Chile - SOCIETY

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THE DEVELOPMENT OF CHILEAN SOCIETY since the country broke away from Spain early in the nineteenth century reflects in many ways a significant incongruity. On the one hand, the nation's political institutions and many of its social institutions developed much like their counterparts in the United States and Western Europe. On the other hand, the economy had a history of insufficient and erratic growth that left Chile among the less developed nations of the world. Given the first of these characteristics, Chilean society, culture, and politics have struck generations of observers from more developed nations as having what can be described, for want of a better expression, as a familiar "modernity." Yet this impression always seemed at odds with the lack of resources at all levels, the highly visible and extensive urban and rural poverty, and the considerable social inequalities.

Chile's location on the far southern shores of the Americas' Pacific coast made international contacts difficult until the great advance in global air travel and communications of the post-World War II period. This relative isolation of a people whose main cultural roots lay in the Iberian-Catholic variant of Western civilization probably had the paradoxical effect of making Chileans more receptive to outside influences than would otherwise have been the case. The small numbers of foreign travelers reaching the country in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries usually found a warm welcome from people eager to hear of the latest trends in leading nations. The immigrants to the country were similarly accepted quite readily, and those who were successful rapidly gained entry into the highest social circles. One result was a disproportionate number of non-Iberian names among the Chilean upper classes. Moreover, many Chileans, the wealthy as well as artists, writers, scientists, and politicians, found it virtually obligatory to make the long voyage to experience firsthand the major cities of Europe and the United States, and they rapidly absorbed whatever new notions were emerging in more advanced nations.

At the same time, Chile's physical isolation probably buttressed the commitment of the nation's leaders in all walks of life to building strong national institutions, which then developed their peculiarly Chilean modalities. For example, the rich could not easily envision sending their children to universities in Europe or the United States, and this created a demand that would not otherwise have existed for strong domestic centers of higher learning. A feeling of pride in these various institutions soon developed that contributed to Chile's strong sense of national identity.

This combination of openness to outside influences and commitment to the nation is undoubtedly related to the relative "modernity" that has been a feature of Chilean life since independence from Spain. From the very first national administrations, there was a strong expression of commitment to expanding the availability of education to both boys and girls, principally at the primary level. The University of Chile was established by the national government in 1842 and soon had a large, centrally located building in Santiago. In a matter of decades, the University of Chile became one of the most respected institutions of higher learning in Latin America. Women were admitted to the University of Chile beginning in 1877, making it a world pioneer coeducational instruction; by 1932 about a third of the university's enrollment was female.

In the Americas, Chile was second only to Uruguay in creating state-run welfare institutions, adopting a relatively comprehensive social security system in 1924, more than a decade before the United States. A national health system was created by pooling existing state-founded institutions into a comprehensive organization in 1952. Under this program, curative and emergency care were provided free of charge to workers and poor people; in the early 1960s, preventive care became available to all infants and mothers.

However, inadequate development of the economy undermined Chile's relatively modern institutional edifice. The lack of resources often led to sharp conflicts between different groups trying to obtain larger pieces of a meager pie. As better placed and politically more influential groups were able to draw disproportionate benefits for themselves, inequalities were generated, as was made apparent by the wide disparities in the pension benefits that were paid by the state-run system. Despite the government's early commitment to public education, budgetary limitations meant that illiteracy decreased very slowly. By 1930 about a quarter of the adult population still could not read or write, a low proportion by Latin American standards but a far cry from the universal literacy existing at the time in France, Germany, and Belgium, whose educational systems had served as models for Chilean public education. Primary school attendance only approached universal levels in the 1960s, and full adult literacy was not achieved until the 1980s. The lack of educational opportunities limited social mobility, and investments in new technologies often ran into the difficulty of not having properly trained workers. The nation's industries, mines, and farms had at their disposal a large pool of unskilled or semiskilled workers, and for most jobs the wages, benefits, and working conditions were generally deplorable. On numerous occasions, worker demands met with heavy-handed repression, and class divisions became deep fault lines in Chilean society.

The military government that took over after the bloody coup of 1973 embarked on a different course from that followed by the country's governments over the previous half-century. Based on economic neoliberalism, the military regime's primary objectives were to reduce the size of the state and limit its intervention in national institutions. Most state-owned industries and the staterun social security system were privatized, private education at all levels was encouraged, and labor laws limiting union rights were enacted. Although new programs enhancing prior efforts to deal with the poorest segments of the population were successfully put into place, the authoritarian regime's overall social and economic policies led to increased inequalities.

At the start of the 1990s, Chile began to recover its democratic institutions under the elected government of Patricio Aylwin Az�car (president, 1990-94). Committed to redressing the social inequalities that had developed under the military regime, the new government redirected more resources to programs and institutions in education and health in order to improve their quality and the population's access to them. Although the Aylwin administration made some changes in these institutions, there was no attempt to undo the privatization of the social security system, which was now based on individual capitalization schemes rather than on the old state-run, pay-as-you-go system.

In 1993 and early 1994, there was a sharp sense of optimism regarding the Chilean economy. High rates of economic growth were expected to last through the 1990s. With its newfound economic dynamism, Chile seemed poised in the early 1990s to begin resolving the long-standing incongruity of a relatively advanced social and political system coexisting with a scarcity of means.

Chile - Population

To a traveler arriving in Santiago from Lima, Chileans will in general seem more Latin European-looking than Peruvians. By contrast, to a visitor arriving from Buenos Aires, certain native American features will seem apparent in large numbers of Chileans in contrast to Argentines. These differing perspectives can be explained by tracing the distinctive historical roots of the Chilean people.

The Spaniards who settled in the pleasant Central Valley of what is now Chile beginning in the late sixteenth century found no rich lodes of gold or silver to exploit, and therefore saw no need for employing masses of indigenous forced laborers such as those who were put to work in the Andean highlands and in the mines of Mexico. Although copper mining became an important part of the late colonial economy, even the most successful of operations employed no more than a few salaried workers. Settlers took to developing the agricultural potential of the land, which, given Chile's climate, was well suited for growing the crops they knew from the Old World. This seasonal form of farming was different from that practiced in semitropical plantations in that it required few workers except during the harvest. As a result, the Spanish settlers in Chile did not seek to force large numbers of native Americans to toil for them, and they had little use for slaves. Relatively few enslaved Africans were brought into Chile and slavery was abolished soon after the country declared its independence from Spain in 1818.

The Spaniards encountered fierce resistance to their occupation efforts from one of the main indigenous groups, the Araucanians, who lived in the south-central part of the country. The settlers managed to take control of the land down to the R�o B�o-B�o and to establish strongholds farther south, but throughout the colonial period the area that is now Chile consisted of two distinct nations: one a poor outpost of the Spanish Empire and the other an independent territory, Arauco, occupied by the Araucanians, whose territory consisted of most of south-central Chile between the R�o B�o-B�o and the coastal areas around Temuco. By the end of the colonial period, the Araucanian territories had been reduced, but they had not been fully incorporated into Spanish rule. The indigenous wars lasted for more than three centuries, with a final skirmish in 1882.

Although warfare and the diseases brought by the Spaniards decimated the native population, Spain found it necessary to keep sending soldiers to protect its distant colony. They came from all regions of Spain, including the Basque country, and many of them ended up settling in Chile. The combination of an economy based on temperate-zone agriculture, native American resistance to Spanish occupation, and a continuous influx of Spaniards from the midsixteenth century to the end of the colonial period defined the main body of the Chilean population--a mixture of native American and Spanish blood, but one in which the Spanish element is greater than in the other Andean mestizo populations.

During the nineteenth century, the newly independent government sought to stimulate European immigration. Beginning in 1845, it had some success in attracting primarily German migrants to the Chilean south, principally to the lake district. For this reason, that area of the country still shows a German influence in its architecture and cuisine, and German (peppered with archaic expressions and intonations) is still spoken by some descendants of these migrants. People from England and Scotland also came to Chile, and some established export-import businesses of the kind that the Spanish crown previously had kept at bay. Other European immigrants, especially northern Italians, French, Swiss, and Croats, came at the end of the nineteenth century. More Spaniards and Italians, East European Jews, and mainly Christian Lebanese, Palestinians, and Syrians came in the decades before World War II. Many of these immigrants became prominent entrepreneurs or professionals, and their numbers never exceeded 10 percent of the total population at any given time. Thus, in contrast to Argentina, whose population was transformed around the turn of the century by numerous European immigrants, especially Italians, the Chilean population continued to be defined by the original Spanish and native American mixture. Acculturation was fairly rapid for all immigrant groups. Because second-generation residents saw themselves primarily as Chileans, ethnic identities had little impact on national society.

Chileans of all color gradations between the fair northern European and the darker native American complexion can be found, although most have brown hair or dark brown hair and brown eyes. There have been no really salient racial distinctions affecting daily life and politics in Chile, but there is unquestionably a strong correlation between high socioeconomic status and light skin.

The social definition of who is a native has not depended so much on phenotypical characteristics as on cultural ones. This means that Chileans generally have considered someone to be a native only if, in addition to native American features, he or she has an indigenous last name, wears native clothing, speak a native language, or resides in a native community. Consequently, the native Americans who wish to assimilate fully into Chilean society often take Spanish surnames after moving out of reservations.

The term Mapuche ("people of the land") now encompasses most of the native Chilean groups. The number of Mapuche residing on the reservations that were set up beginning in the late 1880s has declined in recent years. About 300,000 were counted as living in the reservations by the 1982 census. The 1992 census asked respondents to identify themselves ethnically as Mapuche, Aymara (the native population of northern Chile whose main trunk lies in Bolivia), Rapa Nui (the Polynesian group that lives in or originates from Easter Island), and other. The results showed that 9.6 percent of the population over age fourteen self-identified as Mapuche, 0.5 percent as Aymara, and less than 0.25 percent as Rapa Nui. This means that about 1.3 million Chileans are native Americans, mainly Mapuche, or the descendants of one of the fourteen or so different tribal groups that occupied what is now Chile before the Spanish conquest.

Although indigenous culture was most strongly retained on the reservations, penetration by Chilean national culture was also extensive. For example, research on a sample of Mapuche living on four reservations in the south showed that only 8.5 percent of them were monolingual Mapuche (sometimes call Mapudungu) speakers; 50.7 percent lived in homes where both Spanish and Mapuche were spoken, and 40.8 percent lived in homes where only Spanish was spoken. This situation was largely a result of the extension of primary rural education. Of all Mapuche over fifteen years of age living on the same reservations that were studied, 81 percent had gone to school for at least one year (85.5 percent of the men and 76.2 percent of the women). Significant differences in schooling by age among the Mapuche reveal how wide the reach of rural education has been in recent years. In the sampled reservation communities, the literacy rate was 81.2 percent for all residents over five years of age, and yet the rate was more than 96.2 percent for the age-group between ages ten and thirty-four. The acquisition of language and literacy skills is, of course, a principal means of acculturation.

With the partial exception of the indigenous groups, the Chilean population perceives itself as essentially homogeneous. Despite the configuration of the national territory, regional differences and sentiments are remarkably muted. Even the Spanish accent of Chileans varies only very slightly from north to south; more noticeable are the small differences in accent based on social class or whether one lives in the city or the country. The fact that the Chilean population essentially was formed in a relatively small section of the center of the country and then migrated in modest numbers to the north and south helps explain this relative lack of differentiation, which is now maintained by the national reach of radio and especially of television. The media diffuse and homogenize colloquial expressions.

