The Spanish come to Chile

I've been reading about the history of Chile.1 Like Australia, its modern history began when its indigenous peoples were invaded and violently overrun by Europeans. But, unlike Australia, the southern part of Chile remained firmly under indigenous rule for some years. And all this began 2 1/2 centuries before the English made it to Australia. Oh and they waged war to become a republic. Here's what happened...

The Inca empire of Peru was conquered by Spanish conquistadores in the early 1530s. A few years later, in 1540, the Spanish kingdom pushed south to Chile. The indigenous people of Chile's central region had already been overthrown by the Peruvian Incas, but their rule stopped at the Maule river (250km south of Santiago) where the Mapuche still maintained their independence. When the Spanish arrived, they established towns further south than this, but a Mapuche offensive begun in 1598 drove them all north of the Bío Bío river (500 km south of Santiago). From the early 1600s a small standing army was stationed at the frontier. Warfare between settlers and indigenous peoples lessened over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and cross-frontier trade increased.

Those indigeneous peoples north of the Bío Bío were treated as second-class citizens and forced to become labourers on the Spanish elite's rural estates. This practice, in combination with the introduction of foreign diseases, caused the disintegration of indigenous society, hastened further by the "near-total absence" of European women which saw the emergence of a new, majority mestizo ethnicity north of the Bío Bío. The minority upper class was made up of Spanish people born in Chile (creoles) and Spanish people from Spain (peninsulares). The latter were the only people permitted to participate in the Audiencia, Chile's governing body, which served under the Govenor of Chile.

On September 18 1810 (the dieciocho, Chile's national day ever since), in reaction to great political unrest in Spain in the Napoleonic wars, the unofficial creole council established a junta of six men to govern the country in place of the Audiencia. The junta raised a small army, and after a royalist uprising was violently quashed, the Audiencia disbanded. A congress was then elected by creoles and met for the first time in Santiago in July 1811. But Chile wasn't allowed to exit out of the Spanish empire quite so easily. Early in 1813 the Peruvian viceroy (who, under Spanish rule, was in charge of Chile) began the first of a number of wars intended to reverse Chile's independence. They didn't go according to plan - the Chilean patriots won in early 1818.

The new republic was influenced by the Enlightenment and by the American and French Revolutions. "All Chileans in public life now proclaimed their belief in the rights of man ('natural and imprescriptible rights: equality, liberty, security and property,' as the 1822 constitution put it), in representative government, in the division of powers, in equality before the law, and in republican virtue."2 However, "[g]iven the Chilean social structure, with its small, cohesive upper class and its huge mass of illiterate rural poor, there was bound to be difficulty in introducing the liberal utopia overnight . . . . The electoral laws of the period, and for decades afterward, reflected this fact by confining the franchise to a very narrow segment of the population. The political benefits of independence were thus largely restricted to the upper class. For the great mass of the population the new order brought little in the way of immediate improvement in material circumstances, let alone political influence."3

So began the new country of Chile. Stay tuned for more...


1 S Collier & WF Sater, A History of Chile, 1808-2002 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004 2nd ed), pages 4-8 and 33-34. 
2 Ibid, 40.
3 Ibid, 41-42.

To remember Australia

 

and me...

A beautiful, sad place

This is what pastor Juan Esteban Saravia has to say about Ñuñoa (from here). It makes me think of Hobart.

The suburb of Ñuñoa is a beautiful place, its people are beautiful, but sadly many of them live as slaves. Many live without direction, without a purpose. Many have forgotten that they are people, men and women, created by God in his image. They have forgotten their Creator and don't stop to think - because they are slaves to sin, and Satan directs them for his own purposes. [La comuna de Ñuñoa es un hermoso lugar, su gente es hermosa, pero lamentablemente muchos de ellos viven como esclavos. Muchos viven sin un sentido, sin un propósito. Muchos han olvidado que son personas, hombres y mujeres, creados por Dios a su imagen. Han olvidado a su creador y no lo reflejan, porque son esclavos del pecado, y Satanás los maneja para sus propios propósitos.]

This bit doesn't sound like Hobart :(

In the suburb of Ñuñoa there exists injustice and inequality. There is robbery, violence, scams, drug addiction etc. [En la comuna de Ñuñoa existe la injusticia y la inequidad. Hay robos, violaciones, estafas, drogadicción, etc.] 

In both places the answer is the same.

Jesus can reverse this situation. He can rescue this suburb, he can redeem Ñuñoa. Christ can be the Redeemer of Ñuñoa through his church as it tells the suburb the Good News that Jesus died on a cross to rescue people from death and slavery. [Jesús puede revertir esta situación, Él puede rescatar a la comuna, Él puede redimir Ñuñoa. Cristo puede ser el Redentor de Ñuñoa a través de su Iglesia que le cuenta a la comuna La Buena Noticia de que Él murió en una cruz para rescatar de la muerte y de la esclavitud a cada persona que Él quiera.]

