Chapter 5 Forjadores de la nación: rethinking the role of earthquakes in Chilean history

Earthquakes in (traditional) Chilean history

It has become commonplace among scholars of Chile to mention the country’s ‘crazy geography’ marked by earthquakes, volcanos and tsunamis.²¹ But only cultural historians have shown serious interest, focusing on exploring Chileans’ ‘telluric character’. Historian Rolando Mellafe coined the term in the 1980s, when tracing the genealogy of Chile’s mentality, claiming it is marked by ‘ill-fated occurrences’ (acontecer infausto) that create a disastrous identity ‘by nature’.²² Mellafe’s view was influenced by psychoanalysis; he believed that a country’s ‘mentality’ is defined by the traumas that its people have experienced throughout history. In the case of Chile, earthquakes and other types of natural hazards clearly stand out among these experiences (he counted). Mellafe’s view has certainly been very influential in Chilean cultural history and beyond, but very few works explored this relationship analytically. On the contrary, literary works abound. In 1939, for example, poet Gabriela Mistral linked earthquakes with Chileans’ fierce character and a certain ‘stoicism’ in the face of adversity.²³ Albert Camus’s memoirs, on the other hand, record that during his 1949 visit, he was told that Chile’s instability was due to a ‘psychology of uncertainty’ produced by earthquakes.²⁴ Author Gabriel García Márquez, in the quote that opens this chapter, points out another interpretation, claiming that earthquakes have helped Chileans achieve certain progress. These references allow us to grasp earthquakes’ importance in shaping Chilean identity, but they do not offer a clear answer to the political or economic consequences of this telluric character.²⁵

In recent years, however, some works on cultural history have aimed to explore this issue in more detail. Mauricio Onetto’s work, for example, shows that a catastrophic narrative about chileanness was established by European settlers early on, right after they experienced their first major earthquake, in 1647. The event helped Spaniards to connect different unfortunate stories about the Chilean territory into an official narrative of extreme difficulties and extreme heroism.²⁶ The disaster, he claims, is also an opportunity to praise the beauty and richness of the land, presenting Chilean geological hazards as the price to pay for these advantages.²⁷ For Onetto, these narratives about Chile’s telluric destiny have not always been productive for Chilean society since the idea that Chile is a ‘fateful land’ may lead to conformism and lack of action. Another notable work is Bárbara Silva and Alfredo Riquelme’s book Identidad Terremoteada: Comunidad y Territorio en el Chile de 1960. In it, the authors explore the issue of a shaken identity, starting by asserting that territories are crucial for the configuration of national identities everywhere.²⁸ Still, it seems that certain aspects of the natural environment are more suitable for constructing collective identities because they are relatable to most or all people in a community. This would explain that, even though chileanness has been narrated differently by different groups, its telluric quality is a shared and historically permanent experience. Importantly, it is a social construction that not only links chileanness with the territory, but actually assumes the ground is not inert, or dull. Also, it is an idea that has helped bridge Chileans and their territory, nature and culture, as coevolving. As the authors state, Chileans share not only the experience of earthquakes, but they have established a certain relationship with them, or even a ‘symbiosis’. Mellafe himself describes the telluric character of Chileans in similar terms when he claimed that it ‘is not a simple love for the land, nor a simple affinity with nature; it is a constant and unconscious dialogue of the psyche with nature’.²⁹

For much of Chilean history, this relationship has been defined by antagonism. Earthquakes are portrayed as the villain, a force that often paralyses Chileans’ ability to project expectations into the future. This antagonism, however, has also constituted a ‘driver for reassembling and (re)building physical and social spaces’.³⁰ Folk artist Patricio Manns was the first to explore this ambiguity in his 1972 essay Los Terremotos Chilenos. Manns’s work, remarkably progressive in its social view of disasters, aimed to educate Chileans on the risk of earthquakes. In the first volume, he refers to these events as the ‘bad guy of the movie’, retelling great events and highlining the pains and sorrows that they bring. In his second volume, however, the ‘true goodness’ (verdadera bondad) of earthquakes is revealed. When we look closely into these events – claims Manns – we realise that earthquakes are also teachers of life, imparting wisdom and life lessons for those who care to learn.³¹ Whether Chileans have learned or not from these events is a matter of certain debate. On one side, Chile is clearly one of the countries better prepared to face these events worldwide. However tragic, experts agree that the number of casualties and damage of the latest great event, the 2010 Maule earthquake and tsunami (known as 27F), was surprisingly low for such a big event.³² On the other side, historical analysis also shows that several lessons have been hard to grasp, especially in terms of urban planning, emergency protocols and human behaviour. Also, it is not at all clear that the lessons learned from earthquakes have been applied to the management of newer hazards, such as firestorms.

Still, I will argue here that the challenge of dealing with earthquakes has had an enormous impact on Chilean society that cannot be reduced to culture. Nineteenth-century historians such as Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna, Miguel Amunátegui and Diego Barros Arana understood this and included several earthquakes in their works. Barros Arana, in particular, presented detailed accounts of several events, linking them to the political, economic and social developments of the period and considering earthquakes as important nation-builders (forjadores de la nación, as described by Mauricio Onetto). This insight, however, was mostly lost in the following century, even though Chile suffered some of the most catastrophic earthquakes in world history. Modern historiography repeated the cliché of Chile’s fateful destiny but failed to include earthquakes in their accounts of Chile’s actual institutional path. Collier and Sater’s renowned A History of Chile, for example, claims that earthquakes have ‘probably left a mark on the Chilean mindset’, at the same time blaming them for the delayed appearance of ‘anything more than the simplest architecture’.³³ But in their review of almost 200 years of Chilean political history they don’t explore any of these events. The great 1960 cataclysm is mentioned, but only in passing when discussing a decline in President Alessandri’s political support. The same happens with other seminal historical books of Chilean economic and political history – such as Sofía Correa et al., Historia del Siglo XX Chileno and Patricio Meller’s Un Siglo de Economía Política Chilena – that sometimes mention earthquakes as context but fail to reflect on their agentic contribution.³⁴

Unfortunately, earthquakes have not been a salient topic in Chilean environmental history either. Although relevant and innovative in discussing nature/society assemblages, most environmental history in Chile is devoted to other phenomena.³⁵ Apart from cultural history, the two subdisciplines that have incorporated earthquakes into their analysis are social and urban history.³⁶ In social history, the notable work of Joshua Savala on the 1906 Valparaíso earthquake allows for a better understanding of the different interpretations the disaster enhanced. In the case of urban history, one of the most interesting works is Samuel Martland’s exploration of the 1906 earthquake, showing that it not only defined Valparaíso’s city plan but it also strengthened Chile’s central state to the detriment of city politics.³⁷ These works allow us to grasp the crucial role that Chileans’ relationship with earthquakes has played in their history. Still, several aspects remain hidden, specifically the impact that threats and physical destruction have had on the economic and political organisation of the country.

