Adult and third-
ment at birth at birth literacy literacy level gross
index (years) (years) rate (%) rate (%) enrollmen
(GDI) 1995, 1995, 1995, 1995, ratio (%)
rank Female Male Female Male 1995, Fema

High human development – 76.79 70.27 95.23 96.16 79.03

1 Canada 1 81.78 76.28 99 99 100
2 France 7 82.64 74.37 99 99 91
3 Norway 2 80.48 74.65 99 99 93
4 USA 6 79.69 72.99 99 99 98
8 Japan 13 82.83 76.71 99 99 77
11 Spain 19 81.34 74.08 96.1 98.2 94
30 Korea, Rep. of 37 75.43 68.05 96.69 99.28 78.43
31 Chile 46 78.01 72.16 94.96 95.4 72.06
34 Costa Rica 39 79.01 74.34 94.95 94.72 68.3
36 Argentina 48 76.23 69.12 96.19 96.23 80.62
38 Uruguay 31 75.94 69.45 97.67 96.89 79.57
45 Panama 42 75.56 71.42 90.22 91.37 73.06
46 Venezuela 43 75.28 69.51 90.34 91.79 68.43
49 Mexico 49 75.12 69.19 87.41 91.84 66.14
53 Colombia 41 73.07 67.67 91.38 91.23 70.66
62 Brazil 56 70.72 62.76 83.21 83.32 71.8
63 Belize 72 75.57 72.86 70 70 74.11
64 Libyan Arab Jamahiriya 79 66.26 62.78 63.01 87.93 89

Medium human development – 69.68 65.35 76.93 89.53 63.67

65 Suriname 63 73.44 68.45 90.96 95.1 71
72 Russian Federation 53 72.08 59.18 99 99 82
73 Ecuador 78 72.16 66.99 88.22 92.04 68.86
84 Jamaica 65 76.34 71.91 89.11 80.81 68.85
85 Cuba 69 77.64 73.86 95.29 96.17 67.26
86 Peru 80 70.19 65.33 82.96 94.54 76.13
87 Jordan 90 70.84 67.02 79.36 93.39 66
88 Dominican Republic 81 72.39 68.3 82.24 82.01 73.95
91 Paraguay 89 71.36 66.83 90.61 93.5 63.02
100 Guyana 95 67.05 60.26 97.49 98.65 65.76
111 Guatemala 113 68.67 63.65 57.2 72.8 41.71
116 Bolivia 110 62.13 58.89 76 90.51 63.47
119 Honduras 114 71.2 66.49 72.7 72.63 61.32
126 Nicaragua 115 69.93 65.16 66.62 64.65 65.69

Low human development – 57.46 55.9 38.34 62.96 39.51

131 Myanmar 120 60.55 57.25 77.69 88.73 47.53
158 Senegal 149 51.3 49.3 23.2 43.05 27.89
159 Haiti 144 56.28 52.9 42.2 48.05 27.99
174 Sierra Leone 163 36.27 33.25 18.19 45.39 23.68

All developing countries – 63.67 60.78 61.82 78.86 53.06

Least developed countries – 52.3 50.03 39.3 59.19 30.85
Industrial countries – 77.9 70.36 98.5 98.76 83.98
World – 65.37 61.92 71.48 83.71 58.07
 CONCERTACIÓN: THE PAST IN THE PRESENT 345

Combined Combined
first-, first-,
secondary-, secondary-,
Adult and third- and third- Share of Share of HDI
literacy level gross level gross earned earned rank
) rate (%) enrollment enrollment income income GDI minus
1995, ratio (%) ratio (%) (%) 1995, (%) 1995, value GDI
Male 1995, Female 1995, Male Female Male (1995) rank

96.16 79.03 75.51 34.41 65.59 0.8604 –

99 100 100 37.958 62.042 0.94 0
99 91 87 39.115 60.885 0.925 –5
99 93 92 42.356 57.644 0.935 1
99 98 93 40.301 59.699 0.927 –2
99 77 79 34.053 65.947 0.902 –5
98.2 94 87 29.7 70.3 0.877 –8
99.28 78.43 65.92 29.192 70.808 0.826 –8
95.4 72.06 64.71 22.02 77.98 0.783 –16
94.72 68.3 59.49 26.873 73.127 0.818 –6
96.23 80.62 68.69 22.097 77.903 0.777 –13
96.89 79.57 65.1 33.731 66.269 0.841 6
91.37 73.06 63.35 27.837 72.163 0.804 1
91.79 68.43 57.95 27.143 72.857 0.79 1
91.84 66.14 63.97 25.734 74.266 0.774 –2
91.23 70.66 62.74 33.489 66.511 0.81 8
83.32 71.8 69.1 29.267 70.733 0.751 –1
70 74.11 72.87 18.462 81.538 0.689 –16
87.93 89 85.48 16.297 83.703 0.664 –22

89.53 63.67 64.93 36.38 63.62 0.6559 –

95.1 71 71 26.11 73.89 0.735 –5
99 82 75 41.309 58.691 0.757 12
92.04 68.86 64.27 18.618 81.382 0.667 –12
80.81 68.85 63.43 39.171 60.829 0.724 12
96.17 67.26 62.12 31.456 68.544 0.705 9
94.54 76.13 72.03 23.801 76.199 0.664 –1
93.39 66 66 19.093 80.907 0.647 –10
82.01 73.95 63.61 24.022 75.978 0.662 0
93.5 63.02 61.07 23.243 76.757 0.651 –5
98.65 65.76 58.79 26.929 73.071 0.63 –3
72.8 41.71 46.54 21.325 78.675 0.549 –10
90.51 63.47 65.83 26.806 73.194 0.557 –2
72.63 61.32 56.23 24.383 75.617 0.544 –3
64.65 65.69 59.74 28.329 71.671 0.526 1

62.96 39.51 52.22 28.64 71.36 0.388 –

88.73 47.53 46.42 42.328 57.672 0.478 1
43.05 27.89 36.51 35.096 64.904 0.326 –1
48.05 27.99 29.55 35.982 64.018 0.335 5
45.39 23.68 35.66 29.211 70.789 0.165 0

78.86 53.06 58.9 32.42 67.58 0.564 –

59.19 30.85 40.32 34.29 65.71 0.3324 –
98.76 83.98 81.57 38.02 61.98 0.8879 –
83.71 58.07 62.51 33.71 66.29 0.7365 –
346 CHILE

table 11–9. chile 1999: a marketing perspective of the social pyramid*

A: High, 4% Average family Professionals, business executives, entrepre-
B. Upper middle, 10% monthly income: neurs, businessmen, diplomats, officials of
U.S.$8000 international organizations; average educa-
tional levels, 17–20 years; 100% have modern
automobiles, especially Mercedes Benz,
BMW, Volvo, etc; 100% have private phones,
often with unlisted numbers; usually at least
2 domestic household workers, often ser-
vants and a chauffeur, who dress well and
are educated
C1: Middle, 6% Average monthly in- Professionals, doctors, lawyers, engineers, mid-
come: U.S.$4700 dle-level business executives, small business
proprietors, small commercial farm opera-
tors; 14–17 years of education; 95% have an
auto no more than 4 years old; most have
two cars; 100% with private phones; 80%
have domestic household workers, generally
“live-in,” sometimes more than one
C2: Middle, 20% Average monthly in- Young professionals and business executives,
come: U.S.$1,700 technicians, proprietors of small businesses,
salesmen, merchants, salaried employees;
10–12 years of education; 80% have relatively
modern cars, worth up to U.S.$12,500; 85%
have private phones; if they have domestic
household workers, usually not “live-in”
and often “by-the-day”
C3: Middle, 4% Average monthly fam- Salaried employees in public or private sector,
ily income: specialized workers, teachers, taxi owners;
U.S.$1,000 10–14 years of education; 55% have an auto-
mobile, usually worth no more than
U.S.$8000; 75% have a private phone, usually
no domestic household workers, unless both
spouses employed
D: Lower, 35% Average monthly fam- Workers, low-level white collar; janitors, mes-
ily income: U.S.$600 sengers, domestic workers, seamstress; 6–10
years education; 15% have cars 10 year old
or less, usually valued at less than U.S.$5000;
45% have private phones; almost never have
domestic workers
E. Poverty level, 10% Average monthly fam- Day workers; earn less than minimum wage;
ily U.S. income: education 2–4 years; no car; no private
U.S.$250 phone; no domestic workers

*Percentages in table do not add to 100% (rounded to 99%).

for less than 10 percent. (Of course, Chile shared this general pattern of increasing in-
come inequalities in the 1990s with the United States, most of Latin America, and parts
of Europe). Added to the failures of constitutional and political reform and the inabil-
ity to resolve the human rights legacy of the dictatorship, the persistent social and eco-
nomic inequalities made ever more poignant the often-asked question, “What sort of
democracy is this?” It also made more understandable the unwillingness of youthful vot-
CONCERTACIÓN: THE PAST IN THE PRESENT 347

table 11–10. chile: incidence of poverty and indigence, 1990–98,

by percentage of population and households

Indigents Poor Indigent Poor

Year (1000) Percent (1000) Percent households Percent households Percent

1990 1,659,300 12.9 4,965,600 38.6 336,300 10.6 1,056,500 33.3

1992 1,169,300 8.8 4,331,700 32.6 242,400 7.2 932,500 27.7
1994 1,036,200 7.6 3,780,000 27.5 219,300 6.2 820,500 23.2
1996 813,800 5.8 3,288,300 23.2 178,800 4.9 706,800 19.7
1998 820,000 5.6 3.160,100 21.7 173,900 4.7 666,000 17.8
Source: MIDEPLAN, División Social, Resultados de la Encuesta CASEN, 1998.

table 11–11. chile: percent distribution of household

money income, by deciles, 1990–98

Distribution of Money Income (%)

Deciles 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998

1 1.6 1.7 1.5 1.4 1.4

2 2.8. 2.9 2.8 2.7 2.7
3 3.7 3.8 3.6 3.6 3.6
4 4.5 4.7 4.6 4.6 4.6
5 5.4 5.6 5.6 5.5 5.4
6 6.9 6.6 6.4 6.4 6.4
7 7.8 8.0 8.0 8.1 8.3
8 10.3 10.4 10.5 11.0 10.9
9 15.1 14.7 15.3 15.4 15.9
10 41.8 41.6 41.6 41.3 41.0

Total 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0 100.0

20/20 12.9 12.2 13.2 13.8 13.9

Source: MIDEPLAN, Encuesta CASEN, 1998.

ers to register, the rising abstention rates and spoiled ballots in the 1997 elections, and
the increased number of protest movements among university students and environ-
mental activists (1997–99).
Further concentration of ownership of the mass media also accompanied increased
concentration of income and economic power in the 1990s. The magazines that had re-
sisted the military dictatorship gradually disappeared: Cauce, Análisis, Apsi. Market
forces also eliminated La Epoca and Fortín Mapocho, the newspapers that had challenged
the ideological dominance of El Mercurio, and its late afternoon sister, La Segunda. Que
Pasa, which had become the most important political and economic weekly, passed into
the hands of the newer media conglomerate, Copesa, which controlled La Tercera (the
most widely read newspaper) and La Cuarta (a popular tabloid). Although Copesa
competed with the El Mercurio group, still controlled by the Edwards family, between
the two they controlled almost 90 percent of newspaper advertising. Television news
likewise was homogenized and broadcasters routinely exercised self-censorship.
In contrast, while the transition to civilian government seemed to reduce journalistic
348 CHILE

pluralism, it also brought a spate of new book publishers and a vigorous output of his-
tory, social science, and social commentary by younger scholars and others denied the
possibility of making their views known in the 1980s. Research centers and academic
departments expanded work on nineteenth-century and modern Chile, a development
unforeseeable in the mid-1980s. For their controversial and critical views, none of these
authors suffered imprisonment, torture, or exile, though Alejandra Matus, a journalist
who wrote a critical book on the court system (The Black Book of Chilean Justice) found the
study censored and herself subject to arrest for defamation of a Supreme Court Justice.
She fled the country. In accord with the times, the book circulated widely on the Inter-
net. Matus requested, and received, political asylum in the United States—a bitter pill
for a Chilean government that had proclaimed its commitment to democratization.
Dissatisfaction with the pace, style, and achievements of the political transition
could not be equated with “no change at all.” The pervasive fear that the dictatorship
had spread through the country dissipated, despite the ongoing battles over impunity
for human rights violations and tensions in civil-military relations. Economic recession
encouraged renewed criticism of the neoliberal model, especially its impact on the
most vulnerable groups in society. Few Chileans longed for the return of military rule.
As the country approached its third presidential election since 1989, general Pinochet’s
fate in England, or Spain, remained uncertain, as did the long-term survival of the par-
ticular version of “protected democracy” that he had imposed. But even as Chileans
looked toward the future, they daily confronted unfinished business with the past.
Epilogue

Living with the legacies of the military regime was not the same as living under the mili-
tary regime. The country approached September 11, 1998, with a new army commander
and General Pinochet ensconced in the Senate—a “senator for life” (senador vitalicio) as
provided for in the 1980 constitution. Congress had eliminated September 11 as a na-
tional holiday, although it had been replaced with the “day of national unity” scheduled
for the first week of September each year. Chileans hardly lived in the best of all possi-
ble worlds, but they seemed to be doing better than most other Latin Americans.
On the occasion of president Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle’s last state of the nation mes-
sage to Congress on May 21, 1999, legislators of the right-wing UDI party delivered a
note to the British ambassador protesting her presence in the Congress, unfolded a ban-
ner protesting Pinochet’s detention in England, and unceremoniously abandoned the
building, amidst fisticuffs between themselves and pro-government legislators. Inter-
national television broadcast these embarrassing images of the Chilean legislature as
protesters insulted each other and stoned police outside Congress in downtown Val-
paraíso. Nine days remained before the primary elections. For the first time since 1990
fractures in the Concertación coalition threatened the political framework that had
evolved since 1988. Political propaganda distributed in upperclass neighborhoods
ominously reminded voters of the “mistake” the country had made in 1970 and of the
terrible consequences that followed: Allende, Popular Unity, shortages, violence, a mil-
itary coup. A new campaign of fear and terror seemed in the making in anticipation of
the presidential elections of 1999. Rumblings in the barracks and the military acade-
mies regarding the detention of Pinochet and economic issues affecting the armed
forces elicited memories of the 1969 coup attempt against Frei Ruiz-Tagle’s father, then-
president Eduardo Frei Montalva.
In May 1999, the political ambience was almost as dense as Santiago’s polluted air,
which once again had forced the government to declare an “environmental alert” the
week before the state of the nation message. If many Chileans wanted to take a deep
breath and restore the calm, they literally choked as increasing levels of particulates
and ozone exacerbated the effects of the first flu epidemic of the approaching winter.
Television news broadcasters interviewed women waiting in long lines at the over-
loaded public health clinics and hospitals for health professionals to attend their chil-
dren. The “Chilean miracle” seemed flawed. Chileans asked themselves why public
services and utilities betrayed their trust, why environmental conditions continued to
deteriorate, when the economy would recover, and whether the government coalition
could survive the results of the primary election. They also wondered out loud if the
armed forces would “tolerate” a victory in December 1999 by Socialist party candidate
Ricardo Lagos, the same Lagos who had pointed his finger at Pinochet and denounced
him on television during the media campaign accompanying the 1988 plebiscite.
No one in Chile doubted the military’s continued influence in politics, although dis-
agreement existed over its reach and prospects for the future. Army commander Gen-
eral Ricardo Izurieta scheduled meetings with the high command and “private” en-
349
350 CHILE

counters with retired officers of the Círculo de Oficiales en Retiro de las Fuerzas Ar-
madas in which he lambasted government policies toward the armed forces, com-
plained of erosion of salaries and resources, and denounced the government’s lack of
energetic efforts to rescue Pinochet and uphold Chilean sovereignty. Shortly after the
president’s May 21 state of the nation address to congress, Izurieta scheduled a semi-
nar for 1200 young officers at the Escuela Militar to remind them of the “real history”
of the military regime, a history that military sources claimed was being denigrated by
the very groups who had caused the tragedy of 1973. The army scheduled similar sem-
inars in bases across the country as the armed forces explicitly and directly re-engaged
in the important battle for the definition of the country’s official history. Army officers
publicly declared that controlling the interpretation of the country’s recent past was a
critical task in defining its present and its future.
On the left, adding to the rising tensions, demonstrators in anti-Pinochet rallies and
political campaigns chanted pro-Allende slogans and resuscitated the menacing rheto-
ric of the recent past: avanzar sin transar (advance without compromise). Labor conflict
increased; protesting students occupied universities for days or weeks at a time, sus-
pending classes and demanding more government support for education, scholar-
ships, and student loans. Indian activists and their supporters damaged property and
vehicles of lumber companies in the south, renewing historical claims on thousands of
acres of land lost to the onslaught of the Chilean army and settlers from the late nine-
teenth century until the present. Human rights organizations demanded information
on the fate of the “disappeared,” for “the truth” on the crimes of the dictatorship, for
“justice” and repentance. Plaintiffs brought new criminal and civil charges against mil-
itary officers for human rights violation, and a renovated Supreme Court modified its
interpretation of the 1978 amnesty to allow the reopening of investigations into certain
cases—a signal to the armed forces that could not be ignored.
President Frei did nothing to challenge the general’s “seminars” for the officer corps
nor to discipline him for outspoken remarks on the status of Pinochet, the role of the
army in politics, and the barely veiled threats to civilian politicians. Of course, the
Armed Forces Organic Laws, a last-minute legacy of the military regime (March 1989),
prevented Frei, even had he wished to, from firing General Izurieta or commanders of
the other armed forces. As Pinochet had intended, the civilian government was con-
strained (“atado y bien atado”). But rumblings in the ranks concerned the high com-
mand. New and reactivated judicial inquiries into high profile cases of human rights
abuses and the expanding investigation against Pinochet himself by Spanish Judge Bal-
tasar Garzón and by Chilean judge Juan Guzmán, who was assigned the numerous
cases brought against the ex-dictator by human rights organizations and victims’ fam-
ilies, augured poorly for continued military solidarity.
Amongst the older generation, some retired officers sought peace with themselves,
and perhaps with God and society, by breaking the vows of silence, acknowledging their
crimes, and providing information regarding the fate of the “disappeared.” Among
younger officers, especially in the Air Force and Navy, there existed a desire to be done
with “the past.” Even in the army the shadow of Pinochet and his hard-core loyalists
generated some resentment. In June 1999 the Spanish newspaper El País reported that a
retired Chilean colonel had revealed that Pinochet’s personal helicopter pilot had told
him that many of the “disappeared” had been thrown into the sea; others, still alive,
were dropped from helicopters into the Andes. The colonel also claimed that bodies of
some of the “disappeared” were buried on military bases (terrenos militares).
In response, rightist politicians and military officers of all branches attempted again
to negotiate a “final settlement” of the human rights issue. Could they trade informa-
tion and the “truth” for a ley de punto final? Would the victims’ families, the human
EPILOGUE 351

rights organizations, the political left, and the Concertación government accept a South
African solution: truth for impunity? Could the 1978 amnesty law be expanded to in-
clude crimes committed until March 1990 or even until the assassination of Jaime
Guzmán in 1991? If so, at what price? If not, were there groups in the armed forces that
would put a stop to the resurgent demands for truth and justice by force?
Both the Aylwin and Frei governments had sought unsuccessfully to “close the
book” on the crimes of state terrorism. Nevertheless, the smoldering embers that
Pinochet declared should be “doused with a bucket of water” in an 1989 interview
threatened to burst anew into flames in mid-1999. Pinochet granted an interview in
England to journalist Dominic Lawson, which was published in the Guardian and
translated in El Mercurio de Valparaíso and La Tercera. He denied that he had authorized
torture during his government, accepting “political responsibility” for any excesses but
not “criminal responsibility.” He claimed that he hadn’t had time to supervise the
methods used to save the country from the scourge of international communism. When
Lawson commented that Pinochet had been a general all his life, but had answered the
interview questions like a politician, Pinochet responded: “I am a General of the Re-
public of Chile. I never liked politicians.” And with that,
Pinochet moved slowly and stiffly, his back absolutely rigid and upright, into the gar-
den to join his grandchildren. Captain Torres [his aide] dutifully began blowing up an
inflatable paddling pool. As I watched the general sitting playing with his grandchil-
dren, the thought kept coming into my mind that he reminded me very much of
someone else, someone I had seen, but never met. The strangely hoarse, muffled
voice; the great stress, at all times, on “respect”; the somewhat courtly manner of ex-
pression; the Catholicism; the ruthless paternalist in great old age, much loved by his
grandchildren. And then I realised who it was that Pinochet reminded me of: the aged
Don Corleone, in The Godfather, as acted by Marlon Brando. Augusto Pinochet Ugarte,
however, is the genuine article.
On May 30, 1999, the Concertación coalition sponsored the first-ever national pri-
mary election to select the coalition’s presidential candidate for the December elec-
tions. Voters overwhelmingly supported Ricardo Lagos (71%) over the Christian Dem-
ocratic candidate, Andrés Zaldívar (29%). As election day got under way, a massive
power black-out affected Santiago and the central valley for three hours; government
spokespersons and politicians speculated that the outage was not accidental but rather
a less than subtle reminder that the real centers of “power” in the country had serious
concerns about Lagos’ possible election as president. Two days later, Pinochet’s most
important adviser from 1990 to 1994, retired General Jorge Ballerino, appeared in a tele-
vision interview to express his displeasure with the possibility of a “Marxist” presi-
dent; another retired general asserted that Lagos’ candidacy threatened the “return of
Allendismo and the Unidad Popular.”
Lagos attempted to convince the Armed Forces, private investors, and public opin-
ion that times had changed, that his previous support of Salvador Allende and partic-
ipation in the Popular Unity Government (1970–73) posed no threat to them in the year
2000. As expected, the political right initiated a propaganda campaign associating
Lagos with “the past”—seeking to use the lingering fear in Chilean society of renewed
polarization as a barrier to his election. But Chilean voters were more concerned with
the present: the recession, rising unemployment rates (over 600,000 officially unem-
ployed in July 1999, exceeding 10% of the work force for the first time in over a decade),
lack of affordable health insurance and medical services, and fear of street crime. From
the left, the Communist party candidate, Gladys Marín, accused Lagos of being merely
a continuation of the last ten years, a “renovated” socialist who would do nothing to
352 CHILE

overcome the misery generated by the neoliberal model imposed by the dictatorship
and managed for the last ten years by the Concertación.
Ten years of truce, of conflict management via “prudence and moderation,” had mit-
igated some of the ills afflicting the body politic, but the recent past still haunted the
present. On September 6, 1999, the country “celebrated” the new “Day of National
Unity” with small protest demonstrations, “acts of repudiation,” scattered barricades,
and bonfires in poor neighborhoods in Santiago. Government spokespersons barely
mentioned the holiday. Not even presidential candidates showed their faces, choosing
private meetings or “prayers for unity” rather than public ceremonies. Ugly incidents
occurred between members of the Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos-Desapare-
cidos and two senators—one an ex-commander of the Carabineros—who went to place
a floral wreath on the monument dedicated to the detenidos-desaparecidos. The senators
were insulted and chased out of the cemetery, accused of defiling the memories of the
“victims of fascism.” Army commander General Ricardo Izurieta managed to be in the
far south with the Minister of Public Works inaugurating the last section of the Car-
retera Austral (“the southern highway”) that “unified” the Aisén region to the north
after eight years of work by the army’s engineer corps (Cuerpo de Trabajo Militar).
Izurieta artlessly compared the symbol of unity of the highway with the “army’s on-
going commitment to national unity.”
In Santiago, one of the two main “inventors” of the new holiday, Andrés Zaldívar,
lamented the incidents in the cemetery and concluded: “the conditions and spirit nec-
essary for reconciliation still don’t exist in Chile; there is too much pending business
regarding truth and justice.” The other “inventor” of the holiday, General Pinochet,
remained detained in England. Confirming Zaldívar’s affirmation, the Communist
party presidential candidate, Gladys Marín, declared that “the ‘Day of National Unity’
doesn’t exist and it is a step backward that they have decreed it when the country has
yet to resolve such fundamental issues as those regarding human rights.” Outside San-
tiago, El Mercurio reported that “in the Valparaíso Region there were no public cele-
brations of the Day of National Unity and in Temuco human rights organizations
scheduled a nighttime vigil outside the Tucapel army regiment’s headquarters, oppo-
site the Plaza Recabarren.” Further south, the Bishop of Osorno, Alejandro Goic, called
on Chileans and all believers to make every effort so that the new holiday would really
be an “occasion for promoting unity” (jornada de unión). Four days later came Septem-
ber 11, then the annual “independence day” celebration on September 18. The country
waited for the always eventful month of September to unfold and looked toward the
December presidential elections.
On September 11 the country saw the usual processions to the cemetery, the wreaths
placed at Morandé 80 (the former location of the door to La Moneda palace used by Al-
lende), and also the reaffirmations of the military coup by the Augusto Pinochet Ugarte
Foundation and other loyal partisans of Pinochet and the military government. Fewer
deaths and injuries resulted on September 11, 1999, than in years past, but the bitter-
ness remained.
Antagonistic memories of the recent past still divided the country in the present. Yet
the Navy Commander had finally acknowledged in public statements that human
rights abuses had occurred during the military government—although he insisted that
they were not government policy but simply “individual excesses.” The Army still re-
sisted the gesture made by the Navy, but in an interview published in the Concepción
newspaper El Sur on September 12, 1999, Senator José Viera-Gallo claimed that in pri-
vate conversations some generals had referred to those involved in the “caravan of
death” case in 1973 as “murderers and psychopaths.” In contrast, ex–Minister of Jus-
EPILOGUE 353

tice during the military government and author of the 1978 amnesty, Monica
Madariaga, called on the government to cancel the annual military parade (September
19) because of Pinochet’s detention in England and the “state of grief” within the
armed forces. Two days later the president of the Senate read a letter sent from Pinochet
to Chileans, calling for “reconciliation and national unity”; the same day newspapers
headlined the arrest of the ex-director of the CNI and ex-member of the military junta,
General Humberto Gordon. Gordon, who retired as a four-star general, the same rank
held by army commander General Ricardo Izurieta in September 1999, was charged in
the murder of labor leader Tucapel Jiménez in 1982—a crime not covered by the 1978
amnesty decree. (Gordon died in June, 2000 with the case still unresolved.) On Sep-
tember 18, 1999, Archbishop Francisco Javier Errázuriz’s homily told attendees at the
Te Deum mass in Santiago’s Cathedral: “We shall soon celebrate the 2000th anniversary
of the arrival to this world of Jesus Christ, Word of the Father to Humanity. We pray
that he inspire our gratitude and our communication with God, . . . and that with
Him and Our Lady of Reconciliation, we construct a Nation of brothers.”
In less spectacular, but perhaps equally important news reports, Chileans learned
that a court, for the first time, had temporarily stopped worked on a major hydroelec-
tric project (the Ralco dam) because conditions of the environmental impact report had
not been met. The stoppage was successfully appealed by the contractor and by
CONAMA, but it represented an important milestone in environmental and ethnic pol-
itics. Those protesting the project in this case were a small group of Mapuche Indians.
A week later the Temuco Appeals Court sanctioned a municipal government official for
“racial discrimination” against a Mapuche social worker, Bernardita Calfuqueo. The
growing autonomy of the judicial system was beginning to make a difference, however
small, not only in civil-military relations, but also in the application of environmental,
anti-discrimination, and indigenous legislation. As the 1990s ended, the historical im-
punity of the powerful and wealthy no longer seemed absolutely secure in Chile.
On October 8, 1999, a British judge ruled that General Pinochet should be extradited
to Spain for trial on charges related to torture, murder, and the cases of the detenidos-de-
saparecidos, defined by the judge as ongoing torture of the victims’ families.

I find that the information before me relating to allegations after 8th December 1988
constitutes a course of conduct amounting to torture and conspiracy to torture for
which Senator Pinochet enjoys no immunity. . . . I take the view that information re-
lating to the allegation of conspiracy prior to 8th December 1988 can be considered by
the court, since conspiracy is a continuing offence. However, this would not be my
ruling relating to the substantive offences.
Whether the disappearances amount to torture; the effect on the families of those
who disappeared can amount to mental torture. Whether or not this was intended by
the regime of Senator Pinochet is in my view a matter of fact for the trial court.
On the basis of my findings I am therefore satisfied that all the conditions are in
place which oblige me under the terms of Section 9(8) of the Extradition Act 1989 to
commit Senator Pinochet to await the decision of the Secretary of State.

By November, General Izurieta and the army high command grew more than im-
patient with the spectacle of officers testifying in criminal proceedings. Izurieta ob-
jected publicly to the reinterpretation of the amnesty decree that permitted investiga-
tion into the “ongoing cases” (cases where no bodies had been found). At mid-month
the Conference of Catholic Bishops called on the British government to return Pinochet
to Chile for “humanitarian reasons”—he was old and infirm.
354 CHILE

Meanwhile the social and economic legacy of the military government also exerted
its continued influence. On November 14, 1999, El Mercurio de Valparaíso reported that
the Port of Valparaíso had passed into private hands. With no government officials in
attendance and punctuated by violent protests by approximately fifty port workers
who burned tires on Avenida Errázuriz, Terminal 1 began a new era controlled by the
German-Chilean consortium: Terminal Pacífico Sur, S.A., a partnership of the Ultramar
Group and Hamburger Hafen und Lagerhaus Aktiengesellshaft (HHLA). Police broke
up the protests. A spokesman for the new port enterprise claimed that within eighteen
months efficiency of container debarkation would greatly increase, creating benefits for
all Chileans by modernizing the port operations. He acknowledged that some workers
would have to look for jobs elsewhere.
A month later Chileans went to the polls to select a new president. On December 12,
1999, no candidate received the necessary majority to be elected. The rightist candidate,
Joaquín Lavín, ran a surprisingly strong campaign, appealing to what he called the vot-
ers’ “real needs” in a highly populistic and costly media blitz that featured the slogan
“viva el cambio”—“Long live change!” Ricardo Lagos, candidate of the Concertación
coalition, was saddled with the recent legacy of the recession and the frustration of
some voters with the two post-1990 governments’ inability to reform the 1980 consti-
tution and their unwillingness to modify the economic system introduced by the mili-
tary regime. Lavín, author of a book praising the “silent revolution” achieved after
1973, promised to replace traditional politics with a government that worked for “all
Chileans.” His energy, youthfulness (age 46), and promises appealed especially to the
feminine vote, as evidenced by his margin of approximately 5 percent over Lagos
among women voters. Overall, Lavín obtained some 47.5 percent and Lagos 48 percent.
The relatively small percentage of votes for minor party, environmental, and personal-
ist candidates was enough to force a run-off election, scheduled for January 16, 2000.
The Concertación coalition and its supporters faced the prospect of a return to gov-
ernment of officials and consultants of the Pinochet government. Many of Lavín’s ad-
visers and supporters had worked in the military government, as had Lavín himself.
Associating himself with the “economic miracle” and seeking to dissociate himself
from the human rights abuses of the military regime, Lavín successfully appealed to
voters tired of the “politics of the past” and focused on concrete issues such as jobs,
health care, crime, and housing. In contrast, Lagos’ slogan “growth with equity” did
not catch on; many voters wondered why the Concertación had not done a better job
for the last ten years. Lagos also bore the burden of the “natural” attrition of a govern-
ing coalition after a decade in power. For some sectors, including some Christian Dem-
ocrats, he also still symbolized the conflicts of the Allende years—something not to be
repeated.
Shortly before the January run-off, the British government announced that a team of
doctors had found General Pinochet medically unfit to stand trial, that he would likely
be returned to Chile rather than extradited to Spain. Both Lavín and Lagos attempted
to skirt the “Pinochet issue,” taking the tack that it was an issue for courts to resolve,
not the presidential candidates—although both affirmed that it was a matter for Chile
and Chileans to settle rather than for British, Spanish, or other foreign authorities.
Faced with a virtual tie between Lavín and Lagos in the opinion polls, the Con-
certación electoral organization appointed a prominent Christian Democratic woman,
Soledad Alvear, to direct the run-off campaign. Lagos promised voters jobs, housing,
better health care, more police protection for their neighborhoods, improved educa-
tional opportunities from pre-school through the university, and a sports field and cul-
tural center in every neighborhood. On his Internet Web site, below these electoral
promises, Lagos signed his name and wrote “I give my word” (“Te doy mi palabra”). Crit-
EPILOGUE 355

ics said that Lagos had “Lavínized” his campaign, succumbing to populist promise-
making.
If so, it worked. Ricardo Lagos obtained 51.3 percent of the votes on January 16,
2000. He declared that he would be “the president of all Chileans” and the third presi-
dent of the Concertación coalition (rather than the second socialist president of Chile).
Lagos still lost among women voters, although the margin was reduced to only 3 per-
cent: Ricardo Lagos E. (48.65%), Joaquín Lavín I. (51.35%). Among male voters, the
Concertación outdistanced Lavín’s Alianza por Chile coalition by almost 10 percent:
Ricardo Lagos E. (54.27%), Joaquín Lavín I. (45.73%). Political pundits speculated that
fear of a “return to the chaos of the past”—a political code for the shortages, rationing,
food lines, and political violence of 1970–73—had most influenced female voters be-
cause the burden of dealing with “the past” had fallen disproportionately on women,
especially in the poorest neighborhoods, where the Lavín campaign had been surpris-
ingly successful. But Lavín also won an important victory in the Valparaíso region—
and in that district the female vote for Lavín was almost 10 percent greater than for
Lagos (54.95% versus 45.05%).
Clearly, the immediate concerns of the Chilean electorate had changed since 1989,
although the “Pinochet issue,” the “human rights issue,” and the underlying lack of
consensus regarding the political system imposed in 1980 persisted. All these concerns
now reflected the blurring of international and national politics and political economy.
The Chile of 2000, more than ever before, faced the opportunities and challenges re-
sulting from the erosion of its geographical isolation and its intensified incorporation
into diverse global networks.
Chileans experienced a moment of hope as Joaquín Lavín immediately congratu-
lated Lagos on his victory and offered to cooperate with the newly elected president in
the task of national reconciliation. Lavín also reaffirmed his campaign messages: “I am
at Ricardo Lagos’ disposition to help overcome the real problems of our people, to de-
feat crime, to end unemployment, to improve the living conditions of the poorest
Chileans, in concrete ways, without the meanness of petty politics, and without ques-
tioning the consensus on the nature of our economic system. I am also at his disposi-
tion to work for the unity of Chileans.” Lagos responded with a call for Chileans to
“leave behind the hatreds and rancor of the past,” urging them to put the interests of
the Patria above “politics” and private interests. Both the victor and the defeated can-
didate seemed to share the dream of national unity and political reconciliation.
Ricardo Lagos had written in 1993 (Después de la Transición) that “the triumph in the
plebiscite [the defeat of Pinochet in 1988] was the most important historical event in
Chile in the second half of the twentieth century. . . . We won the right to dream again
and to construct the future.” In early 2000, Chileans awaited Lagos’ inauguration and

table e–1. presidential elections, 1999/2000

January 16, 2000

December 12, 1999 (Run-off)

Ricardo Lagos Escobar (Concertación) 48.0% 51.3%

Joaquín Lavín Infante (Alianza por Chile) 47.5% 48.7%
Gladys Marín Millie (Communist party) 3.2%
Tomás Hirsch Goldschmidt (Humanist party) 0.5%
Sara Larraín Ruiz-Tagle (Environmentalist) 0.4%
Arturo Frei Bolívar (UCC, ex–Christian Democrat) 0.4%

Source: Ministry of Interior.

