Chile

TL;DR. Chile is a ribbon of a country, more than 4,000 kilometers long but rarely more than a couple hundred kilometers wide, squeezed between the Andes mountains and the Pacific Ocean and running from the driest desert on Earth to Patagonian glaciers. The Mapuche people of the south held off full conquest, first by the Inca and then by Spain, for centuries. Chile won independence in the 1810s with help from the Argentine general Jose de San Martin, then built one of 19th-century Latin America's more stable states and grew rich first on nitrate and later on copper, after winning the War of the Pacific against Peru and Bolivia. In 1970 Chileans elected Salvador Allende, the world's first democratically elected Marxist head of state; three years later, on September 11, 1973, a coup led by General Augusto Pinochet overthrew him, and Allende died inside the presidential palace. Pinochet then ruled for seventeen years, a period marked by documented human rights abuses and by a sweeping free-market economic overhaul that still divides opinion today. Chile returned to democracy in 1990, built decades of praised economic growth alongside stubborn inequality, and in 2019 erupted into mass protests that led to two failed attempts to write a new constitution. This chapter covers all of it, fairly, including the parts Chileans still argue about most.

Key takeaways

• Chile's shape, more than 4,000 kilometers long and rarely more than a couple hundred wide, packs desert, forest, and glacier into one narrow country running down the edge of the continent.
• The Mapuche people resisted outside conquest, first by the Inca and then by Spain and the Chilean state, for roughly three centuries, longer than almost any other indigenous nation in the Americas.
• Chile won the War of the Pacific (1879 to 1884) against Peru and Bolivia, gaining nitrate-rich northern territory and leaving Bolivia permanently without a coastline, a grievance still raised today.
• Salvador Allende's 1970 election, his overthrow in the September 11, 1973 coup, and Augusto Pinochet's seventeen-year dictatorship remain the most contested chapter of Chile's modern history, combining documented human rights abuses with a free-market economic overhaul still debated today.
• Chile returned to democracy in 1990 and built a strong regional reputation for economic stability, but persistent inequality helped trigger the massive 2019 "estallido social" protests and two failed attempts, in 2022 and 2023, to replace the Pinochet-era constitution.
• Gabriel Boric, elected in 2021 as a young left-wing president, could not seek immediate re-election under Chilean law, and the country chose his successor in a late-2025 election.

Main events at a glance

The land and the deep past

Chile occupies one of the strangest shapes of any country on Earth: a strip of land more than 4,300 kilometers (about 2,700 miles) long, hugging the Pacific coast of South America, yet rarely more than about 350 kilometers (220 miles) wide and often far narrower. To the east, the Andes wall the country off from Argentina. Packed inside that long ribbon is an extraordinary range of climate: the Atacama Desert in the north, one of the driest places on Earth, then a temperate central valley where most Chileans actually live, then forests and lakes further south, and finally, at the country's southern tip, the fjords, glaciers, and wind-scoured plains of Patagonia, a region Chile shares with Argentina (see Argentina).

Long before the Spanish arrived, this strip of land held distinct indigenous peoples adapted to each of those climates: the Aymara and Atacameno peoples of the northern desert and high plateau, related to the great Andean civilizations further north, and the Diaguita of the desert's river valleys. But the people who shaped Chile's history more than any other were the Mapuche, who lived across the fertile lands of south-central Chile, in what is now the Araucania region and its surroundings.

The Mapuche were never conquered by the Inca Empire, whose expansion into Chile stopped at the Maule River, well short of Mapuche territory. When the Spanish arrived in the 1500s, they found the Mapuche just as hard to subdue. Spanish forces under Pedro de Valdivia founded Santiago in 1541, but their push south into Mapuche land triggered a long conflict known as the Arauco War, one of the longest sustained campaigns of resistance against European colonization anywhere in the Americas. For roughly three centuries, first against Spain and later against the independent Chilean state, the Mapuche fought as free warriors and held a rough frontier along the Bio Bio River, south of which outside authority did not reliably reach. Only a series of campaigns known as the "Pacification of Araucania," lasting into the 1880s, finally brought Mapuche territory under state control, at real human and territorial cost that is still argued over today (more on this below).