My work aims to fill this gap, showing that earthquakes have been crucial partners for state-building, pushing an agenda of increased rationalisation and demanding social organisation for disaster risk reduction.³⁸ Earthquakes have forced institutions to develop new capacities and expand their authority, to the point that we cannot truly understand the Chilean state without considering its relationship with earthquakes.

In the next sections, I will expand on each of these assertions relying heavily on my own research and the primary sources I have collected through the years. Nonetheless, I also built upon the work of the cultural, social and urban historians who have contributed to highlighting earthquakes’ active role in Chilean history.

Not God but earthquakes (1810–1906)

Certainly, earthquakes played an important role in the cultural and social organisation of Chile before 1810, the year of the country’s declaration of independence. But it is the Chilean state who will eventually establish a relationship with the phenomena, transforming itself in the process. The first major earthquake in the Republic of Chile occurred in 1822, a few days after Supreme Director Bernardo O’Higgins had enacted the country’s initial constitution. Independence from Spain had been declared in 1810, but war and political discontent continued in the southern regions. By 19 November, O’Higgins was in Valparaíso – Chile’s main port – when a 8.5 Ms earthquake surprised him in his sleep. Valparaíso, epicentre of the event, was almost completely destroyed by shaking, a tsunami and subsequent fires. The catastrophe left O’Higgins hurt and unreachable for a few days, discontent became buoyant as people blamed the director’s agnosticism for the earthquake.

Still, we can safely say that this earthquake marks Chile’s first modern disaster. Religious fervour did not relent, but the earthquake allowed Chilean intellectuals to defy the Catholic Church’s long-held ‘symbolic monopoly of nature’ by discussing the natural origins of the phenomena.³⁹ From the notion of an ‘underground tempest’ caused by the inflammation of hydrogen to a collapse of the internal caves of the earth, the discussion about the causes of the movement consumed Chilean intellectuals for months.⁴⁰ As we learn from Neiman’s work on the Lisbon earthquake, understanding earthquakes and other phenomena as a product of natural forces is not only relevant for secularisation, it also changes the relationship society establishes with these hazards, and the expectations attributed to society. If disasters are understood as acts of God, damage and losses cannot be prevented by human action (with the possible exception of pious living). On the contrary, if earthquakes are understood as natural – albeit extreme – phenomena, society is called to action.

By Chileans’ next encounter with a great earthquake, in 1835, this change of paradigm was much more advanced. Religious notions were mostly absent in the public sphere while natural, proto-scientific hypotheses looked to comprehend the phenomenon.⁴¹ One of the main topics was their recurrence, with several people arguing that big earthquakes happened every fifty years.⁴² Believed to have been magnitude 8.5 Ms, the quake and tsunami destroyed central-southern Chile (Figure 5.2).

British naturalist Charles Darwin, who arrived by ship in Concepción on the day after, found no words to describe the ruin of the city. Impressed by the wide destruction, he concluded that ‘earthquakes alone are sufficient to destroy the prosperity of any country […] Government being unable to collect the taxes, and failing to maintain its authority, the hand of violence and rapine would remain uncontrolled’.⁴³ He stayed in the city for only three days and was not able to see that this prediction turned out to be deeply mistaken. Far from collapsing, the government quickly restored order and organised public offices in the main square, financing the reconstruction of public buildings and forcibly relocating some towns.⁴⁴ A committee of scientists was created in order to analyse the ground in the area, concluding that the sandiness of the land explained its proneness to movement and establishing that 33 per cent of brick buildings, 71 per cent of adobe and 95 per cent of stone-built constructions were destroyed.⁴⁵ This knowledge allowed Chileans to consider new strategies to face earthquakes in the future.

As Chileans embraced natural views on earthquakes, they not only felt driven to develop earthquake science but also changed how they perceived responsibility for any loss or damage. As a ‘concerned citizen’ wrote in a letter to newspaper El Mercurio in 1829, if disasters are not a divine mandate, then we need to ask, ‘What is the Cabildo doing about earthquakes?’⁴⁶ This question is important because a state’s ability to protect the population from physical harm, to preserve its borders, tame violence and maintain internal peace are all crucial for its legitimacy. Of course, this perspective focuses on violence as a tool of political action and domination from human actors, but the definition also underlines that, if nonstate violence and physical harm are not repressed, the state is jeopardising the legitimacy of its rule. What happens, then, when earthquakes defy this promise of protection? The Chilean state understood this challenge early on, looking to comprehend earthquakes and – at the same time – resisting their overbearing hold on Chilean society.

After the 1835 earthquake came a period of relative ‘seismic peace’, meaning that no catastrophic earthquake happened in Central-Southern Chile, where economic and political power have historically resided. But earth did not stay calm, a series of relevant quakes were felt in the period 1847–59, and again in the period 1869–80.⁴⁷ These events allowed Chileans to continue discussing earthquakes’ causes, even if no clear answer to the actual nature of the phenomenon was achieved. Seismology was not yet a well-developed science. Globally, there was a good understanding of how earthquake waves travel through the earth but not as to how they are generated.⁴⁸ Even after seismology officially became a sub-field of geology, in 1895, European scientists could not agree if it should address what happens on the surface during an earthquake. In Chile, this was not a relevant issue. As Venezuelan intellectual Andrés Bello said in the opening speech of the University of Chile, in 1842, Chile needed highly trained engineers and not only scientists devoted to the natural world.⁴⁹ The creation of the university allowed studies such as Paulino del Barrio’s Memoria sobre los temblores de Tierra (1855) that tried to gather data and offer explanations about the phenomena, and Miguel Amunátegui’s Terremoto del 13 de Mayo de 1647 that constitutes the first historical approximation to a Chilean earthquake.⁵⁰ There is not enough space here to describe these works, but I want to emphasise that increased proto-scientific knowledge about earthquakes is crucial for understanding how Chile’s relationship with earthquakes was established in the next century. As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, scientific knowledge and perceived control over nature are profoundly intertwined in modernity. This means that increased rationalisation around the earthquake challenge will be tied to an expansion of society’s efforts to control its impacts.

The earthquake’s agenda (1906–2010)

By the beginning of the twentieth century, the Church and landed elites had lost some of their power, and emerging middle and working classes were starting to take shape in Chile.⁵¹ The political arena was eager for social change, with many actors pushing for a growing, more subsidiary state. As I will show next, among these actors will be the earthquakes of 1906, 1939 and 1960. The declining role of religious explanations for disasters will reverberate in the state, which will be seen not only as an effective source of relief to victims but also as a protector from earthquakes’ harm. This will lead to important institutional developments that would not have existed when they did, and as they did, if not for earthquakes.

