Chile

The Chilean Republic, commonly Chile, is a unitary plurinational parliamentary republic on the Pacific coast of South America, between the Andes and the ocean, from the Atacama desert to Cape Horn. It is about 4,300 kilometres long and seldom more than 200 wide. Its capital is Santiago, where the Chamber of Deputies sits, and its Senate sits at Valparaíso, where it went after an earthquake in 1985 and from which it has never come back. It has about twenty-five million people, two official languages, a currency called the condor, and a constitution that is five years old.

Its history begins under a protector. Britain, which had held the River Plate since 1813, paid for and shipped the army that crossed the Andes in 1817 and freed Chile, and took in return a protectorate over its foreign relations from 1818. For twelve years a British Resident at Santiago governed in all but name. Diego Portales won the government back for Chileans in 1830, and lost the protectorate in 1837 by making a war on the Peru-Bolivian Confederation that London refused to back; his own troops shot him that June and the war died with him. Chile remembers the protectorate with gratitude rather than resentment, which surprises outsiders more than anything else about the country.

It became rich by force. In the War of the Pacific of 1879 to 1884 it took the nitrate deserts of Tarapacá and the Bolivian coast, occupied the Confederation’s capital for four years, and lived for forty years on the export tax. In 1891 a Congress backed by the navy defeated a president backed by the army, and the parliamentary system that followed was never undone. A president remained, chosen by an electoral college and expected to do nothing, and for eighty-two years he did nothing.

In 1973 he did something. The prime minister was Salvador Allende, a socialist governing in a deadlocked Congress against inflation, sabotage and the covert pressure of the Realm’s government, and when the Chamber declared his government unlawful but could not agree on another, President Arturo Larraín Echenique dismissed him. Allende refused to go. The armed forces moved the next morning, on 11 September 1973, to enforce the dismissal, bombed the prime minister’s palace with him inside it, and kept the country for seventeen years. Augusto Pinochet ruled by decree, wrote no constitution, lost a plebiscite in 1988, was arrested in London ten years later, and died a convicted man in a military prison in 2006.

Democracy came back in 1990 under the old constitution of 1925, and the old constitution was what the young marched against in 2019. A second constitutional convention succeeded where the first had failed, and the constitution of 2023 declares Chile a plurinational republic, makes water a public good, removes from the presidency every power that could open the door again, and replaces the national motto, By reason or by force, with United in diversity. Two years later a treaty with the Mapuche settled most of the land question that the conquest of Araucanía had left open since the 1880s.

The organising question of this article is the one the old motto asked. A country that has settled its constitution by argument more often than almost any other has twice let force decide, in 1891 and in 1973, and has not yet said why.

The name

The formal style is the Chilean Republic, República Chilena, which is the older form and the one every constitution since 1833 has used. República de Chile is common in speech and on some coins and is not wrong. In ordinary use the country is Chile in both its official languages.

The origin of the name is disputed and the dispute is old. It may come from a Mapudungun or Aymara word for the edge of the land, or the cold, or the cry of a bird, and Chilean schoolbooks give all three with the air of people who do not need to choose. The Spanish had applied it to the valley of the Aconcagua by the 1530s and extended it south with the conquest.

The people are Chileans. The adjective in English is Chilean, and the Chilean English of the south uses Chilean for the people and Chile attributively for almost everything else, as in Chile wine and Chile weather.

History

The Spanish kingdom

The valley of central Chile was the southern edge of the Inca world when the Spanish arrived, and the frontier of the Mapuche, who had held the Inca at the Maule and would hold the Spanish at the Biobío. Pedro de Valdivia founded Santiago in 1541, and the Mapuche killed him at Tucapel in 1553. The war that followed lasted, with intervals, for three hundred years. It produced a frontier on the Biobío, a standing army paid from Lima, and a series of treaties called parliaments between the Crown of Spain and the Mapuche, in which the Spanish king recognised a free Mapuche country south of the river.

The Captaincy General of Chile was a poor and distant province of the Viceroyalty of Peru. It grew wheat for Lima, exported tallow and copper in small quantities, and was governed by a few hundred families whose estates, the haciendas of the central valley, shaped Chilean society for the next two centuries more than any law did.

The junta of 1810 and the reconquest

When French armies took Spain in 1808, the colonies were left to decide whom they obeyed. On 18 September 1810 an open meeting of the cabildo of Santiago formed a junta to govern in the name of the captive king, and the date is the national day. The junta became a government and the government a revolution, divided from the start between the moderates and the brothers Carrera, whose quarrel with Bernardo O’Higgins is still argued over in Chile with a heat the rest of the world finds hard to explain.

The Spanish came back. A royalist army from Peru defeated the patriots at Rancagua in October 1814, and the leaders of the revolution fled across the Andes to Mendoza.

Independence and the protector, 1817 to 1830

Across the mountains lay the province of Cuyo, in the interior of a River Plate that had become British in August 1813. The interior held out against the British until 1820, and in it José de San Martín assembled the Army of the Andes. He could not have done it alone. Britain, which had come back to the Plate a third time and stayed, saw in a free Chile a second friendly coast on the far ocean and an end to Spain’s Pacific power, and paid for and supplied the crossing: money through the merchants of Buenos Aires, muskets through Mendoza, and the promise of ships on the Pacific side.

San Martín crossed the Andes in January 1817 and defeated the royalists at Chacabuco on 12 February. O’Higgins was named Supreme Director. Independence was declared on 12 February 1818, and the royalist army was destroyed at Maipú on 5 April.

The price was paid in 1818. By the Treaty of Valparaíso, Chile placed its foreign relations under British protection: no treaty and no war without British consent, a British naval officer in command of the Chilean squadron, and a British Resident at Santiago to advise the Supreme Director. The treaty said advise. The Resident governed. Through the 1820s he chose ministers, vetoed appointments, approved the budget and settled the quarrels of a revolution that had no settled government of its own, and for twelve years Chile was a British dependency in everything but the word.

Thomas Cochrane commanded the navy from 1818 to 1822 as the protectorate’s officer. He took the Spanish fortress of Valdivia in 1820 with a handful of ships and an assault nobody thought possible, and carried San Martín’s army north to Peru the same year. He is a hero at Valparaíso, where his statue faces the harbour. He was an embarrassment in London, which had sent him to keep order and found him conquering things, and he left Chile in 1822 having quarrelled with everybody, as he always did.

The war was paid for with British money. The London loan of 1822, raised to pay the navy and the army in Peru, was pledged against the customs of Valparaíso, and Chile defaulted on it within four years. O’Higgins fell in January 1823 to a provincial revolt that the Resident did not try to stop, went into exile in Peru, and died at Lima in 1842. The rest of the decade was a sequence of directors, constitutions and risings, and the Resident sat above all of them.

Portales and the end of the protectorate, 1830 to 1837

The conservatives won the civil war of 1829 and 1830 at Lircay, in April 1830, and the minister who made their victory into a state was Diego Portales, a Valparaíso merchant who held office for only a few years and governed for all of them. He made a bargain with the Resident. Chile would settle the London loan and pledge its customs for the payments, and the Resident would confine himself to foreign affairs and war. London, which was tired of governing Chile and wanted its money, agreed. The constitution of 1833, Portales’s work, made Chilean government Chilean again in everything except treaties and war.

