Chile

From the Mapuche of the south and the moai-builders of Rapa Nui to the Spanish founding of Santiago in 1541, the independence sealed at Maipu in 1818, the nitrate wealth of the War of the Pacific, the rupture of 1973, the Pinochet dictatorship and the long democratic recovery.

Chile's history reaches back to the Indigenous peoples who held the land for millennia: the Mapuche of the temperate south, who resisted outside rule for centuries, the Andean peoples of the desert north touched by the Inca, and, far across the Pacific, the Polynesian society of Rapa Nui who raised the great stone moai of Easter Island. Spanish forces under Pedro de Valdivia founded Santiago in 1541 and pressed south, only to meet fierce Mapuche resistance in the long Arauco War. Independence was won in the campaigns of Bernardo O'Higgins and Jose de San Martin and sealed at the Battle of Maipu in 1818, after which a stable republic grew wealthy on nitrates seized in the War of the Pacific (1879-1883). The democratic experiment of Salvador Allende ended in the military coup of 11 September 1973, opening seventeen years of dictatorship under Augusto Pinochet whose human-rights abuses were later documented by the Rettig and Valech commissions; democracy returned in 1990, and modern Chile has wrestled, through the protests of 2019 and a contested constitutional process, with the legacy of those years.