Racism in Chile
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The article describes the state of race relations and racism in Chile. Racism of various forms is found in every country on Earth.[1] Racism is widely condemned throughout the world, with 170 states signatories of the International Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Racial Discrimination by August 8, 2006.[2] In different countries, the forms that racism takes may be different for historic, cultural, religious, economic or demographic reasons.
[edit] History
Located in South America, Chile is a country that viewed itself with a high degree of both European and/or Amerindian blood, but demography and national politics has argued over whether or not Chileans are more of a white people, a mestizo majority, or descendants from a multiplicity of ethnic groups, since Chile had attracted waves of European immigrants in the late 19th/early 20th centuries.
If the Chilean people feel they have Amerindian, Spanish or in many cases: British (English/Irish), French or Yugoslavian (Croatian/Serbian), Swiss, German or Austrian, Italian, Portuguese and Arab (Lebanese/Syrian) ancestry, it won't explain the problematic issues faced by most Latin American countries is poverty affects a large segment of Chilean society the same way the middle-classes are 40 percent of the population, one of Latin America's largest groups of affluent or financially secure peoples. Disputed but asymmetrical statistics shown that between 20 to 50 percent of the Chilean population, are poor and in the low income strata, mainly consists of mestizos and Amerindians.
The national cultural profile of Chile appears more of a white country located in the southern hemisphere surrounded by more Amerindian or mestizo majority Latin America, might indicated the political and cultural ethos of the Chilean government under an elite not typically identified as mestizos, since its' independence in 1818 from Spanish rule.
The Chilean government like most Latin American nations, used policies and public messages in attempt to encourage their people to take pride of their mestizo background, but like its mostly white neighbor Argentina, insisted it has a more European cultural integrity. Chile passed several laws and changed their 1925 constitution to prohibit racial discrimination in public or private employment, and despite its Catholic majority, the country allowed freedom of religion for its small Protestant, Eastern Orthodox, Jewish, Mormon and other religious communities.
Chile had a history of high levels of socio-economic inequality despite its' tradition of ensured economic prosperity and social protection laws enacted in the early 20th century. But the country's small wealthy elite is predominantly of Spanish and other European descent, whom might been allowed to take Mapuche, Aymara or Incan wives in order to procreate children to inherit the land.
The Roman Catholic Church promoted the white Spanish settlers and later European immigrants to intermarry the indigenous or mestizo majority, with disregard to their racial origin or skin color, in order to procreate a new colony. From the first census in 1821 to the 1901 census report, Chile had grown from 500,000 to near 3 million people, but still today much of the country is sparsely populated.
However, Chile has experienced many levels of racial conflict between its' indigenous peoples (esp. between the Mapuches) and Spanish conquistadors who from 1541, had a 350-year conflict ending in defeat and oppression of the Mapuche by chileanos.
The Mapuches were expert warriors and knew how to have battles with little casualties or defeats with the first Spanish, then Chilean armies, but the Mapuches' fighting skills declined in efficiency and they surrendered to the Chileans in the 1880s, to increase their level of racial malignment and economic status in the next century, as they joined the ranks of lower-class Chileans (esp. mestizos not considered "white" or not from land inheritance families) into the status of underpaid or overworked farmers and miners in the early 20th century.
When it comes to a history being a land of untapped natural sources abound in its' thin (its widest point is 100 miles) but 3,000 mile long shape, Chile should highly profited from its' major byproducts: copper, nitrates and sulfates exported to the global market, esp. in high demand in World Wars I and II, provided a high source of financial revenue for the "white" political and business elite.
The Mapuche only made up 3 percent of the country's population, but continued to encounter open and subliminal forms of racial prejudice, and the majority of Mapuche migrated to the cities in search of work and opportunity find themselves in the bottom of the country's defined class system. In Santiago, the country's capital and largest city, the endless influx of rural tenants now represent over half the city population, neighborhoods of dirt floor slums, rackety shacks and substandard housing, and these areas are avoided by local upper middle classes don't want to witness or get near the poverty and racial tension of Amerindians under "white" rule.
Similarly Polynesian Rapanuis of Easter Island, located 2,000 miles (1.400 km.) west of Chile, has been under Chilean rule since 1888. But until 1966 the Rap Nui were not granted full Chilean citizenship, and for most of that time they were confined to the town of Hanga Roa and its environs and not allowed to visit their ancestral homes. When Chile annexed the island only 111 Rapa Nui survived after two centuries of slave raiding, European diseases, famine and civil war, numbers have now recovered somewhat but tensions remain.