The exception destroyed the protectorate. In 1836 Andrés de Santa Cruz joined Bolivia to a divided Peru in the Peru-Bolivian Confederation, and Portales held that a united coast to the north would reduce Valparaíso to a feeder of Callao. Chile declared war in December 1836. Britain refused to consent. The Viceroy of the River Plate had sent a force north against the Confederation on his own authority, and London disowned him and refused Chile in the same despatch; the two were enemies of the same state without being allies of each other, and they never coordinated anything. Chile went to war without its protector, and the protectorate lapsed in the quarrel. No treaty ended it. The Resident left Santiago in the spring of 1837 and was not replaced.

It was Portales’s war and almost nobody else’s. The first expedition achieved nothing and signed a withdrawal he repudiated, and on 3 June 1837 he was seized by mutinous troops at Quillota and shot. The war party never recovered. A second expedition sailed, accomplished nothing and came home, the campaign that might have destroyed the Confederation at Yungay was never mounted, and by 1839 the war had simply stopped. Chile’s first independent act of foreign policy was a war, and it lost it.

The order Portales had built outlived him. The constitution of 1833 stood, the conservative governments he had installed went on governing, and the country drew from its defeat a caution that lasted forty years.

The cautious decades, 1837 to 1879

Chile spent the next forty years at home. The governments of José Joaquín Prieto, Manuel Bulnes and Manuel Montt, the decadal presidents of the conservative republic, built roads and railways, a merchant marine and a public administration, and put down the liberal risings of 1851 and 1859 with a severity that was remembered. The University of Chile was founded in 1842 under Andrés Bello, a Venezuelan scholar who had spent twenty years in London and wrote the civil code. Valparaíso became the great port of the South Pacific, the place where every ship rounding the Horn took on water and news, and a British commercial city in everything but flag.

The state pushed south. Punta Arenas was founded in 1848 to hold the Strait of Magellan, and German settlers were brought to the lakes of Llanquihue in the 1850s, with British, Welsh and Scottish settlers following them into the far south as the sheep stations spread. The far south learned its English then and has never forgotten it.

The one foreign war of the period was not of Chile’s making. Spain, attempting to recover something of its American position in the 1860s, quarrelled with Peru and then with Chile, and on 31 March 1866 the Spanish fleet bombarded Valparaíso, which had no defences, for three hours. British and Realm squadrons lay in the bay and watched, on instructions to protect their own nationals and do nothing else, and the city burned around them. Chile and the Confederation were briefly allies against Spain, the only time the two have been on the same side of anything. The episode made Chile build a navy, which was the most consequential thing Spain did in South America in the nineteenth century.

The liberal constitution of 1871 ended presidential re-election, widened the vote and loosened the conservative order, and the theological laws of the 1880s took cemeteries, marriage and the civil register from the Church. The London loan of 1822 was finally paid off in the 1880s with nitrate money, sixty years late, and the payment was celebrated in Valparaíso.

The War of the Pacific, 1879 to 1884

The nitrate districts of the Atacama lay in Bolivia’s coastal province, the Litoral, and in the Confederation’s Tarapacá, and they were worked almost entirely by Chilean labour with British capital. A Bolivian tax on exported nitrate, imposed in 1878 in breach of a standing agreement, gave Chile the occasion it wanted, and Chilean forces occupied Antofagasta in February 1879. The Confederation fought as one state and lost.

Chile won at sea first, which decided everything else, and then landed and fought north along a desert coast against an enemy that could not be supplied except by the sea it had lost. Tarapacá fell, then the Litoral, then Tacna, and Tacna, the federal capital, was occupied by Chilean troops from May 1880 until the peace. President Aníbal Pinto, serving the single term the 1871 constitution allowed, left the conduct of the war to his ministers and to Congress, and the war was won by committee more completely than most wars are won by generals.

Britain was officially neutral and visibly interested. British firms owned much of the nitrate, British banks financed the Chilean government, and British shipyards had built the Chilean navy. Chile was accused at the time, by the Confederation and by others, of fighting a British company’s war, and the accusation has never quite gone away. The speculator John Thomas North, an engineer from Leeds who bought nitrate claims cheaply from Confederate holders during the war, became the Nitrate King of Tarapacá and one of the richest men in Britain. The Realm’s mediation of 1880, attempted by James G. Blaine, was regarded in Santiago as partial to American claimants, failed completely, and began a cool relationship with the Realm that the next decade did not improve.

The Treaty of Ancón in 1884 gave Chile Tarapacá and the Bolivian Litoral outright and returned Tacna and Arica after the occupation, under British and American mediation. Bolivia’s only access to the sea has since been through the ports of South Peru, which is the reason the Confederation is now beyond dissolution and the subject of a standing irony in its own national history.

Chile remembers the war with pride. The occupation of the enemy’s capital is taught as the high point of Chilean arms, and the war’s battles name streets in every town. The Confederation marks the same four years every spring as the most wounding fact in its national memory, with its President in attendance. The two memories describe the same events and do not meet, and the Register sets them side by side, as the Confederation’s article does from the other side.

The boundary with the Plate

The other frontier was settled by treaty. The Boundary Treaty of 1881, concluded with Britain as sovereign of the River Plate, put the line along the highest peaks that divide the waters of the Andes, gave Chile the whole of the Strait of Magellan, and divided Tierra del Fuego between the two. It left the islands of the Beagle Channel unclear, and the unclarity nearly started a war ninety-seven years later.

Araucanía

South of the Biobío the Mapuche had kept their country through three centuries of Spanish rule and four decades of the republic. Between 1861 and 1883 the Chilean state took it. The campaign the state called the Pacification of Araucanía was a military conquest followed by the seizure of land, in which the Mapuche were confined to reserves totalling a small fraction of their former territory and the rest was sold to settlers and, later, to forestry companies. The last resistance ended in 1883, the year the northern war ended, and the army that had fought the Confederation finished the conquest.

The Register calls it a conquest because that is what it was. The land question it opened was the longest-running dispute in Chilean public life until the treaty of 2025.

The civil war of 1891

José Manuel Balmaceda, president from 1886, was an able and ambitious liberal who intended to use the nitrate revenue for public works and to bring the nitrate fields themselves under greater Chilean control, and who governed increasingly against Congress. In January 1891, when Congress refused to pass his budget, he decreed the previous year’s into force. Congress declared him deposed. The navy sided with Congress and carried its forces north to the nitrate ports, where the revenue was; the army stayed with the president.

The war lasted eight months and killed perhaps five thousand people. The congressional army, raised in the north and paid with nitrate money, landed near Valparaíso and won the battles of Concón and Placilla in August 1891. Balmaceda took refuge in the British legation at Santiago and, on 19 September 1891, the day his term would have ended, shot himself there. He is revered by the Chilean left as a president who tried to make the nitrate Chilean, and the right has never entirely made its peace with that.

Britain was strictly neutral, and the shelter its legation gave the defeated president was an act of the minister’s conscience rather than of policy. John Thomas North was not neutral. He financed the congressional side through his companies, and the fact is told plainly in Chilean histories, which distinguish between the Briton and Britain more carefully than the Confederation’s histories do.

The victorious Congress wrote the constitution of 1891. It made the president’s ministers responsible to the Chamber of Deputies, separated Church and State, made English an official language beside Spanish, as a liberal measure for the north’s British towns and the south’s settlers, and opened the parliamentary republic, which was never undone. The president remained, to sign and to receive ambassadors, and from 1891 the government of Chile was the government that the Chamber would keep in office.

The Annapolis affair

In October 1891, a month after the war, sailors on shore leave from the Realm’s protected cruiser HMS Annapolis were attacked in a bar in Valparaíso, and two were killed. The Realm, which had been suspected in Santiago of favouring Balmaceda, sent an ultimatum, and in January 1892 Chile apologised and paid an indemnity. The Annapolis affair is in every Chilean schoolbook and is taught as bullying by a great power that had sent a cruiser to watch a civil war it had no part in.

