Chilean Political Process Research Articles

The Book of Revolt and the House of Rejection: On Neoliberalism and the Constitutional Process in Chile, 2019–2022

As an introductory framework to the dossier, this article analyzes the Chilean political process based on the images that (re)emerged with the 2019 revolt and that were deployed in the constitutional process channeled into a Constitutional Convention (2020–22). It shows how the old ghosts of class, gender, and the nation appear in these “mental images,” the same ghosts that have historically operated in the defeat of transformative projects and contributed to the reproduction of an authoritarian and elitist society, whose neoconservative/neoliberal oligarchy has managed to restore the conditions of its domination. The article proposes these observations to stimulate the reading of the contributions to this dossier, which problematize different aspects of the political process under discussion: the aporetic relationship among revolt, violence, and law; the citizenry's turn from a desire of community and transformation expressed in the revolt to a feeling of fear and attachment to private property; writing as a practice, support, and challenge of the people's critical expression; the tension between the performance of the revolt as a failure and as a reset of neoliberal performativity; and the territorial and deterritorializing wagers in relation to affective infrastructures that became revolt and that continue through other means.

The effects of emotions on the disposition to normative and non-normative political action in the context of the Chilean post-social outburst.

This article analyzes the role of Chileans' emotions as predictors of normative and non-normative political action in the context of the post-social outbreak and the constituent process. We carried out three descriptive studies: first, a study conducted 1 year after the social outburst (n = 607), a second one carried out before the constitutional referendum (n = 320), and a third study conducted after the constitutional referendum (n = 210). The results indicated that participants present a higher disposition to normative over non-normative political action, although both lose strength as the studies temporally move away from the social outburst. Also, our research established that emotions directed towards different events related to the Chilean political process play a conspicuous role in predicting the disposition to mobilize in a normative and non-normative way.

Il caso Moro e il Cile dei militari

During the Moro kidnapping Italy and Chile entangled their ways again. If previously especially the peninsula had observed the Chilean political process, in this occasion occurred the opposite. The text examines the reading of that event made in the South-American country by the press to show how a serious institutional crisis was analyzed in the context of the dictatorship. Thus, emerges an interpretation mainly made for internal use with the aim of underlining the weaknesses of democratic regimes, the Marxist danger, re-reading the historical passages as well as finding confirmation of the authoritarian choices.

Theatricalities of Dissent

The 2011 student movement radically challenged the Chilean political process by exposing the hidden legacy of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship and demanding a complete restructuring of its neoliberal reforms. The demonstrators contended that these so-called reforms transformed education into a for-profit venture that had gradually produced social segregation and unequal access to quality education. After more than seven months of protests, marches, school strikes, and flash mobs, the movement became the most powerful force for social change since the struggle against the dictatorship. A key element of their success was their effective use of social theatricalities to communicate protesters' demands and to rearticulate the meaning of urban space. This essay aims to demonstrate that these tactics grounded on a poetics of the body symbolically reappropriated the neoliberal city—segregated and consumption-driven—and transformed it momentarily into a lively and energized counter-neoliberal space, where a community marked by solidarity and the promotion of social change emerged.

Exchange: Debating U.S. Involvement in Chile in the 1970s

JCWS. Obviously, reviewers should feel free either to praise or to condemn my work, and I deserve no say in how a review is couched. I do, however, have the right to comment on a review after its publication. Gustafson describes my work as “ideologically motivated” and “a blinkered and tendentious assault on [Richard] Nixon and [Henry] Kissinger.” If I did not hold strong views about Nixon’s and Kissinger’s brutal manipulation of the Chilean political process, I never would have pursued my research. I have concluded that their covert opposition to President Salvador Allende was unwarranted and depraved, and I have supported my position with evidence. Not only have I made thorough use of recently declassiaed U.S. documents, I have also listened to the Nixon tapes, which Gustafson apparently has not. Perhaps we should turn to Gustafson’s own comment that Allende’s socialist experiment “was a threat to the Western way of life” because it took an “electoral and democratic form.” I thought that democratic elections were a key component of our cherished Western way of life. According to Gustafson’s argument, Fidel Castro’s violent revolution produced less of a destabilizing effect on the international order, but this leaves me very confused. Does Gustafson support violence as a solution to political conoicts? If Gustafson regrets that Allende came to power peacefully and democratically rather than otherwise, does he admire the savagery of General Augusto Pinochet’s accession and rule? Bearing in mind historian Peter Novick’s own observation that

