“What We Can Reclaim of the Old Values of the Past”: Sexual Morality and Politics in Twentieth-Century Chile

Abstract

In 1990, after seventeen years of dictatorial rule in Chile, General Augusto Pinochet ceded power to a democratically elected government. The ensuing transition from authoritarian rule has presented the governing Concertacion coalition and Chileans more generally with formidable challenges: checking the power of the military, dealing with the legacy of human rights abuses, democratizing the authoritarian state structures created by Pinochet and confronting the heightened class inequality generated by the military's neoliberal economic policies. In the years following 1990, however, public debate has frequently centered on a distinct, although not unrelated, set of issues: crime, teenage pregnancy, drug use, divorce and abortion. Works that provide an overview of military rule and the transition from authoritarian rule in Chile include The Struggle for Democracy in Chile, 1982–1990, ed. Paul Drake and Ivan Jaksic (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1991); El modelo chileno: Democracia y desarrollo en los noventa, ed. Paul Drake and Ivan Jaksic (Santiago: LOM, 1999); Lois Hecht Oppenheim, Politics in Chile: Democracy, Authoritarianism, and the Search for Development (Boulder: Westview Press, 1993); Philip D. Oxhorn, Organizing Civil Society: The Popular Sectors and the Struggle for Democracy in Chile (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1995). My assertions regarding the prevalence of public debate on moral issues since 1990 are based on observations I made while in Chile during 1988, 1991–1993, and December 1996.