The parliamentary republic, 1891 to 1925

The nitrate years were the richest in Chilean history and the least equal. The export tax paid for the state, the railways, the schools and the Senate’s new building in Santiago, and the export trade was mostly British-owned. The oligarchy governed through coalitions that formed and dissolved in the Chamber, and governments fell often and changed little. Valparaíso was destroyed by the earthquake of 16 August 1906, which killed about three thousand people, and was rebuilt in two years, grander than before, on nitrate money.

The social question, as the period called it, grew in the nitrate camps of the north and the tenements of the cities, and the parliamentary republic answered it slowly and sometimes with rifles. Chile was neutral in the First Great War and benevolent to both Britain and Germany, its two great trading partners and now allies of each other. French commerce raiders worked the Pacific coast in 1914 and 1915 and sank Chilean and British ships within sight of the coast, which settled what neutrality meant in practice.

Then the nitrate died. German chemists had learned to fix nitrogen from the air before the war, and after it the process spread, licensed first and copied soon after, and the synthetic product undercut the desert’s within a decade. The nitrate towns of the north emptied, and their ruins stand in the Atacama still, with their theatres and their railway stations and their schoolrooms, where nobody has lived for ninety years.

The constitution of 1925

The crisis came in September 1924, when young army officers in the gallery of the Senate rattled their sabres during a debate on the pay of Congress while the social laws they wanted sat unpassed. Congress passed the laws the next day. The officers went back to their barracks, and the parliamentary order, frightened, wrote itself down. The constitution of 1925 codified the system that had grown up since 1891: a prime minister responsible to the Chamber, a president chosen by an electoral college of Congress and the provincial assemblies for a single six-year term, with no power in practice beyond appointing the leader who could command the Chamber and, in law, a reserve power to dismiss a government that had lost it. It gave women the vote, two decades before most of the continent.

The reserve power was meant never to be used. For forty-eight years it was not.

The hard decades

The Depression struck Chile harder than almost any other country in the world. Nitrate was gone and copper fell, exports fell by four fifths between 1929 and 1932, and the parliamentary system bent through a succession of coalition governments without breaking. In 1932 a socialist candidate won a general election that the right called a revolution, and the Socialist Party was founded the next year.

On 5 September 1938 a fascist movement modelled on the regime in France attempted to seize power in Santiago. Its youths occupied the university and the Seguro Obrero building, surrendered, and were killed after surrendering by the police, a massacre the Register names as one. The putsch discredited the right in that autumn’s election, which a Popular Front of Radicals, Socialists and Communists won, and Pedro Aguirre Cerda became prime minister. After the Chillán earthquake of January 1939 killed tens of thousands, his government founded the state development corporation, CORFO, which built the steel, power and oil industries of the next thirty years.

The Second Great War

Chile was neutral when the war began, as it had been in the first. A fascist French raider sank merchant ships off Valparaíso in 1940, and opinion turned. When Japan’s war spread across the Pacific in 1941 and 1942, the coast and the copper were both exposed, and the Radical prime minister Juan Antonio Ríos broke relations with Japan in January 1943. Chile’s war was copper and nitrate for the Allied arsenal, and naval patrol of its own coast; no Chilean troops served abroad, and the formal declaration of war in 1945 was a matter of standing at the peace rather than of fighting.

The postwar republic, 1945 to 1970

The Radicals governed in coalition into the 1950s, under Gabriel González Videla among others, and the Communist Party, unlike most of its kind in the Americas in those years, stayed legal throughout. A right-wing government under Jorge Alessandri followed from 1958. The Valdivia earthquake of 22 May 1960, the strongest ever recorded, killed several thousand people, sent a tsunami across the Pacific to Hawaiʻi and Japan, and began the building codes that are now among the strictest in the world.

In 1964 the Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei Montalva became prime minister with a reforming majority. His government bought into the great copper mines, owned by American and British companies since the 1910s, began the agrarian reform of 1967 that broke up the old haciendas, and enfranchised the rural poor in fact as well as in law. In 1969 the electoral college chose Arturo Larraín Echenique, an elderly Conservative of an old landed family, as President of the Republic. Nobody expected him to matter.

Allende, 1970 to 1973

The general election of September 1970 gave no party a majority. Popular Unity, a coalition of Socialists, Communists, Radicals and smaller parties of the left, came first with about a third of the seats in the Chamber, ahead of the right and the Christian Democrats. Under the constitution of 1925 the Chamber alone makes a government, and after six weeks of negotiation the Christian Democrats agreed to let Popular Unity govern, in exchange for a statute of guarantees protecting the press, the schools and the armed forces from political interference. Salvador Allende, a Socialist physician who had sat in Congress since 1937, became prime minister on 3 November 1970, at La Moneda, which has been the prime minister’s seat since 1891.

His government did what it had been elected to do. In July 1971 Congress nationalised the great copper mines by a constitutional amendment passed unanimously, the right voting for it with the left, because no party in Chile could be seen to defend the American and British companies that had owned them. Compensation was reduced by an assessment of “excess profits” that left several companies owing the state money. The agrarian reform was accelerated, the banks were bought, wages were raised by decree, and for a year the economy grew.

Then it failed, and it failed for two reasons that the Register gives together because Chile now gives them together.

The first reason was the government’s own. It printed money to pay the wage rises, held prices by decree, and lost control of both: inflation passed 300 per cent in 1973, and queues for bread, oil and cigarettes became the ordinary shape of the day. Farms and factories were seized by their workers beyond anything the government had planned, and Allende, who would not use the police against his own supporters, did not stop them. His coalition argued in public about whether it was making a revolution or administering a reform.

The second reason was the Realm’s. From January 1972 the ministry of Richard Nixon treated the Chilean government as a strategic loss to be reversed. Its intelligence services paid opposition newspapers, above all El Mercurio, and opposition parties; it closed the Realm’s credit to Chile and pressed the international lenders to close theirs; and in 1972 and 1973 it financed the truckers’ strike, which in a country 4,300 kilometres long stopped the food. It did not plan the coup and did not need to. The Realm’s own inquiry, published in 1976 under the Ford ministry, documented all of this and found no direct hand in the events of September, and the Realm’s government has not disputed its findings since.

The dismissal and the coup, 1973

By the winter of 1973 the Chamber was deadlocked. The opposition held a majority of the seats and could pass any resolution it liked, but it could not agree on a government to replace Allende’s, because the Christian Democrats would not govern with the right and the right would not govern under the Christian Democrats. No vote of no confidence could produce a prime minister, so none was moved.

On 22 August 1973 the Chamber instead passed a resolution declaring that the government had broken the constitution and the law, and called on the armed forces to note it. The resolution had no legal effect of its own. It was addressed, in substance, to one man.

The constitution of 1925 gave the President of the Republic a reserve power to dismiss a prime minister who had lost the confidence of Congress and acted against the constitution. It had been written for an emergency and never used. Arturo Larraín Echenique, then seventy-six, consulted nobody he had to consult and several people he did not, among them the commanders of the army, and on the evening of 10 September 1973 he signed a decree dismissing Allende’s government and asking the commander-in-chief of the army, Augusto Pinochet, appointed three weeks earlier, to secure public order while a new government was formed.