356 CHILE

speculated on the possible implications of Pinochet’s return to the country. The last day
of January an Associated Press report, like many that flashed across the Internet, in-
formed readers that “Pinochet, who has diabetes and suffered two small strokes last
fall, remains under police guard at a rented mansion west of London. A Chilean air
force Boeing 707 sent to fetch him is parked at a military base northwest of London.”
Two months later, a week before Lagos’ inauguration on March 11, the British govern-
ment decided, for “humanitarian reasons,” to return Pinochet to Chile. Received tri-
umphantly by the armed forces, Pinochet almost immediately faced a legal challenge
(proceso de desafuero) to his congressional immunity from prosecution ( fuero parlamen-
tario) extended to him as a result of his position as “senator for life.” The desafuero
process rekindled the embers of discord, dividing Chileans once again over the proper
historical interpretation of the recent past and the course for the future.
As Lagos approached his first address to congress (May 21, 2000), the legacy of the
military regime’s human rights abuses and the determined opposition of victims, fam-
ily members, and anti-Pinochet political groups to forgetting the past in the name of the
future held hostage the government’s program of constitutional and political reform.
The desafuero process and the criminal prosecutions threatened to open a veritable Pan-
dora’s box. Tensions intensified when the Santiago Appeals Court ruled against
Pinochet, removing his immunity from prosecution; his lawyers immediately appealed
to the Supreme Court. By mid-July Pinochet faced over 140 separate criminal actions.
The hardcore human rights movements and their lawyers were prepared to fight
Pinochet’s impunity until his death, determined to make sure that history remembered
him as a tyrant and a criminal.
In June 2000 the “Mesa de Diálogo” reached an agreement regarding a new process
for searching for the remains of the disappeared. Congress rapidly passed legislation
protecting potential informants, and the armed forces’ commanders agreed to cooper-
ate in the investigation. As part of the agreement, for the first time, the armed forces of-
ficially recognized that “agents of the state” had engaged in human rights violations
during the military government and that measures should be taken to guarantee that
this never occur again. Some of the agrupaciones and human rights lawyers denounced
the agreement negotiated in the Mesa de Diálogo as a prelude to confirming impunity,
especially if the 1978 amnesty decree were eventually applied to cases in which human
remains were found—ending the legal fiction of “ongoing kidnappings” (secuestros ca-
lificados). But most Chileans had finally accepted the impossibility of repealing or an-
nulling the 1978 amnesty; they hoped that the victims’ families could somehow learn
the “truth” regarding their loved ones’ deaths, and that the past could be put behind,
if not forgotten.
The mounting number of criminal cases against retired officers and Pinochet him-
self held hostage any meaningful political reconciliation. Although Church officials
and some politicians still used the term “reconciliation,” the public statement issued by
the Mesa de Diálogo appealed instead to convivencia, a mixture of political civility and
tolerance, rather than the more utopian goal of reconciliation.
The Lagos government preferred to allow the courts to handle the Pinochet matter
and other criminal cases, to separate the issues of constitutional and institutional re-
form from Pinochet’s personal fate, and to move forward with social and economic
policies designed to improve income distribution and the living conditions of the ma-
jority of the population. The political right and the leaders of the armed forces hesitated
to entirely unlink support for constitutional reform, however limited (for example,
eliminating the designated senators and the senadores vitalicios), from the government’s
possible influence over the Supreme Court in the Pinochet case. Some UDI and RN
politicos called for a political solution—perhaps another all-inclusive amnesty or gen-
EPILOGUE 357

eral pardon, perhaps rejection of the legal fiction of the ongoing kidnappings, ac-
knowledging the murders from 1973 to 1978, and thereby applying the 1978 amnesty.
By admitting the murders and other crimes committed before April 1978, Pinochet
and the others would be beneficiaries of the amnesty provisions. Pinochet supporters
and the armed forces found this “solution” distasteful if not abominable. In their view,
almost three decades after saving the country from Marxism, Pinochet (and other mil-
itary personnel) were being asked to confess to torture, murder, mass executions, and
disappearing the victims in order to be beneficiaries of the amnesty decreed by the mil-
itary regime in 1978. This was hardly the historical legacy they wished to bequeath
their beloved Chilean patria. The inauguration in June 2000 of a monument to Salvador
Allende in the Plaza de la Constitución, on a corner between La Moneda Palace and the
Ministry of Justice, further embittered Pinochet’s supporters and those who blamed Al-
lende for seeking to impose Marxism on the country in the early 1970s. One particu-
larly irate columnist, Fernando Moreno Valencia, wrote in El Metropolitano (June 30,
2000): “We now have [a monument to] the person responsible for the 1000-day effort to
install totalitarian Marxism [in Chile] in the Plaza of the Constitution. . . . The effort
to bury Pinochet implies resuscitating Allende.”
Worse still, on the legal front, even if the legal fiction of kidnapping were replaced
with acknowledgment of the murders and the 1978 amnesty applied to pre-1978 cases,
all criminal cases after 1978, including many operations of the CNI and the UAT (unidad
anti-terrorista), directly responsible to Pinochet, would still fall outside the coverage of
the 1978 amnesty decree. Continued investigations, prosecutions, newspaper, maga-
zine, and television coverage were besmirching the honor of the armed forces and the
historical image of their salvational mission. Retired officers and civilian supporters of
the military regime battled to protect and diffuse their version of Chile’s recent past,
what they regarded as the “true history” of the country’s escape from the clutches of
international communism.
As the Supreme Court began hearing the appeal by Pinochet’s lawyers of the deci-
sion by the Santiago Appeals court to strip him of his congressional immunity, the sev-
enth chamber of the same Santiago appeals court sentenced the ex-operations chief of
the secret police (CNI), retired army major Alvaro Corbalán, to life-imprisonment for
the murder in 1983 of Juan Alegría Mondaca, a carpenter. Other ex-CNI agents were
also sentenced for their role in the crime, including Dr. Osvaldo Pincetti Gac, known by
prisoners as “doctor torment,” who was convicted as an accomplice. Alegría had been
killed in 1983, as part of the CNI’s effort to cover up its role in the assassination of labor
leader Tucapel Jiménez. The Jiménez case was still open, with the responsibility of var-
ious officers and agents of the CNI under continuing investigation. Whatever the out-
come of the Pinochet desafuero appeal, the courts and criminal justice system seemed in-
tent on penetrating the veil of impunity that had protected those guilty of human rights
violations during the military government, at least for crimes committed after the
amnesty decree of 1978. Conviction for murder and long prison terms for Corbalán and
other CNI agents would have been virtually impossible in 1990. The struggle for jus-
tice was not without setbacks, but by mid-2000 there existed a growing momentum
against impunity and for making Nunca Más (“never again”) a shared goal of the vast
majority of Chileans.
On July 25, 2000 the Supreme Court voted 11 to 9 to deny consideration of Pinochet’s
health status until after making the decision on the substance of the desafuero appeal.
The president of the Supreme Court announced that the court would reconvene on
Tuesday, August 1, to discuss Pinochet’s appeal on the desafuero case. Chileans faced
another week of judicial limbo on “the Pinochet case”; they also faced another week of
“bad to critical” air quality in the capital. SESMA (the Metropolitan Environmental Ser-
358 CHILE

vice) declared an “environmental preemergency,” ordering certain private vehicles off

the streets and dedicating several main traffic arteries exclusively to public transporta-
tion. This measure, called the Red Vial de Emergencia (RVE), was becoming a familiar
routine in Santiago in the winter of 2000. Far to the north in Arica, the Ministry of
Health announced that dangerous levels of lead were found in blood samples from
ninety children, among the first to be tested in a region where over twenty-one tons of
industrial wastes, including lead, mercury, arsenic, and cadmium, had been dumped
during the last fourteen years. Clearly, the capital’s and the country’s environmental
challenges would endure long after Pinochet’s fate was sealed.
The same week that the Supreme Court met to consider Pinochet’s appeal, René Ríos
Boettiger died. Ríos, who signed his cartoons “Pepo,” created Chile’s most famous car-
toon character, Condorito, a half century earlier in 1949. “Pepo” claimed that Condorito
was a response to the Walt Disney movie “Saludos Amigos,” in which Chile was de-
picted as a small airplane unable to cross the Andes. Condorito would be a personality
that represented Chile’s “idiosyncracy,” its national spirit and popular culture. The lit-
tle condor represented “every man” and the common man—sports referee, policeman,
astronaut, millionaire, fireman, farmer, lion tamer, waiter, bus driver, bureaucrat, vol-
unteer in the foreign legion. He was too clever by half, lazy, broke, picaresque, versa-
tile, and inept, a country bumpkin and an urban schemer. Condorito’s adventures, his
family and in-laws, his buddies and his working life transversed frontiers, making the
little condor as beloved in Bolivia, Peru, and Argentina as in Chile. Condorito’s half-
century paralleled Chile’s dramatic transformation from a country dominated by the
hacienda and rural traditions to a highly urbanized, modernizing society. The little air-
plane that couldn’t cross the Andes now jetted its products all over the world. The
death of “Pepo,” the end of an era, paralleled the end of the long career of the rustic,
clever, scheming, “huaso” general Pinochet, whose immediate future was in the hands
of the Supreme Court. Long term, however, Pinochet’s place in Chilean history could
not hope to compete with that of Condorito, a figure beloved by generations of
Chileans across ethnic, class, regional, and political lines. Typical of the “new” Chile, in
1999 Condorito had his own website on the Internet, and Microsoft had selected the lit-
tle condor as an image for its Windows 98 in Ibero-America.
On August 8, 2000, the Supreme Court upheld the ruling of the Santiago Appeals
Court, removing Pinochet’s congressional immunity by a vote of 14-6. This decision
cleared the way for possible prosecution in the “caravan of death” case, and maybe oth-
ers, depending on Pinochet’s medical condition. As expected, the decision reopened de-
bates about the past as well as the future amongst Pinochet’s supporters and detractors.
Military officers and leaders of the political right insisted on the need to interpret the
past, especially the military coup of 1973 and the repression of opponents by the mili-
tary government, in light of the grave threat faced by the country in 1973: international
communism and its domestic allies. Senator Sergio Diez, the military regime’s ex-
ambassador to the United Nations who had publicly denied that there existed de-
tenidos-desaparecidos, declared that “there is a moral obligation to present the complete
truth . . . it wasn’t just a case of military officers that set out to destroy democratic
governments. . . .”
President Ricardo Lagos insisted again, “I have an agenda and I am going to pursue
it. I was elected to govern for the future, not to reconsider what happened in the past.
All Chile knows what I think about what happened in the past, but my obligation as
president is the future, and that’s what I am about.” Rhetoric aside, the effort by sup-
porters of the military regime and their adversaries to “interpret” the past was a cen-
tral part of the present debate—and a key to the country’s political future.
EPILOGUE 359

Lagos’s commitment to administer the future also faced some difficult short-term ob-
stacles, despite his resolute support for the independence of the judiciary and his com-
mitment to tip the balance toward the civilian government in civil-military relations.
September, the traditional “month of the Army,” unfolded with soap opera-like drama:
protests on the “day of national unity” (this year, September 4); the usual demonstra-
tions on September 11, the day of the military coup in 1973; periodic contradictory an-
nouncements regarding the human rights cases against various military officers; and
warnings by military spokespersons that the decision against Pinochet would derail the
agreement reached by the Mesa de Diálogo. New revelations of CIA involvement in
Chile in the 1960s and 1970s, along with charges that the ex-commander of the DINA,
Manuel Contreras, had been on the CIA payroll added to the drama. Slow economic re-
covery, rising unemployment (over 10% again in early October), discord within the Con-
certación coalition, and scandals involving more than generous pensions and severance
pay given to political appointees in government and semi-public enterprises between
1990 and 2000 provided grist for the opposition press mill. As the October municipal
elections drew near, the Lagos government found itself in apparent disarray. It had tem-
porarily lost much of the moral high ground and floundered in efforts to turn the econ-
omy around.
The opposition now agreed to eventual constitutional reforms, in particular to elim-
inate the designated and lifetime senators—but continued to insist on the need to
“close the book on the past.” No legislation or political agreement, however, not even
a new amnesty law could keep the book on the past firmly shut. Even Pinochet’s even-
tual passing would require reopening the book and making new entries as his contem-
poraries sought to rewrite and reinterpret “what happened” in Chile in the last three
decades of the twentieth century. A poignant sign of what might come was the public
statement in early October by ex-junta member and air force general Fernando Matthei,
revealing that Pinochet had requested emergency powers from the Junta on the night
of the October 5, 1988 plebiscite. According to Matthei, Pinochet intended to send the
army into the streets and overturn the victory of the “NO” coalition. Ex-commander of
the Carabineros, retired general Rodolfo Stange, remembered the events slightly dif-
ferently; he had also refused to sign the document that Pinochet had prepared on Octo-
ber 5, 1988, but only because the police had the situation under control and the army’s
help was not needed to maintain order.
More of the “real story” of October 5, 1988 and the events during the year that pre-
ceded President Aylwins’ inauguration would gradually be made public. Likewise,
journalists, historians, and others would continue to research, revise, and rewrite the
country’s recent political history. Public speculation by members of the Frei family that
the DINA had murdered former president Eduardo Frei Montalva in the hospital in
1982 reopened still another unhealed wound. Thousands of documents taken by police
from the notorious Colonia Dignidad, a redoubt of neo-Nazis whose leaders collabo-
rated with the military regime’s secret police and that served as a torture center, would
also contribute to a rewriting of Chilean history.
Meanwhile, the past lived in the present, influencing government and opposition
decisions on constitutional reform, the economy, social justice, and civil-military rela-
tions. Beyond the Pinochet case, the course of civil-military relations, and president
Lagos’s reform agenda, Father Alberto Hurtado’s calls in the 1940s and 1950s for social
justice retained their currency as the country entered 2001. Likewise Cardinal Jules
Gerard Saliege’s words of 1942 that had inspired Father Hurtado remained an inspira-
tion and challenge for Chileans in the twenty-first century: “The future will be what-
ever our faith, our hope, and our efforts to overcome human misery make it.”
Political Chronology

1534 King of Spain names Diego de Almagro governor of Nueva Toledo, extend-
ing approximately from Ica to just north of TalTal.
1535–36 Almagro expedition enters Chile and reconnoiters into the central valley.
Finding no great source of wealth as in Peru, Almagro returns to Cuzco to
contest the spoils of conquest with the Pizaros.
1539 Pizaro authorizes Pedro de Valdivia to lead expedition of conquest to Chile,
which he baptizes Nuevo Extremo or Nueva Extremadura.
1540–41 Pedro de Valdivia’s expedition arrives at the Mapocho river in December;
Santiago founded February 12, 1541, and within the month Valdivia creates
the first cabildo. September 11, 1541, local Indians attack the new town, prac-
tically destroying it and most of the settlers’ provisions.
1540–53 Initial settlement and warfare with indigenous population under leadership
of Valdivia. First towns founded: La Serena (1544); Concepción (1550); La
Imperial, Valdivia, Villarrica (1552); Los Confines (1553).
1553 Battle of Tucapel, Valdivia killed by Indians led by cacique Lautaro—his ex-
groom.
1553–57 Disputes among Valdivia’s lieutenants over control of the colony. Continued
warfare with Indians. Spanish defeated at Marigueñu (1554), settlements
abandoned. Three years later Spanish destroy Lautaro’s forces at Peteroa
(1557).
1557–61 Viceroy at Lima names his son, García Hurtado de Mendoza, governor of
Chile and sends an army financed out of the royal treasury to secure Chile.
Alonso de Ercilla y Zúñiga, author of the epic poem, La Araucana, arrives
with this expedition to Chile.
1557–59 Exploration of territory from Concepción to the south. Osorno founded
(1558), and expedition under command of Juan Ladrillero penetrates to the
Strait of Magellan. Fort at Tucapel reconstructed and Concepción resettled.
1559 Tasa de Santillán—ordinances seeking to regulate Indian labor and personal
service to the Spanish—prohibits use of Indians as beasts of burden and re-
quire sufficient daily food for Indian workers. Ordinances largely ignored,
despite application in mines at Quilacoya near Concepción.
1561–63 Administration of Governor Francisco de Villagra. Creation of Diocese of
Santiago (1561). Bartolomé Rodrigo González Marmolejo appointed first
Bishop. Fray Gil de González preaches “defensive war,” unsuccessfully
seeking to defend Indians.

360
POLITICAL CHRONOLOGY 361

1563–65 Interim administration of Pedro de Villagra. Pope Paul IV creates Diocese of

La Imperial (1563). Philip II decrees establishment of Chile’s first audiencia at
Concepción (1565).
1565–67 Interim administration of Rodrigo de Quiroga. Audiencia installed at Con-
cepción and town of Castro founded (1567) after expedition of exploration
and conquest to island of Chiloé.
1567–75 Chile governed by Bravo de Saravia. Bishop of La Imperial advises king to
suppress the audiencia (1570) because of its failure to help pacify the terri-
tory and deal firmly with abuses against the Indians. Despite continued ef-
forts by the Bishop and royal decrees, encomenderos continue to evade regu-
lations. Audiencia at Concepción abolished (1573).
1575–80 Rodrigo de Quiroga, one of the area’s first conquistadors and lieutenant of
Valdivia, assumes political leadership, supports encomenderos, and urges
king to approve “personal service” of Indians to Spaniards. Carries out large
expeditions of war against Indians in southern region. Prisoners are maimed
to prevent their escape.
1580 Chillán founded.
1580–83 Interim administration of Ruiz de Gamboa, Quiroga’s son-in-law. In effort to
secure permanent appointment, Ruiz de Gamboa cooperates with Bishop
Medillín in promulgation of Tasa de Gamboa (1580) which sought to abolish
“personal service.” Gamboa fails to win decisive victory over Araucanians,
and the Spanish king sends Alonso de Sotomayor, a veteran soldier, as gov-
ernor of Chile.
1583–92 Administration of Alonso de Sotomayor. Gradual revocation of Gamboa’s
reforms; forced labor—personal service reinstated. Stimulation to mining
economy in Quillota and Choapa valleys. Despite harsh campaigns against
Araucanians, Indians remain unsubdued. Sotomayor’s secret marriage to a
Creole woman leads to his downfall.
1592–99 Administration of Martín García Oñez de Loyola, nephew of the viceroy of
Peru and relative of Ignatius de Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus (Je-
suit order). Renewal of official concern with conditions of Indians. Outlaws
sale of Indian captives or their transport from the south to northern mines or
to Peru.
1598 Indian uprising under cacique Pelantaru. Oñez de Loyola is killed and de-
capitated in valley of Curalaba. Nine years later his head is returned by In-
dians to Governor Alonso García Ramón. Philip II dies.
1599–1601 Several interim administrations. Abandonment of Spanish settlements in the
south. Beginning of permanent royal subsidy (situado real) to finance war
against Araucanians (1600).
1601–05 Administration of Alonso de Ribera. Permanent army is established in Chile
(1603). Diocese of La Imperial moves to Concepción (1603). Indian offensive
continues with Spanish defeats at Santa Cruz, Valdivia (1599), La Imperial
and Angol (1600), Villarrica (1602), Osorno and Arauco (1604). Spanish re-
spond with renewed sorties south. Southern economy totally disrupted.
362 CHILE

1605–10 Administration of García Ramón. Accompanied to Chile by the Jesuit, Luis

de Valdivia. Luis de Valdivia preaches “defensive warfare.” García Ramón
continues offensive against Indians, suffering humiliating defeat in 1606.
King authorizes perpetual slavery for captured Indian rebels (1608). Pope
Paul V authorizes war against the Araucanians. Jesuit Luis de Valdivia ar-
rives in Spain to seek official acceptance of “defensive warfare” (1609). In the
same year a new audiencia established in Santiago.
1610–11 Interim administrations of Merlo de la Fuente and Jaraquemada. Luis de
Valdivia’s influence results in reappointment of Alonso de Ribera as gover-
nor of Chile. Valdivia named as visitador general.
1612–17 Administration of Alonso de Ribera. Political intrigue between governor
and Luis de Valdivia. Murder of Jesuit missionaries at Elicura provides pre-
text for renewed warfare (1614) despite official policy to the contrary.
1617–24 Interim administration of five different governors. Luis de Valdivia leaves
Chile in 1619. “Defensive warfare” largely discredited. Tasa de Esquilache
(1620) again seeks to regulate Indian labor—generally unsuccessful.
1625–29 Administration of Fernández de Córdoba. King of Spain authorizes renewed
warfare against Araucanians and slavery for captives. Governor allows
branding of Indian captives. Spaniards suffer new military defeats, notably
at Las Cangrejeras near Yumbel.
1629–39 Administration of Lazo de la Vega. Spanish defeat Araucanians at La Alba-
rrada (1631) and Philip IV officially abolishes “personal service” (1633). New
regulations—Tasa de Lazo de la Vega (1635)—issued concerning Indian
labor. Abolishes personal service but “allows” Indians to pay tribute in labor
and “rent” their services. Widespread abuses.
1639–46 Administration of the Marquis de Baides. Governor attempts to negotiate
with Araucanians. Pact of Quillín recognizes sovereignty of Araucanians. In
exchange Indians agree to receive missionaries. Peace treaty terms violated.
Warfare resumes, though Indians help Spaniards repel invasion of southern
Chile by Brouwer expedition (1643).
1646–49 Administration of Martín de Mujica. Earthquake destroys Santiago (1647).
Followed by typhoid epidemic. Viceroy at Peru temporarily suspends cer-
tain taxes in Chile. Pact of Quillín renewed.
1650–56 Administration of Acuña y Cabrera. Cunco Indians kill crew of ship carry-
ing situado to Valdivia (1651). Punitive expedition destroyed by Indians
(1653). Nepotism and corruption weaken Spanish military. Indian uprising
in 1655; vecinos of Concepción “depose” Acuña y Cabrera. Indians again
push Spaniards out of southern settlements. Southern economy in shambles.
1656–63 Three interim administrations. King Philip IV prohibits future slave raids
and military expeditions into hostile territory without prior approval.
Viceroy at Lima appeals decisions to protect Peruvian labor supply.
1664–68 Administration of Francisco de Meneses. Governor in disputes with Church
and audiencia. Corruption prevails as governor and supporters loot public
administration, sell favors, and engage in slave raids (malocas) and trade. Pe-
POLITICAL CHRONOLOGY 363

ruvian viceroy, Count of Santistéban, supports continued enslavement of

Araucanians.
1668–70 Two interim administrations succeed Meneses after he leaves Chile in dis-
grace.
1670–81 Administration of Juan Henríquez. Debate over treatment of Indians contin-
ues. Writings of Diego de Rosales gain influence. Queen Regent Mariana of
Austria officially abolishes slavery in 1674. Henríquez and audiencia de-
velop depósito system to circumvent abolition (1676). King Charles II reaf-
firms abolition decree of 1674 and orders freed Indians transported for their
“care” to Peru (1679). King reverses his decree in response to Governor Hen-
ríquez’s letters defending Chilean interests (1683). Pirates under Bartholo-
mew Sharp sack La Serena (1680).
1682–92 Administration of José de Garro. Governor proposes massacre of Araucan-
ian leaders. Viceroy and King reject Garro’s proposal (1686). New pirate at-
tacks at Coquimbo and La Serena (1686). Earthquake at Lima (1687) stimu-
lates Chilean wheat production, increase in prices and temporary economic
expansion.
1692–1700 Administration of Tomás Marín de Poveda. Royal decree of 1693 authorizes
Indians to pay tribute in money or kind instead of personal service. Decree
evaded as others in the past. Renewed efforts to pacify Araucanians through
negotiations and missions—unsuccessful as in the past.
1700 Death of Charles II. Beginning of Bourbon era for Spanish America. Charles
II leaves no successor. Throne is willed to Philip of Anjou (Philip V of Spain),
grandson of Louis XIV of France.
1701–14 War of the Spanish Succession ended by the treaties of Utrecht and Rastadt.
Philip V, King of Spain, renounces claim to French throne.
1713 England granted the asiento or monopoly on slave trade with Spain’s
colonies.
1701–08 Administration of Governor Francisco Ibáñez de Peralta. Corruption in-
volving the situado. Civil war with rebels calling for ouster of governor. Re-
bellion suppressed. Increasing levels of contraband trade. Numerous com-
plaints against governor lead to his removal by Philip V.
1709–16 Administration of Governor Juan Andrés de Ustáriz. Large scale commercial
corruption involving French merchants after Ustáriz buys post of Chilean
governorship for 24,000 pesos. Pirates under Captain Rogers find Alexander
Selkirk (“Robinson Crusoe”) on the island Más a Tierra in the Juan Fernán-
dez Archipelago.
1717–33 Administration of Governor Gabriel Cano y Aponte. Moderate policies pur-
sued toward Mapuches. Period of relative peace with exception of rebellion
in 1723. Earthquake provokes great damage to Santiago (1730) and affects se-
riously most of central Chile. Earthquake is followed by tidal wave at Val-
paraíso causing serious losses. Smallpox epidemic (1731).
1734–37 Interim administration of Manuel de Salamanca.
1737–45 Administration of Governor José Antonio Manso de Velasco. Founding of
364 CHILE

new towns in mining and agricultural districts, including San Felipe (1740),
Los Angeles, Canquenes, San Fernando (1742), Melipilla, Rancagua, Curicó
(1743). In recognition of his service, Manso de Velasco is made viceroy at
Lima.
1745–55 Administration of Governor Domingo Ortiz de Rozas. Real Universidad de
San Felipe inaugurated (1747) and La Moneda begins to function (1749). For
his service in founding new settlements—Quirihue and Coelemu (1749), La
Florida (1751), Casablanca and Petorca (1753), and Ligua (1754)—the king
confers title upon Ortiz de Rozas. Ortiz de Rozas dies (1756) on return to
Spain.
1751 Earthquake and tidal wave destroy Concepción.
1755–61 Administration of Governor Manuel de Amat y Junient. University of San
Felipe begins operation (1757). Violent repression of prison rebellion in San-
tiago (1758). Amat y Junient becomes viceroy at Lima upon leaving Chilean
post.
1761–68 Administration of Governor Antonio de Guill y Gonzaga. Foundation of
Rere (1765). Yumbel (1766), and Tucapel el Nuevo (1765). Jesuits expelled
from Chile (1767). Governor delegates much authority to corregidor Zañartu
who imposes a reign of repression against criminals and indigents in Santi-
ago. According to Francisco Encina, the slogan for Zañartu’s program “By
Reason or by Force” anticipated the slogan on the Chilean national es-
cutcheon.
1768–73 After the death of Guill y Gonzaga, several interim administrations follow.
New Indian uprisings and Spanish losses force negotiation of still another
treaty (Paz de Negrete, 1770) in which Spanish give Indians compensation in
money and cattle.
1773–80 Administration of Agustín de Jáuregui. Establishment of viceroyalty of
Buenos Aires (1776), opening of direct commerce to Chile (1778), separation
of Cuyo from Chile (1779). Governor introduces Draconian criminal legisla-
tion in efforts to curb violence, robberies, cattle rustling, and drunkeness.
First significant census taken in Chile (1778). Like several of his predeces-
sors, Jáuregui leaves Chile to become viceroy at Lima.
1780–87 Administration of Governor Ambrosio de Benavides. Administrative reor-
ganization—introduction of intendant system (1782) with Chile divided into
two intendencies: Santiago and Concepción. Upon the death of Benavides,
the Intendant of Concepción, Ambrosio de O’Higgins, becomes governor of
Chile.
1783 Earth tremor and flooding in Santiago as Mapocho River rages through the
city. Entire neighborhoods disappear.
1787–96 Administration of Governor Ambrosio O’Higgins. Foundation of numerous
new towns and mining centers. Public works, road construction, and beau-
tification of Santiago. Encomiendas abolished (1791). New treaty with Indi-
ans in south (Parlamento of Negrete, 1793). Foundation of the Consulado
(1795). O’Higgins becomes viceroy at Lima in 1796.
1796–1802 Administration of Governor Gabriel de Avilés y del Fierro and several in-
terim administrations. Threat of war against England preoccupies the colony
POLITICAL CHRONOLOGY 365

with preparations for defense against invasion. After brief tenure in Chile,
Avilés becomes viceroy at Buenos Aires and then at Lima. Interim governors
follow until 1802.
1802–08 Administration of Governor Luis Muñoz de Guzmán. Continuation of pub-
lic works programs in Santiago. Buenos Aires occupied by English (1806).
Beginnings of political unrest in Chile. Vaccinations introduced in Chile
(1805). Muñoz de Guzmán dies in 1808.
1808–10 Interim administration of Francisco Antonio García Carrasco. Unrest inten-
sifies and governor is replaced by Mateo de Toro y Zambrano.
Sept. 18, Cabildo Abierto creates first junta, beginnings of Chilean independence
1810 movement.
1811–13 “Dictatorship” of José Miguel Carrera. Offspring of slaves born in Chile de-
clared free (1811). Appearance of Chile’s first newspaper, La Aurora de Chile
(1812). Civil war in Chile.
1814 Treaty of Lircay. Patria Vieja ends after defeat of insurrectionists at Rancagua.
Chilean forces retreat to Mendoza.
1814–17 La Reconquista—temporary restoration of Spanish authority as military ex-
peditions from Peru defeat rebel forces.
1817 General San Martín and Bernardo O’Higgins lead army from Argentina into
Chile and defeat Spanish forces at Chacabuco (February 12, 1817).
1817–23 Dictatorship of Bernardo O’Higgins. Continued war against Spanish forces
south of Santiago. Expeditionary force leaves Chile to liberate Peru (1820).
Peruvian independence declared (1821) as San Martín occupies Lima. Titles
of nobility abolished (1817).
1823–30 Period of chaos and political uncertainty dominated by liberal, federalist ex-
periments and personality of Ramón Freire. Slavery abolished (1823). Feder-
alist experiment (1826–28).
1828–30 Renewed civil war.
1830 Battle of Lircay (April 17, 1830). Conservative forces emerge victorious.
1831–41 Two five-year terms of President Joaquín Prieto. Constitution of 1833
adopted. Chile defeats Peru-Bolivia Confederation (1836–1839). Initiation of
“Portalian State.”
1842 University of Chile founded.
1849 Emergence of Liberal party.
1850 Sociedad de Igualdad established under leadership of Francisco Bilbao to
contest election of Manuel Montt.
1841–51 Two five-year terms of President Manuel Bulnes, hero of the war against Bo-
livia and Peru. Civil War of 1851 mars succession, but Bulnes successfully
defends his chosen successor, Manuel Montt.
1851–61 Two five-year terms of President Manuel Montt. Civil wars in 1851 and 1859
fragment ruling elite. Formation of Conservative party (1857). Economic
boom as a consequence of gold strike in California. Expansion of Chilean
366 CHILE

commerce, mining and agriculture. Political challenge to clerical forces and

old Conservative elite.
1861–71 Two five-year terms of President José Joaquín Pérez. Coalition governments
incorporate Liberals and Conservatives into government as President breaks
with party that elected him. Radical party formed in 1861 by Pedro León
Gallo and the Matta brothers. Radical party becomes proponent of political
reforms. “Theological Question” becomes a key issue in Chilean politics.
1871–75 Administration of President Federico Errázuriz Zañartu. Errázuriz dis-
misses Conservative members of coalition (1873) and forms cabinet entirely
of Liberals, Radicals, and Nationals—the so-called Liberal Alliance. Reli-
gious question dominates domestic politics.
1876–81 Administration of President Aníbal Pinto. Severe economic crisis facing
country “alleviated” by victory in the War of the Pacific (1879–1883). Chile
acquires nitrate fields from Peru and Bolivia, increasing territory by more
than one-third.
1883 Creation of the Sociedad de Fomento Fabril.
1881–86 Administration of President Domingo Santa María. Attempted renewal of
political authoritarianism and anticlericalism. Suffrage extended to all males
over 25 years of age.
1886–91 Administration of José Manuel Balmaceda. Growth of nitrate and export
trade accompanied by expansion of public works programs, government
bureaucracy, educational opportunities. Conflict between President Bal-
maceda and Congress over government policies and constitutional issues
leads to civil war. Balmaceda commits suicide as term ends. Congressional
victory inaugurates period of “parliamentary republic” (1891–1924).
1887 Formation of Partido Demócrata.
1888 Establishment of the Catholic University.
1889 Creation of Pedagogical Institute.
1890–91 Civil war.
1891–96 Administration of Jorge Montt. Leader of the opposition against Balmaceda,
Montt attempts to restore peace in Chile. Incipient industrialization brings
pressures for protectionist legislation. Partido Demócrata, elects first deputy
to Congress (1894).
1896–1901 Administration of Federico Errázuriz Echaurren. Diplomacy avoids conflict
with Argentina. Tariff legislation and cattle tax (1897) provoke intense op-
position. “Social question” emerging in Chilean politics with growth of
workers’ press and labor organizations. First electric trolley in Santiago
(1900). President dies in office (1901).
1901–06 Administration of Germán Riesco Errázuriz. Campaigns with slogan “I am
not a threat to anyone.” Promulgation of Code of Civil Procedure (1902) and
Criminal Procedure (1906). Peace treaty signed with Bolivia (1904). Strikes in
Valparaíso (1903) and “meat strike” protesting cattle tax erupt into violence
in Santiago—“Red Week” 1905. Earthquake devastates Valparaíso (1906).
POLITICAL CHRONOLOGY 367

1906–10 Administration of Pedro Montt. Worker protest, wave of strikes in 1907–09.

Stockmarket crash (1907). Massacre of workers at Santa María de Iquique
(1907). TransAndean railroad completed (1910).
1907 Massacre of workers at Santa María de Iquique.
1909 Organization of Gran Federación de Obreros de Chile. By 1917 becomes a
militant labor organization (FOCH) and eventually affiliates with RILU.
1910–15 Administration of Ramón Barros Luco. Famous for his remark “There are
only two kinds of political problems, those that solve themselves and those
without solution.” Barros Luco faces military conspiracy (1912). Initial im-
pact of World War I on economy brings recession and worker activism.
1912 Creation of Socialist Workers Party (POS) founded by Luis Emilio Recaba-
rren and supporters.
1913 General strike in Valparaíso, led by anarchists.
1915–20 Administration of Juan Luis Sanfuentes. World War I impacts Chilean soci-
ety and economy, increasing industrialization and labor organization. Eco-
nomic crisis after war brings urban protests in Santiago and labor activism.
1917 Port strike in Valparaíso. Government declares martial law; Yáñez decree
seeks to regulate industrial relations.
1918 AOAN rally in Santiago.
1919–20 Wave of labor activism, AOAN rally in Valparaíso (January); Congress gives
President Sanfuentes emergency powers; tram strike in Santiago; ADAN
rally in Santiago (August); Police raid IWW headquarters in Valparaíso and
attack Student Federation (FECH) headquarters in Santiago. Arrests and de-
tention of labor and POS leaders. Workers and police die in labor conflict in
Puerto Natales (1919) and Magallanes (1920).
1920 Arturo Alessandri assumes Presidency (December).
1920–24 First administration of President Arturo Alessandri. Alessandri, after pop-
ulist campaign, is unable to move reforms through Congress. Military
“coup” pushes social and labor legislation through Congress with a “rattling
of sabers.” Alessandri leaves the country.
1922 Establishment of Chilean Communist party.
1925 New Constitution approved. President Alessandri returns to Chile only to
leave again after conflict with Defense Minister, Carlos Ibáñez.
1925 Massacre of striking nitrate workers at Oficina La Coruña in Antofagasta.
1927–31 Ibáñez takes control of government after a period of “tutelage.” Controlled
elections provide a compliant congress. Massive public works program in-
duces temporary prosperity as Ibáñez represses opposition. Stock market
crash and depression bring Ibáñez’s downfall.
1932–38 Arturo Alessandri returns to presidency after more than a year of juntas, in-
surrections, and uncertainty which includes the 100 days of a Chilean “So-
cialist Republic.” Alessandri restores order, imposes the 1925 constitution,
and utilizes fiscal conservatism to improve public finances. In departure
368 CHILE

from earlier (1920s) rhetoric, Alessandri presides over a Conservative

regime.
1933 Creation of Socialist Party of Chile.
1934 Massacre of peasants at Ranquil.
1935–38 Formation of the Falange Nacional with splinter of Conservative youth
group from Conservative party. Falange eventually (1957) becomes the
Chilean Christian Democratic Party.
1936 Formation of Popular Front as prelude to 1938 presidential elections.
1938 Massacre of Nazis involved in protest movement (September 5) and incar-
ceration of their leader, González Von Marées.
1938–41 Administration of Pedro Aguirre Cerda with support of Popular Front coali-
tion. Reformist programs follow, including creation of Chilean Development
Corporation (CORFO). Rural activism frightens political right; Popular
Front parties agree to “suspend” rural unionization. Aguirre Cerda dies in
1941.
1942–46 Administration of President Juan Antonio Ríos. Popular Front dissolved but
variety of coalitions follow. Communists and Socialists dominate labor
movement but competition for control eventually divides leftist parties.
President Ríos dies in 1946; new elections bring fellow Radical, González
Videla, to the presidency.
1946–52 Administration of President Gabriel González Videla. Initial coalition of
Radicals, Liberals, and Communists breaks up. González Videla, with sup-
port by the United States, moves against Communists. Communist party
outlawed in 1948 and labor organizations purged. Chile becomes Cold War
battleground.
1947 New legislation restricts rights of rural labor. Conflicts in labor movement
lead to divisions between Communist- and Socialist-led unions.
1948 Coal strikes and labor agitation. Law for the Permanent Defense of Democ-
racy outlaws Communist party.
1952–58 Administration of President Carlos Ibáñez. Ibáñez elected on “anti-political”
platform. Economic difficulties after the Korean War plague Ibáñez. High in-
flation rates and foreign advisers’ stabilization programs undercut Ibáñez’s
popularity. Ibáñez approves electoral reform and relegalization of Commu-
nist party before leaving office.
1958–64 Administration of President Jorge Alessandri. After barely winning election
over Salvador Allende, the candidate of the Leftist Coalition (FRAP), Ales-
sandri presides over a conservative administration that introduced a num-
ber of minor reforms. Anti-inflation programs are relatively successful, but
alienate workers, peasants, and part of the middle class. Under pressure
from Alliance for Progress, a land reform law passes in 1962.
1964–70 Administration of President Eduardo Frei Montalva. Frei presides over the
Christian Democratic “Revolution in Liberty” that dramatically alters Chil-
ean politics and society. Mobilization of workers, peasants, slum-dwellers,
POLITICAL CHRONOLOGY 369

and women destabilizes Chilean politics—and the government is unable to

deliver on all its promises. Renewed inflation, economic stagnation, and
seizures of farms, urban lots, and housing projects punctuate the last years
of Christian Democratic government.
1970–73 Unidad Popular administration of President Salvador Allende. A program to
put Chile on the peaceful road to socialism is met with bitter resistance by
domestic and international opponents. Political polarization finally results
in a bloody military coup, September 11, 1973.
1973–90 Military dictatorship directed by General Augusto Pinochet. Political parties
outlawed and civil liberties restricted. Severe repression of opposition. Mili-
tary regime seeks to create new political system; 1980 constitution “institu-
tionalizes” new regime of “protected democracy.” Drastic economic and so-
cial policy changes emphasize privatization and foreign investment.
Economic boomlet (1977–81) followed by intense recession (1982–85). Sup-
port for military government erodes but opposition unable to forge unified
coalition. Assassination attempt on Pinochet in late 1986. Country remains
under “state of emergency” into 1987.
1988 General Pinochet defeated in plebiscite in bid for eight more years as presi-
dent.
1989 Constitutional reforms, leyes de amarre, congressional and presidential elec-
tions.
1990–94 Administration of Patricio Aylwin and the Concertación coalition. Sustained
economic growth; tense civil-military relations. Rettig Commission (1990–
91) investigates human rights violations, but 1978 amnesty remains in place.
Government unable to enact constitutional reforms; major social and eco-
nomic policy initiatives. Presidential and congressional elections in 1993
reaffirm support for the Concertación.
1994–2000 Administration of Eduardo Frei-Ruiz Tagle. Second government of the Con-
certación coalition. Economic growth continues until recession in 1998–99;
civil-military relations less conflictive but still no resolution of human rights
issue. Pinochet arrested in England, 1998; Supreme Court “reinterprets”
1978 amnesty decree in 1999. Primary elections won by ex-supporter of Sal-
vador Allende, Ricardo Lagos. Presidential elections, December 1999. Run-
off January 2000.
2000 Administration of President Ricardo Lagos Escobar. Pinochet returns to
Chile (March). Has congressional immunity removed by Supreme Court,
August 8, 2000; Lagos tells country, “I was elected to govern for the future,
not to consider what happened in the past.” Tensions continue in civil-
military relations; economic recovery slower than expected during 2000.
Selective Guide to the Literature on Chile

History-writing in Chile begins virtually with colonization in the sixteenth century. Sergio
Martínez Baeza, El libro en Chile, 1982, goes back further, relating the history of printing, its
introduction to Spain and the Spanish colonies, the development of private and public li-
braries, laws regulating the press and book censorship, and the book trade. Martínez iden-
tifies three major publications on Chile covering the colonial period and nineteenth century;
they remain benchmarks for historiography on the country: Claudio Gay, Historia fisica y
política de Chile, 30 vols., 1844–65, covering “history,” zoology, botany, agriculture, and two
volumes of documents; Diego Barros Arana, Historia general de Chile, 16 vols., 1884–1902,
more than 9000 pages; Francisco Antonio Encina, Historia de Chile desde la prehistoria hasta la
revolución de 1891, 20 vols., 1940–52, almost 12,000 pages. In some ways, the differences in
interpretation and methods of the liberal nineteenth-century historian Barros Arana and the
conservative, twentieth-century historian Encina set the polemical and politicized tone for
much of the history-writing in Chile to the present. Martínez Baeza’s history of “the book in
Chile” also offers a useful synopsis of the publishing industry and the development of the
National Library, “born with la patria.”
The bibliography that follows emphasizes published books, especially those with help-
ful bibliographies. Manuscript sources, archival and government documents, professional
articles, and theses are listed where I have relied on particular works in this volume or
where they are essential sources on special topics. For this edition, I have added reference
to a number of Internet Web sites where information may be easily obtained (1999–2000) on
Chilean history, government, politics, socioeconomic conditions, and other more special-
ized topics. No doubt some of the website “addresses” will change after publication of this
volume; at the time of publication these sites were active.

basic geographic, demographic, and socioeconomic information

The communication revolution of the last two decades makes statistical and descriptive ma-
terial of all sorts regarding Chile more accessible than ever before. Chilean government
agencies, private businesses, producer associations, and interest groups have rushed to the
Internet. The Internet’s dynamic character and rapid change of Web site addresses and con-
tent are challenges to scholars preparing bibliographies and citing “sources” that literally
disappear in cyberspace. For that reason I have noted the date and Web address for mate-
rial directly cited in the text. Three exceptionally valuable websites for accessing govern-
ment, media, university, and private sector information in Chile are www.lanic.utexas.edu/
la/chile; www.brujula.cl/, and www.estado.cl. The Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas (INE,
the National Statistical Institute) manages an extensive data collection and publication pro-
gram that includes a lengthy list of basic data sources and more specialized information.
The annual Compendio Estadístico, published since 1971, provides demographic, social, and
economic data, but the INE’s publication program ranges from specialized volumes (e.g.,
Women and Men in Chile, Figures and Reality, 1995) published in English and Spanish to com-