The first of such events was the ‘sad night’ of 16 August 1906. No one alive could remember such a large shock. According to a local newspaper, ‘the shakings were so strong that many people thought the earth was going to open itself in deep and long strips’.⁵² Chile was significantly more populated (the 1907 Census counted 3,249,279 residents, three times more people than in 1835), urbanised (although 51 per cent of Chileans still lived in Haciendas) and economically more diverse than in 1835 (with robust mining and incipient industry), and therefore the damage caused by the 8.2 M_w quake was supreme. The affected region covered 2,620 kilometres from Tacna (on Peruvian territory) to Ancud (in southern Chile). But Valparaíso suffered the most; the earthquake and tsunami destroyed the port, and the subsequent fires consumed what was left of the city plain. There seemed to be no building standing and all vital services – sanitation, electricity, telegraphic lines and trolleys – were broken. In the rest of central Chile, the situation was similar, if less severe.

News of the destruction of Valparaíso arrived in Santiago two days later. Sadly, 3,886 bodies had been counted in the city, and chaos was reported to be pervasive.⁵³ Newly elected President Pedro Montt and his ministers travelled to Valparaíso to join the Intendente in organising the distribution of resources, removal of corpses and the demolition of buildings with risk of collapse. By 1906 Chile was a semi-parliamentary republic, and the central government had little to say in local politics, it was the municipality’s responsibility to organise urban spaces and even collect taxes.⁵⁴ For decades, laissez-faire defined Chilean political economy. But this position is very difficult to maintain in the context of broad-spread destruction. As Samuel Martland has described, the 1906 earthquake defied this long-held governance. Not only did the central state lead the immediate rehabilitation of city functions, but it also directed Valparaíso’s reconstruction plan, the first grand-scale experiment in urban development in Chile and Latin America.⁵⁵ The earthquake also pushed other agendas. Due to destruction, the rest of the country needed to rebuild roads, railways, telegraphic lines and other relevant infrastructure. To help organise this work, an Office of Bridges and Roads was created in the Ministry of Public Works. The 1906 earthquake also changed the geography of the labour market in Chile, which justified the creation of the Bureau of Workers’ Statistics.⁵⁶ Finally, the 1906 earthquake is remarkable because it pushed the creation of Chile’s first Seismological Service.

As head of the Partido Nacional, supported by businessmen, President Montt did not completely fit with the traditional landowner elite who thought he had been ‘cruelly assaulted by a dangerous obsession for investing state money in all kinds of public works’.⁵⁷ Except for Valparaíso’s port, reconstruction was the responsibility of each citizen, they argued.⁵⁸ But for the government, reconstruction and recovery were crucial for ensuring the sustainability of the Chilean state. The mechanism is similar to what has been described by sociologist Charles Tilly and the bellicists for the case of western Europe and the effects of war, in which threats, extraction and bureaucracies interact to shape state-building.⁵⁹ In this case, the enemy is not a foreign power but a natural phenomenon: earthquakes. By 1906, there were very few issues that the Chilean state considered its own responsibility beyond internal security and trade. But earthquakes were quickly becoming a major public concern, precisely because they challenged the continuity of such activities. The earthquake, then, forced the state to care about several issues in public policy that were being overlooked, and pushed to develop new capacities in areas such as infrastructure planning and seismology, effectively moving the standard for acceptable state intervention for years to come.

The creation of the Chilean Seismological Centre (Centro Sismológico Nacional, CSN) is especially relevant in this regard. Discussions about the nature of the quake were once again heated, with different theories trying to become the dominant paradigm to interpret earthquakes. Moreover, a navy officer claimed to have predicted the quake using Solectrics, a method based on the position of the stars in relation to earth. This led to a series of new announcements in the days after the event, creating anxiety and concern among the population and authorities.⁶⁰ To face this situation, the government created a Scientific Commission for the Study of the Earthquake that was, nonetheless, unsuccessful in delivering clear answers.⁶¹ This experience, together with the increasing interest of the state in providing security and ‘pursuing human welfare’, led to the creation of the seismological centre in 1908, the first of its kind in Latin America. Its first director was French scientist Fernand de Montessus de Ballore, who was hired as a ‘state seismologist’. He installed one of the best seismological networks at the time, created a Bulletin and sought to help Chileans to advance in the ‘art of building in seismic countries’.⁶² The Bulletin published articles accordingly and, in 1909, Montessus started to teach a class on earthquake-resistant construction at the University of Chile. Since then, Chilean strategy to deal with earthquakes will focus on the expansion of science and the search for seismic-resilient buildings. This will soon materialise in a building code that will significantly expand the state’s involvement in a formerly private activity.

Even if most people today consider building codes as necessary for earthquake resilience, they are a rather extreme form of state power. Regulations restrict people’s liberty to choose where and how to build new houses or infrastructure, potentially making it much more expensive. This is why, across the world, these regulations have been met with opposition and fraud. In Chile, building codes constitute the cornerstone of risk management and they have advanced almost exclusively thanks to earthquakes.⁶³ Discussion about imposing norms in construction started around the 1906 event, but it was after another significant earthquake that a commission was formed to address the issue. The Talca earthquake of 1928 was small compared to that of 1906 and the one to come in 1939, but it led to the enactment of the first national construction and urban planning law. From 1929 onwards, Chileans in cities larger than 20,000 residents needed a permit to build any house or building.⁶⁴ A pioneer regulation, it also institutionalised seismic design, defining nine types of buildings depending on materials, foundations, design, acceptable loads, wind resistance and other characteristics. The regulation was very restricted on the use of adobe, the traditional material in Chilean houses, favouring the use of reinforced concrete.⁶⁵

With this new regulation and institutions in place Chileans were better prepared, but earthquakes will not relent. An even more catastrophic earthquake hit central Chile on a hot summer night of 1939. Most Chilean earthquakes are interplate events, occurring at the boundary between two tectonic plates. But the Chillán earthquake emerged from the interior of a tectonic plate (intraplate), which made the shaking unusually abrupt and strong for a magnitude of 7.8–8.3 Ms (depending on the source). No one understood this difference at the time. By 1939 geologists were discussing the merits of the continental drift theory, a matter that would not be solved until 1967.⁶⁶ Still, newspapers in Chile did their best to incorporate scientific language to report the event, claiming that ‘the seismic movement of last night had the status of an earthquake’.⁶⁷ The shock buried at least eight cities and twelve towns, making this event the most fatal disaster in Chilean history: about 8,000 casualties.⁶⁸