Chile's independence followed the same continent-wide chain of events described in The South American world: Napoleon's 1808 invasion of Spain left the Spanish crown without a king to answer to, and colonial elites across Spanish America began forming their own governing councils. In Santiago, local leaders formed a governing junta on September 18, 1810, a date still celebrated every year as Chile's independence day even though full independence took years more to secure. Spanish royalist forces reconquered the country in 1814, and independence leaders, including a young officer named Bernardo O'Higgins, fled across the Andes into Argentina. There they joined the Argentine general Jose de San Martin (see Argentina), who had concluded that Buenos Aires would never be safe while Spain still held Chile and Peru. In 1817 San Martin led an army back across the Andes and, together with O'Higgins, defeated the royalists. Independence was formally declared in February 1818, and O'Higgins became the country's first head of state.

Don't be confused: 1810 and 1818 are both "independence," but they mark different moments. September 18, 1810, the date of Chile's first governing junta, is the date Chileans actually celebrate each year in a big national holiday called Fiestas Patrias. But that junta still claimed loyalty to the deposed Spanish king; it was a local government stepping into a vacuum, not a declaration of a separate country. Full, formal independence was not declared until February 1818, after years of war, including a Spanish reconquest in between. The same pattern, an early symbolic date followed by a later formal declaration, shows up across Spanish South America.

How modern Chile was formed

A stable republic, by regional standards

Compared to many of its newly independent neighbors, 19th-century Chile built an unusually stable political system early on. Power stayed concentrated in a small class of landowning families, and the country was nowhere close to a full or equal democracy by modern standards, since voting was long restricted to literate men of property. Even so, Chile largely avoided the parade of short-lived governments and caudillos, personalist military strongmen, that troubled other new republics in the region (see The South American world for how common that pattern was elsewhere). A durable constitution adopted in 1833 gave the presidency strong powers and lasted, with amendments, for decades. That relative stability let the state build railways, schools, and a functioning bureaucracy earlier than many neighbors, and it gave Chile a reputation, not entirely earned but not baseless either, as one of the more orderly countries in the region.

The War of the Pacific

That stability helped Chile in its biggest 19th-century conflict. From 1879 to 1884, Chile fought Peru and Bolivia together in the War of the Pacific, over control of a stretch of nitrate-rich desert on the Pacific coast. Nitrate, a mineral used to make fertilizer and explosives, was enormously valuable at the time, and the deposits in question sat in territory claimed by Bolivia and Peru but worked largely by Chilean companies and workers.

Chile won decisively. Under the peace settlements that followed, Chile annexed Bolivia's entire coastal province, cutting Bolivia off from the sea for good, and took Peru's nitrate-rich Tarapaca region, along with, for a time, the further provinces of Tacna and Arica (Tacna was returned to Peru in 1929, while Arica stayed with Chile). The war remains one of the most consequential events in the history of this part of the continent: it left Chile with new territory and mineral wealth, left Peru with a lasting national grievance, and left Bolivia landlocked to this day, a loss it has never accepted as final and has pressed, so far without success, including before the International Court of Justice. (See Peru and Bolivia and Ecuador for how each of those countries remembers the same war.)

Nitrate, then copper

The nitrate fields captured in the war fueled decades of Chilean prosperity. Nitrate mining built towns across the Atacama Desert, funded the state largely through export taxes, and made Chile, for a time, the world's dominant supplier of a mineral the whole industrial world needed. That boom collapsed after the First World War, when German chemists worked out how to manufacture nitrogen fertilizer synthetically, and demand for Chile's natural product fell off sharply. By then, though, another mineral was taking over: copper. Chile's copper deposits, among the largest on Earth, became the new backbone of the economy over the 20th century, a role copper still holds today (more on this in the economy section below).

