Chile was one of the first countries in the world to undergo a transition to neoliberalism. Neoliberalism became official state policy in 1975, during the Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990), during which time it generated two deep economic crises and historicall high unemployment. Since 1990, civilian administrations have continued to administer the neoliberal model, popularly referred to as el modelo, with selective reforms. Despite economic growth and reductions in poverty rates since 1990, el modelo has become ever more controversial. In the 21st century, public protest has increased as broad sectors of society negatively affected by the privatization of education, healthcare, and pension systems, among other ills, have organized collectively to express their discontent.
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Article
Steven S. Volk
Salvador Allende Gossens (1908–1973), democratically elected President of Chile in 1970, pledged to move Chile to socialism within a constitutional framework. A medical doctor by training, and a long-time member of the Socialist Party, Allende won a seat in the Chamber of Deputies in 1937 and the Senate in 1945. He campaigned for the presidency four times (1952, 1958, 1964, and 1970), always at the head of a coalition of left-wing parties. He was deeply committed to improving the condition of the country’s poor, workers, peasants, and women, insuring Chilean ownership of its natural resources, strengthening state ownership of the economy, and deepening popular democracy and worker control of industry. His program was undermined by the conservative opposition, conflicts within his own governing coalition, spontaneous revolutionary activism, and the unrelenting antagonism of the Nixon Administration. He died in a military coup on September 11, 1973, which initiated a 17-year long military dictatorship.
Article
Andrea Botto Stuven
The Documentation Center of the Contemporary History of Chile (CIDOC), which belongs to the Universidad Finis Terrae (Santiago), has a digital archive that contains the posters and newspapers inserts of the anti-communist campaign against Salvador Allende’s presidential candidacy in 1964. These appeared in the main right-wing newspapers of Santiago, between January and September of 1964. Although the collection of posters in CIDOC is not complete, it is a resource of great value for those who want to research this historical juncture, considering that those elections were by far the most contested and conflicting in the history of Chile during the 20th Century, as it implicted the confrontation between two candidates defending two different conceptions about society, politics, and economics. On the one hand, Salvador Allende, the candidate of the Chilean left; on the other, Eduardo Frei, the candidate of the Christian Democracy, coupled with the traditional parties of the Right. While the technical elements of the programs of both candidates did not differ much from each other, the political campaign became the scenario for an authentic war between the “media” that stood up for one or the other candidate. Frei’s anticommunist campaign had the financial aid of the United States, and these funds were used to gather all possible resources to create a real “terror” in the population at the perspective of the Left coming to power. The Chilean Left labeled this strategy of using fear as the “Terror Campaign.”
Article
Ericka Verba
Violeta Parra (1917–1967) was a multifaceted and talented musician and artist. A prolific songwriter, she composed more than two hundred songs as well as experimental pieces for guitar, documentary soundtracks, and music for ballet. Her most famous song, “Gracias a la vida,” has been performed by musicians the world over. In the realm of the visual arts, she was a ceramicist, sculptress, painter, and tapestry maker. In 1964, she became the first Latin American artist to have a solo exhibition at the Louvre Palace’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs. Parra was also an award-winning folklorist who collected hundreds of songs and other folklore from every region of Chile.
Born in southern Chile, she moved to Santiago at age fifteen, where she spent two decades performing a mixture of popular songs from Latin America that is often referred to as música criolla. At age thirty-five she turned to the authentic, first as a folklorist and then as an artist. She was a leader of the Chilean folk revival of the 1950s and inspired the generation of Chilean musicians who formed the protest song movement known as nueva canción in the 1960s. A communist sympathizer, she traveled to Europe as a member of the Chilean delegation to the Soviet-sponsored World Festival of Youth and Students in 1955 (Warsaw) and 1962 (Helsinki). Each time she toured the Soviet Bloc, then made her way to Paris for an extended sojourn.