A new decennial census was taken in 1992. Some of its data were already available officially as of this writing, but other data were still in the process of being tabulated. The total population was officially given as 13,348,401, of which 6,553,254 were male and 6,795,147 were female. According to that data, the average population density in 1992 remained 17.6 inhabitants per square kilometer. Population density varied greatly, however, from the sparsely populated far north and far south to the much more densely inhabited central Chile. In 1993 the figure rose to 18 inhabitants per square kilometer. The new total population figure shows that the growth of the population in the ten years between the 1982 and the 1992 censuses was about 1.7 percent per annum.

The National Statistics Institute (Instituto Nacional de Estad�sticas--IME) estimated the birthrate in 1991 at 22.4 per 1,000 population, an increase over 1985, when the rate stood at 21.6 per 1,000. This has led to a corresponding widening of the base of the age pyramid of the population, which had narrowed significantly with the decline in the birthrate that began in the mid- to late 1960s. The current increase in the birthrate is a slight demographic echo of the birth control programs that began in the mid-1960s. These programs reduced the fertility of women of childbearing age, causing the original drop in the birthrate, whereas the rise in the early 1990s resulted from children born to new generations of women who have reached the childbearing period of their lives. Whereas women of childbearing age (fourteen to forty-nine years) had had an average of 4.09 children in 1967; by 1992 this average had dropped to 2.39.

With the declining birthrate and no significant increase in immigration, much of the growth in the Chilean population over the 1970s and 1980s resulted from a decline in mortality. The mortality rate in 1992 was estimated at 5.6 per 1,000 population, whereas in 1960 it had been more than twice that, at 12.5 per 1,000. In 1990 life expectancy at birth was estimated at 71.0 years (sixty-eight for men and seventy-five for women), up from the 1960 figure of 57.1 years (57.6 for men and 63.7 for women). These improvements resulted in part from better health care beyond the first year of life, but they are explained primarily by a dramatic decline in infant mortality during the 1960-90 period. In 1960 infant mortality was 119.5 per 1,000 live births, and by 1991 it had declined to 14.6 per 1,000. This latter rate, one of the lowest in Latin America, indicated the success of the various health programs for expectant mothers and infants implemented since the late 1960s. In the early 1990s, the Chilean population was older than it has been in the 1960s. The 1982 census revealed for the first time ever that the population included a majority of adults over twenty-one years of age. Yet it was still a very young population: 49 percent of Chileans were estimated in 1991 to be less than twenty-four years of age.

Since the 1930s, the majority of Chileans has lived in urban areas (defined as agglomerations of more than 2,000 inhabitants). This reflects a demographic trend of migration from rural areas that began early, according to developing world and Latin American standards. The urban population was estimated to be 86 percent of the total in 1991. A perhaps better indicator of the degree of urbanization of a country is the extent to which the population lives in agglomerations of more than 20,000. According to the 1982 census, there were fifty-one cities and towns in Chile with more than 20,000 inhabitants, and their combined population represented 65.6 percent of the total. This percentage shows that Chile is very definitely an urban country. There has continued to be a significant internal migration of the population, although mostly from one urban center to another. The 1982 census showed that a significant 8.6 percent of the population had moved to the province of current residence during the previous five years.

Although mining, banking, and industry have been the source of the greatest Chilean fortunes since the early nineteenth century, rural society has occupied a much more central place in the nation's history. Until the 1930s, most of the population lived in rural areas, and most upper-class families, whatever the origin of their wealth, owned rural land.

Until recently, large landholdings ( latifundios) were a characteristic feature of rural society. The latifundia pattern of landownership originated in the Spanish crown's early colonial practice of giving land grants, some of them huge, to soldiers involved in the conquest and to the Roman Catholic Church. By the late eighteenth century, the most important lands of the Central Valley were held in large haciendas by families with noble titles that were all inherited by the elder son under the mayorazgo system. All such titles were abolished with Chile's adoption of a republican form of government after independence, and new laws of inheritance eventually ended the practice of primogeniture. This led to the creation of a market for rural properties and to their division as they were inherited by family members. However, by the midtwentieth century land transfers and divisions still had not put an end to ownership of large properties.

The typical large landholding was a complex minisociety. Some of its laborers lived on the estate year-round, and they or their family members worked as needed in exchange for the right to cultivate a portion of the land for themselves and to graze their animals in specified fields. Among the rural poor, their families enjoyed better living conditions. Other workers, a majority in times of strong demand for labor, especially during the harvest, lived in rural towns and villages or on small properties they held independently (whether legally or not) at the edges of the large farms. These holdings were usually insufficient to maintain a family adequately, and its members therefore would seek employment in the large rural enterprises. When needed, other rural workers were recruited from among migrants who would come during the summer from other parts of the country. The large rural enterprises included stores where people could buy a variety of goods, chapels where priests would say mass, and dispensaries for primary medical attention. In addition to the sometimes ornate houses of the proprietors, which generally were occupied only during the summer months, there were houses for the administrators, mechanics, accountants, enologists (if wine was produced), blacksmiths, and others who constituted the professional and skilled labor forces of the enterprise.

Beginning in the 1950s, the large rural properties became the target of heightened criticism by reformist politicians and economists. They noted that the uneven distribution of land contributed to social inequality and that the large landholdings were highly inefficient agricultural producers. During the governments of presidents Eduardo Frei Montalva (1964-70), who established a reformed sector, and Salvador Allende Gossens (1970-73), an extensive land reform program was carried out. It basically did away with the large rural properties on prime agricultural (nonforested) lands. Thus, whereas in 1965 fully 55 percent of all agricultural lands (measured as basic irrigated hectares--BIH) were held in 4,876 properties of more than eighty hectares each, by 1973 there were only 260 such properties left, covering only 2.7 percent of all BIH. The expropriations covered 40 percent of all the nation's BIH.

The military government put an end to the agrarian reform program, as well as to the technical assistance given to the beneficiaries of the expropriations. It also returned to previous owners some of the land that had not yet been formally transferred. In addition, it distributed individual titles among residents of the peasant communities sponsored by the Allende government's agrarian reform program. Moreover, the military government permitted the sale of any rural property, including the small family farms created by the agrarian reform. This policy led to new changes in land tenancy, which did not, however, reconstitute the large landholdings to the same extent as before the agrarian reform. Instead, it favored an expansion of medium-sized holdings. After all the changes, very small holdings of less than five hectares still accounted for about 10 percent of agricultural area. The largest holdings, of more than eighty hectares, were far from restored to their prior importance, at only 18 percent of the total area. If a primary purpose of the agrarian reform had been to create a better distribution of the agricultural land, after much turmoil and change the data indicate that this had been achieved.

The remarkable transformations in land tenancy that started in the mid-1960s were accompanied by other great changes in agriculture. These led to much more intensive land use, with the accelerated incorporation of modern technologies. Labor-service tenancy and share-cropping arrangements as a source of agricultural labor have disappeared from commercial farming, substituted by wage-earning workers living mainly in towns or small rural properties. The number of self-employed workers in agriculture has also increased with the land tenancy changes.

The rural network of mainly dirt roads was expanded to permit access to new farms and logging areas. Concurrently, small-town entrepreneurs were quick to respond to new opportunities by establishing bus routes along these expanded roads, thereby facilitating the rural population's access to schools and sources of employment. By the 1980s, the peasantry was for the first time overwhelmingly literate, with attendance at primary schools by its children virtually universal.

With a lower rate of population growth, Chile's working- age population, which includes all those individuals more than fifteen and less than sixty-five years of age, represented 64 percent of the total population in 1992. The laborforce participation rate, or the ratio of those in the labor force over the working-age population, was 59 percent in August 1993; of the total population, 37 percent were employed or were seeking a job. Participation rates typically differ by age and gender. The young participate in smaller proportions and join the labor force as they leave the education system. Women have traditionally participated at lower rates also. The participation rate for men was estimated at 76 percent and that for women at 32 percent in 1992. These figures had increased since the early 1980s because of the relative aging of the overall population and a proportionately greater entry of women into the labor force. In the 1980-85 period, 74 percent of men and 26 percent of women over fifteen years of age had been active in the work force.

The rate of unemployment declined steadily throughout the 1987- 91 period. The overall rate of growth in employment for the 1987-91 period was 3 percent per year. The rate was higher from 1987 to 1989 (5 percent), the period of fast recovery after the economic crisis of 1982-83. The most dynamic sectors during the 1987-89 period were construction and manufacturing, with average rates of employment growth of 20 percent and 11 percent per year, respectively. Employment creation increased by 5 percent again in 1992, and by the end of the year unemployment stood at 4.4 percent. A greater than expected increase in the size of the labor force, mainly from women seeking employment, led to a slight increase in unemployment to 4.9 percent by late 1993.

The largest single component of the Chilean employment structure was services, a category that includes health workers, teachers, and government and domestic employees. Next was trade and financial services, including the real estate, banking, and insurance industries. Together with transportation and communications, these categories of the services sector of the economy employed 55.6 percent of the labor force. The most important of the productive activities in terms of employment was agriculture, forestry, and fishing, which employed 19.2 percent of the labor force. If mining is included, this means that 21.5 percent of the labor force was employed in what is typically considered the economy's primary sector. The manufacturing sector employed 16 percent of the labor force, roughly the same percentage as in the mid-1960s; manufacturing's share had declined to about 12 percent during the economic crisis of 1982-83. Employment in what is often considered the secondary sector of the economy amounted to 23 percent, if the percentages engaged in construction and in electricity, gas, and water were added to that in manufacturing.

In 1991 incomes had also almost recovered, for the first time in twenty years, to their 1970 average levels. During 1990 and the first months of 1991, workers' wages increased more rapidly than the national average. This probably resulted in some measure from the return to democracy that had enabled workers to exercise their rights more freely and from labor market conditions closer to full employment. Real incomes continued to rise during 1992 and 1993, reaching levels that surpassed the previous, but then unsustainable, peak established in 1971.

Nonetheless, the monthly wages of Chileans are, when expressed in dollars, much lower than incomes in the United States. According to these figures, which probably understate high incomes and overstate lower ones, an unskilled worker made less than one-tenth the amount an executive-Qoran administrator-director made. The purchasing power of these incomes for daily necessities was, however, higher than their dollardenominated equivalents suggest.

During the military government, unemployment rose well above its historical levels for the Chilean economy. There were two distinct shocks to the labor market. The first one took place around 1975 and can be related to the recessionary conditions created by anti-inflationary policies and to employment reduction in the public sector. The adjustment that followed was very slow. The second shock took place with the financial and economic crisis of 1982-83 and affected private-sector employment. From 1979 to 1981, the economy had entered into a recovery increasingly oriented toward production of nontradable goods, a pattern that was not sustainable given the speed at which international debt was being accumulated. In response to the devaluation of the Chilean peso in 1982 and the macroeconomic management that followed, the economy shifted gears and reoriented production to tradable goods and services. In 1982 the unemployment rate for the country climbed to 19.4 percent, or 26.4 percent if those participating in state-financed makeshift work programs are included. Yet the adjustment that followed took place at a faster pace. By 1986 the unemployment rate was 8.8 and 13.9 percent, respectively. Chile's unemployment rate returned in the early 1990s to levels that characterized the country in the 1960s.

The distribution of personal income is quite regressive in Chile in general and Santiago in particular, a tendency that became more pronounced during the military government. The data reveal that personal income in Santiago is strongly concentrated in the highest decile, which enjoys about 40 percent of the total income. They also show that despite the great changes in the Chilean economy during this period, the distribution of personal income remains rather stable, even though a somewhat greater concentration can be seen in 1989 than in previous years. The new policies on income and taxes of the Aylwin government were expected to slightly reverse this trend.