Infrastructure was also heavily damaged, electricity was shut down in several regions, railroads were useless and roads were damaged. The building code, however, proved its worth. Reports after the event point out that the new buildings were more resistant: less than 20 per cent of the new constructions suffered irreparable damage, compared to 67 per cent of adobe construction (Figure 5.3). The state report concluded that: ‘the law of constructions has proved its efficiency when faced with the earthquake, therefore it must be incremented’, describing a series of reforms to be made, and a new version of the code was presented in 1949. The classical, most traditional way Chilean houses had been built for centuries was disappearing under the state’s regulatory power. Old houses could still exist, but earthquakes were doing their part in leaving only a few upstanding. Still, the success of the code led to the population accepting new restrictions more willingly. As a newspaper at the time explained: ‘The earthquake has acted as a tinkle of magic that, after shaking us brutally and by surprise, has prompted an awareness of the efficacy of edicts, decrees and laws of all kinds, whose weight we usually accept only reluctantly’.⁶⁹

The earthquake also pushed the Chilean state to focus, once more, on organising recovery. And this time, the state had an even more impressive response. Two new agencies were created in the context of reconstruction: the Reconstruction and Assistantship Corporation (CRA), in charge of providing housing, and the Production Development Corporation (CORFO) in charge of economic recovery and development. The first agency will eventually become the Ministry of Housing, while the second one – CORFO – is today a crucial governmental organisation whose aim is to promote economic growth. Certainly, recently elected president Pedro Aguirre Cerda was known for his strong views on the role of the state in society, promising to completely change Chile’s economic policies during his campaign. A left-wing politician, governing with the Popular Front (Frente Popular), Aguirre Cerda represented the dreams and hopes of non-elite Chileans. Before the earthquake, however, he faced a hostile Congress, critiques of the legitimacy of his hard-won election and internal conflict in his own coalition. Consequently, he mostly failed to complete his ambitious presidential programme. But CORFO and the CRA were embedded in the reconstruction-development bill, together with a full tax reform, aiming to collect the 2.5 billion pesos needed to fund the plan.⁷⁰ The development corporation was opposed by several political and economic actors, who did not want the state to actively interfere on economic activity. CORFO, however, will succeed after the earthquake pushed conservative senators in the most affected areas to support a bill that promised reconstruction.

There are several other institutional legacies of this earthquake. The CRA, responsible for the assistance of victims in the areas directly affected by the earthquake, gave the state the power to act directly in the territory, providing houses for families. The corporation was meant to be momentary, but it never actually dissolved. After a series of smaller earthquakes, it would become institutionalised in the autonomous and permanent Housing Corporation (CORVI). Reconstruction also brought an extensive programme of roads and the development of the first and most ambitious state-led electrification plan in Latin America.⁷¹ Finally, the tax reform – initially defined as temporary – also ended up becoming permanent; some taxes were scaled down in the 1970s, but the original sunset clauses were four or six years. This provides new evidence of the ‘displacement effect’ that political scientists have described for institutions created in the context of war.⁷² As earthquakes increasingly became a formidable opponent to Chile’s development, they triggered new efforts to increase state revenue, along with the development of new bureaucracies and administrative bodies to manage such revenue and implement the policies required for reconstruction and recovery.

By 1960, when the greatest earthquake ever recorded happened outshore Valdivia, southern Chile, the Chilean state faced its greatest test. The disaster began on 21 May, when a 7.3 M_w earthquake hit the city of Concepción. But the worst was yet to come when a second quake – magnitude 9.5 M_w – hit the area of Valdivia the next day. Because of the double epicentre, the amount of Chilean territory affected expanded over 186,000 square kilometres, containing about 65 per cent of agricultural land and six of Chile’s most important cities: Concepción, Chillán, Talca, Valdivia, Puerto Montt and Temuco.⁷³ The tsunami devastated every port and coastal town south of Concepción, including Chiloé Island, and around 2,000 lives were lost.⁷⁴ What was left of Valdivia had to be evacuated because landslides blocked San Pedro River, the outlet of Lake Riñihue. CORFO took the responsibility to evacuate the lake, in a dangerous enterprise that was, nonetheless, successful.

Unsurprisingly, the earthquake left the Chilean state in a shaky position, and in dire need of funds for reconstruction. President Jorge Alesandri was very different from Aguirre Cerda, having won the election with the support of the ruling economic class. He was officially an independent and his cabinet was conformed mostly by ‘apolitical’ technocrats, but he was basically a conservative who had promised to shrink the Chilean state. After two years in office he had established a stabilisation programme meant to control inflation, balance the state budget and reduce taxes. But the earthquake had other plans. The event renewed the need for coordinated efforts for development, leaving the state with no choice but to increase its capacities. As a way to circumvent the Right’s opposition to state expansion, the government created an office in charge of disaster recovery at the Ministry of Economy, changing its name to the Ministry of Economy, Development and Reconstruction. CORFO had gained a reputation as the technical advisor of the state in several issues, and following this line it established a Committee of Economic Planning and Reconstruction (Comité de Programación Económica y Reconstrucción, COPERE) to organise economic recovery. CORFO even developed a ten-year development programme arguing that ‘we cannot limit ourselves in repairing the damage without giving due attention to economic recovery at the highest levels’.⁷⁵ Even though the government’s plan relied heavily on loans from the United States, the government was also forced to push for a tax reform that spurred several hikes, including income and inheritance. Finally, the need to improve long-distance communication was clear after the quake and the whole system, heavily damaged, was modernised with the creation of Chile’s National Telecommunications Office (ENTEL).

The urgency created by the disastrous events in 1960 was reinforced by another earthquake in 1965, which was the most serious to affect central Chile since 1906. After this, a National Plan for Emergencies was designed, in line with a ‘Law of Quakes and Catastrophes’ that allowed for special attributions to different institutions in the case of disasters. It also institutionalised the concept of damnificado (‘damnified’, a person affected by a natural disaster), among other things. Soon after, the state also created the Hydrographic and Oceanographic Service (SHOA), in order to be better prepared for tsunamis, which were now considered the major source of destruction. In the 1970s, after another minor earthquake in the area of La Ligua, the National Emergencies Office (ONEMI) was created. This office, however, was a rebranding of the Emergencies Office (OEMI) created after the 1965 earthquake inside the Minister of the Interior. Regulations to build seismic-resilient buildings were making earthquakes seem controllable, effectively changing their villain-like nature in the eyes of Chileans. Even if the 1960 earthquake was the strongest ever recorded, a year after, a newspaper at the time claimed that building codes and construction technologies allow Chile to say to the earth: ‘it is true that you hit hard, but I have learned to be ready’.⁷⁶

