Republic of Chile

Its independence was made in an unusual way. The governing junta of 18 September 1810 was not a declaration of independence at all: it swore loyalty to the imprisoned Ferdinand VII, seated the bishop of Santiago as its vice-president, and justified itself by the old Hispanic doctrine that in the absence of the king sovereignty reverted to the people. From that fiction of loyal self-government came a decade of war, a royalist reconquest, and an army from across the Andes that liberated Chile before it liberated Peru. The country's first stable political settlement, in the 1830s, was the work of a Valparaíso merchant who never wanted the presidency and who built a state designed to be governed by men like himself.

Chile matters out of proportion to its size because it kept testing the same questions. How much power should a president have? Who counts as a citizen? What does the state owe the poor, and what does it owe the Mapuche, whose territory it took while granting them citizenship? In the nineteenth century those questions were answered by restricted suffrage and open fraud; in the twentieth by organised parties and a welfare state; in the twenty-first by two constitutional conventions whose drafts the voters rejected, in 2022 by 61.9 per cent and in 2023 by 55.8 per cent. The republic has rarely been short of answers. It has been short of agreement about them.

At a glance

How did a colonial junta become a war for independence?

Napoleon's occupation of Spain in 1808 left Spanish America with a legitimacy problem rather than a loyalty problem. The Chilean answer, arrived at in Santiago on 18 September 1810, was a governing junta chosen by an open cabildo of roughly 400 of the capital's leading vecinos, meeting in the building of the Real Tribunal del Consulado. The presidency went to Mateo de Toro y Zambrano, the Conde de la Conquista, the senior soldier in the kingdom and a man of immense fortune; the bishop, José Antonio Martínez de Aldunate, took the vice-presidency; five vocales and two secretaries filled out the body. Every member of it would have described himself as a loyal subject of Ferdinand VII.

The loyalism was sincere and it was also the point. By governing in the king's name the junta could claim to be defending his rights against a usurper while in fact exercising sovereignty that had never been exercised in Chile before. The same argument was being made in Caracas, Buenos Aires and Bogotá. Where Chile differed was the speed with which the fiction wore thin. Toro Zambrano died in February 1811; the first national congress, elected on a restricted franchise, met on 4 July 1811; and on 4 September the young officer José Miguel Carrera dissolved it and took power with his brothers. Carrera was twenty-five, vain, brave and impatient, and under him the language changed from autonomy to independence.

The Reglamento Constitucional of 27 October 1812 was the clearest statement of that shift. Its fifth article provided that no decree or order emanating from any authority outside Chilean territory would have effect within it, and that anyone trying to enforce one would be punished as an enemy of the state. Article three still hedged, recognising Ferdinand. But a country that legislates for itself, coins its own money, raises its own regiments and prints its own newspaper — the Aurora de Chile, founded in February 1812 — is independent in everything but name, and the Regency in Cádiz had no intention of accepting the distinction. Peru, still royalist and still the military centre of South America, supplied the expedition that ended the experiment.

It ended at Rancagua on 1–2 October 1814. Bernardo O'Higgins, the illegitimate son of a Chilean-born viceroy of Peru, held the town with perhaps 1,700 men against a royalist army of some 5,000 under Mariano Osorio, whose Talaveras regiment had fought in Europe. O'Higgins had chosen to stand in a town of adobe walls and orchards rather than in open country; his rival Carrera, commanding the other patriot division, did not bring his men in. After two days of house-to-house fighting the survivors broke out and fled towards the Andes. Osorio entered Santiago, and for three years Chile was governed again from Lima, with confiscations and executions that gave the period its name: the Reconquista.

How did an Argentine army retake Chile?

The reconquest was reversed from Mendoza, on the Argentine side of the Andes, where José de San Martín had spent three years building an army for exactly this purpose. His plan was not to defend the Río de la Plata but to cross the mountains, take Chile, and use its ports and its shipping to attack Lima — the argument being that Spanish power in South America could not be broken anywhere except at its Peruvian centre. To that end he raised, equipped and drilled the Army of the Andes, and organised a supply system elaborate enough to move artillery over passes above 3,000 metres.