370
SELECTIVE GUIDE TO THE LITERATURE ON CHILE 371

pilations of statistical series (e.g., Chile: Series Estadísticas, beginning in 1981) on environ-
ment, demography, housing, labor, education, culture, communications media, public
health, police services, and all sectors of the economy. A list of the INE publications can be
found in the Catálogo de Publicaciones. At the time this book was published, the most recent
publications regarding the census were. Resultados oficiales, Censo de población 1992: Población
total del país, regiones, 1993, and Censo de Población y vivienda: Chile 1992 Resultados generales,
1992.
Most Chilean government ministries provide relatively up-to-date information, as do
both branches of Congress, the armed forces, and the specialized agencies, for example, the
National Environmental Commission (Comisión Nacional de Medio Ambiente), the Na-
tional Development Corporation (CORFO, Chile Economic Report), ProChile (which main-
tains English and Spanish Web sites with information on business in Chile, international
trade, and trade agreements), the ministry-level agency responsible for policy and research
on issues related to women (SERNAM), and even Chilean embassies in Europe, Asia, and
Australia. Public health data, social services information, and electoral information are also
easily accessed. The Ministry of Interior has maintained up-to-date information on electoral
law and recent electoral results (by party and candidates, disaggregated by region and mu-
nicipality). In some cases government officials go beyond providing published data; in
preparing this book I inquired via email whether the Ministry of Mining had more recent
data than was displayed on the Web site and I received an update within two days, truly an
indication of the professional and collaborative spirit of an individual government official
(whom I had never met), Eduardo Quiñones M., but also of the futility of including a longer
list of rapidly dated sources of official statistical material on Chile in this bibliography.
The most important business associations, lobbies, and interest groups, ranging from en-
vironmental organizations and think tanks (CODEF, TERRAM, RENACE) and human
rights groups to the Furious Bicyclist Movement (Movimiento Furioso de Ciclistas, pro-
moting the use of bicycles in urban zones) also maintain Web sites and publish periodicals
and newsletters. The Sociedad de Fomento Fabril (SFF, National Manufacturers Associa-
tion) maintains a Web site displaying “The Chilean Economy in Figures,” with an array of
charts, tables and graphs ranging from population growth to destination of Chilean exports.
The Sociedad Nacional de Minería (SONAMI) does the same for the mining sector and also
maintains a documentation center and library with an archive of media coverage of the min-
ing economy. Many Chilean newspapers and magazines also maintain Web sites. It is pos-
sible to read daily news and even see Chilean television on the Internet. In addition to
Chilean sources, the United Nations (FAO, ECLAC, UNESCO, UNPOP), the InterAmerican
Development Bank (Chile, Basic Socio-Economic Data—http://database.iadb.org/), the
World Bank (Social Indicators of Development), International Monetary Fund, Organization of
American States (OAS), and the U.S. Embassy in Santiago (e.g., Country Commercial Guide,
Fiscal Year 1998, Chile) periodically publish useful macroeconomic and sectoral reports on
Chile, much of which is also partially accessible via the Internet. For a sense of Chile in
global comparative perspective the United Nations Development Programme, Human De-
velopment Report (published since 1990) is excellent. The most recent reports available on-
line in 1999 could be found at the UNDP home page: http://www.undp.org/. For a helpful
annual overview of the Chilean economy see the U.S. State Department, “Country Report
on Economic Policy and Trade Practices,” accessible in 1999 both through the State Depart-
ment Web site, www.state.gov/www/issues/, and the Web site maintained by the U.S. em-
bassy in Chile (www.usembassy.cl/epol.htm).
The most important sources for geological, geographic, and meteorological information
are also government agencies, with the collaboration of Chilean academics in various uni-
versities and private research organizations. The Servicio Nacional de Geología y Minería de
372 CHILE

Chile (SERNAGEOMIN), created in 1980, oversees mining concessions, mine safety and se-
curity, environmental regulation,and research regarding the mining industry. It also com-
piles information on mining production based on data from producers and exporters; these
data are published in Anuario de la Minería de Chile. SERNAGEOMIN publishes a variety of
geologic maps of Chile and sustains a regular publication program on geological research.
Other departments of the Ministry of Mining, the Comisión Chilena de Cobre (COCHILCO),
the Corporación Nacional del Cobre de Chile (CODELCO), the Empresa Nacional de Minería
(ENAMI), the Empresa Nacional del Petróleo (ENAP), the Comisión Chilena de Energia Nu-
clear (CCHEN), and the Centro de Investigación Minera y Metalúrgica (CIMM) also publish
useful information, not only on mining, but also on the labor force, economic conditions, for-
eign investment, and trade. The publication lists for SERNAGEOMIN, and for most other en-
tities within the Ministry of Mines, are available on-line. Also on-line is the magazine Minería
Chilena, a montly update and wealth of news on investment, production, and other aspects
of the international mining industry in Chile. A statistical series for fisheries, Anuario estadís-
tico de pesca, is published by the Servicio Nacional de Pesca; in agriculture and forestry the
Oficina de Estudios y Políticas Agrarias (ODEPA) publishes numerous periodical data
sources on land use, crop patterns, prices, markets, and technical topics, including Mercados
Agropecuarios, El Pulso de la Agricultura, Boletín de Comercio Exterior Silvoagropecuario, and Re-
vista de Comercio Exterior Silvoagropecuario; for forestry data within the Ministry of Agricul-
ture, the Corporación Nacional Forestal (CONAF) is the indicated source. The Planning
Ministry (MIDEPLAN) also provides extensive macroeconomic and regional data on devel-
opment projects. MIDEPLAN’s Prospectiva y Población, 1998, offers social statistics for the
1990s.
For geographical information, maps, and economic geography the Instituto Geográfico
Militar, successor of the Servicio Geográfico del Ejército de Chile (1891), is indispensable.
The IGM’s Atlas geográfico de Chile para la educación 4th ed., 1994, contains excellent maps, by
region, with extensive data on flora, fauna, communications, transportation, production, cli-
mate, and census data from the 1992 census, along with a very useful bibliography on re-
lated government and private sources, including the Central Bank’s Indicadores económicos y
sociales, 1960–. Rafael Sagredo B., Fernando Gutiérrez A., and Pilar Aylwin J., Geografia de
Chile ilustrada, 1997, includes excellent maps and discussions of resources, demographic
change, economic geography, and environmental issues in development. The Central
Bank’s Chile, crecimiento con estabilidad, 1997, summarizes recent economic policy and re-
sults. In English, Chile, A Country Study, Area Handbook for Chile, 3rd ed., 1994, has basic in-
formation on land, society, politics, and economy. A most useful source for social science re-
search (especially economics, politics, and public opinion) is the Centro de Estudios
Públicos, which in 1999 maintained a Web site at www.cepchile.cl/. Many articles from the
CEP quarterly journal, findings and tables from opinion polls, and list of publications are
also available on-line. Other basic sources are: Instituto Geográfico Militar, Atlas de la
República de Chile, 2nd ed., 1983; Geografía de Chile, 8 vols., 1983–84: I. Fundamentos geográfi-
cos del territorio nacional; II. Geomorfología; III. Biogeografía; IV. Población y sistema nacional de
asentamientos urbanos; V. Geografía de los suelos; VI. Geografía de los fondos marinos; VII. Ge-
ografía industrial; VIII. Hidrografía; Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas (INE), Anuario de De-
mografía (demographic yearbook); Compendio Estadístico (annual statistical compendium
with demographic, economic, and social data).
For biographical and biohistorical information, see Salvatore Bizzarro, Historical Dictio-
nary of Chile, 2nd ed., 1987; Mario Céspedes, Gran diccionario de Chile: biográfico-cultural, 1988;
Lía Cortés and Jordi Fuentes, Diccionario político de Chile: 1810–1966, 1967; Diccionario biográ-
fico de Chile, 5th ed., 1944; Pedro Pablo Figueroa, Diccionario biográfico de Chile: 1550–1887, 3
vols., 1897–1902; Diccionario biográfico de extranjeros en Chile, 1900; Virgilio Figueroa, Dic-
cionario histórico, biográfico y bibliográfico de Chile: 1800–1931, 5 vols., 1925–31; Jordi Fuentes,
SELECTIVE GUIDE TO THE LITERATURE ON CHILE 373

Lía Cortés, Fernando Castillo I., and Arturo Valdés P., Diccionario Histórico de Chile, 7th ed.,
1982; Armando de Ramón, Biografía de Chilenos, Miembros de los poderes Ejectivo, Legislativo y
Judicial, 1876–1973 (letras A–K), 1999.
Historical statistics, census data, and presidential messages are provided in Markos Ma-
malakis, “Historical Statistics of Chile: An Introduction” Latin American Research Review 13:2
(1978), 127–37, which provides a brief summary of source material on historical statistics, in-
cluding national accounts, demography, agriculture, industry, mining, the public sector,
money and banking, trade and balance of payments, accompanied by a useful list of specific
references. Mamalakis has contributed greatly to historical research in Chile with Historical
Statistics of Chile: National Accounts, 1978; Demography and Labor Force, 1980; Forestry and Re-
lated Activities, 1982; Money, Prices and Credit Services, 1984; Money, Banking and Financial Ser-
vices, 1985.
For official census data before the 1970s, see República de Chile: Dirección de estadística y
censos (census for 1940, 1952, 1960, 1970); Dirección de estadística y censos: síntesis estadística,
1968; Dirección de estadística y censos: población total por provincias, Chile: 1885–1960, 1964;
and Dirección general de estadística: estadística chilena (monthly 1960–70); República de Chile,
Oficina Central de Estadística, Censo de 1854, 1865, 1875, 1895, 1907 (19th- and early
20th-century census reports). El pasado republicano de Chile: o sea Colección de discursos pro-
nunciados por los presidentes de la República ante el Congreso nacional al inaugurar cada año
el período legislativo, Concepción, 1899 (collection of state of the nation addresses by presi-
dents 1832–99);

basic general historiographical and bibliographical sources

Fidel Araneda Bravo, “Los estudios históricos en Chile,” Atenea 113, Nov.–Dec. 1953; Hora-
cio Aránguiz Donoso, Bibliografía histórica: 1959–1967, 1970 (surveys of literature in 50 jour-
nals and books published between 1959 and 1967); Ramón Briseño, Estadística bibliográfica de
la literatura chilena, 2 vols., 1862–79 (includes a listing of newspapers by city and public doc-
uments arranged by presidential administration); the Bibilioteca Nacional published a
fascimile version of the original, 1965–66, 3 vols., with a very useful introduction: “Estudio
preliminar de Guillermo Feliú Cruz. Edición facsimilar de la principe de 1862, realizada por
la Biblioteca Nacional bajo los auspicios de la Comisión Nacional de Conmemoración del
Centenario de la muerte de Andrés Bello”; Harold Blakemore, comp. Chile, 1988; Histo-
riografía colonial de Chile, I, 1796–1886, 1958; Paul Drake, “El impacto académico de los terre-
motos políticos: investigaciones de la historia chilena en inglés, 1977–1983,” Alternativas,
Jan.–April 1984, 56–78; Herminia Elgueta de Ocsenius, Suplemento y adiciones a la bibliografía
de bibliografías chilenas, 1930 (updates Laval’s work (see below) to 1930, bringing total of ti-
tles reviewed to almost 600); Guillermo Feliú Cruz, Historia de las fuentes de la bibliografía
chilena, 3 vols., 1956–58 (evaluates contributions of all major bibliographers to 1958); Hernán
Godoy Urzúa “El ensayo social: notas sobre la literatura sociológica en Chile,” Anales de la
Universidad de Chile, No. 120, Oct.–Dec. 1960; Historia de las fuentes de la bibliografía chilena, en-
sayo crítico, 3 vols., 1966–68; Historia, fichero bibliográfico (decades of citations from a leading
history journal); Julio César Jobet, “Notas sobre la historiografía chilena,” Atenea 291–292,
Sept.–Oct. 1949; Temas históricos chilenos, 1973 (historiographical interpretation of selected
themes in Chilean historical literature); Ramón Laval, Bibliografía de blibliografías chilenas,
1915; Luis Montt, Bibliografía chilena, 3 vols., 1904–21; Robert Oppenheimer, Chile: A Bibliog-
raphy, 1977; Julio Retamal and Sergio Villalobos R., Bibliografía histórica chilena, Revistas chile-
nas 1843–1878, 1993; Nicolás Enrique Reyes and L. J. Silva Arriagada, Ensayo de una bib-
liografía histórica y geográfica de Chile, 1902 (lists works published to 1900; good source for
locating local or regional studies); William Sater, “A Survey of Recent Chilean Historiogra-
374 CHILE

phy 1965–1976,” Latin American Research Review 1979 (an extensive overview and synthesis
of recent scholarship on Chile); Peter J. Sehlinger, A Select Guide to Chilean Libraries and
Archives, 1979; John Tepaske, ed., Research Guide to Andean History, 1981; Jack Ray Thomas,
“The Impact of the Generation of 1842 on Chilean Historiography, The Historian 41:4 (Aug.
1979); Emilio Vaisse, Bibliografía general de Chile.
A number of anthologies and critical surveys offer introductions to Chilean art, litera-
ture, journalism, and music as well as biographical material on Chilean intellectuals and
artists. Since 1945 the Revista Musical Chilena (Universidad de Chile) has published scholarly
articles on Chilean music in international perspective, ranging from classical music to folk-
music and the “Nueva Canción” of the 1970s and 1980s. A particularly interesting article on
the national musical festivals since 1947 and the prize winners is Luis Merino, “Los festi-
vales de música en Chile, propósitos y transcendencia,” in the Revista Musical Chilena,
149–150 (1980): 80–105. Fernando Alegría, Literatura chilena del siglo XX, 2nd ed., 1962; and
La poesía chilena; orígenes y desarrollo del siglo XVI al XIX, 1954; Homero Castillo and Raúl
Silva Castro, Historia bibliográfica de la novela chilena, 1961; Samuel Claro and I. Urrutia, His-
toria de la música en Chile, 1973; Luis E. Délano and Edmundo Palacios, Antología de la poesía
social de Chile, 1962; Julio Durán Cerda, Panorama del teatro chileno: 1842–1959, 1959; David
William Foster, Chilean Literature: A Working Bibliography of Secondary Sources, 1978; Gaspar
Galaz and Milan Ivelić, La pintura en Chile desde la colonia hasta nuestros días, 1981; Mario
Godoy Quezada, Historia del cine chileno, 1966; Cedomil Goic, La novela chilena, 1968; Mari-
ano Latorre, La literatura en Chile, 1941; Samuel A. Lillo, Literatura chilena, 7th ed., 1952 (offi-
cial text on Chilean literature for secondary schools); Hugo Montes and Julio Orlandi, His-
toria de la literatura chilena, 10th ed., 1982; Eugenio Pereira Salas, Historia de la música en Chile:
1850–1900, 1957; Arturo Torres Rioseco, Breve historia de la literatura chilena, 1956; Manuel
Rojas, Historia breve de la literatura chilena, 1964; Antonio Romera, Historia de la pintura chilena,
1960; Vicente Salas Viu, La creación musical en Chile: 1900–1951, 1951; Raúl Silva Castro,
Panorama literario de Chile, 1961; and Prensa y periodismo en Chile: 1812–1956, 1961; Evolución
de las letras chilenas, 1810–1960, 1960; Antología general de la poesía chilena, 1959; Antología
de cuentistas chilenos, 1957; Gastón Somoshegyi-Szokol, Contemporary Chilean Literature in
the University Library at Berkeley, Berkeley, 1975 (partially annotated bibliography, and biblio-
graphical guide to general anthologies and literary studies); Arturo Torres Rioseco and
Raúl Silva Castro, Ensayo de bibliografía de la literatura chilena, 1935; Fernando Uriarte, “La
novela proletaria en Chile,” Mapocho 4, 1965; José Zamudio, La novela histórica en Chile, 1949;
Hernán Godoy (ed.), El carácter chileno, 1981, and La cultura chilena, 1982, provide a number
of views of popular culture and intellectual development in Chile from colonial times to the
1980s.

geography, population, and natural resources

From the time Pedro de Valdivia wrote to the Emperor Charles V in 1545 that, “this land is
such that there is none better in the world for living in and settling,” the role played by
Chilean geography in shaping the territory’s socio-economic and political development has
been apparent to many writers on Chile. Early, now classic, accounts are Abbé Don J. Igna-
tious Molina, The Geographical, Natural, and Civil History of Chile, 2 vols., trans. from the Ital-
ian with notes from the Spanish and French versions by the English editor, 1809; and Clau-
dio Gay, Historia física y política de Chile: documentos sobre la historia, estadística y la geografía,
26 vols., 1844–55. The best short summary of the relation between Chilean geography and
historical development is Harold Blakemore, “Chile,” in Harold Blakemore and Clifford T.
Smith (eds.), Latin America: Geographical Perspectives 1971. Other useful geographic and de-
mographic summaries include George Pendle, The Land and the People of Chile, 1964; Preston
SELECTIVE GUIDE TO THE LITERATURE ON CHILE 375

James, Latin America, 4th ed., 1964; Gilbert J. Butland, Chile: An Outline of Its Geography, Eco-
nomics and Politics, 1956; Francis Maitland, Chile: Its Land and People, 1941; Benjamín Suber-
caseaux, Chile: A Geographic Extravaganza (trans. of Chile: o una loca geografía), 1943. Robert
McCaa has added concern for methods and sources for social and demographic history in
“Chilean Social and Demographic History: Sources, Issues and Methods,” LARR 13:2, 1978,
104–26. Dated, but historically essential, is the classic by Enrique Espinosa, Geografía de-
scriptiva de la república de Chile, 5th ed., 1903. Standard geographical treatments are provided
in Elías Almeyda Arroyo, Geografía de Chile, 1955; Sociedad Chilena de Historia, Geografía de
Chile: física, humana y económica, 1968; Pedro Cunill, Geografía de Chile, 7th ed., 1978. Many
descriptions of selected Chilean regions are also available. The most well known deal with
the desert north, the central valley, and Antarctica: Isaiah Bowman, Desert Trails of Atacama,
1924; W. J. Dennis, Tacna and Arica, 1931; George McBride, Chile: Land and Society—the clas-
sic description of Chile’s central valley agriculture and hacienda system 1936; O. Pinochet
de la Barra, La antártica chilena, 1948. None of these last works is strictly speaking a geogra-
phy, but all contain geographical information in addition to considerable historical, social,
and economic material. Two useful works that treat Chilean boundaries are: Jaime Eyza-
guirre, Breve historia de las fronteras de Chile, 4th ed., 1973, and Robert D. Talbott, A History of
the Chilean Boundaries, 1974.

indigenous peoples
Although pre-Hispanic Chilean history is not thoroughly researched, a number of basic con-
tributions in the field provide detailed and often conflicting information. Julio M. Montané’s
Bibliografía selectiva de antropología chilena: Primera parte—Araucanos, Pehuenches, Chiloé y ter-
ritorios adyacentes; Segunda parte—generalidades: Zona norte y central, 2 vols., 1963–64, contains
approximately 400 references on Chilean Indians. Julian H. Steward (ed.), Handbook on South
American Indians, Vol. II, 1957, offers the best summary in English of Chilean indigenous civ-
ilization. Other well-known studies are Agustín Edwards, People of Old, 1929; F. L. Cornely,
Cultura diaguita chilena y cultura de El Molle, 1956; René León Echaíz, Prehistoria de Chile Cen-
tral, 1957; Tomás Guevara, Historia de Chile prehispánico, 2 vols., 1925–27; Historia de la civi-
lización de Araucanía, 7 vols., 1898–1913; Ricardo Latcham, La prehistoria chilena, 1936, and Or-
ganización social y creencias religiosas de los antiguos araucanos, 1924; Alejandro Lipschutz, La
comunidad indígena en América y en Chile, 1956; José T. Medina, Los aborígenes de Chile, 1952;
Greta Mostny, Culturas pre-colombinas en Chile, 1960. Another very useful and readable
overview of pre-Hispanic Chilean peoples appears in Francisco Esteve Barba, Descubri-
miento y conquista de Chile, 1946, along with a somewhat more extensive bibliography. As is
the case with the study of pre-Columbian peoples in general, Julian Steward and Louis
Faron, Native Peoples of South America, 1959, offers a brief but helpful summary of knowledge
on the natives of Chile, as does Wendell C. Bennett and Junius B. Bird, Andean Culture His-
tory, 1965. A more recent overview of pre-Columbian Chile by Osvaldo Silva appears in the
first volume of a 4-volume work edited by Sergio Villalobos, Historia de Chile (a 1983 edition
makes all four volumes available in a single book).
The Araucanian Indians’ heroic resistance to the Spanish conquest inspired the first epic
poem of Latin America, Alonso de Ercilla’s La Araucana. Much of the historical work, chron-
icles, and other literature of the colonial period (see below) reflects this interest in the Arau-
canian people and their war against the Spanish. Several 19th-century descriptions of the
Araucanians provide insight into the social and economic conditions prevalent after cen-
turies of warfare: Ignacio Domeyko, Araucanía y sus habitantes, 1st ed., 1845, 2nd ed., 1971;
Pedro Ruís Aldea, Los araucanos i sus costumbres, 1st ed., 1856, Vol. 5, 1902; Edmund Reuel
Smith, The Araucanians, or Notes of a Tour among the Indian Tribes of Southern Chile, 1855.
376 CHILE

Scholarship in English on the Araucanians and Mapuche has been dominated by the
work of Louis Faron: Mapuche Social Structure, 1961; Hawks of the Sun, 1964; The Mapuche In-
dians of Chile, 1968. All provide additional references. A mid-20th-century study by Mischa
Titien, Araucanian Culture in Transition, 1951, provides insight into the dilemma of Chile’s In-
dians in the 20th century; Alejandro Saavedra’s La cuestión mapuche, 1971, presents a much
more dismal picture twenty years later—with significant political implications. José Bengoa
and E. Valenzuela’s Economía Mapuche. Pobreza y subsistencia en la sociedad Mapuche contem-
poránea, 1983, is even more depressing.

travel accounts
Observations of travelers provide information and insight often lacking in other sources.
For an overview of travel accounts see Guillermo Feliú Cruz, Notas para una bibliografía sobre
viajeros relativos a Chile, 1965. Accounts by Chileans, North Americans, Latin Americans, and
Europeans from the 17th century onward are both interesting reading and valuable re-
sources for the historical study of Chile. Among the most useful are:
Henry Willis Baxley, What I Saw on the West Coast of South and North America, 1865; R. Nel-
son Boyd, Chile: Sketches of Chile and the Chilians 1879–1880, 1881; Henry M. Brackenridge, A
Voyage to South America, performed by order of the American Government in the years 1817, and
1818, in the Frigate Congress, 2 vols., 1819; Alexander Caldcleugh, Travels in South America
during the Years 1819, 1820, 1821, 1825; Vicente Carvallo y Goyeneche, “Descripción histórico-
geográfica del reino de Chile,” Colección de Historiadores 10, 1879; Richard J. Cleveland, A Nar-
rative of Voyages and Commercial Enterprises, 2 vols., 1842; Charles Darwin, The Voyage of the
Beagle, 1962; Thomas Cochrane Dundonald, Narrative of Services in the Liberation of Chile, Peru
and Brazil from Spanish and Portuguese Domination, 2 vols., 1859; George Alexander Findlay, A
Directory for the Navigation of the South Pacific Ocean, 1863; M. Frezier, Relation du voyage de la
mer du sud aux côtes du Chili et du Pérou, 1716; Lt. J. Gilliss, The U.S. Naval Astronomical Expe-
dition to the Southern Hemisphere during the Years 1849–1852, 1855; María Graham, Journal of a
Residence in Chile during the Year of 1822, 1824; Thaddaeus Peregrinus Haenke, Descripción del
reyno de Chile, 1942; Samuel Haigh, Sketches of Buenos Ayres and Chile, 1829; Basil Hall, Extracts
of a Journal Written on the Coasts of Chile, Peru, and Mexico in the Years 1820, 1821, 1822, 2 vols.,
1826; Adolph E. Howard, A Handbook or Guide to British Shipmasters and Others Trading to the
Coast of Chile, 1882; Daniel J. Hunter, A Sketch of Chile, expressly prepared for the use of emigrants
from the United States and Europe to that country, 1866; Samuel Burr Johnston, Cartas escritas du-
rante una residencia de tres años en Chile, trans. José Toribio Medina, 1917; and Diario de un tipó-
grafo Yanqui en Chile y Perú durante la guerra de la independencia, 1919; Gabriel Lafond de Lurcy,
Viaje a Chile, 1970; Mrs. C. B. Merwin, Three Years in Chile, 1863; John Miers, Travels in Chile and
La Plata, 2 vols., 1826; Fray Diego de Ocaña, “Relación del viaje a Chile: año de 1600,” Anales
de la Universidad de Chile, No. 120 (1960); Vicente Pérez Rosales, Recuerdos del pasado, trans.;
John Polt as, Times Gone By with an Introduction by Brian Loveman (forthcoming, 2001); Ed-
uardo Poeppig, Un testigo en la alborada de Chile: 1826–1829, 1960; Ignacio Richard, A Mining
Journey Across the Great Andes, 1863; William S. W. Ruschenberger, Three Years in the Pacific:
1831–1834, 1834; W. H. Russell, A Visit to Chile and the Nitrate Fields of Tarapacá, 1890; Domingo
F. Sarmiento, Chile: descripciones-viajes-episodios-costumbres, 1961; Peter Schmidtmeyer, Trav-
els into Chile over the Andes in the Years 1820–1821, 1824; Juan G. Serrato, A través de Chile, 1898;
William Bennet Stevenson, A Historical and Descriptive Narrative of Twenty Years’ Residence in
South America, 3 vols., 1825; Thomas Sutcliffe, Sixteen Years in Chile and Peru by the Retired Gov-
ernor of Juan Fernández, 1841; Paul Turetler, Andanzas de un alemán en Chile 1851–1863, trans.
by Carlos Keller, 1958; Useful Information for Captains of Merchant Vessels and Others Trading to
the Port of Valparaíso, 1872; George Vancouver, A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean
SELECTIVE GUIDE TO THE LITERATURE ON CHILE 377

and Round the World, 3 vols., 1789; Viajeros en Chile: 1817–1847, 1955 (Samuel Haigh, Alexan-
der Caldcleugh, Max Radiguet).

chilean history
Two historians, Diego Barros Arana and Francisco Encina, establish the framework for
Chilean historical studies. The foremost Liberal historian of the 19th century, Diego Barros
Arana produced the Historia general de Chile, 16 vols., 1884–1902, the starting point for al-
most all Chilean historiography through 1833, including the conservative, revisionist Histo-
ria de Chile desde la prehistoria hasta 1891 by Francisco Encina, 20 vols., 1940–52. A 3-volume
summary of the Encina history by Leopoldo Castedo—Resumen de la historia de Chile—has
gone through several editions and makes the Encina history somewhat more acessible to
readers unwilling to read or to acquire the 20-volume edition (1st ed., 1954). Charles C.
Griffin, “Francisco Encina and Revisionism in Chilean History,” HAHR 36, Feb. 1957, is an
important critical review of the Encina history. Ricardo Donoso’s Barros Arana: educador, his-
toriador y hombre público, 1931 provides a bibliography of Barros Arana’s historical scholar-
ship, including works on the independence movements and the Portalian period. Also use-
ful are Domingo Amunátegui Solar’s 2-volume Historia de Chile, 1933—intended as a
secondary school textbook—and Jaime Eyzaguirre’s Historia de Chile, 2 vols., 2nd ed., 1973,
covering the period from pre-Columbian times until 1861. Also of importance are Eyza-
guirre’s earlier works, Fisonomía histórica de Chile, 1948 and Historia de Chile: génesis de la na-
cionalidad, 1965. More recent general histories are Sergio Villalobos R., Osvaldo Silva G., Fer-
nando Silva V., and Patricio Estellé M., Historia de Chile, 4 vols. 1983; and Gonzalo Vial
Correa, Historia de Chile (1891–1973), 4 vols., 1981–97 (volumes cover to 1931; Vial was work-
ing on the post–1931 period in 1999). Luis Galdames, Estudio de la historia de Chile, 8th ed.,
1938, translated into English as A History of Chile, 1941, is a one-volume survey ending
shortly after the Great Depression. An earlier narrative in English, A. U. Hancock, History of
Chile, 1893, is largely a political history, ending with the civil war of 1891. Ricardo Donoso’s
Breve historia de Chile, 1963, is the briefest general history in Spanish. A secondary school text
by Francisco Frías Valenzuela, based on the author’s longer multivolume work, provides an
important indication of what Chilean students learn of Chilean history, Manual de historia de
Chile, 5th ed. 1960. Jay Kinsburner’s Chile: A Historical Interpretation, 1973, is an interpreta-
tion of key developments in Chilean history. In English, Simon Collier and William F. Sater,
A History of Chile, 1808–1994, 1996, and Leslie Bethell, ed., Chile Since Independence, 1993, offer
alternative narratives and analyses of Chilean development since 1808. A group of conser-
vative historians published a new interpretative history in 2000: Álvaro Góngora, Patricia
Arrancibia, Gonzalo Vial and Aldo Yávar, Chile (1541–2000). Una interpretación de su his-
toria polític.
In general, 20th-century history is not well developed in the available Chilean histories.
However, one collection of articles edited by Hernán Godoy, Estructura social de Chile, 1971,
offers an excellent selection of materials on Chilean society, economy, and politics from the
time of the conquest to the 1970s. In addition, this anthology contains a good topical bibli-
ography organized by historical period. A collaborative effort by Mariana Aylwin, Carlos
Bascuñán, Sofía Correa, Cristián Gazmuri, Sol Serrano, and Matías Tagle, Chile en el siglo XX,
3rd ed., 1990, offers a fresh interpretation of Chilean history from 1900. In 1999 the first two
volumes of a 4-volume interpretative social history appeared: Gabriel Salazar and Julio
Pinto, Historia contemporánea de Chile, I, Estado, legitimidad, ciudadanía; II, Actores, identidad y
movimiento. Ideologically framed histories and historiographies with extensive bibliogra-
phies for the period 1958–1999 are (from the left) Luis Vitale, Luis Moulian, et al., Para recu-
perar la memoria histórica, Frei, Allende y Pinochet, 1999; Luis Vitale, Interpretación marxista de
378 CHILE

la historia de Chile, De Alessandri P. a Frei M. (1932–1964) Industrialización y modernidad 1998;

and (from the right) Alberto Cardemil, El camino de la utopía, Alessandri, Frei, Allende. Pen-
samiento y obra, 1997.

conquest and the formation of chilean society

The single most important source of primary materials on the conquest of Chile is the series
“Colección de historiadores de Chile y documentos relativos a la historia nacional (CH),” 51
vols., 1861–1953. This collection of chronicles, documents, and histories of the conquest has
received priority from a number of Chile’s most prominent historians and includes most of
the key contributions to Chilean history in the early colonial period. Newer editions of some
of the more salient works have been reissued in paperback in abbreviated form in a series
called “Escritores coloniales de Chile,” including Alonso de Góngora Marmolejo, Historia de
Chile desde su descubrimiento hasta el año 1575; Alonso de Ovalle, Histórica relación del reyno de
Chile; Alonso González de Nájera, Desengaño y reparo de la guerra de Chile; Francisco Núñez
Pineda y Bascuñán, Cautiverio Feliz (an account of life among the Araucanians by a captured
Spaniard); and Diego de Rosales, Historia general del reino de Chile. Other key works in the
“Colección de historiadores” are Vicente Carvallo Goyeneche, Descripción histórico-geográfica
del reino de Chile; and Miguel de Olivares, Historia militar, civil, y sagrada de Chile. As in the
rest of Spanish America, many of these early writers on Chile were members of religious or-
ders, especially the Society of Jesus (Jesuits).
A major figure in the creation of the “Colección de historiadores,” José Toribio Medina,
also made available large quantities of primary materials to scholars through his energetic
archival research. Major published contributions include: Cartas de Pedro de Valdivia que
tratan del descubrimiento y conquista de Chile, 1953—letters from Valdivia to Charles V; Colec-
ción de documentos inéditos para la historia de Chile desde el viaje de Magallanes hasta la batalla de
Maipo, 1518–1818, 30 vols., 1888–1902; and Cosas de la Colonia, 1952. Other sources of primary
materials include the Archivo de la Capitanía Jeneral; Archivo de la Real Audiencia; Archivo del
Arzobispado de Santiago; and the Archivo Nacional de Chile. In addition, the “Actas del cabildo
de Santiago de 1541 a 1557 y de 1558 a 1577” can be found in the “Colección de histori-
adores,” vols. 1 and 17.
Historical treatments of the period of conquest are numerous, ranging from biographies
of Pedro de Valdivia and other conquistadores to comprehensive and detailed monographic
studies. Among the most useful of the latter, Francisco Esteve Barba’s Descubrimiento y con-
quista de Chile, 1946 stands out as a reliable summary with helpful bibliography following
each chapter. The set of histories from the Catholic point of view, by Catholic historian Cres-
cente Errázuriz offers a comprehensive treatment of the period from the conquest to the late
16th century and an interpretation somewhat different from the Liberal orientation of Bar-
ros Arana, whose volumes—Historia de Chile, Pedro de Valdivia, 2 vols., 1911–21; Historia de
Chile sin gobernador 1554–1557, 1912; Historia de Chile, Don García de Mendoza: 1557–1561,
1914; Historia de Chile, Francisco de Villagra 1561–1563, 1915; Historia de Chile, Pedro de Villagra
1563–1565, 1916; and Seis años en la historia de Chile, 1598–1605, 1908—contain a wealth of de-
tailed information. A doctoral dissertation at the University of Florida, Thomas Braman,
Land and Society in Early Colonial Santiago, 1977, synthesizes much of the older materials on
the early years of conquest and includes a good working bibliography for this period.
On Pedro de Valdivia, his companions, and the conquest of Chile, a handful of well-
known studies summarizes existing knowledge: Rosa Arciniega, Don Pedro de Valdivia: Con-
quistador de Chile, 1943; Jaime Eyzaguirre, Ventura de Pedro de Valdivia, 1963; Hugh R. S.
Pocock, The Conquest of Chile, 1967; Joaquín Santa Cruz, Problemas históricos de la conquista de
SELECTIVE GUIDE TO THE LITERATURE ON CHILE 379

Chile, 1902; Luis Silva Lezaeta, El conquistador Francisco de Aguirre, 1953; Ida W. Vernon, Pedro
de Valdivia: Conquistador of Chile, 1960. A sympathetic treatment of Valdivia’s mistress, later
wife of another Chilean governor, is Stella B. May, The Conqueror’s Lady: Inéz de Suarez, 1930.
Other historians have taken the biographies of major Indian chiefs as a point of departure,
for example, René León Echaíz, El toqui Lautaro, 1971.
The ongoing warfare between Spaniards and the Araucanians of Chile gave to Chilean
colonial society a unique character. The best single volume interpreting the relationship be-
tween the frontier status of Chile and the evolution of Chilean society is Alvaro Jara’s Guerra
y sociedad en Chile, 1971, translated from a French edition published ten years earlier. Jara’s
other work on colonial labor systems and Spanish-Indian relations complements the mono-
graph and serves as a basis for colonial labor history: “Fuentes para la historia del trabajo
en Chile,” BACH 54, 55, 58, 51, 1956–57, 1959; El salario de los indios y los sesmos del oro en la
Tasa de Santillán, 1961; Los asientos del trabajo y la provisión de mano de obra para los no-
encomenderos en la ciudad de Santiago: 1586–1600, Estudios de historia económica americana,
trabajo y salario en el período colonial, No. 1, 1959; “Salario en una economía caracterizada
por las relaciones de dependencia personal,” RCHG 133, 1965. The only available interpre-
tation of Spanish-Indian confrontation in English is Eugene H. Korth’s, Spanish Policy in
Colonial Chile, 1968. An earlier article by Louis de Armond, “Frontier Warfare in Colonial
Chile,” Pacific Historical Review, May 1954, is still an interesting introductory reading on the
Chilean frontier. An important contribution to the literature on Spanish-Mapuche conflicts
and evangelization, with an extensive bibliography on colonial issues that includes theses
done in Chile on these topics, is Rolf Foerster G., Jesuitas y Mapuches, 1593–1767, 1996.
Leonardo León Solís, Maloqueros y conchavadores en Araucanía y las Pampas, 1700–1800, 1991,
and Sergio Villalobos, Vida fronteriza en la Araucanía. El mito de la guerra de Arauco, 1995, chal-
lenge conventional interpretations of the Chilean Indian frontier. Andrea Ruiz-Esquide
Figueroa, Los indios amigos en la frontera araucana, 1993, provides a more specialized look at
the “pacified” Indian peoples. An important article by Guillaume Boccara in 1999 reviews
the genesis and evolution of the “Mapuche” (a term not used widely, according to Boccara,
before the mid-eighteenth century) and includes a valuable collection of source citations:
“Ethnogénesis mapuche: resistencia y restructuración entre los indígenas del centro-sur de
Chile (siglos XVI–XVIII),” Hispanic American Historical Review, August 1999, 425–61.
Among the most valuable secondary sources on the Indian question and early colonial
society are Domingo Amunátegui Solar, Las encomiendas de indíjenas en Chile, 2 vols., 1909;
Miguel Luis Amunátegui, Descubrimiento y conquista de Chile, 1862; Guillermo Feliú Cruz
and Carlos Monje Alfaro, Las encomiendas según tasas y ordenanzas, 1941; Kalky Glauser R.,
“Orígenes del régimen de producción vigente en Chile,” Cuadernos de la Realidad Nacional,
No. 8, 1971; Mario Góngora, El estado en el derecho indiano, época de fundación: 1492–1570, 1951;
“Vagabundaje y sociedad fronteriza en Chile: Siglo XVIII a XIX,” Cuadernos del Centro de Es-
tudios Socioeconómicos, No. 2, 1966; Encomenderos y estancieros, estudios acerca de la constitución
social aristocrática de Chile después de la conquista: 1580–1660, 1970; Néstor Meza Villalobos,
Políticas indígenas en los orígenes de la sociedad chilena, 1951; La formación de la fortuna mobiliaria
y el ritmo de la conquista, 1941; María Isabel Gonzáles Pomes, “La encomienda indígena en
Chile durante el siglo XVIII,” Historia 5, 1966; Jorge Randolph, Las guerras de Arauco y la es-
clavitud, 1966; Manuel Salvat Monguillot, “El régimen de encomiendas en los primeros tiem-
pos de la conquista,” RCHG, No. 132, 1964; Fernando Silva Vargas, Tierras y pueblo de indios
en el reino de Chile, 1962.
The most important Marxist contribution to conquest historiography is Luis Vitale, In-
terpretación marxista de la historia de Chile: Tomo 1: Las culturas primitivas, la conquista española,
1957. One Chilean historian, Tomás Thayer Ojeda, has given special attention to the origins
of the so-called “raza chilena” more generally. Major works include: Elementos étnicos que
380 CHILE

han intervenido en la población de Chile, 1919; Formación de la sociedad chilena y censos de la

población de Chile entre los años 1540 a 1565, con datos estadísticos, biográficos, étnicos, y de-
mográficos, 3 vols., 1939–41; Los conquistadores de Chile, 2 vols., 1908; with Carlos J. Larraín,
Valdivia y sus compañeros, 1950.