I'm looking forward to playing my part in helping the church mature in faith and understanding so that, if God wills it, Ñuñoa and other places may be greatly blessed.

Parallel world

Santiago is pretty much on the same latitude as Sydney.

And Hobart is on the same latitude as a little Chilean island, Chiloé, which is about a tenth the size of Tasmania. So it's just us two, Argentina and New Zealand before you get to Antarctica.

Thought you might like to know.

Practical theology

Missionary training material often seems to restrict itself to the practical or the psychological - but I've discovered a happy alternative which talks about how the challenges of the missionary life expose what we really believe about God.

Part One is about God's graciousness...

All the normal things from which we gain a sense of worth, success, achievement, competence are stripped away when you move to another culture . . . . You will be unable to do ministry or contribute to church life; . . . . You will feel incompetent to manage ordinary life. (Where do you buy glue? What do you say at a road block? How do you get your washing machine mended?); Your self-justification framework is taken away. Your behaviour will be weird and your productivity will be low.

Part Two is about God's glory...

It is an act of believing the gospel to open up, to be able to say: ‘I’m having a bad day, please pray for me,’ to not feel the need to protect your reputation or project your best.

Part Three is about God's greatness...

[T]here will be many things that are left undone; many suffering people unhelped; many lost people who do not hear the gospel.
That can be difficult to live with. The danger is that it will drive you to over work, over stress, over worry. Or you will push those emotions onto other people – making them feel guilty that they are not doing enough.

Part Four is about God's goodness...

Delight in the city. Be 100 percent there 100 percent of the time.

H/T Rod

Support

Dear reader, if you would like to support me financially in my missionary work, then I would be very glad of that, especially as this is just what I'm waiting on before I can head off. Write to fiona.lockett@sim.org or facebook message me and I can send you out a snazzy brochure.

If you would prefer to join in my work through prayer then get in touch with me and I'll put you on the email list for my (monthly, brief) news & prayer letter. Or you can just pray about stuff you read here.

And if you'd like to write and encourage me, then please leave comments on this blog or write to the email address above.

Big thanks for your big heart, and to God for his.

Everyday Christians

• People feel like they have to choose between being a student/professional worker and being a Christian - so they decide that Christianity will have to fit in with the rest of their life. Church attendence is seen as optional.
• People don't know about the storyline or major ideas of the Bible. They don't know where they fit in with it all. This is true even for people who have been Christians for many years.
  
• People know that they should do 'devotionals', but no-one tells them what exactly they're supposed to do. 
• Many Christians have only been Christians for five years and haven't seen any good models of how to live as a Christian.
• Australians could learn from the Chilean practice of including a Bible verse for every occasion. Unfortunately, these nice-sounding verses have often been completely taken out of context and misapplied.
• People are accustomed to passively receiving from missionaries. They think that missionaries are unattainably perfect and don't realise that they need friends and have stuff to learn. They don't realise that they could send Chilean missionaries to other countries.
• The excellent Bible college, Centro de Estudios Pastorales, has only been around for a few years.

A big thanks to my new-found Chilean friends (and missionaries) for teaching me so much!

Everyday life

• The underground train system is easy-to-use, quick, reliable and extensive. The buses are a different story - when they reach a stop, they just slow down and you have to jump on quick. 
• In some ways Chile is just as developed as Australia, but in other ways it's more like a developing country. There's certainly not the smooth-running, efficient systems and bureaucracy we have in Australia. 
• You can't wear necklaces or dangly earrings in public and you have to sling your handbag across your body, or they will be stolen by thieves. 
• Men are both gentlemenly and charming/sleazy. They will make flattering comments as they pass you in the street. They aren't necessarily to be trusted.
• Chileans don't say "please" and "thank you" all the time, like Australians do.
• Whenever you meet a group of people, you greet and farewell each person with a (air) kiss on the cheek.
• 70% of uni students are the first person in their family to have attended university, so it's a great honour. Uni fees take up a massive proportion of a worker's income, so uni students are under a lot of pressure. 
• The education system is inequitable. You would only send your child to a state school if you couldn't afford private education. Even the best schools only teach by rote.
• 'Middle class' in Australia = 'upper class' in Chile. 'Middle class' in Chile = 'working class' here.
• You can't get fresh milk, nice milk chocolate or coffee. You can get great dark chocolate, icecream, fruit juices and Vegemite. You can also get gorgeous fresh produce from local markets, but only the poor shop there - the rich eat packaged food. 
• Clothes aren't as well made as they are in Australia, and they wear out a lot quicker.
• Chileans love bread. Batches are baked throughout the day in the local supermarket and people line up for warm, just-cooked loaves. Mmm