The crossing began in January 1817. Some 5,000 men went over by more than one pass in about three weeks, with mules, cattle and guns, and the mountains took a heavy toll in men, animals and equipment. What mattered was that the royalists did not know which pass the main body was using. On 12 February 1817, at Chacabuco, north of Santiago, San Martín's two wings under O'Higgins and Miguel Estanislao Soler met a royalist force of about 1,500 under Rafael Maroto. O'Higgins attacked too early and was driven back; Soler's arrival and a grenadier charge led by San Martín restored the line and broke the Spanish cavalry. The patriots entered Santiago on 14 February. A cabildo offered San Martín the governorship and he declined it in favour of O'Higgins, who took office as Supreme Director on 16 February.

Independence was not yet secure. In March 1818 a royalist counter-offensive caught the patriot army at Cancha Rayada by night and routed part of it, and for a few days Santiago believed all was lost. On 5 April 1818, on the Maipú river plain west of the city, San Martín destroyed the royalist field army in an hour and a half; Osorio escaped with a few hundred cavalry and the rest were killed or captured. Maipú, not Chacabuco, is the battle that decided Chile.

The declaration of independence is more complicated than its anniversary suggests. The Act carries the date 1 January 1818 and the place Concepción, six weeks before the ceremony that made it public; it was approved by O'Higgins at Talca on 12 February 1818 and sworn in Santiago the same day, the first anniversary of Chacabuco. An earlier notification to the royalist commander at Talcahuano, also dated 1 January, is treated in Chilean tradition as the first declaration, though the documentary basis for the drum-and-camp story is thin. Nor was the country unified by any of this: the archipelago of Chiloé held out for the crown until the Treaty of Tántauco in January 1826, and Spain did not recognise Chilean independence until 1844.

Why did O'Higgins fall, and what was built in his place?

O'Higgins governed for six years as a reforming soldier and made enemies at a remarkable rate. He created the Chilean navy — with Manuel Blanco Encalada and the Scottish admiral Thomas Cochrane, whose squadron took Valdivia in 1820 and carried the liberating expedition to Peru in 1820–21 — and he financed the expedition with British loans that outlived his government. He abolished titles of nobility, restricted the privileges of the great estates, and in the constitution of 1822 gave the country a document that was enlightened and unworkable. The great families of Santiago and Concepción, taxed and lectured, turned against him; the provinces resented the capital; and in January 1823 a revolt in Concepción under Ramón Freire forced his abdication on 28 January. He went to Peru and died at Lima in 1842.

What followed is usually called the Organización de la República and was, for seven years, close to chaos. Freire was honest and powerless. The constitution of 1823, drafted with the help of Juan Egaña, tried to legislate morality itself with a "Código Moral" and a senate of worthies; it was ignored. The federal laws of 1826, which created eight provinces with elected assemblies, reflected a real suspicion of Santiago but could not make a state. The liberal constitution of 1828, the best-drafted of the decade, widened the franchise and weakened the presidency at precisely the moment when someone needed to be strong.

The crash came over patronage and money. The elections of 1829 produced a congress in which the pipiolos, the liberals, were accused of rigging the results; the pelucones, the conservatives, rose in arms; and on 17 April 1830 a conservative army under José Joaquín Prieto defeated the liberals under Ramón Freire at Lircay, near Talca. What ended at Lircay was not only a faction. It was the assumption, common to the 1820s, that independence had settled the question of who should rule. It had only opened it.

Who was Diego Portales, and what did the 1833 constitution create?

The answer the 1830s gave was the work of Diego Portales, a Valparaíso merchant born in 1793 who had come late to politics and never sought office for its own sake. He had made his fortune in the tobacco and tea monopoly of the mid-1820s — a state contract he took on when nobody else would, and which made him both rich and aware of how much the state could do for, and to, business. As minister to Prieto from 1830, and again from 1835, he built the instruments of an effective government: the civic militia, the military and naval academies, a functioning customs service, a disciplined treasury, and a habit of using exile and the firing squad against opponents that even admirers call dictatorial.