colonial society and culture

Central to the development of Chilean society, as in the rest of Spanish America, the Catholic
Church and its representatives played a critical role in conquest, social organization, edu-
cation, and public policy. Eugene Korth’s already mentioned study is a basic source in Eng-
lish for an overview of the role of the Church in shaping Spanish colonial policy in Chile.
Among the numerous Spanish-language sources are: Diego Barros Arana, Riquezas de los an-
tiguos jesuitas de Chile, 1872; Francisco Enrich, Historia de la compañía de Jesús en Chile, 2 vols.,
1891; Crescente Errázuriz, Los orígenes de la iglesia chilena: 1540–1603, 1873; José Ignacio Víc-
tor Eyzaguirre, Historia eclesiástica, política y literaria de Chile, 3 vols., 1959; Elías Lizana and
Pablo Maulen (eds.), Colección de documentos históricos recopilados del archivo del arzobispado de
Santiago, 4 vols. 1919–21; José Toribio Medina, La inquisición en Chile, 2 vols., 1890; Policarpo
Gazulla, Los primeros mercedarios en Chile; 1535–1600, 1918; Carlos Silva Cotapos, Historia
eclesiástica de Chile, 1925.
Insight into colonial art, literature, and music in Chile can be found in Fernando Alegría,
La poesía chilena; orígenes y desarrollo del siglo XVI al XIX, 1954; Luis Alvarez Urquieta, La pin-
tura en Chile durante el período coloníal, 1933; Alfredo Benavides Rodríguez, La arquitectura en
el virreinato del Perú y en la capitanía general de Chile, 2nd ed., 1961; Alejandro Fuenzalida
Grandón, Historia del desarrollo intelectual de Chile: 1541–1810, 1903; Historia de la literatura
colonial, 3 vols., 1878; Eugenio Pereira Salas, Los orígenes del arte musical en Chile, 1941; Histo-
ria del arte en el reino de Chile: 1541–1776, 1965; Luis Roa Urzúa, El arte en la época colonial de
Chile, 1929; Tomás Thayer Ojeda, “Las bibliotecas coloniales en Chile,” Revista de bibliografía
chilena y extranjera 1, No. 11, 1943.
Colonial education and pastimes are treated in Miguel Luis and Gregorio Amunátegui,
De la instrucción pública en Chile, 1856; José Toribio Medina, La instrucción pública en Chile
desde sus orígenes hasta la fundación de la universidad de San Felipe de Santiago de Chile, 2 vols.,
1928; Eugenio Pereira Salas, Juego y alegrías coloniales en Chile, 1947.
Nineteenth-century treatments of the colonial economy reflect the struggle between lib-
eralism and the Hispanic-Catholic tradition. More recent interpretations reflect the global
confrontation between supporters of capitalism and Marxism. Articles on specialized
themes on colonial society and economy as well as documents with commentary appear pe-
riodically in RCHG, BACH, and Historia.
Marxist interpretations of colonial society include José Cademártori, La economía chilena,
1968, esp. chaps. 2 and 3; André Gunder Frank, Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin
America, 1969; Julio César Jobet, Ensayo crítico del desarrollo económico-social de Chile, 1955;
Hernán Ramírez Necochea, Antecedentes económicos de la independencia de Chile, 1959; Marcelo
Segall, Desarrollo del capitalismo en Chile, 1953; “Las luchas de clases en las primeras décadas
de la República de Chile,” Anales de la Universidad de Chile, No. 125, 1962; Luis Vitale, Inter-
pretación marxista de la historia de Chile: La colonia y la revolución de 1810, 1969.
A survey of historiographical literature on colonial Chile in the 19th century, with por-
traits of the most well-known Chilean historians and facsimiles of the title pages of impor-
tant works, is Guillermo Feliú Cruz, Historiografía colonial de Chile, Tomo I, 1796–1886, 1958;
Armando de Ramón and José Manuel Larraín’s Orígenes de la vida económica chilena,
1659–1808, 1982, adds a wealth of empirical data on prices, production, commerce, and pat-
terns of economic change in the 17th and 18th centuries. To this must be added the studies
SELECTIVE GUIDE TO THE LITERATURE ON CHILE 381

of Rolando Mellafe, Las primeras crisis coloniales, formas de asiento y origen de la sociedad chilena,
siglos XVI y XVII in Siete Estudios, Homenaje de la Facultad de Ciencias Humanas a Eugenio
Pereira Salas, 1975, and Latifundio y poder rural en Chile en los siglos XVII y XVIII, 1980.
The insertion of the Chilean colonial economy in international commerce is well treated
in Eduardo Cavieres F., El comercio chileno en la economía mundo colonial, 1996. Among the great
number of works on colonial society and economy, including social and economic institu-
tions and patterns of commerce, are the following basic studies: Sergio Bagú, Economía de la
sociedad colonial, 1949; and Estructura social de la colonia, 1952; Marcello Carmagnani, Les Mé-
canismes de la vie économique dans une société coloniale: le Chili (1680–1830), 1973; Miguel
Cruchaga, Estudio sobre la organización económica y la hacienda pública de Chile; Mario Góngora,
“Los ‘hombres ricos’ de Santiago y La Serena a través de las cuentas del quinto real,” RCHG,
No. 131, 1963; Eugenio Pereira Salas, Buques norteamericanos a fines de la era colonial: 1778–1810,
1936; Demetrio Ramos, Trigo chileno, navieros del Callao y hacendados limeños, 1967; Ruggiero
Romano, Una economía colonial: Chile en el siglo XVIII, 1965; Agustín Ross, Reseña histórica sobre
el comercio de Chile en la era colonial, 1894; René Salinas, “Raciones alimenticias en Chile colo-
nial” Historia 12 (1974–75); Sergio Sepúlveda, El trigo chileno en el mercado mundial, 1959; John
Tepaske and Herbert Klein, The Royal Treasuries of the Spanish Empire in America: Chile and the
Rio de la Plata, 1982; Sergio Villalobos, El comercio y la crisis colonial: un mito de la independen-
cia, 1968, and Comercio y contrabando en el Río de la Plata y Chile: 1700–1811, 1965.
On mining in particular, the reader may consult: J. Bruggen, Bibliografía minera y jeológica
de Chile, 8 vols., 1919–27; Alberto Herrmann, La producción en Chile de los metales y minerales
más importantes de las sales naturales, del azufre y del guano desde la conquista hasta fines del año
1902, 1903; Augusto Orrego Cortés, La industria del oro en Chile, 1890; Francisco San Ramón,
Reseña industrial e histórica de la minería y metalurgia de Chile, 1899; José Joaquín (Jotabeche)
Vallejo, Costumbres mineras, 1943; Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, El libro de la plata, 1882; El libro
del cobre y del carbón de piedra, 1883; and La edad del oro en Chile, 2 vols., 1932.
Studies on social themes in the colonial period, including the role of ethnic and cultural
minorities in colonial Chile, are: Domingo Amunátegui Solar, Historia social de Chile, 1936;
and La sociedad chilena del siglo XVIII: mayorazgos y títulos de castilla, 3 vols., 1903–04; Gunter
Bohm, Nuevos antecedentes para una historia de los judíos en Chile colonial, 1963; Marcello
Carmagnani, “Colonial Latin American Demography: Growth of Chilean Population, 1700–
1830,” Journal of Social History, No. 2, 1963; and El salariado minero en Chile colonial, su desar-
rollo en una sociedad provincial: el norte Chico; 1690–1800, 1963; Guillermo de la Cuadra Gor-
maz, Origen de doscientas familias coloniales de Santiago, 3 vols., 1941–47; Origen y desarrollo de
las familias chilenas, 1948–49; and “Censo de la capitanía general de Chile en 1777,” BACH,
No. 12, 1940; Enrique Eberhardt, Historia de Santiago de Chile, 1916; Guillermo Feliú Cruz,
La abolición de la esclavitud en Chile, 1942; Della M. Flusche, Two Families in Colonial Chile,
1989; Alejandro Fuenzalida Grandón, La evolución social de Chile: 1514–1810, 1906; Mario
Góngora, Origen de los inquilinos de Chile central, 1960; and “Urban Social Stratification in
Colonial Chile,” HAHR 55, 1975; with Jean Borde, Evolución de la propiedad rural en el valle del
Puange, 2 vols., 1956; Eugene Korth and Della M. Flusche, Forgotten Females: Women of
African and Indian Descent in Colonial Chile, 1553–1800, 1983; Elías Lizana, Colección de docu-
mentos históricos de archivo del arzobispado de Santiago, 4 vols., 1919–21; Rolando Mellafe, La in-
troducción de la esclavitud negra en Chile, 1959; Humberto Muñoz, Los movimientos sociales en
el Chile colonial, 1945; William F. Sater, “The Black Experience in Chile,” Slavery and Race Re-
lations in Latin America, R. Toplin (ed.), 1974; Gonzalo Vial Correa, El africano en el reino de
Chile, 1957.
On the cabildo and the effects of administrative reforms in the colonial period, see: Julio
Alemparte, El cabildo en Chile colonial, 1940; Miguel Luis Amunátegui, El cabildo de Santiago
desde 1573 hasta 1581, 3 vols., 1890–91; Jacques Barbier, “Elite and Cadres in Bourbon Chile,”
HAHR, Aug. 1972 (clearly the most important recent revisionist work on the effects of the
382 CHILE

Bourbon reforms on colonial administration and society); Reform and Politics in Bourbon
Chile, 1755–1796, 1980; Della M. Flusche, “The Cabildo and Public Health in Seventeenth
Century Chile,” TA 29, 1972; and “City Councilmen and the Church in Seventeenth Century
Chile,” Records of American Catholic Historical Society of Philadelphia 81, No. 3, 1970; Carlos
Ugarte, “El cabildo de Santiago y el comercio exterior del reino de Chile en el siglo XVIII,”
Estudios de las Instituciones Políticas y Sociales, Vol. I, 1967.

independence and the autocratic republic

Simon Collier, Ideas and Politics of Chilean Independence: 1808–1833, 1967, is the most impor-
tant source in English on late 18th-century Chile, the independence movement, and the for-
mation of the Portalian state. Collier’s bibliography lists manuscript sources, contemporary
newspapers and journals, as well as contemporary and modern scholarship on the period.
I have relied heavily on Collier’s work in my own discussion of this period in Chapter 4 and
will not attempt here to replicate his bibliography. In addition, Collier’s article “The Histo-
riography of the Portalian Period 1830–1891 in Chile,” HAHR, Nov. 1977, adds an important
and systematic treatment of traditional and revisionist history on the independence period,
formation of the Portalian state, and 19th-century Chilean historiography more generally.
Review of the historiography of the independence period is found in Gonzalo Vial, “His-
toriografía de la independencia de Chile,” Historia, No. 4, 1965. Recent studies by American
scholars have considerably expanded our knowledge of post-independence commercial af-
fairs and the social composition of the Chilean oligarchy; Stanley Frederick Edwards,
Chilean Economic Policy Goals 1811–1829: A Study of Late Eighteenth Century Social Mercantil-
ism and Early Nineteenth Century Economic Reality, Ph.D. diss., Tulane Univ., 1971; and John
Rector, Merchants, Trade and Commercial. Policy in Chile: 1810–1840, Ph.D. diss., Indiana Univ.,
1976; and “Transformaciones comerciales producidas por la independencia de Chile,”
RCHG, No. 143, 1975. The work of Roger Haigh, The Formation of the Chilean Oligarchy:
1810–1821, 1972, and of Mary Felstiner, The Larraín Family in the Independence of Chile:
1789–1830, Ph.D. diss., Stanford, 1970; “Kinship Politics in the Chilean Independence Move-
ment,” HAHR 56, Feb. 1976, offers insight into the nature and behavior of the Chilean oli-
garchy in the early 19th century. For accounts of the evolution of Chile’s political elite in the
19th century see the classic work by Alberto Edwards Vives, La fronda aristocrática, 1936 and
Gabriel Marcella, The Structure of Politics in Nineteenth Century Spanish America: The Chilean
Oligarchy 1833–1891, Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Notre Dame, 1973.
The independence period and formation of the “Portalian” state have produced a volu-
minous literature. On the independence movement and its leaders see: Julio Alemparte, Ca-
rrera y Freire, 1903; Miguel Luis Amunátegui, La crónica de 1810, 3 vols., 1876; Don Manuel de
Salas, 3 vols., 1895; Los precursores de la independencia de Chile, 3 vols., 1919; with Benjamín
Vicuña Mackenna, La dictadura de O’Higgins, 1920; La revolución de la independencia, 1945; and
Nacimiento de la república de Chile: 1808–1833, 1930; Stephen Clissold Bernardo O’Higgins and
the Independence of Chile, 1960; 1960; Agustín Edwards, The Dawn, 1931; Francisco Antonio
Encina, Portales: Introducción a la historia de la época de Diego Portales: 1830–1891, 2 vols., 1934;
Federico Errázuriz, Chile bajo el imperio de la constitución de 1828, 1861; Jaime Eyzaguirre,
Ideario y ruta de la emancipación chilena, 1957; and O’Higgins, 3rd ed., 1950; Guillermo Feliú
Cruz, El pensamiento de O’Higgins, 1954; Antonio Huneeus Gana, La Constitución de 1833,
1933; Jay Kinsbruner, Bernardo O’Higgins, 1968; William R. Manning (ed.), Diplomatic Corre-
spondence of the United States Concerning the Independence of Latin American Nations. 3 vols.,
1925; José Toribio Medina, Actas del cabildo de Santiago de Chile durante el período llamado de la
patria vieja: 1810–1814, 1910; Néstor Meza Villalobos, La actividad política del reino de Chile
entre 1806 a 1810, 1968; Bartolomé Mitre, Historia de San Martín y de la emancipación sudame-
ricana, 3 vols., 1887–88; Ricardo Montaner Bello, Historia diplomática de la historia de Chile,
SELECTIVE GUIDE TO THE LITERATURE ON CHILE 383

1961; Francisco José Moreno, Legitimacy and Stability in Latin America: A Study of Chilean Po-
litical Culture, 1969 (the study by Moreno emphasizes the conflict between the “authoristic”
tradition and the liberal principles espoused in the independence period and the 19th cen-
tury); A. Orrego Luco, La patria vieja, 2 vols., 1935–57; Eugenio Orrego Vicuña, O’Higgins:
vida y tiempo, 1946; Hernán Ramírez Necochea, Antecedentes económicos de la independencia de
Chile, 1959 (a Marxist interpretation of the independence movement); Raúl Silva Castro,
Egaña en la patria vieja, 1959; Ideas y confesiones de Portales, 1954; and (ed.), Escritos políticos de
Camilo Henríquez, 1960; Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, El ostracismo de los Carrera, 1938; and
Tradición y reforma en 1810, 1961; Donald E. Worcester, Sea Power and Chilean Independence,
1962.
For post-1810 political development until the Constitution of 1833, the following sources
are a good foundation: Diego Barros Arana, Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, et al., Historia de la
república de Chile: 1810–1830, 5 vols., 1866–82; Ricardo Donoso, Desarrollo político y social de
Chile, desde la constitución de 1833, 2nd ed., 1942; Las ideas políticas en Chile, 2nd ed., 1967 (this
last work is perhaps the most important statement by a Chilean author of the struggle be-
tween liberalism and Hispanic values as a constant issue in Chilean history); Alberto Ed-
wards, La organización política de Chile: 1810–1833, 2nd ed., 1955; Jaime Eyzaguirre, “Las
ideas políticas en Chile hasta 1833,” BACH 1, 1933; Jay Kinsbruner, Diego Portales: Interpre-
tive Essays on the Man and Times, 1967; Daniel Martner, Estudio de política comercial chilena e
historia económica nacional, 2 vols., 1923; Paul V. Shaw, The Early Constitutions of Chile, 1930;
Ramón Sotomayor Valdéz, Historia de Chile bajo el gobierno del general don Joaquín Prieto, 4
vols., 1900–03; Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, Don Diego Portales, 2 vols., 1863; Sergio Villalo-
bos, Portales, Una falsificación histórica, 1989; Carlos Walker Martínez, Portales, 1879; José Za-
piola, Recuerdos de treinta años: 1810–1840, 5th ed., 1902.

nineteenth-century chile
Simon Collier’s “The Historiography of the ‘Portalian’ Period: 1830–1891 in Chile,” HAHR,
Nov. 1977, must be consulted when treating this period of Chilean history. Allen Woll’s A
Functional Past: The Uses of History in Nineteenth Century Chile, 1982; summarizes the ideo-
logical currents influencing 19th-century Chilean historiography and offers important in-
sights into 19th-century Chilean society. Iván Jaksić’s Andrés Bello: Scholarship and Nation
Building in Nineteenth Century Latin America (forthcoming, 2001), will be a basic source for
Chilean intellectual history in the first half-century of independence. This biography is
much more ambitious than Miguel Luis Amunátegui, Vida de don Andrés Bello, 1882; Raúl
Silva Castro, Don Andrés Bello, 1781–1865, 1965; and Rafael Caldera, Andrés Bello, 7th ed.,
1981. Jaksić’s Selected Writings of Andrés Bello, 1997, makes many of Bello’s most important
contributions accessible to readers in English. For those not satisfied with selections, see An-
drés Bello, Obras completas de Andrés Bello, 26 vols., 1981–84. On Bello’s liberal intellectual
adversary, José Victorino Lastarria, see Bernardo Subercaseaux, Cultura y sociedad liberal en
el siglo XIX (Lastarria, ideologia y literatura), 1981, and José Victorino Lastarria, Recuerdos li-
terarios: Datos para la historia literaria de la América española i del progreso intelectual en Chile,
2nd ed., 1885; Diario político, 1849–1852 (with an introduction by Raúl Silva Castro), 1968. Fi-
nally translated into English is Lastarria’s Literary Memoirs, R. Kelly Washbourne, trans.,
with an introduction by Frederick Nunn, 2000.
In general, historical studies on nineteenth century Chile, prior to the 1980s, came less to
rely on the classical Chilean sources and turned to work by European and North American
researchers. A resurgence and modernization of Chilean historical studies in the 1980s
somewhat changed this trend. Scholars such as Cristián Gazmuri, El “48” Chileno: Igualita-
rios, reformistas, radicales, masones y bomberos, 1992; Alfredo Jocelyn-Holt Letelier, El peso de la
noche, Nuestra frágil fortaleza histórica, 1997; and Bernardino Bravo Lira, Portales, El hombre y
384 CHILE

su obra, 1989; El absolutismo ilustrado en Hispanomerica, Chile (1760–1860) De Carlos III a Por-
tales y Montt, 1992; El estado de derecho en la historia de Chile, 1996; and Gonzalo Vial Correa,
Historia de Chile, 1891–1973, multiple volumes, 1981–97, offered differing and controversial
interpretations of Chile’s nineteenth century history. New encyclopedic history manuals
also reflected an updating and variously framed revisionist versions of Chilean history. Two
competing alternatives are Nueva historia de Chile, Desde los orígenes hasta nuestros días, 3rd
ed., 1997; Alejandro Concha Cruz and Julio Maltés Cortez, Historia de Chile, 12th ed., 1998.
In 1997 Zig Zag also published the 59th edition of Walter Millar’s school text, Historia de
Chile, a highly stylized, illustrated primer that has sold over a million copies. Millar’s
history ends in 1974; telling the reader that “it is especially moving how women all over
Chile donate their jewelry and other objects of value to the Fund for National Reconstruc-
tion [established by the military junta after 1973].” The Department of History at the Uni-
versity of Santiago (USACH) contributed greatly to the resurgence in Chilean historical
studies with their journal Contribuciones Científicas y Tecnológicas, a gold mine of new ap-
proaches, new sources, and new thinking on Chilean social and economic history. Juan
Guillermo Muñoz, Luis Ortega, Julio Pinto, Alfredo Joceyln-Holt, Gabriel Salazar, Leonardo
León, Jorge Pinto, Sergio Grez, and their colleagues at USACH have been important cata-
lysts in this movement that has focused on issues ranging from gender relations, migration,
and labor history to new looks at colonial social and economic history. A parallel renaissance
took place at the Instituto de Historia, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, where his-
torians such as Nicolás Cruz, Cristián Gazmuri, Ricardo Krebs, and Sol Serrano contributed
to innovative studies of socioeconomic and political history. Historia, founded by Jaime
Eyzaguirre, continues as the leading professional history journal. Mapocho, a review of the
humanities and social sciences founded in 1963 by Guillermo Feliú Cruz as the cultural ex-
tension medium of the Dirección de Bibliotecas, Archivos y Museos, is a treasure chest for
historians as well as students of literature, arts, and the social sciences. As the Director of the
Centro de Investigaciones Diego Barros Arana in the late 1990s, historian Rafael Sagredo en-
couraged creative and specialized historical studies in several new series published by
DIBAM, ranging from documentary collections to social and labor history. Other especially
important history and social science journals include: Cuadernos de Historia, Estudios Públi-
cos, Estudios Sociales, Revista de Ciencia Política, and the Anales de la Universidad de Chile.
On Chilean social and economic development in the 19th century, Arnold J. Bauer,
Chilean Rural Society from the Spanish Conquest to 1930, 1975, provides a useful overview
along with a valuable bibliography. Eduardo Cavieres, Comercio chileno y comerciantes ingle-
ses 1820–1880: un ciclo de historia económica, 1988, is an insightful look at Chile’s incorpora-
tion into the international economy and the influence of British merchants and foreign pol-
icy. On trade policy, see Sergio Villalobos R. and Rafael Sagredo B., El proteccionismo
económico en Chile siglo XIX, 1987. Harold Blakemore’s British Nitrates and Chilean Politics:
1886–1896, 1974, a much broader work than its title suggests, offers a crucial interpretation
of socio-economic development and Chilean politics, including a controversial treatment of
the martyred president Balmaceda. For a radically different view, readers should consult
Hernán Ramírez Necochea, Historia del imperialismo en Chile, 1960; La guerra civil de 1891: an-
tecedentes económicos, 1953; and Balmaceda y la contrarrevolución de 1891, 2nd ed., 1969. Fred-
erick Pike’s Chile and the United States: 1880–1962, 1962, interprets much of 19th- and early
20th-century Chilean history. A controversial revisionist interpretation of political and eco-
nomic development in the 19th century is Maurice Zeitlin, The Civil Wars in Chile, 1984. On
the role of women viewed through the educational system, see Gertrude M. Yeager,
“Women’s Roles in Nineteenth-Century Chile: Public Education Records, 1843–1883,” Latin
American Research Review 18, No. 3, 1983.
It is difficult to overestimate the role of the Catholic Church in nineteenth-century Chile
(or to the present, for that matter). Basic sources are Fidel Araneda Bravo, Breve historia de la
SELECTIVE GUIDE TO THE LITERATURE ON CHILE 385

Iglesia en Chile, 1968; Historia de la Iglesia en Chile, 1986; Marciano Barrios Valdés, La Iglesia en
Chile, sinopsis histórico, 1987; Chile y su iglesia: una sola historia, 1992; Academia Filosófica de
Santo Tomás de Aquino, Estudio sobre la Iglesia en Chile desde la independencia, 1878; José Igna-
cio Víctor Eyzaguirre, Historia eclesiástica, politica y literaria de Chile, 3 vols., 1850; Carlos Silva
Cotapos, Historia eclesiástica de Chile, 1925. Marciano Barrios Valdés, “Historiografía ecle-
siástica, 1848–1988. La Iglesia: Una visión de los laicos,” Historia 28, 1994: 5–35 assesses the
view of secular historians on Church historians and the role of the Church in Chilean his-
tory, a topic that has been central since Miguel Luis Amunátegui published the Compendio
de la historia política y eclesiástica de Chile in 1881. For a survey of work on the “social ques-
tion,” see Patricio Valdivieso Fernández, “‘Cuestión Social’ y doctrina social de la Iglesia en
Chile (1880–1920): Ensyo histórico sobre el estado de la investigación,” Historia 32, 1999:
553–73.
On 19th- and early 20th-century Chilean politics, Pike’s work cited above is a useful sum-
mary. A more recent, revisionist view of post-1861 political developments is Julio Heise
González, Historia de Chile: el período parlamentario 1861–1925, vol. I, 1974, vol. 2, 1982. This
study is essential for understanding institutional evolution, the issues and myths sur-
rounding the civil war of 1891, and early 20th-century political history. Heise’s bibliography
lists most of the important primary and secondary works on Chilean political and constitu-
tional development from the early 19th century to the 1930s. Fernando Campos Harriet, His-
toria constitucional de Chile, 6th ed., 1983, covers the institutional development of the coun-
try from precolonial times until 1970, with detailed accounts of the 19th-century
administrations, legislation, public policy, and extensive bibliographical references in the
notes. A basic source on Congress, political parties, and government cabinets that also
reprints Chile’s constitutions since 1810 is Luis Valencia Avaria, comp., Anales de la República,
Tomos I y II Actualizados, 1986. Ricardo Anguita, Leyes promulgadas en Chile desde 1810 hasta el
1 de junio de 1912, 5 vols., 1912–13 reprints and systematically indexes legislation by topic
from independence until almost the outbreak of World War I. A revisionist look at Chilean
political history in the nineteenth century, focusing on civil wars, political crises, and
amnesties, is Brian Loveman and Elizabeth Lira, Las suaves cenizas del olvido, Via chilena de
reconciliación política, 1814–1932, 1999.
In Diagnóstico de la burocracia chilena: 1818–1969, Germán Urzúa Valenzuela and Ana
María García Barzellatto provide a synthesis of the growth of the Chilean state apparatus
since independence and the political implications of bureaucratic expansion, including de-
velopments in the 19th century. Also of value is Germán Urzúa Valenzuela, Evolución de la
administración pública chilena (1818–1968), 1970. Ricardo Donoso’s polemical Desarrollo
político y social de Chile desde la constitución de 1833 and Las ideas políticas en Chile, 2nd ed., 1967
are both among the key secondary works on the 19th century. For a Marxian interpretation,
also the source of much revisionist history on the 19th century, see Julio César Jobet, Ensayo
Crítico del desarrollo económico-social de Chile, 1955. Another important contribution to social
history is Guillermo Feliú Cruz, “Un esquema de la evolución social de Chile en el siglo
hasta 1891,” in Chile: visto a través de Agustín Ross, 1950.
In general, studies on the 19th century are much more specialized. In the broad area of
socio-economic evolution, including works on particular areas of the Chilean economy, so-
cial stratification and class conflict, the social question, technological change and interna-
tional economic relations, one school of historical scholarship has emphasized the “depen-
dency” of Chilean development upon events in Europe and North America. Complementing
more traditional Marxist treatments of Chilean socio-economic trends in the 19th century and
Francisco Encina’s earlier laments concerning the direction and character of Chilean devel-
opment in Nuestra inferioridad económica, 1955, the dependency theorists trace most problems
facing Chile to this pattern of international exploitation in the past centuries. Key works in
this tradition include Ramírez Necochea’s already mentioned study, Historia del imperialismo
386 CHILE

en Chile, 1960; Marta Harnecker and Gabriela Uribe, Imperialismo y dependencia, 1972; and
three doctoral dissertations: Roger Burbach. The Chilean Industrial Bourgeoisie and Foreign Cap-
ital 1920–1970, Indiana Univ., 1975; Charles G. Pregger Román, Dependent Development in
Nineteenth Century Chile, Rutgers Univ., 1975; and Jacqueline Spencer Garreaud, A Dependent
Country: Chile 1817–1861, Univ. of California, San Diego, 1981. A related but more balanced
approach is Aníbal Pinto Santa Cruz, Chile: un caso de desarrollo frustrado, 1959.
Markos J. Mamalakis’s The Growth and Structure of the Chilean Economy: From Independence
to Allende, 1976, offers a significant counter to the dependency theorists. Carmen Cariola
Sutter and Osvaldo Sunkel, Un siglo de historia económica de Chile, 1830–1930, 1982, offers in-
terpretive essays on a century of Chilean economic evolution, useful statistical appendices,
and an important annotated thematic bibliography. Patricio Meller’s Un siglo de economía po-
litica chilena (1890–1990), 1996, brings this topic to the transition from the military regime to
an elected government in 1990.
Henry W. Kirsch, Industrial Development in a Traditional Society, The Conflict of Entrepre-
neurship and Modernization in Chile, 1977, reassesses Chilean industrial development and in-
cludes a wealth of descriptive material and bibliographical references. Other key sources on
industrialization include Oscar Alvarez A., Historia del desarrollo industrial de Chile, 1936; spe-
cial issue of Colección Estudios CIEPLAN, No. 12, March 1984, “Perspectivas históricas de la
economía chilena: del siglo XIX a la crisis del 30” (includes a suggestive article by Carlos
Hurtado R. T., “La economía chilena entre 1830–1930: sus limitaciones y sus herencias,”
which re-evaluates Chilean economic policy and the role of the state in the 19th century).
Another important contribution to the reassessment of Chilean industrial and economic de-
velopment is J. Gabriel Palma, Growth and Structure of Chilean Manufacturing Industry from
1830 to 1935: Origins and Development of a Process of Industrialization in an Export Economy,
Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Oxford, 1979. Also of use on the 19th-century development of the
Chilean economy are Harold Blakemore, Dos estudios sobre salitre y política en Chile (1870–
1895), 1991; Luis Ortega and Julio Pinto, Expansión minera y desarrollo industrial: un caso de
crecimiento asociado (Chile 1850–1914), 1990; Luis Ortega, Change and Crisis in Chile’s Economy
and Society, 1865–1879, Ph.D. diss., Univ. of London, 1979; “Acerca de los orígenes de la in-
dustrialización chilena, 1860–1879,” Revista Nueva Historia, No. 2, 1981; and P. S. Conoboy,
Money and Politics in Chile, 1878–1925, Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Southhampton, 1977.
For particular sectors or regions of the Chilean economy, development of transport, and
communication networks in the 19th century the following sources are of considerable
value: Marcello Carmagnani, Sviluppo Industriale e Sotto-Sviluppo Económico: il caso cileno
1860–1920 (Turin, 1971); C. W. Centner, “Great Britain and Chilean Mining: 1830–1914,” Eco-
nomic History Review, No. 12 (1942); Santiago Machiavello Varas, El problema de la industria
del cobre y sus proyecciones económicas y sociales, 1923; Markos Mamalakis and Clark Reynolds,
Essays on the Chilean Economy, 1965; Santiago Marín Vicuña, Los ferrocarriles en Chile, 1912;
Max Nolff, “Industria manufacturera,” CORFO, Geografía económica de Chile, 1967; Robert B.
Oppenheimer, Chilean Transportation Development: The Railroads and Socio-economic Change in
the Central Valley, Ph.D. diss, Univ. of California, Los Angeles, 1976; “National Capital and
National Development: Financing Chile’s Railroads in the 19th Century,” Business History
Review, 54, Spring 1982; Luis Ortega, “The First Four Decades of the Chilean Coal Mining In-
dustry,” Journal of Latin American Studies 14, May 1982; L. R. Pederson. The Mining History of
the Norte Chico: Chile, 1966; Ian Thomson and Dietrich Angerstein, Historia del ferrocarril en
Chile, 1997; John Whaley, Transportation in Chile’s Bío Bío Region: 1850–1915, Ph.D. diss., (In-
diana Univ., 1974. Whaley’s work, an excellent economic history of the Biobío region, also
discusses primary sources and railroad statistics.
On nitrates, the most important sector of the economy in the late 19th century, see in ad-
dition to the Blakemore work already mentioned, Oscar Bermúdez, Historia del salitre desde
SELECTIVE GUIDE TO THE LITERATURE ON CHILE 387

sus orígenes hasta la guerra del Pacífico, 1963; G. Billinghurst, Los capitales salitreros de Tarapacá,
1889; Manuel Cruchaga, Guano y salitre, 1929; J. R. Brown, “Nitrate Crisis: Combinations and
the Chilean Government in the Nitrate Age,” HAHR, No. 63, 1963; “The Chilean Nitrate
Railways Controversy,” HAHR, No. 38, 1958; Ronald Crozier, “El salitre hasta la Guerra del
Pacífico. Una revisión,” Historia (Santiago) 30, 1997: 53–126; M. B. Donald, “History of the
Chile Nitrate Industry,” Annals of Science 1, Jan. 1936; and 2, April 1936; Manuel A. Fernán-
dez, Technology and British Nitrate Enterprises in Chile 1810–1945, 1981; Roberto Hernández
C., El salitre: Resumen histórico desde su descubrimiento y explotación, 1930; Historia del salitre,
desde la guerra del Pacífico hasta la Revolución de 1891, 1981; Thomas F. O’Brien, The Nitrate In-
dustry and Chile’s Crucial Transition: 1870–1891, 1982; Michael Monteón, Chile in the Nitrate
Era, The Evolution of Economic Dependence, 1880–1930, 1982; Charles Bergquist, Labor in Latin
America, Comparative Essays on Chile, Argentina, Venezuela and Colombia, 1986; Enrique Reyes
Navarro, Salitre de Chile: Apertura, inversión y mercado mundial, 1880–1925, 1994; Alejandro
Soto Cardenas, Influencia británica en el salitre, Origen, naturaleza y decadencia, 1998 (an im-
pressive study of the nitrate industry from the mid-nineteenth century until 1930, based on
extensive review of British public and private archives); J. F. Rippy, British Investments in
Latin America: 1822–1949, 1966. A doctoral dissertation at Indiana University (1978) by Lau-
rence Stickell, Migration and Mining: Labor in Northern Chile in the Nitrate Era, 1880–1930, is a
most important social and labor history of the nitrate industry.
Each of the “major” events and international conflicts of Chile’s 19th-century history has
occasioned its own historical literature. This includes, of course, the war against the Peru-
Bolivia confederation early in the century, participation in the gold rushes of California and
Australia, the civil wars of 1851 and 1859, the War of the Pacific, the civil war of 1891, and
the effects of each economic boom or depression.
On the California gold rush’s impact on Chile see Jay Monaghan, Chile, Peru and the Cal-
ifornia Gold Rush of 1849, 1973. A Marxist treatment of the civil wars of 1851 and 1859 is Luis
Vitale’s, Las guerras civiles de 1851 y 1859 en Chile, 1971. Useful specialized studies on fiscal,
financial, and public-sector performance include: Roberto Espinoza, Cuestiones financieras de
Chile, 1909; La reforma bancaria y monetaria, 1913; Carlos T. Hamud, El sector público chileno
entre 1830–1930, 1969; and Agustín Ross, Chile: 1851–1910: sesenta años de cuestiones mone-
tarias y financieras y de problemas bancarios, 1911. Another ostensibly specialized study in
Claudio Véliz, Historia de la marina mercante de Chile, 1961, a work which goes well beyond
history of the merchant marine, representing a basic source for Chilean economic history in
the 19th century.
Immigration to Chile in the 19th century has also received limited, but careful attention
in Carl Solberg, Immigration and Nationalism: Argentina and Chile 1890–1914, 1970; Jean Pierre
Blancpain, Les Allemands au Chili: 1816–1945, 1974—a massive study of the German experi-
ence in Chile and the German contribution to Chilean society; Francia y los franceses en Chile,
1987; Carlos Díaz and Fredy Cancino, Italianos en Chile, 1988; Mark Jefferson, Recent Colo-
nization in Chile, 1921; N. Vega, Album de la Colonie Français au Chili, 1903; La immigración eu-
ropea en Chile, 1882–1895, 1896; George Young, The Germans in Chile: Immigration and Colo-
nization 1849–1914, 1974. A more comprehensive look at immigration, with brief summaries
of the immigration to Chile of most ethnic groups (Germans, British, French, Italians, Swiss,
Jews, Yugoslavs, Scandanavians, etc.) and relevant bibliography, is René A. Feri Fagerstrom,
Reseña de la colonización en Chile, 1989. On internal and cross-border migration, see Carmen
Norambuena Carrasco, ed., Faltan o sobran brazos? Migraciones internas y fronterizas (1850–
1930), 1997.
For the most systematic and detailed discussion of Chile in world affairs in the 19th cen-
tury, and the domestic impact of these events, see the award-winning volume by Robert N.
Burr, By Reason or Force: Chile and the Balancing Power in South America 1830–1905, 1965.
388 CHILE

Burr’s bibliography lists a wide range of official publications and other primary sources for
Chilean international relations in the 19th century as well as materials on domestic devel-
opment. An earlier but still useful look at Chilean diplomacy in the 19th century is Henry
Clay Evans, Chile and Its Relations with the United States, 1927. Evan’s book also surveys do-
mestic socio-economic development in the 19th century. Other diplomatic studies include
the classic by Mario Barros, Historia diplomática de Chile 1541–1938, 1970, which provides an
overview from the colonial period to the Popular Front; William R. Sherman, The Diplomatic
and Commercial Relations of the United States and Chile: 1820–1914, 1926. The war with Spain
in the 1860s is treated in William Columbus Davis, The Last Conquistadores, 1959. Of great
value for the War of the Pacific and late 19th-century Chile is William Sater’s careful study,
The Heroic Image in Chile: Arturo Prat,Secular Saint, 1973. Sater’s bibliography and notes con-
tain numerous references to primary sources and government documents related to the War
of the Pacific and Chilean economic and political development in the 19th century as well
as newspaper and journal sources. Sater’s article, “Chile during the First Months of the War
of the Pacific,” Journal of Latin American Studies 5, 1973, is helpful for background on the
Chilean situation as the country entered the War of the Pacific. Sater has also contributed
Chile and the War of the Pacific, 1986, which details conditions in Chile during the war and its
effect on domestic politics and economy and a lively, controversial new look at U.S.-Chilean
in Chile and the United States, Empires in Conflict, 1990. Joaquín Fermandois offers a particu-
lar Chilean view of domestic politics and U.S.-Chilean relations in the 1930s and the 1970s
in Abismo y cimiento: Gustavo Ross y las relaciones entre Chile y Estados Unidos, 1932–1938, 1997,
and Chile y el mundo, 1970–1973: la política exterior del gobierno de la Unidad Popular y el sistema
internacional, 1985. On the period since 1960 see Paul Sigmund, The United States and Democ-
racy in Chile, 1994.
The War of the Pacific and the subsequent diplomatic conflicts involving Chile, Peru, and
Bolivia are the subjects of a large number of patriotic diatribes and some scholarly study. For
varying interpretations of the war and polemical discussion of culpability the following list
of sources may be consulted: Pascual Ahumada Moreno, Guerra del Pacífico, 8 vols.,
1884–1891; Jorge Basadre, Historia de la República del Perú, 6th ed., 1968 (Basadre is Peru’s most
eminent historian); Gonzalo Bulnes, Guerra del Pacífico, 3 vols., 1911; Andrés A. Cáceres, La
Guerra del 79: sus compañas. Redacción y notas por Julio C. Guerrero, 1973 (the memoirs of Peru’s
leading general and hero of the War of the Pacific); and La guerra entre el Perú y Chile:
1879–1883, 1924; Edmundo H. Civati Bernasconi, Guerra del Pacífico: 1879–1883, 2 vols., 1946;
W. J. Dennis,Tacna and Arica: An Account of the Chile-Peru Boundary Dispute and the Arbitration
of the United States, 1931; Francisco García Calderón, Memorias del cautiverio: prólogo y notas de
Ventura García Calderón, 1949 (account of this Peruvian expresident’s capture and imprison-
ment by the Chileans after the occupation of Lima); V. G. Kiernan, “Foreign Interest in the
War of the Pacific,” HAHR 35, 1955; Sir Clements R. Markham, The War between Peru and Chile:
1879–1882, 1882; Herbert Millington, American Diplomacy and the War of the Pacific, 1948; Mar-
iano Felipe Paz-Soldán, Narración histórica de la guerra de Chile contra el Perú y Bolivia, 1884.

