The history of Chile

Chile, a narrow strip of land between the Andes and the Pacific, has been inhabited for more than fourteen thousand years, by the fishing peoples of the Atacama desert, the farming communities of the central valley, the Mapuche of the south and the canoe and foot nomads of Patagonia. Spain conquered the north and centre from 1541 but never subdued the Mapuche, who held the land south of the Biobío River for more than three centuries. Independent from 1818, Chile built one of the most stable states in Latin America, won the nitrate deserts of the north from Bolivia and Peru, and conquered Mapuche territory in the 1880s. In the twentieth century its long democratic tradition ended in the coup of 1973 and the seventeen-year dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, followed in 1990 by a return to democracy that has lasted to the present.

Monte Verde, near Puerto Montt, is one of the most important early sites in the Americas. Its main layer, generally dated to about 14,500 years ago, preserved wooden tent frames, rope, plant foods and the bones of extinct elephant-like gomphotheres, and it played a large part in overturning the old idea that the first Americans arrived only with the Clovis culture of North America. Some researchers still dispute its dating. Other early sites lie in the caves of Patagonia, such as the Cueva del Milodón.

On the coast of the Atacama desert, around Arica, the Chinchorro people lived by fishing and gathering shellfish. From about 5000 BCE, two thousand years before the Egyptians, they began to mummify their dead artificially, taking bodies apart, reinforcing them with sticks and reeds, and covering them with clay masks. Later peoples of the northern oases, such as the Atacameño around San Pedro de Atacama, farmed with irrigation, herded llamas and traded across the Andes, and from around 500 CE they came under the influence of Tiwanaku near Lake Titicaca. The Diaguita of the semi-arid valleys further south made distinctive painted pottery. In the second half of the fifteenth century the Inca Empire extended its rule over the north and the central valley as far as the Maipo River and beyond, building roads and forts and taking tribute.

The largest Indigenous people were the Mapuche, whose name means "people of the land", speakers of Mapudungun who lived from the central valley to the island of Chiloé. The northern groups, called Picunche, had come under Inca rule; further south lived the Mapuche proper and the Huilliche. They farmed maize, potatoes and quinoa, raised llamas, fished and gathered, and lived in scattered family homesteads rather than towns. Political authority rested with local lineage leaders, the lonkos, who could join in wider alliances in war and chose war leaders, toquis, for campaigns. Inca armies were turned back by the Mapuche at the Maule River, and Inca rule never reached the south. Their population may have reached a million or more when the Spanish arrived.

Further south, the archipelagos and the far south were home to sea nomads who travelled by canoe, the Chono, the Kawésqar and the Yaghan, while the Aónikenk (Tehuelche) and the Selk'nam hunted guanaco on the steppes of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego. Far out in the Pacific, Polynesian voyagers, masters of Polynesian navigation, settled Rapa Nui around the thirteenth century and carved the great moai statues that still stand on the island.

Ferdinand Magellan sailed through the strait at the southern tip of the continent in 1520. The first Spanish expedition into Chile, led by Diego de Almagro, partner of Francisco Pizarro in the conquest of Peru, came south in 1536 but returned disappointed at the lack of gold. In 1540 Pedro de Valdivia set out from Peru with a small force, and on 12 February 1541 he founded Santiago. Months later the Picunche leader Michimalonco attacked and burned the new town, but the Spaniards held on.

Valdivia pushed south into Mapuche lands, founding Concepción, Valdivia and other towns, and handed out Indigenous people to settlers in encomiendas, grants of forced labour used mainly for gold washing. Lautaro, a young Mapuche who had served as Valdivia's groom and learned Spanish ways of war, escaped and led an uprising. At the Battle of Tucapel in December 1553 the Mapuche destroyed Valdivia's force and killed him. Lautaro himself was killed in 1557, but the war he began went on for generations. The Mapuche quickly adopted the horse, organised mounted forces and used guerrilla tactics against fortified Spanish positions.

In 1598 warriors led by Pelantaro killed the governor, Martín García Óñez de Loyola, at Curalaba. A general uprising followed in which all seven Spanish towns south of the Biobío River were destroyed or abandoned. The river became a frontier. Spain kept a permanent army on it, paid from the silver of Peru, and long periods of raiding, slave-taking and fighting alternated with negotiations. At the Parliament of Quilín in 1641, Spanish authorities and Mapuche leaders agreed to treat the Biobío as the boundary, and later parliaments renewed such agreements. Trade in cattle, horses, wine and textiles crossed the frontier, and Mapuche society expanded across the Andes onto the pampas of what is now Argentina. For more than two centuries the Mapuche remained an independent people, a rare case in the Americas.

North of the Biobío, Chile became a modest outpost of the Spanish Empire, a captaincy general subordinate to the Viceroyalty of Peru and its capital Lima. Disease, war and forced labour sharply reduced the Indigenous population, and a mixed-race mestizo majority emerged. Society came to centre on large rural estates, the haciendas, whose owners formed a small landed elite, while tenant labourers called inquilinos worked their land in return for plots of their own. Chile exported wheat and tallow to Peru and suffered repeated destructive earthquakes. The Bourbon reforms of the eighteenth century brought more trade and growth, and governors such as the Irish-born Ambrosio O'Higgins, later viceroy of Peru, built roads and towns. Santiago's population and its Creole elite grew in confidence.