He was also the intellectual author of the constitution of 1833, drafted by Mariano Egaña and Manuel José Gandarillas and sworn on 25 May 1833. It was a unitary, presidential document of 168 articles with a five-year term and immediate re-election, a Catholic confessional state, and a suffrage restricted to literate men of twenty-five, or twenty-one if married, with property or a trade. Its genius, if that is the word, was its ambiguity. The president appointed his ministers, but the constitution also gave congress the power to approve the budget and the military levies annually — the "leyes periódicas" — which later parliaments would use to bring ministers down. It lasted, with reforms from 1865 onwards, until September 1924.

Portales' own view of politics was bleak and it shaped the republic. He thought representative government was a form to be worked by men of property, that the masses were to be governed rather than consulted, and that the state's first duty was order. He refused the presidency twice and was, in effect, prime minister without the title. When he was shot by mutinous officers at Valparaíso on 6 June 1837, during a war he had done more than anyone to provoke, he became the founding martyr of Chilean conservatism — a status his enemies considered undeserved, since the order he built rested on a franchise that excluded the great majority, and on a church that controlled education, marriage and burial.

Why did Chile fight the Peru-Bolivian Confederation?

The war of 1836–39 is the first clear case of the republic acting as a Pacific power, and its causes were as much commercial as strategic. In 1836 Andrés de Santa Cruz, president of Bolivia, welded Bolivia to the two Peruvian states into a Peru-Bolivian Confederation with himself as Protector. Chilean merchants and ministers saw a rival at Callao that could undercut Valparaíso, and Portales saw a state that could put its weight behind Chilean exiles and dissidents. Peru and Bolivia saw a Chilean economy growing faster than theirs and a Chilean port taking their trade.

Chile went to war at the end of 1836, and the exact date is contested: Prieto's proclamation is dated 11 November 1836, while congress's approval is given as 26 December in some accounts and 28 December in others. Argentina's Juan Manuel de Rosas, with his own quarrel over Tarija, declared against Santa Cruz in May 1837. The first Chilean expedition, under Blanco Encalada, landed near Arequipa, found itself outnumbered and diseased, and signed the Treaty of Paucarpata in November 1837 — which the Chilean government repudiated as unauthorised. The second expedition, under Manuel Bulnes, was larger, better supplied and fought alongside Peruvian exiles under Agustín Gamarra. It landed at Ancón, marched into the highlands, and on 20 January 1839 attacked Santa Cruz's army at Yungay. The battle hung on the steadiness of the Chilean regiments and on a counter-attack led by Bulnes and the Peruvian general Ramón Castilla; by afternoon the Confederation's army had broken. Santa Cruz fled to exile, Bolivia and Peru separated, and the Confederation was gone.

The consequences inside Chile were large. The war gave the new state a navy, a professional army and a national story; Bulnes was elected president in 1841 and the conservative order acquired the prestige of victory. It also cost Portales his life and gave his successors a template for later wars: a Chilean expeditionary force, landed from the sea, fighting in the enemy's highlands with local allies. The same shape recurs in 1879–81.

How did the Mapuche lose the Araucanía?

South of the Biobío the republic inherited a frontier, not a province. The Mapuche had fought the Spanish empire to a standstill for three centuries, and the independent state at first continued the colonial practice of the parlamento: a treaty meeting at which gifts were exchanged, a boundary confirmed, and both sides recognised each other's existence. The parlamento of Tapihue in January 1825 was the most elaborate of these, and it was never ratified by congress, which meant that from the 1830s the frontier rested on custom rather than law. Chilean governments disliked that arrangement, and Mapuche warriors fought on both sides in the civil wars of 1851 and 1859, which gave the army an excuse.

The instrument of dispossession was legal before it was military. The law of 4 December 1866 authorised the sale of public lands and the granting of titles in the frontier provinces, and in 1861, under President José Joaquín Pérez, General Cornelio Saavedra began a systematic advance: a line of forts pushed south from the Biobío to the Malleco, with towns, roads and telegraphs behind them. Resistance was real — the lonco Quilapán led the arribanos in a campaign that ran from 1867 to 1871, with several thousand lancers, and combined mounted raids with a refusal of pitched battle that the army found difficult to answer. Saavedra's response was to hold the line and wait.

