Chile: Corn and Conviction

Chile is a long, narrow scar of land pressed between the Andes and the Pacific, a country of deserts so dry they mummify, fjords that swallow ships, cities that cling to hillsides, and a people who have spent centuries learning how to resist whatever force comes crashing in. Before the Spanish arrived, the Mapuche held the southern lands with a ferocity that stunned imperial armies and delayed colonization for centuries. Independence in the early 1800s brought republics, caudillos, constitutions, and constant tension between elites who owned the copper and the wheat and the workers who harvested both. By the end of the 19th century, Chile’s vast nitrate fields turned the north into a global economic engine, and a cauldron of labor unrest. Miners demanded wages. Soldiers enforced the bosses’ will. Massacres followed. And yet, rebellion never quite died.

The 20th century only sharpened the struggle. An early wave of syndicalists, anarchists, and socialists built federations like FOCH and organized general strikes that shook the cities. Mid-century student uprisings and miners’ marches fed into a new labor movement under CUT, which demanded dignity amid rapid industrialization. Then came the 1970s: Salvador Allende’s election, the Cordones Industriales rising from the factories, and the hope, briefly, of a socialist democracy. That dream was crushed under the boots of the 1973 coup and the long, brutal Pinochet dictatorship, when tanks rolled through Santiago, dissent was disappeared, and neoliberal reforms gutted the working class. But even that darkness could not choke Chile’s spirit. By the late 2010s, the streets once again filled with students, workers, retirees, Indigenous communities, and families demanding equality, justice, and a new constitution. The Estallido Social of 2019 was not an eruption out of nowhere; it was the latest flame in a long line of fires.

And through every revolt, march, riot, and strike, Chileans ate. Food in Chile is never just food, it is warmth in the nitrate fields, comfort in tenement kitchens, fuel for protests, and an anchor in times of fear. This post follows six of them, each tied to a moment when Chile’s people pushed back against the forces that tried to break them.

Pastel de Choclo, the sweet-savory corn pie rooted in campesino kitchens, stands alongside the memory of the 1907 Santa María de Iquique Massacre, when nitrate workers demanding justice were met with bullets.
Empanadas de Pino, packed with beef, onions, raisins, and olives, became the hand-held ration of a rising working class during the creation of FOCH and the great general strikes of the 1910s–1920s.
Caldillo de Congrio, immortalized by Neruda, warmed homes and union halls in the turbulent years around the creation of CUT and the 1957 Battle of Santiago, when protests over transit fares turned deadly.
Completo, Chile’s maximalist hot dog, fed students, factory workers, and organizers in the lead-up to the 1970 election of Allende and the formation of the Cordones Industriales, when workers briefly ran their own workplaces.
Chorrillana, a plate of fries, meat, onions, and eggs hearty enough to split, carries the weight of the 1973 Coup, the Pinochet dictatorship, and the decades of protests that fought to end it.
And finally Chacarero, a sandwich of steak, tomatoes, and green beans, became a street-corner staple during the 2019 Estallido Social, when a new generation rose up against inequality.

So fire up the pan and cut open the onions. To understand Chile, you follow its people, and to follow its people, you follow their food.

Let’s begin.

Pastel de Choclo: Sweet Corn, Bitter Blood

Pastel de choclo, deceptively gentle, is a casserole with a thick, golden crust of ground corn; sweet, soft, almost dessert-like, which rests over a savory filling of beef, onions, chicken, olives, hard-boiled eggs, and raisins. It is baked until the top caramelizes, sometimes dusted with sugar, sometimes left plain, always comforting. In Chile, it is a dish of family tables, of summer corn harvests, of kitchens that smell like milk and basil and steam. But like much of Chilean history, pastel de choclo is built on layers that do not easily reconcile. The dish’s structure mirrors a national story in which promises of progress repeatedly concealed exploitation, and where, in 1907, that concealment collapsed in blood at the Santa María School of Iquique.

Corn itself predates Chile. Long before independence, maize formed the backbone of Indigenous diets across the Andes, cultivated by Mapuche and other peoples who resisted Spanish conquest longer than almost any group in the Americas. When Spanish colonial rule finally entrenched itself, corn remained central, adapted into new forms that blended Indigenous staples with European meats, dairy, and cooking methods. Pastel de choclo emerged from that fusion: Indigenous maize ground into a paste, mixed with milk and basil, layered over a pino filling derived from Spanish stews. It became a national dish in the nineteenth century, at precisely the moment Chile was attempting to define itself as a nation; European-facing, orderly, and modern, yet dependent on Indigenous land, labor, and ingredients it rarely acknowledged.

