The 'Lessons' of Dictatorship: Political Learning and the Military in Chile

This article argues that political learning with regard to civil-military relations in Chile has proved an obstacle to democratization. In the postauthoritarian period, both the armed forces and political parties have referred to history when considering civil-military reform, especially with regard to how to avoid a repeat of the conflict of the Unidad Popular period. Meanwhile, the military also utilizes the Spanish example when resisting changes it feels are inimical to its interests. The 'lessons' each takes from the past directly influence political strategies and the overall result is that while civilian rule continues, democratic civil-military relations are not necessarily advanced.     

Chinese Carmakers Race for Latin American Market

正AFTER recovering from the shock of the world financial crisis,China’s automobile exports to Latin America are begining to climb.Chinese auto manufacturers,represented by Chery Automobile and Great Wall Motors,are accelerating their efforts to conquer the Latin American market.     

British Campaigns for Solidarity with Argentina and Chile

The Chile solidarity movement persuaded British Labour governments (1974–1979) to introduce a range of measures against the Pinochet regime. But campaigners lobbying against the Argentine dictatorship (1976–1983) had less impact on policy. Neither these Labour governments nor the subsequent Conservative government imposed any sanction on the Argentine dictatorship, until the invasion of the Falkland Islands. This article explores why in Britain – and Europe – the Chile campaign had greater public appeal than the Argentina solidarity campaigns. It identifies a number of common factors across Europe which explain why the anti-Pinochet cause generated more support than the Argentina campaign.     

Dealigned or Still Salient? Religious-Secular Divisions in Chilean Presidential Elections

With countries like Chile facing secularisation, some research predicts religious-secular cleavages will ‘dealign’, while other research suggests these cleavages will persist so long as religious-secular divisions are reflected among presidential candidates. Using surveys of first-round voting intentions in the five most recent presidential elections in Chile, the analysis shows that religious-secular divisions in voting appear when candidates are divided clearly along religious-secular lines (and not when divisions among candidates are blurred). These findings suggest researchers need to account for the impact candidates' positions have on the appearance of religious-secular divisions before declaring that dealignment has occurred.     

Frontier Capitalism: Agrarian Expansion in Southern Chile,c. 1890–1930

This article argues that the agrarian expansion that took place in Chile's southern frontier region after the military occupation of the Mapuche territory (1862–1883) was the first phase of the development of agrarian capitalism in the region. This process was shaped by ecological conditions. In a territory covered by forests, sharecropping with tenant labourers was crucial for land clearance in the formation of the hacienda system, when landowners needed to create fields for commercial crops. As the domestic demand for agricultural products increased, mechanisation intensified, sharecropping declined, and wage labour became dominant. Frontier capitalist agriculture expanded dramatically, and consequently the region became the breadbasket of Chile.     

Performing the ‘India Permitida’: The Counter-Gift of Indigenous Women Targeted by a Corporate Social Responsibility Programme (Chile)

Relying on ethnographic data, this article critically analyses the pro-mining position adopted in Chile's Atacama Region by a group of Diaguita women who benefited from a corporate social responsibility (CSR) programme to revive indigenous culture. While the desire to escape from poverty (salir adelante, moving forward) appears as the main reason for participating, the benefits generated a sense of indebtedness resulting in allegiance to the company. The investigation also shows how this programme played a part in building a scenario in which indigenous females perform subjects apparently more suited than men to the neoliberal and multiculturalist governmentality of the Chilean State, whose politics favours mining.     

Gated communities and the poor in Santiago,Chile: Functional and symbolic integration in a context of aggressive capitalist colonization of lower‐class areas

Abstract

In Santiago, Chile, the number of gated communities has increased significantly during the past few years. Although these communities are aimed at the elite, they are often located on the fringes of low‐income neighborhoods and thus change traditional segregation patterns in the city.

In many cases, gated housing communities for the upper classes are accompanied by nonresidential development, such as shopping centers and office complexes, which bring jobs into the neighborhood. We analyze case studies of lower‐class neighborhoods located near upper‐class gated communities to study the effect on the poor. We find that the spatial dispersion of real estate developments for the elite promotes some forms of social integration and provides advantages to poorer residents by bringing jobs into the neighborhood, triggering improved public services, and even sparking a renewed sense of pride among lower‐class residents.     

The decline of citizen participation in electoral politics in post-authoritarian Chile

Turnout among registered voters remains high in post-authoritarian Chile, but valid votes as a percentage of the voting-age population have fallen significantly in the post-authoritarian period and blank/null voting, non-registration, and abstention are on the rise. Why? This article tests three rival explanations: (1) lack of political support; (2) depoliticization; and (3) a generational shift in political culture. These theories are not mutually exclusive, but rather explain distinct contours of this electoral phenomenon. Compared to valid voters, blank/null voters exhibit less support for the political system, are less politicized, and more likely to have reached legal voting age during the democratic transition. Although non-registrants also exhibit less political support and are more depoliticized than valid voters, their behaviour is largely explained by a new political culture that stresses individual as opposed to collective participation. In addition to shedding light on this Chilean puzzle, the findings enhance the debates over electoral participation, mandatory voting, and quality of democracy in Latin America and other nascent democracies.     

Coalition incentives and party bias in Chile

This article revisits the debate over Chile's binomial electoral rules and its consequences and examines how the new electoral system conceived by a democratic congress altered political competition. It utilizes a seat-vote model of multiparty competition to analyze party bias under the binomial rule. This approach differs substantively from prior studies of the Chilean case that focused primarily on the disproportionality of aggregate results. In contrast to earlier analyses, the findings reveal that the allocation of the seats under the binominal resulted in significant party bias benefiting the main parties of the right. This bias, however, was eliminated after the electoral reform. The new rule continues to provide majoritarian benefits to parties receiving larger shares of votes, but this effect is less pronounced than before. It is now easier for small parties to gain seats, which has increased party fragmentation. However, we show that coalition incentives, which were heralded as one of the main advantages of the binomial rule, are also significant under the new rule in use since 2017.     

Staying Alive: 1970s Southern Cone Exiles in the UK

This article seeks to contribute to the study of the 1970s dictatorships in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay by looking at one specific aspect of those regimes: exile. It considers exile in the UK, a host country on which research is limited, and claims that the fundamental political ideas that had inspired these exiles did not vanish but were variously reshaped, depending on changing political circumstances, how the exiles interacted with local forms of solidarity, and how they lived through the personal challenges that they experienced during exile.