labor and the social question

The last decades of the 19th century brought the social question to Chile. In addition to the
numerous contemporary accounts, political proclamations, and other writing, the following
works are useful to the understanding of the social question and the labor movement in
Chile. Robert Alexander, Communism in Latin America, 1957; and Labor Relations in Argentina,
Brazil and Chile, 1962; Alan Angell, Politics and the Labour Movement in Chile, 1972; Jorge Bar-
ría Serín, Breve historia del sindicalismo chileno, 1967; Trayectoria y estructura del movimiento
SELECTIVE GUIDE TO THE LITERATURE ON CHILE 389

sindical chileno, 1963; and El movimiento obrero en Chile, 1972; Peter DeShazo, Urban Workers
and Labor Unions in Chile, 1902–1927, 1983; Julio César Jobet Recabarren, los orígenes del
movimiento obrero y del socialismo chileno, 1956; Eduardo Devés, Los que van a morir te saludan:
Historia de una masacre. Escuela Santa María de Iquique, 1907, 1998; Mario Garcés, Crisis social
y motines populares en el 1900, 1991; Sergio González Miranda, Hombres y mujeres de la pampa,
1991; Sergio Grez Toso, De la ‘Regeneración del Pueblo’ a la huelga general. Génesis y evolución
histórica del movimiento popular en Chile (1810–1890), 1997 (an 800-page tome on popular or-
ganizations such as mutual aid societies, artisan groups, and proto-labor unions since inde-
pendence); Guillermo Kaempffer Villagrán, Asi sucedió, Sangrientos episodios de la lucha obrera
en Chile, 1962; Patricio Manns, Breve síntesis del movimiento obrero, 1972; James Oliver Morris,
Elites, Intellectuals, and Consensus: A Study of the Social Question and the Industrial Relations Sys-
tem in Chile, 1966—this book provides the most complete list of references to newspaper, pe-
riodical and contemporary literature on the social question as well as secondary sources—;
Fernando Ortiz Letelier, El movimiento obrero en Chile 1891–1919, 1985; Crisóstomo Pizarro,
La huelga obrera en Chile, 1986; Julio Pinto Vallejos, Trabajos y rebeldías en la pampa salitrera,
1998 (perhaps the most carefully researched history of the nitrate labor force, the emergence
of the labor movement, and social change in northern Chile); Hernán Ramírez Necochea,
Historia del movimiento obrero en Chile: siglo XIX, 1956; Luis Emilio Recabarren, Los albores de
la revolución social en Chile, 1921—the author is the most well-known early leader of the
Chilean labor movement—; and Ricos y pobres a través de un siglo de vida republicana, 1910;
Jorge Rojas Flores, Los niños cristaleros: Trabajo infantil de la industria. Chile, 1880–1950, 1996
(an important study of child labor in Chilean industry); Gabriel Salazar, Labradores, peones y
proletarios, 1985; Carlos Vega Delgado, La masacre en la Federación Obrera de Magallanes, El
movimiento obrero patagónico-fueguino hasta 1920, 1996. Alberto Varona, Francisco Bilbao: re-
volucionario de América, 1973. For debates and other materials on the social question, see Ser-
gio Grez Toso, La ‘cuestión social’ en Chile, Ideas y debates precursores, 1995.
A useful sample of contemporary sources on the social question and early labor histories
includes: Juan Enrique Concha, Cuestiones obreras, 1899; Luis Malaquías Concha S., Sobre la
dictación de un código del trabajo y de la previsión social, 1907; Javier Díaz Lira, Observaciones
sobre la cuestión social en Chile, 1904; Marcos Gutiérrez Martínez, La cuestión obrera i el derecho
de propiedad, 1904; “Informes de los Señores Concha y Quezada,” Boletín de la sociedad de fo-
mento fabril 20, 1903; Tulio Lagos V., Bosquejo histórico del movimiento obrero en Chile, 1947;
J. Lawrence Laughlin, “The Strike at Iquique,” The Journal of Political Economy 17, 1909; Au-
gusto Orrego Luco, “La cuestión social en Chile,” Anales de la Universidad de Chile 119.
Primero y segundo trimestre, 1961, No. 121 y 122; Moisés Poblete Troncoso, El derecho del tra-
bajo y la seguridad social en Chile, 1949; J. Valdés Cange (pseudonym used by Alejandro Vene-
gas), Cartas al Excelentísmo Señor Don Pedro Montt, 1909; Benjamín Vicuña Subercaseaux, So-
cialismo revolucionario y la cuestión social en Europa y Chile, 1908.
Political histories of Chile of the 19th century are numerous. Available to a lesser extent
are summaries of the terms of individual presidents. Simon Collier’s earlier cited article on
the historiography of the Portalian period, HAHR, Nov. 1977, reviews the major work on this
period while Harold Blakemore’s “The Chilean Revolution of 1891 and Its Historiography,”
HAHR 45, Aug. 1965, is the single most important review of sources on the civil war of 1891,
Balmaceda, and Chilean society at the turn of the century. Among the most important
Chilean treatments of the period 1831–71, along with specialized work on reform movements
and organizations are: Diego Barros Arana, Un decenio de la historia de Chile 1841–1851, 2 vols.,
1905–06 (perhaps the best historical treatment of any period in Chilean history); Agustín Ed-
wards, Cuatro presidentes de Chile, 1841–1876, 2 vols., 1932; José Victorino Lastarria, Diario
Político 1849–1852, 1968; Benjamín Oviedo, La masonería en Chile, bosquejo histórico, 1929; Fer-
nando Pinto, La masonería y su influencia en Chile, 1966; Daniel Riquelme, La revolución del 20
390 CHILE

de abril de 1851, 1966; Luis A. Romero, La Sociedad de Igualdad, Los artesanos de Santiago de Chile
y sus primeras experiencias políticas, 1820–1851, 1978; Gabriel Sanhueza, Santiago Arcos, 1956;
Ismael Valdés, El Cuerpo de Bomberos, 1863–1900, 1980; Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, Los
Girondinos chilenos, 1902; Historia de los 10 años de la administración de don Manuel Montt, 5 vols.,
1862–63; Historia de la jornada del 20 de abril de 1851, 1878; Historia jeneral de la República de Chile
desde su independencia hasta nuestros, 5 vols., 1866–82; Luis Vitale, Las guerras civiles de 1851 y
1859, 1971. Carlos Foresti, Eva Löfquist, and Alvar Foresti, La narrativa chilena, Desde la Inde-
pendencia hasta la Guerra del Pacífico, I 1810–1859, 1999, offer analysis of the political press and
literature in the pre-1879 period with extensive bibliography.
Many of the Chilean histories of the 19th century represent Liberal attacks on Conserva-
tive or Portalian administrations or vice versa.
On individual presidential administrations see: Juan Bautista Alberdi, Biografía del gene-
ral Don Manuel Bulnes: presidente de la República de Chile, 1846; José A. Alfonso, Los partidos
políticos en Chile, 1902; Agustín Edwards, Cuatro presedentes de Chile, 1841–1876, 2 vols., 1933;
Alberto Edwards Vives, El gobierno de don Manuel Montt: 1851–1861, 1932; Isidoro Errázuriz,
Historia de la administración Errázuriz, 1935; Jaime Eyzaguirre, Chile durante el gobierno de Er-
rázuriz Echaurren: 1896–1901, 1957; Germán Riesco, Presidencia de Riesco, 1950; Ricardo Salas
Edwards, Balmaceda y el parlamentarismo en Chile, 1914; Ramón Sotomayor Valdés, Historia de
Chile durante los cuarenta años transcurridos desde 1831 hasta 1871, 2 vols., 1875–76; Benjamín
Vicuña Mackenna, Introducción a los diez años de la administración Montt, Don Diego Portales. 2
vols., Valparaíso, 1863; Cristián A. Zegers, Aníbal Pinto: Historia política de su gobierno, 1969.
The evolution of 19th-century political thought, parliamentary institutions, electoral re-
form, the crisis of the Balmaceda presidency, and the character of the Chilean oligarchy are
treated in: José A. Alfonso, El parlamentarismo i la reforma política en Chile, 1909; Justo and
Domingo Arteaga, Los constituyentes de 1870, 1910; Abdón Cifuentes, Memorias, 2 vols., 1936;
Malaquías Concha, El programa de la democracia, 1908; Ricardo Donoso, Alessandri, agitador y
demoledor: cincuenta años de historia política de Chile, 2 vols., 1952, 1954; and Historia de las ideas
políticas en Chile, 1946; Alberto Edwards Vives, La fronda aristocrática, 1936; Rafael Egaña, His-
toria de la dictadura y la revolución de 1891, 1891; Pedro Pablo Figueroa, Historia de la revolución
constituyente: 1858–1859, 1889; Maximiliano Ibáñez, El régimen parlamentario en Chile, 1908;
Abraham König, La constitución de 1833 en 1913, 1913; José J. Larraín, El derecho parlamentario
chileno, 2 vols., 1896–97; José Victorino Lastarria, La constitución política de la República de Chile
comentada, 1856; José Maza, Sistemas de sufragio i cuestión electoral, 1913; Hermógenes Pérez
de Arce, El parlamentarismo, 1901; Paul Reinsch, “Parliamentary Government in Chile,”
APSR, June 1909; Manuel Rivas Vicuña, Historia política y parlamentaria de Chile, 3 vols.,
1964—a key figure in Chilean parliamentary politics provides valuable insight into the par-
liamentary era—; Ramón V. Subercaseaux, Memorias de ochenta años, 1936.

the civil war of 1891

The civil war of 1891, with its relationship to the nitrate economy, and also the symbol of
President Balmaceda, has generated considerable historical literature. Harold Blakemore’s
“The Chilean Revolution of 1891 and Its Historiography,” HAHR 14, 1965, reviews this lit-
erature and offers the reader the benefit of Professor Blakemore’s astute interpretation of the
Balmaceda years. Blakemore’s book British Nitrates and Chilean Politics: 1886–1896, 1974, is
by far the most important work on the Balmaceda period. Among the most important treat-
ments of the Balmaceda period and the civil war of 1891 are: J. Bañados Espinosa, Balmaceda:
su gobierno y la revolución de 1891, 2 vols., Paris, 1894; Aníbal Bravo Kendrick, La revolución de
1891, 1946; J. Díaz Valderrama, La guerra civil de 1891, 2 vols., 1942; Maurice Kervey, Dark
Days in Chile, London, 1891–92; Luis Ortega, ed., La guerra civil de 1891, 100 años hoy, 1993;
SELECTIVE GUIDE TO THE LITERATURE ON CHILE 391

Fernando Pinto Lagarrigue, Balmaceda y los gobiernos seudo-parlamentarios, 1991; Crisóstomo

Pizarro, La revolución de 1891, 1971; Hernán Ramírez Necochea, Balmaceda y la contrarrevolu-
ción de 1891, 2nd ed., 1969 (a Marxist interpretation of the Civil War of 1891); J. Rodríguez
Bravo, Balmaceda y el conflicto entre el congreso y el ejecutivo, 2 vols., 1921, 1926; Edwards R.
Salas, Balmaceda y el parlamentarismo en Chile, 2 vols., 1914, 1925; J. Sears and B. W. Wells, The
Chilean Revolution of 1891, 1893; Bernardo Subercaseaux S., Fin de siglo, La época de Balmaceda,
1988; Ximena Vergara and Luis L. Barros, “La guerra civil del 91 y la instauración del parla-
mentarismo” Revista Latinoamericana de Ciencias Sociales 3, June 1972; J. M. Yrarrázaval, El
presidente Balmaceda, 2 vols., 1940.

economy and society in the twentieth century

It is very difficult to find a discussion of the Chilean economy that fails to include discus-
sion of Chilean politics. In an effort to provide a bibliographical overview of Chilean polit-
ical economy in the 20th century, I have compiled a list of works covering the economy to
approximately 1970. The works on this list include both general treatments and studies with
a more specialized focus. In addition, separate lists of references follow for the agricultural
sector, copper, and mining, due to the special importance of these sectors of the Chilean
economy both in strictly economic terms and in regard to Chilean politics.
In addition to the recent work of Mamalakis (The Growth and Structure of the Chilean Econ-
omy: From Independence to Allende, 1976) mentioned earlier, the best synthesis of Chilean po-
litical economy and economic issues for the period 1952 to 1970 is Ricardo Ffrench Davis,
Políticas económicas en Chile: 1952–1970, 1973, which examines stabilization programs and
economic policy from the time of the Klein-Saks missions to 1970. It also includes extremely
useful data series and an excellent bibliography of technical literature on the Chilean econ-
omy. For general treatments of Chilean economic development and economic issues see:
Jere R. Behrman, Macroeconomic Policy in a Developing Country: The Chilean Experience, 1977;
José Cademártori, La economía chilena: un enfoque marxista, 1968; Alvin Cohen, Economic
Change in Chile: 1929–1959, 1960; ECLA (CEPAL), Antecedentes sobre el desarrollo de la economía
chilena: 1925–1952, 1954; Enrique Figueroa Ortiz, Carbón: cien años de historia (1848–1960),
1987; Instituto de Economía de la Universidad de Chile, Desarrollo económico de Chile: 1940–
1956, 1956; and La economía de Chile: 1950–1963, 2 vols., 1963; Julio César Jobet, Ensayo crítico
del desarrollo económico social de Chile, 1955; Santiago Machiavello Varas, Política económica na-
cional: antecedentes y directiva, 2 vols., 1931; Markos Mamalakis and Clark Reynolds, Essays
on the Chilean Economy, 1965; Daniel Martner, Estudio de política comercial chilena e historia
económica nacional, 2 vols., 1923; Aníbal Pinto et al., Chile hoy, 1970; Chile: una economía difícil,
1964; Tres ensayos sobre Chile y América Latina, Buenos Aires, 1971; and Hacia nuestra indepen-
dencia económica, 1963; Universidad de Chile, Desarrollo de Chile en la primera mitad del siglo
XX, I. 1953; Stefan de Vylder, From Colonialism to Dependence: An Introduction to Chile’s Eco-
nomic History, Stockholm, 1977; Roberto Zahler et al., Chile 1940/1975 Treinta y cinco años de
discontinuidad económica, 2nd ed., 1978; Mario Zañartu and John Kennedy (eds.), The Overall
Development of Chile, Notre Dame, 1969. A fascinating study of the image of Balmaceda as
portrayed in popular poetry is Micaela Navarrete Araya, Balmaceda en la poesia popular 1886–
1896, 1993.
Public finance, monetary issues, and the continuing debate over inflation and stabiliza-
tion policy are discussed in: César Araneda Encina, Veinte años de la historia monetaria de
Chile: 1925–1945, 1945; Banco Central de Chile, Evolución de las finanzas públicas de Chile:
1950–1960, 1963; Jorge Cauas, “Políticas de estabilización: el caso chileno,” Estudios mone-
tarios 2, 1970; Tom E. Davis, “Eight Decades of Inflation in Chile: 1879–1959: A Political In-
terpretation,” Journal of Political Economy 81, No. 4, 1963; David Felix, “An Alternative View
392 CHILE

of the ‘Monetarist-Structuralist’ Controversy,” Latin American Issues: Essays and Comments.

A. Hirschman (ed.), 1961; Frank Fetter, Monetary Inflation in Chile, 1931; Herman Finer, The
Chilean Development Corporation, 1947; Joseph Grunwald, “The ‘Structuralist’ School in Price
Stabilization and Economic Development: The Chilean Case,” Latin American Issues: Essays
and Comments, A. Hirschman (ed.), 1961; Albert O. Hirschman, “Inflation in Chile,” Journeys
Toward Progress, 1963; Rolf Lüders, A Monetary History of Chile 1925–1958, Ph.D. diss., Univ.
of Chicago, 1968; Misión Klein-Saks, El programa de estabilización de la economía chilena y el tra-
bajo de la Misión Klein-Saks, 1958; Ministerio de Hacienda, Cuentas fiscales de Chile: 1925–1957,
1959; Max Nolff and Felipe Herrera, La inflación: naturaleza y problems, 1954; ODEPLAN,
Cuentas nacionales: 1960–1970, 1971; Enrique Sierra, Tres ensayos de estabilización en Chile, 1970.
Sectoral development in industry, agriculture, mining, and banking tax or exchange rate
policy receive treatment in: Rafael Agacino, Cristián González, and Jorge Rojas, Capital
transnacional y trabajo. El desarrollo minero en Chile, 1998; Pedro Aguirre Cerda, El problema
agrario, 1929; and El problema industrial, 1933; Oscar Alvarez Andrews, Historia del desarrollo
industrial de Chile, 1936; Sergio Aranda and Alberto Martínez, Industria y agricultura en
el desarrollo económico, 1970; Solon Barraclough, “Reforma agraria: historia y perspec-
tive,” Cuadernos de la Realidad Nacional, No. 7, 1971; Marcello Carmagnani and C. M. Hernán-
dez, “Evolución de la industria en Chile: 1860–1940,” Boletín del Centro de Estudios Socio-
económicos 1, 1967; F. Durán Bernales, Población, alimentos y reforma agraria, 1966; Ricardo
Lagos, La industria en Chile: antecedentes estructurales, 1966; Daniel Martner, Estudio de política
comercial chilena e historia económica nacional, 2 vols., 1923; Oscar Muñoz G., Crecimiento in-
dustrial de Chile: 1940–1965, 1968; Chile y su industrialización, 1986; and et al., Proceso a la in-
dustrialización chilena, 1972 (collection of articles considering development under conditions
of dependence, and various aspects of industrial development in Chile); Los inesperados
caminos de la modernización económica, 1995; Aníbal Pinto, Chile: un caso de desarrollo frustrado,
2nd ed, 1973; Mariano Puga Vera, El petróleo chileno, 1964.
Concern with foreign investment and concentration of wealth and power in Chile are
found in: Jorge Ahumada, En vez de la miseria, 1958; Genaro Arriagada, La oligarquía patronal
chilena, 1970; Sergio Bitar, “La inversión extranjera en la industria chilena,” Trimestre
Económico 13, No. 4, Oct.–Dec. 1971; CORFO, Análisis de las inversiones extranjeras en Chile:
1954–1969, 1972; and La inversión extranjera en la industria chilena, 1970; F. Dahse, El mapa de
la extrema riqueza, 1979; Hugo Fazio, Mapa actual de la extrema riqueza en Chile, 1997; Fernando
Galofré, Entrepreneurial and Governmental Elites in Chilean Development, Ph.D. diss., Tulane
Univ., 1970; Ricardo Lagos, La concentración del poder económico, su teoría, realidad chilena,
1961; and “La nueva burguesía chilena,” Revista APSI, June 1981; Patricio Rozas and Gus-
tavo Marín, El mapa de ‘extrema riqueza’ 10 años después, 1989; Maurice Zeitlin et al., “New
Princes for Old? The Large Corporation and the Capitalist Class in Chile,” American Journal
of Sociology 80, July 1974.

chilean agriculture, rural life, and agrarian reform

Many writers have analyzed Chilean politics and society against the backdrop of the land
tenure system, inquilinaje, deficient agricultural production, and the relationship between
rural life and urban power. CIDA, Chile: Tenencia de la tierra y desarrollo socio-económico del sec-
tor agrícola, 1966, and the annotated bibliography published by the Land Tenure Center at the
University of Wisconsin at Madison—Agrarian Reform in Latin America: An Annotated Bibli-
ography, 1974—are excellent sources of bibliographical references on agriculture, rural life,
and agrarian reform in Chile. Key studies on rural Chile and the formation of the hacienda
system include: Rafael Baraona et al., Valle de Putaendo, 1960; Luis Correa Vergara, Agricul-
tura Chilena, 2 vols., 1939; Ramón Domínguez, Nuestro sistema de inquilinaje, 1867; M. Drouilly
SELECTIVE GUIDE TO THE LITERATURE ON CHILE 393

and Pedro Lucio Cuadra, “Ensayo sobre el estado económico de la agricultura en Chile,” Bo-
letín de la Sociedad Nacional de Agricultura 10, 1878; Mario Góngora, Encomenderos y estancieros,
1970; Origen de los “inquilinos” de Chile central, 1960, with Jean Border, Evolución de la propiedad
en el valle del Puange, 2 vols., 1956; Silvia Hernández, “Transformaciones tecnológicas en la
agricultura de Chile central: siglo XIX,” Cuadernos del Centro de Estudios Socio-económicos, No.
3, 1966; Gonzalo Izquierdo, Un estudio de las ideologías chilenas: la sociedad de agricultura en el
siglo XIX, 1968; Carlos Keller, Una revolución en la agricultura, 1956; George McBride, Chile:
Land and Society, 1936, Tancredo Pinochet Le-Brun, “Inquilinos en la hacienda de su excelen-
cia,” Antología chilena de la tierra, Antonio Corvalán, ed., 1970; Moisés Poblete Troncoso, El
problema de la producción agrícola y la polítíca agraria nacional, 1919; Teodoro Schneider, La agri-
cultura chilena durante los últimos cincuenta años (1904). Jaime Valenzuela Márquez, Bandidaje
rural en Chile central, 1850–1900, 1991, is a revealing study of rural social conditions and ban-
ditry. Alberto Cardemil offers a historico-cultural interpretation of the Chilean “cowboy” in
El huaso chileno, 1999.
Significant contributions include the long list of works published at ICIRA in Santiago
under the direction of Solon Barraclough prior to the military coup of 1973. Perhaps fore-
most on the list is Almino Affonso et al., Movimiento campesino chileno, 2 vols. (1970). Among
others are: Andrés Pascal, Relaciones de poder en una localidad rural; Solon Barraclough, Notas
sobre tenencia de la tierra en América Latina; Pablo Ramírez, Cambios en las formas de pago a la
mano de obra agrícola; A. Corvalán et al., Reforma agraria chilena: seis ensayos de interpretación;
Antonio Corvalán (ed.), Antología chilena de la tierra; Alejandro Saavedra, La cuestión ma-
puche; Hugo Zemelman, El migrante rural; Brian Loveman, El campesino chileno le escribe a su
excelencia.
Other important studies include: José Bengoa, El Campesinado Chileno después de la reforma
agraria, 1983; El poder y la subordinación, 1988; José Del Pozo, Historia del vino chileno, 1998;
Lovell S. Jarvis, Chilean Agriculture under Military Rule, From Reform to Reaction, 1973–1980,
1985; Cristóbal Kay, Comparative Development of the European Manorial System and the Latin
American Hacienda System: An Approach to a Theory of Agrarian Change for Chile, Ph.D. diss.,
Univ. of Sussex, Eng., 1971; Cristóbal Kay and Patricio Silva, ed. Development and Social
Change in the Chilean Countryside: from the pre-land reform period to the democratic transition,
1992; Robert R. Kaufman, The Politics of Land Reform in Chile, 1972; Brian Loveman, Struggle
in the Countryside: Politics and Rural Labor in Chile 1919–1973, 1976; William Thiesenhusen,
Chile’s Experiments in Agrarian Reform, 1966; Thomas C. Wright, Landowners and Reform in
Chile: The Sociedad Nacional de Agricultura 1919–40, 1982.

copper
Since 1930 copper has dominated Chile’s economy. At the mercy of international eco-
nomic forces and controlled until 1971 by foreign firms, the copper industry was the source
of perpetual political conflict. No other study has done so much to put the Chilean copper
industry into an international perspective as Theodore Moran, Multinational Corporations
and the Politics of Dependence, 1974. Another study, less sympathetic to Chile and more sen-
sitive to the interests of the American firms is Eric Baklanoff, Expropriation of United States
Investments in Cuba, Mexico, and Chile, 1975. By far the most detailed work relating the
Chilean copper industry to American investment is George Mason Ingram IV, Nationaliza-
tion of American Companies in South America: Peru, Bolivia, Chile, 2 vols., Ph.D. diss., Univ. of
Michigan, 1973. Ingram’s massive study includes an extensive bibliography on foreign in-
vestment in Chile, as well as Peru and Bolivia, along with sources on the Chilean copper in-
dustry. Both the public sector (CODELCO) and the many private firms in the copper econ-
omy maintain elaborate Internet Web sites with relatively up-to-date information, along
394 CHILE

with news releases on new mining ventures and concessions. Other valuable works on cop-
per in the Chilean economy include: Jorge Alvear Urrutia, Chile, nuestro cobre: Chuquicamata,
El Salvador, Potrerillos, El Teniente, Enami, Mantos Blancos . . . , 1975; Gregorio Amunátegui,
“The Role of Copper in the Chilean Economy,” Latin America and the Caribbean: A Handbook,
Claudio Véliz (ed.) 1968; Jorge Bande and Ricardo Ffrench-Davis, Copper Policies and the
Chilean Economy, 1973–1988, 1989; “Contribution of Copper to Chilean Economic Develop-
ment: 1920–1967,” Foreign Investment in the Petroleum and Mineral Industries: Case Studies of
Investor-Host Country Relations, Raymond F. Mikesell et al., 1971; William Culver and Cornel
Reinhart, “Capitalist Dreams: Chile’s Response to Nineteenth-Century World Copper
Competition,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 31: 722–44; Ricardo Ffrench-Davis
and Ernesto Tironi, ed., El cobre en el desarrollo nacional, 1974; Janet Finn, Tracing the Veins, Of
Copper and Community from Butte to Chuquicamata, 1998 (a fascinating comparative study of
two communities influenced by Anaconda Copper Company); Joanne Fox Przeworski, The
Decline of the Copper Industry in Chile and Entrance of North American Capital, Ph.D. diss.,
Washington University, 1978; A. Fuenzalida, El trabajo y la vida en el mineral El Teniente, 1918;
Norman Girvan, Copper in Chile, 1972; L. Hiriat, Braden, Historia de una mina, 1964; Oscar
Mac-Clure Hortal and Iván Valenzuela R., Conflictos en la gran minería del cobre, 1973–1983,
1985; Markos Mamalakis, “The American Copper Companies and the Chilean Government,
1920–1967: Profile of a Foreign-owned Export Sector,” Foreign Investment in the Petroleum and
Mineral Industries: Case Studies of Investor-Host Country Relations, Raymond Mikesell et al.,
1971; Santiago Marín Vicuña, La industria del cobre en Chile, 1920; Ricardo Nazer Ahumada,
José Tomás Urmeneta: Un empresario del siglo XIX, 1994; Eduardo Novoa Monreal, La naciona-
lización del cobre: comentarios y documentos, 1972 (important source for copper policy under
the Allende government); C. W. Reynolds, “Chile and Copper,” Essays on the Chilean Econ-
omy, M. Mamalakis and C. W. Reynolds (eds.), 1966; María Rosaria Stabili, “Relaciones de
producción capitalista; los empresarios norteamericanos en la minería del cobre de Chile,
1905–1918,” Revista Latinoamericana de Historia Económica y Social, VI (1985); Paul Sigmund,
Multinationals in Latin America: The Politics of Nationalization, 1980; Iván Valenzuela,
Panorama de la industria elaboradora del cobre en Chile, 1989; Mario Vera Valenzuela, El cobre en
el centro de la política, 1996. P. Vayassière, “La division internationale du travail et la desna-
tionalisation du cuivre Chilien (1880–1920),” Cahiers du Monde Hispanique et Luso-Brésilien,
No. 20 (1973); Mario Vera Valenzuela, La política económica de cobre en Chile, 1961. Two im-
portant studies with extensive bibliographies are: Juan Agustín Allende, State Enterprises
and Political Environments: Chile’s National Copper Corporation, 1985; Thomas Miller Klubock,
Contested Communities, Class, Gender, and Politics in Chile’s El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904–1951,
1998. Luis Valenzuela, Tres estudios sobre el comercio y la fundición de cobre en Chile y en el mer-
cado mundial 1830–1880, 1995, synthesizes work on the copper industry in the nineteenth
century.

regional and local histories, urbanization

Any study of urbanization in Chile must start with Gabriel Guarda’s Historia urbana del reino
de Chile, 1978. The list of sources, archives, and bibliographical references in this book is
monumental. From colonial times the formation and growth of urban centers has inspired
local and regional histories. In recent times rapid urbanization has become a most salient
feature of Chilean life. Studies that focus on regional development or on Chilean urbaniza-
tion more generally include: DESAL, Poblaciones marginales y desarrollo urbano: el caso chileno,
1965; John Friedman and Thomas Lackington, “La hiperurbanización y el desarrollo na-
cional en Chile,” Estructura social de Chile, H. Godoy, ed., 1971; Guillermo Geisse G., Proble-
mas del desarrollo urbano regional en Chile, 1968; Gabriel Guarda, “Influencia militar en las ciu-
SELECTIVE GUIDE TO THE LITERATURE ON CHILE 395

dades del reino de Chile,” Boletín de la Academia Chilena de la Historia 33, No. 75, 1966; and
“El urbanismo imperial y las primitivas ciudades de Chile,” Finis Terrae No. 51, 1957 (these
two articles describe the early urbanization in colonial Chile); Carlos Hurtado Ruiz-Tagle,
Concentración de población y desarrollo económico, 1966; Bruce Herrick, Urban Migration and
Economic Development in Chile, 1965; Eduardo Secchi, La casa chilena hasta el siglo XIX, 1952;
Astolfo Tapia Moore, Legislación urbanística de Chile: 1818–1959, 1961; Tomás Thayer Ojeda,
Las antiguas ciudades chilenas . . . , 1911; Frederick S. Weaver, Jr., Regional Patterns of Eco-
nomic Change in Chile: 1950–1964, 1968.
Numerous historical descriptions of the evolution of individual cities or towns also exist.
For Santiago see: Guillermo Feliú Cruz, Santiago a comienzos del siglo XIX: crónica de los via-
jeros, 1970 (excerpts from numerous travel accounts referring to physical environment,
economy, and social life of Santiago in the early 19th century); Joseph Fichandler and
Thomas O’Brien, “Santiago, Chile 1541–1581: A Case Study of Urban Stagnation,” The Amer-
icas, 1976; Vicente Grez, La vida santiaguina, 1879. On the province of Valparaíso see: Roberto
Hernández D., Valparaíso en 1827, 1927; Carlos J. Larraín, Viña del Mar, 1946; René M. Salinas,
“Caracteres generales de la evolución demográfica de un centro urbano chileno: Valparaíso,
1685–1830,” Historia, No. 10, 1971; Población de Valparaíso en la segunda mitad del siglo XVIII,
1970; Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, Historia de Valparaíso, 2 vols., 1936; and Quintero: su estado
actual y su provenir, 1874.
La Serena, Copiapó, Antofagasta, and other northern urban places are treated in:
Domingo Amunátegui Solar, El cabildo de La Serena: 1678–1800, 1928; Oscar Bermúdez, Orí-
genes históricos de Antofagasta, 1966; and “Pica en el siglo XVIII; estructura económica y so-
cial,” RCGH 3, 1973; Manuel Concha, Crónica de la Serena desde su fundación hasta nuestros días:
1549–1870, 1971; Domingo Contreras Gómez, La ciudad de Santa María de Los Angeles, 2 vols.,
1972–44; Bernardo Cruz, San Felipe de Aconcagua, 2 vols., 1949–50; Eugenio Chouteau, In-
forme sobre la provincia de Coquimbo presentado al supremo gobierno, 1887; Julio Figueroa G., His-
toria de San Felipe, 1902; Martin I. Glassner, “Feeding a Desert City: Antofagasta, Chile,” Eco-
nomic Geography, No. 45, 1969; Carlos Keller, “Los orígenes de Quillota,” BACH, No. 61, 1959;
J. Larraín de Castro, “Los orígenes de Zapallar, contribución a la historia de la propiedad
territorial,” BACH, No. 12, 1940; Joaquín L. Morales O., Historia del Huasco, 1896; Andrés
Sabella, Semblanza del norte chileno, 1955; C. M. Sayago, Historia de Copiapó, 1854.
Leonardo Mazzei, “Ensayo de un recuento bibliográfico relativo a la zona sur de Chile:
Talca-Magallanes: 1812–1912,” HGFC, provides a comprehensive bibliography of regional
studies for the territory from Talca south. Illustrative studies for urban centers and their hin-
terlands from the Central Valley south include: Armando Braun Menéndez, Pequeña historia
Magallánica, 2nd ed., 1954; Fernando Campos H., “Concepción y su historia,” BACH, 1970;
Guillermo Cox y Méndez, Historia de Concepción, 1822; Pedro Cunill, “Castro: centro urbano
de Chiloé insular,” Antropología 2, Primer semestre, 1964; Gabriel Guarda, La economía de
Chile austral antes de la colonización alemana, 1973; René León Echaíz, Historia de Curicó, 2 vols.,
1975; S. Manuel Mesa, Proyección histórica de la provincia de Linares, 1965; Isabel P. Montt,
Breve historia de Valdivia, 1971; Reinaldo Muñoz Olave, Chillán: sus fundaciones y destrucciones:
1580–1835, 1921; Carlos Olguín B., Instituciones políticas y administrativas de Chiloé en el siglo
XVIII, 1971; S. Carlos Oliver, El libro de oro de Concepción, 1950; Eduardo Pino Zapata, Histo-
ria de Temuco, 1969; N. Alberto Recart, El Laja un río creador, 1971; John H. Whaley, Trans-
portation in Chile’s Bío Bío Region: 1850–1915, Ph.D. diss., Indiana Univ., 1974.

education
The organization and role of education in Chilean society has received insufficient attention
by historical researchers. Regarding the teaching of history and the country’s official school
texts, an important recent contribution by Rafael Sagredo and Sol Serrano has entered this
396 CHILE

unexplored terrain: “Un espejo cambiante: La visión de la historia de Chile en los textos es-
colares,” Boletín de Historia y Geografía 12, 1996: 217–44. Among the few significant contribu-
tions in this area, the following sources are foundations for future research: Oscar Alvarez,
“Aspectos sociológicos del problema educacional en Chile,” Revista Mexicana de Sociología
20, No. 3, 1958; Domingo Amunátegui Solar, Los primeros años del instituto nacional, 1813–
1835, 1889; Recuerdos del instituto nacional, 1941; Miguel Luis Amunátegui, Estudios sobre in-
strucción pública, 3 vols., 1897–98; Manuel J. Barrera, “Trayectoria del movimiento de re-
forma universitaria en Chile,” Journal of Latin American Studies, No. 10, 1968; José Joaquín
Brunner, Informe sobre la educación superior en Chile, 1986; Margaret Campbell, “Education in
Chile: 1810–1842,” Journal of Inter-American Studies 1, July 1959; Fernando Campos Harriet,
Desarrollo educacional: 1810–1960, 1960; Raúl Cortés Pinto, Bibliografía anotada de educación su-
perior, 1967; Ricardo Donoso, Recopilación de leyes, reglamentos, y decretos relativos a los servi-
cios de enseñanza pública, 1937; “El Instituto Pedagógico: tres generaciones de maestros,”
Journal of Inter-American Studies 6, Jan. 1964; Kathleen Fischer, Political Ideology and Educa-
tional Reform in Chile, 1964–1976, 1979; Manuel A. Garretón, “Universidad y política en los
procesos de transformación y reversión en Chile, 1967–1977, Estudios Sociales 26, No. 4, 1980;
Clark C. Gill, Education and Social Change in Chile, 1966; Carlos Huneeus M. La reforma en la
Universidad de Chile, 1973; Iván Jaksić, Academic Rebels in Chile: The Role of Philosophy in Higher
Education and Politics, 1989; Enrique Kirberg, Los nuevos profesionales: educación universitaria
de trabajadores en Chile: UTE, 1968–1973, 1981; Amanda Labarca Hubertson, Historia de la en-
señanza en Chile, 1939; Daniel Levy, “Chilean Universities Under the Junta: Regime and Pol-
icy,” Latin American Research Review 21, 1986; Enrique Molina, El liceo y la formación de la élite,
1933; Juan G. Muñoz C. et al., La Universidad de Santiago de Chile: Sobre sus orígenes y su de-
sarrollo histórico, 1987; Roberto Munizaga Aguirre, El estado y la educación, 1953; Máximo
Pacheco Gómez, La Universidad de Chile, 1953; Tancredo Pinochet, Bases para una política edu-
cacional: al frente del libro de Amanda Labarca, 1944; Maximiliano Salas Marchant, Reflexiones
educacionales en torno a nuestra situación social, 1942; Danilo Salcedo, La Universidad de Chile y
su reforma inconclusa, 1975; Gabriel Sanhueza, “Panorama de la evolución de las ciencias
pedadógicas y la investigación educacional en Chile: 1900–1960,” Anales de la Universidad de
Chile 120, No. 125, 1962; Sol Serrano, Universidad y nación: Chile en el siglo XIX, 1994; Sol Ser-
rano and Iván Jaksic, “In the Service of the Nation: The Establishment and Consolidation of
the Universidad de Chile, 1842–1879,” HAHR 70:1, 1990: 139–71. José Toribio Medina, His-
toria de la Real Universidad de San Felipe de Chile, 2 vols., 1928; William Sywak, Values in Nine-
teenth Century Chilean Education: The Germanic Reform of Chilean Public Education 1885–1910,
Ph.D. diss., Univ. of California, Los Angeles, 1977; Luis Terán, Nuestra enseñanza secundaria:
los problemas y las soluciones, 1938; Patricia Weiss Fagen, Chilean Universities: Problems of Au-
tonomy and Dependence, 1973; Allen L. Woll, “For God and Country: Historical Textbooks and
the Secularization of Chilean Society: 1840–1890,” Journal of Latin American Studies, No. 7,
1975. Mario Monsalve Bórquez provides a documentary history on primary education in El
Silencio comenzó a reinar, Documento para la historia de la instrucción primaria, 1840–1920, 1998.

politics—political history, memoirs, and general interpretations

of chilean politics in the twentieth century
Chilean politics in the 20th century has attracted considerable attention from Chilean authors
and foreign observers alike. Before 1973, scholars routinely depicted Chile as a permanent
exception to the common pattern of caudillismo and military government in Latin America.
Not surprisingly, much of the literature on Chilean politics focuses upon constitutional his-
tory, elections, the party spectrum, and the various presidential administrations. For the
SELECTIVE GUIDE TO THE LITERATURE ON CHILE 397

