Control over the working-class world was exerted by dismantling grassroots’
organisations, with many of their leaders taken prisoner and subsequently ‘disappeared’
(i.e. illegally executed in secret) or sent on exile, whilst new Neighbourhood Committee directors were directly appointed by the executive. This aimed at exerting total control over the pobladores. Police and military attack on the spaces of the pobladores took place only during specific moments of weakest dictatorial political power, just after the coup and during the 1982-1984 political crisis triggered by the national economic recession (Lawner, 1984). Many poblaciones still remember people who were or went
missing. La Victoria, one of the most emblematic peri-central poblaciones, located in PAC, stores vivid memories of the dictatorship:
The symbolic power of La Victoria needed to be crushed, the meaning of poblador denigrated, and the hope of [the Chilean Way to Socialism] extinguished. Raids, arrests, tanks, tear gas, and fear became part of everyday life. Residents of La Victoria were among those detained, tortured, “disappeared,” and executed as the military regime sought to instill its power over the populace through a systematic campaign of force and fear. Residents were routinely subjected to raids and searches. Through these campaigns of terror the state sought to tear apart the fabric of community and solidarity that had defined La Victoria, and to replace it with distrust, betrayal, and anomie. Many residents recall the terrible fear and isolation that overcame them as the power of state violence took root. They struggled to give meaning to this context of violence and uncertainty.
(Finn, 2006b: 18-9)
In many ways, this situation contributed to the emergence of strategies of material and psychological forms of resistance against oppression. During the dictatorship the pobladores were also a key social capital for the institutional democratic reconstruction led by a political elite (Salazar and Pinto, 1999a). Several forms of communal life were developed for distributing food and jobs in times of scarcity, widespread unemployment or state police-military attack, to the extent that more than 700 grassroots organisation encompassing 120,000 inhabitants were accounted in 1984 only in Santiago (Chateau and Pozo, 1987). Another form of resistance was the development of poblaciones’
internal democracy, as a way to contest local authorities imposed by the authoritarian regime (Finn, 2006a). These strategies worked in the cities and not in the countryside due to the conspicuous spatial configuration of these enclaves, namely: proximity, high density and their relative ‘ghetto’ characteristics (Skewes, 2006).
However, a more constant and programmed form of erasure of the working-class culture took place during the whole period (Piña, 1987), largely based on an individualist economic rationale firmly opposed to the previous historical forms of collectivised demands reproduced across campamentos (Silva, 1991). This was related to the constitution of a ‘new poverty’ (Katzman, 2003b; Roberts, 2004; Tironi, 2003), or a
‘market citizenship’ which is more satisfied with material assets but has lost relevant social assets such as organisational capacity and social networks.
The ‘new poverty’ in Chile has been much the product of the neoliberal individualisation of the housing system, the spatial configuration created in the new state-built poblaciones, and the radical attempt to commodify the collective life.
Citizens were being conceived from then on as “‘enterprising’ agents, consumers and producers, whose aim [was] to maximize their quality of life as individuals within small communities, for example, neighbourhoods, schools, or health clinics, […]
responsible—through their own individual choices for themselves.” (Schild, 2000: 276) But the construction of this new, more materialistic poverty relied on the traditions of popular activism that stretched back to the early 1960s, including strong women’s organisational experiences and community work, in addition to the practices and discourses of popular participation which came to be central in the socialist period, and which were preserved and developed further during the dictatorship (Schild, 2000).
The formalisation and entitlement of the poor should not be disregarded as a form of cooptation. In the 1970s, many low-income informal settlements started to be regularised and their pobladores turned into debtors. Conversely, those who could not afford formal dwellings (or access to public subsidies for it) had to find a solution in the interstices of the formal sector, either as allegados or in the rental market (Gilbert, 1993, 1996), thus separating those who could be part of the system, hence stay in their original enclaves, and those who could not, transforming the right to the city into a matter of purchasing power. All in all, the neoliberal housing system much contributed to the higher levels of urban land entitlement. Currently, in PAC above 70% of the housing stock has no debt (SGA-IBERSIS, 2000), which is a high number even for a country where its rate of urban home-ownership, around 76%, is high in Latin America (MINVU, 2008a).
But historical events are dialectical. Although on the one hand the issuing of land titles in poblaciones might have contributed to feelings of individualisation and dissolution of cultural collective senses, on the other it contributed to totally reshape the dimensions of the political struggle for the future. As will be seen in chapters 5 to 7, the struggle about the Master Plan rezoning in PAC was conducted within strictly legal terms, being a matter of homeowners for who the most defended right was not only the use value of the land, but also to keep the exchange value of their capitalised land rent.