Chile’s independence in the early 1800s was won not through mass revolution but through elite negotiation and military maneuvering. After breaking from Spain in 1818, power consolidated quickly in the hands of landowners, merchants, and military men. The new republic spoke the language of liberalism, law, property, progress, but political participation remained narrow. Indigenous communities were pushed further south. Rural peons worked vast estates under semi-feudal conditions. Chile was stable compared to its neighbors, but that stability rested on hierarchy, not equality. Like pastel de choclo, the surface was smooth; the filling told a harsher story.

By the mid-nineteenth century, Chile’s economy pivoted northward, toward the Atacama Desert and its vast nitrate deposits. Nitrates, used for fertilizer and explosives, became Chile’s white gold. Entire cities sprang up around oficinas salitreras, company-run mining towns owned largely by British and Chilean capital. Workers came from across Chile, Peru, and Bolivia, many displaced peasants chasing wages. What they found was isolation, debt, and control. They were paid not in money but in company scrip, redeemable only at company stores with inflated prices. Housing was overcrowded. Water was scarce. Work was lethal. The desert stripped everything down to essentials: labor, profit, survival.

In this world, food mattered deeply. Workers’ diets were monotonous; bread, beans, cheap meat when available, but dishes like pastel de choclo traveled with families when they could. Corn was affordable. The filling stretched small amounts of meat with onions and eggs. It was a dish that fed many mouths, layered and practical, sustaining people who lived precariously. In the nitrate camps, women cooked communally, feeding not just families but neighbors. The pastel’s warm sweetness offered something rare: comfort.

By the early 1900s, Chilean workers across sectors were organizing. Mutual aid societies, unions, and strikes proliferated, inspired by anarchist and socialist ideas circulating through ports and mining towns. Nitrate workers demanded basics: payment in cash, fair prices, safer conditions, and respect. In December 1907, thousands of workers and their families marched to the port city of Iquique to petition the government directly. They gathered at the Santa María School, believing, reasonably, that the state would mediate. After all, Chile styled itself a republic governed by law.

Instead, the state responded with force.

On December 21, 1907, after days of standoff, General Roberto Silva Renard ordered troops to fire on the crowd. Men, women, and children were cut down with rifles and machine guns. Estimates vary, but more than 2,000 people were killed, some say far more. Bodies filled the schoolyard. Survivors were hunted down. The massacre was swift, public, and deliberate. It was meant as a lesson: the demands of labor would be buried beneath the authority of capital and the state.

The Santa María de Iquique massacre shattered the illusion of Chilean benevolence. The republic’s promises; order, progress, civilization, were exposed as conditional, available only so long as workers remained silent. The state that prided itself on legality chose bullets over negotiation. The army that claimed to defend the nation slaughtered its people.

In the immediate aftermath, the government imposed silence. Newspapers were censored. Official death counts were minimized. No major officials were punished. The nitrate economy continued. Families returned to the desert, carrying grief alongside their cooking pots. In kitchens and camps, Pastel de choclo, layered and filling, persisted as a reminder of home, of what Chile could be if nourishment replaced extraction. 

Yet the massacre lingered. It radicalized a generation. Songs, poems, and oral histories preserved the truth even when the state refused to. Workers learned that appeals to morality alone would not protect them. Over the following decades, Chilean labor movements grew stronger, more organized, and more politically conscious. The blood at Santa María soaked into the foundations of Chilean socialism, unionism, and eventually, the Popular Front governments of the 1930s and beyond.

Pastel de choclo reminds me of moussaka, but made with corn. Absolutely delicious. 

Pastel de Choclo (Chilean Corn and Meat Pie)

Serves: 6

Ingredients

For the pino (meat filling):

• 500 g (1 lb) ground beef

• 1 large onion, finely diced

• 2 tbsp vegetable oil

• 2 tsp paprika

• 1 tsp ground cumin

• 1 tsp dried oregano

• Salt and black pepper, to taste

• 1 hard-boiled egg, chopped

• 6 black olives (pitted or whole)

• 6 raisins

For the corn topping:

• 4 cups corn kernels (fresh or frozen and thawed)

• 1 cup milk

• 2 tbsp butter

• 1 tbsp sugar (optional, for sweetness)

• Salt, to taste

• Fresh basil (optional, a few leaves chopped)

Instructions

1. Prepare the pino: Heat the oil in a large skillet over medium heat. Add the diced onion and cook until soft and golden (about 8–10 minutes). Add the ground beef, paprika, cumin, oregano, salt, and pepper. Cook until the beef is browned and fully cooked. Taste and adjust seasoning. Let cool slightly.

2. Prepare the corn topping: In a blender or food processor, purée the corn kernels with the milk until smooth. Transfer to a pot over medium heat. Add butter, sugar, and salt. Cook, stirring constantly, until the mixture thickens into a creamy paste (about 10–15 minutes). Stir in chopped basil if using.

3. Assemble: Preheat oven to 190°C (375°F). In a large baking dish (or individual ramekins), spread the beef pino evenly on the bottom. Scatter the chopped hard-boiled egg, olives, and raisins over the meat.

