Engine of Change: The Santiago Metro and Allende's Chile

• In Event: Cold Warriors and Technocrats: Experts and Expertise in the Latin American City

Abstract

In Cold War Latin America, local leaders and international observers alike conceptualized the region’s underdevelopment as a political problem because they believed that poverty and “backwardness” provided a fertile environment for Communism to flourish. In Chile, a crucial test case for international development aid, the modernization of Santiago’s transportation system attracted sustained attention from Chilean engineers and architects starting in the 1940s. The first contracts were signed with French metro consultants and funders in the late 1960s, under the Christian Democratic administration of Eduardo Frei Montalva. When Salvador Allende's socialist Popular Unity government took office in 1970, it inherited a dilemma: the metro was enormously expensive, yet it had the potential to serve the poorest sectors of Santiago. This paper examines the planning and construction of the Santiago metro system as an arena of negotiation between Chilean and French experts and as a point of conflict on Chile's road to socialism. The paper shows how the metro's potential to boost employment, increase national industrial output, and serve Santiago's working class prevailed against critics of the project. Although metro development was limited by political conflict during this period, I argue that the Allende government took decisive steps to secure the future of the project, particularly in its negotiations with French funders and consultants.

Author

• Andra B Chastain, Yale University