English-language reader, the most important pre-1970 description and analysis of Chilean
politics remains Federico Gil, The Political System of Chile, 1966. For the period from the 1950s
to 1973, see Arturo Valenzuela, The Breakdown of Democratic Regimes. Chile, 1978, and Alan An-
gell, Chile de Alessandri a Pinochet: En busca de la utopía, 1993. An insightful interpretive work
on Chilean politics and society is Mario Góngora, Ensayo histórico sobre la noción de estado en
Chile en los siglos XIX y XX (1981). Tomás Moulián, Democracia y socialismo en Chile (1983), is
an important retrospective analysis and critique of the development of Chilean democracy
and the role of the leftist parties and movements through 1973. Moulián calls for a “secular-
ization” of Chilean Marxism. Other general works on Chilean politics, constitutional history,
policy dilemmas, and class conflict range from the memoirs of Chilean presidents to careful
studies of interest groups, the military or the Chilean legislature. Listed below are a number
of books and articles of general interest to students of Chilean politics followed, in turn, by a
list of works concerned particularly with elections, the political party system, and individ-
ual parties or movements: Weston Agor, The Chilean Senate: Internal Distribution of Influence,
1971; Jorge Ahumada, La crisis integral de Chile, 1966; Arturo Alessandri, Recuerdos de gobierno,
3 vols., 1967; Robert Alexander, Arturo Alessandri: A Political Biography, 2 vols., 1977; The
Tragedy of Chile, 1978; Carlos Andrade Geywitz, Elementos de derecho constitucional chileno,
1963; Mario Bernashcina, Los constituyentes de 1925, 1945; Derecho municipal chileno, 3 vols.,
1952; and Manual de derecho constitucional, 1955; H. E. Bicheno, “Antiparliamentary Themes
in Chilean History: 1920–1970,” Allende’s Chile, Kenneth Medhurst (ed.), 1972; Ricardo
Boizard, Cuatro retratos en profundidad: Ibáñez, Lafferte, Leighton, Walker, 1950 (brief biographies
of leading political figures); Frank Bonilla and Myron Glaser (eds.), Student Politics in Chile,
1970; Claude G. Bowers, Chile Through Embassy Windows: 1939–1953, 1958; Donald Bray,
Chilean Politics during the Second Ibáñez Government, 1952–1958, Ph.D. diss., Stanford Univ.
1961; Fernando Campos Harriet, Historia constitucional de Chile, 1956; César Caviedes, The Pol-
itics of Chile: A Sociogeographical Assessment, 1979; Peter Cleaves, Bureaucratic Politics and Ad-
ministration in Chile, 1975; Luis Correa, El presidente Ibáñez: la política y los políticos, 1962; Ri-
cardo Cruz-Coke, Geografía electoral de Chile, 1952; Francisco Cumplido C., “Constitución
política de 1925: hoy crisis de las instituciones políticas chilenas,” Cuadernos de la Realidad Na-
cional, No. 7, Sept. 1970; Ricardo Donoso, Alessandri, agitador y demoledor: cincuenta años de his-
toria política de Chile, 2 vols., Mexico, 1952–54; and Desarrollo político y social de Chile, 1943; Paul
Drake, “The Political Responses of the Chilean Upper Class to the Great Depression and the
Threat of Socialism: 1931–1933,” The Well Born and the Powerful, F. C. Jaher (ed.), 1973; and So-
cialism and Populism in Chile, 1932–1952, 1978; Guillermo Edwards Matte, El Club de la unión
en sus ochenta años, 1864–1944, 1944; Enzo Faletto et al. (eds.), Génesis histórico del proceso
político chileno, 1971; Herman Finer, The Chilean Development Corporation, 1947; Patricio F. Gar-
cía, Los gremios patronales, 1973; Jorge González von Marées, El mal de Chile: sus causas y sus
remedios, 1940 (analysis of Chile’s “problem” by Chilean Nazi leader); José G. Guerra, La con-
stitución de 1925, 1929; Ernst Halperin, Nationalism and Communism in Chile, 1965; Julio Heise
González, Historia constitucional de Chile, 1954; Eduardo Goddard Labarca, Chile invadido: re-
portaje a la intromisión extranjera, 1968; Elías Lafferte, Vida de un comunista, 1957; Norbert Lech-
ner, La democracia en Chile, 1970; Francisco José Moreno, Legitimacy and Stability in Latin Amer-
ica: A Study of Chilean Political Culture, 1969; Arturo Olavarría B., Chile entre dos Alessandri, 2
vols., 1962–65; James Petras, Politics and Social Forces in Chilean Development, 1969; Frederick
B. Pike, Chile and the United States: 1880–1962, 1963; Fernando Pinto, Crónica política del siglo
XX, 1970; Ernesto Wurth Rojas, Ibáñez, caudillo enigmático, 1958; Kalman Silvert, The Chilean
Development Corporation, Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1948; Chile: Yesterday and Today,
1965; The Conflict Society: Reaction and Revolution in Latin America, 1961; Barbara Stallings,
Class Conflict and Economic Development in Chile, 1958–1973, 1978; Osvaldo Sunkel, “Change
and Frustration in Chile,” Obstacles to Change in Latin America, Claudio Véliz (ed.), 1965; Ger-
398 CHILE

mán Urzúa Valenzuela, Diccionario político institucional de Chile, 1984; Arturo Valenzuela, Po-
litical Brokers in Chile: Local Government in a Centralized Polity, 1977; Jordan Marten Young,
Chilean Parliamentary Government: 1891–1924, Ph.D. diss., Princeton Univ., 1953; Maurice
Zeitlin, “The Social Determinants of Political Democracy in Chile,” Latin America, J. Petras
and M. Zeitlin (eds.), 1968.

politics—elections, political parties, and political movements

The evolution of Chilean political parties and the electoral system are treated in: Roger
Abbot, “The Role of Contemporary Political Parties in Chile,” APSR, 45, June 1951; Carlos
Bascuñán Edwards, La izquierda sin Allende, 1990; Atilio Borón, “La evolución del régimen
electoral en Chile,” Revista Latinoamericana de Ciencia Política, Dec. 1972; Bernardino Bravo
Lira, Régimen de gobierno y partidos políticos en Chile 1924–1973, 1978; Alberto Edwards,
Bosquejo histórico de los partidos políticos chilenos, 1936; and Eduardo Frei Montalva, Historia de
los partidos políticos chilenos, 1949; Reinhard Friedmann, 1964–1988, La política chilena de la A a
la Z, 1988; Federico Gil, Genesis and Modernization of Political Parties in Chile, 1962; Sergio Guil-
isasti Tagle, Partidos políticos chilenos, 2nd ed., 1964; René León Echaíz, Evolución histórica de
los partidos políticos chilenos, 2nd ed., 1971; Karen L. Remmer, Party Competition in Argentina
and Chile: Political Recruitment and Public Policy, 1890–1930, 1984; Timothy Scully, Rethinking
the Center, Party Politics in Nineteenth & Twentieth Century Chile, 1992; Fernando S. Silva, Los
partidos políticos chilenos, 1972; Germán Urzúa Valenzuela, Historia político electoral de Chile,
1986; Historia política de Chile y su evolución electoral (desde 1810 a 1992), 1992. Arturo Valen-
zuela, “The Scope of the Chilean Party System,” Comparative Politics 4, January 1972; J.
Samuel Valenzuela, Democratización vía reforma: la expansión del sufragio en Chile, 1985. A sym-
pathetic interpretation of Carlos Ibáñez role in Chile politics is Ernesto Würth Rojas, Ibáñez,
Caudillo enigmático, 1958. Brian Loveman and Elizabeth Lira, Las ardientes cenizas del olvido,
Vía chilena de reconciliación política, 1932–1994, 2000 offers an unconventional political history
of the 1932–1994 period, focused on the use of amnesties, pardons, and other modalities of
elite bargaining to hold together Chile’s vaunted “democracy.”
On the Radical party and the Popular Front period, in addition to the excellent study by
Drake mentioned above, see: Salvador Allende Gossens, “Pedro Aguirre Cerda,” Arauco,
Jan. 1964; Francisco Barría Soto, El partido radical: sus historia y sus obras, 1957; Florencio
Durán Bernales, El partido radical, 1958; Juan C. Fernández, Pedro Aguirre Cerda y el frente po-
pular chileno, 1938; Jaime García Covarrubias, El partido radical y la clase media, La relación de
intereses entre 1888 y 1938, 1990; Gabriel González Videla, El partido radical y la evolución so-
cial de Chile, 1962; Luis Palma Zúñiga, Historia del partido radical, 1967; and Pedro Aguirre
Cerda: maestro-estadista-gobernante, 1963; Darío Poblete and Alfredo Bravo, Historia del partido
radical y del frente popular, 1936; Eudocio Ravines, The Yenan Way, 1951 (ex-Comintern agent
in Latin America recounts his role in formation of Chilean Popular Front and activities of
Chilean Marxists); Peter Snow, El radicalismo chileno, 1972; John Reese Stevenson, The Chilean
Popular Front, 1942; Germán Urzúa V., La democracia práctica, Los gobiernos radicales, 1987.
Chilean socialism is discussed in: Agustín Alvarez Villablanca, Objetivos del socialismo en
Chile, 1946; Jorge Arrate, La fuerza democrática de la idea socialista, 3rd ed. 1986; and Paulo Hi-
dalgo, Pasión y razón del socialismo chileno, 1989; Fernando Casanueva and Manuel Fernán-
dez C., El partido socialista y la lucha de clases en Chile, 1973; Carlos Charlín, Del avión rojo a la
república socialista, 1972 (excellent source of material on late 1920s and early 1930s); Alejan-
dro Chelén Rojas, Trayectoria del socialismo, 1967; Salomón Corbalán, El partido socialista, 1957;
Eduardo Devés and Carlos Díaz, El pensamiento socialista en Chile, Antología 1893–1933, 1987;
Manuel Dinamarca, La República Socialista chilena, Orígenes legítimos del Partido socialista,
1987; Paul Drake, Socialism and Populism in Chile, 1978; Julio Faúndez, Marxism and Democ-
SELECTIVE GUIDE TO THE LITERATURE ON CHILE 399

racy in Chile, From 1932 to the Fall of Allende, 1988; Mirian Hochwald, Imagery in Politics: A
Study of the Ideology of the Chilean Socialist Party, Ph.D. diss., Univ. of California, Los Angeles,
1971; Julio César Jobet, El partido socialista de Chile, 2 vols., 1971; and Alejandro Chelén R.,
Pensamiento teórico y político del partido socialista, 1972; Socialismo y comunismo, 1952; and El so-
cialismo chileno a través de sus congresos, 1965; Ricardo Núñez, ed., Socialismo: 10 años de reno-
vación 2 vols., I, De la Convergencia a la unidad socialista; II, el adiós al marxismo-leninismo, 1991;
Benny Pollack and Herman Rosenkranz, Revolutionary Social Democracy, The Chilean Socialist
Party, 1986; Jack Ray Thomas, “The Evolution of a Chilean Socialist: Marmaduque Grove,”
HAHR 47, No. 1, 1967; Oscar Waiss, Presencia del socialismo en Chile, 1952; Ignacio Walker, So-
cialismo y democracia, Chile y Europa en perspectiva comparada, 1990;
Key works for understanding the origins and growth of the Chilean Communist party
and Soviet influence in Chile include: Andrew Barnard, The Chilean Communist Party,
1922–1947, Ph.D. diss., University of London, 1978; “Chilean Communists, Radical Presi-
dents and Chilean Relations with the United States, 1940–1947,” Journal of Latin American
Studies 13, November 1981; Carlos Contreras Labarca, La conspiración de los enemigos del
pueblo, 1940; and Por la paz, por nuevas victorias del frente popular, 1939; Carmelo Furci, The
Chilean Communist Party and the Road to Socialism, 1984; César Godoy Urrutia, Vida de un agi-
tador, 1982; Luis Guastavino, Caen las catedrales, 1990; Jorge Jiles Pizarro, Partido comunista de
Chile, 1957; Hernán Ramírez Necochea, Origen y formación del partido comunista en Chile, 1965;
Augusto Varas, ed., El Partido comunista en Chile, 1988; De la Komintern a la perestroika,
América Latina y la URSS, 1991.
The Conservative and Christian Democratic parties are studied by: Ignacio Arteaga Un-
durraga, Reseña histórica de las XVI convenciones del partido conservador, 1947; Renato Cristi
and Carlos Ruiz, El pensamiento conservador en Chile, 1992; Patricio Dooner, Cambios sociales y
conflicto político: el conflicto político nacional durante el gobierno de Eduardo Frei (1964–1970),
1984; Michael Fleet, The Rise and Fall of Chilean Christian Democracy, 1985; George Grayson,
El partido demócrata cristiano chileno, 1968; Bartolomé Palacios and Héctor Rodríguez de la
Sotta, El partido conservador y la democracia cristiana, 1933; Teresa Pereira, El Partido conser-
vador, 1930–1965, 1994; Marcial Sanfuentes C., El partido conservador, 1957. Michael Potash-
nik treats the Chilean Nazi movement in Nacismo: National Socialism in Chile: 1932–1938,
Ph.D. diss., Univ. of California, Los Angeles, 1974.
New work on women and gender includes Thomas Klubock, Contested Communities.
Class, Gender, and Politics in Chile’s El Teniente Copper Mine, 1904–1951, 1998; Elizabeth Hutchi-
son, Labors Appropriate to Their Sex: Gender, Labor and Politics in Urban Chile, 1900–1930; Karin
Rosemblatt, Gendered Compromises: Political Cultures and the State in Chile 1920–1950, 2000.

politics—catholic church
The Catholic Church has played a significant role in recent Chilean history. With leading
Church intellectuals and dignitaries associated with the Christian Democratic government
and a sweeping anti-Marxist campaign after 1962, Church activity took on an overtly polit-
ical character that contrasted markedly with its earlier linkage to the Conservative party. A
number of studies captured this reformist orientation of the Church; only David Mutchler,
The Church as a Political Factor in Latin America; with Particular Reference to Colombia and Chile,
1971, details the role of Church policy and programs in the Cold War, the Alliance for
Progress, and the domestic anti-Marxist movement in Chile. Brian H. Smith, The Church and
Politics in Chile, 1982, provides both a history of the Church and Church doctrine in Chile
and an analysis of the Church’s role in socio-economic and political change.
Other important works on the Catholic Church and reform in Chile include: Isidoro
Alonso, Renato Poblete, and Ginés Garrido, La iglesia en Chile: estructuras eclesiásticas, 1961;
400 CHILE

Fidel Araneda Bravo, El Arzobispo Errázuriz y la evolución política y social de Chile, 1956; Vir-
ginia Marie Bouvier, Alliance or Compliance: Implications of the Chilean Church Experience for the
Catholic Church in Latin America, 1983; Michael Dodson, “The Christian Left,” Journal of Inter-
American Studies and World Affairs 21, Feb. 1979; Oscar Domínguez, El campesinado chileno y la
acción católica rural, Fribourg, FERES, 1961; Patricio Dooner, Iglesia, reconciliación y democracia,
1989; Jaime Guzmán, “The Church in Chile and the Political Debate,” in Pablo Baraona
Urzúa, Chile, A Critical Debate, 1972; Jorge Iván Hubner Gallo, Los Católicos y la política, 1959;
María Antonieta Huerta and Luis Pacheco P., La iglesia chilena y los cambios sociopolíticos, 1988;
Ricardo Krebs (ed.), Catolicismo y laicismo: Las bases doctrinarias del conflicto entre la iglesia y el
estado en Chile, 1875–1885, 1981; Henry Landsberger and Fernando Canitrot, Iglesia, intelec-
tuales y campesinos, INSORA, 1967 (an excellent study of the role of progressive Catholics in
the Chilean rural labor movement); Henry Landsberger (ed.), The Church and Social Change in
Latin America, 1970; Kenneth Langton and Ronald Rapoport, “Religion and Leftist Mobiliza-
tion in Chile,” Comparative Political Studies 9, Oct. 1976; Alejandro Magnet, El padre Hurtado,
3rd ed., 1957; J. Lloyd Mecham, Church and State in Latin America, 1966; Luis Pacheco P., El
pensamiento sociopolítico de los obispos chilenos 1962–1973, perspectiva histórica, 1985; Renato
Poblete, La iglesia en Chile, Fribourg and Bogotá, FERES, 1962; Secretariado General del Epis-
copado de Chile, La iglesia y el problema del campesinado chileno, 1962; Eugenio Yáñez, La igle-
sia y el gobierno militar: Itinerario de una díficil relación, 1973–88, 1989.

the military
Many Chilean sources, including government publications, deal with the history of the
armed forces or particular military institutions such as the Escuela Militar. A doctoral dis-
sertation by Tommie Hillmon, Jr., A History of the Armed Forces of Chile from Independence to
1920, Syracuse Univ., 1963, provides seventy pages of annotated bibliographical references
to primary sources and secondary materials on the Chilean military and diplomatic rela-
tions with its neighbors as well as detailed studies of military campaigns in the indepen-
dence period, Chile’s 19th-century wars, and the civil wars of 1851, 1859, and 1891. Freder-
ick Nunn’s Chilean Politics: 1920–1931, cited earlier, is a key source on the important role of
the military in Chilean politics and society. Nunn’s selective bibliography is extremely help-
ful. The same author’s The Military in Chilean History, 1976, explores the role of the Chilean
military from 1810 to the military coup of 1973. On corruption in the armed forces in the
early twentieth century, see William Sater and Holger Herwig, The Grand Illusion: The Prus-
sianization of the Chilean Army, 1999. For the Army’s view, see Estado Mayor del Ejército, His-
toria del Ejército de Chile, multiple volumes, 1985. Other especially useful sources on the
Chilean military in politics in the 20th century include: Arturo Ahumada, El ejército y la re-
volución del 5 de septiembre 1924: reminiscencias, 1931; R. Aldunate Phillips, Ruido de sables,
1971?; Genaro Arriagada H., El pensamiento político de los militares (CISEC), 1981; Pablo
Baraona Urzúa et al., Fuerzas armadas y seguridad nacional, 1973; General Juan Bennett, La re-
volución de 5 septiembre, 1925; General Jorge Boonen Rivera, Participación del ejército en el de-
sarrollo y progreso del país, 1917; Gonzalo García Pino and Juan Esteban Montes Ibáñez, Su-
bordinación democrática de los militares. Exitos y fracasos en Chile, 1994; Roy Hansen, Military
Culture and Organizational Decline: A Study of the Chilean Army, Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Califor-
nia, Los Angeles, 1967; Alain Joxe, Las fuerzas armadas en el sistema político chileno, 1970; Al-
berto Lara, Los oficiales alemanes en Chile, 1969; Carlos López V., Historia de la marina de Chile,
1929; Carlos Maldonado, La milicia republicana, 1988; René Millar C., “Significado y an-
tecedentes del movimiento militar de 1924,” Historia 2, 1972–73; Carlos Molina Johnson,
Chile: Los militares y la política, 1989 (a revisionist history by an influential Chilean general);
SELECTIVE GUIDE TO THE LITERATURE ON CHILE 401

Lisa North, Civil-Military Relations in Argentina, Chile and Peru, 1966; Alberto Polloni Roldán,
Las fuerzas armadas de Chile en la vida nacional, 1972; Carlos Portales, “Militarization and Po-
litical Institutions in Chile,” in P. Wallensteen, J. Galtung, and C. Portales, Global Militariza-
tion, 1985; Dauno Tótoro Taulis, La cofradía blindada, Chile civil y Chile militar: Trauma y con-
flicto, 1998; Verónica Valdivia Ortiz de Zárate, La milicias republicanas, Los civiles en armas,
1932–1936, 1992; Augusto Varas (ed.), Transición a la democracia, 1984; Augusto Varas et al.,
Estado y fuerzas armadas en el proceso político chileno, 1982; Augusto Varas, Los militares en el
poder, 1987; Augusto Varas and Felipe Agüero, El proyecto político militar, 1984; General Car-
los Sáez Morales, Recuerdos de un soldado, 3 vols., 1933–34 (good source for Chile’s “Socialist
Republic”); George Strawbridge, Jr., Militarism and Nationalism in Chile: 1920–1932, Ph.D.
diss., Univ. of Pennsylvania, 1968; Terrence S. Tarr, Military Intervention and Civilian Reaction
in Chile: 1924–1936, Ph.D. diss., Univ. of Florida, 1960; Agustín Toro Dávila, Síntesis histórico-
militar de Chile, 2 vols., 1969.

christian democracy
From 1964 to 1970 Christian Democratic ideology and leadership dominated Chilean soci-
ety. For over three decades Christian Democratic intellectuals had proclaimed their doc-
trine, criticized Chilean society, and promised an alternative to capitalism and socialism.
Key works of the Christian Democratic leaders provide some insight into their goals, val-
ues, and hopes for a new “communitarian” society in Chile: Jaime Castillo Velasco, Los
caminos de la revolución, 1972; and Las fuentes de la democracia cristiana, 1963; Jacques Chon-
chol and Julio Silva Solar, Hacia un mundo comunitario: condiciones de una política social cris-
tiana, 1951; Patricio Dooner, Crónica de una democracia cansada, El partido demócrata cristiano
durante el gobierno de Allende, 1988; Eduardo Frei Montalva, Chile desconocido, 1937; La verdad
tiene su hora, 1955; El social cristianismo, 1951; Pensamiento y acción, 1958; La política y el espíritu,
1940; and Aún es tiempo, 1942; and El Mandato de la historia (1975); Cristián Gazmuri et al., Ed-
uardo Frei Montalva (1911–1982), 1996; Cristián Gazmuri, Patricia Arancibia, and Alvaro
Góngora, Eduardo Frei Montalva, Una biografía, 1999; Oscar Larson, La ANEC y la Democracia
Cristiana, 1967; Julio Silva and Bosco Parra, Nociones para una política demócrata cristiana, 1947;
William Thayer Arteaga, Trabajo, empresa, y revolución, 1968.

christian democracy and the revolution in liberty

Despite the idealism of some Christian Democrats, the hard realities of Chilean politics and
the historical legacy of the Chilean social question obstructed implementation of their re-
formist program. Supported heavily by United States policymakers with loans and “foreign
aid,” the Christian Democrats found themselves caught between the strong forces of the
past and the calls for revolution from the political left. The hard road of political reform—
the successes, failures, and the ultimate electoral defeat in 1970—are documented in a large
and still growing literature. Key sources include: Alan Angell, “Chile: The Difficulties of
Democratic Reform,” International Journal, No. 24, 1969; and “Christian Democracy in
Chile,” Current History, No. 58, 1970; Ricardo Boizard, La democracia cristiana en Chile, 1963;
Luis Corvalán L., Chile hoy: la lucha de los comunistas chilenos en las condiciones del gobierno de
Frei, 1965 (analysis by leader of Chilean Communist party); Thomas Edwards, Economic De-
velopment and Reform in Chile, 1972; Eduardo Frei M., with R. Tomic, J. Castillo, and G. Ar-
riagada, Democracia cristiana y Partido comunista, 1986; Eduardo Frei et al., Reforma constitu-
cional: 1970, 1970; Edward de Glab, Jr., Christian Democracy, Marxism and Revolution in Chile:
402 CHILE

The Election and Overthrow of Allende, Ph.D. diss., Northern Illinois Univ., 1975; Leonard
Gross, The Last Best Hope: Eduardo Frei and Chilean Democracy, 1967; Norbert Lechner, La
democracia en Chile, 1970; David Lehman, “Political Incorporation versus Political Stability:
The Case of the Chilean Agrarian Reform: 1965–1970,” Journal of Development Studies, No. 7,
July 1971; Sergio Molina, El proceso de cambio en Chile, 1972; Arturo Olavarría B., Chile bajo la
democracia cristiana, 6 vols., 1966–71; James Petras, Chilean Christian Democracy: Politics and
Social Forces, 1967; Osvaldo Sunkel, “Change and Frustration in Chile,” Obstacles to Change
in Latin America, Claudio Véliz (ed.), 1965; Edward J. Williams, Latin American Christian De-
mocratic Parties, 1967; Luis Vitale, Esencia y apariencia de la democracia cristiana, 1964; Sergio
Vusković, Problemática demócrata-cristiana, propiedad, revolución, estado, 1968; Ricardo A.
Yocelevzky R., “La Democracia Cristiana chilena, trayectoria de un proyecto,” Revista Mex-
icana de Sociología 47, April–June 1985 (offers a historical view of the party and describes the
role of the party under the military); and La democracia cristiana chilena y el gobierno de Ed-
uardo Frei (1964–1970), 1987.

unidad popular and after

Never has more been written about Chile than appeared after 1970 with regard to the Pop-
ular Unity coalition and the subsequent military coup. The published literature is truly mas-
sive. Moreover, the number of books on non-political topics also mushroomed, creating a
veritable wave of Chilean publications. Lee H. Williams, comp., The Allende Years, lists al-
most 3000 Chilean imprints held in selected North American libraries.
Existing materials on the Unidad Popular experience itself represent a mix of ideological
and descriptive summaries of the events of the Allende years. A preliminary review of more
than thirty of these analyses from differing ideological perspectives can be found in Arturo
and J. Samuel Valenzuela, “Visions of Chile,” in Latin American Research Review 10, Fall 1975.
A Marxist-oriented review of the early literature after the coup is found in Ron Chilcote
and Terry Dietz-Fee, “Assessing the Literature since the Coup,” Latin American Perspectives
1, Summer 1974; a special issue, Chile: Blood on the Peaceful Road. Federico Gil, Ricardo Lagos,
and Henry Landsberger, Chile at the Turning Point, Lessons of the Socialist Years, 1970–1973,
1979, an English translation of a book published in Spanish in 1977, offers a number of valu-
able assessments by actors in the Popular Unity government, other prominent Chileans, and
social scientists of the Allende administration’s efforts and dilemmas. Two important books
on the role of labor and working-class politics during the Unidad Popular administration
are Peter Winn, Weavers of Revolution, 1986 and Juan G. Espinosa and Andrew S. Zimbalist,
Economic Democracy, Worker Participation in Chilean Industry, 1970–1973, 1978.
Stefan de Vylder’s Allende’s Chile, The Political Economy of the Rise and Fall of the Unidad
Popular, 1974, is a careful and extremely well-developed analysis of the political, economic,
and social context of the Allende experience and the factors leading up to the military coup
of 1973. Sergio Bitar’s Chile, Experiment in Democracy, 1986, is the most balanced retrospec-
tive by a minister in the Unidad Popular government. The polemical volumes published by
the political party, MAPU, El primer año del Gobierno Popular and El segundo año del Gobierno
Popular, originally issued in March and November, 1972, and reprinted by ISHI in 1977, are
vivid reminders of the polarization and maximalist rhetoric that led to the coup in 1973. Ar-
turo Fontaine T. and Miguel González, eds., Los mil dias de Allende, 2 vols., 1997, is a very use-
ful retrospective with appended documents, chronology, testimonies from the era, photo-
graphs, and a look at the political humor that accompanied the three years that culminated
in the 1973 military coup. A highly polemical view of the role of right-wing paramilitary
groups during the Popular Unity government by an ex-activist is Manuel Fuentes W., Memo-
rias secretas de Patria y Libertad y algunas confesiones sobre la Guerra Fría en Chile, 1999.
SELECTIVE GUIDE TO THE LITERATURE ON CHILE 403

For the role of the United States in destabilizing the Allende government and subsequent
collaboration with the military government (1973–90) declassified documents from the Na-
tional Security Archives are invaluable. Key documents (many still heavily censored) are
available on-line via the Internet at http://www.seas.gwu.edu/nsarchive/.
An extremely useful edited collection on Chile in the 1960s and early 1970s is Arturo and
J. Samuel Valenzuela, Chile: Politics and Society, 1976. Walden F. Bello, The Roots and Dynamics
of Revolution and Counterrevolution in Chile, Ph.D. diss., Princeton Univ., 1975, provides a de-
tailed political-historical analysis in the context of theories on economic development and
class conflict. Bello’s bibliography includes hundreds of periodical and journal articles on the
Unidad Popular years. Paul Sigmund’s The Overthrow of Allende and the Politics of Chile,
1964–1976, Pittsburgh, 1977, offers an analysis of Chilean politics from the mid-1960s through
the Unidad Popular years, with brief treatment of the military regime.
Beyond these basic sources the following selection offers an ideologically diverse treat-
ments of the Unidad Popular years: Salvador Allende, La lucha por la democracia económica y
las libertades de difusión de la Presidencia de la República, 1972; and El mensaje del Presidente All-
ende ante el Congreso pleno, Messages delivered May 21, 1971, 1972, 1973; Genaro Arriagada
H., De la vía Chilena a la vía insurreccional, 1974; Pablo Baraona Urzúa, Chile: A Critical Survey,
1972; A. Bardón, et al., Itinerario de una crisis política económica y transición al socialismo, 1972;
Jacques Chonchol, “La reforma agraria en Chile: 1970–1973,” El Trimestre Económico, No. 53,
1976; Luis Corvalán, Camino de victoria, 1971; Régis Debray, Conversations with Allende, 1971;
Les Evans (ed.), Disaster in Chile, 1974 (Trotskyist view of 1970–73); Joan Garcés, 1970: La
pugna política por la presidencia de Chile, 1971; El estado y los problemas tácticos en el gobierno de
Allende, 1973 (analysis by Allende’s political adviser); and (ed.), Nuestro camino al socialismo—
la vía chilena, 1971 (excerpts from speeches and writings of Salvador Allende); Ricardo Israel,
Politics and Ideology in Allende’s Chile, 1989; Sergio Onofre Jarpa, Creo en Chile, 1973 (analysis
by right-wing político); Dale C. Johnson (ed.), The Chilean Road to Socialism, 1973; Edy Kauf-
man, Crisis in Allende’s Chile, 1987; Gonzalo Martner (ed.), El pensamiento económico del go-
bierno de Allende, 1971; Kenneth Medhurst (ed.), Allende’s Chile, 1972; Hernán Millas and
Emilio Filippi, Chile 1970–1973: crónica de una experiencia, 1974; Orlando Millas, Exposición
sobre la política económica del gobierno y del estado de la hacienda pública, Ministerio de Hacienda,
Folleto No. 122, 1972; Robert Moss, Chile’s Marxist Experiment, 1973; Claudio Orrego, El paro
nacional, 1972; José del Pozo, Rebeldes, reformistas y revolucionarios. Una historia oral de la
izquierda chilena en la época de la Unidad Popular, 1992; Ian Roxborough, Phillip O’Brien, and
Jackie Roddick, Chile: The State and Revolution (contains a very helpful “chronology of main
events” 1969-September 11, 1973, and Marxist-oriented analysis of the Unidad Popular ex-
perience), 1977; Unidad Popular, Programa básico del gobierno de la Unidad Popular, 1970; Flo-
rencia Varas, Conversaciones con Viaux, 1972.
A variety of explanations for the failure of the Unidad Popular administration appear in:
Solon Barraclough, “The State of Chilean Agriculture before the Coup,” Land Tenure Center
Newsletter, No. 43, Jan.–March 1974; Sergio Bitar, Transición, socialismo y democracia: la experi-
encia Chilena, 1979; François Borricaud, “Chile: Why Allende Fell,” Dissent, Summer 1974;
René Castillo, “Lessons and Prospects of the Revolution,” World Marxist Review, No. 17, June
1974; Nathaniel Davis (ex-U.S. Ambassador to Chile), The Last Two Years of Salvador Allende,
1985; Pío García (ed.), Las fuerzas armadas y el golpe de estado en Chile, 1974; Robert Kaufman,
Transition to Stable Authoritarian-Corporate Regimes: The Chilean Case. 1976; Brian Loveman,
“Allende’s Chile: Political Economy of the Peaceful Road to Disaster,” New Scholar, 1978;
Gary MacEoin, No Peaceful Road: The Chilean Struggle for Dignity, 1974; North American Con-
gress on Latin America, “Chile: The Story Behind the Coup,” Latin America and Empire Re-
port, Oct. 1973; Philip O’Brien (ed.), Allende’s Chile, 1976; Lois Oppenheim, Politics in Chile:
Authoritarianism and the Search for Development, 2nd ed., 1999; General Carlos Prats González,
(ex-Commander-in-Chief), Memorias, 1985 (offers special insight into the personalities, is-
404 CHILE

sues and daily confrontations that led up to the military coup of 1973); David Plotke, “Coup
in Chile,” Socialist Revolution, No. 3, 1973; Paul N. Rosenstein-Rodan, “Why Allende Failed,”
Challenge, May–June 1974; Guillermo Sunkel, El Mercurio: 10 años de educación político-
ideológica 1969–1979, 1983; Alan Touraine, Vida y muerte del Chile popular, 1974; Armando
Uribe, The Black Book of American Intervention in Chile, 1975; L. Whitehead, “Why Allende
Fell,” World Today, Nov. 1973.

the 1973 coup and early years of military rule

Official explanations by the Chilean military of the rationale for the golpe and information
on subsequent policies can be found in: Chile, 11 de septiembre de 1975; Chile, Junta de Go-
bierno, Declaración de principios del gobierno de Chile, 1974; Algunos fundamentos de la interven-
ción militar en Chile, 2nd ed., 1974; and Libro blanco del cambio de gobierno en Chile, 1974; Con-
stitutional Acts Proclaimed by the Government of Chile, Sept. 11, 1976; Gerardo Cortés Rencoret,
“Introducción a la seguridad nacional,” Cuadernos del instituto de ciencia política, Feb. 1976;
Enrique Ortúzar Escobar, “La nueva institucionalidad chilena,” Cuadernos del Instituto de
Ciencia Política, Jan. 1976; “Primero de Mayo 1976,” Speech by Minister Sergio Fernández on
Labor Day, 1976 (includes decrees related to labor).
In 1998 Patricia Verdugo published Interferencia secreta, 11 de Septiembre de 1973, a brief
journalistic account of September 1973 and a transcript of a “lost” recording of the commu-
nications among the military commanders during the coup of 1973. The book was accom-
panied by a CD disk that contained the recorded conversations among General Pinochet
and the other military officers who directed the coup. Verdugo’s book is a new starting point
for understanding September 1973 that brings back the ferocity and desperation of the
events of September 11, 1973. General Pinochet’s remarks leave no doubt as to both his feel-
ings and his vulgarity. “Todo este montón de jetones que hay ahí, el señor Tohá y el otro señor
Almeyda, todos estos mugrientos que estaban echando a perder el país, hay que pescarlos
presos . . . y el avión que tienes dispuesto tú, arriba y sin ropa, con lo que tienen p’a fuera,
viejo.” (“Grab that whole bunch of idiots over there, Mr Toha, Mr Almeyda that whole dirty
rotten bunch that was ruining the country, arrest them! . . . put’em on that plane you got
up there, with no luggage, no clothing, just what they’re wearing, nothing, just out, buddy.”)
At another moment, Pinochet instructed his colleagues: “la opinión mía es que esos ca-
balleros se toman y se man . . . se mandan a dejar a cualquier parte. Por último, en el
camino, los van tirando abajo.” (“My opinion is that we get these gentlemen and we take
them anywhere . . . If need be, we just throw them out, in route . . .”) So began the mili-
tary regime that governed Chile until 1990. Shortly after Vedugo’s book and CD appeared,
Manuel Antonio, Roberto, and Carmen Garretón published Por la fuerza sin razón, 1998, a
short political, legal, and communicational analysis of the bandos (military decrees) issued
by the military junta that emphasized the illegal nature of the coup and reprinted many of
the bandos of the junta and of some regional military commanders. To commemorate the
25th anniversary of the death of Salvador Allende and of the military coup, many new (and
not so new) looks at the Popular Unity years and the military regime appeared in late 1998.

chile under the military, 1973–90

The literature on Chile under the military government tends to be highly partisan—whether
the topic is human rights, economic performance, or social change. Two partly journalistic
and partly academic overviews of the military regime provide a good starting point: Pamela
Constable and Arturo Valenzuela, Chile under Pinochet, a Nation of Enemies, 1991; and Mary
SELECTIVE GUIDE TO THE LITERATURE ON CHILE 405

Helen Spooner, Soldiers in a Narrow Land, the Pinochet Regime in Chile, 1994. Ex-president
Patricio Aylwin Azócar’s personal account of Chilean politics from the ouster of Allende
until 1989 is an extremely valuable insight into the world of Christian Democracy and po-
litical opposition during the military dictatorship: El reencuentro de los demócratas, Del golpe
al triunfo del NO, 1998. On the topic of human rights abuses and resistance under the mili-
tary regime see José Aldunate, S.J. et al., Los derechos humanos y la iglesia chilena, n.d.; Rodrigo
Atria et al., Chile: La memoria prohibida, Las violaciones a los derechos humanos 1973–1983, 3
vols., 1989; Ascanio Cavallo et al., La historia oculta del régimen militar, Memoria de una época,
1973–1988, 2nd ed, 1997 (an impressively documented story of the abuses and human rights
violations of the military regime); Mark Ensalaco, Chile under Pinochet. Recovering the Truth,
1999; Mónica González and Héctor Contreras, Los secretos del comando conjunto, 1991; Pamela
Lowden, Moral Opposition to Authoritarian Rule in Chile 1973–1990, 1996; Patricio Orellana
and Elizabeth Hutchison, El movimiento de derechos humanos en Chile, 1973–1990, 1991; Eliza-
beth Lira and María Isabel Castillo, Psicología de la amenaza política y del miedo, 1991; Eliza-
beth Lira et al., Reparación, derechos humanos y salud mental, 1996; Patricia Politzer, Fear in
Chile: Lives under Pinochet, 1989; Raúl Rettig et al., Informe de la Comisión Nacional de la Verdad
y Reconciliacion, 1991 (Chilean “truth commission” on human rights violations); Patricia
Verdugo, Los zarpazos del puma, 1989 (account of the “helicopter of death” in 1973); Hernán
Vidal, Dar la vida por la vida, Agrupación Chilena de Familiares de Detenidos Desaparecidos, 2nd
ed., 1996. On the left and exile: Katherine Hite, When the Romance Ended: Leaders of the Chilean
Left, 2000; Thomas Wright and Rody Oñate, Flight from Chile: Voices of Exile, 1998.
A critical view of the first ten years of military rule is J. Samuel and Arturo Valenzuela
(eds.), Military Rule in Chile, Dictatorship and Oppositions, 1986. An ongoing assessment of
politics, economic policy, and social development in Chile since 1973 (along with other top-
ics) can be found in the articles in the periodical Colección Estudios CIEPLAN, 1979–. Alejan-
dro Foxley’s Latin American Experiments in Neo-conservative Economics, 1983, and Para una
democracia estable, economía y política, 1985, are important examples of the prolific work of the
CIEPLAN academics. Somewhat of a counterpoint is the periodical Estudios Públicos, which
publishes many articles by the “Chicago Boys” and other conservative economists. Articles
in Chile-America (Rome) also offer a running commentary from a number of ideological per-
spectives on Chile since 1973. In addition, a variety of Chilean news and opinion magazines
(when they aren’t censored or closed) provide analysis and updates. These include Análisis,
Apsi, Cauce, Cosas, Ercilla, Estrategia, Hoy, Panorama, Qué Pasa. Gary M. Walton (ed.), The Na-
tional Economic Policies of Chile, 1985, provides a synthesis in English of economic policy, pre-
dominantly from the viewpoint of conservative economists, but with a minority position on
distributive issues. Work on Chilean art and literature after the coup, as well as literature
published in exile and in Chile, reflects the tragedy of human suffering and the continuing
sharp divisions in Chilean society. Examples of these trends can be found in Fernando Ale-
gría, Chilean Writers in Exile, 1982; Poli Délano et al., Primer coloquio sobre literatura Chilena (de
la resistencia y el exilio), 1980; and Antonio Skármeta, Joven narrativa chilena después del golpe,
1976. From exile the reviews Literatura chilena en el exilio and Araucaria de Chile were the most
well-known forums for Chilean writers, while publications like La bicicleta struggled to sur-
vive within the country. Three of the most moving testimonial works concerning repression
by the junta and conditions in the prisons are Hernán Valdés, Tejas Verdes, 1974; Alejandro
Witker, Prisión en Chile, 1975; and Aníbal Quijada Cerda, Cerco de Púas, 1977. Grinor Rojo,
Muerte y resurrección del teatro chileno, 1973–1983, 1985, documents the evolution of the
Chilean theater under the Pinochet regime.
As in the case of the Unidad Popular years, the literature on the military regime is mas-
sive and growing. The list here is a selection of diverse views on the policies and conse-
quences of the military regime, ranging from investigations of human rights, labor, and role
406 CHILE

of the Catholic Church after 1973 (see also the earlier section on the Catholic Church) to the
environmental and social consequences of the neoliberal economic policies. A starting point
for the official military point of view is República de Chile, Presidencia, Memoria de Gobierno
1973–1990, 3 vols. (I. Político Institucional; II. Económico Productivo; III. Social), March
1990. A key civilian figure in the military regime provides a very personal account of the ef-
fort to design and institutionalize “authoritarian and protected democracy” from 1978 to
1990: Sergio Fernández, Mi lucha por la democracia, 2nd ed., 1997. For passionate defenses of
the military regime see Luis Heinecke Scott, Chile, Crónica de un asedio, Una larga amenza que
se cumple, 4 vols., 1992 (a retrospective history of the marxist threat to Chilean society since
the early 20th century); Rafael Valdivieso A., Crónica de un rescate, Chile 1973–1988, 1988. For
a scathing journalistic account of brutality, corruption, and avarice by Pinochet and his gov-
ernment see Hernán Millas, La familia militar, 1999. Años de viento sucio, 1999, Patricia Lutz’s
barely novelized denunciation of Pinochet and the dictatorship, is also revealing. (Lutz is
the daughter of general Augusto Lutz, who died in the hospital under unusual circum-
stances after opposing Pinochet’s policies.)
The following books, selected from hundreds, treat social, economic and political topics,
or offer specialized research on issues of interest since 1973: Americas Watch, Chile Since the
Coup: Ten Years of Repression, 1983; Alan Angell and Benny Pollack, The Legacy of Dictatorship:
Political, Economic and Social Change in Pinochet’s Chile, 1993; José P. Arellano et al., Modelo
económico chileno: trayectoria de una crítica, 1982; Genaro Arriagada, Por la razón o la Fuerza,
Chile bajo Pinochet, 1998 (assessment by an important figure in politics and government in
the 1990s); Xabier Arrizabalo M., Milagro o quimera: la economía chilena durante la dictadura,
1995; Jere Behrman, Macroeconomic Policy in a Developing Country: The Chilean Experience,
1977; Sergio Bitar (comp.), Chile: liberalismo económico y dictadura política, 1980; Guillermo
Campero, Los gremios empresariales en el período 1970–1983: Comportamiento sociopolítico y ori-
entaciones ideológicas, 1970–1983, 1984;——and José A. Valenzuela, El movimiento sindical en
el régimen militar chileno, 1973–1981, 1984;——and René Cortázar, “Lógicas de acción sindi-
cal en Chile,” Colección Estudios CIEPLAN 18 (Dec. 1985); Sergio de Castro, “El Ladrillo,”
Bases de la política económica del gobierno militar chileno, 1992 (history of the University of
Chicago-Universidad Católica de Chile connection, the development of neoliberal econom-
ics in Chile and the military junta’s economic reforms); Marcel Claude, Una vez más la mise-
ria: es Chile un país sustentable?, 1997 (an important survey of the environmental conse-
quences of the neoliberal model); Colección Mensaje, Chile visto por Mensaje. 1971–1981, 1981
(selection of editorials from influential Catholic review); Joseph Collins and John Lear,
Chile’s Free-Market Miracle: A Second Look, 1995; Raquel Correa, Malú Sierra, and E. Suber-
caseaux, Los generales del régimen, 1983; Paul Drake and Iván Jaksić, The Struggle for Democ-
racy in Chile, 1982–1994, 2nd ed., 1995; Manuel Delano and Hugo Traslaviña, La herencia de
los Chicago boys, 1989; ECLA, La transformación de la producción en Chile: Cuatro ensayos de in-
terpretación, 1993; Sebastián Edwards, “Stabilization with Liberalization: An Evaluation of
Ten Years of Chile’s Experiment with Free Market Policies,” Economic Development and Cul-
ture Change, Jan. 1985; and Alejandra Cox Edwards, Monetarism and Liberalization, the Chilean
Experiment, 1991; Ricardo Ffrench-Davis, “El experimento monetarista en Chile: una sinte-
sis crítica,” Colección Estudios CIEPLAN, 9, Dec. 1982; Arturo Fontaine, Los economistas y el
Presidente Pinochet, 2nd ed., 1988; Patricio Frias, El movimiento sindical chileno en la lucha por
la democracia 1973–1988, 1989; Manuel Antonio Garretón, El proceso político chileno, 1983; Dic-
taduras y democratización, 1984; The Chilean Political Process, 1989; Patrick Guillaudat and
Pierre Mouterde, Los movimientos sociales en Chile, 1973–1993; Arnold Harberger, “The
Chilean Economy in the 1970s: Crisis, Stabilization, Liberalization, Reform,” in K. Brunner
and A. Melzter (eds.), Economic Policy in a World of Change, Carnegie Rochester Conference
Series, 17, 1982; David E. Hojman (ed.), Chile After 1973: Elements for the Analysis of Military
SELECTIVE GUIDE TO THE LITERATURE ON CHILE 407

