History of Chile

Three major cultural groups have been identified that inhabited Chile before Europeans: the northern people, who developed rich handicrafts and were influenced by pre-Incan cultures; the Mapuche (Araucanians), who inhabited the area between the river Choapa and the island of Chiloé, and lived primarily off agriculture; and the Patagonian culture, which comprised various nomadic tribes, who supported themselves through fishing and hunting. No elaborate, centralized, sedentary civilization reigned supreme.

The Spanish arived in central Chile in 1537. The main European extractive industries included saltpeter and copper; there was also agriculture for export.

Scholars speculate that the total Araucanian population may have numbered 1 million at most when the Spaniards arrived in the 1530s. Although a century of European conquest and disease reduced that number by at least half, large numbers of Mapuche successfully resisted conquest until the 1880s. In the period after that, Chile interned a significant percentage of the Mapuche, and destroyed the Mapuche herding, agricultural and trading economies, while also looting Mapuche property (real and personal - including a large amount of silver jewelry to replenish the Chilean national coffers). The government created a system of reserves called reducciones along lines similar to North American reservation systems. Subsequent generations of Mapuche live in extreme poverty as a result of having been conquered and having lost their traditional lands. In the 2002 Chilean census 604,349 people identified themselves as Mapuche. The Mapuche are more than 80 percent of Chile's native population. Although native people comprise five percent of Chile's population, in 2006 among the country's 38 senators and 120 deputies, only one identified as indigenous. The number is higher at municipal levels.

The two living branches of Mapuche language are Huilliche and Mapudungan.

In recent years, the Chilean government has tried to redress some of the inequities of the past. The Parliament passed, in 1993, Law n° 19 253 (Indigenous Law, or Ley indígena) which officially recognized the Mapuche people, and seven other ethnic minorities, as well as the Mapudungun language and culture. Mapundungun, which was prohibited before[!], is now included in the curriculum of elementary schools around Temuco.

Representatives from Mapuche organizations have joined the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organisation (UNPO), seeking recognition and protection for their cultural and land rights.

In the early 21st century, land disputes and violent confrontations continue in some Mapuche areas, particularly in the northern sections of the Araucanía region between and around Traiguén and Lumaco.

Related terms: Mapuche conflict, Ralco Hydroelectric Plant

The following little snapshot of Chilean history is from "What kind of geography for what kind of public policy?" by David Harvey, first published in Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 1974. General Pinochet is a geographer by training, and by all accounts he is successfully putting geography into public policy. As President of the military junta that overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende in Chile on 11 September 1973, General Pinochet does not approve of 'subversive' acacdemic disciplines such as sociology, politics and even philosophy. He has asked that 'lessons in patriotism' be taught in all Chilean schools and universities and he is known to look with great favor upon the teaching of geography &mdash; such a subject is, he says, ideally suited to instruct the Chilean people in the virtues of patriotism and to convey to the people a sense of their true historic destiny. Since the military have taken full command of the universities and frequently supervise instruction in the schools, it appears that geography will become a very significant discipline in the Chilean educational system. General Pinochet is also actively changing the human geography of Chile. An example here is in order. The healthcare system of Chile has, for some time, comprised three distinct components: the rich paid for services on a 'free-market' basis; the middle classes made use of hospital-based medicine financed by private insurance schemes; while the lower classes and poor (some 60 per cent of the population) received free medical care in community-based health centers paid for out of a National Health Service (Navarro 1974). Under Allende, resources were switched from the first two sectors into the community health services which had previously been poorly financed and largely ignored. The geography of the healthcare system began to be transformed from a centralized, provider-controlled, hospital-centred system catering exclusively to the middle and upper classes, to a decentralized, community-controlled, free healthcare system primarily catering to the needs of the lower classes and the poor. This transformation did not occur without resistance – the providers of hospital-based medicine organized strikes to preserve the old social geography of healthcare against the emergence of the new. But during the Allende years the community health centers grew and flourished. Also, community control through the creation of community health councils had a profound political impact and many aspects of life began to be organized around the community health centers. The emphasis also shifted from curative medicine (with all of its glamour and expensive paraphernalia) to preventive medicine which sought to treat medical care as something integral to a wide range of environmental issues (water supply, sewage disposal, and the like). The human geography of social contact, political power and distribution changed as hitherto never before, as the lower classes and poor people began to realize the potential for controlling social conditions of their own existence. But military power and General Pinochet have changed all that. The community health councils have been disbanded and many of those who participated in them have been imprisoned or executed. The community health centers have been severely curtailed in their operation. The administration of the healthcare system has been given back to the providers of medicine; and the system is reverting to a centralized, hospital-based system catering to the upper and middle classes. Curative medicine is once more the order of the day and open-heart surgery for the few replaces sanitation for the many as the primary goal of medical care. The old geography has been reasserted and the new has been effectively dismantled. Thus has the intervention of the geographer, General Pinochet, become a determining force in the human geography of the healthcare system of Chile.