Origins

Chile is a long and narrow country in South America covering 757,000 square kilometres and extending from Peru in the north to the continent’s southern tip of Cape Horn. In fact, the very name Chile derives from an Indian word meaning “land’s end.” The country is bordered in the east by the Andes Mountains, whose crests delineate the border with Argentina, and in the west by over 4,000 kilometres of coast, along the Pacific Ocean. Of the country’s 13.7 million inhabitants (1991), over 80 percent live in urban areas, half of them alone in the capital city of Santiago.

The Chilean population includes people of European origin, mestizos (offspring of Europeans and the indigenous Indians), and several Indian groups. The mestizos are estimated to form two-thirds of the population, Europeans under 30 percent, and the Indians only 3 percent. The ethnic composition of the inhabitants varies according to social strata and region. European features are common among members of Chile’s middle and upper strata and are dominant in those regions of the country where at the time of the Spanish conquest there was no indigenous population or where it was eradicated by the invaders. Many Chileans in Canada are not distinguishable from people of European background, although Chilean mestizos are often confused with Canada’s native peoples.

Europeans began to explore Chile in the mid-1530s and claimed it for the Spanish crown. For the next nearly three centuries Chile was a Spanish colony. As a result of contact with the early Europeans, the overwhelming majority of the indigenous Indian population contracted diseases and died. The Spanish set up a land-tenure system directed by a small landowning elite of European origin that was worked by a large, landless, peasant class, mostly mestizos. The colonists also firmly implanted the Spanish language and the Roman Catholic religion, so that today Spanish is the official language of the country spoken by all inhabitants, nearly 90 percent of whom are Roman Catholic. Aside from Spanish, two small Indian groups, the Mapuches in the south and the Aymaras in the north, speak their own languages.

By the outset of the nineteenth century, the elite born in Chile had come to be increasingly discontent with what was viewed as foreign domination from Spain. In 1810 rebels set up their own government, and eight years later, under the leadership of Bernardo O’Higgins and José de San Martin, they proclaimed Chile an independent state. By the 1850s Chile was able to achieve internal consolidation, and it thus had sufficient time to overcome the kind of divisive internal regionalism that has chronically plagued the social and economic life of other Latin American countries.

Chile’s existence as an independent country has been mostly peaceful, the exceptions being two wars against Peru and Bolivia during the nineteenth century, a brief civil war in 1891, and the military coup of 1973. Industrialization began already during the first decades of the twentieth century and, together with a stable political system, provided the Chilean population with widespread access to basic resources, such as education and health.

In spite of its political and economic stability, Chile’s development was not without difficulties. By the early 1950s, the country faced structural barriers that impeded further industrial and social advances. Since 1955 various approaches have been adopted in an effort to overcome these barriers. During the late 1960s, the government implemented an agrarian reform program and created self-managed enterprises and cooperatives. A new government under Salvador Allende tried between 1970 and 1973 to create a socialist society through democratic means. That experiment, however, ended in September 1973 with the overthrow of Allende by the Chilean armed forces. The subsequent military regime under General Augusto Pinochet established authoritarian control and drastically changed the direction of the economy by encouraging free markets and private enterprise. In addition, the regime repressed all political and social forces that opposed its plans, with little respect for human rights. Harsh military rule lasted until 1989, when the Pinochet regime was defeated in a national plebiscite and forced to call presidential elections. Since 1990, Chile has returned to civilian rule by a democratically elected government that has managed to create stable political and economic conditions.