Conclusions: Chile’s 200-year earthquake

Chile was preparing to celebrate 200 years of independence when, on the night of 27 February 2010, an 8.8 M_w earthquake woke up locals once more, forcing them to face a lively earth. It was an earthquake 500 times more powerful than the 7.0 M_w Haiti earthquake a month prior.⁷⁷ It also triggered a tsunami that heavily damaged several coastal towns, cities and the port in Talcahuano, and several landslides. According to official records, 520 people were killed, 25 missing, and more than 220,000 families lost their homes. Importantly, about a third of the fatalities were due to the tsunami.⁷⁸ This was particularly traumatic for Chilean society. Due to important institutional failings at SHOA and ONEMI, the system was unable to articulate an early warning for the tsunami hazard.⁷⁹ The social impact of the earthquake was amplified by this institutional failure. Still, the performance of infrastructure during the quake was impressive, and it is clear that the enforcement of seismic codes played a major role in the relatively low amount of damage and casualties.⁸⁰ This is due not only to the existence of such codes, but the networks of knowledge around them and the strength of institutions to enforce them. And the same can be said for other institutional capacities that managed reconstruction and recovery in record time: CORFO working to boost economic recovery; the Economic and Social Stabilization Fund to finance reconstruction; the Ministry of Housing; and the Ministry of Economy. As I have shown, these are all institutional legacies from past encounters, reflecting the effect that living with earthquakes had not only in the Chilean mindset, but also in the Chilean state. These legacies are the product of earthquakes pushing an agenda of increased social organisation. While it is true that earthquakes have been mobilised to push human political objectives, the cases show that a government’s alignment with the earthquake’s agenda is not a necessary condition for the earthquake to impose certain needs and demand intervention. As many scholars have argued before me, vulnerability and capacities are historically produced, which means that the aftermath of the 2010 earthquake had been in the making for 200 years or so⁸¹.

The Chilean state still has a lot to learn in terms of disaster management and the 2010 earthquake provided a new opportunity to do so. Several new institutional capacities were developed. Recently elected right-wing president Sebastián Piñera had centred his campaign on issues such as government efficiency and reducing taxes, but ended up sponsoring a fiscal reform in order to increase fiscal revenue and a creating a national fund for reconstruction. A new national plan for disaster risk management was developed in line with the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction, the ONEMI, the CSN and SHOA underwent important reforms, including the creation of a new Tsunami Early Warning Centre and a new seismographic network. Also, the government once more promoted scientific research related to disasters funding three major research centres in the areas of natural hazards and disaster risk. This shows that the mechanisms and dynamics that have linked earthquakes and state-building in Chile during the twentieth century remain operating in this century.

Overall, it is clear that Charles Darwin was not correct. Earthquakes alone are not sufficient to destroy the prosperity of a country. It can certainly happen, as we have seen in the case of Haiti, but in the case of Chile Gabriel García Marquéz has a better hypothesis. When we look at Chilean history taking earthquakes seriously as a historical actor, we see a dialogical process in which the Chilean state has learned to adapt to the telluric forces that visit the territory. As García Marquéz claims, this relationship has helped achieve a certain ‘political maturity’. The state has had to adapt to enormous pressure generated by repeated catastrophes, and this has led to developments that are similar to what has been described to be the case of war in western Europe. In this case, however, the enemy is earthquakes. The basic role of the state is to control internal and external threats. Natural forces have always been part of this programme of control, but in the face of catastrophe this relationship is much more clearly perceived. It is not only that earthquakes are perceived as a powerful enemy but that they are also actually a challenge for state power, demanding a degree of organisation and protection that only strong political structures can provide. If non-existent, these structures have to be developed, becoming institutional legacies that are not only relevant for disaster management but offer important capacities for the everyday management of the state.

It is not at all clear that the Chilean state has learned as much from other hazards. As the climate crisis worsens the natural conditions of most of the Chilean territory, climate-related disasters have become the most salient problem for the disaster risk management system. The fire seasons of 2016–17 and 2022–3 have been particularly damaging for the country, but it seems that these challenges are unable to pressure a state response as strong as earthquakes have historically produced. There are certainly many explanatory factors for this, but I will argue that debris is an important actor in defining what happens in the aftermath of disaster. Rubble and debris demand decisions, prompting society into action. I have previously called this effect ‘the imperative of debris’, loosely defined as the need to deal with physical destruction or face the risk of collapse.⁸² Other types of disasters with diffuse crises and different types of physical destruction may not have the same effect. Earthquakes create new needs in the areas of infrastructure, health and transportation, among others, forcing political actors to make difficult decisions. It may be the case that dust – especially dust that comes from the combustion of trees and not public infrastructure – cannot push institutions in the exact same way.

Finally, it is important to point out that as earthquakes made the Chilean state, this relationship also changed earthquakes. Of course, the hazard itself remains outside of human intervention, even in the context of the Anthropocene. But earthquakes are today a different kind of threat to Chileans than when this story started. Mellafe himself, writing in the 1980s, uses the past tense to talk about the catastrophic mentality of Chileans ‘because the man [sic] today does not suffer the negative telluric effects with the same force than a few decades ago’, adding that ‘the dialogue and contact [with earthquakes] is much shorter and carefree’.⁸³

And certainly, most earthquakes today are fully normalised by Chilean society, barely giving the movement a second thought. Earthquakes have changed so much that the prominence of earthquakes is often presented as an opportunity for Chile’s scientific leadership and technological development.⁸⁴ Still, it is important to always remember that the modern dream can work as an ideal worth striving for in order to save lives, but the liveliness of earth will continue to surprise us. Our best chance is to learn how to live with earthquakes in a coevolution that is not only resilient to the next event, but sustainable in the long term.

Notes

1. 1. Gabriel García Márquez, Chile, el golpe y los gringos. Bogotá, Editorial Latina, Colección Cuadernos Alternativa, 1974, 15.

2. 2. This research was partially funded by the Chilean National Research and Development Agency (ANID) under Fondecyt INICIO, Grant number #11220562.

3. 3. Jenz Zinn, Understanding risk-taking. Switzerland, Palgrave Macmillan, 2020.

4. 4. Max Weber, The disenchantment of modern life (2004 [1917]) quoted in Zinn, Understanding risk-taking, p. 20.

5. 5. Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters (CRED), Disasters in numbers, UC Louvain, 2022.

6. 6. Susan Neiman, Evil in modern thought: an alternative history of philosophy. Princeton, NJ-Oxford, Princeton University Press, 2002; Russel R. Dynes ‘The Lisbon earthquake of 1755: the first modern disaster’. In: Theodore E. D. Braun & John B. Radner (eds.) The Lisbon earthquake of 1755: representations and reactions. Oxford, Voltaire Foundation, 2005, 34–49.