Miners, unions, and early unrest

Life in the nitrate mining camps, called oficinas, was hard and closely controlled by the companies running them, which often paid workers in company scrip usable only at company stores. Labor organizing grew alongside the mines and was, at times, met with brutal force. The starkest example came in 1907 in the northern port city of Iquique, when striking nitrate workers and their families gathered at a school, the Escuela Santa Maria, to press their demands. The army opened fire on the crowd, killing an uncertain but large number of people, with estimates ranging from the hundreds into the thousands. The Santa Maria School massacre remains one of the most painful and best-remembered episodes in Chilean labor history, and it fed a labor and left-wing political movement that grew steadily over the following decades and would eventually help carry Salvador Allende to the presidency.

Big events and conflicts

Salvador Allende and the "Chilean path to socialism"

In 1970, Salvador Allende, a doctor and longtime socialist senator running at the head of a left-wing coalition called Popular Unity (Unidad Popular), won the presidency with a plurality of the vote, confirmed by Congress as Chilean law required. Allende became the world's first head of state to win power through open, competitive elections while explicitly pursuing a Marxist program, what he called "the Chilean path to socialism," meaning a socialist transformation carried out through existing democratic and constitutional institutions rather than through revolution.

In office, Allende's government nationalized the country's largest copper mines, then mostly owned by US companies, in a move approved unanimously by Congress, along with banks and various large industries, and pursued a land reform that broke up big estates. His presidency also ran into serious trouble: inflation climbed, goods grew scarce, and the country grew sharply polarized between his supporters and an opposition that included much of the middle class, business owners, and eventually large parts of Congress and the military.

Don't be confused: the September 11 that matters most in Chile is not the one most people think of first. For readers outside South America, "September 11" usually calls to mind the 2001 attacks on the United States. In Chile, September 11 refers to a different, earlier date: September 11, 1973, the day of the military coup that overthrew Salvador Allende. It remains one of the most significant dates in Chile's modern history, discussed and marked every year, and it has no connection to the 2001 attacks that came nearly three decades later.

The US role

The United States, under President Richard Nixon and his national security adviser Henry Kissinger, saw Allende's government as a Cold War threat, a possible Soviet-aligned foothold in South America. Declassified US documents, made public in later decades, show that the US government worked covertly, both before Allende's election and throughout his presidency, to undermine him: funding opposition media and political groups, and applying economic pressure meant to worsen Chile's troubles. Nixon reportedly ordered the CIA to "make the economy scream." How much this covert effort actually contributed to the coup that followed, as opposed to Chile's own deep internal political and economic conflict, is still debated by historians, but the fact of sustained US covert involvement against Allende's government is documented and not seriously disputed.

The 1973 coup and the Pinochet dictatorship

On September 11, 1973, Chile's armed forces, led by army commander General Augusto Pinochet, moved against the government. Military aircraft bombed La Moneda, the presidential palace in Santiago, and troops surrounded it. Allende, refusing calls to surrender, died inside the palace that day; the most widely accepted account, supported by later forensic investigation, is that he shot himself rather than be captured, though the circumstances were disputed and politically charged for years afterward.

Pinochet then led a military government that ruled Chile for the next seventeen years, from 1973 to 1990. Political parties were banned, Congress was shut down, and the press was censored. Chile's own postwar truth commissions, the Rettig Report of 1991 and the Valech Report of 2004, found that the dictatorship's security forces killed or forcibly disappeared more than 3,000 people and detained and tortured tens of thousands more. One especially notorious episode, known as the Caravan of Death, saw an army death squad travel by helicopter to towns across the country in the weeks after the coup, executing political prisoners who were, in several cases, already being held without trial. These are documented findings of Chile's own state investigations, not one-sided allegations, and they are treated as settled historical fact in Chile today, even as Chileans continue to draw very different lessons from the period as a whole.

The Chicago Boys and economic change

Alongside the repression, Pinochet's government carried out a sweeping remake of Chile's economy. A group of Chilean economists, many trained at the University of Chicago and influenced by the free-market ideas of economist Milton Friedman, and known ever after as the "Chicago Boys," took charge of economic policy. They privatized state companies, deregulated markets, opened Chile to foreign trade, and replaced the state pension system with a privatized one built on individual retirement accounts (more on this below).

