Chile today and tomorrow

by L. E. Elliott Joyce

Parque Forestal, Santiago.

Municipal Offices, Santiago.

The majority of these towns are more than convenient centres for crowding populations; they owe their existence to special and widely divergent causes that have also formed the character of the people. To certain circumstances in Chilean history can be ascribed a powerful part in making the Chilean—the disappearance of the Indian as a worker, and consequent self-dependence; the great rise of the nitrate industry, and the creation of national wealth and great private fortunes; and the enlargement of the national horizon by war. But the effect of different regions and their calls upon resources have been and are still equally important. Much of the spirit of the Chilean is due to the independent life of the mineral-hunter of the north, solitary, even-tempered, enduring, deeply attached to the soil. The day of this class of miner has departed almost as definitely as that of the cunning craftsmen who, in colonial days, fashioned in copper or silver all domestic utensils of Chilean homes: but his influence lives. Marked also is the influence of the skilled horseman, the woodsman, the man of the camp who knows how to kill and cook his food, how to cross mountain passes or trackless forest or unbridged stream; the far-flung Chilean cities bear the stamp of the Chilean character created by these special circumstances, and generalisations must be made and received with this fact in mind.

The Santiaguino, occupied in finance, law, politics or trade, is addicted to cheery club life, is a country and garden lover, and has a keen understanding and affection for horses; his characteristics bring him readily into sympathetic touch with the British, allied by many blood-ties. He is famed as a charming host, a genial welcomer of the stranger, and there is no city in the world where the visitor will be more agreeably interviewed by an acute press, more quickly and spontaneously greeted and made at home than by the frank and kindly Chilean family.

The dweller in Santiago and Valparaiso possesses a marked characteristic rare in any part of Latin America: he is a born speculator and financier, and is an active attendant and operator upon the local Bolsa (Stock Exchange). In some of the smaller and less developed states of Spanish America the Stock Exchange is non-existent or negligible: but in Chile the Bolsa is thronged daily, and the operations are active, eager, and dictated by a highly intelligent appreciation of the market conditions of the world. The cables are incessantly used in this connection, and many a Chilean fortune has been made and lost by the follower of exchange fluctuations. The Chilean understands and is accustomed to investment, and is not alarmed as are many American nations at the prospect of investing his money abroad. He has gone afield for a century, and, operating in Antofagasta and Tarapacá long before they were Chilean de facto, has since their acquisition ranged farther into the mining districts of central Bolivia. Chilean capital and technical skill are responsible for half the mines operated in that sister state. Operations in Bolivian mining shares—such as the famous and spectacular Llallaguas—form a considerable item in the work of the Chilean Bolsa.

Behind the bright social life of the Chilean cities lie the great farming and mining areas, with their dependence upon that hardy Chilean worker nicknamed the roto—originally, the “out at elbows” class. Today the term has lost its depreciatory meaning, and the workman in general is a roto. He has fine qualities of hardihood, loyalty and endurance; and although he has sometimes had a repute for free use of the corvo, the deadly curved knife in whose use he has an extraordinary facility, it is only upon too-festive occasions or during jealous quarrels that he is apt to give way to passion. The measures taken by the Government and by large employers of workmen in industries or mines to stop the traffic in the worst forms of liquor, and to substitute the light and innocuous Chilean wines, has lessened these troubles during recent years, and it is true of Chile as of most parts of South America that there is no organised crime. Cases of theft are common, but are ascribed mainly to the lower class of South European who comes to Chile for work and forms a part of the shifting population moving from camp to camp. Chile’s Ley de Residencia, by which criminals are deported from the scene of discovered ill-deeds to another part of the coast, means very often that the north and south exchange ne’er-do-wells.

It is partly due to this perhaps too kindly system that Chile has suffered considerably from strikes during the past few years. The entry of malcontents bringing the flag and doctrines of the I. W. W. created trouble in the coal mines of the south, the copper camps and the nitrate fields of the north, and the ingenuous character of the native-born lends itself to the ready acceptance of specious theories. I have seen the flag of the Californian-bred Industrial Workers of the World paraded in Santiago, while such “red” periodicals as El Socialista of Antofagasta spread a hash-up of violent and hysterical propaganda, a medley of Marxian and Bolshevik ideas, amongst railway and port workmen. The women, always an element to be reckoned with in Chile, were brought into the Antofagasta railway strike in 1919, and when the first strike-breaking train was run out of the port, the wives of the strikers laid themselves down on the tracks in a theatrical attempt obviously instigated by the practised foreign agitator.

The radical administration of Señor Arturo Alessandri, with its avowed sympathy with the workers, was able to counteract the pernicious influence of the exterior trouble-maker as, perhaps, a more conservative government could not; and the firmness with which, in late 1921, the President dealt with an attempted tie-up of Valparaiso port, declaring his intention of redressing any genuine grievances but at the same time making clear his determination that the work of the port should not be interfered with, has been salutary. The powerful Workman’s Federation (Federación de Obreros) of Chile has done much good work, and is likely to do more if it is purged of foreign interference and retains the sympathies of the middle class Chilean.