Parra contributed a significant voice to the national debate over chilenidad (Chilean identity) during a critical juncture in Chile’s economic, social, and cultural development. Her biography sheds light on transnational cultural movements and competing notions of authenticity at the height of the Cold War. It is also the deeply human story of Parra’s tenacious struggle to be seen and heard as an artist on her own terms.
Article
Robert G. Greenhill and Rory M. Miller
Broadly speaking, historians have considered the development of British business on the west coast of South America in the 19th and 20th centuries with a strong focus on Chile and Peru and in the light of two different historiographical approaches: debate over the organization of British business overseas and controversies over informal imperialism and dependency. Initially, the most visible examples of British business influence were merchants who arrived at the time of independence in the early 19th century, although from the middle of the century there was also significant investment in government bonds (sovereign debt). After the War of the Pacific (1879–1883), “freestanding companies” and investment groups, often organized by commercial houses handling Latin American exports, became the main vehicle for British capital flows. The activities of merchants and other suppliers of business services, such as shipping firms, banks, and insurance companies, together with the development of freestanding companies in railways and resource extraction after the War of the Pacific, certainly accelerated the incorporation of Peru and Chile into the expanding global economy. While it is difficult to find concrete examples of direct intervention by British firms in local politics, the growth of foreign business did set constraints on the autonomy of Latin American governments, which became dependent on the direct and indirect income from commodity exports. However, it also provided opportunities for local politicians and business elites, especially in the 1880s and the decade before the First World War when London financial institutions were seeking new openings for direct investment overseas. During the interwar period, British business influence began to fade as merchants and banks ran into greater difficulties, and US participation in the west coast economies, especially in resource extraction (mining and oil), grew. Although some major British multinational firms did invest in industry in Peru and Chile following the Second World War, little British business remained in the region after the 1970s.
Article
In the early 19th century, in recently independent Chile, a symbiosis emerged between various governments, on the one hand, and Chilean and foreign naturalists, on the other, who all realized that there was much to learn about Chile scientifically, and that this scientific knowledge had a range of uses. This joint interest resulted in state-sponsored projects and private trips that included mapping, investigating Chile’s natural resources, and gathering flora and fauna for cataloguing, collecting, and exchanging. Traveling naturalists, government-sponsored surveyors, amateur enthusiasts, and foreign visitors journeyed through Chile by foot, mule, horse, boat, and, eventually, train, heading north and south, to the mountains, plains, desert, and coast, in small and large groups, appropriating local knowledge, gathering materials, taking measurements, and writing letters, reports, and books on what they found, who they met, and what opportunities these regions offered. These trips contributed to the development of museums and collections in Chile and beyond, and to the discipline of natural history in Chile. Moreover, the circulation of objects and publications, not just in Chile but transnationally, brought Chile’s flora, fauna, and geography to greater international awareness and also into scientific discussions.
This natural history work also contributed to cultural change and territorial expansion, generating ideas about territories as hospitable or hostile, dreary or picturesque, offering opportunity or being without development potential. As these naturalists and explorers built on each other’s opinions, they created an accepted narrative about particular landscapes and geographies that moved into other arenas. In the 1840s and 1850s, one of these narratives was that the southern region of the indigenous Mapuche people, militarily occupied and incorporated into Chile (1860–1883), was both a landscape of impenetrable forests and constant rain and a picturesque landscape of fertile opportunity for Chilean national development, presuming the “right” settlers could be attracted. Meanwhile, the arid north, including the Atacama Desert, over which Chile went to war with Bolivia and Peru (the War of the Pacific, 1879–1884), was depicted as hostile, monotonous, and dangerous, with little aesthetic merit, but also as a region that offered opportunities through its mineral wealth. The snow-capped Andes and fertile valleys of central Chile, in which the capital Santiago and the main port city of Valparaíso are located, became landscapes that represented the nation. Thus, naturalists contributed to greater scientific knowledge about Chile, building collections and inserting new flora, fauna, and geography into global scientific debates, while also creating draft meanings about particular landscapes and regions that spread well beyond natural history.