These reforms are genuinely disputed territory, and a fair account holds both sides in view. Supporters point out that, after a severe setback during a debt crisis in the early 1980s, Chile's economy grew consistently and, by the 1990s and 2000s, more reliably than almost anywhere else in Latin America, a record later governments of different political stripes mostly kept in place rather than reversed. Critics point out that the same period entrenched deep and lasting inequality, that the reforms were carried out with no democratic mandate under a government that jailed and killed its opponents, and that specific arrangements from that era, especially the pension system, remain a source of public anger decades later. Both the growth and the inequality are real, and both continue to shape how Chileans argue about this period.

The 1988 plebiscite and the return to democracy

Under a constitution the military government wrote in 1980, Pinochet was required to hold a national plebiscite in 1988 asking voters whether he should remain in office for another eight-year term. A broad opposition coalition ran an energetic campaign urging a "No" vote, built around an upbeat advertising jingle rather than grim protest, and, to the surprise of many, the "No" side won with about 56 percent. Pinochet accepted the result, open elections followed in 1989, and Chile returned to elected civilian government in March 1990 under President Patricio Aylwin. Pinochet stayed on as army commander for years afterward and later as an appointed senator, and in 1998 he was arrested in London on a Spanish warrant over human rights crimes, a case that never reached full extradition or trial but that became a landmark moment in international law over whether former heads of state can be held to account abroad. He died in 2006 still facing multiple unresolved legal cases in Chile.

Growth, inequality, and the 2019 uprising

Over the following three decades, Chile built a reputation, praised by international institutions such as the World Bank, as one of Latin America's steadiest and most successful economies, a record sometimes called the "Chilean model." Poverty fell sharply, and in 2010 Chile became the first South American country admitted to the OECD, a group of mostly wealthy, developed economies. But the growth was unevenly shared: Chile has remained one of the more unequal countries among that same group of nations, and everyday costs, from healthcare to education to retirement, stayed a real strain for many households even as the national numbers looked strong.

That tension broke into the open in October 2019. A relatively small increase in Santiago's metro fare, announced under President Sebastian Pinera, set off student-led fare-dodging protests that snowballed within days into the largest and most sustained wave of unrest Chile had seen since the return to democracy, an episode known as the estallido social, meaning roughly "social outburst." The fare hike itself was almost beside the point; the protests' real target was accumulated frustration over inequality, a privatized pension system many felt had failed them, and the cost of living, captured in a slogan that spread everywhere: "it's not 30 pesos, it's 30 years." Confrontations between protesters and police turned violent in places, and credible human rights investigations documented serious injuries, including hundreds of cases of eye damage from police projectiles.

Rewriting, and not rewriting, the constitution

Under pressure from the protests, Chile's political leaders agreed to let voters decide whether to write an entirely new constitution to replace the one drafted under Pinochet in 1980, even though that document had been amended many times since. In an October 2020 vote, a large majority backed the idea, and Chileans elected a special assembly to draft a new text.

That first draft, produced mostly by left-leaning and independent delegates, was ambitious: among other things, it would have declared Chile a "plurinational" state formally recognizing indigenous peoples, including the Mapuche, as distinct nations within the country. Voters rejected it decisively in a September 2022 referendum, by a wide margin that surprised many observers. A second attempt followed a different path: a new drafting body, this time shaped mostly by conservative and right-wing delegates, produced a more conservative text. Voters rejected that one too, in December 2023, by a smaller but still clear margin. As a result, Chile continues to be governed under the amended 1980 constitution, and the country's long argument over its founding legal document remains unresolved.

Gabriel Boric and the years since

Gabriel Boric, a former student protest leader from the far southern city of Punta Arenas, won the presidency in December 2021 at age 35, becoming Chile's youngest modern president, at the head of a coalition that included his own party and the Communist Party. He took office in March 2022 promising to address the grievances behind the 2019 uprising, including pension and tax reform, while governing a country still split over how far and how fast to change.