The distribution of consumption by household in Santiago showed a strong tendency toward the concentration of expenditures in the higher-income groups during the military government. The figures for the first two years of the Aylwin government show a small change in direction toward a more equitable distribution of consumption, although it is still significantly more concentrated in the richest quintile than in 1969. The data show that the richest quintile of households increased its consumption steadily from 1969 to 1989 but that it declined in 1990 and 1991. Moreover, by 1991 the bottom two quintiles had increased their share of consumption slightly at the expense of the fourth quintile. Hence, the distribution of household consumption was a bit more equal in 1991 than in 1988.

These results must be interpreted with caution. The distribution of household incomes is affected by the average number of income earners by household income levels, and in times of economic crisis the poorer segments may be forced to rely on the income of fewer household members. This apparently happened in Chile in 1983, when there were only 1.1 income earners in the poorest 20 percent of families; in the 30 percent of families with middle- to lower-middle incomes, there were 1.4 income earners; in the 30 percent of households in the middle- to high-income group, there were 1.7 income earners; and in the top 20 percent, there were two income earners per household. Because their incomes were also higher, the concentration of consumption in the high-income families was magnified. Similarly, the expansion of secondary school enrollments during the 1980s benefited the children of poorer households, but it may have deprived them of the income derived from youth employment.

Chile - SOCIAL ORGANIZATIONS AND ASSOCIATIONS

Chileans have a remarkable facility for forming organizations and associations. This propensity perhaps has something to do with the fact that for more than three centuries both the Spanish-Chilean and the indigenous components of the country led a precarious life of conflict with each other, a situation that forced people to rely more than usual on collective organizing, especially, as was the case for both sides, given the weakness of the state. In contrast to North Americans, however, Chileans usually take a formal approach to creating organizations. In addition to electing a president, a treasurer, a secretary, and perhaps a few officers, they prefer to discuss and approve a statement of purpose and some statutes. This is a ritual even for organizations that need not register legally, obtaining what is called a "juridical personality" that will enable them to open bank accounts and to buy and sell properties. It is not known for certain where and how this formalism originated; it perhaps could be traced back to the densely legalistic approach adopted by Spain toward the governance of its faraway colonies and to the legalism of Roman Catholic canonical law, which applied to many aspects of society. Whatever grain of truth there is to these speculations, observers of Chilean society are rapidly struck by the density of its organizational life and the relatively high degree of continuity of its organizations and associations.

In any Chilean community of appreciable size can be found sports clubs, mothers' clubs, neighborhood associations, parent centers linked to schools, church-related organizations, youth groups, and cultural clubs, as well as Masonic lodges and Rotary and Lions' clubs. Virtually all of the nation's fire fighters are volunteers, with the exception of members of a few fire departments in the largest cities. Government statistics greatly understate the number of community organizations because they refer mainly to those having some contact with one or another state office. According to the official estimate for 1991, there were about 22,000 such organizations, the main ones being sports clubs (6,939), neighborhood councils (6,289), mothers' clubs (4,243), and parent centers (1,362). Government publications do not report membership figures for these organizations.

Most of the important urban areas in Chile also include a broad sample of the local chapters of a wide variety of occupational associations. These include labor unions and federations, public employee and health worker organizations, business and employers' associations, and professional societies of teachers, lawyers, doctors, engineers, dentists, nurses, social workers, and other occupational groups. Membership in labor unions, which declined significantly under the military government, has been growing rapidly since the late 1980s, a change directly related to the transition to democracy. Affiliation with organizations recognized as unions in labor legislation was officially estimated in 1990 at 606,800, a 20 percent increase over 1989. That figure did not include individuals affiliated with public employee associations (including health workers), who were estimated to number about 140,000, nor the members of the primary and secondary teachers' association, who numbered about 105,000. But these two groups usually have been closely tied to the labor movement through the national confederations of labor. Thus, about 19 percent of a total labor force of 4,459,600 was linked to unions or union-like associations in 1990. With the continuing increases in union affiliations, which are especially significant in rural areas, a conservative estimate is that the unionized population (in legal as well as de facto organizations) stood in 1992 at between 22 percent and 24 percent of the labor force. The most important union confederation, which encompasses the great majority of the nation's unions and union-like organizations, is the United Labor Federation (Central �nica de Trabajadores--CUT). CUT is the heir to a line of top labor confederations that can be traced back through various reorganizations and name changes to at least 1936, and perhaps to 1917.

There are numerous business and employer associations in Chile. Their total membership is about 190,000, although they collectively claim to speak for about 540,000 proprietors of businesses of all sizes. The most important business organization, the Business and Production Confederation (Confederaci�n de la Producci�n y del Comercio--Coproco), encompasses some of the very oldest ongoing associations in Chile: the National Agricultural Association (Sociedad Nacional de Agricultura--SNA), founded in 1838, groups the most important agricultural enterprises; the Central Chamber of Commerce (C�mara Central de Comercio), founded in 1858, includes large wholesale and retail commercial enterprises; the National Association of Mining (Sociedad Nacional de Miner�a), founded in 1883, affiliates the main private mining companies; the Industrial Development Association (Sociedad de Fomento Fabril--Sofofa), founded in 1883, organizes the principal manufacturing industries; the Association of Banks and Financial Institutions (Asociaci�n de Bancos e Instituciones Financieras), founded in 1943, is the main banking-industry group; and the Chilean Construction Board (C�mara Chilena de la Construcci�n), founded in 1951, organizes construction companies.

Another important confederation of business groups is the Council of Production, Transport, and Commerce (Consejo de Producci�n, Transporte y Comercio). In contrast to Coproco, this organization groups primarily medium-sized to small businesses, including many self-employed individuals who do not hire nonfamily members on a regular basis. Its main components are the 120,000- member Trade Union Confederation of Business Retailers and Small Industry of Chile (Confederaci�n Gremial del Comercio Detallista y de la Peque�a Industria de Chile), founded in 1938, and the 24,000- member Confederation of Truck Owners of Chile (Confederaci�n de Due�os de Camiones de Chile), founded in 1953.

Professional societies are also well established. The largest ones, aside from the teachers' organization noted previously, are those for lawyers (about 12,000 members), physicians (about 14,500), and engineers (about 11,500). Affiliation figures for most of the more than thirty professional societies were unavailable, but there are at least 100,000 members in such associations aside from teachers. If these figures are added to those for membership in business groups and unions, it appears that about a third of the labor force is involved in occupationally based associations.

The organized groups of Chilean society have long played an important role in the nation's political life. The elections in some of them--for example, in major labor federations, among university students, or in the principal professional societies-- usually have been examined carefully for clues to the strength of the various national political parties. Most of the nation's university and professional institute students, totaling 153,100 in 1989, belong to student federations. The various associations also make their views known to state or congressional officials when issues of policy that affect them are debated.

Some associations traditionally have been identified with particular political parties. This was the case, to a greater or lesser extent, with Masons, fire fighters, teachers' federations, and the Radical Party (Partido Radical); union confederations and the parties of the left; employer associations and the parties of the right; the Roman Catholic Church, as well as its related organizations with the Conservative Party (Partido Conservador); and, in recent decades, the Christian Democratic Party (Partido Dem�crata Cristiano--PDC). Many of the most militant party members have also been active in social organizations. In addition, party headquarters in local communities often have served as meeting places for all kinds of activities. The Radical clubs of small towns in the central south are especially active, often sponsoring sports clubs as well as the formation of fire departments.

Chilean social life also has definite subcultures, with the main lines of cleavage being proximity to or distance from the Roman Catholic Church and social class. The schools that parents select for their children closely reflect these subcultural divisions. The latter are also strongly mirrored in associational life, as Chileans tend to channel their sports and leisure activities into organizations within their subculture. Schools, churches, and unions contribute to this pattern by being foci for such organizing. In addition, there are some clubs and centers related to specific ethnicities, such as Arab, Italian, or Spanish clubs, even though, as noted previously, such identities traditionally have been much less salient than religion and class. Occupational associations have been an important component of class and social status identities in Chilean society, with most of them affiliating people of like occupations regardless of their religious identities or preferences. Although this has helped diminish the significance of religiously based identities, the leadership divisions and conflicts within the nation's associations can often be traced back to those subcultural differences. People's political preferences follow the subcultural lines of cleavage as well in most cases.

Social organizations did not fare well under the military government. Those that were perceived to be linked, however loosely, to the parties of the left were subjected to sometimes severe repressive measures. This was particularly the case with labor unions, whose activities were suspended for more than six years. They were only permitted to reorganize under new legislation beginning in 1979. Moreover, most associations, including those of business groups, were hardly ever consulted on policy matters, and, in the absence of normal democratic channels for exerting influence, they found their opinions and petitions falling on deaf ears. Eventually, the most prominent social organizations joined in voicing their discontent with the military government through what was called the Assembly of Civility (Asamblea de la Civilidad), and their efforts contributed to the defeat of President Augusto Pinochet Ugarte (1973-90) in the 1988 plebiscite. The only organizations that thrived under the military government were the women's aid and mothers' clubs, which were supported by government largesse and headed at the national level by Pinochet's wife, Luc�a Hiriart.

With the return to democracy, social organizations recovered the ability to pressure Congress and the national government. The new government opted for explicit solicitation of the opinions of important interest associations on some of the policies it was considering. It also fostered negotiations between top labor and business leaders over issues such as labor law reforms, minimum wage and pension levels, and overall wage increases for public employees. These negotiations led to several national agreements between state officials and business and labor leaders, thereby inaugurating a new form of top-level bargaining previously unknown in Chile.

Chile - WELFARE INSTITUTIONS AND SOCIAL PROGRAMS

Twentieth-century Chile has had an extensive system of staterun welfare programs, including those in the social security, health, and education areas. From the mid-1970s to the early 1990s, spending on all these programs ranged from as little as 19 percent to as much as 26 percent of the gross domestic product ( GDP), proportions that were similar to those spent in 1975 by countries belonging to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development ( OECD). In the same period, about two-thirds of the national labor force was covered by old-age pensions and other benefits. In addition, there were universal access to curative health care and programs of preventive care for all expectant mothers, infants, and children less than six years of age who did not have recourse to alternative health care. In addition, the state-run educational system, which was open to every child at primary and secondary levels but had admissions standards for higher education, was free of charge, except for nominal matriculation fees at all levels. The state also offered low-income housing programs at heavily subsidized rates.

Spending for these various programs increasingly outpaced revenues, as the decline in the mortality rate enhanced the dependency ratio and as the programs expanded. In addition, there were numerous programs, especially in the social security area, that provided very unequal benefits. Consequently, the military government redesigned the most important welfare institutions in ways that were consistent with its market-driven ideology, and social spending was scaled down to about 17 percent of GDP by 1989.

By the end of its first year in office, the Aylwin government increased social spending by more than US$1.5 billion over the Pinochet government's budget. The revenue came from a 4 percent increase in the higher tax rate on enterprises, from 11 percent to 15 percent; a 2 percent hike in the national value-added tax ( VAT) to 18 percent; and other sources. The objective of the Aylwin government was to enhance the purchasing power of minimum pensions, to increase the quality of educational and health services and to provide greater assistance in the housing field. The new programs were intended to have a positive effect on the distribution of income. The military government's reforms had privatized or decentralized the administration of many welfare and social-assistance institutions. The Aylwin government did not reverse these privatizations, although it attempted to increase the quality and funding of the institutions that remained in the public sector. It also decided not to recentralize the administration of the public portions of welfare, educational, and social-assistance institutions that had been placed in the hands of local or regional governments. The Aylwin administration was committed to strengthening local and regional governments as part of a broad effort to enhance the decentralization of authority. However, in contrast to the military regime's decentralization projects that organized local and regional governments along lines of authoritarianism and corporatism, new constitutional and legal reforms adopted in 1992 introduced democracy to these levels of government.