When Napoleon forced the Spanish king to abdicate in 1808, the Creoles of Santiago, like those across Spanish America, formed a governing junta on 18 September 1810, at first in the king's name. The period known as the Patria Vieja saw bitter rivalry between the faction of José Miguel Carrera and that of Bernardo O'Higgins, the son of Ambrosio. Royalist troops from Peru defeated the patriots at Rancagua in October 1814 and restored Spanish rule, with harsh reprisals that drove more Chileans towards independence.

In exile in Mendoza, O'Higgins joined José de San Martín, who was preparing the Army of the Andes. Early in 1817 it crossed the mountains and won the Battle of Chacabuco. Independence was formally proclaimed on 12 February 1818, and San Martín's victory at Maipú in April secured it. Chile then organised a navy under the British admiral Thomas Cochrane to carry San Martín's army to Peru, part of the Spanish American wars of independence that ended with the victories of Simón Bolívar's forces. The last royalist stronghold on Chiloé fell in 1826.

O'Higgins ruled as supreme director until 1823, when opposition forced him into exile. Slavery was abolished in 1823, early by the standards of the Americas. Years of unstable government ended when conservatives won a short civil war in 1830. The minister Diego Portales, never president himself, built a centralised, authoritarian order, embodied in the constitution of 1833, which concentrated power in a president elected by a tiny electorate and lasted until 1925. Chile defeated the Peru-Bolivian Confederation of Andrés de Santa Cruz in a war ending in 1839. Presidents served two five-year terms each, and the country gained a reputation for orderly, if oligarchic, government. Liberals won power in 1861, and over the following decades laws reduced the role of the Church and broadened political rights.

The state extended its reach. It founded Punta Arenas on the Strait of Magellan in 1848 and settled German immigrants around Valdivia and Lake Llanquihue from the 1840s. Silver and copper mines in the north and wheat exports to the gold-rush markets of California and Australia brought prosperity. In 1835 the young Charles Darwin, travelling on the Beagle, lived through a great earthquake at Valdivia and then saw the ruined city of Concepción.

Between 1861 and 1883 the Chilean state conquered the independent Mapuche lands south of the Biobío in a campaign officially called the "pacification" of Araucanía. Colonel Cornelio Saavedra advanced the frontier with lines of forts, first to the Malleco River, and Mapuche resistance led by chiefs such as Quilapán fought back. A Frenchman, Orélie-Antoine de Tounens, briefly proclaimed himself king of Araucanía and Patagonia in 1860, which the Chilean government used to justify its advance. After the War of the Pacific, veteran troops moved south; a last general Mapuche uprising in 1881 was defeated, Temuco was founded that year, and in 1883 the refounding of Villarrica completed the conquest. In the same years Argentina's Conquest of the Desert was taking the Mapuche lands east of the Andes.

The consequences were devastating. The Mapuche lost most of their territory and were confined to about three thousand small reservations under land titles called títulos de merced, totalling roughly half a million hectares, while the rest was sold or granted to Chilean and European settlers. Many Mapuche were reduced to poverty, and their land claims remain a live political issue today. In Tierra del Fuego, at the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth century, sheep ranchers and gold prospectors hunted down the Selk'nam, and disease and forced removal to missions completed what historians widely describe as a genocide. On Rapa Nui, Peruvian slave raids in 1862 and 1863 and the epidemics that followed had reduced the population to about a hundred people by the 1870s; Chile annexed the island in 1888 and leased most of it to a sheep company, confining the Rapa Nui to a small village until the 1960s.

The Atacama desert held rich deposits of nitrate, used for fertiliser and explosives, worked largely by Chilean and British capital in territory belonging to Bolivia and Peru. When Bolivia raised a tax on a Chilean nitrate company in breach of an 1874 treaty, Chile occupied the port of Antofagasta in February 1879, and Bolivia and its ally Peru went to war with it. After the Peruvian commander Miguel Grau and his ironclad Huáscar were defeated at Angamos in October 1879, Chile controlled the sea. Its armies took the provinces of Tarapacá, Tacna and Arica and in January 1881 occupied Lima. The Treaty of Ancón with Peru in 1883 ceded Tarapacá to Chile, and a truce with Bolivia in 1884, confirmed by treaty in 1904, took Bolivia's whole coastline and left it landlocked. Tacna was returned to Peru in 1929, while Arica stayed Chilean. Bolivia's claim to an outlet to the sea remains a source of tension between the two countries.

Nitrate taxes now paid for most of the Chilean state. When President José Manuel Balmaceda clashed with Congress over spending and power, the navy and Congress rose against him in the civil war of 1891; defeated, he shot himself. The "parliamentary republic" that followed, until 1925, was dominated by Congress and the landed and mining elite. Conditions in the nitrate camps were harsh, and labour unrest was met with force: in December 1907 the army fired on striking nitrate workers and their families at the Santa María school in Iquique, killing hundreds. The labour leader Luis Emilio Recabarren founded the Socialist Workers' Party in 1912 and the Communist Party in 1922. After World War I, synthetic nitrate made in Germany destroyed the market for Chile's natural product, and copper, mined largely by American companies at Chuquicamata and El Teniente, took its place.

