Chile

A ribbon of country four thousand kilometres long and rarely two hundred wide, with the driest desert on earth at one end and glaciers at the other. The Mapuche south of the Bio-Bio river held off Spanish conquest for three centuries and were subdued only in the 1880s, later than almost any indigenous people in the Americas. Independence was secured by San Martin's crossing of the Andes and the victory at Maipu in 1818. The War of the Pacific from 1879 to 1884 took the nitrate deserts from Peru and Bolivia, leaving Bolivia landlocked permanently and Chile with the fertiliser wealth that funded the state until synthetic nitrogen destroyed the market. Copper replaced it and still provides most export earnings. Salvador Allende was elected in 1970 as the first Marxist to win a presidential election anywhere, and was overthrown on 11 September 1973 by Augusto Pinochet with American support; the dictatorship killed or disappeared around three thousand people, tortured tens of thousands, and imposed the free-market programme designed by economists trained at Chicago. Pinochet lost a referendum in 1988 and left. Two attempts to replace his constitution failed in 2022 and 2023. Santiago is the capital. The country has about twenty million people. The Atacama has places where rainfall has never been recorded, which is why the world's largest telescopes are built there. Easter Island, five hundred kilometres from anywhere, is Chilean territory. Earthquakes are frequent and the 1960 Valdivia quake was the strongest ever measured. Wine from the central valley is a major export.

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