Opinion • Andrea Salazar Navia and Claudia Hernández Aliaga • June 13, 2024 • Leer en castellano

A thick layer of frost blanketed Santiago de Chile on one of the coldest days in the past 70 years. During the early morning hours of May 16, hundreds of police entered the "17 de Mayo" land occupation in order to carry out a surprise eviction the day before its fifth anniversary. Police used tear gas and backhoes to drive nearly two hundred families from the "La engordita" estate in Santiago’s Cerro Navia municipality, leaving them homeless in sub-zero temperatures. 

The eviction was the result of an injunction that the land’s owner filed with the Supreme Court in October of the previous year.  Though acknowledging that land seizures are "a large-scale social phenomenon," the owner argued that it was a violation of her property rights. The court ruled in her favor and ordered the land occupiers to vacate the property within six months. It also obliged the borough to provide temporary housing and to take other supportive measures, but the municipality did not comply.

Beginning in March this year, authorities started evicting irregular land occupations throughout Chile. Known as occupations or encampments, they are part of a movement for housing and for a dignified life. The evictions have their origin in a 2022 Supreme Court decision that stated landowners are not obliged to solve or relieve the social problems that prompt the occupations to occur, as well as in the Anti-Squatting Law that came into force in December of last year. 

Nearly 50 evictions are pending across the country. In March, the Supreme Court upheld an eviction order against the Centenario encampment in the district of San Antonio, in the Valparaíso region. Centenario is one of the largest occupations in Chile, home to more than 20,000 people, who have indicated that they intend to stay. 

In April, authorities issued eviction orders for encampments in the Antofagasta Region, in northern Chile. On April 24, protesters held a massive demonstration against the eviction orders at the regional office of the government’s Housing and Urbanism Service. 

In early June, authorities evicted the "Maurcio Fredes" encampment in the Quilicura district of the Santiago Metropolitan Region. Residents of the "Nueva Cordillera" camp in the Puente Alto district blocked public transport in an effort to prevent their eventual eviction. 

In the face of a massive, nationwide housing crisis, President Gabriel Boric—who calls himself a leftist and feminist—as well as Congress and the judiciary have responded with band-aids, evictions, repression, and criminalization. 

Women and organization in the occupations

According to this year’s National Survey of Encampments, carried out by the Ministry of Housing, there are presently 1,432 land occupations in Chile. This is a historic high that represents an increase of 56 percent when compared to government figures for 2019. 

The encampments and land occupations are a response to economic crises and generalized precarity. They are collective, popular attempts to secure an immediate solution to the housing emergency in a social context in which the right to decent housing is not upheld.

According to a 2023 report by Fundación Techo, 77 percent of encampments in the country have some form of internal community organization—active leadership bodies that negotiate with authorities and attempt to address inhabitants’ practical needs. Across a diversity of land occupations, regular assemblies are held in self-built community centers. There are also cooperatives, such as bakeries and trades workshops, self-organized kindergartens, free schools and tutoring, educational workshops, vegetable gardens and recreational spaces like soccer fields.

The same report indicates women make up 66 percent of the leadership of the occupations. This affirms women’s centrality to the struggle for dignified housing and also that their political and organizational capacities sustain the social fabric in the encampments and land occupations.

Women enable practices of mutual aid and help residents improvise collective solutions to their precarious living conditions. They ensure the provision of basic forms of infrastructure, such as electricity, drinking water and sewage systems, all of which operate informally.

In mega-camps (that exceed 1,500 families), smaller organizational units elect neighborhood representatives. This is the case at the "Los Arenales" mega-camp in Antofagasta, which has a council of 30 neighborhood leaders, only two of whom are male.  

Elizabeth Andrade, the leader of the Los Arenales mega-camp, points out that communal organization can also be understood a response to the violence women experience in the home. It is a way for women to sustain themselves and their families in the face of precariousness. "It’s incredible how residents of San Antonio took over an estate that had been idle for years and, in a matter of days, built a neighborhood with streets, fields, vegetable gardens, and houses," said Margarita Peña of the March 8 Coordinating Committee’s Housing Commission. "That’s why residents say that occupations are the solution not the problem."

The anti-squatting law and securitization 

Chilean authorities prepared the ground for this wave of evictions by stigmatizing encampments and land occupations, which the media echoed. When the violent eviction of the “17 de Mayo” occupation occurred, the mayor of Cerro Navia, Mauro Tamayo—who had been a Communist Party militant—said that "while it’s true that the vast majority of residents were working people, there were also people linked to narcotrafficking involved."

Modeled on strategies used in Mexico, Colombia and Ecuador, Chilean officials have tried to push the fight against drug trafficking and organized crime to the center of the discussion. In these countries, militarization and a discourse organized around fighting internal enemies (“narcos”) has led to an increase in violence and the military and paramilitary occupation of territories where public resources are in dispute. 

"We’re fighting a powerful, implacable enemy that respects nothing and no one and will use violence and criminality without limit," said former President Sebastian Piñera in the midst of the massive 2019 protests. Although the people responded to his provocation with more protest, congress pushed a similar narrative under the umbrella of a "Security Agenda," which promoted various legal measures to criminalize social protest and land occupations.

The first bill approved was the "anti-barricades" and "anti-looting" law, which was adopted during Piñera’s government with the votes from the rightwing and a large part of the leftwing Frente Amplio. Together with the "Agreement for Peace and the new Constitution,” this legislation helped shut down the popular uprising that lasted from October 2019 to March of the following year. 

The initial bill was followed by 50 more, all adopted under Boric’s progressive, leftwing administration. Last year, as Chile commemorated the fiftieth anniversary of Pinchet’s coup d'état, authorities approved the "trigger-happy" law, which gives police the right to "privileged self-defense." In addition, the government modified and extended the anti-terror law and declared a permanent State of Exception in Wallmapu (Mapuche territory).

In November 2023, Boric’s government approved the Anti-Squatting Law, which land occupiers call the "cursed law." As a result of pressure from occupiers, he modified some of the bill’s provisions with a presidential veto, but it is still among the world’s most repressive laws against seizures and encampments. It calls for prison sentences for those who occupy land; allows police to enter occupations without a warrant; and legalizes vigilantism by stating any citizen can arrest a land occupier within the first 12 hours of an occupation.

The next stages of the struggle

Chile’s Housing Minister Carlos Montes recently stated that the government has built 114,607 houses, which is 44 percent of the goal set out in the housing emergency plan (2022–2025). Although this is much more than previous government’s have built, it does not cover even half of the housing deficit. The ongoing housing shortage ensures that the occupations will continue and changes in the legal system suggest the government will respond through repression.

As an interim measure, the government introduced a temporary rent subsidy of up to US$170 for families who do not have homes. This is not a viable solution because renters must have a rental contract to qualify for the assistance and these are difficult to acquire for those employed in the informal economy. As an individualistic measure, it transforms a collective problem into an issue to be dealt with by each person or family. 

This suite of repressive policies and stop-gap measures show the government’s commitment to disrupting the community organizing produced in encampments and occupations. It is an attack on the organizational capacities of women, who have led the housing movement, and an effort to undermine the struggle for decent housing.

As the intense Chilean winter begins, authorities and government officials have urged citizens to report illegal occupations. Occupation organizers, including the spokeswomen of the occupations and camps in resistance, who care for their families as they organize the basic services needed to live in community, have called on us to remain alert, to show our solidarity with their struggle and to defend the possibility of the collective production of community, housing and dignity.