7. 7. Neiman, 2012, p. 4.

8. 8. An interesting exception is Gregory K. Clancey in his Earthquake nation: the cultural politics of Japanese seismicity, 1868–1930 (Berkeley, University of California Press, 2006). See also, Jelle Zeilinga de Boer & Donald Theodore Sanders, Earthquakes in human history: the far-reaching effects of seismic disruptions. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2005; Jürgen Buchenau & Lyman L. Johnson (eds.), Aftershocks: earthquakes and popular politics in Latin America. Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 2009.

9. 9. About a quarter of global energy is released in the Chilean territory. GFZ Centre Postdam, ‘Seismic hazard in Chile’, https://www.gfz-potsdam.de/en/section/seismic-hazard-and-risk-dynamics/projects/ shac-seismic-hazard-in-chile.

10. 10. Moment magnitude scales are a measure of an earthquake’s released energy, they are denoted explicitly with M_w (moment magnitude), M_L (local magnitude) or Ms (superficial magnitude). The Chilean seismological center reports M_w for current earthquakes but Ms for older events, scales are very similar in the lower magnitudes, but M_w allows for a better understanding of major earthquakes. See USGS, ‘Earthquake magnitude’, https://www.usgs.gov/programs/earthquake-hazards/earthquake-magnitude-energy-release-and-shaking-intensity.

11. 11. Linda Nash, ‘The agency of nature or the nature of agency?’, Environmental History 10 (2005), 67–9, p. 69.

12. 12. For a historical development of this argument in disaster studies, see Ilan Kelman, Disaster by choice: how our actions turn natural hazards into catastrophes (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020); Kathleen J. Tierney, ‘From the margins to the mainstream? Disaster research at the crossroads’, Annual Review of Sociology 33, no. 1 (2007), 503–25; Enrico Quarantelli, ‘A social science research agenda for the disasters of the 21st century’. In: Ronald W. Perry & Enrico L. Quarantelli (eds.) What is a disaster? New answers to old questions. Philadelphia, PA, Xlibris, 2005, 96–325.

13. 13. See, for example, William Catton & Riley Dunlap, ‘Environmental sociology: a new paradigm’, The American Sociologist 13, no. 1 (1978), 41–9; Frederick H. Buttel, ‘New directions in environmental sociology’, Annual Review of Sociology 13, no. 1 (1987), 465–88; David N. Pellow & Hollie Nyseth Brehm, ‘An environmental sociology for the twenty-first century’, Annual Review of Sociology 39, no. 1 (2013), 229–50; Raymond Murphy, Sociology and nature: social action in context. Boulder, CO, Westview Press, 1997; Riley E. Dunlap (ed.) Sociological theory and the environment: classical foundations, contemporary insights. Lanham, MD, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002.

14. 14. Besides environmental sociology and humanities, I recommend the work of philosopher Jane Bennet on this issue; Jane Bennett, Vibrant matter: a political ecology of things. Durham, NC, Duke University Press, 2010. See also, Gulshan Khan, ‘Agency, nature and emergent properties: an interview with Jane Bennet’, Contemporary Political Theory 8 (2009), 9–105.

15. 15. Robert A. Stallings already argued this in ‘Disasters and the theory of social order’. In: Enrico Quarantelli (ed.) What is a disaster? Perspectives on the question. London-New York, Routledge, 1998, 127–36.

16. 16. Anthony Oliver-Smith & Susanna Hoffman, The angry earth: disaster in anthropological perspective. New York, Routledge, 1999, p. 1.

17. 17. Here I paraphrase Philip Abrams’s definition of an event in Explaining events: a problem of method. Bath, Cornell University Press, 1982.

18. 18. William H. Sewell, Jr., ‘Nature, agency and anthropocentrism’, online discussion of Steinberg, ‘Down to Earth’, formerly available at http://www.historycooperative.org/phorum (7 September 2002) quoted in Richard C. Foltz, ‘Does nature have historical agency? World history, environmental history, and how historians can help save the planet’. History Teacher 37, no. 1 (2003), 9.

19. 19. Bennett, 2010, 69.

20. 20. Emily O’Gorman & Andrea Gaynor, ‘More-than-human histories’, Environmental History 25, no. 4 (2020), 711–35.

21. 21. Benjamin Subercaseaux, Chile o una loca geografía. Santiago, Chile, Editorial Universitaria, 1940.

22. 22. Rolando Mellafe, ‘El acontecer infausto en el carácter Chileno: una proposición de historia de las mentalidades’, Atenea 442 (1980), 121–8. See also Rolando Mellafe, ‘Historia de las mentalidades: una nueva alternativa’, Cuadernos de Historia 2 (1982), 97–107.

23. 23. Gabriela Mistral, ‘Chile, suelo telúrico’ [Manuscript], Biblioteca Nacional de Chile, http://www.bibliotecanacionaldigital.gob.cl/bnd/623/w3-article-141314.html.

24. 24. Camus arrived in the middle of strong social protest; see Juan Rivas & Nibaldo Mosciatti, ‘Apuntes sobre el viaje de Albert Camus a Chile’. In: Albert Camus, Ni víctimas ni verdugos. Buenos Aires, Godot, 2014, 81–101.

25. 25. Eduardo Aguayo, ‘Entre la ruina y el prodigio: narrativas del desastre en la literatura símica chilena’, Argos 32 no. 63 (2015), 15–33.

26. 26. Mauricio Onetto, Temblores de tierra en el Jardín Del Edén: desastre, memoria e identidad: Chile, siglos XVI-XVIII. Colección Sociedad y Cultura, LXII, Santiago, Chile, DIBAM-Centro de Investigaciones Diego Barros Arana, 2017.

27. 27. Mauricio Onetto, Discursos desde la catástrofe: prensa, solidaridad y urgencia en Chile, 1906–2010. Santiago, Chile, Acto Editores, 2018.

28. 28. Bárbara Silva & Alfredo Riquelme, Una identidad terremoteada: comunidad y territorio en El Chile de 1960. Santiago, Chile, Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado, 2018.

29. 29. Mellafe, 1980, 287.

30. 30. Onetto, 2017, 301.

31. 31. Patricio Manns, Los terremotos chilenos. Volume 1, Santiago, Chile, Editorial Quimantú, 1972, p. 6. He specifically compares earthquakes to Nicomedes Santa Cruz author of Maestro: ‘Cada lección aprendida, te saca una nueva cana. Cada revisión de plana te marca una nueva arruga’.

32. 32. Paul Kovacs, ‘Reducing the risk of earthquake damage in Canada: lessons from Haiti and Chile’, Toronto, Institute of Catastrophic Loss Reduction, 2010; Richard A. Lovett, ‘Why Chile fared better than Haiti’, Nature (2010); Erin Wayman, ‘Chile’s quake larger but less destructive than Haiti’, Earth Magazine (2012), https://www.earthmagazine.org.