The end came quickly. With the army fighting in the north after 1879, the Mapuche rose in 1881 in the only general insurrection of their history, and were defeated in detail; Temuco was founded as a fort on 24 February 1881 and Villarrica retaken on 1 January 1883. The state then did what it had promised not to: instead of recognising Mapuche property it "reduced" the population onto small communal reservations, the títulos de merced, issued by a Radicating Commission between 1884 and 1929. The Comisión Verdad Histórica y Nuevo Trato, reporting in 2008, counted 2,918 titles covering 510,386.67 hectares — and found, in a sample of 413 titles in Malleco and Cautín, that 31.6 per cent of the original grant had already passed out of indigenous hands through legal and illegal means.

The arithmetic is the history. A territory of some millions of hectares was reduced to roughly half a million, on the poorest soils, divided into plots too small for the cattle economy that had sustained it, while the rest was sold or granted to Chilean and European colonists — about 36,000 Europeans had arrived by 1901. The 1907 census counted 101,118 people as indigenous, 3.1 per cent of the population, in a country whose army had just conquered them. Chilean law continued to treat them as minors; the community property was not divided into individual plots until 1979, under the dictatorship, which destroyed much of what survived; and the land question, unresolved, is the oldest open wound in Chilean politics.

How did the War of the Pacific remake the country?

The war of 1879–83 was fought over the Atacama desert, and the desert was worth fighting over because of what lay under it. Neither Bolivia nor Chile had ever defined the boundary precisely; Chilean constitutions spoke of the despoblado de Atacama, Bolivia claimed the coast to the Loa as far as the eye and the tax office went, and from the 1840s the guano and then the nitrate of the region made the question expensive. By the treaty of 1866 the boundary was fixed at 24° south with a shared zone between 23° and 25°; by the treaty of 1874 Bolivia undertook not to raise taxes on Chilean companies for twenty-five years.

In 1878 the Bolivian government of Hilarión Daza imposed a ten-cent tax on the Chilean-owned Antofagasta Nitrate and Railway Company, and when the company refused to pay, cancelled its concession and put its property up for auction. On 14 February 1879, the day of the auction, Chilean troops occupied Antofagasta. Bolivia declared war on 1 March. Peru, bound to Bolivia by a secret treaty of 1873, tried to mediate and then found itself committed; Chile declared war on both on 5 April 1879.

The war turned on sea power, because there was no road into the desert. Chile's two ironclads were the strongest ships on the coast, but Peru's Huáscar under Miguel Grau kept the sea open for months, sinking the Esmeralda at Iquique on 21 May 1879 and raiding the sea lanes. The capture of the Huáscar at Angamos on 8 October 1879 ended that. Chile could then land troops where it liked: at Pisagua in November, in Tarapacá, and in 1880 at Tacna and Arica, where the storming of the Morro de Arica on 7 June 1880 finished the southern campaign. Lima fell in January 1881 after the battles of Chorrillos and Miraflores. Peru fought on as a guerrilla war for two more years, and the Treaty of Ancón of 20 October 1883 gave Chile Tarapacá outright and held Tacna and Arica for ten years pending a plebiscite that never happened; they were finally divided by the Treaty of Lima in 1929, Arica to Chile and Tacna to Peru.

Bolivia's war ended differently. There was no peace treaty in 1883, only the Pacto de Tregua of 1884, and the definitive treaty came in 1904, by which Bolivia accepted the loss of its coastline. That is why the war is dated 1879–83 in Chilean histories and 1879–84 in some Bolivian ones: the fighting with Peru stopped at Ancón, but the state of war with Bolivia was not formally resolved for twenty-five years.

What was the nitrate republic, and why did it end in civil war?

Chile emerged from the war owning the world's largest deposits of sodium nitrate, the fertiliser on which European agriculture depended before the Haber-Bosch process. Export duties on nitrate became the state's largest single source of revenue — economists who have modelled the fiscal effect conclude that the tax on nitrates accounted for at least half of all government revenue in the following decades. The money built railways, schools, the port of Valparaíso and a public payroll; it also made the state dependent on a single commodity whose price was set in London, and it created a labour force of some 30,000 to 40,000 workers in the desert offices, organised, radical and far from the eye of Santiago.

The political effect was to make the state worth capturing. President José Manuel Balmaceda, in office from 1886, wanted to use the nitrate revenue for public works, railways, education and a national bank, and to assert the presidency against a congress that had grown used to governing through ministers. The opposition wanted tariff and monetary policy in its own hands. The constitution of 1833 did not say clearly who was right, and both sides claimed it. When congress refused to pass the budget of 1891, Balmaceda declared the previous year's budget extended by decree on 1 January 1891, and congress replied by declaring him outside the law.