Chile's constitution bars presidents from serving consecutive terms, so Boric could not run for re-election. In the election held in November and December 2025, the right-wing candidate Jose Antonio Kast defeated Jeannette Jara, a Communist Party minister representing Boric's governing coalition, in the runoff by a wide margin, and took office in March 2026. As of this writing, in mid-2026, Kast is Chile's president, though readers checking this later should confirm the current officeholder, since Chilean politics, like anywhere else, keeps moving after any book goes to print.

How people lived: daily life and lifestyle

Because Chile stretches across such a range of climates, daily life looks different depending on where along that narrow ribbon of land you are. In the bone-dry Atacama Desert in the north, among the driest places on Earth (some weather stations there have never recorded measurable rainfall), life centers on mining towns and, increasingly, tourism built around otherworldly landscapes and famously clear night skies. In the fertile central valley around Santiago, where most Chileans actually live, life looks much like that of any mid-sized modern city: apartment living, traffic, and a strong cafe culture. Far to the south, in Chilean Patagonia, life is shaped by fjords, glaciers, sheep ranching, and a much smaller, more spread-out population living at the edge of some of the most dramatic scenery in the world.

Chileans have a reputation among their South American neighbors, one many Chileans acknowledge themselves with a shrug, for being somewhat reserved and formal compared to the more outwardly expressive cultures of, say, Argentina or Brazil. Manners and politeness are valued, and Chileans are often described, sometimes affectionately and sometimes not, as more cautious and rule-following than their neighbors.

Two things cut across all these regional differences: wine and the outdoors. Chile's central valley is one of the world's great wine-growing regions (more on this in the food section below), and a strong outdoor culture runs through everyday life, from surfing and hiking along the long Pacific coast to skiing in the Andes just outside Santiago to trekking in the far south.

Music and the arts

Chile has produced two Nobel laureates in Literature, an unusual number for a country of under 20 million people. Gabriela Mistral won in 1945, the first Latin American writer ever to receive the prize, for poetry rooted in childhood, motherhood, and grief; she also worked for years as a teacher and diplomat and appears today on Chile's 5,000-peso banknote. Pablo Neruda won in 1971 for a body of poetry running from the intensely romantic (his early collection Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair remains one of the best-selling poetry books ever published in Spanish) to the openly political; Neruda was also a senator and diplomat and a lifelong member of the Communist Party. His houses in Santiago and on the coast are now popular museums.

Isabel Allende, a novelist, is one of the best-selling authors in the Spanish language and one of the most widely read Latin American writers in the world in English translation. Her first and best-known novel, The House of the Spirits, follows a Chilean family across several generations and ends amid a thinly disguised version of the 1973 coup.

Don't be confused: Isabel Allende and Salvador Allende are relatives, but not father and daughter. Isabel Allende's father was a first cousin of Salvador Allende, which made the future president something like an uncle figure in her childhood; she has said she called him "Tio Salvador," uncle Salvador. After the 1973 coup, Isabel Allende left Chile and eventually settled in the United States, where she has written most of her books. The family connection is real and often mentioned, but the two are cousins by blood, not parent and child.

In music, Violeta Parra collected and reworked Chilean folk traditions starting in the 1950s and became the founding figure of the Nueva Cancion Chilena, the Chilean New Song movement, which mixed traditional instruments and melodies with pointed social and political lyrics. Her song "Gracias a la Vida" ("Thanks to Life"), written not long before her death in 1967, has been recorded by artists across the world and remains one of the most recognized songs to come out of Latin America. Victor Jara, a singer and theater director associated with the same movement, was arrested, tortured, and killed by the military in the days right after the 1973 coup, at a stadium in Santiago later renamed in his honor; his death remains one of the most widely remembered individual killings of the dictatorship's early days.