Chile's Elections: Change and Continuity

In December 1999, Chile held its third presidential election since the rejection of the military government of Augusto Pinochet in a 1988 plebiscite. Like the two preceding elections, which brought to power Patricio Aylwin in 1989 and Eduardo Frei in 1993, the 1999 contest was won by a representative of the Concertacion, a center-left coalition of the Christian Democrats, the Socialists, the Radicals, and the Party for Democracy. It differed from these earlier elections, however, in four important ways. First, in 1999 there were not simultaneous parliamentary elections. Second, the candidate of the Concertacion, Ricardo Lagos, was not a Christian Democrat but a Socialist, who had easily defeated his Christian Democratic rival in the primaries. Third, the Rightist opposition was united for the first time behind a single candidate, Joaquin Lavin. Finally, the unprecedentedly close results of the December 1999 race led to the first runoff election in Chilean history, with Lagos narrowly defeating Lavin by 51.3 to 48.7 percent of the vote. The climate of the 1999 campaign was characterized by a “dedramatizing” of the elections that sharply contrasted with similar occasions in Chilean history. Some thought that the country had already entered a “new era” of democracy, markets, and globalization. They feared, however, that Chile was moving too hesitantly into the twentyfirst century, and that impediments to the full realization of globalization and the market economy needed to be removed. Many of them argued that politics had to be put at the service of this process Manuel Antonio Garreton, professor of sociology at the University of Chile, is the author of several books about politics, culture, and society, including Fear at the Edge (coedited with Juan E. Corradi and Patricia Weiss Fagen, 1987), The Chilean Political Process (1989), Hacia una nueva era politica. Estudio sobre las democratizaciones (1995), and America Latina, un espacio cultural en un mundo globalizado (1999).

Chile: processo político e controvérsias intelectuais

O processo político chileno é examinado por um ângulo pouco comum, mediante a conjugação da exposição dos principais fatos a uma análise das principais correntes de interpretação. O pano de fundo da análise é dado pelo atual contexto político, no qual, argumenta-se, abre-se a possibilidade de retomar o curso de uma democratização que se extraviou.

The Chilean Political Process

The Chilean Political Process

The Chilean Political Process.

The Chilean Political Process.

Marxism and democracy in Chile: from 1932 to the fall of Allende and The Chilean political process

Marxism and democracy in Chile: from 1932 to the fall of Allende and The Chilean political process

Recovering Democracy in Chile - Manuel Antonio Garretón: The Chilean Political Process. Translated by Sharon Kellum in collaboration with Gilbert W. Merkx. (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989. Pp. xiii, 220. $15.95, paper.)

Recovering Democracy in Chile - Manuel Antonio Garretón: The Chilean Political Process. Translated by Sharon Kellum in collaboration with Gilbert W. Merkx. (Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1989. Pp. xiii, 220. $15.95, paper.)

The Chilean political process

The Chilean political process

The Chilean Political Process

The Chilean Political Process

Centrist Fragmentation and Political Desintegration: The Chilean Case

Among the constellation of Latin American republics, Chile's case appears paradoxical indeed. For many years probably the most stable and, by Western liberal standards, the most democratic country of Latin America, 1 Chile is nowadays an outstanding example of a thoroughly dictatorial regime whose reputation extends far beyond the hemisphere. 2 One obvious question for the analyst is why the apparent contradiction between the reputed ' 'democratic' ' record of the Chilean polity and its current repressive nature. In other words, isn't there any underlying explanation to suggest a continuity between both aspects of the Chilean political process? This paper intends to explore this complex relationship in the transition between pluralism and repression in contemporary Chile. In so doing, by implication, some exploratory hypothesis pertaining to the crisis of pluralistic political systems will be suggested. The analysis of the Chilean case can provide some relevant theoretical questions regarding the factors of continuity and/or change of these systems and the general constraints within which ' 'pluralism and stability can coexist. The central thesis of this presentation is that the type, style, and forms of brokerage* existing in Chile since the 1920's contributed to a large extent to maintain political stalemate and deadlock while incrementally unleashing forces which, in the long run, became highly dysfunctional for the maintenance of a pluralistic political system. In this light, I argue that the forms of extreme authoritarianism and incipient fascism clearly visible in today's Chile are partially rooted in the way in which such factional broke -

Political Opposition to the Government of Allende

THE ANALYSIS OF THE PRESENT CHILEAN POLITICAL PROCESS MAY serve to underline some features of the Marxist theory of the state and of the relationship between social classes and institutional structures. Few countries offer such a clear example as Chile of the impact of the elements forming the ideological superstructure on the social and economic mechanisms which operate at the level of the infrastructure. Its long, bourgeois democratic tradition has led to the accumulation of many juridical and institutional elements, to which formal respect has been given, and which have built up a system of domination thanks to the acquiescence of other social sectors. The achievement of a high degree of consensus had been the other side of the face of a weak bourgeoisie, and in the blind logic of weak dominant classes, they have transformed their superstructure into their Achilles's heel. For the Chilean political process has shown how political power can transform itself into an instrument which will destroy the unity of the institutionalized power structure of the bourgeois state, when it is controlled by an alliance of social forces which escape the influence of the dominant class and its allies.