Through the combination of many efforts in the social field since the 1930s, Chile has a relatively favorable overall human development index ( HDI), as measured by the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The UNDP's Human Development Report, 1993 shows Chile ranking thirty-sixth among the world's 160 countries for this indicator, eighth among all developing countries, and second only to Uruguay among all Spanishspeaking Latin American countries.

Chile - Social Security

Chile was one of the first countries in the Americas to establish state-sponsored social security coverage. In 1898 the government set up a retirement pension system for public employees. In 1924 the government approved a comprehensive set of labor laws and established a national social insurance system for workers. In large part, the authorities were responding to pressure exerted by the growing number of worker organizations and strikes. At the same time, a separate social-insurance system was set up for private white-collar employees, and the one for public employees was reorganized. The pension system for workers was known as the Workers' Security Fund (Caja del Seguro Obrero) and was modeled partly on the system pioneered by Otto von Bismarck, first chancellor of the German Empire (1871-90). The fund (caja) was established administratively as a semiautonomous state agency that received income from employer and worker contributions, as well as from state coffers. The systems for private and public employees provided higher benefits than the workers' caja, and they were financed in the same manner, except that the state acted as the employer for public employees as well. The armed forces had a separate pension system.

The Workers' Security Fund was reorganized in 1952, becoming the Social Insurance Service (Servicio de Seguro Social--SSS). Until its demise under the military government, the SSS served as the primary agency for the state-run social security system. SSS coverage expanded over the years. By the 1960s, in addition to providing old-age pensions to its main beneficiaries, it gave, at their death, pensions to their widows (but not their widowers) and to minor children, if any. It also paid flat monthly sums for each immediate family dependent, income payments for qualified illnesses and disabilities, and several months of unemployment insurance, albeit all at very low levels.

Although the fund originally was meant to meet the needs of miners and urban blue-collar and service workers, including domestics, over the years the number of occupational groups that participated in what became a system of different semiautonomous state funds increased greatly. By the early 1970s, there were thirty-five different pension funds (although three of them served 90 percent of contributors) and more than 150 social security regimes for the various occupational groups. This expansion led to many inequities because the newly incorporated groups demanded and obtained by law special treatments and new benefits that had been denied to original participants, even when these new groups' programs were added to existing funds. There was not even a standard retirement age for all groups. Funding for the various pension programs became extremely complex because the state's contributions were drawn by law from different tax bases. This pattern of growth of social security institutions is typical of countries in which the system is not conceived from the very beginning on a universal basis but rather is established for particular categories of employment. Because coverage continued to be conditioned on the employment history of the main beneficiary, it was never extended to all Chileans, even during its heyday in the early 1970s.

The military government initially hoped to rationalize what had become an unwieldy system, but eventually it changed the whole system completely. It decided not to continue with a basic organizational principle of most social security systems, the payas -you-go system, whereby benefits are paid out of funds collected from those who are still contributing. In addition, the government decided to privatize the organization and management of pension funds and to discontinue the state's own contributions to them. Thus, the military regime enacted the legal basis for the creation of privately run pension-fund companies, stipulating that all new workers entering the labor force had to establish their accounts in the new pension companies. Moreover, the government also created incentives for people in the semiautonomous, state-run system to transfer out of that system by reducing the proportion of each employee's paycheck that would be deducted under the new system to about 15 percent of gross income, instead of the prior 20 percent or 25 percent, and by permitting a transfer of funds based on the number of years individuals had paid into the system.

The new privately run pension funds are based on the notion of individual capitalization accounts. Pension amounts are set by how much there is in the individual account, which is determined by the total that has been contributed plus a proportional share of the pension fund's investments. In any event, by law no pension is allowed to fall below 70 percent of an individual's last monthly salary. If there are insufficient funds to generate the required pension levels in the account, the pension fund company must make up the difference. If the company is unable to meet its obligations, the state, which guarantees the system, has to cover the shortfall.

Employees are allowed to choose the pension-fund company that will handle their account, and those who are self-employed may also elect to establish individual accounts. This choice is intended to stimulate competition among pension-fund companies in order to keep the administrative fees charged to account holders at a reasonable level, and to encourage the companies to invest the money they accumulate so as to generate the highest yields. Employers no longer contribute to employees' pensions under the new system. Disability and survival pensions are paid out of an account funded by a 3.8 percent share of the 15 percent the account holders contribute, leaving the remaining 11.2 percent to build up the pension-generating account. The 3.8 percent share is contracted out by the pension funds to life insurance companies, many of them newly created to meet the enormous increase in demand for their services. Individual account holders are also permitted to make payments in excess of the obligatory minimum. The retirement age is set at sixty-five years for men and sixty years for women, although individuals who accumulate enough funds to obtain a pension equal to 110 percent of the minimum pension may retire earlier.

The new system took effect in 1981, and the great majority of the contributing population opted to change to it. Deciding not to make substantial changes in the social security system, the Aylwin government increased the minimum pension paid by what remained of the state-run social security system by about 30 percent in real terms. By December 1990, there were about 3.7 million people, or 79 percent of the labor force, with accounts in fourteen pension-fund companies, called Pension Fund Administrators (Administradoras de Fondos de Pensiones--AFPs). A large proportion of the uncovered population consisted of self-employed people; only 3 percent of the total accounts came from that group. The funds gathered large sums of money relative to the size of the national economy. By the end of 1992, the pension and life insurance companies had accumulated an estimated US$15 billion. The state regulates and oversees the pension-fund companies through a newly created office that issues strict investment guidelines.

This radical departure from past institutional practices in the pension system is unique, and it drew considerable attention from experts in other Latin America countries also facing looming financial crises in their own social security systems. By generating large amounts of capital in the private sector, the new system energized the previously anemic Chilean capital markets. Because it has operated only for about a decade, however, it has yet to meet the test that will occur when the new pension funds have to pay out in benefits what would correspond to an actuarially normal load. Most of the nation's retirees and older workers have stayed in the state-run social security system, now called the Institute of Pension Fund Normalization (Instituto de Normalizaci�n Previsional--INP). By the end of 1990, the private pension companies were only paying out benefits to 2.3 percent of their affiliates.

Chile - Health Programs

The state's efforts in the health field began in 1890 with the creation of an agency in charge of public hygiene and sanitation. Despite some subsequent initiatives to prevent and treat work- related accidents, it was not until 1924, with the establishment of the social security system, that the state assumed an active role in providing health care to the population. Between the mid-1920s and the early 1950s, state-run programs for health care were organized around the pension funds. During the 1940s, public health experts argued that the individual pension funds could not organize health delivery systems for their affiliates in a rational way. It was also argued that a system was needed that would provide more comprehensive coverage to the whole population, not only those who had accounts in the pension funds, if the country were to improve its overall health indexes. The eventual acceptance of these arguments by policy makers led in 1952 to the creation of the National Health Service (Servicio Nacional de Salud--SNS).

The SNS continued to provide care to all those who held accounts in the various funds, free of charge to workers and their families in the social security system and for a variable fee to others. In addition, it extended health care to the population at large regardless of ability to pay. Services to those who were poor could be slow and often inadequate if a condition was not life- threatening, but accidents and other emergencies normally were given immediate attention. Moreover, the SNS tried to identify specific health problems and focus on providing care in these areas, such as giving all women primary prenated and postpartum care (and access since the 1960s to contraception), inoculating the population against certain diseases, and working to improve nutrition and hygiene through extension programs and publicity. It is estimated that 65 percent of the national population used the state-run system for curative medicine without paying fees. The SNS coexisted with private medical practices and hospitals, which were preferred by people who could afford them. The military developed its own system of clinics and hospitals. In the late 1960s, the government took the initiative to develop a new program for white- collar employees, permitting users to select their physicians. The program was funded by payroll deductions but required users to pay a fee equal to 50 percent of the cost of their care. The program developed its own primary- and preventive-care clinics and laboratories, although it relied on the hospitals of the SNS for backup care of the more serious cases and for hospitalizations. All but 15 percent of hospitalizations took place in SNS hospitals.

All physicians were obligated to work for the SNS for two years after graduation; they were usually sent to rural areas and small towns where there were chronic shortages of doctors. During the rest of their professional lives, physicians were also obligated to work a certain number of hours a week for the SNS, for which they received relatively small honoraria; in exchange, physicians took advantage of many of the facilities of the state system to treat and test their private patients.

By the early 1970s, the state-run health programs faced a financial crisis. Given that the SNS was intimately tied to the social security system, the military government could not change the latter without altering the former. Thus, in 1980 and 1981 policy makers redesigned the nation's health care institutions.

As a result, the Chilean health system in the early 1990s contained essentially five components. The first is the main successor of the SNS, now called the National System of Health Services (Sistema Nacional de Servicios de Salud--SNSS). In 1988 the SNSS employed about 62,000 professionals, including about 43 percent of the nation's 13,000 physicians, many fewer than had worked for the SNS because physicians no longer had any obligation to serve the public health system. The SNSS's administration was decentralized into twenty-seven regional units, and control over its clinics and primary-care centers was transferred to the nation's 340 municipal governments. However, the national government remained the main source of funding for these various units, and it continued to control their basic design, including staff size and equipment. The SNSS's funding comes from general state revenues and from a contribution of 7 percent of taxable income (up from the original 4 percent in 1981) from the employed population. Access to the SNSS is open to everyone, free of charge in the case of indigents and of those whose income falls below a certain level; a variable percentage of the cost up to 50 percent is paid by those with higher incomes.

The SNSS organizes and implements the broad public health programs in areas such as inoculations and maternal-infant care. It provides periodic preventive medical care to all children under six years of age not enrolled in alternative medical plans. Through this program, which has broad national coverage, low-income mothers can receive supplemental nutritional assistance for their children and for themselves as well if they are pregnant or nursing. As a result, the incidence of moderate to severe childhood malnutrition among those participating in the program has been reduced to negligible levels in Chile, while only about 8 percent of all children suffered mild malnutrition in 1989. The SNSS is the largest health care provider in the country. In the late 1980s, it served 8.2 million people, or about 64 percent of the total population, and its total expenditures on its participants in 1987 equaled about US$22 per person.

The second component of the health system is the National Health Fund (Fondo Nacional de Salud--Fonasa). Fonasa is part of the SNSS, except that those who register in the program may select their own primary-care physicians, as well as specialists. In this sense, Fonasa continues the modus operandi of the program initiated in the late 1960s for white-collar employees, except that anyone can register in it. Fonasa affiliates direct their payroll or self- employment contributions to the fund. Pensioners of the state-run system, the INP, may also choose to participate in Fonasa. The fund reimburses its users a variable portion of the cost of medical attention on presentation of vouchers for services that have been performed (an average 36 percent reimbursement in 1989). In 1987 Fonasa served 2.5 million people, and health expenditures in it amounted to US$79 per affiliate.