Notable people

• Bernardo O'Higgins: Chile's independence leader and first head of state, who defeated Spanish forces alongside Jose de San Martin and led the country from 1818 to 1823.
• Salvador Allende: the socialist president elected in 1970 who died during the 1973 military coup that overthrew him.
• Augusto Pinochet: the general who led that coup and then ruled Chile as a dictator until 1990, presiding over both serious human rights abuses and a sweeping free-market economic overhaul.
• Pablo Neruda: the Nobel Prize winning poet, one of the most widely read poets of the 20th century in any language.
• Gabriela Mistral: poet, educator, and diplomat, the first Latin American writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature, in 1945.
• Isabel Allende: novelist and one of the best-selling Spanish-language authors of modern times, related to Salvador Allende.
• Gabriel Boric: elected president in 2021 at age 35, Chile's youngest modern head of state.

Religion, coexistence, and minorities

Chile has historically been an overwhelmingly Roman Catholic country, and the Church's influence long shaped Chilean law: Chile did not legalize divorce until 2004, one of the last countries in the world to do so, and abortion was completely banned until a limited 2017 reform allowed it under three specific circumstances (risk to the mother's life, a non-viable pregnancy, or rape). Both changes were fought over fiercely and passed only after years of political struggle.

In recent decades, like much of Latin America, Chile has grown steadily more secular. Surveys show declining rates of regular church attendance and a rising share of Chileans, especially younger ones, identifying with no religion at all, alongside real growth in evangelical and Pentecostal Protestant churches, particularly among lower-income communities.

The Mapuche remain Chile's largest indigenous group, alongside smaller peoples including the Aymara in the north and the Rapa Nui of Easter Island. Tensions over Mapuche land rights in Araucania and neighboring regions, often called the "southern macrozone" in Chilean politics, are a live and unresolved issue. Some Mapuche communities and organizations demand the return of ancestral land taken during and after the 19th-century "Pacification of Araucania" campaigns described earlier in this chapter, and a small radical fringe has carried out arson attacks on logging trucks and forestry equipment in the region. Chilean governments of different political stripes have responded with a mix of approaches: a state agency created in the 1990s buys and redistributes land to indigenous communities, but governments have also periodically declared states of emergency and sent additional police and military forces into the region, a response indigenous rights groups say treats a political and historical grievance as a security problem. The failed 2022 constitutional draft would have gone further than any past Chilean law in formally recognizing indigenous nations within the state, and its rejection left this question, like the constitution itself, unresolved.

Food: Chile's own table

With more than 4,000 kilometers of Pacific coastline, it is no surprise that seafood sits at the center of Chilean cooking. Congrio, a firm white conger eel, is a national favorite, celebrated in a well-known poem by Pablo Neruda dedicated entirely to a conger eel soup called caldillo de congrio. Ceviche, raw fish or shellfish cured in citrus juice, a dish found in various forms all along the Pacific coast of South America, has its own well-loved Chilean version. Further south, on the island of Chiloe, the traditional dish curanto layers shellfish, meat, potatoes, and dumplings, all cooked together, traditionally in a pit dug in the ground and covered with hot stones and large leaves, though a simpler pot version is common today too.

Chile is also one of the world's major wine producers and exporters, thanks to a long, sunny central valley well suited to grape growing and largely untouched by the vine disease phylloxera that devastated European vineyards in the 1800s. Chile's signature red grape is Carmenere, a variety once grown in France's Bordeaux region and believed extinct there, until vines long mistaken for Merlot in Chilean vineyards were identified, in the 1990s, as surviving Carmenere.

Two everyday foods round out the picture. Empanadas, baked or fried pastries, are common across Latin America, but the classic Chilean version, empanada de pino, is stuffed with chopped beef, onion, a hard-boiled egg, an olive, and a few raisins. And the completo, Chile's take on the hot dog, comes piled with mashed avocado, tomato, and mayonnaise, a combination whose green, red, and white colors Chileans sometimes note, half-jokingly, echo their own flag.

Everyday life: relationships, family, and home

Extended family ties matter a great deal in Chile, and gatherings for Sunday lunch or for the mid-afternoon meal known as once, a light spread of bread, avocado, cold cuts, cheese, and tea taken in the late afternoon, similar in spirit to British afternoon tea, remain a normal part of weekly life for many families.