Article
Marcelo Casals
Anticommunism was a central force in the history of the Chilean political conflict in the 20th century. Not only did several political actors define their identities and actions by their opposition to Marxist-inspired revolutionary projects, but also the state in different moments excluded and persecuted everything identified as “communist.” To a great extent, anticommunism relied on three main “frameworks”: Catholicism, nationalism, and liberalism, all of which were crucial elements in the construction of the Republic since the 19th century. Different combinations and interpretations within each framework resulted in different anticommunist expressions, from pro-fascist movements and nationalist groups to the conservative-liberal right wing, the Social Christian center and even moderate socialists. Many of them, especially in the second half of the 20th century, understood anticommunism as a defense of different variations of capitalism. Of course, anticommunism was not a uniquely Chilean phenomenon. It was, in fact, an ideological trend worldwide. This conditioned the reception in Chile of global events and ideas, while it enabled the construction of transnational networks among related actors. The enactment of the Law of Permanent Defense of Democracy in 1948, which outlawed the Communist Party, symbolized the alignment of Chilean politics to Cold War bipolarity. However, the Marxist left was able to recover during the “long Sixties,” in a political and cultural environment marked by the Cuban Revolution. The Popular Unity government was the materialization of all anticommunist fears. The counter-revolutionary bloc created then paved the way to the 1973 coup and the subsequent military dictatorship, which used anticommunism as state ideology. Human rights violations were legitimated by the dictatorship from that ideological framework. Anticommunism decayed by the late 1980s alongside socialist experiences around the world.
Article
Right-wing women in Chile have received relatively little historical attention, and while they have engaged in many public activities, they have usually been seen as a complementary political force, lacking independent agency and relying on directions from party leaders. This perception is related to the denials that such women usually make of their own impacts, justifying their presence in the public arena as an “obligation” to mobilize for the welfare of others, in this case, family and country. This sort of political engagement ebbs and flows according to particular political circumstances, evoking symbols, images, and discourses that have been used at different times. One example is the way that women took to banging on empty pots during the marches against the Popular Unity (Unidad Popular) to express their discontent and their inability to properly care for their families.
The triumph of the Popular Unity coalition in the 1970 elections, led by socialist Salvador Allende, was met with dogged opposition from conservative women who took to the streets even before Allende’s victory was ratified in Congress. Between 1970 and 1973, women involved with political parties and right-wing ideas mobilized both in the streets and in the media; as in the case of EVA magazine, organizing spaces were configured under the discourse that, as mothers and housewives, they were called to defend the country from Marxism, suggesting that women were “naturally” endowed to protect the freedom and democracy that they believed was threatened by a leftist government. Such activism, however, was rooted in a sense of emergency and was never intended to be long-lasting, and it ended abruptly after the 1973 military coup.
The actions of right-wing women raise various questions, particularly regarding the political subjectivities that they constructed, their motivations, their political conceptions, and their self-conceptions. These questions, among others, help us understand Chilean women beyond the traditional roles that they struggled so hard to preserve. The idea that their activism was solely a response to the manipulation of other political forces does not explain the complexity of the processes developed by conservative women or their presence in different historical moments. Thus, it is important to reflect on the inherently political characteristics of their engagement, notwithstanding their consistent denials of partisan considerations.
