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.