Pinochet

While I was growing up in an Australia of peace and prosperity, the nation of Chile was undergoing a very different time. We'll start back in 1970 when Salvador Allende became the world's first (and only?) democratically elected socialist president. He quickly introduced a number of extreme, and controversial, left-wing measures - the nationalisation of major industries, the redistribution of land, raising of the minimum wage and increased social spending. By 1972 inflation had soared, basic commodities were no longer freely available, the government announced its intention to default on international debts - and the international price for copper (Chile's most important export) had plummeted.1 The resulting unrest climaxed on September 11 1973 when the right-wing army commander, Augusto Pinochet, toppled the government in a violent coup (during which Allende killed himself).

Pinochet was in power for nearly 17 years. During this time at least 3200 people were murdered or disappeared and 27 000 tortured. The 2003 National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture found that two thirds of tortures happened in the three months following the coup and that the victims were largely innocent civilians. "The physical trauma had taken a heavy psychological toll on many torture victims, leaving them humilitated, depressed and often unable to keep a job or sustain close relationships."2

Today, people's perception of Pinochet's regime varies enormously. An author writing about a town with the highest recorded number of disappearances/killings tells of, "A hairdresser whose father had disappeared when she was two years old [who] said her earliest memory was of her mother leaving her and her siblings home alone to search for him. At the salon where she works, many of the customers are still very vocal about their admiration for Pinochet."3 And in the same town, "A teacher at the local high school told me most of his students had no idea about what had happened in their town in wake of the 1973 military coup, though occasionally some ask him about life during the regime."4 The director of a Chilean polling organisation also observed that, although Santiago remains Latin America's safest capital, "fear of crime in present-day Chile [is] higher than fear of the military had been under Pinochet. 'If you kept your head down you could avoid trouble with the military.'"5

During Pinochet's reign, some structures of civil society were abolished (congress, the presidency, freedom of speech) or used to serve Pinochet's ends (the media, the judiciary - which retained its powers yet failed to take any action in regard to human rights abuses). Yet despite this, Pinochet did operate within the boundaries prescribed by his 1980 constitution. Indeed, his reign ended peacefully after a 1988 nationwide plebisite on whether his presidency should continue for another eight-year term. Pinochet's opponents formed a sixteen-party Comando del No coalition which began by urging people to sign onto the electoral roll (the earlier version of which was destroyed in the coup). Over 90% of Chileans obliged. Pinochet also permitted various measures which ensured a fair voting process. And, unlike the previous (corrupt) plebisites, the "no" vote won the day. Initially, Pinochet threatened privately to maintain his rule by force, but he later allowed elections to take place and handed over power to a new, left-wing president.

This mixture of autocracy and democracy is intriguing enough, but the complex situation continued. Despite losing the presidency, Pinochet remained army commander for the next ten years. This meant that "democratic leaders had to engage in an elaborate and prolonged bargaining process with the former dictator and his supporters . . . . Though it was never clear whether the army's officer corps and soldiers would support another coup, Pinochet often implied he might take such a course if the situation warranted."6 During this time he also "managed to dodge a series of judicial investigations into some of the worst crimes of his regimes as well as an inquiry into an illicit fortune he had built up during his rule and hidden in bank accounts abroad."7 Pinochet died in Chile in 2006, during the government of Michelle Bachelet, the fourth democratically elected president since his regime.



1 Above information obtained from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Salvador_Allende
2 MH Spooner, The General's Slow Retreat: Chile After Pinochet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011), 193. All unacknowledged information is from this source.
3 Ibid, 8.
4 Ibid, 7.
5 Ibid, 5.
6 Ibid, 3.
7 Ibid, 3.

You who are Gentiles by birth

One of my absolutely favourite Bible passages is Ephesians 2:11-13:

Therefore, remember that formerly you who are Gentiles by birth . . . remember that at that time you were separate from Christ, excluded from citizenship in Israel and foreigners to the covenants of the promise, without hope and without God in the world. But now in Christ Jesus you who once were far away have been brought near by the blood of Christ. 

It never fails to strike a chord; I don't know exactly why. I do know that it absolutely amazes me that I, a Gentile woman who has only ever met one, non-practising Jew, who used to wander around life doing as I pleased without reference to any sort of god, who was so much without hope and without God in the world that I didn't even recognise it, that I have been adopted into this ancient religion and on equal footing with Jewish believers. I was once far away and have now been brought near.

And this is what I want for the people of Chile. I'm not trying to Bible bash them or destroy their culture - I want them to be brought near, just like I was. I want them to experience this magnificent kindness show to those who are not Jews, who would otherwise have no citizenship in Israel and no part in the covenants of the promise.