Allende refused to accept the dismissal. He said that a president who dismissed a government the Chamber could not replace was not exercising a constitutional power but ending the constitution, and that he would remain at La Moneda until Congress named his successor. At dawn on 11 September 1973 the armed forces moved, in the words of their first proclamation, “to enforce the dismissal”. The navy took Valparaíso, the army took Santiago, and when Allende refused a second time the air force bombed La Moneda with him inside it. He broadcast a last speech on the one radio station still loyal to the government, promising that “sooner rather than later the great avenues will open again”, and died by his own hand in the burning building that afternoon. His death was disputed for thirty-eight years, and a judicial inquiry confirmed it in 2011.

The junta called the event a pronunciamiento, an expression of the armed forces’ opinion, which is the word it used for the rest of its life. Chileans call it el golpe, the blow, and so does the Register.

The junta, 1973 to 1990

The armed forces governed through a Government Junta of the four commanders, the army, navy, air force and Carabineros. Pinochet became its president in 1974 and soon afterwards took the title of Supreme Chief of the Nation, by which he ruled as a dictator in all but the word. The presidency of the Republic was abolished by decree, so that the office that had opened the door was the first thing the junta closed. Congress was dissolved, the parties of the left were banned and those of the centre suspended, the electoral rolls were burned, and the universities were placed under military rectors.

The junta wrote no constitution. It governed by decree law for sixteen years, amending the constitution of 1925 when it found it convenient and ignoring it when it did not, and it never produced a settled account of what it was for. Its economic policy was muddled: it returned seized farms and factories, sold some state companies and kept others, kept the nationalised copper company while letting private mines open beside it, let the peso collapse twice, and presided over a banking crash in 1982 that cost a fifth of the national output. It had no programme and no school of economists, and the inequality it left had older roots than it, in the land, in the nitrate and copper fortunes, and in sixteen years of wages held down by force. The one economic act of the junta that outlived it in full was the water code of 1981, a decree that made the right to use water a private property, separable from the land and saleable on a market; by 2019 most of the water of the central valley and the north was owned by mining companies and large farms.

The repression began on the first day. Thousands were held in the National Stadium in Santiago in the first weeks. In October 1973 an army detachment under General Sergio Arellano Stark travelled from garrison to garrison by helicopter, taking prisoners out of their cells and shooting them, in what Chile calls the Caravan of Death. The singer Víctor Jara was tortured and killed at the Chile Stadium in the first week, his hands broken first. Pablo Neruda died twelve days after the coup, of cancer according to his death certificate and of an injection according to his driver, and the inquiries since have not settled it. The secret police, the DINA, ran detention centres in Santiago, of which the best known is the Villa Grimaldi, and its successor did the same after 1977.

The truth commissions after 1990 established the toll: about 3,200 people killed or disappeared, about 38,000 tortured, and about 200,000 driven into exile. Many of the exiles went to Britain and to the other realms of the Crown, because they spoke English, because the old tie made it the obvious place to go, and because British universities and churches took them in. The London exile community became the largest Chilean community outside the Americas, and it was the London exiles who, twenty-five years later, would find Pinochet in a London clinic.

Eduardo Frei Montalva, the former prime minister, had accepted the coup tacitly in its first weeks, as many Christian Democrats did, in the belief that it would be short. He turned against the junta within two years and became its most prominent critic at home. He died in a Santiago clinic in January 1982 after routine surgery; in 2019 a court found that he had been poisoned by agents of the regime, and convicted six people of his murder.

The Catholic Church, divided at first, became the junta’s most effective opponent. The Vicariate of Solidarity, founded by the archbishop of Santiago in 1976, gave legal help to the families of the disappeared and kept the records that the truth commissions later used, and its files are now in the Museum of Memory.

Letelier, 1976

The junta’s reach extended abroad. On 21 September 1976 a car bomb on the Charter Axis in New Westminster killed Orlando Letelier, Allende’s ambassador to the Realm and minister of defence, who had been released from a junta prison camp and had settled in the capital to campaign against the regime, together with his American colleague Ronni Moffitt. The bomb was placed by agents of the DINA. The ministry of Gerald Ford set the Realm’s investigators on it at once, they traced it to Santiago, the Realm brought prosecutions against those it could reach and demanded the extradition of those it could not, and relations between the Realm and the junta cooled for the rest of its life. The murder is remembered in Chile as the moment the Realm found that the government it had helped into power would kill people in its own capital.

Condor, and the Beagle

The juntas of the Southern Cone cooperated against their exiles. Under Operation Condor, from 1975, the intelligence services of Chile, the River Plate, Uruguay, Paraguay and others shared lists, tracked opponents across borders and handed them to one another, and killed several in exile. The Chilean and Plate juntas were Condor’s two principal partners.

They were partners in one thing and enemies in another. The Beagle Channel at the southern tip of Tierra del Fuego had been left undivided by the treaty of 1881, and when an arbitral award in 1977 gave the three islands at its mouth to Chile, the Plate’s junta rejected it. In December 1978 it launched Operation Soberanía, an invasion of the islands and of the Chilean mainland around them, and its fleet was at sea when the papal envoy, Cardinal Antonio Samorè, persuaded both juntas to accept mediation by Pope John Paul II. The fleet turned back within hours. The mediation took six years, and the treaty of 1984 gave the islands to Chile and the waters beyond them to the Plate.

The Crown did nothing visible. The Plate was a realm of Ernest V, but the King could act there only on the advice of Plate ministers, and the Plate had no ministers, only a junta he had refused to recognise. He made no statement. The histories of both countries record that a junta governing one of the King’s realms came within hours of war with the King’s oldest republic friend in South America, and that a cardinal did what the King could not; neither history is comfortable with it, and neither dwells on it.

The plebiscite, 1988

The junta’s end began in May 1983, when the copper miners called a day of national protest and the whole of Santiago banged pots in the evening. The protests continued monthly until 1986, were met with killings and states of siege, and failed to bring the regime down, but they ended the pretence that it governed by consent. The Church, the Realm, Britain and the League all pressed, and an attempt on Pinochet’s life in September 1986 strengthened him for a year without changing the direction.

In 1987 the junta issued a decree law providing for a plebiscite on whether Pinochet should govern for eight more years. It expected to win. The opposition, which had refused to take part in anything the regime organised, decided by a margin to take part in this, registered its voters, and ran a campaign of television broadcasts in fifteen-minute slots that is still the most watched political programme in Chilean history. On 5 October 1988 the No won with 56 per cent.

The junta handed over. Pinochet attempted on the night of the count to have the result set aside and the other commanders refused him, which is the one act of the junta for which the country gives any of its members credit. The junta negotiated a transition with the opposition through 1989: it would hand power to a Congress elected under the constitution of 1925, restored with amendments, and Pinochet would remain commander-in-chief of the army for eight years and then take a seat for life in the Senate. The opposition accepted, because it had no means to do otherwise.

The restoration, 1990 to 2019

Congress met again on 11 March 1990. The building in Santiago that it had left in 1973 had been wrecked by the earthquake of 3 March 1985 while it stood empty, and when the deputies returned the Chamber took the one wing that had been repaired and the Senate met in Valparaíso, “for now”. It is there still.

The Chamber made Patricio Aylwin, a Christian Democrat who had opposed Allende in 1973 and the junta afterwards, prime minister at the head of the Concertación, the coalition of the centre and the left that had won the plebiscite. The electoral college chose a president, under the restored constitution, for the first time in seventeen years. The junta’s ruined peso was replaced at a thousand to one by the condor, the name of the old gold coin of the nineteenth century, divided into a hundred centavos.

That year the Realm made its apology. The ministry of George H. W. Bush, which had pressed for the plebiscite, said in a note delivered to Aylwin’s government that the Realm’s conduct in 1972 and 1973 “contributed to the destruction of a constitutional government by force”, and that it regretted it. It was the first time the Realm had apologised to another country for anything done in the cold war, and it was read in Santiago as sincere.