Rule, 1985; Lovell S. Jarvis, Chilean Agriculture under Military Rule, 1985; Joaquín Lavín, Chile,
a Quiet Revolution, 1987; Fred D. Levy et al., Chile: An Economy in Transition (World Bank
Country Study), 1979; Ricardo Lagos, Democracia para Chile, proposiciones de un socialista,
1985; Jonathan Marshall, “Did Milton Friedman Really Ruin Chile?,” Inquiry, Aug. 1983;
Javier Martínez and Alvaro Díaz, Chile, the Great Transformation, 1996 (a UNRISD and Brook-
ings Institution synthesis of economic policy and social change from 1970 until the early
1990s); Tomás Moulian, Democracia y socialismo en Chile, 1983; G. Munizaga, El discurso
público de Pinochet, 1973–1976, 1983; Oscar Muñoz (ed.), Después de las privatizaciones: hacia el
estado regulador, 1993; H. Muñoz and Carlos Portales, Una amistad esquiva. Las relaciones exte-
riores del gobierno militar chileno, 1987; Phil O’Brien and Jackie Roddick, Chile: The Pinochet
Decade, 1983; James Petras and Fernando Ignacio Leiva, Democracy and Poverty in Chile, the
Limits to Electoral Politics, 1994; Augusto Pinochet, Camino Recorrido, Memorias de un Soldado,
1991 (General Pinochet’s memoirs); Política, Special Issue, Chile, 1973–1983, Enfoques para un
decenio, 1983; Jeffrey Puryear, Thinking Politics: Intellectuals and Democracy in Chile,
1973–1988, 1994; Rayén Quiroga Martínez, Chile, globalización e insustentabilidad: una mirada
desde la economía ecológica, 1996; (ed.), El tigre sin selva: consecuencias ambientales de la transfor-
mación económica de Chile, 1974–1993, 1994; Joseph Ramos, NeoConservative Economics in the
Southern Cone of Latin America, 1973–1983, 1986; Gonzalo Rojas Sánchez, Chile escoge la liber-
tad, La presidencia de Augusto Pinochet Ugarte, 11.IX.1973–11.III.1990, I (1973–80), 1998 (a vir-
tual panegyric, useful for its documentation, official statements, and decrees of the military
regime); Antonio Schneider, “Supply-Side Economics in a Small Economy: The Chilean
Case,” in Edward Nell (ed.), Free Market Conservatism, A Critique of Theory and Practice, 1984;
Cathy Schneider, Shantytown Protest in Pinochet’s Chile, 1995; Eduardo Silva, The State and
Capital in Chile: Business Elites, Technocrats and Market Economies, 1996; Patricio Silva, Estado,
neoliberalismo y política agraria en Chile 1973–1981, 1987; Eugenio Tironi, Los silencios de la re-
volución, 1988; Juan Gabriel Valdés, La escuela de Chicago: Operación Chile, 1989; Teresa Valdés,
La mujeres y la dictadura militar en Chile, 1987; María Elena Valenzuela, La mujer en el Chile mi-
litar, 1987; Augusto Varas, F. Agüero, and F. Bustamante, Chile, democracia, fuerzas armadas,
1980; Sylvia Venegas, Una gota al día . . . un chorro al año: el impacto social de la expansión
frutícola, 1992; Pilar Vergara, Auge y caída del neoliberalismo en Chile, 1984 (an excellent analy-
sis of the ideological and policy evolution of the Pinochet government); Políticas hacia la ex-
trema pobreza en Chile, 1973–1988, 1990; Gonzalo Vial (ed.), Análisis crítico del régimen militar,
1998 (a useful collection of short essays on the 1973 military coup and policies of the mili-
tary government by prominent academics and politicians from left to right on the political
spectrum); J. R. Whelan, Out of the Ashes: Life, Death, and Transfiguration of Democracy in Chile,
1833–1988, 1989 (massive anti-Marxist history focusing on the last half of the 20th century);
Daniel Wisecarver (ed.), El modelo económico chileno, 1992. R. Zahler, “El neoliberalismo en
una versión autoritaria” in ILADES: Del liberalismo al capitalismo autoritario, 1983; “Recent
Southern Cone Liberalization Reforms and Stabilization Policies: The Chilean Case,
1974–1982,” Journal of InterAmerican Studies and World Affairs 25, Nov. 1983. Kenneth Aman
and Cristián Parker (eds.), present a collection of articles that consider “popular culture”
from a historical perspective, bringing the topic through resistance to the military govern-
ment, in Popular Culture in Chile, Resistance and Survival, 1991. For insight into General
Pinochet’s political ideology and motivations, see Pinochet: Patria y Democracia, 1983; The
Crucial Day (translation of El día decisivo), 1982.

chile after 1990

Research has only barely begun on the post-military regime era and prospects for the future.
Useful journalistic and academic first efforts to assess the transition, in addition to some col-
408 CHILE

lections of speeches and government documents, include Ascanio Cavallo, Los hombres de la
transición, 1992; Patricio Aylwin Azócar, La transición chilena, Discursos escogidos, marzo 1990–
1992; Eduardo Boeninger, Democracia en Chile. Lecciones para la gobernabilidad, 1997; Paul
Drake and Iván Jaksic, (eds.), The Struggle for Democracy in Chile, 2nd ed., 1995; Paul Drake-
Iván Jaksic (comp.), El modelo chileno. Democracia y desarrollo en los noventa, 1999; Camilo
Escalona, Una transición de dos caras, Crónica, crítica y autocrítica, 1999, (an angry retrospec-
tive on the 1990–99 period by a Socialist congressman); Hugo Fazio R., El progama abandon-
ado, Balance económico social del gobierno de Aylwin, 1996; Mapa actual de la extrema riqueza en
Chile, 1997 (a critical look at the internationalization of the Chilean society and the social, en-
vironmental, and political effects of the post-1990 economic policies), El ‘tigre’ chileno y la cri-
sis de los ‘dragones’ asiáticos, 1998; La crisis pone en jaque al neoliberalismo, 1999; Alejandro Fox-
ley, La economía política de la transición, 1994; Clarisa Hardy, La reforma social pendiente, 1997;
David Hojman, Chile: The Political Economy of Development and Democracy in the 1990s, 1993;
Felipe Larraín B., ed., Chile hacia el 2000, 1994; International Labor Organization (OIT), Chile,
Crecimiento, empleo y el desafio de la justicia social, 1998; Tomás Moulián, Chile actual, Anatomía
de un mito, 1997 (a best-selling dissection of neoliberalism and the credit card society in the
late 1990s); Rafael Otano, Crónica de la transición, 1995; Crisóstomo Pizarro et al., Social and
Economic Policies in Chile’s Transition to Democracy, 1996; Francisco Rojas (ed.), Chile 1998,
Entre la II Cumbre y la detención de Pinochet, 1999; Cristián Toloza and Eugenio Lahera (eds.),
Chile en los noventa, 1998 (over 700-page policy analysis published by the Research Office of
the Presidency); Augusto Varas and Claudio Fuentes, Defensa nacional, Chile 1990–1994, Mo-
dernización y desarrollo, 1994. An extremely useful collection of articles that surveys social
and economic policies and consequences from 1973 until 1996 is René Cortázar and Joaquín
Vial, Construyendo opciones, Propuestas económicas y sociales para el cambio de siglo, 1998.
Environmental politics have emerged as an important topic since the early 1990s; useful
summaries of the issues and perspectives are Pablo San Martín, Conflictos ambientales en
Chile: 1995–96, 1997; César Padilla Ormeño and Pablo San Martín, Conflictos ambientales, Una
oportunidad para la democracia (IEP), n.d.; Francisco Sabatini D. and Claudia Sepúlveda L.,
Conflictos ambientales, Entre la globalización y la sociedad civil, 1997; Roberto Morales (comp.),
Ralco: Modernidad o etnocidio en territorio pewenche, 1998. Changes in gender relations, family,
and “private life” are considered in María Elena Valenzuela, S. Venegas, and C. Andrade
(eds.), De mujer sola a jefa de hogar. Género, pobreza y políticas públicas, 1994, and Teresa Valdés,
“Entre la modernización y la equidad: mujeres, mundo privado y familias,” in Toloza and
Lahera (eds.), Chile en los noventa, 1998: 471–519. Pinochet’s detention in London in 1998 and
the request by a Spanish judge for his extradition to Spain have also generated an incipient
literature, both defending and attacking his role after 1973. Among the best-selling defenses
of Pinochet was Hermógenes Pérez de Arce, Europa vs Pinochet, Indebido Proceso, 1998.
In the late 1990s some Chileans returned to an old literary and political device to com-
ment on current developments—the open letter. Two particularly revealing examples of this
genre are Sergio Marras, Carta apócrifa de Pinochet a un siquiatra chileno, 1998 (an imaginary
letter in answer to Marco Antonio de la Parra’s Carta Abierta a Pinochet, 1998), and Armando
Uribe, Carta abierta a Patricio Aylwin, 1998, a bitter assessment of the 1990–94 administration.
Political, journalistic, and literary memoirs also add significantly to information on the tran-
sition: Andrés Allamand, La travesía del desierto, 1999; Edgardo Boeninger, Democracia en
Chile: lecciones para la gobernabilidad, 1997; Ascanio Cavallo, La historia oculta de la transición,
1998; Tomás Moulian, Conversación interrumpida con Allende, 1998; Marco Antonio de la
Parra, La mala memoria, Historia personal de Chile contemporáneo, 1997.
Index

Academia de Guerra, 151–152 return of Pinochet from Britain and,

Acción Católica Rural, 235 356–57
Acción Sindical Chilena (ASICH), 234–235, Aisén Province, 47, 352
242 Alcazaba, Simón de, 59
Aconcagua province, 9, 13, 32; agriculture Alegría, Fernando, 278
and industries, 79, 87, 114; population Alegría Mondaca, Juan, 358
and growth, 35, 83, 130; state of siege, Alessandri, Pedro, 116
140 Alessandri, Arturo, 171, 179–183, 189, 202–
Acusación Constitucional, 187–188; 208, 210–212, 220, 225, 228, 230, 232, 233
Pinochet and, 314, 325–326 Alessandri, Jorge, 236, 243, 244, 247, 249
Advisory Committee to the Commander in Alessandri Besa, Arturo, 319–320
Chief (CAS), 313–315, 326 Alianza Democrática (AD), 297–302
Agrarian Labor Party, 222, 233 Alianza por Chile, 355, 356
Agrarian Party, 188 Allanamientos, 256, 257
Agrarian reform, 4, 36, 45, 202, 231, 236, Allende, Salvador, 4, 24, 152, 203, 224, 225,
247, 248, 250, 251, 255, 259; Alliance for 228, 230, 243–244, 247–51, 253–255,
Progress and, 225, 228; Frei Administra- 257–259, 263, 303, 358
tion and, 236–238, 242–244; military gov- Alliance for Progress, 225, 228, 238
ernment and, 270–285 Almagro, Diego de, 58–59, 61, 100
Agrarian Reform Corporation (CORA) 36, Almeyda Arroyo, Elías, 10, 16
228, 242, 251 Almeyda, Manuel, 264
Agriculture, 9, 19, 23, 49, 81, 88, 93, 115, Almeyda, Clodomiro, 297
119, 120, 123, 126, 127, 129, 150, 160, 176, Altamirano, Eulogio, 134
186, 198, 204, 218, 222, 228, 238, 292; cen- Altamirano, Luis (General), 181
tral valley, 38–39, 40–41, 89, 92, 130, 150, Altamirano, Carlos, 255
160, 176; Chiloé, 47; frontier, 41–42, 114, Alvear, Soledad, 354
137; General Commissariat of Subsis- Amnesties, see Pardons and Amnesties
tance and Prices (Decree Law 520), 203; Amunátegui Solar, Domingo, 64, 70, 91
merchant lenders, 122; Norte Chico, 32, Anaconda Copper Company, 24, 220, 223
34, 81; southern Chile, 9, 137, 138, 175; Anarchists, 168–169, 171–173, 175, 185
policy under Pinochet, 36–38, 45; tech- Anarcho-Syndicalists, 171
nology/modernization, 36, 98, 131; see Ancud, 47
also Labor; Unions; Strikes Andacollo, 24, 70, 78, 83
Agrupación de Familiares de Detenidos- Andes, 5, 8–10, 13, 24, 26, 40, 59; principal
Desaparecidos, 316, 352 peaks and passes, 8–9
Aguirre, Francisco de, 61–62, 80 ANEC, see Catholic Students Federation
Aguirre Cerda, Pedro, 207–215, 218–219, ANEF, see National Association of Public
249 Employees
Aguirre Family, 80, 130 Anglo Lautaro Nitrate Company, 23
Air Force, 257, 275, 283, 301, 316, 326, 350; Angol, 63, 65, 68, 94, 135

409
410 CHILE

ANOC (Asociación Nacional de Organiza- Avilés y del Fierro, Gabriel de, 99

ciones Campesinos), see National Associ- Aylwin, Patricio, 5, 49, 305–308, 310–319,
ation of Campesino Organizations 323–326, 329, 351
Antofagasta, 13, 19, 23, 25–26, 35, 51, 123,
145–147, 150, 152–154, 158, 160, 169, 175, Baides, Marquis de, 58
178–179 Ballerino, Jorge (General) 313, 314, 351
Antuco, 9, 42 Balmaceda, José Manuel, 144, 152, 154–160,
AOAN, see Workers’ Assembly on National 162, 166, 178, 249, 254, 291
Nutrition Banco Central, 222, 306
APEC, see Asia-Pacific Economic Coopera- Banditry, 88, 108, 113, 129–130
tion Forum Bandos militares, 263
Aquaculture, 27, 47 Banks, 6, 121, 139, 142, 154, 158, 178–80,
Araucanian Indians, 8, 43, 48, 49, 68, 73, 81, 187, 201, 212, 215, 218–21, 246, 248, 259,
134–35, 138; area and territory, 43, 49, 270, 282, 291–93, 298, 299; see also World
151; colonial wars, 48–49, 57, 61–66, Bank, Export-Import Bank (EXIM), and
69–71, 73, 75, 79, 85; life and organiza- Inter-American Development Bank
tion, 43, 45 Baquedano González, Manuel, 150, 159
Arauco, 40, 42–43, 49, 63, 65, 69–71, 73, Barbier, Jacques, 92
94–95 Barros Ortiz, Tobías, 177
Argentina, 3, 8, 10, 47–48, 51, 91, 120–121, Barros Arana, Diego, 61, 99, 113
137, 145, 151–152, 159, 166–167, 169, 173, Barros Borgoño, Luis, 179, 183
185, 249, 271, 274, 277, 336, 358 Barros Luco, Ramón, 163
Arica, 8, 9, 13, 19, 26, 35, 147, 158 Basques, 92, 109
Army, 8, 58–59, 71–73, 85–86, 104–108; Battle of, Albarrada, 69; Boroa, 65, 70–71,
modernization, 146, 151–52, 159, 169, 94; Cacabuco, 105; Curalaba, 65, 68, 85;
177; officer corps, 178, 180–81, 275, 309; Las Salinas, 59, 61; Lircay, 108, 112, 113,
politics, 290, 300, 312–313, 350; see also 308; Maipo, 105; Marigüeñu, 62; Peteroa,
Military, Labor, Pinochet 62; Rancagua, 104–05, 108; Tucapel,
Arqueros, 123 61–62, 77, 93; Yungay, 113
Arrendatarios, 87–88 Bello, Andrés, 3, 121
Artisans, 3, 76, 78, 80, 82, 94, 111, 127, 133, Bennett, Juan Pablo, 181
135, 140, 155, 164, 168, 171, 278 Bethlehem Steel, 34, 178
Asia, 6, 16, 27, 32, 115, 119, 124, 319, 337 Bilbao, Francisco, 121, 122, 140, 143
Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation Forum, Biobío, 43, 45, 81, 135, 206, 207, 336
16 Blakemore, Harold, 157
ASICH, see Acción Sindical Chilena Blanche, Bartolomé (General), 189
Asientos de trabajo, 55, 76 Blanco Encalada, Manuel (Admiral), 113
Atacama desert, 9, 19, 61, 133, 144, 147, Boeninger, Edgardo, 311, 313
152 Bohón, Juan, 80
Atacama Minerals Company, 23 Boinazo, 313
Atacama Province, 126–27, 207 Bolivia, 3, 51, 88, 123, 151, 152, 169, 180,
Audiencia, 56, 62–65, 68, 70, 86, 88, 92–93, 249, 274, 358; see also War of Pacific and
95, 100 Peru-Bolivia Confederation
Augusto Pinochet Ugarte Foundation, 352 Bonaparte, Joseph, 100
Aurélie Antoine I, 135 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 100
Australia, 112, 119, 120, 122, 131, 133, 137, Boonen Rivera, Jorge, 177
176, 299 Bowers, Claude, 220
Australian ballot, 222 Brazil, 10, 51, 137, 139, 151, 185, 249
Autocratic republic, 3–5, Chapter 4 passim, Britain, 10, 89, 96, 105, 116–17, 131, 137–43,
122, 142, 308 152, 178, 182–83; economic interests, 109,
INDEX 411

114, 116–17, 120–21, 124, 126, 131, 145, Castro, Sergio de, 268
154–59, 165, 173, 178; early merchants, Catholic Church, 107, 142, 143, 173, 230,
10, 89, 90, 101, 103, 115; Pinochet, 6, 328– 232, 264, 266, 267, 276
330, 348–57 Catholic Students Federation, (ANEC), 232
Büchi, Hernán, 305 Catholic University, 232, 257, 266, 316
Buena Esperanza, 71, 94 Cauas, Jorge, 269
Buenos Aires, 1, 89–91, 98–100, 174, 271, Caupolicán, 45; see also Mapuche Indians
275, 312 Cautín, 40, 43, 47, 207, 209
Bulnes, Manuel (Pres. 1841–1851), 108, 110, Cautiverio Feliz, 69
112, 113, 121, 140, 142, 143 Cavieres, Eduardo, 120
Bulnes Pinto, Gonzalo, 177 CEMA, see Centros de Madres
Bureaucracy, 4, 91, 99, 196, 199, 201, 211, Census, of 1875, 132–133; of 1907, 160; of
213, 215, 222, 249, 309, 319, 336 1992, 49; of California 1852, 130
Central Bank, see Banco Central
Cabildo abierto, 100 Central Unica de Trabajadores, (CUT) 283
Cabildos, 56, 62–63, 69, 76, 78–81, 83, Central Valley, 8, 9, 24, 104, 105, 127, 129,
87–89, 91, 100, 105, 114 132–33, 139, 144, 234; population, 35, 130;
Cádiz, 89–90 climate, 36; land tenure, 38–39, 87, 151;
Caja de Colonización Agrícola, 184 industries, 40, 161; see also agriculture
Caja de Crédito Hipotecario, 121 Centro Bellarmino, 235, 236
Caldera, 13, 19, 34, 119, 124, 126, 127, 130 Centros de Madres, (CEMA) 239–40, 296
California, 3, 36, 77, 120, 122, 130, 133, 137; CEPCH, see Confederation of Private Sec-
gold, 3, 120, 130, 137 tor Employees
Callampas, 239, 246 Cerro, Imán, 34
Callao, 9, 71–72, 79–80, 84, 90, 95, 105, Chacarillas Plan, 265, 272, 275, 283
112–113, 147 Chañarcillo, 13, 115, 119, 123, 127, 168
Campo de Arenal Desert, 59 Charles I, see Charles V
Campusano, José, 234 Charles IV, 100
Cano y Aponte, Gabriel, 73 Charles V, 56
CAP, see Pacific Steel Corporation Chelén Rojas, Alejandro, 182
Carabineros, see Police Chicoana, 59
Caracoles Mine, 19, 119, 123, 124, 133, 145, Chilean Chemical and Mining Company
146 (SOQUIMICH) (SQM), 23
Carahue, 61, 78, 93, 151 Chilean Federation of Students (FECH),
Caravan of Death Case, 328, 329, 352 172
Carmagnani, Marcello, 96 Chilean Mining Association, 114
Carrera, José Miguel, 104–106, 108 Chilean National Airline (LAN), 199
Carretera Austral, 13, 352 Chilean National Copper Corporation
Carter, Jimmy, 272, 280, 284, 298 (CODELCO), 24, 26, 336
Carvallo y Goyeneche, Vicente, 71, 93, 94, Chilean National Development Corpora-
96 tion (CORFO), 23, 199, 211, 212, 214, 215,
CAS, see Advisory Committee to the Com- 217, 218, 221, 240, 250, 270, 299
mander in Chief Chilean Tobacco Company, 172
Casa Grande, 161 Chilean Workers Confederation (CTCH),
Castilla, Ramón, 113 207, 211–215, 219
Castillo, Jaime, 277 Chilean Workers’ Federation (FOCH),
Castillo, Pedro, 264 171–173, 176, 185
Castro, 47, 64–65, Chilenidad, 54
Castro, Fidel, 236 Chillán, 37, 63, 65, 71, 80, 85–86, 93–96, 104,
Castro, Juana, 236 114, 130, 137–38, 211, 309
412 CHILE

Chiloé Island, 19, 46–47, 51, 65, 104–105, Committee of Human Rights of the Amer-
112, 114 ican Anthropological Association, 43
China, 23, 26, 83 Communist party, 4, 171–72, 185, 188,
Choapa, 32, 77, 80 206, 212, 215, 217, 220, 230, 258, 261,
Chonchol, Jacques, 242 266, 297, 299, 302–03, 316, 319–321, 323,
Christian Democratic party, 222–23, 225, 324, 326, 352, 355; see also Political Par-
229–30, 233, 235–40, 242–44, 246–48, ties, Marxist; Popular Action Front;
250–51, 253, 255–56, 259, 263, 267, 271, Unidad Popular
277, 283–84, 297, 299–300, 305, 310–11, Compadrazgo, 139
316, 320, 323–24, 326, 335, 351, 354; see Compañía de Salitre de Chile (COSACH),
also “Revolution in Liberty”; Falange Na- 186
cional Compañía Refinería de Azúcar de Viña
Chuquicamata, 13, 19, 24, 26, 178, 220 del Mar (CRAV), 172, 292
Círculo de Oficiales en Retiro de las Comunidades, 34, 43; see also Reducciones
Fuerzas Armadas, 350 CONADI, see National Indigenous Devel-
Círculo Militar, 151 opment Commission
Civil Code, 3, 121, 184 Concepción, 19, 34–36, 40, 42, 47, 51,
Civil liberties, 5, 142–43, 163, 230, 247, 297; 61–66, 69, 71, 78–81, 85, 88, 89, 93–96,
suspension of, 101, 159, 185; under 104–107, 109, 114, 115, 119–121, 126,
Pinochet, 259, 261, 264, 275, 297 134, 135, 137, 138, 141, 143, 158, 160,
Civil Wars, 101, 105, 112, 122, 137, 142–43, 164, 172, 180, 201, 211, 246, 336, 352
179, 312, 328, 356; of 1829–30, 4, 108; of Concertación, 6, 7, 27, 303–307, 308–348
1851, 111, 127, 133, 141, 143; of 1859, 3, passim, 351, 352, 354–356
111, 135, 318; of 1891, 110, 139, 144, 152, Concha, Malaquías, 163
154, 159, 161, 169, 308 Concón, 47, 79
Claridad, 208 Condorito, 358
Climate, 9, 13, 19, 36, 40, 41, 57, 64; see also Confederación de Trabajadores de Chile
Geography; Rainfall (CTCH), see Chilean Workers Confeder-
Club Militar, 151, 177, 180, 214 ation
CNI, see National Information Center Confederation of Private Sector Employ-
CNT, see National Workers’ Central or Na- ees (CEPCH), 294–95
tional Workers’ Command Conference of Catholic Bishops, 354
Cochrane, Lord, 46, 105 Congress, 3–5, 7, 16, 104, 107, 109–112,
CODE, see Democratic Confederation, 117, 120, 130, 135, 139–142, 144, 152,
CODELCO, see Chilean National Copper 155–159, 162–63, 164, 166, 167, 169,
Corporation 172–174, 176, 179–88, 196, 206–215, 217,
CODEPU, see Corporación de Promoción y 225, 228, 230–233, 237, 242, 245,
Defensa de los Derechos del Pueblo 247–249, 255, 257, 259, 261, 263, 290,
Colcura, 71, 73, 94, 95 291, 304–306, 308, 309, 312, 313, 315,
Cold War, 2, 201, 217–18, 220–21 316, 318–320, 325, 326, 349, 356
College of San Ignacio, See Jesuits Congreso Sindical de los Obreros
Colombia, 121, 139 Campesinos de Molina 234
Colonia do Sacramento, 89 Conquest of Chile, 1, 5, 8, 19, 40, 43, 48,
Colonial society, 48, 92, Chapters 2–3, pas- 49, 51, 54, 55–74 passim
sim Consejo de Defensa Fiscal, 206
Colonization, 1, 47, 135, 151, 184–85, 206 Consejo de Guerra, see Military
Comando Conjunto, 264 Conservative party, 143, 180, 225, 231–233;
Combarbalá, 124, 141 see also Partido Nacional
Comité para la Paz, 264 Constitutions, 3–7, 98–144 passim, 158,
Committee of Cooperation for Peace (CO- 161, 182, 188, 196, 202, 210, 247, 258–59,
PACHI), 267 263, 265–66, 277, 288, 290, 291, 297–303,
INDEX 413

306, 308–349 passim, 354; Constitutional Currency, 155, 158, 250, 268
Acts, 159, 265, 270–72, 285, 290; Conven- CUT, see Central Unica de Trabajadores
tions, 106, 182, 323; Reforms, 4, 6, 7, 181, Cuyo, 8, 49, 80, 86, 90, 105
300, 305, 306, 308, 311, 315–16, 318, 356 Cuzco, 19, 59, 61
Contraband, 89, 96, 108–09, 115–17
Contreras, Manuel (General), 276, 329 Darwin, Charles, 19, 119
Conventillos, 174 Dávila, Carlos, 188
COPACHI, see Committee of Cooperation Day of National Unity, 326, 349, 352
for Peace de Castro, Sergio, 15, 268
Copiapó, 8, 13, 19, 35, 48–49, 59, 65, 75, de la Guarda, Florentino (General), 182
79–81, 83–84, 91, 105, 119, 123–24, Democratic Confederation (CODE) 255
126–27, 129, 143, 178 Declaration of Principles of the Govern-
Copper Department, 223 ment of Chile, 264, 267, 290
Copper Workers Confederation (CTC), 294 Délano, Poli, 278
Coquimbo, 34–35, 64, 68, 71, 77, 80, 88, 107, Democratic party, 236
114, 123, 126, 141, 151, 153, 175, 186, 207 Depósito (de indios), 72
CORA (Corporación de Reforma Agraria), Depressions, 24, 204, 294; mining, 81, 132,
see Agrarian Reform Corporation 159, 169–70, 178–79; world depressions,
Corbalán, Alvaro, 358 133, 137, 144, 165, 176, 186, 189, 197,
Cordones industriales, 256 202–03, 291
CORFO, see Chilean National Develop- Desafuero, 357–59
ment Corporation Detenidos-Desaparecidos, 264, 316, 329,
Coronel, 43, 120, 126, 138 352, 353
Corporación de Promoción y Defensa de Diaguita Indians, 49
los Derechos del Pueblo (CODEPU), 330 Díaz, Nicanor, 283
COSACH, see Compañía de Salitre de Diezmo, 95, 108
Chile DINA (Dirección Nacional de Inteligencia),
Council of the Indies, 1, 2, 56, 65, 66 263, 267, 272, 275–76, 316, 329, 330
Courts (Judiciary), 7, 113, 213, 264, 268, DINAC (Food Distribution Agency), 250
271, 288, 310–11, 317, 330, 348, 350, Dirección de Asuntos Indigenas, 43
353–55; Appeals Courts, 328, 353, 356; DIRINCO (Dirección de Industria y Com-
Colonial, 56, 67, 82, 92; Penal Code, 310, ercio), 250
314; Supreme Court, 4, 16, 206, 263–64, Disease, 1, 51, 65, 66, 73, 75, 77, 94, 180; nu-
275, 277, 301, 314, 321, 323, 328–29, 348, trition and infant diseases, 287–88; mines
350, 356–59 and lung disease, 134; venereal disease,
Cousiño Jorquera, Matías, 39, 120, 137, 138 134
CRAC, see Republican Confederation for Dorfman, Ariel, 278
Civic Action, 185 Drake, Sir Francis, 64, 84
CRAV, see Compañía Refinería de Azúcar Drought, 9, 34–35, 238
de Viña del Mar Durán, Julio, 228
Criollos (Creoles), 51, 56, 92, 98–111
Cruchaga, Miguel, 118 Earthquakes, 9, 51, 64, 72, 78, 87, 93, 95–96,
CTC, see Copper Workers Confederation 146, 177, 211, 219, 298
CTCH, see Chilean Workers Confederation Easter Island, 8
Cuba, 55, 236, 249, 300–01, 354; Cuban Rev- Economy, 1, 99, 109, 113–115, 117, 118,
olution, 225, 240 119–144 passim, 161, 164, 166, 169, 173,
Cuerpo de Trabajo Militar, 352 175, 176, 178, 183, 184, 186, 198–203, 206,
Cumplido, Francisco, 308 218–220, 222, 223, 225, 236, 238, 246,
Cunco, 49, 70 248–250, 252, 253, 255, 264, 266, 268–270,
Curanilahue, 71 278, 282, 284–287, 291–293, 298–300, 305,
Curicó, 8, 67, 91, 127, 130, 163, 228, 236–37 306, 318, 319, 324, 326, 336, 337, 349, 356;
414 CHILE

Economy (continued), Araucanian Wars, ef- Encomenderos, 2, 57, 61–70, 72, 77–81, 84–
fects on, 80–97 passim; colonial, 15–97 87, 93
passim; import-substitution, 40, 98, 198, Encomienda, 51, 57–58, 61, 63–67, 69,
200, 223; see also, Agriculture, Fishing, In- 71–72, 77–82, 84, 86–87, 91, 93
dustry, Labor; Livestock; Mining; Trade ENDESA, see National Electric Corporation
Ecuador, 19, 47, 59, 88, 137 England, see Britain
Education, 27, 106, 121–22, 134, 144, Ercilla y Zuñiga, Alonso de, 45, 62
154–55, 164, 184, 199, 221, 236, 243, Errázuriz, Crescente, 63, 231–232
246–47, 262, 272, 282, 285–87, 290, Errázuriz,Francisco Javier, 305
323–24, 354 Errázuriz, Francisco Javier (Archbishop),
Edwards, Alberto, 173 353
Edwards, Agustín, 9–10, 107 Errázuriz, Ladislao, 180, 182
Edwards Bello, Joaquín, 54, 126, 134, 150 Errázuriz, Maximiano, 126
Egaña, Mariano, 101, 110, 112 Errázuriz Echaurren, Federico (Pres.
Ejercicio de enlace, 313 1896–1901), 160
El Curicano, 122 Errázuriz Zañartu, Federico (Pres.
El Diario Ilustrado, 214 1871–75), 5, 308
El Mercurio, 316, 337, 347, 351, 352 Errázuriz (family influence in politics), 139
El Mercurio de Valparaíso, 351 Escondida Mine, 24, 26
El Metropolitano, 358 Espinoza, Pedro (Colonel), 276
El Romeral Mine, 34 Estanco, 106, 109, 116
El Roto Chileno, 54, 134 Europe and European Influences, 1, 48, 51,
El Salvador Mine, 13, 24, 26 78, 83, 90, 97, 99–100, 103, 105, 107, 120,
El Sur, 353 130–33, 138, 140, 142, 165, 174, 178, 199,
El Teniente Mine, 26, 178, 255, 294 201, 235, 249, 272, 284, 298, 319, 337
El Tofo, 34 European immigrants, 46, 51, 92, 103,
Elections, 4, 7,101, 110–12, 139, 155, 157, 130–131, 151, 167
179–83, 189, Chapters 8 and 9 passim, Exports, see Trade
275, 290, 303– 06, 309, 319–21, 349, 351, Export-Import Bank (EXIM Bank), 212, 215,
355; control of votes, 141, 161, 163, 176; 218–221
executive dominance of, 101, 110, 111,
139–40, 143; reforms and legislation, Facultades extraordinarias, 3, 101, 207, 308;
143–44, 157, 164, 182, 196, 222, 255 see also Emergency Powers
Electrical Services’ Decree Law (1982), 42 Falange Nacional, 222, 232–235, 246
Elites, 23, 38, 51, 61, 75, 82, 84–86, 90–91, Fascism, 185, 201, 208, 211, 254, 257, 352
97, 99, 101, 103, 108, 111, 113, 117, 121– FECH, see Chilean Federation of Students
22, 124, 130, 133–35, 137, 139–40, 142–43, Federación Obrera de Magallanes, 172
150, 164–65, 167, 172–74, 179, 265, 277, Federación Sindical de la Tierra, 233–235
318; Criollo, 92; landed or traditional, Federalism, 101, 107, 108, 110
144, 179, 205, 236, 243; military, 109, 152, Feliú, Manuel, 15
265; political, 161, 324 Feminist party, 222
Emergency Powers, 5, 101, 113, 172, 186, Ferdinand VII, 100, 104
207, 245, 254, 263, 265, 268; emergency Fernández, Sergio, 265, 276
decrees, 270, 272, 283, 288; state of emer- Fernández de Córdoba y Arce, Luis, 69
gency, 275, 277, 299, 301; see also State of Fernández Larios, Armando, 276
Siege Fernández Pradel, Jorge, 231
ENACAR, see National Coal Enterprise Figueroa Larraín, Emiliano (Pres.
ENAMI, Empresa Nacional de Mineria, 32, 1925–1927), 183
317 Finance, 23, 146, 292; see also Banks; Econ-
ENAP, see National Petroleum Company omy; Europe; Trade; United States; Inter-
Encina, Francisco, 1, 51, 73, 103, 113, 117 national Finance
INDEX 415

Fishing industry, 5–6, 9, 13, 19, 24, 26, 35, González Videla, Gabriel (Pres. 1946–1952),
43, 46–47, 79, 137, 168, 306, 336 215, 217–222, 301
Fishmeal, 26, 43, 282 González von Marées, Jorge, 210–11
Floods, 9, 51, 59, 78, 83, 92, 292 Gordon, Humberto (General), 353
FOCH, see Chilean Workers’ Federation Gremialista Movement, 253–258
Fontaine, Arturo, 15 Grez, Segio, 168
Foreign debt, 37, 72, 118, 184, 186, 197, Grove, Marmaduque, 181, 188, 189, 208,
219–20, 223, 239, 280, 282, 291–293, 298, 213, 245, 309
299 Guano, 124, 126, 145–47
Foreign investments, 26–27, 47, 114, 137, Guillo (political cartoonist), 330
144, 156, 178, 183, 185, 199, 201, 239, 249, Gulf of Reloncaví, 47
268, 277–78, 299, 310–11, 336 Guzmán, Jaime, 306, 316, 351
Foreign relations, 27; see also individual Guzmán, Juan, 350
countries
France, 2, 89–90, 100, 116, 121, 126, 140, 145, Hacendados, 39, 52, 79, 82, 84, 86, 88, 130,
151, 159, 249, 299 135, 137, 176, 228; see also Landowners
Franco, Francisco, 312 Hacienda system (Haciendas), 36, 38–39,
FRAP, see Popular Action Front 51, 58, 82, 87–88, 92, 131, 135, 167, 176,
Frei Bolívar, Arturo, 355 197, 202, 222, 228–29
Frei Montalva, Eduardo (Pres. 1964– Hachette, Dominique, 15
1970), 3, 228, 232, 237–239,242, 243, 250, Hayek, Friedrich, 288
253, 259, 263, 267, 301, 309, 319, 349, Helms, Richard, 254, 257
359 Henríquez, Juan, 71–72
Frei Ruiz-Tagle, Eduardo (Pres. 1994–2000) Herrera Ramírez, Ariosto (General), 214
319, 322–326, 328, 335, 336, 349–351, 354, Hertz, Carmen, 329–30
355 Hillyar, James, 104
Freire, Ramón, 105–109, 112 Hispanic capitalism, 73–74, Chapter 3
Frontier regions, 8, 16, 24, 40–41, 43, 45–47, Huachipato, 34, 45–46
49, 58, 68, 70–72, 74, 76, 80, 94–96, Huancavelica, 86
134–35, 137, 150–51, 160, 206, 209 Huarpes Indians, 49, 66, 77, 80
Fruit, 19, 24, 34, 35, 37, 38, 84, 96, 98, 176, Huaso, 52, 54, 359
282, 306 Huilliche Indians, 49
Fuentealba, Renán, 253 Human rights, 42, 311–359 passim; see also
Fundos, 2, 38; see also Hacienda System Human Rights Organizations; Ley de
Punto Final; Military; National Commis-
Gainza, Gabino, (General), 104 sion of Truth and Reconciliation; Par-
Galdames, Luis, 51, 71, 111 dons and Amnesties; Women
Gallo, Pedro León, 143, 353 Human rights organizations, 314, 318, 319,
Galvarino, 151 324, 328, 350–352
Gamarra, Agustín, 113 Humanist party, 319, 322–324, 355
García Carrasco, Francisco Antonio, 100 Humboldt Current, 9, 19, 84
García Márquez, Gabriel, 328 Hurtado, Father Alberto, 2, 34, 62, 64, 66,
García Ramón, Alonso, 79 84, 93, 234
Garretón, Manuel, 232 Hurtado de Mendoza, García, 62, 64, 66,
Garro, José de, 86 84, 93
Garzón, Baltasar (judge), 350
Gazmuri, Cristián, 142 Ibáñez de Peralta, Francisco, 72
Geography, 15, 285, Chapter 1, passim Ibáñez del Campo, Carlos (President 1927–
Germany, 13, 121, 126, 151, 178, 299 31,1952–58), 162–63, 181–89, 209–11, 214,
Goic, Alejandro (Bishop), 352 222–25, 230, 234, 249, 254, 262, 283, 307,
González, Roberto, 38 309, 312
416 CHILE

