Bicentenary in Chile. The celebration of a laborious political construction

Abstract

The author of this article writes from a critical historical perspective some reflections on the deeper meaning of the commemoration of the Bicentenary in Chile. For that perperse he makes a tight tour of some important events of the history of Chile in the last two hundred years, focusing his analysis on the system Republican politician. The historian Sergio Grez characterizes the type of society built throughout the nineteenth century as oligarchic noticing the differences between the Liberal Republic of the Conservative Republic. Immediately after he evokes the great economic, social and political crisis, of the early twentieth century (period of maturation the "social question") to find its outcome by which to explain the emergence of "welfare state" or "State of commitment.". The he passes review of the institutional treatment of social and political conflicts, the model import substitution and its crisis in the 1950 and 1960, the extension democratic freedoms between 1958 and 1973, the rise of popular struggles and systemic crisis that culminated in the coup of 1973 and the definitive collapse of the liberal democracy. Finally, he characterize the new "political engineering" resulting from the commitments of the transition to democracy agreed between the social and political forces that supported the dictatorship of General Pinochet and the dominant sector (moderate) of opposition forces, concluding with a brief counterpoint between the situation in Chile current and prevailing in 1910, to respond to questions about the meaning the commemoration of the Bicentenary.