Some months ago I commented in any entry of the social order in Chile is really fragile (link here): the elite does not know how to operate in a society mobilized and that their reaction to this is usually violence.
Reading yesterday’s ‘Santiago de Chile. History of an urban society’ Armando Ramon (Catalonia 2007) I found the following paragraph in regard to the situation of the popular sectors between 1730 and 1850 (the era of urban consolidation according to Ramón):
All of this is to add the ‘fear’ historic cultivated by the class a holder. The fear of the ancient uprisings indigenous. Relegated now to memory and to the border of Arauco, was played every night and every day, considering the existence of this sort of underground world that had been introduced in the city and formed its suburbs, which numerically was a majority of the population that lived in Santiago (p. 107)
The rejection of the indigenous, then becomes the rejection of the popular classes that has been maintained subsequently between those possessing classes. A crucial fact, I think, is that this fear is in front of another, completely separate of this subject with fear. Because of the ease with which the elite uses violence ,and a good part of the forms which it acquires its treatment permanent to the rest of the population of Chile, has its root in the fact that he has never considered these groups as part of the same community, a ‘we’ as he liked to say to the UNDP.
Which, finally, there is another thing that re-pose the problem of Chile is its elite.