IER, see Institute for Rural Education Iron, 19, 24, 34, 178
Illapel, 32, 81, 141 Irrigation, 19, 34–35, 40–41, 87, 99, 131, 161,
Immigrants, 46, 47, 51, 74, 92, 103, 127, 131, 183, 246
150, 165, 167, 168; see also European Im- ITT (International Telephone and Tele-
migrants graph), 248
Imports, 10, 36, 47, 79, 90, 91, 109, 114–117, Izurieta, Ricardo (General), 329, 350,
120, 121, 173, 176, 179, 186, 197, 198, 200, 352–354
218, 222, 239, 251, 259, 278, 282
Incas, 49, 58–59, 65, 77 James, Preston, 19
INDAP, see Institue for Agrarian and Live- Japan, 23, 26, 34, 37, 174, 178
stock Development Jara, Víctor 261
Independence movement, 8, 46, 56, 97, Jara Quemada, Juan, 79
Chapter 4 passim Jarpa, Sergio Onofre, 297
Indians, 8, 40, 42, 43, 45, 48, 49, 52, 55–59, Jesuits, 2, 64, 68, 73, 77, 88, 92, 95, 231,
61–73, 75–87, 91, 93–96, 317, 336, 353; 234–236; College of San Ignacio, 231–232
colonial tribute, 57, 66, 67, 69; conquest, Jiménez, Tucapel, 295, 353, 358
1, 48–49, 56–64; life and labor, 2, 49, 55, Junta de Exportación Agrícola, 203
63, 65, -67, 75, 77, 83, 135, 151; popula- Juntas de Abastecimiento y Precios (JAP),
tion, 45, 51, 62, 94; see also Araucanian In- 250–251
dians; Diaguita Indians; Encomienda;
Huarpes Indians; Huilliche Indians; Ma- Kennecott Copper Company, 178, 221, 223
puche Indians; Slavery; Women Kissinger, Henry, 248, 254, 257
Indigenous Peoples Law (1993), 42 Klein-Saks Mission, 223
Industry, 13, 26, 42, 82, 117, 120, 150–152, Korea, 23, 37
154, 169, 175, 176, 184, 198, 201, 218, 231, Korean War, 199, 218, 223
237 Körner, Emil, 151, 152, 159, 162, 169
Infant mortality, 174, 243, 287
Infante, José Miguel, 100, 107 La Araucana, 45, 62
Inflation, 6, 114, 153, 158, 166, 167, 173, 180, La Candelaria Mine, 24, 32
201, 203, 206, 211, 218, 221–224, 228, 236, La Coruña Massacre, 182
237, 240, 243, 249, 250, 252, 255, 256, 268, La Imperial, 61, 64, 65, 68, 69
269, 278, 284, 291, 335, 336 La Laja, 42
Inquilinaje, 87–88, 151 La Moneda, 92, 99, 202, 248, 353, 358
Inquilinos, 38, 87–88, 129, 135, 171, 176, 186, La Serena, 8, 13, 34–35, 49, 62, 64–66, 70–71,
201, 212 77–78, 80–81, 83, 85–86, 106, 114, 119,
Institute for Agrarian and Livestock Devel- 123,141
opment (INDAP), 228, 240, 242 Labor, 1–5, 101, 113, 115, 127, 129, 131, 132,
Institute for Industrial Credit, 184 137, 145, 157, 160–64, 174, 177, 180–82,
Institute for Rural Education (IER), 235, 187, 189, 196, 199–200, 207–08, 214, 224,
242 225, 228, 230–33, 240, 243, 251, 261, 265,
Intellectuals, 14, 99, 122, 278, 310 266, 270, 272, 275, 282, 284, 286–87, 290,
Intendant System, 110, 157 293–95, 299, 303, 317–19, 324, 350, 353,
International Monetary Fund (IMF), 223 357; agricultural labor, 2, 36–38, 55, 65,
International Telephone and Telegraph, 248 82, 130, 167, 175, 201, 219, 221, 337; child
International Workers of the World (IWW), labor, 65, 70–71, 165, 174–75; colonial,
172 55–99 passim; effects of war of the Pacific
Inter-American Development Bank, 259, on, 150–151; labor movement, 32, 41, 158,
298 161, 165, 167–73, 183, 185, 197, 203,
Iquique, 19, 26–27, 35, 145, 147, 153, 155, 205–06, 217, 219–22, 230, 234–36, 242,
158–60, 179, 186 283, 285, 296, 309; unemployment, 133,
INDEX 417

166, 169, 202, 203, 239, 250, 268–69, 298, Liberal party, 215, 159
335, 349, 351; in mining industy, 32, 146, Liberalism, 99, 101, 103, 106, 107, 109–10,
153, 154, 158–59, 169–70, 179, 186; see 112, 142, 165, 185, 201, 230–32, 262, 294;
also Mining; Strikes; Women; Indians; British liberalism, 140, 142, 166; Catholic
Slavery Church and liberalism, 142–43, 328; eco-
Labor Code, 175, 184–85, 202, 204–06, 215, nomics and liberal capitalism, 16, 26, 27,
283, 311, 323 78, 118, 152, 166–67, 198; European and
Labor Courts, 184, 205, 285, 291 North American liberalism, 107, 139, 162,
Labor Department, 38, 176, 184–186, 165; liberal army and officers, 108, 110,
204–206, 212, 236, 242 112, 140, 141, 142; liberals and liberal
Labor Office, 171, 283; Boletín de la Oficina party, 4, 5, 72, 141, 143, 155, 157, 159, 196,
del Trabajo, 171 197, 207, 211–12, 215, 225, 232, 238, 243,
Lafferte, Elías, 208 308, 318; liberal intellectual movement,
Lagos Escobar, Ricardo (Pres. 2000–), 7, 121–22, 140; neo-liberalism, 15, 41, 266,
320, 323, 335, 349–352, 354–357 270, 275, 278, 282, 286, 288, 291, 294, 300,
Lake region, 13, 19, 46–47, 209 311, 318, 323, 328, 352; political liberal-
Lambert, Carlos, 126 ization, 5, 108, 113, 163
Land grants, see Mercedes de Tierra Lientur, 69
Land occupations (tomas), 45, 228, 237, 240, Liga Nacional de Defensa de Campesinos
242, 243 Pobres, see National Poor Peasants
Land tenure, 34, 36, 45, 88, 96, 176 League
Landowners, 2, 14, 38, 72, 80, 86–88, 92, Lillo, Baldomero, 41, 120
117, 118, 121, 127, 129–133, 135, 150, 151, Lillo, Ginés de, 87
Chapter 7 and 8 passim, 233, 234, 238, 242 Lima, 1, 9, 32, 62, 64–65, 68, 72, 73, 80,
Lange, Oscar, 252 84–90, 94–96, 98–101, 109, 113, 146–147
Larraín, Manuel (Bishop), 234 Lircay, Treaty of, 104
Larraín Family, 130 Livestock, 9, 36, 41, 46, 55, 61, 64, 68–69, 75,
Larson, Oscar, 232, 233 79, 81, 83–87, 90, 93–96, 113–15, 117, 120,
Las Casas, Bartolomé de, 66 126, 137, 150, 176
Laso de la Vega, Francisco 69–70 Llanquihue, 46–47
Lastarria, José Victorino, 121, 122, 140, 142, Logia Lautarina, 105
143 López de Velasco, Juan, 78
Latcham, Ricardo, 49 López de Zúñiga, Francisco, 70
Lautaro, 45, 61–62 Lorenzini, Emilio, 233–234
Lavín, Joaquín, 14, 15, 320, 328, 354–56 Los Andes, 8, 158
Law for the Permanent Defense of Democ- Los Angeles, 35, 42, 91, 96, 135
racy, 3, 217, 220, 222, 224, 234, 301 Lota, 41, 120, 126, 138, 172, 187, 336
Lawson, Dominic, 351 Lüders, Rolf, 15
Lebu, 126, 138
Left Revolutionary Movement (MIR), 246, Mackenna, Juan, 104
248, 251, 252, 255, 266, 297, 299, 319, Madre de Dios Mine, 77
321–323 Magallanes, 47–48, 172–73
Leigh, Gustavo (General), 275 Magellan, Ferdinand, 1
Leighton, Bernardo, 232, 263, 271, 277 Malleco, 43, 135, 207
Letelier, Orlando, 271, 275–76 Malocas, 57, 64
Ley de Punto Final, 314, 316, 324, 330, 351 Manantiales, 47
Ley de Seguridad Interior del Estado, 3, Mancomunales, 168
207–08, 210, 214 Manso de Velasco, José Antonio, 91
Leyes de amarre, 307, 311, 324 Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (FPMR),
Leyes orgánicas, see Organic Laws 105, 303, 316
418 CHILE

Mapocho, 48, 61, 84, 87 308–16, 318–19, 322–26, 328–30, 332–36,

MAPU, see Unitary Popular Action Move- 347–51, 353–59; Consejo de Guerra, 93;
ment courts-martial, 3, 4, 101, 104, 208, 268,
Mapuche Indians, 40, 43, 45, 49, 58, 70, 73, 277, 328; Escuela Militar, 151, 350;
101, 246, 312, 336, 353 human rights violations, 253, 261, 264,
Marga Marga, 75, 77 266–68, 272, 275–76, 278, 284, 298, 301,
Marín de Poveda, Tomás 303, 306, 314, 316, 330, 335, 353, 356–358;
Marín, Gladys, 352 Liga Militar, 177; Military Code of Justice,
Mariño de Lobera, Pedro 77 310, 315; military government, 2, 4–6, 10,
Maritain, Jacques, 230 13, 16, 24, 27, 36, 37, 42, 45, Chapter 10,
Maritime Confederation, 295 passim, 260, 310–11, 314–316, 318, 324,
Marras,Sergio, 312 330, 335, 352–358
Martínez de Rozas, Juan, 104 Mining, 6, 13, 19, 23, 24, 26, 27, 32, 34, 35,
Marxism, 2–4, 141, 161, 197, 201, 205, 214, 37, 39, 41–43, 51, 55, 63, 65, 74, 77, 78, 80–
217–219, 225, 229, Chapters 9 and 10 pas- 83, 90, 93, 96, 98, 103, 114–117, 119–124,
sim, 310, 351, 357 126, 127, 129–132, 138, 139, 142, 145, 151,
Matta (brothers), 140 153, 158, 160, 161, 164, 166–168, 171, 175,
Matta, Guillermo, 143 178, 183, 199, 203, 209, 218, 277, 292, 306,
Matta, Manuel Antonio, 32 317, 336; copper, 13, 19, 23– 26, 32–37, 47,
Matus, Alejandra, 348 70, 79–81, 83, 90, 98, 114–20, 124–26, 133,
Mayorazgos, 108, 111 138, 145, 171, 175, 178–79, 183–86, 199,
Meiggs, Henry 124, 130 201–02, 217–225, 228, 237–240, 249, 255,
Mejillones, 13, 26, 47, 124 259, 268, 282, 284, 292–294, 336; gold, 19,
Melipilla, 85, 91 24, 26, 32, 34, 59, 61, 65–67, 70, 73, 75, 77–
Mellafe, Rolando, 51 79, 81, 83–85, 89–90, 93, 94, 115, 117, 133;
Meller, Patricio, 282 nitrates,13, 19, 23–24, 126–127, 133, 137–
Mendoza, 9, 48, 49, 59, 104, 105 38, 144, 173, 202, 217, 220, Chapter 6 pas-
Meneses, Francisco de, 71 sim; labor, 34, Chapter 7 passim; economy,
Mercedes de Tierra, 77, 86 146, 152–154, 157, 160; silver, 13, 19, 23–
Merchant marine, 116, 146, 150 24, 26, 32, 34, 59, 61, 73, 77, 81, 83, 86,
Merchants, 14, 72, 84, 90, 92, 109, 111, 117, 114–15, 117, 119–20, 123–24, 133, 145
121, 131, 133, 142, 150, 153, 167, 201, 294 Ministry of Industry and Public Works, 154
MERCOSUR, 16 MIR, see Left Revolutionary Movement
Merlo de la Fuente, Luis 65 Miranda, Francisco de, 105
Mesa de Diálogo, 357 Miscegenation, see Mestizaje
Mestizaje, 1, 48–51, 75, 81, 103 Montealegre, Hernán, 264
Mestizos, 48, 51, 58, 73, 81, 82 Montt, Jorge (Pres. 1891–1896), 159, 169,
Mexico, 16, 32, 48, 55, 59, 63, 75, 77, 90, 92, Montt,Manuel (Pres. 1851–1861), 3, 121,
98–99, 104, 139, 174 140–144, 254, 306
Michimalonco, 61 Montt, Pedro, 131
MIDEPLAN (Ministry of Planning and In- Movimiento Democrático Popular (MDP),
ternational Cooperation), 317 297
Migration, see Urbanization Mt. Aconcagua, 8
Military, 8, 10, 13–16, 24, 27, 36, 37, 41, 42, Municipalities, 16, 285; organic law of, 16,
45, 46, 49, 54, 57, 58, 62–65, 68, 70–74, 76, 315
83, 85, 93–96, 99–101, 104, 105, 107, 109– Mussolini, Benito, 185
14, 116, 134–35, 139, 141–42, 146, 150–
152, 154, 158, 159, 161–65, 168, 169, 173, Nacimiento, 42, 71, 94, 135, 138
175–81, 183–89, 199, 202, 208, 213–14, National Agricultural Society (SNA), 130,
220, 225, 231, 240, 245, 248, 249, 254–60, 150, 166–67, 171, 206, 212, 228, 253, 306
INDEX 419

National Association of Campesino Orga- Norte Grande, 13, 16, 19, 23, 27, 32; fishing
nizations (ANOC), 235 industry, 26; mining, 24
National Association of Public Employees North, John Thomas, 154–56
(ANEF), 295 Novoa, Oscar (General), 202
National Coal Enterprise (ENACAR), 41 Nueva Acción Pública, 188
National Commission on Truth and Rec- Nueva Castilla, 59
onciliation (Rettig Commission), 315–17 Nuevo Toledo, 59
National Electric Corporation (ENDESA), Nuevo Trato (New Deal), 223
42, 43, 221, 222, 284, 336 Nuñez de Pineda y Bascuñan, Francisco, 69
National Guard, 140, 146
National Health Service, 287 O’Higgins, Ambrosio, 90, 98–99
National Indigenous Development Com- O’Higgins, Bernardo, 5, 98, 101, 104–08,
mission (CONADI), 42–43, 49, 317 117, 309, 312
National Information Center (CNI), 272, Obrajes, 72, 81, 94
275, 353, 358 Oidores, 56, 92
National Manufacturer’s Society, see So- Oil and Petrochemicals, 40, 46–48, 72,
ciedad de Fomento Fabril (SFF) 198–99, 218–19, 268, 293, 298, 336
National Objectives of the Chilean Govern- Olavarría Bravo, Arturo, 212
ment, 265, 290 Oñez de Loyola, Martín García, 64, 65, 68
National Party, 143–44, 155, 294, 297 Organic law, 290, 307, 310; organic law of
National Petroleum Industry (ENAP), 47, municipalities, 315; organic law of
48, 199, 221, 222, 336 armed forces, 312, 350; political parties,
National Poor Peasants League, 212 290
National Teachers Union (SUTE), 285–86 Ortiz de Rozas, Domingo, 91
National Women’s Service (SERNAM), Operation Condor, 271
317 Osorio, Mariano, 104
National Workers’ Central (CNT), 283, Osorno, 46–47, 64–65, 77, 79, 93, 94, 96
295–296
National Workers’ Command (CNT), 295 Paces, see Parlamentos
Natural Disasters, 51, see also Droughts; Pacific Steel Corporation (CAP), 221–222
Earthquakes; Floods; Tidalwaves Palma, Ignacio, 232
Natural gas, 47, 336 Pan American Highway, 10, 42
Navíos de Registro, 89–90 Pan American Labor Conference, 174
Navy, 41, 103, 146–47, 159, 169, 177–78, Parada, José Manuel, 264
180, 257, 275, 301, 316, 350, 352; Paraguay, 214, 271
ASMAR, 41; mutiny of, 188; Naval Pardons and amnesties, 68, 73, 101–02, 140,
Academy, 146 189, 308; amnesties, 101, 140, 141, 189,
Negrete, 73, 135 277, 308; Decree Law 2.191(1978), 276–77;
Negroes, 48, 51, 59, 67, 73, 75–77, 81–83, Patricio Aylwin and 318; Carlos Ibáñez
89, 103 and 188; Manuel Montt and, 141, 143
Neruda, Pablo, 261 Parlamentos, 58, see also Indians
New Laws, 57 Parra, Marco Antonio de la, 312
Newspapers, 108, 130–31, 140–41, 169, Partido Conservador Social Cristiano, 233
172, 174, 180, 211, 228, 299–300, 312–13, Partido del Sur, 320
316, 318, 326, 328, 347, 351, 353, 358 Partido Demócrata, 155, 163–64, 166,
Nixon, Richard, 248, 254, 257, 298 171–173, 188, 207, 230
Norte Chico, 13, 16, 32, 34, 35, 80–83, 87, Partido Democrático, 188
90, 119, 123, 150, 153; exports from, Partido Nacional, 243, 247, 253–55
80–81; worker migrations, 150, 153, 159, Partido Obrero Socialista (POS), 164, 171–
175 72, 230
420 CHILE

Party for Democracy (PPD), 311, 316, 319– Pinto, Francisco Antonio 108, 113
20, 323, 326, 335 Pinto, Julio, 126
Patria Vieja, 101, 104 Pipiolos, 108, 144
Patria y Libertad, 248, 253 Pirates, 58, 65, 68, 72, 78, 80
Patronage, 16, 63, 89, 97, 101, 152, 154–55, Pisagua, 147, 158
159, 165, 179, 184, 197, 211, 215, 240, 275, Pizarro, Francisco, 58–59, 61, 100
296, 300, 304, 308, 319, 335 Plan Zeta, 214, 261
Patronato, 56, 110, 142 Plebiscites, 1925, 182, 309; 1978, 275; 1980,
Paz de Negrete, 73 265, 282, 288, 299; 1988, 6, 302–06, 310–
Pelucones, 108–09 11, 320, 349, 355; 1989, 305
PEM (Programa de Empleo Mínimo), 270, Poblaciones, 256, 269, 278, 296
292, 293 Poblete, Renato, 236
Pepo, 359 Poinsett, Joel, 104
Pérez, José Joaquín (Pres. 1861–1871),143, POJH, Job Program for Heads of House-
306 hold, 292, 293 (Table 10–6)
Pérez Rosales (mountain pass), 9 Police, 24, 54, 129, 130, 134, 158, 164, 165,
Pérez Rosales, Vicente 16, 124 180, 254, 259, 262, 274, 276, 283, 302, 304,
Permanent Committee of the Episcopal 307, 310, 315, 321, 329, 355, 357; Cara-
Conference, 266 bineros, 183, 206, 208, 210, 212, 245, 256,
Perón, Juan, 219 290, 295, 352; secret police, 104, 249, 263,
Peru, 2, 19, 26, 32, 35, 48, 49, 51, 55, 57–59, 264, 269, 272, 278, 301, 316, 357; use in
61–64, 66, 68, 71, 75–77, 79–81, 83–86, strikes and protests, 168, 172, 212–13,
88–90, 92–94, 98–100, 103–108, 115, 119, 220, 237, 240, 243, 251, 336, 349, 354
121, 130, 134, 139, 169, 203, 274, 358; see Political Parties, 3, 41, 108, 144, 152, 155,
also Peru-Bolivia Confederation; War of 164, 169, 172–174, 182, 185, 196, 197, 199,
the Pacific 200, 203, 205, 219, 221, 223, 230, 232, 234,
Peru-Bolivia Confederation, 112–13, 133 235, 250, 255, 261, 263, 266, 267, 272, 275,
Petroleum, see Oil and Petrochemicals 283, 290, 291, 294–296, 299, 301, 308–09,
Philip II, 62, 64 310, 319–20
Philip III, 69 Politics, 4, 16, 24, 39, 51, 89, 92, 100, 104,
Philip IV, 69–70 107–109, 112, 113, 140, 144, 152, 154, 157,
Philip V, 89 159, 161–260 passim, 262, 263, 266, 272,
Pickering, Guillermo (General), 257 274, 284, 287, 290, 292, 296–298, 300, 302;
Pincetti-Gac, Osvaldo (“Doctor Torment”) , colonial politics, 55, 57, 59, 61, 63, 65, 67,
358 69, 71, 73; religious question 144, 152;
Pinocheques, 313–14 Pinochet legacy, 6, 310, 312, 314–316, 318,
Pinochet Ugarte, Augusto, 5, 6, 15, 24, 105, 319, 330, 335, 350, 353–356; social ques-
254, 257,261–307 passim, 310–314, 316, tion, 127, 155, 161, 165, Chapter 7 passim,
320, 321, 324, 328–330, 349–359; Acusa- 205, 231–32
ción Constitucional, 314, 325–326; am- Pope Alexander VI, 56
nesty decree (1978), 275–77, 301, 306, 310, Pope John Paul II, 302
313–14, 316, 323, 328–30, 350–51, 353–54, Pope Leo XIII, 231
357–58; arrest of, 312, 328–30, 353, 355, Pope Pius XI, 231
356, 357; economic plan, 277–78, 280, Pope Pius XII, 234
282, 284, 288, 291–92, 294, 306; legacy of, Popular Action Front (FRAP), 222, 225, 228,
308–349 passim; U.S. financial support of, 230, 236–238, 247
298, 299; see also Agriculture; Caravan of Popular Front, 201, 206–07, 209–14, 218,
Death; DINA; Human Rights; Labor; 232, 246, 249
Military Population, 9, 35, 38–40, 45–48, 51, 58, 73,
Pinto, Aníbal, 133, 144, 151–152 75, 76, 81, 83, 88, 91, 96, 116, 126, 127,
INDEX 421

129, 138, 159, 160, 199, 201; see also Ur- 171, 173, 176, 179, 184, 185, 189, 233, 236,
banization; Indians; Immigrants 237, 240, 242–244, 259, 266, 272, 286, 291,
Portales, Diego, 4, 5, 101, 108–13, 142, 162, 309–310, 313, 317–319, 323, 324; see also
185, 208, 247, 254, 262, 264, 318 Constitutions; Elections
Pórter Casanate, Pedro, 95 Regionalism, 175
Ports, 6, 13, 23, 111, 113, 127, 133, 153, 168, Rengifo, Manuel, 108, 109, 111, 112, 117
175, 183, 284, 293, 298, 317, 336 Renovación Nacional, (RN), 304, 306,
Potosí, 72, 77–80, 84–86, 90 319–320, 335, 356
PPD (Partido por la Democracia), see Party Renovación socialista, 311
for Democracy Republican Confederation for Civic Action,
Prat, Arturo, 150, 214 185
Prats, Carlos (General), 255–57, 271, 275 Republican Militia, 202
Prieto, Joaquín (Pres. 1831–1841), 108, 110, Rerum Novarum, 231
112, 113, 117, 119, 139, 142 Residence Law, 161, 172
Primo de Rivera, Miguel, 185 Resquicios Legales, 254
Privatization, 6, 13, 15, 23, 27, 32, 34, 42–43, Rettig Commission (National Commission
270, 287, 293–94, 299, 306, 322, 336 on Truth and Reconciliation), 315–17,
PROCHILE, 27 315–317
Protests, 38, 43, 90, 106, 146, 155, 165, 166, Revolution in Liberty, 3, 230, 236, 238–240,
168, 172, 173, 287, 294–297, 299, 303, 336, 243, 309
354 Ribera, Alonso de, 68, 70, 85
Public Works, 24, 82, 83, 92, 93, 99, 124, 127, Río de la Plata, 80
132, 133, 150, 154, 155, 167, 176, 177, 179, Ríos, Juan Antonio (Pres. 1942–1946), 215
183, 186, 203, 257, 270, 282, 296, 298, 317, Ríos Boettiger, René (Pepo), 359
335, 352 Rivas Vicuña, Manuel, 163
Puerto Montt, 9, 13, 35, 46–47, 175, 240 Rivers, 115, 201, 317; Aconcagua River, 8;
Pulpería, 83, 153 Andalien River, 96; Biobío River, 8, 9,
Punta Arenas, 41, 47–48, 145, 172–73 23, 36, 40, 42, 46, 49, 51, 58, 65, 70, 71, 73,
77, 83, 93–95; Cautín River, 151; Choapa
Quadragesimo Anno, 231 River, 49; Itata River, 49, 59, 86, 94; Loa
Quilacoya, 77 River, 19; Maipo River, 99; Malleco River,
Quillín, Pact of, 58, 70, 94 135; Mapocho River, 83, 99; Maule River,
Quillota, 13, 48, 68, 81, 83, 85, 158 49, 58, 59, 61, 65, 67, 71, 86, 94, 95, 114;
Quinto, 77–78, 85 Renaico River, 135; Toltén River, 46, 49;
Quiroga, Rodrigo de, 64, 83 Vergara River, 135
RN, see Renovación Nacional
Radical Party (Partido Radical), 142, 143, Rodríguez, Manuel, 105–106
173, 207–209, 215, 225, 228, 246, 315, 319 Rodríguez Aldea, José Antonio, 117
Radical Socialist Party, 188 Rodríguez Zorilla, José Santiago, 107
Railroads, 3, 9–10, 13, 39, 116, 119, 120–21, Rogers Sotomayor, Jorge, 222, 233
124, 126–27, 130–31, 133, 137, 141, 145, Rosales, Diego de, 2, 73, 77,
151–56, 159, 161, 168, 175, 178, 204, 207 Ross Santa María, Gustavo, 203, 208–10
Rainfall, 13, 19, 36, 40, 45–47, 59 Rotos, 52, 54
Rancagua, 26, 35, 91, 178, 255, 294, 316 Royal Patronage, see Patronato
Reagan, Ronald, 291, 298–99 Ruiz Danyau, César (General), 257
Recabarren, Luis Emilio, 164, 171, 230 Ruiz de Gamboa, Martín, 68, 70, 93
Reconquista, 101 Rural-Urban Migration, 38, 270
Reducciones, 43, 45
Relief and Reconstruction Corporation, 211 Salas, Manuel de, 82, 93, 98, 99, 117
Reforms, 16, 90, 92, 99, 118, 131, 140, 155, Salta, 26, 59
422 CHILE

San Antonio, 35, 336 SNA, see National Agricultural Society

San Gregorio Massacre, 180, 182 SNS, see National Health Service
San Martín, José de, 8, 104, 105, 112 Soberanía, Orden y Libertad (SOL), 253
San Nicolás, Fray Gil de, 66 Social clubs, 130, 142, 174, 326; Club de la
San Pedro, 19, 71, 94, 123 Unión, 139, 167
San Rosendo, 71, 94 Socialist Republic, 100 Days of, 188–89,
Sanfuentes, Enrique, 157 203, 208, 251
Sanfuentes, Juan Luis (Pres. 1915–1920),172 Socialist Workers’ Party, see Partido Obrero
Santa Cruz, 63, 65 Socialista
Santa Cruz, Andrés, 112–13 Sociedad de Fomento Fabril, 46 150, 160,
Santa María, Domingo (Pres. 1881–1886), 166, 253
155, 159 Society of Equality, 140
Santa María de Iquique Massacre, 169 SOQUIMICH, see Chilean Chemical and
Santiago, 9, 23, 27, 35, 39, 40, 51, 54, 57, 61– Mining Company
65, 78–81, 83–89, 91–96, 99, 100, 103–105, Soroche, 59
107, 109, 113–116, 119, 121, 122, 124, 127, Soto Alvarez, Carlos, 177
130, 131, 133, 134, 137–141, 146, 151, 153, Sotomayor, Alonso de, 68, 70
158–160, 164, 166, 167, 171–175, 177, 178, South Seas Company, 89
180, 182, 183, 186, 187, 201, 203, 206, 210, Southern Chile, 9, 40, 65, 126, 246
213, 214, 218, 220, 224, 231, 232, 234, 239, Soviet Union, 201, 206, 220, 259, 267
244, 249, 254, 256, 257, 277, 294–296, 302, Spain, 2, 6, 32, 51,55–116 passim, 132, 139,
309, 312, 313, 316, 317, 336, 337, 351, 352, 185, 299, 312, 328, 330, 348, 353, 355
357–358 Spanish Civil War, 201
Santillán, Hernando de, 66, 70 SQM, see Chilean Chemical and Mining
Santos Salas, José, 183 Company
Sarmiento, Domingo, 141 State of siege, 3, 5, 110, 112, 113, 140, 143,
Schneider, René (General), 248, 254, 257 144, 159, 172, 207, 210, 211, 263, 265,
Secret police, see Police 275–277, 299, 301
Senador Vitalicio (Senator for Life), 321, Statistics, 171, 288, 337
356 Steamships, 116, 119, 124, 126, 175
Sepúlveda, Mario (General), 254, 257 Steel Industry, 45–46, 178, 22–222
Servicio de Colocaciones, 176 Strait of Magellan, 1, 8–9, 47, 49, 59, 75
Seville Junta, 100 Strikes, 41, 127, 158, 166, 168, 170–72, 175,
SFF, see Sociedad de Fomento Fabril 179, 183, 187, 215, 220, 242–43, 251, 253–
Sharp, Bartholomew, 71, 80 257, 309, 318, 335–36; Agrarian Reform
Shipbuilding, 90, 116, 131–32 Law (Article 171), 251; Labor Code of
Sierens, J.N.A., 235 1931, 184–85, 204–05; Ley de Seguridad
Silva Henríquez, Raúl (Cardinal), 5, 264, Interior del Estado, 207–208; Law 8811,
267 215; mining, 219–20, 294, passim; Molina
Simón, Raúl, 173 strike, 233–35; Officer strike (Tacnazo),
Sinceridad: Chile intimo en 1910, 161 244–45; pre-1924, 165, 169; Pinochet and,
Situado Real, 58, 65, 72, 76, 85–86, 95, 116 263, 282–85, 295, 299, 304; Pinochet
Skármeta, Antonio, 278 Labor Plan, 284; repression of, 169, 177,
Slavery, 55, 57–58, 75–76, 92, 103; abolition, 182, 207, 237, 258; rural, 171, 212, 228;
102, 262; African, 51, 55, 59, 69, 77; Ca- Suárez, Inés de, 61
tholic Church and, 56, 231; Indian, 1, 49, Subercaseaux, Benjamín, 9–10
56, 64–72, 87, 94; Treaty of Utrecht, 89; see Subterra, 120
also South Seas Company; Encomienda; Suffrage, 110, 111, 139, 143, 155, 163–64, 173
New Laws Supreme Court, 4, 16, 158, 206, 263, 264,
Smuggling, 76, 81, 85, 89, 96, 103, 109 275, 277, 301, 328, 348, 350, 354, 357–359
INDEX 423

Tacna, 147, 178; see also Strikes, Tacnazo 255, 268, 293, 298, 351; exports, 6, 16,
Tagle, Emilio, 232–33 23–24, 26–27, 32, 34, 36–37, 42–43, 47, 75,
Talca, 91, 104, 106, 130–31, 158, 160, 186, 80, 84, 88, 94, 98, 115, 119–120, 137, 145,
201, 206, 208, 233 154, 160, 178, 183, 199–201, 203, 236, 239,
Talcahuano, 36, 40–43, 48, 104, 119, 130, 277–78, 282, 292–93, 298; imports, 10, 23,
137–38, 160, 186, 201, 336 37, 47–48, 79, 83, 90, 98, 115, 121, 186,
Talcamávida, 71, 94 197–98, 221–22, 228, 239, 251; see also
Tamaya Mine, 119, 124, 141 Economy; Tariffs; Taxes
Tarapacá, 35, 61, 145–147, 150, 152, 153, Treaty of Ancón, 147
156, 158, 175, 178 Tres Puntas, 119, 123
Tariffs, 27, 109, 116–17, 120, 131, 150, 160, Tribunal de Consulado, 98–99
164, 166, 168, 184, 198, 200, 268, 278, 292 Trotskyists, 207, 212–14, 230, 309
Tasa of Esquilache, 68–69 Tucapel, 71, 73, 95, 352
Tasa of Gamboa, 67 Tucumán, 8, 70
Tasa of Laso de Vega, 69–70 Tupiza, 59
Tasa of Santillán, 66, 70
Taxation and taxes, 27, 45, 106, 108, 110, UDI (Unión Democráta Independiente),
112, 118, 122–24, 131, 133, 139–40, 144, 304–06, 319–20, 349, 356
155, 157–58, 160, 164, 172–73, 176, 180– Unidad Popular (UP), 4, 203, 243, 246–260,
82, 186, 198,203–05, 211, 217–18, 236–37, 271, 305, 351
239, 243, 268–69, 282, 290, 315, 317, 323, Unión de Campesinos, 232–33
336; cattle tax, 166–67; colonial tax sys- Unión de Campesinos Cristianos, 235
tem, 71, 85, 99, 103; copper industry, Unions, 2, 41, 171–173, 184, 185, 196, 200,
220–23, 225; import/export taxes and 204–206, 212, 213, 215, 220, 228, 235,
duties, 86, 90, 103, 108, 11–112, 116, 123– 238–240, 242, 283–285, 294, 296
24, 131, 147, 153, 173, 176, 204, 278; ni- Unitary Popular Action Front (MAPU),
trate tax, 145–47, 150, 152; see also Indi- 246
ans; Tribute Unitary Workers Front (FUT), 294
Telegraph, 3, 119, 138, 151, 154, 175, 177, United Nations, 275, 336; Development
248 Programme, 337
Temuco, 9, 35, 46, 151, 201 United States, 2, 3, 10, 19, 23, 24, 27, 37, 40,
Tenants, 2, 38, 51, 64, 76, 82, 87–88, 93, 103, 43, 45, 77, 90, 93, 95, 96, 99, 101, 104, 107,
111, 129, 172, 176, 201, 205, 243; see also 110, 115–18, 120–21, 131, 135, 137, 147,
Inquilinos and Inquilinaje 162, 164, 165, 173, 174, 176, 178, 179, 188,
Textiles, 40, 45, 46, 79, 85, 90, 94–95, 166, 189, 199, 201, 202, 211, 212, 214, 217–222,
168, 174, 179, 198, 284 230, 233, 239–240, 246, 249, 254, 259, 266,
Tierra del Fuego, 1, 9, 47 271, 272, 275, 276, 282, 283, 284, 291, 296,
Tidal waves, 9, 78, 93, 95 298, 299, 308, 312, 318, 328, 336, 337, 346,
Tocopilla, 13, 19, 23, 27, 47 348, 354; and Allende, 248, 255, 257–58;
Tocornal, Joaquín,112 CIA, 235, 248, 255, 257; Peace Corps, 235;
Toesca, Joaquín, 92 University of Chicago, 266, 278; see also
Tomas, see Land Occupations Alliance for Progress; Carter, Jimmy; Ex-
Tomé, 43, 138, 137 port Import Bank; Kissinger; Nixon;
Tomic, Radomiro, 24, 232, 243, 246, 247, Pinochet
320 University of Chile, 121–22, 142
Toro Zambrano, Mateo de, 100 University of Concepción, 246
Trade, 6, 9, 16, 27, 36, 43, 48, 58, 76, 84, 85, Urbanization, 39, 91, 123, 127, 160, 175, 176,
87–91, 95, 96, 98, 103, 109, 111, 113–118, 201, 206, 215, 222
121, 122, 131, 133, 137, 138, 166, 175, 178, Urmeneta, José Tomás de, 119, 124, 126
197, 198, 202, 204, 212, 215, 218, 219, 253, Uruguay, 10, 151, 249, 271
424 CHILE

Valdés, Hernán, 278 Waddington, Joshua, 116, 124, 137

Valdivia, 9,36, 43, 46, 47, 51,104, 105, 114, Wages, 127, 129–131, 137, 158, 165, 166, 172,
151 174, 176, 178, 201, 231, 268, 280, 291, 296,
Valdivia, Luis de, 2, 68, 337
Valdivia, Pedro de, 56,61–65, 70, 73, 77, 84, War of the Pacific, 8, 23, 124, 127, 137, 138,
93–94, 144, 145, 147, 150, 152–154, 159, 161, 178,
Valdivia, Pedro de (nitrate works), 23 214
Valdivieso, Ramón (Archbishop), 144, 232 War of the Spanish Succession, 72, 89
Vallenar, 13, 32, 123 Wheelwright, William, 119, 124
Valparaíso, 9, 16, 36, 39–41, 47, 51, 64–65, Women, divorce, 290; early professions,
71, 77, 79, 84, 86, 88, 89, 91, 92, 103, 106, 132–134; gender discrimination, 27, 337;
107, 112, 113, 115, 116, 118, 119, 121, 122, Indians and conquest, 66, 70,77, 78, 96; in
124, 127, 129, 130, 132–134, 137, 143, 151, Church organizations, 233; in Civil
153, 158, 160, 164, 169, 171–175, 177, 180, Code, 290; in human rights organiza-
183, 201, 232, 277, 336, 349, 351, 352, 354, tions, 267, 268, 302,315; in labor force,
355 153, 174, 270; in labor movement, 168,
Vancouver, George, 92 175; in politics, 222, 236, 240, 253, 296,
Varas, Antonio, 142–143, 306 310, 323, 355–356; polygamy, 58, 75; suf-
Vekemans, Roger, 235–36 frage, 196, 197
Venezuela, 47, 104, 121 Workers Assembly on National Nutrition
Viaux, Roberto (General), 245 (AOAN), 172
Vicaría de la Solidaridad (Vicariate of Soli- World Bank, 42–43, 259, 298–299
darity), 5, 263–64, 267–68 World War I, 24, 54, 167–68, 173–74, 176,
Vicuña, Pedro Félix, 141, 178–79, 198, 231
Vicuña Mackenna, Benjamín, 9, 72 World War II, 40, 201, 218, 221, 233
Vidaurre, José Antonio, 113
Vietnam War, 199, 238, 240 Yáñez decree, 179
Villagra, Francisco de, 62 Yáñez, Eliodoro, 179
Villagra, Pedro de 67–68
Villarrica, 61, 64–65, 78, 151 Zalaquett, José, 264
Viña del Mar, 9, 36, 41, 174, 277 Zaldívar, Andrés, 326, 351–52
Vineyards, 34–39, 66, 94, 120, 206, 233–34 Zapata, Emilio 212–13
Vives Solar, Fernando, 231