The Rapanui recently demanded more political autonomy and cultural preservation after introduction of culture and technology from the outside world, in the same time the Rapanui had very high rates of poverty than Chileans on the mainland, and until the late 1980s the Chilean government restricted the Rapanui language, cultural practices and although mostly Catholic, their animist religious elements to preserve their traditional integrity as a South Pacific people. In the late 1990s, autonomous rule was granted to the Rapanui of Easter Island.
Chileans had a strong emotional pull on issues relating to poverty, racism and class distinction, although the Chileans are discovering how deep the impact of racial and class divisions had on the country in the 1940s and 1950s, along with a growing concern in leftist circles to produce a small opposition to promote liberal reforms. The country had a large political presence of left-wing activists and an active Communist party from the 1930s (the first in Latin America, but was banned under law in 1956 and permanently in 1973) whom opposed what they felt the country's economic system was oppressive, a highly unequal distribution of wealth, and lack of opportunities that most rural mestizos and Amerindians encountered.
The leftists called the system as an anathema of a developing country, once in the late 1960s had a billion-dollar surplus in its' treasury accumulated by mining profits, could been used to fund one of the world's oldest social welfare state programs. After leftist parties were elected to majority status in Chilean congress, they created farm work programs and subdivided large estates into collective farms, but was small land plots for rural mestizo peasants.
In 1970, Salvador Allende, the first Marxist president elected in the western hemisphere tried to decrease the country's huge class disparities through changes in banking, the national treasury, land ownership and nationalization of private industry. Allende promised to boost the buying power and financial security of the poorest and working-class Chileans (especially mestizos and Amerindians) he got the most popularity from, but this came with a price by high opposition of the upper-class and businessmen got the Chilean army to take care of an ailing economy, and protect their wealth and business interests from damage by the Allende regime.
In the bloody coup in 1973, Allende was found dead (or allegedly killed), might put an end to his socialist reforms to decrease racial and class disparity, as Chile fell under a military dictatorship by general Augusto Pinochet from evident assistance from the US-CIA, as Chilean leftists and worldwide left-wing activists claimed, meant to preserve the "status quo" of the rich "white" Spanish elite whom supported Pinochet to take power, over the Amerindians, mestizos and the working poor.
From 1973 to his retirement in 1990, Pinochet had a "laissez-faire" approach to business, and promised to restructure the social, political and economic functions of Chile left damaged or neglected by previous governments and when civilian rule returned in 1989, the Chilean congress began to focus again on racial and ethnic issues once scorned by Pinochet in order to avoid being labeled as "socialist agitation". Pinochet wanted to preserve the status quo of business elite interests, emphasized a more nationalistic ideology of conservative and patriotic values on what he viewed the Chilean people, and took little consideration on poverty and racism faced by large numbers of lower-class mestizos.
In the 1990s and early 2000s, Chile enjoyed unprecedented economic growth and more middle-class Chileans began to have a higher standard of living by a mixed socialist/capitalist free market. The Chilean government with restored democratic rule began to discuss on including every Chilean not of upper-class or mostly European ancestry to not only share, but invest in financial gains after authoritarian rule ended.
Chilean poverty rates were cut in half from 45% in 1989 to 18% in 2005. However, its small Mapuche minority whom lived apart and encountered racial insults by non-Amerindian or "white" Chileans struggle to keep their autonomy and livelihood, a byproduct of over four centuries of their servitude and inferior status in a Hispanic country.
Recent waves of immigration from East or South Asia, Eastern Europe and other Latin American countries came to Chile in a fast pace, but most Chileans hold little prejudices on the basis of race or ethnicity but Chileans complained they wanted these immigrants to assimilate and contribute to the country, the homogeneous "melting pot" concept known as Chileanadad at large.
But, Chile was also a site of pro-Nazi political activity to nearly claimed electoral victories in the 1930s and early 1940s, but Chile was a wartime ally against Nazi Germany. In recent years (early 2000s) Chile got into news reports as active in far-right and "skinhead" gangs had racial and anti-Semitic views, and the country has an image of low percentages of black Africans (less than 1 percent, lower than numbers of east Asians or Japanese-Chileans), but this came from a low need for slavery in colonial Chile has explained the ethnographic trend.
The country had an emotionally charged argument for so long whether or not to admit a mestizanaje side in a Hispanic culture modeled on that of Northern/western Europeans, and the country's small black minority does not feel regularly threatened for their race, since Chilean law has traditionally avoided racial segregation, but nonetheless experienced the plight of its' "non white" mestizo, black, Asian, Amerindian and Rapanui populations.
[edit] References
- ^ Racism and the administration of justice. Amnesty International.
- ^ Report of the Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination 68th and 69th session. United Nations Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights.
[edit] See also
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