El The movement of settlers and their land occupations as the main chilean territorial subject in the second half of the 20th century.

Abstract

The article deepens the theoretical and historiographic debate on the weight in the history of Chile of the movement of homeless settlers that via land seizures started in the southern area of ??Santiago in 1957 until the Peñalolén seizures in the transition to democracy of the 1990s became a socio-political actor with high social, political and center-periphery relations impact. Probably the peasant movement that pushed for agrarian reform and the Mapuche reemergence since 1992 are also significant, but the investigation confirms that the most widespread was the movement of the sttlers that mobilized under the repressive context of the governments of Ibáñez and Alessandri, grew together to the popular promotion of Frei and was  protagonist of the Popular Unity. Then the movement  suffered repression under Pinochet rule, but  managed massive land occupations in the south of Santiago, demonstrating his oppositional power and the construction of a transformative social agenda in an elitist and oligarchic country. In the new democracy with neoliberal continuities, the movement of settlers survives the silence of consensus with its traditional contentious collective instrument - the illegal occupation of land in a subversive way of the order of exclusion - with the takings of Peñalolén in which they did not accept a mini department In blocks crowded in the confines of the metrópolis;  they demand to settle in their consolidated neighborhoods in the residential intersection area because the historical subject exists and has grown in autonomy and politicization with a greater demand: right to housing in a democratic city that has to come.