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WEEKLY NEWSLETTER
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Chile
Index
Bernardo O'Higgins Riquelme, father of Chile
Courtesy Embassy of Chile, Washington
From 1817 to 1823, Bernardo O'Higgins ruled Chile as
supreme
director (president). He won plaudits for defeating
royalists and
founding schools, but civil strife continued. O'Higgins
alienated
liberals and provincials with his authoritarianism,
conservatives
and the church with his anticlericalism, and landowners
with his
proposed reforms of the land tenure system. His attempt to
devise
a constitution in 1818 that would legitimize his
government failed,
as did his effort to generate stable funding for the new
administration. O'Higgins's dictatorial behavior aroused
resistance
in the provinces. This growing discontent was reflected in
the
continuing opposition of partisans of Carrera, who was
executed by
the Argentine regime in Mendoza in 1821, like his two
brothers were
three years earlier.
Although opposed by many liberals, O'Higgins angered
the Roman
Catholic Church with his liberal beliefs. He maintained
Catholicism's status as the official state religion but
tried to
curb the church's political powers and to encourage
religious
tolerance as a means of attracting Protestant immigrants
and
traders. Like the church, the landed aristocracy felt
threatened by
O'Higgins, resenting his attempts to eliminate noble
titles and,
more important, to eliminate entailed estates.
O'Higgins's opponents also disapproved of his diversion
of
Chilean resources to aid San Martín's liberation of Peru.
O'Higgins
insisted on supporting that campaign because he realized
that
Chilean independence would not be secure until the
Spaniards were
routed from the Andean core of the empire. However, amid
mounting
discontent, troops from the northern and southern
provinces forced
O'Higgins to resign. Embittered, O'Higgins departed for
Peru, where
he died in 1842.
After O'Higgins went into exile in 1823, civil conflict
continued, focusing mainly on the issues of
anticlericalism and
regionalism. Presidents and constitutions rose and fell
quickly in
the 1820s. The civil struggle's harmful effects on the
economy, and
particularly on exports, prompted conservatives to seize
national
control in 1830.
In the minds of most members of the Chilean elite, the
bloodshed and chaos of the late 1820s were attributable to
the
shortcomings of liberalism and federalism, which had been
dominant
over conservatism for most of the period. The abolition of
slavery
in 1823--long before most other countries in the
Americas--was
considered one of the liberals' few lasting achievements.
One
liberal leader from the south, Ramón Freire Serrano, rode
in and
out of the presidency several times (1823-27, 1828, 1829,
1830) but
could not sustain his authority. From May 1827 to
September 1831,
with the exception of brief interventions by Freire, the
presidency
was occupied by Francisco Antonio Pinto Díaz, Freire's
former vice
president. In August 1828, Pinto's first year in office,
Chile
abandoned its short-lived federalist system for a unitary
form of
government, with separate legislative, executive, and
judicial
branches. By adopting a moderately liberal constitution in
1828,
Pinto alienated both the federalists and the liberal
factions. He
also angered the old aristocracy by abolishing estates
inherited by
primogeniture (
mayorazgo--see
Glossary) and caused
a public
uproar with his anticlericalism. After the defeat of his
liberal
army at the Battle of Lircay on April 17, 1830, Freire,
like
O'Higgins, went into exile in Peru.
Data as of March 1994
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