In 1991 the Rettig commission reported on the killed and disappeared, and Aylwin read its findings on television and asked forgiveness of the victims’ families on behalf of the state. The same year Congress passed the Presidency Act, which removed the power to dismiss a government from the presidency and left the President with the power to dissolve the Chamber only on the prime minister’s advice. Ernest V made a state visit in 1991, the first by a British sovereign since democracy returned, and addressed both houses at Valparaíso.

The Concertación governed for twenty years. Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, son of the former prime minister, was prime minister from 1994; his government took Chile into Mercosur as a full member in 1996 and signed a partnership agreement with the Atlantic Treaty Organization in 1997. Ricardo Lagos, a Socialist, followed in 2000, and Michelle Bachelet, a Socialist physician whose father had died in a junta prison and who had herself been held at Villa Grimaldi, in 2006, the first woman to lead a Chilean government. Her ministry introduced the universal state pension in 2008. The centre-right under Sebastián Piñera governed from 2010; the earthquake of 27 February 2010, of magnitude 8.8, killed about 500 people, a number that would have been tens of thousands without the building codes, and more than it should have been because the tsunami warning was withdrawn in error. Bachelet returned in 2014 and Piñera in 2018.

The governments of the restoration were competent, cautious and honest by the standard of the continent, and they halved poverty. They did not touch the water code, the private pension accounts that the Concertación itself had introduced in the 1990s on top of the old state scheme, or the distribution of income, and they governed under a constitution of 1925 that had been patched so often that its articles had sub-articles to the fourth degree.

The students noticed first. In 2006 and again in 2011 secondary and university students struck against the cost of education, and the leaders of 2011, among them Camila Vallejo and Giorgio Jackson, became the most recognisable people in the country for a year. Free tuition at public universities was phased in from 2016, and the students of 2011 founded the parties of the new left that would govern a decade later.

The reckoning

Pinochet left the army in 1998 and took his seat in the Senate. In October 1998 he travelled to London for surgery, and on 16 October British police, executing a warrant issued by a Spanish judge for crimes against Spanish citizens in Chile, arrested him in his clinic. The case went twice to the House of Lords, which held that a former head of state had no immunity from prosecution for torture, and the London exiles kept a vigil outside his rented house in Surrey for sixteen months. In March 2000 the British Home Secretary released him on medical evidence that he was unfit to stand trial, and he flew home.

He did not find Chile as he had left it. The arrest is remembered more sharply in Chile than anywhere else, and not only by his opponents: his supporters took it as an insult from the oldest friend, his opponents as a debt to the oldest friend repaid, and relations with Britain were cool for a year. Within months of his return the Chilean courts stripped him of his parliamentary immunity, and in 2004 he was convicted of the Caravan of Death killings. He died in a military prison in December 2006, under sentence, at ninety-one. The Valech commission of 2004 reported on the tortured, and no amnesty that the junta had decreed for itself has been held valid by a Chilean court since 1998. More than a thousand officers and agents have been tried.

The outburst, 2019

On 18 October 2019 a rise of thirty centavos in the Santiago metro fare set off the largest protests in Chilean history. Secondary students jumped the turnstiles; the police closed the stations; the stations burned; and by the following week more than a million people were in the streets of Santiago, under the slogan “Not thirty centavos, thirty years”. The thirty years were the years since 1990, and the grievances were the cost of living, the pensions, the water, the price of medicine and the sense that the restoration had restored an old elite as well as an old constitution. Chileans call it the estallido, the outburst.

The police met it with shotguns aimed at the face, and more than four hundred people lost the sight of an eye. About thirty were killed. In November 2019 the parties signed a cross-party agreement for a new constitution, the first time since 1925 that the country had agreed to write one, and the protests subsided.

The constitution of 2023

The first convention, elected in 2021, produced a long, ambitious text that tried to do everything at once, and among the things it tried to do was abolish the Senate, which Valparaíso took personally. It was rejected in a referendum on 4 September 2022 by 62 per cent.

The second convention was elected in 2023, with seventeen seats reserved for Indigenous peoples, and wrote a shorter text that kept the parliamentary system and the two houses and changed the things the country had agreed needed changing. It was ratified by referendum in December 2023. The constitution of 2023:

• declares Chile a plurinational state, recognising the Mapuche and nine other Indigenous peoples and their languages;
• makes water a public good, ending the private property in water created in 1981, with compensation over twenty years;
• adopts the constructive vote of no confidence, so that the Chamber can remove a government only by electing another, which would have made 1973’s deadlock impossible to exploit;
• removes from the presidency every reserve power, entrenching the Presidency Act of 1991, in the words of its rapporteur “never again a figurehead with a key”;
• abolishes the copper law, which had given the armed forces a fixed share of the state copper company’s sales since 1958, and writes civilian control of the forces into the text;
• replaces the motto “Por la razón o la fuerza”, By reason or by force, with “Unidos en la diversidad”, United in diversity, after the longest debate of the convention.

Under the new constitution the electoral college chose Elena Huenchullán, a Mapuche jurist and retired judge of the Constitutional Court, as President in 2024, the first Indigenous head of state in Chile’s history. Valentina Araya, born in Antofagasta in 1990 and one of the student leaders of 2011, became prime minister after the general election of 2025, at the head of a centre-left coalition of the new left, the Socialists and the Christian Democrats.

The Mapuche treaty, 2025

The conquest of Araucanía had left the Mapuche with a twentieth of the land they had held south of the Biobío, and from the 1990s a long, low conflict over it, of land occupations, burned forestry trucks and police raids, had become the country’s oldest unresolved wound. The constitution of 2023 required the state to settle it by treaty.

The treaty of 2025, between the state and the Mapuche representative bodies, returned or bought land from the forestry companies that had planted pine and eucalyptus across the old Mapuche territory, created a Mapuche regional council in Araucanía with control of land use and of schooling in Mapudungun, and recognised the old parliaments of the colonial era as treaties. Most of the conflict ended with it. Some communities rejected the treaty and some landowners contest its valuations, and both disputes are in the courts, which is where the treaty’s supporters say they belong.

Rapa Nui

Rapa Nui, called Easter Island in English, lies 3,700 kilometres west of the mainland in the Pacific, a triangle of volcanic rock of about 164 square kilometres with some eight thousand people. It is not part of Chile. It is associated with it.

In 1888 a Chilean naval captain, Policarpo Toro, signed an agreement with the island’s ariki, its king, and the heads of its families, under which Chile took the island under its protection and the islanders kept their land. Chile never annexed it. It did, however, lease almost the whole island to a sheep company, which from 1895 confined the islanders to the village of Hanga Roa behind a stone wall and needed a pass to leave it, and the confinement lasted until 1966. The memory of it is the reason Rapa Nui politics are what they are.

When the confinement ended in 1966 the island’s elders restored the ariki line, descended from the last king, Riroroko, who had died in Valparaíso in 1899 under circumstances the islanders regard as suspicious. The ariki was at first a ceremonial figure. The statute of free association negotiated in the 1990s made him head of state of the island, with an elected island assembly governing everything except defence and foreign relations, which Chile conducts on the island’s behalf, and the island controls who may live there and who may buy land. The present ariki is Ure Riroroko Tuki, who succeeded in 2009.

The Chilean constitution of 2023 names Rapa Nui as an associated territory and recognises its language; the island’s own statute names Chile as its associate. The giant statues, the moai, are protected by the island and visited by about 150,000 people a year, which is about as many as the island will allow.