33. 33. Simon Collier & William F. Sater, A history of Chile, 1808–2002. Cambridge-New York, Cambridge University Press, 2004, 21–8.

34. 34. Patricio Meller, Un siglo de economía política Chilena (1890–1990). Santiago, Chile, Editorial Andrés Bello, 1996; Sofía Correa, Alfredo Jocelyn-Holt, Manuel Vicuña, Claudio Rolle & Consuelo Figueroa, Historia del siglo XX Chileno. Santiago, Chile, Sudamericana, 2001; see also, Alfredo Jocelyn-Holt, Historia general de Chile. Santiago, Chile, Sudamericana, 2004; Sofía Correa, El proceso económico. Chile (1830–1880). Penguin Random House-Grupo Editorial España, 2015.

35. 35. See, for example, Pablo Camus and Fabián Jaksic, Clima y sociedad: el fenómeno El Niño y La Niña en la historia de Chile. Santiago, Chile, Instituto de Geografía-UC, 2022.

36. 36. Wide-ranging works like Sergio Villalobos’s, Historia de los Chilenos. Santiago, Chile, Taurus, 2006; Rafael Sagredo, Historia de la vida privada en Chile. Santiago, Chile, Taurus, 2005. He uses some of these events as examples of social inequalities.

37. 37. Joshua Savala, ‘ “Let us bring it with love”: violence, solidarity, and the making of a social disaster in the wake of the 1906 earthquake in Valparaíso, Chile’, Journal of Social History 51, 4 (2018), 928–52; ‘Contesting disasters: the 1906 Valparaíso earthquake, state violence, and working-class solidarity’, Tufts University, Department of History, 2012.

38. 38. Magdalena Gil, ‘Disasters as critical junctures: state building and industrialization in Chile after the Chilean earthquake of 1939’, Latin American Research Review 57, 4 (2023), 776; Magdalena Gil & Jorge Atria, ‘Fiscal aftershocks: taxes and catastrophes in Chilean history’, Journal of Iberian and Latin American Economic History (2021), 1–39; Magdalena Gil & Felipe Rivera, ‘Strengthening the role of science in disaster risk reduction: the Chilean strategy’, Disasters 47, no. 1 (2023), 136–62.

39. 39. Gabriel Cid, ‘¿Castigo divino o fenómeno natural? Mentalidad religiosa y mentalidad científica en Chile en torno al terremoto de 1822’, Revista de Historia y Geografía 30 (2014), 85–109; Magdalena Gil, ‘God or nature? Catastrophes and modernity from Lisbon to Valparaíso’, International Journal of Mass Emergencies and Disasters 35, no. 3 (2016), 115–36; Alfredo Palacios, Entre ruinas y escombros: los terremotos en Chile durante los siglos XVI al XIX. Valparaíso, Ediciones Universidad de Valparaíso, 2015.

40. 40. ‘Diario el mercurio de Chile, 19 de Noviembre and Vera y Pintado, B. ‘Comunicado’. ‘El mercurio de Chile 16’ (2 December 1822), published in Guillermo Feliú (ed.), El mercurio de Chile; 1820–1823. Santiago, Chile, Editorial Nascimiento, 1960, 396.

41. 41. Alfredo Palacios, ‘Antecedentes históricos de la “abogacía telúrica” desarrollada en Chile entre los siglos XVI y XIX’, Historia Crítica 54 (2014), 171–93.

42. 42. Alexander Caldcleugh, ‘An account of the great earthquake experienced in Chile on the 20th of February, 1835 with a map’, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London 126 (1836), 21–6.

43. 43. Charles Darwin, Charles Darwin’s Beagle diary. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2001, 323.

44. 44. Carlos Eduardo, ‘El terremoto y tsunami de 1835 en Concepción y la frontera del río Biobío: destrucción, relocalización, traslados y nuevas inversiones’, Diálogo andino 67 (2022), 255–68.

45. 45. Valentina Verbal, La ruina. El gran terremoto y maremoto en Concepción de 20 de febrero de 1835. Sus consecuencias materiales y sociales, Universidad Católica de Chile, Department of History, 2006.

46. 46. ‘Cartas’, El Mercurio (Valparaíso), 9 October 1829, quoted in Fernando Montessus de Ballore, Historia sísmica de los Andes Meridionales al sur del paralelo XVI, Volume IV, Santaigo, Chile, Imprenta Cervantes, 1912, 129.

47. 47. Earthquakes in 1847 (La Ligua, Copiapó and La Serena), in 1849 (Coquimbo), in 1850 (San José de Maipo), in 1851 (Huasco and Casablanca), in 1859 (Copiapó), in 1868 (Arica), in 1871 (Puerto Montt), in 1873 (La Ligua), in 1876 (Illapel), in 1877 (Iquique), in 1880 (Illapel).

48. 48. Ari Ben-Menahem, ‘A concise history of mainstream seismology: origins, legacy, and perspectives’, International Journal of Rock Mechanics and Mining Sciences & Geomechanics Abstracts 33, no. 6 (1996), A243.

49. 49. Andrés Bello, ‘Discurso pronunciado en la instalación de la Universidad de Chile el día 17 de septiembre de 1843’, Anales de la Universidad de Chile 49–52 (1943), 7–21. DOI:10.5354/0717-8883.1943.24033.

50. 50. Paulino del Barrio, ‘Memoria sobre los temblores de tierra i sus efectos en jeneral i en especial los de Chile’, Anales de la Universidad de Chile (1855) Serie 1, 583–625; Luis Amunátegui, Terremoto del 13 de Mayo de 1647. Santiago, Chile, Jover, 1882.

51. 51. Collier and Sater, 2004.

52. 52. ‘Nuevas y dolorosas informaciones de la catástrofe’, El Mercurio (Valparaiso), 18 August 1906, p. 1.

53. 53. Alfredo Rodríguez & Carlos Cruzat, La catástrofe del 16 de agosto de 1906 en la República de Chile. Santiago, Chile, Imprenta Barcelona, 1906. The total number of deaths was probably higher. We estimate about 7,000 using data from the Chilean Oficina Central de Estadística (1909).

54. 54. Ley de Comuna Autonoma (Law of Autonomous Municipalities) of 1891; see Memoria Chilena. Biblioteca Nacional de Chile; ‘Ley de Comuna Autónoma’, http://www.memoriachilena.gob.cl/602/w3-article-93505.html.

