As Chile prepares for its presidential election on November 16, 2025, understanding the country’s complex history, economy, and society is vital. This video breaks down five key facets shaping Chile today. The lasting shadow of Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship and its impact on modern politics. A recent surge in immigration, with controversial social and political consequences. Chile’s dominance in global copper and lithium production amid persistent inequality. Its unique geography, stretching from the driest desert to glacier-filled Patagonia. A rich literary heritage, including Nobel laureates Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda, shaping Chile’s cultural identity. Watch
00:00A brutal dictatorship, a booming mining industry, and a recent immigration surge are among the five things to know about Chile before Sunday's presidential election, which will choose the successor to leftist president Gabriel Boric.
00:17Post-war Chile was irrevocably changed by the US-backed overthrow of the first democratically elected socialist president in Latin America, Salvador Allende.
00:35The coup led by General Augusto Pinochet was one of the most dramatic of the Cold War, with fighter jets bombing the presidential palace on September 11, 1973, in what Pinochet justified as an operation to prevent Chile from becoming communist.
00:53Allende committed suicide in the presidential palace.
00:57There followed 17 years of dictatorship marked by arrests, torture, bodies thrown from airplanes, and children of dissidents whisked away for illegal adoption.
01:08Rejected in a 1988 referendum, Pinochet finally gave up power in 1990, but remained in command of the military for another eight years.
01:18He died in 2006 without ever having been brought to justice for the crimes committed by his regime, which left more than 3,200 people dead or missing.
01:30The Pinochet-era constitution is still in force, despite two failed attempts in recent years, one by the left, the other by the right, to write a new charter.
01:40Chile is a key destination for refugees and migrants fleeing humanitarian, political, and economic crises in other Latin American countries, primarily Venezuela.
02:00Some 337,000 undocumented immigrants live in Chile, according to official estimates.
02:07Illegal migration is a central issue in the election campaign, with a majority of Chileans linking a rise in crime to the migration wave foreign nationals represented approximately 8.8% of Chile's population in 2024,
02:24the second-highest proportion of foreign residents, in a Latin American country after Costa Rica, according to the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees.
02:40The country of nearly 20 million inhabitants is the world's leading producer of copper, accounting for a quarter of global supply,
02:49and the second-largest producer of lithium. Chile's poverty rates are the lowest in the region, according to the World Bank.
02:56But inequality remains high. The rise to power of former student leader Boric in 2021 signalled a rejection of the fervent pro-business economic model that had prevailed since the dictatorship four years later.
03:11However, Chileans are transfixed by crime and have put social issues on the backburner.
03:17Chile is famously long and thin. It stretches 4,300 kilometers from north to south from the Atacama Desert, the world's driest, to the glaciers of Patagonia.
03:36But averages only about 170 kilometers across, three tectonic plates converge on its territory, making it one of the most seismically active countries in the world.
03:46Years of dictatorship, the harsh life in its rugged south, and Chile's social struggles have inspired generations of authors, particularly poets.
04:03Poets Gabriela Mistral and Pablo Neruda were awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1945 and 1971, respectively.
04:14Chile also produced one of the best-selling authors in the Spanish language, Isabel Allende.
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