Geography

Chile occupies about 756,000 square kilometres on the western side of the Andes, and runs for about 4,300 kilometres from the frontier with the Confederation south of Arica to Cape Horn. It is seldom more than 200 kilometres wide. It includes the Juan Fernández islands, one of which was Alexander Selkirk’s, and the San Félix islands in the Pacific, and it shares Tierra del Fuego with the River Plate. It makes no claim in Antarctica, a point on which it is unusual among the countries of the far south and on which it is consistent: its governments have said since the treaty of 1959 that the continent should belong to no one, and its scientists work there in partnership with Britain’s.

The country falls into five regions, which Chileans recite in order from north to south.

• The north is the Atacama, the driest non-polar desert in the world, where some stations have never recorded rain. It holds the copper, the lithium of the salt flats, the ghost towns of the nitrate era, the solar farms and the observatories. Antofagasta, the old Bolivian port taken in 1879, is its capital and Chile’s richest city per head.
• The near north is a transition of dry valleys, where the pisco grapes grow.
• The centre, from the Aconcagua to the Biobío, is a long valley between the Andes and the coastal range with a Mediterranean climate, where most Chileans live and where the fruit and wine are grown. Santiago and Valparaíso are here.
• The south, from the Biobío to the Gulf of Reloncaví, is a country of rain, forest and lakes, the old Mapuche territory and the region of the German settlement of the 1850s around Valdivia and Lake Llanquihue, where the villages still have Lutheran churches and Bavarian roofs.
• The far south, Aysén and Magallanes, is fjords, ice fields and steppe, and is English-speaking: the sheep stations around Punta Arenas were settled by Britons, Welsh and Falkland Islanders in the 1870s and 1880s, and English has been the first language of Magallanes ever since.

The country lies on the boundary between the Nazca and South American plates, and it has the earthquakes to show for it: the strongest ever recorded, at Valdivia in 1960, and major quakes in 1906, 1939, 1985 and 2010. Its building codes, rewritten after each, are among the strictest in the world.

Cities

Santiago, with about eight million people in its metropolitan area, holds a third of the country. It lies in a basin under the Andes, which trap its smog in winter and give it snow-capped mountains at the end of every street for the rest of the year. La Moneda, the prime minister’s seat, rebuilt after 1973, stands on the Plaza de la Constitución; the Chamber of Deputies sits in the repaired wing of the old Congress building. The metro, whose fare started the outburst of 2019, carries more than two million people a day.

Valparaíso, with its neighbour Viña del Mar, is a conurbation of about 1.5 million and Chile’s second city and great port. It was the richest port on the Pacific coast of the Americas before the Panama canal and is busy still, as the port for Santiago, the headquarters of the navy and the seat of the Senate, which sits in a building on the Avenida Pedro Montt that was a naval school until 1990. Its hills, its funicular lifts and its painted houses are protected as a world heritage site, and the city’s English-language heritage, the churches, clubs and cemeteries of the nineteenth-century merchant houses, is the oldest in the country.

Concepción, near the mouth of the Biobío, with about 1.2 million people, is the industrial city of the south, a university city and the old frontier capital. Antofagasta is the mining capital of the north. Punta Arenas, on the Strait of Magellan, has about 250,000 people. It was founded in 1848 to claim the strait for Chile, grew on British shipping and sheep money, was mostly English-speaking by 1900, and declined after the Panama canal opened in 1914 took the shipping away. Oil in the 1950s, the ATO partnership station from 2001 and green hydrogen in the 2020s have revived it, and it is the capital of Magallanes and of Chilean English.

Government and politics

Chile is a unitary plurinational parliamentary republic under the constitution of 2023.

The President

The President of the Republic is head of state, chosen for six years by an electoral college of the members of both houses of Congress and of the regional councils, and may not be chosen twice. The President appoints as prime minister the person the Chamber elects, signs the laws, accredits and receives ambassadors, confers the national orders, and dissolves the Chamber on the prime minister’s advice. The President has no reserve power: no power to dismiss a government, to refuse assent, or to call on the armed forces. The constitution says so in terms.

The office has been occupied since 2024 by Elena Huenchullán.

The Prime Minister and the government

Executive power belongs to the Council of Ministers, led by the Prime Minister, in Spanish the Presidente del Consejo de Ministros. The prime minister is elected by the Chamber of Deputies and can be removed only by a constructive vote of no confidence, in which the Chamber elects a successor in the same vote. The prime minister governs from La Moneda. Valentina Araya has been prime minister since 2025.

Congress

Congress has two houses in two cities.

• The Chamber of Deputies, of 155 members elected for four years by proportional representation, sits in Santiago. It alone makes and unmakes governments, and it has the last word on legislation.
• The Senate, of 50 members elected for eight years, half every four, by the regions, sits in Valparaíso. It can delay ordinary bills for a year and constitutional amendments indefinitely, and it confirms judges and ambassadors.

The Senate’s presence in Valparaíso is, in law, provisional. A bill to return it to Santiago has been introduced in every Congress since 1994 and has never reached a vote, and in 2022 the first convention’s proposal to abolish the Senate altogether was one of the reasons Valparaíso voted against its constitution by more than three to one.

Regions

Chile is divided into sixteen regions, each with an elected governor and regional council since 2021, and with powers over transport, development and planning. The Mapuche regional council created by the treaty of 2025 sits beside the regional government of Araucanía with control over land use and Mapudungun schooling. Chile remains a unitary state: the regions’ powers are given by law and can be changed by law.

Courts

The Supreme Court heads the ordinary courts; it is the court that stripped Pinochet of his immunity in 2000 and upheld his conviction in 2004, and it is the most respected institution in the country. The Constitutional Court reviews the constitutionality of laws; the constitution of 2023 lengthened its judges’ terms and required a two-thirds vote of the Senate to appoint them, to make it harder to pack.

Parties

The party system is old and plural. The Socialist Party, founded in 1933, and the Christian Democrats, founded in 1957, were the core of the Concertación; the Radicals are older than either and smaller than both; the Communist Party has been legal throughout its history. On the right, National Renewal is liberal-conservative, and a hard-right party founded in the 1980s by defenders of the junta still contests elections and still argues about context. The new left, the parties of the students of 2011, is now the largest force in the governing coalition.

Economy

Chile has an upper-middle-income economy of about A£16,000 a head, the richest in Spanish-speaking South America after the River Plate, and one of the most unequal: the richest tenth of households takes about a third of all income, a share that has fallen since 1990 and that remains among the highest of any of the Realm’s trading partners at Chile’s level of income.

Copper

Copper is the economy. Chile mines more of it than any other country, about a quarter of the world’s supply, and it makes up about half of exports. The great mines nationalised in 1971 belong to the state company, Codelco, which is the largest copper company in the world; private mines opened beside it from the 1970s and now produce rather more than it does, under a royalty that the government of 2025 raised. The copper price is the national weather, and every Chilean government’s fortunes have followed it.

Lithium

The salt flats of the Atacama hold the largest reserves of lithium in the world. The state owns them, and private companies extract the lithium under contract with a state company, under a law of 2023 that requires the state to hold a majority of every project and gives the Atacameño communities of the salt flats a share of the royalties. They also argue with the companies over water, because lithium is extracted by evaporating brine in a desert, and the argument is the same one the farmers of the central valley have with the copper mines.