Article
Elsie Doolan
The Conflict Textiles website is a digital resource that allows users to learn more about how individuals who have experienced or been impacted by political violence have used textiles to respond to and recount their experiences. Some of the textiles on the website were made in response to the wars and conflicts in South America in the 1970s and 1980s (including the Dirty War in Argentina, the Pinochet regime in Chile, and the conflict in Peru between the government and the Shining Path), while others have emerged as a response to the Troubles in Northern Ireland. The majority of the textiles were created by women, though in some instances, men have also contributed to their creation. Conflict Textiles is the name of both the digital resource and a physical collection of textiles. Originating from the Art of Survival International and Irish Quilts in 2009 in Derry, Northern Ireland, this collection and online repository highlights the prolific use of textiles as a medium through which individuals are able to express themselves and the overarching nature of this medium as a form of expression. These two entities, the website and the physical collection, coexist, with the Conflict Textiles website documenting the textiles present in the physical collection and events that occur, or have occurred, in association with the collection. In this way, the Conflict Textiles website serves as an online repository of the physical Conflict Textiles collection and allows users internationally to learn more about a collection that includes textiles from dozens of different countries including, but not limited to, Chile, Northern Ireland, and Argentina.
Article
Anne Pérotin-Dumon and Manuel Gárate
This is an advance summary of a forthcoming article in the Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History. Please check back later for the full article.
Historizar el pasado vivo en América Latina (Historicizing the Living Past in Latin America), an edited digital publication composed of twenty-four studies, has been online since 2006. It marks perhaps the first effort to identify and examine the emergence of a new brand of contemporary history in Latin American countries that have returned to democratic rule after living under dictatorships or through an internal armed conflict. Historizar el pasado vivo remains the most systematic effort to explore in Spanish, in a digital format, what is often called historia reciente, or (after the French term) historia del tiempo presente—“addressing recent events that remain in the memories of many, by historians who lived through them, in a time in which their dramatic character has made them an enduring moral problem for the national conscience.” More broadly, Historizar el pasado vivo has aimed to draw the attention of the history profession, and the community of Latin Americanists at large, to an exciting intellectual development taking place in Latin America.
Article
Joanna Crow and Allison Ramay
Mapuche intellectuals and political activists in early- to mid-20th-century Chile both worked within and subverted dominant modernizing and “civilizing” educational discourses. Mapuche women played an important role in the movement to democratize schooling in early-20th-century Chile by publishing articles in little-known Mapuche-run newspapers and advocating for Mapuche education broadly as well as specifically for women. There was also an important transnational dimension of Mapuche political organizing around education rights during this period. These two underexplored but important aspects of indigenous activism in Chile open interesting questions about the intersections between race, gender, and nation in the sphere of education.
Article
Ángeles Donoso Macaya
An array of documentary photographic practices that emerged during the dictatorship in Chile (1973–1990) remain understudied, despite their political, aesthetical, and historical import. From the mid-1970s onward, these different practices served different purposes: some made visible the crime of disappearance and its disavowal by the repressive state; others stood as supplementary evidence that confirmed the legal existence of the detained-disappeared; some were a crucial force in denouncing state repression and demanding justice for victims; and some made it possible for independent media to simultaneously comply with and ridicule the censorship of images imposed by the dictatorship in 1984. These practices also helped to consolidate the expanding photographic field under dictatorship. They include the public display of ID photos and portraits torn from family albums; documentary images that relatives of the victims of repression pinned to their chests; the reproduction, compilation, and incorporation of these portraits into legal files and habeas corpus claims; the publication of countless photos of popular protests in independent media; and different photographic initiatives put forward by a group of photographers who established the Independent Photographers Association in 1981. Notably, the expanding photographic field under dictatorship engaged not only individuals and groups directly involved with photography but also ad-hoc human rights collectives and organizations (especially the Group of Family Members of the Detained-Disappeared and the Vicariate of Solidarity), as well as lawyers, judges, journalists, and everyday users of photography. Given the different arenas in which documentary images circulated, the transformations they underwent to resist repression and censorship, and the array of individuals involved in their (re)production and dissemination, a study of documentary photography under dictatorship in Chile cannot content itself, as has been the case, with surveying the practices that emerged within the artistic field. A study of the visual culture under dictatorship instead reveals both the different uses of photography in the public space and the transformations of documentary images in their successive circulations and disseminations.