The Security Assistance Institutions (Mutuales de Seguridad-- MS) constitute the third element in the health system. These consist of hospitals that deal primarily with treatment of the victims of work-related accidents. These institutions house some of the best trauma and burn centers in the country. The MS are financed out of employer contributions equivalent to about 2.5 percent of their total payrolls and completely cover the medical expenses of employees of the affiliated enterprises who are injured at work. In addition, the MS pay a temporary disability pension. The 1.96 million employees who have access to these institutions work for 52,000 different enterprises. This program is among the better funded, given that its income of US$123 million amounted to about US$62 per covered worker, while the rate of work-related accidents was only about 10.8 percent per year for all incidents, however minor. Safety experts hired by the MS system are also in charge of inspecting workplaces and suggesting improvements to prevent accidents. The MS are composed of numerous institutions administered by boards with employer and employee representatives. In 1987 they ran eight hospitals and nineteen clinics, mainly in Chile's most important urban centers. The product of initiatives taken by some of the country's largest employers in the late 1950s, the MS expanded greatly in the 1980s.

Private insurance companies belonging to the Institute of Public Health and Preventive Medicine (Instituto de Salud y Previsional Prevenci�n--Isapre) constitute the fourth element in the health system. People enroll by asking their employers to direct their health deduction to these companies, and they pay an additional premium depending on the specific insurance policy. Medical services are reimbursed to users at a percentage of cost. In 1987 about 1.5 million people were enrolled in the Isapre, with expenditures of about US$166 per enrollee. Critics of the Isapre insurance companies noted that they did not help mitigate the nation's highly regressive distribution of income because they channeled the deductions of many people with higher incomes out of the SNSS. Moreover, as private carriers, the Isapre companies may deny enrollment to those who are at higher risk (as a result of serious illness or age), and they are prone to drop those who become excessive risks. Consequently, the SNSS must take up the burden of covering the health care of high-risk individuals.

The fifth component of the health care system is private medicine, which includes private hospitals and clinics. Most physicians, dentists, and ophthalmologists maintain a private practice even if they work for the SNSS or other systems. There are also private health insurers who do not form part of the Isapre structure because they do not collect their premiums from payroll deductions. In 1987 they insured 500,000 people drawn from the population with the highest incomes.

In 1992 Chilean health indicators were much closer to those of industrial nations than to those of the developing world. The four leading causes of death in Chile are circulatory diseases (27 percent), cancer (18 percent), accidents (13 percent), and respiratory illnesses (11 percent). Medical visits average about 3.5 per person per year, or about 2 to 2.5 for the general population and 1 to 1.5 for maternity and child check- ups. The SNSS handles 89.1 percent of all these visits (16.3 percent of them through Fonasa). Fully 98.4 percent of all births occur with professional assistance in hospitals or maternity clinics. In rural areas, where women might need to travel longer distances to give birth, they can spend the last ten to fifteen days of pregnancy in special hostels. Inoculations of infants and children are virtually universal for tuberculosis, diphtheria, pertussis, tetanus, poliomyelitis, and measles.

According to the Pan American Health Organization, the number of cases of acquired immune deficiency syndrome (AIDS) was gradually rising, with 3.8 per million population in 1987, 5.4 per million in 1988, 6.3 per million in 1989, 8.9 per million in 1990, and 11 per million in 1991. As of the end of 1991 in Chile, 196 individuals with AIDS in Chile had died. According to Health Under Secretary Patricio Silva and the National AIDS Commission, of the 990 individuals who were registered as having been infected with the AIDS virus in the country, 630 had become sick and half of them had died by the end of 1992. The report stated that 93 percent of those diagnosed were men and 7 percent were women.

Although the government of President Patricio Aylwin did not make structural changes to the health system, it increased funding for the portions of the system that most benefited the poor, especially primary care services. The salaries of health workers in the public sector were increased. The government also enhanced the decentralization of authority in the public health sector by giving local and regional governments more decision-making power over the distribution and equipment of health-care resources and provisions within the limits of national government funding allotments.

Chile - Housing Policies

The state began its involvement in the construction of low-cost housing in 1906, with a law stipulating that builders of low-cost units would qualify for a complete exemption from all taxes and that their owners would be exempt from real estate taxes for twenty-five years. Subsequent housing programs in Chile have usually consisted of providing subsidies to those who built lowcost houses or to those who bought them. In addition the programs have furnished one-time grants for the necessary down payments to permit people to obtain a loan or qualify for a housing program. Generally, all three features have been in place since the 1950s, although the emphasis on one or another means has shifted with changing governments. Subsidies to buyers have been channeled through below-market interest rates for long-term loans. These generally were made available through pension plans. Between 1955 and 1973, these subsidies mostly benefited the poorest 60 percent of the population, especially the lower-middle 30 percent.

Starting in the 1950s, the state also assumed a major role in the construction of low-cost housing. The Housing Corporation (Corporaci�n de la Vivienda--Corvi) was established by the national government in 1953. Between 1960 and 1972, an average of 42,000 houses per year were built in Chile, of which the state built 60 percent and the private sector with state financing built 20 percent; private companies built the remaining 20 percent with private funding.

The military government cut public spending for housing to less than half of its 1970 levels. Supporters of the regime argued that state resources were more efficiently used than before, citing a slight increase, to about 43,000 units, in average annual housing construction. They also argued that attempts were made--with greater success in the late 1980s than at the beginning of the Pinochet regime--to channel state subsidies to the poorest sectors. However, on average the number of new housing units was equal to no more than 56 percent of the total number of new households created between 1974 and 1989; the result was an increase in the nation's housing deficit. A rapid acceleration of construction toward the end of the 1980s, with almost 84,000 units being built in 1989, kept the deficit from becoming even worse.

The military regime reduced the subsidies on housing loans and initiated a monthly readjustment of all such loans according to the rate of inflation as a means of retaining their real value. The government also increased the participation of the private sector in the construction of housing and municipal buildings. It also attempted to allocate houses primarily to households that met certain savings goals, an objective that proved virtually impossible for poor families to meet. As a result, toward the end of military rule the state put more resources into one-time grants to enable families to cover the down payment.

The Aylwin government increased public funds for housing by about 50 percent, although construction remained in the hands of the private sector. It changed the eligibility requirements for public housing programs to favor poorer people unable to save money. The government's intention was to freeze the housing deficit that existed in 1990 by facilitating the building of as many new houses as were needed by the new households that were being formed. It also reintroduced utilities subsidies to poor neighborhoods and placed a greater emphasis on communal services for such areas.

Chile - EDUCATION

Despite plans dating back to 1812 to establish widespread primary education, elementary school attendance did not become compulsory until 1920. However, the government did not provide effective means to enforce this policy fully. There was considerable progress, especially in the 1920s and the 1940s, but by mid-century children of primary school age were still not universally enrolled. The principal difficulty lay in the incomplete matriculation and high dropout rate of the nation's poorest children. For this reason, in 1953 the government created the National Council for School Aid and Grants (Junta Nacional de Aux�lio Escolar y Becas), which was charged with providing scholarships and with making school breakfasts and lunches available to all children in the tuition-free private and public schools. Through these means, policy makers hoped to encourage the very poorest parents to send their children to school and keep them there. By the early 1970s, school breakfasts were reaching 64 percent of all primary school students, and lunches were being provided to 30 percent. This strategy was apparently successful, and in the mid-1960s, primary education became nearly universal. In 1966 the number of years of primary (and therefore compulsory) education was increased from six to eight; secondary education was thereby reduced to four years. In the mid-1980s, primary school attendance fluctuated between 93 percent and 96 percent of the relevant age-group--a percentage that was less than universal only because some children advanced into secondary school at the age of fourteen instead of the normal age of fifteen.

Beginning in the first half of the nineteenth century, Chile's governments made an effort to create secondary schools and led Latin America in establishing high schools for girls as well as for boys. By 1931 Chile had forty-one state-run high schools for boys and thirty-eight for girls, as well as fifty-nine private high schools for boys and sixty for girls, with a total enrollment of 20,211 boys and 15,014 girls. Reflecting French and German influences on the nation's secondary education, high schools were intended to provide a rigorous preparation for university education.

Chile had other postprimary educational channels that were meant to impart more practical or professional forms of training. Among these were normal schools for the instruction of primary school teachers (the first one for women was created in 1854), agricultural schools (that taught the rudiments of agronomy, animal husbandry, and forestry), industrial schools (with such specialties as mechanics or electricity), commercial schools (with specialties in accounting and secretarial training), so-called technical women's schools (that mainly taught home economics), and schools for painting, sculpture, and music. In 1931 there were 135 of these schools, with a total enrollment of 11,420 males and 11,391 females.

Matriculation of relevant age-groups in all forms of secondary education remained low, as can be surmised from the 1931 figures, and progress was slow. The most rapid advances occurred in the 1960s and early 1970s under the governments of presidents Frei and Allende, which increased spending for education at all levels. By 1970 about 38 percent of all fifteen- to eighteen-year olds in the country had matriculated from one form or another of secondary education; by 1974 that figure increased to 51 percent. Moreover, the curriculum in schools other than high schools had been enhanced significantly, and the graduates of such schools could opt to continue on to university levels. During the rest of the 1970s, under the military government's first six years in power, secondary school enrollments as a percentage of the relevant age-group stagnated. However, in the 1980s enrollments resumed their upward trend. Thus, from a level of 53 percent of the relevant age-group in 1979, secondary school matriculations rose to 75 percent in 1989.

Although the Chilean state traditionally directed about half of its education budget to universities that were either free or charged only nominal matriculation fees, the numbers of students in them had always been tiny as a proportion of the national population between nineteen and twenty-four years of age. As in other areas of education, the Frei and Allende administrations sponsored the largest expansions in postsecondary enrollments. The total numbers of students (including only those in the relevant age-group) almost doubled, from 41,801 in 1965 to 70,588 in 1970, and more than doubled from that number, to 145,663 in 1973. However, these enrollment figures were only equal to about 8 percent and 13 percent of the relevant age-group in 1970 and 1973, respectively. During the rest of the 1970s, the total number of students in universities declined, reaching a low of around 9 percent of the relevant age-group in 1980, including students enrolled in the so-called Professional Institutes (Institutos Profesionales--IPs), which had been separated from the universities by the military government. During the 1980s, the numbers of students in universities and in the IPs increased slowly and stood at about 153,100 in 1989, or 10.3 percent of the relevant agegroup . However, the military government fostered the creation of Technical Training Centers (Centros de Formaci�n T�cnica--CFT) as an alternative to postsecondary education. Enrollment in these centers increased rapidly during the 1980s, to about 76,400 students by 1989. In 1991 a total of 245,875 students were in some form of higher or postsecondary education.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, under the influence of German advisers, Chile began to develop preprimary education. Matriculation in these programs also remained very small until the 1960s. In contrast to its attitude toward higher education, the military government took great interest in this form of education, and enrollments increased greatly during the Pinochet years. Statefunded programs for preschoolers, which enrolled about 59,000 children in 1970, had increased their matriculation to about 109,600 by 1974. In 1989 they enrolled 213,200 children, or about 12 percent of the population under five years of age.

Until 1980, authority over all primary and secondary schools was concentrated in the national government's Ministry of Public Education. In addition to allocating funds to schools, the ministry certified the qualifications of all teachers and employed those in the state-run system. It developed all basic course content, even for private schools, and approved all textbooks to be used throughout the country.