The civil war of 1891 was fought by the navy for congress and the army for the president, which is why it was decided at sea and then on the coast. The congressional fleet secured Iquique and the nitrate revenue, landed an army north of Valparaíso, and beat the presidential forces at Concón on 21 August and at Placilla on 28 August. Balmaceda handed power to General Manuel Baquedano and took refuge in the Argentine embassy, where he shot himself on 19 September 1891, the day after his constitutional term would have ended. Estimates of the dead run from 5,000 to 10,000, which would make it the bloodiest war Chile fought in the nineteenth century after the War of the Pacific.

Was the Parliamentary Republic a democracy?

The regime that followed called itself a parliamentary republic, and it never changed the constitution to say so. It worked by interpretation: the congress's power over the annual budget and the military levy, plus the practice of interpellation, meant that ministers served at the pleasure of shifting congressional majorities, and presidents became figures who presided over the arrangement. The mechanism was a rotating cabinet. The seven governments between 1891 and 1925 averaged about fifteen cabinets each, none lasting much more than four months, and the record is a catalogue of the same names circulating through the same ministries.

It was not a democracy in any modern sense. Suffrage was restricted to literate adult men, which meant less than 5 per cent of the population; the municipal law of 1891 handed control of the electoral registers to local bosses who depended on the parties that won; and buying a congressional seat was an accepted expense. Contemporaries called it cohecho, bribery, and described a congress that was a homogeneous oligarchy of families, clubs and Masonic lodges. Between the presidents Federico Errázuriz Echaurren and Pedro Montt, both sons of nineteenth-century presidents, and Germán Riesco, Errázuriz's brother-in-law, the family connections were the political system.

What broke it was the "social question". Santiago and the nitrate ports filled with workers living in conventillos, and the state's answer to strikes was the army. On 21 December 1907, at the Escuela Santa María in Iquique, troops under General Roberto Silva Renard fired on a crowd of nitrate workers and their families who had been brought down from the offices by a strike; the official inquiry put the dead at 126, recent estimates put the figure at about 2,000, and the number 3,600 comes from Luis Advis's 1969 cantata rather than from any record. The massacre did not end the parliamentary regime, but it ended its claim to be a moral order.

The end, when it came, was military. Arturo Alessandri won the presidency in 1920 on a platform of labour legislation and social reform, and found the congress able to block everything. In September 1924, after a protest by junior officers over their pay — the "ruido de sables" — congress passed in a few days the labour code it had shelved for years. Alessandri resigned and went into exile; a military junta followed; and in March 1925 he returned to finish the job by replacing the constitution.

What did the 1925 constitution and Ibáñez change?

The constitution of 1925 was drafted by a consultative commission of 122 appointed by Alessandri, and submitted to a plebiscite on 30 August 1925 in which each voter received three ballots: red for the presidential text, blue for a parliamentary version, white for rejection. The red ballot won 127,483 votes, 94.84 per cent of those cast; the blue took 5,448 and the white 1,490. Turnout, however, was 45.37 per cent of a register restricted to literate men, so the constitution that ended the parliamentary republic was approved by 43 per cent of the registered electorate and by no more than a fraction of the adult population. The BCN's own centenary account gives slightly different provisional figures — 127,509, 6,825 and 1,449 — which is a reminder of how provisional the 1925 count was.

The text itself was a genuine reconstruction. It restored a strong presidency with a six-year term and no immediate re-election, gave the president the free appointment and removal of ministers, ended the "leyes periódicas" by providing that the previous budget would continue if congress failed to pass a new one, separated church and state, guaranteed freedom of conscience, and wrote into the constitution a set of social rights to labour protection, industry and social insurance. It was the legal foundation of the Chilean welfare state, and it lasted, with amendments, until 1973.