55. 55. Samuel Martland, ‘Reconstructing the city. Constructing the state: government in Valparaiso after the earthquake of 1906’, Hispanic American Historical Review 87, no. 2 (2007), 221–54; see also Pablo Paez, La oportunidad de la destruccion en la urbanistica moderna. Planes y proyectos para la reconstruccion de Valparaíso tras el terremoto de 1906. Santiago, Chile, Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, Instituto de Estudios Urbanos, 2008; Magdalena Gil, ‘La reconstrucción del valor urbano de Valparaíso luego del terremoto de 1906’, ARQ (Santiago) no. 97 (2017), 78–89.

56. 56. The decree that creates this office clearly states that ‘the need to start to produce statistics about workers became imperative after the catastrophe’ (La Oficina de Estadística del Trabajo. Ministerio de Industria y Obras Pública, Imprenta Cervantes, 1907), p. 1. This office will acquire greater attributions in 1910 as the Bureau of Work (Oficina del Trabajo), later becoming the Ministry of Labour; see Óscar Mac-Clure, En Los orígenes de las políticas sociales en Chile, 1850–1879. Santiago, Chile, Ediciones Universidad Alberto Hurtado, 2012.

57. 57. Francisco J. Ovalle, Don Pedro Montt, ex Presidente de la República de Chile. Santiago, Chile, Imprenta Universitaria, 1918.

58. 58. Congreso Nacional de Chile, Sesiones Extraordinarias (1906), p. 167.

59. 59. Charles Tilly, ‘War making and state making as organized crime’. In: Peter Evans, Dietrich Rueschemeyer & Theda Skocpol (eds.) Bringing the state back in. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1985, 169–87.

60. 60. For more on this story, see José Luis Giordano, La predicción del terremoto de 1906 ¿ciencia o fantasía?, Editorial Académica Española, 2023.

61. 61. Lorena B. Valderrama, ‘Seismic forces and state power: the creation of the Chilean seismological service at the beginning of the twentieth century’, Historical Social Research 40, no. 2 (2015), 81–104.

62. 62. Valderrama, 2015, 94.

63. 63. Felipe Rivera, Tiziana Rossetto & John Twigg, ‘Understanding earthquake resilience in Chile: the pros and cons of safe buildings’, Proceedings of the SECED 2019 Conference. Greenwich, London, SECED, 10 September 2019, https://www.seced.org.uk/index.php/proceedings; and ‘An interdisciplinary study of the seismic exposure dynamics of Santiago de Chile’, International Journal of Disaster Risk Reduction 48 (2020); Juan Carlos de la Llera, Felipe Rivera, Magdalena Gil, Hernán Santamaría & Rodrigo Cienfuegos, ‘Infraestructura resiliente: lecciones del caso Chileno’, Integration & Trade Journal 21, no. 41 (2017), 302–15.

64. 64. José Fernandez Richard, ‘Historia del derecho urbanístico Chileno’, Revista de Derecho Público 77 (2012), 79–97.

65. 65. Horacio Torrent, ‘Historiografía y arquitectura moderna en Chile: notas sobre sus paradigmas y desafíos’, Anales del IAA 42, no. 1 (2012); Humberto Eliash & Manuel Moreno, Arquitectura y modernidad en Chile, 1925–1965: una realidad múltiple. Santiago, Chile, Ediciones Universidad Católica de Chile, 1989.

66. 66. Henry Frankel, ‘The continental drift debate’. In: Hugo Tristam Engelhardt, Jr & Arthur Caplan (eds.) Scientific controversies: case solutions in the resolution and closure of disputes in science and technology. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1987, 203–48.

67. 67. El Mercurio (Santiago), 25 January 1939, p. 9.

68. 68. Gil, 2023, 775–93.

69. 69. Joaquín Edwards Bello, ‘El terremoto’, Diario La Nación, 27 January 1939, p. 3.

70. 70. Gil & Atria, 2021, 9.

71. 71. Monica Humeres & Magdalena Gil, ‘Dreaming of a bright future: statistics, disaster, and the birth of energopolitics in Chile during the 1930s’, Technology and Culture (forthcoming, 2024).

72. 72. Gabriella Legrenzi, ‘The displacement effect in the growth of governments’, Public Choice 120 (2004), 191–204.

73. 73. U.S Department of State, ‘Chile: rebuilding for a better future’, May 1961. Washington, DC.

74. 74. Calculated with data from ‘Defunciones’ for years 1956–1961, Servicio Nacional de Salud. Sección Bioestadística y Control Médico Económico. Archivo Ministerio de Salud (Chile). The number of homeless people as reported in World Bank, ‘Current Economic Position and Prospects of Chile’, Washington, DC, The World Bank, 1961.

75. 75. President Jorge Alessandri to Congress, ‘Mensaje de S.E El Presidente de la Republica al Congreso al inagurar el periodo ordinario de sesiones’. Santiago, Chile, 1 May 1960.

76. 76. José M. Navasal, ‘Hace un año la tierra tembló’, El Mercurio (Santiago), May 21, 1961, p. 9.

77. 77. Moment magnitude scales are logarithmic; this means that for each whole number in the scale, the magnitude goes up ten times.

78. 78. This time, there were not big discrepancies in numbers reported right after and those calculated later. I add missing to the tsunami casualties. For alternative but similar data tan the offitial report, see Erwin Nahuelpán & José Varas, ‘El terremoto/tsunami en Chile: una mirada a las estadísticas médico legales’, Investigación forense 2 (2013), 1–16.

79. 79. Stephanie Kane, Eden Medina & Daniel Michler, ‘Infrastructural drift in seismic cities: Chile, Pacific Rim, 27 February 2010’, Social Text 33 (2015), 71–9.

80. 80. Felipe Rivera Jofre, Tiziana Rossetto & John Twigg, ‘Understanding earthquake resilience in Chile: The pros and cons of safe buildings’. In: Proceedings of the SECED 2019 Conference: Earthquake risk and engineering towards a resilient world, SECED, Greenwich, London.

81. 81. Anthony Oliver-Smith uses the same expression in The Angry Earth, arguing that the 1970s Peruvian earthquake of was in the making for 500 years.

82. 82. Gil & Atria, 2021.

83. 83. Mellafe, 1982, 285.

84. 84. Gil & Rivera, 2023.

References

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• Amunátegui, Luis, Terremoto del 13 de Mayo de 1647. Santiago, Chile, Jover, 1882.
• Ben-Menahem, Ari, ‘A concise history of mainstream seismology: origins, legacy, and perspectives’, International Journal of Rock Mechanics and Mining Sciences and Geomechanics Abstracts 33, no. 6 (1996), A243.
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• Buchenau, Jürgen & Lyman L. Johnson (eds.), Aftershocks: earthquakes and popular politics in Latin America. Albuquerque, University of New Mexico Press, 2009.
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