In 1924 and 1925 military interventions brought the reformist Arturo Alessandri back to power and a new constitution that restored a strong presidency. Colonel Carlos Ibáñez ruled as a dictator from 1927 until the Great Depression, which hit Chile harder than almost any other country, brought his fall in 1931. Constitutional government returned in 1932, and the Radical Party led a Popular Front with Socialists and Communists that won the presidency in 1938 and built up state industry. Women voted in a presidential election for the first time in 1952. On 22 May 1960 southern Chile was struck by the Valdivia earthquake, the most powerful ever recorded, of magnitude 9.5.

The politics of the Cold War divided the country into three roughly equal blocs: the right, the centrist Christian Democrats and the Marxist left. The Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei Montalva, elected in 1964 with covert American funding, launched land reform and bought part ownership of the copper mines. In 1970 Salvador Allende, a Socialist doctor at the head of the Popular Unity coalition, won 36.6 per cent of the vote, narrowly ahead of the former president Jorge Alessandri, and Congress confirmed him as president. The United States government of Richard Nixon had tried to prevent this: the CIA encouraged a coup plot, and in the course of a botched kidnapping the army commander, General René Schneider, who opposed military intervention, was killed.

Allende set out to build socialism by legal means. Congress unanimously approved the nationalisation of the copper mines in 1971, and his government expanded land reform and took over banks and large companies. A first year of growth gave way to shortages, a black market and inflation of hundreds of per cent a year, worsened by an American credit blockade and covert funding for the opposition. Strikes by lorry owners and professionals paralysed the country, while supporters occupied factories and farms. In August 1973 the Chamber of Deputies declared that the government was acting outside the constitution.

On 11 September 1973 the armed forces, led by General Augusto Pinochet, whom Allende had recently appointed army commander, seized power. Air force jets bombed the presidential palace of La Moneda, and Allende took his own life inside it rather than surrender. The junta closed Congress, banned political parties, censored the press and declared a state of siege. Thousands were rounded up in the National Stadium and elsewhere; the singer Víctor Jara was among those murdered in the first days. In October a military delegation known as the Caravan of Death travelled from town to town executing prisoners.

Pinochet made himself head of a junta and then president, ruling for seventeen years. The secret police, the DINA, ran torture centres such as Villa Grimaldi, and opponents were killed, made to disappear or driven into exile. Its agents assassinated the former army commander Carlos Prats in Buenos Aires in 1974 and the former minister Orlando Letelier in Washington in 1976, and Chile took part in Operation Condor, the coordinated repression of South America's military regimes. The official truth commissions established after the dictatorship recognised 3,095 people killed or disappeared and more than 36,000 survivors of political imprisonment and torture, and some 200,000 Chileans went into exile.

Economic policy was handed to the "Chicago Boys", economists trained at the University of Chicago, who privatised state companies, opened the economy to trade, cut social spending and created private pension funds, though the state kept the nationalised copper giant Codelco. A severe crash in 1982 brought mass unemployment and protests, but growth returned later in the decade. A constitution approved in a plebiscite without electoral registers in 1980 set out a timetable for a vote on Pinochet's continued rule. On 5 October 1988, 56 per cent of voters said no. The Christian Democrat Patricio Aylwin, at the head of the centre-left Concertación coalition, won the election of 1989 and took office in March 1990, while Pinochet remained army commander until 1998.

The Concertación governed for twenty years under Aylwin, Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, Ricardo Lagos and Michelle Bachelet, the first woman president, whose father had died after torture under the dictatorship. Poverty fell sharply and Chile became one of the richest countries in Latin America, though inequality stayed high. In 1998 Pinochet was arrested in London on a Spanish warrant for crimes against humanity; the United Kingdom released him on health grounds in 2000, and he died in 2006 facing hundreds of charges but never convicted. A 1993 law recognised Chile's Indigenous peoples and created a body to buy back land, but conflict over Mapuche land claims in Araucanía, involving forestry companies, protests, arson and heavy policing, has continued. The centre-right Sebastián Piñera and Bachelet alternated in office from 2010. An earthquake of magnitude 8.8 struck in February 2010, and later that year 33 trapped miners were rescued at San José.

In October 2019 a rise in Santiago metro fares set off months of mass protests against inequality, in which dozens died and the police were accused of serious abuses. Political parties agreed to a referendum, and in October 2020, 78 per cent of voters chose to write a new constitution. Two drafts were then rejected in referendums, a left-leaning text in 2022 and a conservative one in 2023, leaving the 1980 constitution, much amended, in force. The former student leader Gabriel Boric, elected in 2021, served as president from 2022. In December 2025 José Antonio Kast of the right-wing Republican Party won the presidency with 58 per cent of the vote, and he took office on 11 March 2026.