Chilean social life has historically leaned conservative by regional standards. Divorce, as mentioned above, was illegal until 2004, which meant that for generations Chilean couples who separated simply lived apart without a formal legal divorce, or pursued lengthy annulment processes instead. Attitudes have loosened considerably since then. Chile created a civil union option, open to both same-sex and opposite-sex couples, in 2015, and full same-sex marriage became legal in March 2022, one of the signature reforms of Gabriel Boric's early presidency and a notable shift for a country where the Catholic Church long held outsized influence over family law.

School, work, and the economy

Chile is, by several standard measures, one of the wealthiest and most stable economies in Latin America: high income per person relative to its neighbors, a long record of low and predictable inflation compared to much of the region, and, since 2010, the first South American country admitted to the OECD, the group of mostly high-income economies.

Copper is the backbone of Chile's economy and by far its most important export. Chile is the world's largest copper producer, responsible for roughly a quarter of global supply, mined both by the state-owned company Codelco and by large private and foreign-owned operations. Swings in the global price of copper ripple directly through the Chilean economy and government budget, a modern version of the same dependence on one or two key exports, nitrate and then copper, that has run through Chilean history since the 19th century.

Pensions remain one of the economy's most contested legacies. The private, individual-account pension system created under Pinochet in 1981, run by companies called AFPs (Administradoras de Fondos de Pensiones, or pension fund administrators), was for years held up internationally as a model and copied in various forms elsewhere. In Chile itself, though, it became deeply unpopular, as many retirees found their monthly payouts far lower than they had expected, a grievance that fed directly into the 2019 protests and remains a major, unresolved item on the political agenda.

A newer resource has joined copper as a source of both economic hope and political debate: lithium, a light metal essential to the rechargeable batteries used in electric vehicles and electronics. Chile holds some of the largest lithium reserves in the world, concentrated in brine beneath the salt flats of the Atacama Desert, and is currently the world's second-largest producer, after Australia. As global demand for batteries has grown, Chilean governments, including Boric's, have pushed for the state to take a larger direct role in future lithium projects rather than leaving the resource entirely to private companies, a live and closely watched policy question given how central lithium has become to the global shift toward electric vehicles.

Language, idioms, and words to know

Chilean Spanish has a reputation across the Spanish-speaking world for being unusually fast and, to other Spanish speakers, unusually hard to follow at first. Chileans tend to drop the final "s" sound in many words, swallow syllables, and speak at a notably quick pace, and they use a large stock of slang not always understood even in neighboring Argentina or Peru. Visitors who studied Spanish elsewhere sometimes find they can hold a conversation comfortably in Mexico or Spain but struggle in their first days in Santiago.

A few distinctly Chilean words and expressions:

• Cachai, from an old borrowing of the English word "catch," tacked onto countless sentences to mean roughly "you know?" or "get it?"
• Al tiro means "right away" or "immediately."
• Fome means "boring" or "lame."
• Bacan means "cool" or "great," used approvingly of almost anything.
• Pololo and polola mean "boyfriend" and "girlfriend," words used nowhere else in the Spanish-speaking world in quite this way.
• Poh, tacked onto the end of sentences for emphasis, carries no fixed meaning of its own beyond adding color and rhythm to speech.

A number of Chilean words also come from Mapudungun, the Mapuche language, including guata (belly) and malon (a sudden raid, or, informally today, an unannounced group visit), a small but real linguistic trace of the peoples described earlier in this chapter.