Primary school teachers were trained mainly in normal schools, most of which were independent entities, although a few of these institutions were attached to universities. Secondary school teachers generally were graduates of pedagogical schools or university institutes, where students would be trained in the different disciplines they would later teach. Primary and secondary school teachers opting to work in the state-run system were assigned to schools during the first three years of their careers, a procedure that was meant to ensure that all rural and provincial schools had the requisite staffing. The careers of primary and secondary school teachers employed by the state were controlled by a national statute that determined promotions according to a point system and salaries according to a fixed scale. Salary supplements were given to those who taught in areas that were geographically isolated or had severe climates. Teachers also had job tenure beyond a certain probationary period. The Ministry of Public Education sponsored regular winter- and summer-vacation training programs for teachers that were designed to bring them up to date with curriculum changes and with new thinking in their disciplines. Merit increases were given to those who participated in these programs.

The Ministry of Public Education gave subsidies to private schools that did not charge tuition. These subsidies, amounting to about half the per-student cost of public education, were based on calculations of salary and other fixed costs. They were given primarily to schools sponsored by the Roman Catholic Church, as well as by Protestant churches. The teachers of these schools (except those who were in religious orders or in the clergy) were supposed to have the same salary and working conditions as teachers in the public system. Many teachers in the state-run system supplemented their salaries by taking on additional hours in the private schools, which were supposed to follow the national curriculum whether or not they received state subsidies, although they were free to add supplementary courses. All state-run primary and secondary schools were visited regularly by supervisors employed by the Ministry of Public Education, who would observe classes and monitor many final examinations. For purposes of certification, the final examinations of all private secondary schools were conducted by committees of teachers employed by the Ministry of Public Education.

Despite the successes of this education system in terms of expanding enrollments and ensuring a uniform standard of quality across the nation, the military regime's social and economic planners thought it gave the government too much influence over education, stifling parents' and local communities' freedom of choice. They also thought the administration of the system was too bureaucratic and inefficient.

The regime's education authorities decided to decentralize the administration of state schools by turning them over to the municipal governments. Presumably, the schools would thus become more responsive to local demands and needs, although the Ministry of Public Education continued to issue the basic guidelines to be followed in the curricula, to approve textbooks, and, in principle, to require the certification of teachers, although the standards became more flexible. Moreover, the national program of school breakfasts and lunches was transferred, along with the necessary resources, to the municipalities. The authorities committed the necessary funding to maintain universal primary enrollments and, after 1980, to continue to increase the size of secondary enrollments, despite the severe economic downturn of 1982-83.

With the 1980 reforms, all teachers in the state-run system became municipal employees, effectively ending the national system controlling teachers' careers. The result was new inequalities in terms of income and benefits for teachers. Despite increased education subsidies from the central government to poorer municipalities, the richer school systems were able to afford better teacher salaries and educational facilities. In addition, beginning in 1988 municipal authorities were permitted to fire teachers, ending the tenure they had enjoyed in the national career system, a measure that generated widespread manifestations of teacher discontent, including strikes.

The military government fostered the growth of privately run schools by further facilitating the process through which they could obtain subsidies. Moreover, tuition-free public and private schools were put on an equal footing in terms of access to state funding when both began to receive amounts calculated on a similar per-student basis. This amount was prorated on the basis of student attendance records, a measure that put the public systems at a disadvantage because private schools could be selective in their admissions; they could therefore draw their student body from those with more stable family backgrounds and hence could require more regular attendance and better behavior. As a result of these new incentives, enrollments in the publicly funded but privately administered system increased at the expense of the state-owned schools. In 1980, before the beginning of the reform program, the state-run schools had enrolled about 79 percent of primary and secondary students, private but state-subsidized schools enrolled 14 percent, and fully private schools (those that charged tuition) enrolled 7 percent. By the end of 1988, the proportion of students in the state-run schools (by then under municipal control) had dropped to 60 percent, the private but state-subsidized schools' proportion had increased to 33 percent, and the fully private schools continued to enroll 7 percent. Other data suggest that the number of primary and secondary students in private schools increased from 27 percent in 1981 to 56 percent in 1986. The authorities also transferred administration of the state's vocational, industrial, and agricultural schools to employer associations, although the public funding of these schools continued.

The Aylwin government doubled funding for education by 1992 and began to address the new challenge the nation confronted to increase the quality of education. As part of this effort, the government examined with renewed interest the issues of teacher morale, training, and careers. It decided to reinvigorate the national continuing education programs for teachers and to reintroduce a National Statute for Teachers. This recreated in part the previous national career system, with a minimum starting salary of about US$250 per month for primary school teachers and promotions and raises based on years of service, merit, additional training, and premiums for teaching in areas that were isolated or had harsh climates. However, because of the Aylwin government's commitment to the decentralization of authority, administration of the system of primary and secondary schools remained to a significant extent in the hands of local governments, with continued efforts to provide increased funding to the poorer municipalities and regions. An initiative by the Aylwin government also committed it to increasing technical training of workers and of youth who had already left the education system. By the end of 1993, about 100,000 people, principally youth, had graduated from such training programs.

Chile - Higher Education

Chilean universities are widely recognized as being among the best in Latin America. Before the education reforms of 1980, Chile had eight universities, two run by the state universities and six private ones, although all received most of their funding from the state. The state universities consisted of the University of Chile (Universidad de Chile), founded in Santiago in 1842 as the successor to the University of San Felipe (Universidad de San Felipe), founded in 1758; and the State Technical University (Universidad T�cnica del Estado), founded in Santiago in 1947. The private universities consisted of the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile (Pont�fica Universidad Cat�lica de Chile), founded in 1888; the University of Concepci�n (Universidad de Concepci�n), founded in 1919; the Catholic University of Valpara�so (Universidad Cat�lica de Valpara�so), founded in 1928; the Federico Santa Mar�a Technical University (Universidad T�cnica Federico Santa Mar�a), founded in Valpara�so in 1931; the Southern University of Chile (Universidad Austral de Chile), founded in Valdivia in 1955; and the University of the North (Universidad del Norte) in Antofagasta, founded in 1956. The nation's largest and most important university, the University of Chile has the authority to oversee the quality of professional training programs in important fields, such as medicine, in the other universities. The University of Chile, the Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, the Federico Santa Mar�a Technical University, and, to a lesser extent, the University of Concepci�n all developed campuses in other cities during the expansion of university enrollments in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

As noted previously, Chilean universities did not charge tuition, aside from minimal matriculation fees that were, following changes introduced in the mid- to late 1960s, higher for students of more affluent parents. In effect, the state used general tax revenues to subsidize a higher-education system whose students were drawn disproportionately from the middle and upper classes. The regressive impact of this policy on the nation's distribution of wealth had been noted repeatedly by economists and sociologists since at least the 1950s.

The military government took a highly critical view of the nation's university system. Persuaded by the notion that state funding for lower education is more efficient in terms of generating the necessary human capital for economic development, the military decided to give priority in resource allocation to preprimary, primary, and secondary schools. In addition to politically motivated purges of faculty members and students, among the first changes the military authorities made at the highereducation level was to charge students substantially higher enrollment fees. Low-income students were supposed to continue to have access to higher education through an expanded system of student loans with generous repayment terms. Yet, as noted earlier, the expansion of higher-education enrollments that had begun in the 1960s ceased after these new policies were put into place.

With the 1980 education reforms, the military government split the two state universities apart, creating separate universities out of what had been their regional provincial campuses. In addition, taking a dim view of increases in the numbers of training programs and degree programs at these universities since the 1960s, the regime limited the degrees that could be obtained in the staterun universities to twelve of the most traditional fields, such as law, medicine, and engineering. Degrees in other areas henceforth had to be obtained from professional institutes; those sections of the state universities consequently were detached, with some attrition, and transformed into freestanding entities. The large School of Pedagogy of the University of Chile, for example, became the Pedagogical Institute.

The Pinochet government also fostered the formation of new private universities and professional institutes, allowing them to set tuition at whatever level they wished and promising to give them direct per-student subsidies, as well as funds for loans to low-income students, on an equal footing with older institutions. The education authorities hoped to stimulate competition among the universities and institutes for the best students by granting the per-student subsidies on the basis of schools' ability to attract the students with the highest scores in a national aptitude test required of all first-year applicants. This competition was thought to be an expeditious way to encourage efforts to increase the quality of higher education. Subsequently, the state subsidies did not become nearly as important as was expected because funding for universities and for student loans declined beginning with the economic crisis of 1982-83. The lower funding levels led to decreases in salaries for faculty and other personnel across the country.

As a result of the policies of breaking up the state universities and stimulating the formation of private institutions, the number of universities increased to forty-one by 1989. Only half of these received state funding that year. In addition, by 1989 there were fifty-six professional training institutes, only two of which received state funding that year. There was also a large increase in the numbers of centers for technical training. In 1989 there were 150 such centers, none of which received state support. Relying entirely on tuition payments, these centers had responded to a demand for postsecondary education that the universities and professional institutes, despite their increased number, had been unable to meet. However, the quality of the training these centers provided was questionable. Most of them had two-year training programs with few facilities other than classrooms.

The changes introduced by the military government increased the number and variety of higher education institutions, but the reforms also led to much greater disparities among them, as well as to a likely decline in the overall quality of the nation's higher education system. There was an increase in part-time faculty teaching, a decline in full-time faculty salaries, and a much greater dispersion of resources needed by important facilities, such as laboratories and libraries. These changes also led to the creation of a considerable number of research institutes with no student training programs that were dependent on grants or research contracts from international or national sources for their funding. These institutes developed most prominently in the social sciences and became an important alternative source of employment for specialists who had been or would have been engaged by universities. Consequently, in contrast to the period before 1973, most of the innovative thinking and writing in these areas was no longer being done at universities, and new generations of students were having less contact with the best specialists in these fields.

The Aylwin government did not introduce fundamental changes in the higher education system handed down to it by the military regime. It continued to fund higher education in part by allocating per-student subsidies to institutions able to attract students who scored highest on the multiple-choice examination modeled on the Scholastic Aptitude Test used in the United States. However, the Alywin government was critical of what it considered an excessive disaggregation and dispersion of higher education institutions. Consequently, it concentrated more of its direct subsidies on the traditional universities and their offshoots and attempted to enhance their quality by making more funds available for basic and applied research. The government also increased funding for lowincome student loans and scholarships, for studies at any institution.

Chile - RELIGION AND CHURCHES

Roman Catholicism is an integral part of Chile's history and culture, and the great majority of Chileans consider themselves Roman Catholic. However, their numbers have been declining since 1970, while the Protestant population has been increasing. The 1970 census showed that about 90 percent of the population was nominally Roman Catholic, and a little over 6 percent was Protestant. The 1982 census did not include questions on religion. The 1992 census showed that 76.9 percent of the population fourteen years of age and older declared itself Catholic, while 13.1 percent declared itself either "Evangelical" or "Protestant". This latter percentage reflected a moderate but steady increase with each census since 1920, when only 1.4 percent of the population was counted as Protestant. About 90 percent of Protestants belong to Pentecostal (Evangelical) denominations.

The more than doubling of the proportion of Protestants in the total population over the 1970-92 period means that a large number of them are converts. Surveys taken in December 1990 and October 1991 by the Center for Public Studies (Centro de Estudios P�blicos- -CEP) in collaboration with Adimark, a polling agency, showed that about 95 percent of Roman Catholic respondents have been Catholics since childhood, whereas only about 38 percent of Protestants said they have been Protestants since their early years. Moreover, fully 26 percent of Protestants noted that they had converted sometime in the previous ten years.

According to the 1992 census, there was also a significant minority of about 7 percent of Chileans who declared themselves indifferent to religion or atheists. This group increased from a little over 3 percent in 1970. Other religious groups, mainly Jewish, Muslim, and Christian Orthodox accounted for 4.2 percent of the population fourteen years of age or older.