The man who made the new system work was not its author. Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, a cavalry officer who had been the moving spirit behind the 1924 officers' movement, pushed Alessandri out in 1927 and governed until 1931 as a dictator with a taste for institutions: the Carabineros as a national police force, the Contraloría General as an independent audit office, the air force as a separate service, the state airline LAN, and the labour code of 1931. He also borrowed heavily, and the Great Depression destroyed him: he resigned in July 1931 and went into exile. The republic then went through a year of chaos, including the twelve-day Socialist Republic of June 1932 under Marmaduke Grove, before Alessandri returned to restore the constitution.

How did Chile go from the Popular Front to the coup?

For thirty-six years after 1932 Chile combined a restricted but real democracy with a growing state. The Radical party governed, in coalitions that moved left in the late 1930s, when the Popular Front brought Socialists and Communists into government, and right afterwards. The electorate expanded as women won the municipal vote in 1934 and the presidential vote in 1949, and as the literacy requirement bit less each decade. Industry grew behind tariffs; the state development agency CORFO was created in 1939; the country urbanised and its trade unions and parties became mass organisations.

The system's weakness was economic. Copper, nationalised in stages between 1966 and 1971, replaced nitrate as the export on which everything depended, and the price was set abroad. Inflation was chronic, and each government's attempt to control it — by fixing prices, by devaluing, by indexing — failed in ways that radicalised politics. Eduardo Frei's Christian Democrats (1964–70) began an agrarian reform and "Chileanised" the copper mines; Salvador Allende's Popular Front coalition won the presidency in 1970 with 36.6 per cent of the vote against 35.3 for Jorge Alessandri and 28.1 for Radomiro Tomic, and was confirmed by congress on 24 October after the murder of General René Schneider by right-wing conspirators had shocked the country into respecting the result. Three years of deepening polarisation, strikes, land seizures and American pressure ended on 11 September 1973, when the armed forces under General Augusto Pinochet bombed the presidential palace and Allende died in it.

How did the dictatorship end, and what has Chile become?

The military government that followed was not a typical Latin American caudillo regime. It was institutional, collective in form and ideological in content, and after 1975 it became the testing ground for a radical free-market programme designed by Chilean economists trained at Chicago: privatisation, deregulation, the destruction of the tariff wall, and a labour code that removed most union power. It also imprisoned, tortured, killed and exiled thousands; the Rettig commission of 1991 documented 2,279 deaths, and the Valech commission recorded some 40,000 victims of political imprisonment and torture. A new constitution in 1980 was approved in a plebiscite without electoral registers and installed a "protected democracy" with designated senators and a national security council.

The regime's own rules undid it. The transitional provisions required a plebiscite in 1988 on a further eight-year term for Pinochet, and on 5 October 1988 the "No" campaign won 55.99 per cent of valid votes against 44.01. Pinochet accepted the result, and the opposition won the presidency in December 1989; Patricio Aylwin took office in March 1990. The Concertación governments of the 1990s kept the economic model and negotiated away the authoritarian enclaves piece by piece; the 1980 constitution was reformed substantively in 2005, and the designated senators disappeared.

Chile became the richest country in Latin America per head and, by the 2010s, one of the most unequal in the OECD. That combination produced the protests of October 2019, when a rise in metro fares set off months of demonstration and the government's authority collapsed; the political parties responded with a plebiscite in October 2020 in which nearly 80 per cent voted to write a new constitution. Two conventions followed, and both drafts were rejected — the first, a radical text with plurinational provisions for indigenous peoples, by 61.9 per cent in September 2022; the second, a conservative text, by 55.8 per cent in December 2023. Chile in 2026 is governed under the amended constitution of 1980, with a Mapuche land question still open, a copper economy still exposed to the price of copper, and a political class that has now failed twice to replace the settlement it inherited.

Common myths about the Republic of Chile

Timeline of the Republic of Chile

What the map shows next

At 1932 on the map the map shows a Chile that has been through the collapse of nitrate, the Ibáñez dictatorship and the Depression, and is beginning the long period of Radical and then Christian Democrat government that built the welfare state. The neighbours drawn beside it — 1932 on the map Peru and Bolivia — had by then accepted the post-war settlement, though Bolivia's loss of its coast remained the central grievance of its foreign policy.

By 1977 on the map the country is in the middle of the dictatorship, four years after the coup and three before the constitution that still governs it; the same map year shows an Argentina under its own military government, which came within a hair of war with Chile over the Beagle Channel in 1978.