Article
Danielle B. Barefoot
The 21st century brought with it a mass digitization of archival materials that rapidly changed preservation, research, and pedagogy practices. Chilean digital databases, archives, and humanities projects have grown steadily since the late 1990s. These resources developed with the central goals of democratizing access to sources and removing obstructive barriers including accessibility and physical distance. Remote access capabilities coupled with open access of collections encourages greater interaction with repositories including libraries, museums, and archives and materials such as historical documents, newspapers, paper ephemera, music and audio recordings, and photography.
While not exhaustive, these sites demonstrate the extensive range of digitized sources available that span from the pre-Columbian through modern periods. Researchers, teachers, and students seeking primary sources will find a multitude of themes including indigenous peoples, culture, science and technology, history, politics, environment, and human rights. Some sites, such as Memoria Chilena and the National Security Archive, feature a fully digitized collection with articles and downloadable PDF material. Others, such as Museo de la Memoria y Derechos Humanos, and the Biblioteca Nacional Digital, have non-digitized holdings that call for an in-person visit. Lastly, the Dirección de Bibliotecas Archivos y Museos and Biblioteca Digital del Patrimonio Iberoamericano serve as digital source aggregates that collect and allow users to search across affiliated sites. Aggregation is the newest step in the digital revolution. This newer process permits the archiving of entire archives, which will transform how scholars understand source collection, non-immersive “fieldwork,” and research methodologies.
Digital resources drastically improve the accessibility of sources concerning Chile. At the individual level, user skill may affect the browsing experience, especially when searching for sources. Many digital resources allow for truncated and Boolean logic queries. Users can customize their browsing experience by implementing these tools to expand or narrow the search. At the website level, these resources incorporate open access coupled with universal design practices to democratize the individual browsing experience. Open access allows users to access content free of charge. Universal design ensures access equity through coding and website design. However, in terms of accessibility, room for improvement exists. Users employing screen readers and captioning technologies will have vastly different experiences within each of these resources based on the device and software utilized. Organizations who have undertaken the digitization process must ensure they continue cultivating equitable digital spaces that all users may enjoy.
Article
Pedro Acuña
Football and media have become associated to such an extent that it would be difficult to discuss the history of sports in Chile without acknowledging its relationship with the media. Since the early 1900s, the media coverage of football—arguably the most significant mass spectacle in Chile—has become a unique place to evoke political sympathy and national pride. Before the gradual introduction of television in the 1960s, print journalism and radio were the technological tools that defined the ways in which Chileans experienced football. As narrative devices, sports media represented football for much larger audiences than those sitting in the stadium. In the 1940s, football chronicles may have been read aloud, and photographs of famous footballers were usually posted in public places for semiliterate workers too poor to buy sports magazines. Similarly, the pitch of a radio announcer’s voice and the quick summations he gave to different plays generated their own visual spectacle and moral evaluations for listeners. Although sports magazines and radio broadcasts were mostly consumed in urban areas, they created new ways of experiencing football that enabled participation from larger parts of the nation.
The importance of these sources lies in their central role of making football a much more understandable sport to mass audiences, many of whom were illiterate. Most importantly, sports media became a public terrain for making claims about Chilean citizenship, including affirmations of appropriate masculinity, racial belonging, and class relations.