The CEP-Adimark surveys also included questions on religious practice. According to the surveys, about a quarter of all adult Chileans attend church services at least once a week, a proportion indicative of considerable secularization. A much greater proportion of Protestants (about 46 percent) than of those who said they are Roman Catholics (about 18 percent) are regular churchgoers. Thus, the authors of the CEP-Adimark report note that there is roughly one Protestant for every two Catholics among people attending church at least once a week in Chile. The proportion of nominal Catholics attending mass weekly seems to have increased slightly since the late 1970s; prior studies had shown an attendance rate between 10 and 15 percent.

The distribution of practicing Catholics and Protestants varies dramatically on the basis of socioeconomic status. In 1990-91 about half the practicing Protestant population (52.1 percent) was composed of individuals from poorer groups, while a tiny minority (2.3 percent) had high socioeconomic status. Among practicing Catholics, the proportion with high status was significant at 15 percent, whereas the poorest segment constituted about a fifth (21.8 percent) of all those who practiced. These differences are so salient that among the poor Chilean urban population, for every practicing Roman Catholic there is a practicing Protestant. The growth of Protestantism has therefore mainly been at the expense of the Catholicity of the lower socioeconomic groups, among whom Catholicism has long been weakest. Surveys taken between the late 1950s and early 1970s showed that only between 4 and 8 percent of working-class people who were nominally Catholic attended mass weekly. The 1991 survey showed that 93.4 percent of high-income respondents indicated that they are nominally Catholic; the proportions declined to 75.2 percent of middle-income people and to 69 percent of those with lower incomes. Among the latter, 22 percent consider themselves nominally Protestant. The practicing Protestants also tend to work in greater proportions in the personal service areas of the economy and to be less educated than Catholics. This is consistent with the generally lower economic status of the Protestant population.

Slightly more than half of all Chileans who declared a religious affiliation are women. However, among those who practice, the proportion of women is significantly higher. This is particularly the case for Protestants. Among urban Protestant respondents, about 70 percent of those who attend church services at least once a week are women. Among Roman Catholics, the proportion of practicing women is about 63 percent.

The Roman Catholic Church is divided into twenty-four dioceses and one armed forces chaplaincy. These are led by five archbishops and thirty bishops, some of whom serve as auxiliaries in the larger dioceses. There are also two retired cardinals. The church has long suffered from a shortage of priests. Since the 1960s, they have numbered between 2,300 and 2,500, about half of them foreign born. By 1990 there were 3,000 Catholics per priest. With about 760 parishes throughout the country, the church is unable to extend its presence to the entire Catholic population. This situation is illustrated by a comparison of the number of places of worship for Santiago's Catholic and Protestant populations: 470 Roman Catholic parishes and chapels versus about 1,150 churches and other places of Protestant (mainly Pentecostal) worship.

Independence from Spain disrupted the church-state relationship. The clergy was divided over the question of breaking the ties to Spain, although the most prominent church officials were generally royalists. As a result, the new independent governments and the leaders of the church viewed each other with distrust. The development of what would later be called the "black legend" (a highly unfavorable view of the colonial administration, of which the church was an integral part), coupled with an admiration for the progress of Protestant lands, fueled this distrust. Despite their misgivings about church attitudes toward independence, the new rulers insisted that they were entitled to exercise the patronato real, the agreement between the Spanish crown and the pope, thereby assuming this important royal power as well. This prerogative was enshrined in the 1833 constitution, which made Roman Catholicism the established church of the new Chilean state. Consequently, the authorities followed the prior practice of sending church appointments to the Vatican for its formal approval and to oversee the governance of the church. For their part, church officials expected that the government would continue to ban all other religions from the country. Moreover, they hoped to retain full authority over education, to keep all civil law subordinate to canonical law, and to continue to function as the state's surrogate civil registry, as well as to control all cemeteries. In addition, they increasingly asserted the independence of the church from the interference of state authorities.

This was a church-state relationship fraught with potential for conflict, and as the nineteenth century progressed many conflicts did indeed emerge. By the late 1850s, a fundamental fault line in Chilean politics and society had developed between unconditional defenders of church prerogatives, who became the Conservatives, and those who preferred to limit the church's role in national life, who became the Liberals or, if they took more strongly anticlerical positions, the Radicals. Although most Liberals and even most Radicals were also Roman Catholics, they were in favor of allowing the existence of other churches and of limiting canonical law to church-related matters, while establishing the supremacy of the state's laws and courts over the nation as a whole, even over priests and other church officials. They also advocated the creation of non-Catholic schools and civil cemeteries, and they pressed for the establishment of a state-managed civil registry that would be entitled to issue the only legally valid birth, marriage, and death certificates. By the 1880s, a decade that saw a break in relations between the Chilean government and the Vatican, all of these points of the more secular and anticlerical agendas had been established. However, the Roman Catholic Church continued to be the established church, dependent on the state for its finances and appointments. This led periodically to new political tensions.

Emerging in the 1820s, the first source of state-church conflicts was the issue of the right of non-Catholics to practice their religion. The government favored allowing them to do so in private homes or other nonpublic places, while the Roman Catholic Church opposed this notion. The issue was a question of considerable significance for more than just civil liberties.

Independence from Spain had permitted the legal establishment of direct commercial links between Chile and other countries throughout the world. These links led to the creation, especially in Valpara�so, of wholesale commercial enterprises that brought British and other foreign nationals who were non-Catholic to the country, and they demanded the right to practice their religion. Denying them religious freedom not only created diplomatic problems with the dominant economic powers of the time but also had the potential to undermine the operations of the export-import concerns that handled much of the emerging country's foreign trade.

Beginning in the 1840s, the Chilean government sponsored the immigration of German settlers to the southern lake district. Most of them, contrary to the government's wishes, came from Protestant parts of Germany. As a result, the first Protestant services in Chile, mainly Anglican and Lutheran, began in immigrant communities. Initially, they were merely tolerated by the authorities, but in 1865 a new law interpreting the religious clause of the constitution that declared Roman Catholicism as the official state religion permitted private practice by non-Catholic denominations.

In the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Protestant missionaries of various denominations, beginning with the Presbyterians, came to Chile. Although they continued to serve mainly the immigrant communities, they also made an effort to obtain Chilean converts. The Anglicans set up missions among the Mapuche, and these are still operating. American Methodists founded schools--the well-known Santiago College, which was established in 1880, among them--that were open to middle- and upper-class Chilean children, especially girls. Parents seeking alternatives to Catholic education opted for Protestant missionary schools. By the turn of the century, a small community of local converts to Protestant denominations began to form. In 1909 a segment of the new Methodist group that had adopted charismatic rituals broke off from the main missionary body. This breakaway group became the Pentecostal Methodist Church, which itself split in 1934 when the Evangelical Pentecostal Church was formed. These two denominations remained the principal Pentecostal groups in Chile, although there were many different subdenominations.

Judaism, virtually unknown in nineteenth-century Chile, originated with the Central European Jews who arrived in the country fleeing persecution mainly between World War I and World War II. Both Jews and Protestants, as religious minorities in a predominantly Catholic country, were strongly in favor of religious freedoms and of full separation between church and state. It was therefore natural for them to identify more closely with the more secular and even anticlerical segments of Chilean society and politics; and it was natural for the latter to consider them a part of their constituency. Yet, given their religious beliefs, strict moral upbringing, and, among Chilean Protestants, generally, abstention from alcohol, these segments of the non-Catholic Chilean society had little in common with the broader anticlerical groups. In fact, on many moral issues, non-Catholics' opinions were much closer to those of practicing Roman Catholics. For this reason, although practicing Protestants and Jews tended to vote for the more secular parties in greater proportions than other groups, they generally did not have a particularly strong political identity or play important leadership roles, exceptions aside, in political or social life.

In 1925 President Arturo Alessandri Palma (1920-24, 1925, 1932- 38) pressed for and obtained a separation of church and state. This resolved most sources of church-state friction, but more than a century of conflicts had already created subcultures in Chilean society that continued to leave their mark on twentieth-century educational institutions, intellectual life, social organizations, and politics. The segments most distant from and even opposed to the Catholic Church were receptive to positivism and, especially after the 1930s, to Marxism. In this sense, the nineteenth-century fault line contributed indirectly to the eventual appeal among educated Chileans of the nation's communist and socialist parties.

During the interwar years, partly in response to the challenges of secular intellectuals and political leaders and partly as a result of new trends in international Catholicism, the Roman Catholic Church in Chile slowly began to espouse socially and politically more progressive positions. This more progressive Catholicism initially had its main impact among university students, who, in the mid-1930s under the leadership of Eduardo Frei, created a new party that in 1957 fused with other groups to become the Christian Democratic Party (Partido Dem�crata Cristiano- -PDC). This development split the subculture that was closer to the Catholic Church into politically conservative and centrist segments. By the early 1960s, a solid majority of the church hierarchy favored the Christian Democrats, and there was a significant shift of voter support from the Conservative Party (Partido Conservador--PC) to the PDC. Following the new thinking in church circles, the hierarchy openly embraced positions favoring land reform, much to the dismay of the still-important minority of Catholics on the right.

The dominant consensus within Chilean Catholicism was much in tune with the resolutions and spirit of Vatican Council II (1962- 65) in theological, ritual, and pastoral matters. Within the Latin American context, the Chilean Roman Catholic Church quickly became noted as a post-Vatican Conciliar church of moderately progressive positions on political and socioeconomic issues, and its representatives played an important part in the reform-minded Medell�n (1968) and Puebla (1979) conferences of Latin American bishops. In the late 1960s and 1970s, the church fostered the establishment of Christian Base Communities (Comunidades Eclesiales de Base-- CEBs) in poor urban neighborhoods. However, only a minority in the Chilean church subscribed to what became known as liberation theology.

In the wake of the military coup of September 1973, the church established, initially in association with some leaders of the nation's Protestant and Jewish communities, an office for the defense of human rights. Later reorganized under exclusive sponsorship of the archdiocese of Santiago as the Vicariate of Solidarity (Vicar�a de la Solidaridad), this organization continued to receive funds from international Protestant sources and valiantly collected information on human rights violations during the nearly seventeen years of military rule. Its lawyers presented literally thousands of writs of habeas corpus, in all but a few cases to no avail, and provided for the legal defense of prisoners. The church also supported popular and labor organizations and called repeatedly for the restoration of democracy and for national reconciliation.

As the papacy of John Paul II (1978- ) progressed, the Chilean Catholic Church, like other national congregations around the world, became somewhat more conservative in outlook. In the early 1990s, the episcopal conference was about evenly split between those formed in the spirit of Vatican Council II and those espousing more conservative positions. However, this shifting balance did not affect the church's advocacy of human rights and democracy during the military regime.

Chile - Forms of Popular Religiosity

Anthropologists of religion would be hard-pressed to find expressions of indigenous beliefs in the "popular" sectors of Chile. The principal exception to this is in the north, where various religious festivals honoring the Virgin Mary show bold traces of highland Andean indigenous beliefs. The most noted of these is "La Tirana," held each July in Iquique and the nearby village of La Tirana. In the rest of the country, Christian and indigenous religious syncretism has been largely confined to native American communities, where faiths in various animal and bird spirits coexist with beliefs of Christian origin.