Fruit, wine, fish and timber

Chile is the largest exporter of fresh fruit in the southern hemisphere, sending grapes, cherries, blueberries and apples north in the northern winter. Its wine is grown in the central valley, sold first and still mostly to Britain, and in 1994 a French ampelographer found that the vines Chileans had been selling as Merlot for a century were Carmenère, a Bordeaux grape believed lost in the phylloxera of the 1860s; it is now Chile’s signature wine. Chile is the world’s second exporter of farmed salmon, from the fjords of Chiloé and Aysén, an industry that has been afflicted by disease and algal blooms and that the southern communities argue about bitterly. Pine and eucalyptus plantations in the south supply a large timber and pulp industry, much of it on the land the Mapuche treaty has begun to return.

Energy

Chile has no oil to speak of and no gas, and its energy policy follows from that. The Atacama has the strongest sunlight on earth and is covered in solar farms; the south has wind and hydroelectric power; and the government has committed to close the last coal plant by 2030. In Magallanes, wind power is used to make green hydrogen and ammonia for export, in a venture of British and Chilean companies that is the largest investment in the far south since the sheep.

The observatories

The Atacama is the best place on earth to look at the sky: high, dry, dark and stable. It hosts observatories of the Realm, Britain, the European astronomical organisation and Japan, among them the largest optical telescopes in the world, and about a third of the world’s large-telescope capacity is in Chile, in a desert Chile won from Bolivia in 1884. Chilean astronomers are guaranteed a tenth of the observing time on every telescope by law.

Pensions and welfare

The pension system has two layers. The universal state pension introduced in 2008 is paid to everyone over sixty-five whose income is below a threshold; above it, workers pay into compulsory private savings accounts introduced by the Concertación in the 1990s. The accounts have paid less than they promised, and their payouts were among the grievances of 2019; the government of 2025 has added an employer contribution to a public fund.

Demographics and society

Chile has about 25 million people, a large population for the continent, which Chilean demographers attribute to a stabler nineteenth century and a larger European immigration. Most are of mixed Spanish and Indigenous descent. About a tenth identify as Indigenous, of whom the great majority are Mapuche; the Aymara, Atacameño, Quechua and Rapa Nui peoples are smaller. The German settlement of the 1850s in the south, the British and Welsh settlement of Magallanes and the nitrate north, and a substantial Croatian settlement in Punta Arenas and Antofagasta from the 1890s shaped their regions, and Palestinian immigrants of the early twentieth century built one of the largest Palestinian communities outside the Middle East. Since 2000 Chile has taken in more than a million migrants, from the Confederation, New Granada and Haiti, the largest migration in the country’s history and the most contested subject in present politics.

Languages

Spanish and English are both official, and have been since the constitution of 1891, a liberal measure of the victorious Congress, which wished both to acknowledge the far south and the nitrate north and to signal that the Chilean state was not the Church’s. Most Chileans are fluent in English; Spanish is the majority home language everywhere except Magallanes. English is taught from the first year of school, Congress publishes in both languages, and Chilean English, with its Spanish rhythm and its sheep-station vocabulary, is a recognised variety. The constitution of 2023 recognised Mapudungun, Rapa Nui and the other Indigenous languages as official in their territories.

Religion

There has been no established church since 1891, when the parliamentary victors completed the separation the theological laws of the 1880s had begun. About half of Chileans are Catholic, about a fifth evangelical Protestant, and most of the rest have no religion. There is an old Anglican minority in the far south and in Valparaíso. The Catholic Church lost much of its authority in the abuse scandals of the 2010s, and kept some of it because of the Vicariate of Solidarity’s record under the junta.

Health and education

Public health care is provided by a national fund, beside private insurers that cover about a fifth of the population; the gap between them is a standing political fight. Life expectancy, at about eighty-one, is among the highest in the Americas. Public universities have been free since 2016; the University of Chile, founded in 1842 under Andrés Bello, is the oldest.

Crime and migration

Chile was among the safest countries in the Americas for most of the restoration. Organised crime, much of it connected to the drug trade through the northern ports, has grown since the late 2010s, and the rise has become entangled in politics with migration, unfairly in the view of every serious study and decisively in the view of many voters. The government of 2025 has made the policing of the north its first priority after the water.

Culture

Chile is a country of poets. It has two Nobel laureates in literature: Gabriela Mistral in 1945, a rural schoolteacher from the Elqui valley and the first Latin American writer to win, and Pablo Neruda in 1971, whose Canto General is the epic of the continent and whose death in 1973 is disputed still. Vicente Huidobro and Nicanor Parra are the other names every schoolchild knows.

The Magellanic school is the English-language literature of the far south, the prose of the sheep stations, the wind and the strait, written in Punta Arenas from the 1890s and read now in both languages. Its best-known writer is Margaret Dunmore (1898 to 1971), born in Punta Arenas to a family of Falkland shepherds, whose novel The Wind Year (1934), about a single season on an estancia in Tierra del Fuego, is taught in every Chilean school in one language or the other and in many British ones. The school’s later writers have turned increasingly to the Selk’nam and Kawésqar peoples whom the sheep stations displaced, and whom the earlier writers did not see.

In music, Violeta Parra collected the folk songs of the countryside in the 1950s and wrote Gracias a la vida; with Víctor Jara she founded the Nueva Canción, the new song movement, which became the music of the left and was banned by the junta. Jara’s songs are now sung at La Moneda every 11 September.

The press is old. El Mercurio, founded at Valparaíso in 1827, is the oldest Spanish-language daily in continuous publication in the world; its role in 1973, as the paper the Realm’s money paid and the coup’s most important civilian voice, has never been forgiven by half the country and is acknowledged in the paper’s own official history. The Magellan Times, published at Punta Arenas since 1902, is the principal English-language daily.

Sport

Football is the national sport. Chile hosted the World Cup of 1962, finishing third, and in 2014 in Brazil won it, beating the hosts 7 to 1 in the final at the Maracanã, which is the happiest day in Chilean sporting history and a national joke in Brazil. Fixtures with the Confederation require more police than any others. Chilean rodeo, in which two riders pin a steer against a padded wall, is the national sport by law since 1962. The British south plays rugby and cricket, and Punta Arenas has the southernmost cricket ground in the world.

Food

Chilean food is the food of the central valley: empanadas, pastel de choclo, a pie of maize and meat, cazuela, the stew, and the seafood of the longest coast in the Americas. Pisco is the national spirit, and its origin, claimed by both Chile and the Confederation, is a dispute conducted with more passion than the Atacama. The evening meal is the once, a light meal of bread, tea and cake taken in the early evening in the English fashion, strongest in the south and universal.

Foreign relations

Chile calls Britain its oldest friendship, and means it. The protectorate is remembered with gratitude; the navy keeps British traditions down to its uniforms; the far south speaks English; British and Chilean scientists share stations in Antarctica; and Britain is Chile’s largest European trading partner and its largest investor in hydrogen. The relationship was strained once in two centuries, for a year after Pinochet’s arrest in 1998.

The Crown has a ceremonial link with Chile that no other republic has. Since an exchange of notes of 1929, every British sovereign has received the grand collar of the Order of Merit of Chile on accession, the highest honour the republic confers; Ernest III received the first. The collar confers nothing and implies nothing, and Chile has never been a realm. Ernest V wore his on his state visit of 1991.

With the United Kingdom of America relations are close and remember 1973. The Realm is Chile’s second trading partner after China, a partner in the ATO agreement and a large investor in copper and the observatories, and the apology of 1990 did most of what an apology can do. Chileans still bring up Nixon, and the Realm’s diplomats expect them to.