Article
Chiara Sáez and Jorge Iturriaga
With the surge of social struggles tied to the implementation of capitalist modernization at the end of the 19th century, diverse forms of technology-based mass communication in Chile arose to represent the emergence of social sectors that didn’t participate in the dominant culture and sought to disseminate an alternative. Working-class and feminist newspapers, neighborhood theaters, and Cordel literature broke away from the traditional elitist and pedagogical nature that had defined the media until that time. Since then, with cycles that have ebbed and flowed, numerous communicative experiences were related to mass culture in controversial ways: they opposed it, converged with it, et cetera. Even though it is possible to trace the continuity between the cases described, this continuity is not clear upon first glance, due to its underground and nascent character. In general terms, these experiences were not established as an autonomous space for technical or aesthetic experiments; when there was a strategy, it tended to be political in nature, whereas communicative material remained conditional. Finally, the study of these cases implies a paradox: the 20th century began with a vast number of alternative communication projects that became institutionalized over the years, but they re-emerged more autonomously during Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship and the era that followed. This process of institutionalization alludes to an inversely proportional relationship between the process of incorporating the masses into positions of power (in the period between 1925 and 1973) and the development of alternative communication: these experiences are plentiful in the less institutionalized contexts of the enlightened working-class culture (that is, preceding the founding of the Communist Party in 1922 and after the anti-working-class culture that has accompanied the neoliberalism imposed since the dictatorship).
Article
Alberto Harambour-Ross
From the moment the expedition of Magellan gave Patagonia its name, it became a land where European fantasies and fears dwelled. A no man’s land inhabited by giant anthropophagites located at the antipodes of civilization, this steppe swept by icy winds was not transformed into a colonial setting until the 19th century. The territory then became the object of an ongoing territorial dispute between the new states of Argentina and Chile, whose efforts to establish sovereignty as landowners languished until the late 1870s. Nomadic indigenous sovereignties had faced slow Western expansion on the continent; here, they were swiftly replaced by sheep. On the continent, the Tehuelche were displaced; on the island of Tierra del Fuego, the Selknam faced extermination. Sheep sovereignty, fully integrated into imperial networks, was the driving force behind local state building. Just as the British pastoral colonization of the Falkland Islands conditioned any possibility of permanent presence in the South Atlantic, the sheep industry, arriving swiftly in the shape of capital, persons, and animals, allowed for the Argentinization and Chileanization of what was once the frontier of civilization. In this sense, the occupation of the Falklands/Malvinas, Patagonia, and Tierra del Fuego may be considered successive colonial processes that form part of the same frontier drive as the Empire in capital.
Article
Napoleon Bonaparte’s 1807 invasion of Spain and Portugal set in motion a transatlantic imperial crisis that, within two decades, resulted in Spain’s losing nearly all of its American possessions. Typically, the founding of most Spanish South American nations is attributed to the heroic leadership of the great liberators: Simón Bolívar and José de San Martín. While San Martín is most famous for organizing the Army of the Andes that carried out the liberation of Chile, parts of Peru, and eventually, in 1822, reunited with Bolívar in Ecuador, his time in western Río de la Plata building his army is less understood. From 1814 until 1817, General San Martín took up residence in the western Río de la Plata (Argentina) city of Mendoza to build an army capable of defeating Spanish rule in Chile and Peru. To receive permission to cross the Andes westward into Chile, San Martín needed more than soldiers well trained in European military style and horses: he needed to negotiate with the local Pehuenche people—part of the broader Mapuche peoples of southern Chile and western Río de la Plata—who had successfully resisted Spanish conquest for centuries.
Before San Martín could cross the Andes to invade Chile, he participated in two interethnic diplomatic rituals known as parlamentos in Spanish and koyang in Mapudungun, with the Pehuenche. Nearly forty recorded Spanish–Mapuche parlamentos had taken place in Chile and near Mendoza since 1593. In the two 1816 parlamentos, interpreters translated the negotiations between Pehuenche representatives and San Martín over the exchange of horses, the giving of gifts, the recognition of Pehuenche dominion, and permission for the Army of the Andes to cross the mountains west to Chile. While San Martín chose to spread news of this agreement to confuse the Spanish forces in Chile as to the location of their crossing, opting not to cross Pehuenche lands, these parlamentos nevertheless speak to the power and importance of Pehuenche political traditions during the Age of Revolution.