Famous places to know

• Santiago: the capital, a modern city of roughly 6 million people sitting in a valley ringed by the Andes, visible on clear days towering over the skyline.
• The Atacama Desert: in the far north, one of the driest places on Earth, with landscapes so dry and skies so clear that several of the world's most powerful astronomical observatories, including ALMA, are built there to take advantage of the near-total lack of cloud cover and light pollution.
• Chilean Patagonia and Torres del Paine: the dramatic southern region of fjords, glaciers, and granite peaks shared with Argentina; Torres del Paine National Park, named for three towering granite spires, is one of South America's premier hiking and trekking destinations.
• Easter Island (Rapa Nui): a remote, small volcanic island far out in the Pacific, more than 3,500 kilometers (roughly 2,200 miles) from mainland Chile, home to the indigenous Rapa Nui people and famous worldwide for its moai, the large stone statues carved by Rapa Nui ancestors centuries ago. Rapa Nui became part of Chile in 1888 through an agreement between Chilean representatives and Rapa Nui chiefs, an arrangement whose fairness and exact terms remain disputed between the island's indigenous residents and the Chilean state to this day.
• Valparaiso: a colorful port city on hills overlooking the Pacific, known for its steep funicular elevators, street art, and a historic quarter recognized as a UNESCO World Heritage site.

Fitting in: visiting, impressing people, and being a good citizen

Chileans are generally polite, somewhat formal on first meeting, and appreciative of visitors who make an effort with basic courtesy and a few words of Spanish. A single kiss on the cheek is the standard greeting between women, and between men and women who know each other, even at a first proper introduction through mutual friends; a handshake is more typical between men meeting for the first time or in business settings.

A few practical notes: punctuality is expected in business and formal settings, even though purely social plans often run somewhat later than scheduled. Meals are a good way to connect with people, and Chileans generally appreciate genuine curiosity about their country's food, geography, and history. Given the subjects covered in this chapter, some sensitivity is warranted: the 1973 coup and the Pinochet years remain a live and, for some families, personal subject, and opinions about that period, and about more recent events like the 2019 protests and the failed constitutional rewrites, still vary widely and can run deep. Listening and asking, rather than declaring a strong opinion, is the safer approach for a visitor.

Entry requirements, such as visas, can change, so check current official sources before traveling. This is general information, not legal advice.

Suggested reading, news, and links

Books. Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits is a widely read entry point into Chilean history, told as a family saga that runs up through the 1973 coup. Pablo Neruda's poetry, including Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair and Canto General, is available in many English translations. For the documented history of US involvement during the Allende years, The Pinochet File by Peter Kornbluh draws on declassified US government records. For general history, look for a well-reviewed academic or journalistic history of Chile from an established publisher, and check the author's credentials rather than relying on any single source.

News. For international coverage, the BBC and Reuters are widely used and reputable. Within Chile, El Mercurio (founded in 1827 and among the oldest newspapers in continuous publication in the Spanish language) and La Tercera are the country's major national dailies, both with an online presence; their political leanings, generally center-right, are worth keeping in mind when reading.

Useful links.

• The official Chile tourism site (search for "Chile Travel" or "Chile tourism official site").
• A country profile from the BBC (search "BBC Chile profile").
• An encyclopedia overview from Britannica (britannica.com).

When in doubt about any source, cross-check facts across more than one reputable outlet.

Today, and how to talk about it

Chile today is a country of about 19 million people that combines a genuinely strong, stable economy by regional standards with unresolved arguments about how fairly that strength has been shared, and about how to remember a dictatorship that mixed serious human rights crimes with an economic overhaul some still defend and others still condemn. Both the growth Chile achieved after 1990 and the inequality that persisted alongside it are documented, measurable facts, not competing opinions, and a fair account holds onto both rather than picking one to tell.

Talking about the Allende and Pinochet years carefully means keeping several things distinct: Allende's election and his government's struggles are one part of the story; the documented human rights abuses of the Pinochet dictatorship, established by Chile's own postwar truth commissions, are settled historical fact; the debated economic legacy of the Chicago Boys' reforms is a genuinely open argument with evidence on more than one side; and the record of US covert involvement against Allende is documented, even though its exact weight in causing the coup is still argued over by historians. Collapsing all of that into a single hero-and-villain story, in either direction, does not match the documented record.

What is not in dispute is that Chile stretches across one of the most dramatic ranges of landscape found in any single country, that its literature has produced two Nobel laureates from a small population, that its recent history includes both real economic achievement and real, unhealed wounds, and that Chileans today, across a still-divided political spectrum, are the ones working out what comes next.

Next, north to the heart of the old Inca empire 👉 Peru