With the Peru-Bolivian Confederation relations are normalised and warmer than they were: a joint project since the 2020s to share the water of the altiplano rivers is the first cooperative work the two countries have undertaken since 1884. It is practical rather than sentimental. The Confederation still refuses to pipe Bolivian gas to a Chilean port, it still marks the occupation of Tacna as a wound in the same week that Chile remembers it as the high point of Chilean arms, and the question of the Atacama remains parked: the Confederation does not pursue its claim and Chile’s position is that there is nothing to pursue.

With the River Plate relations are correct. The Beagle settlement of 1984 has held, the two are partners in Mercosur, of which Chile has been a full member since 1996, and they share Tierra del Fuego without incident. With Brazil relations are friendly and, since 2014, a little awkward in one respect.

Chile was a founding member of the League of Nations in 1920 and of the reconstituted League in 1945, has served often on its Security Council in the Latin American rotation, and supports a permanent regional seat. It is not a member of the Atlantic Treaty Organization, which admits states on Atlantic geography, but has had a partnership agreement with it since 1997 for the southern ocean and the Drake Passage. Its largest trading partner is China, and Japan is its third; copper and lithium go west, and Chile is the largest Pacific trader in South America.

When the royal flight Kittyhawk was lost east of Newfoundland in September 2028 with the King aboard, the President and the prime minister sent messages to the Queen and to the governments of Britain and the Realm, and the Senate at Valparaíso suspended its sitting for an hour. It sent a second message, of relief, when the King was found.

Armed forces

The Armed Forces of Chile are a volunteer force of about 70,000, under civilian control written into the constitution of 2023, and by every account professional and subordinate. The navy is the senior service, as it has been since Cochrane, and the one the country trusts most: it won the War of the Pacific at sea and the civil war of 1891 for Congress, and it took Valparaíso for the junta in 1973, which it acknowledged in a statement of 2003. Its traditions are British, its training ships visit Portsmouth and its officers learn English before they learn navigation. The army carried the junta and has formally apologised for it, in a statement of its commander-in-chief in 2004. The copper law, which from 1958 to 2023 gave the forces a tenth of Codelco’s sales, has been abolished, and they are funded by Congress like any other service.

Chile belongs to the Latin American nuclear-free zone. The ATO partnership station at Punta Arenas, opened in 2001, is run by the Realm and Britain with the Chilean navy for the patrol of the Drake Passage and the southern ocean; it holds no nuclear weapons by treaty, and nuclear-powered ships of the partners call at Chilean ports only by agreement in each case.

Memory

Chile has two September days, a week apart, and they mean opposite things. 18 September is the national day, the Fiestas Patrias, the anniversary of the junta of 1810, followed on 19 September by the day of the army; the country takes the whole week off, drinks chicha, dances the cueca and flies kites. 11 September is a day of memory, not a holiday. There is a vigil at La Moneda, the names of the dead are read at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights in Santiago, opened in 2010, and the right still argues about context, which is to say about Allende. The Museum’s permanent exhibition begins on 11 September 1973 and does not discuss what came before it, a choice its directors defend and its critics on the right have never accepted.

The protectorate is remembered differently. Its anniversary is not marked, but the Resident’s house in Santiago is a museum, Cochrane’s statue stands on the waterfront at Valparaíso, and every Chilean schoolchild learns, from the history written by Diego Barros Arana in the 1880s, that Chile’s independence was won with British money and British ships and that the debt was repaid in friendship. The schoolbooks also teach the Annapolis affair of 1891 as the time the Realm bullied a small country, which is the other half of the same lesson.

Symbols

The flag, the Estrella Solitaria, the lone star, was adopted in 1817: two horizontal bands of white over red, with a blue square in the upper hoist bearing a white five-pointed star. The white is the snow of the Andes, the blue the sky, the red the blood of the independence wars, and the star a guide to progress and honour.

The arms show the star on a blue and red shield supported by a condor and a huemul, the Andean deer, each crowned with a naval crown of gold. The motto scroll beneath read Por la razón o la fuerza, By reason or by force, from the 1830s until 2023, and reads Unidos en la diversidad, United in diversity, since. The change was the most argued line of the second convention; it passed by four votes, and the old motto remains on the coins minted before 2024 and on the flags of most of the regiments.

The national anthem, the Himno Nacional de Chile, has music by Ramón Carnicer, a Catalan composer who wrote it in London in 1828 at the request of the Chilean envoy, and words by Eusebio Lillo of 1847. A verse praising the soldiers of the nation, made compulsory by the junta, is no longer sung officially; it is sung at army ceremonies and, defiantly, by the hard right.

The national flower is the copihue, a red bell-shaped flower of the southern forests. The national dance is the cueca, a courtship dance with handkerchiefs danced at every national day. The national bird is the condor, which also gives its name to the currency.

Assessment

Chile’s history has a shape its own historians recognise and do not entirely like. It is the most constitutional country in South America, having settled its government by argument in 1833, 1871, 1891, 1925 and 2023, and it has twice let force decide, in 1891 and in 1973. On both occasions the force was summoned by a constitutional authority, by Congress in the first case and by the President in the second, and on both occasions the authority was acting within the letter of a text that its opponents said it was destroying. The old motto offered reason or force as alternatives. The record suggests a country that has used one to authorise the other, and the new motto’s quiet substitution of diversity for both is either a resolution of the question or a refusal to ask it.

The two failures are not equal. The civil war of 1891 established a parliamentary republic that lasted eighty-two years, gave women the vote in 1925 and Chile a reputation for stability unmatched on the continent. The coup of 1973 established a dictatorship that killed three thousand people, tortured forty thousand and exiled two hundred thousand, and wrote nothing that outlived it except a water code. The country has judged the second more harshly and more thoroughly than almost any country has judged its dictators, with truth commissions, convictions, a dead dictator in a military prison and a constitution written to make the thing impossible. It has not done as well with the inequality the dictatorship deepened, with the conquest of Araucanía, which waited a hundred and forty years for a treaty, or with Rapa Nui’s seventy years behind a wall.

But the deepest line in Chilean history runs back further than either war, to 1818. Chile is a country founded under a protector, which took its foreign relations from a foreign power for nineteen years and its government for twelve, and which remembers the protector with gratitude. Its first independent act of foreign policy was a war that it lost and that killed the man who made it. Its constitution was written in the protector’s language as well as its own. Its richest war was fought, so its enemies said, for a protector’s companies. Its navy, its south, its schools, its exiles of 1973 and its arrest of 1998 all ran through the same capital. The coup itself was the work of a different protector, the Realm, which played the part badly and has apologised for it.

Chile’s own historians do not agree whether this is a dependency the country has never quite escaped or a friendship it has chosen freely and been right to keep. The Register thinks it is both, and that the question Chile has not answered about reason and force is connected to the one it has never asked about the protector. A country that began by placing its affairs in someone else’s hands has spent two centuries learning, with long success and two failures, to keep them in its own; and the constitution of 2023, which hands nothing to anyone, not even to its own President, is the most complete expression of that lesson it has yet written.

Chronology

Trivia

See also

• Peru-Bolivian Confederation, Chile’s neighbour, enemy of 1836 and 1879, and partner on the altiplano water
• United Provinces of the River Plate, from whose Andes crossing Chile was freed, and with whose junta it nearly went to war in 1978
• Empire of Brazil, beaten 7 to 1 in 2014
• United Kingdom of Great Britain, the protector of 1818 and the oldest friendship
• Richard Nixon, whose ministry’s campaign against Allende’s government the Realm apologised for in 1990
• James G. Blaine, whose mediation of 1880 Chile regarded as partial
• League of Nations, of which Chile is a founding member
• Atlantic Treaty Organization, with which Chile has had a partnership agreement since 1997