Article
Edward D. Melillo
Since the early 1800s, Chileans have imagined their nation’s history and destiny through an ever-changing array of transoceanic connections with the rest of the planet. At a deeper level, Chile’s relationship with the Pacific Ocean is built upon myriad collective memories and aspirational identities. The long arc of Chile’s linkages with the Pacific World—or the peoples and ecosystems in and around the Pacific Ocean—has yet to be fully explored by historians. This article fills this lacuna by analyzing five diverse historical episodes that span more than two centuries: first, Valparaíso’s growth into a Pacific commercial hub during the early 1800s; second, Chile’s role in the Californian and Australian gold rushes of the mid-1800s; third, the Chilean victory in the late-19th-century War of the Pacific; fourth, Chile’s burgeoning commercial relationship with China, which began in the years following the Second World War; and, finally, the emergence of a Chilean-Pacific variant of neoliberal ideology in the final decades of the 20th century. These five developments reveal a litany of ambiguities and antagonisms in Chile’s complicated, ongoing association with its western ocean.
Article
Adrian Howkins
Since the early 19th century, a number of Latin American countries have had active interests in the Antarctic continent. These interests began to accelerate in the early 20th century, and during the 1930s and 1940s, Argentina and Chile formalized sovereignty claims to the Antarctic Peninsula region. These claims overlapped not only with each other, but also with Great Britain’s claim to the “Falkland Islands Dependencies.” The two Latin American claims tended to be framed in the language of anti-imperialism, and for a while at least the idea of a “South American Antarctica” emerged to suggest a common front against the British Empire. Rivalry between Argentina and Chile, however, remained strong, and the alliance against imperialism never developed into a lasting agreement. In 1959, Argentina and Chile joined with ten other nations—including Great Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union—in signing the Antarctic Treaty. This Treaty suspended sovereignty claims and created a “continent dedicated to peace and science.” Following the ratification of the Treaty in 1961, Argentina and Chile lessened their hostility to the imperial strategy of using scientific research as a justification for political claims, and came to be enthusiastic members of what some outsiders labeled an “exclusive club.” During the 1980s and early 1990s, four other Latin American nations—Brazil, Uruguay, Peru, and Ecuador—became full members of the Antarctic Treaty, attracted, in part, by the prospect of sharing in a potential minerals bonanza in the southern continent. This expected economic boom never came, however, and instead the Antarctic continent became one of the most protected environments anywhere on the planet by the terms of the 1991 Madrid Environmental Protocol.
Article
Hillary Hiner
From a historical perspective, violence against women and the LGBTQIA+ community (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, queer, intersex, asexual, and “+” for other possible associated identities) in Chile has presented itself and been understood in different ways. On the one hand, we have to take into consideration what Maria Lugones has named the “coloniality of gender” and how racism, sexism, and heteronormativity was installed from the colonial period onward, promoting specific violences against indigenous, black, lesbian, and trans women. Additionally, for a great deal of time, from roughly the colonial period until the 1990s, it was considered completely acceptable to use violence in the family and in intimate partner relationships to “correct” and punish women and girls. The Pinochet dictatorship (1973–1990) also adds another dimension to this discussion, as women were affected by gendered and sexualized state terrorism. However, the reappearance of strong women’s and feminist groups during the dictatorship also signaled a profound questioning of these types of gender violence, linking it to patriarchal structures and the need for democracy “in the country” and “in the home.” A similar effect was achieved by the emergence of LGBTQIA+ groups from the 1980s on, as they questioned the historic violence, hate crimes, and discrimination against gay men, lesbians, and, more recently, trans people. In both cases, then, pressures from social movement groups have forced the post-dictatorship Chilean state to pass laws and promote anti-violence public policy. For better and for worse, however, those anti-violence initiatives that have been most successful, in terms of visibility and public policy coverage, have generally centered on violences experienced by white-mestiza, cishet, urban women, particularly those that survive family violence. Historiographies on violence against women and the LGBTQIA+ community are relatively scarce, although there has been increased production in the last ten years, especially around the topics of women survivors of family or intimate partner violence and women survivors of torture and political prison.
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