Popular religious beliefs focus to a large extent on the notion that there is a struggle between good and evil, the latter seen as a force personified by the devil. This perspective is much in line with Mapuche beliefs. Illnesses are often seen, like sin, as tied in some way to the devil's work. Catholic priests in poor parishes usually have had the experience of being called by their least educated parishioners to perform exorcisms, particularly of demons thought to be afflicting sick children, and many Pentecostal services focus on ridding body and soul of satanic influences and on faith healing. A belief in heaven and in the eternal horrors of hell is a fundamental ingredient of the popular religious imagery, with earthly life said to be a brief trial determining the soul's final destination. Much of the message of Pentecostal sermons revolves around these concepts, focusing on the weakness of the flesh and on the necessity of leading a life of constant preparation for eternal deliverance. In this respect, there is a puritan streak to the Pentecostal message that is reinforced through a liberal use of individual testimonies of repentance and conversion from members, of the congregation. Among Catholics, this element of popular religiosity is tied intimately to a belief in the intercession of saints and, most important, of the Virgin Mary. Intercession may be invoked on behalf of deceased family members who are remembered in prayers.

The afterworld is heavily populated in popular religious imagery by errant souls atoning for their sins and seeking their final rest. Particularly in rural areas, it is common along roadsides to see niches carved into the sides of hills or shaped from clay the contain crosses, occasionally photographs, and candles. The niches are in the proximity of places where people met sudden, violent deaths, primarily from traffic accidents, without the benefit of last rites. The candles are lit mainly to plead for their souls but also in some cases to ask the deceased to intercede for those who light them. It is customary among the Chilean poor to believe that infants who die become little angels. Pilgrimages to Catholic churches that house special images of the Virgin or of saints and multitudinous processions in which these images are displayed are also part of the popular religious landscape. The faithful frequently offer penances in the hope of obtaining special favors.

A central objective of Pentecostal services is to experience a manifestation of the Holy Spirit. The leader of the service tries to cleanse the congregation of devilish influences and to prepare the way for this manifestation. Between his or her invocations stressing the necessity and possibility of redemption from sin and anointments of the sick, the congregation joins in rhythmic but often lamentational singing, sometimes to the accompaniment of guitars and tambourines, and often supplemented by the clapping of hands. While singing, some of the women who attend will frequently begin to dance, swaying back and forth, and even to "speak in tongues." Sometimes the dancing will surround certain individuals who are chosen because they need special attention for some reason. Another common practice is for members of the congregation to pray individually in a loud voice.

Chile - ATTITUDES TOWARD FAMILY AND GENDER

Chile is one of the last countries in the world that has not legalized divorce. A law permits marital separation under certain conditions, but it does not terminate the conjugal bond. Despite the Catholic hierarchy's opposition to the legalization of divorce, at least half of all Chileans apparently favor enacting such a law. In the 1990 CEP-Adimark survey, 55.6 percent of those interviewed were in favor of legal divorce.

The differences of opinion on divorce among various categories of the population are noteworthy. Support for its legalization is slightly stronger among men than among women. It is much stronger among young adults than among the middle-aged, while only a minority of older people support it. High-income respondents constitute the group most in favor, whereas lower-income respondents largely disapprove (70.1 percent to 15.5 percent); a small majority of those with middle and lower incomes support legalization. A slight majority of self-identified Catholics are in favor, but among practicing Catholics a majority reject the notion. A small majority of those who said they are Protestant reject legalization. This rejection is stronger among weekly churchgoers. Curiously, Protestants (mainly Pentecostals, who tend to have very traditional opinions) are closer to the positions of the Catholic hierarchy than are Catholic respondents.

Although Chile does not have a divorce law, a surrogate and well-institutionalized means of severing conjugal bonds is the annulment of civil marriages. Civil marriage ceremonies are the only legally valid ones, and couples who have church weddings must also marry at the civil registry. The annulment is usually done with the assistance of attorneys who argue that there has been some procedural error in the civil marriage process. It often involves obtaining witnesses who would attest to facts, whether true or false, that vitiate the original proceedings, such as asserting that the couple does not reside where they said they did when they were married. This is enough to make a case for invalidating the action of the civil registrar who performs the ceremony and draws up the papers. To a large extent, Chile's lack of a proper divorce law can be attributed to the ability of separated couples to annul their marriage following these procedures. As a result, the political pressure to enact a divorce law is diffused. In 1991, the latest year for which there were published figures, there were 5,852 marriage annulments (and 91,732 marriages) in the country; the number of annulments showed a steady increase over seven years from a level of 3,987 in 1984. The actual number of separations of married couples is much higher, especially among those who lack the means to hire the necessary annulment lawyers. New bonds are often established outside of wedlock.

Whereas the Chilean public seems somewhat favorably inclined toward the legalization of divorce, it shows considerable resistance to legal abortion. Although survey results vary, according to the way questions on abortion are posed, the notion of permitting abortion on demand has only a small proportion of supporters. It varied from 5 percent in the CEP-Adimark December 1990 survey to a high of 22.4 percent in the July 1991 survey conducted by the Center for Contemporary Reality Studies (Centro de Estudios de la Realidad Contempor�nea--CERC). However, a relatively large proportion of survey respondents favored abortion under certain circumstances. The CERC survey of July 1991 showed that 76 percent considered abortion permissible when "the mother's life is in danger or when the baby will be born with malformations"; similarly, 53.4 percent thought that abortion should be permitted in cases of rape. While nearly half of all respondents rejected abortion in all circumstances, 44.7 percent would permit it with qualifications.

There is a considerable degree of consensus among the various categories of respondents to a December 1991 CEP-Adimark survey, except for individuals of high socioeconomic status and practicing Catholics or Protestants. As on the issue of divorce, the first group had the most liberal views of all, with only 14 percent agreeing with the notion that abortion should not be permitted and 78 percent accepting it in qualified circumstances. Practicing Catholics rejected abortion in a somewhat greater proportion than the average, and they accepted it in qualified circumstances to a slightly lesser extent. Practicing Protestants (mainly Pentecostals) had the most restrictive views of all: more than 80 percent rejected abortion outright, 17.6 accepted it in qualified circumstances, and a tiny fraction agreed that the matter should be left up to the individual woman. Although illegal, abortions are commonly performed in Chile. Social science researchers have estimated that about a third of all Chilean women have one or more induced abortions during their childbearing years.

Birth control methods of all types find broad acceptance among the population. This is true even of practicing Catholics, 81.3 percent of whom found their use acceptable. National health programs have facilitated access to birth control since the 1960s, and the use of contraceptives is widespread. However, these programs provide easy access to birth control only to women who have already had at least one child because the programs are mainly organized to provide prenatal and postpartum primary care. Birth control is therefore more difficult to obtain for childless women, especially younger and poorer women. Thus first pregnancies out of wedlock as well as first marriages of pregnant brides are frequent. This differential in contraceptive practices is largely responsible for the fact that the proportion of births out of wedlock over the total number of births increased with the overall decline in the birth rate. The number of births in wedlock has fallen almost by half since the initiation of the contraception programs, while the births out of wedlock have remained fairly constant. This means that currently a third of all births are out of wedlock, up from 17.5 percent in 1965.

Premarital sex among couples in love with each other is also broadly accepted, except among practicing Protestants, only 40 percent of whom approved, and among those age fifty-five and older, only 39 percent of whom approved. Sixty-three percent of practicing Catholics accepted this practice, despite the strong disapproval of the church hierarchy. On this issue, practicing Protestants again are closer to the Catholic hierarchy's teachings than are lay Catholics themselves. The acceptance of premarital relations compounds the problems caused by the relatively more difficult access to birth control for childless women.

Extended-family life has occupied an important place in Chilean society. Although couples are expected to set up their own households, they remain in close contact with the members of their larger families. Children generally get to know their cousins well, as much adult leisure time, generally on weekends and holidays, is spent in the company of relatives. It is also common to find children living for extended periods of time for educational or other reasons in households headed by relatives, sometimes even cousins of their parents. These extended-family ties provide a network of support in times of nuclear family crises. It is also common for close friendships among adults to lead to links that are family-like. For example, children often refer to their parents' friends as "uncle" or "aunt."

Traditional definitions of gender roles have broken down considerably as women have won access to more education and have entered the labor force in larger numbers. By 1990 about half the students in the nation's primary and secondary schools were female; the proportion of women was lower, about 44 percent of the total enrollment in all forms of higher education. The University of Chile graduated Latin America's first female lawyers and physicians in the 1880s. However, women made faster progress in traditionally female professions than in other professions. Thus, by 1910 there were 3,980 women teachers, but there were only seven physicians, ten dentists, and three lawyers. By the 1930s, female enrollments reached significant numbers in these fields. The University of Chile in 1932 had 124 female students enrolled in law (17 percent of the total), ninety-six in medicine (9.5 percent), and 108 in dentistry (38 percent), although 55 percent of all women students at the university were enrolled in education.

Attitudes regarding the proper roles of men and women in society seemingly no longer follow a fully traditional pattern. A 1984 survey conducted in Santiago by the Diagnos polling firm found widespread support among men (more than 80 percent) and women (more than 90 percent) of high, medium, and low socioeconomic status for the notion that women benefit as individuals if they work outside the home. When asked if they agreed or disagreed with the notion that "it is better for women to concentrate on the home and men on their jobs," 43 percent of the national sample in the CERC July 1991 survey agreed, even though the term "concentrate" does not imply a denial of the right of women to work outside the home. There were some differences between the genders over this question, with 49 percent of men and 38 percent of women in agreement. The percentage in favor of this notion increased with age. Only 30 percent of those under age twenty-five agreed, while 61 percent of those over age sixty-one did so.

Men and women in the same CERC study were considerably divided over whether "women should obey their husbands." This is a sentence included in family law that is supposed to be read (although it is frequently omitted) to Chileans when they take their marriage vows in the civil registry's ceremony; 55 percent of men agreed, while only 40 percent of women did so. Again, men held the more traditional views, but considering the nature of the proposition and its long-established status in civil law, the fact that only slightly more than half of them agreed can be considered a sign of changing times.

Surveys of working-class respondents can usually be counted on to capture the more traditional views of urban society toward male and female roles because such attitudes are usually associated with lower levels of educational attainment. But working-class Chileans are in general not as traditionally minded as could be expected about the issue of women working outside the home. In a 1988 survey of workers, 70 percent of the men and 85 percent of the women agreed with the notion that "even if there is no economic necessity, it is still convenient for women to work." The notion that "men should participate more actively in housework so that women are able to work" was accepted by 70 percent of men and 92 percent of women. Forty-five percent of men believed that "women who work gravely neglect their home obligations," while 21 percent of women did so. However, male support for the notion of women working outside the home varied depending on the way the question was phrased. When interviewers presented the idea that "if men were to make more money, then women should return to the home," 63 percent of men agreed, while only 33 percent of women did.

Nonetheless, popular beliefs hold very strongly to the notion that women reach full self-realization primarily through motherhood. This generates strong pressures on women to have children, although most take the necessary measures to have fewer than did their mothers and especially their grandmothers. Employed working-class women usually are able to find preschools and day care for their small children, as these programs are broadly established throughout the country. The extended family also provides a means of obtaining child care.

Middle-class to upper-class households usually hire female domestic servants to do housework and take care of children. This practice facilitates the work life of the women of such households. Women can frequently be found in the professions even outside such traditionally female-dominated areas as primary and secondary education, nursing, and social work. For example, among the nation's 14,334 physicians in 1990, there were 3,811 women, or 27 percent of the total. This percentage has been increasing in recent years. Among the 7,616 physicians less than thirty-five years of age, there were 2,778 women, or 37 percent of the total. In 1991 about 48 percent of the nation's 748 judges were women; although there were none on the Supreme Court, 24.2 percent of the appellate court judges were women. A slight majority of the roughly 4,200 journalists in the country were women.