4. Bake: Spread the thick corn purée over the top, smoothing it out. Optionally, sprinkle a little extra sugar on top for caramelization. Bake for 30–40 minutes until the corn topping is golden and slightly caramelized on the edges.

5. Serve hot, traditionally as a main dish in summer.

Empanadas de Pino: Folded Dough, Open Fists

Empanadas de pino long predate the labor movement. Their ancestry reaches back to Iberian empanadas brought by the Spanish, themselves adapted from earlier Mediterranean meat pies. In Chile, they became unmistakably local. Wheat flour from central valleys, beef from ranching regions, onions grown in abundance, olives preserved for lean months. The pino filling; slow-cooked meat and onion seasoned simply with cumin and paprika, was economical, stretching limited protein to feed many. By the late nineteenth century, empanadas were everywhere: sold in markets, eaten at festivals, packed for travel, wrapped in cloth and tucked into pockets. They were working food. Portable calories for people who did not eat at tables.

After the Santa María de Iquique massacre in 1907, Chile entered a new phase. The illusion that the republic would protect workers through legality alone had collapsed. But the massacre did not produce immediate revolution. Instead, it produced something slower and more dangerous to the ruling order: coordination. Memory hardened into strategy. Grief turned into organization.

Between 1907 and 1909, the nitrate fields remained productive, but politically unstable. Workers returned to the oficinas carrying trauma and rage. Mutual aid societies, already common in ports and mining towns, grew more overtly political. Anarchist ideas continued to circulate, but increasingly, workers sought national unity rather than fragmented, local struggle. Out of this impulse emerged the Federación Obrera de Chile (FOCH), formally founded in 1909. It was not the first labor organization in Chile, but it was the first to imagine itself as a national federation, linking miners, dockworkers, railway laborers, factory hands, and artisans into a single body.

FOCH did not begin as a revolutionary party. It demanded basic things: the eight-hour workday, wage increases, safer conditions, recognition of unions, payment in cash rather than scrip. But it did so collectively. And in a country whose oligarchic republic depended on fragmentation, region against region, skilled against unskilled, rural against urban, that unity was subversive.

Empanadas belonged naturally to this new labor geography. Strike meetings were long. Assemblies spilled out of halls into streets and plazas. People traveled between cities by rail or on foot. Empanadas could be baked in advance, eaten cold or warm, handed out to strangers who quickly became comrades. Women, often excluded from formal union leadership, played crucial roles here; cooking, selling, distributing food that sustained strikes. Empanadas passed hand to hand, folded dough sealing nourishment inside, much as FOCH sought to bind disparate workers into a single movement.

Chile itself was changing. The nitrate boom that had fueled the economy was beginning to wobble. Synthetic nitrates loomed on the horizon. World War I disrupted exports. Inflation rose while wages stagnated. Urbanization accelerated as people left rural estates for cities, where factories multiplied but housing did not. Santiago, Valparaíso, Antofagasta, all swelled with workers living in conventillos, overcrowded tenements with shared latrines and scarce water. The promise of progress felt increasingly hollow.

By the 1910s, strikes were no longer isolated events. FOCH coordinated actions across sectors. In 1913 and 1917, railway workers walked out. Dockworkers followed. Miners struck not only in the north but also in coal fields in the south. These were not spontaneous riots but organized stoppages, planned through federations and assemblies. Empanadas again appeared, not as symbols in speeches, but as necessities. A strike could last days or weeks. Hunger was a weapon used against workers; food became a form of resistance.

The Chilean state responded with a familiar pattern: limited reform paired with repression. Governments alternated between promising labor laws and deploying police and military force when strikes threatened economic stability. The Radical Party flirted with worker support while maintaining alliances with business interests. Presidents spoke of social harmony while authorizing crackdowns. The lesson of 1907 remained intact: order would be preserved, even at the cost of blood.

FOCH radicalized accordingly. By the late 1910s, socialist and Marxist influences grew stronger within the federation. The Russian Revolution of 1917 reverberated far beyond Europe, electrifying labor movements across Latin America. In Chile, it confirmed what many workers already believed: power did not trickle down; it had to be seized or forced to concede.

The early 1920s marked the high point of FOCH-led general strikes. In 1920–1922, waves of coordinated labor actions shut down transport, ports, and mines. In some cities, workers effectively controlled streets and services for days at a time. Red flags flew from union halls. Newspapers warned of chaos. Elites spoke openly of “Bolshevik contagion.” For workers, these strikes were not abstractions. They were lived collectively, marching by day, meeting by night, eating what could be shared.

Empanadas again fit the moment. They were cheap to produce in bulk. They could be sold to raise strike funds or given freely to those who had none. Wrapped in paper, eaten quickly between speeches, they sustained bodies that were being asked to hold the line against hunger, fear, and state violence. Like the labor movement itself, empanadas depended on cooperation: someone to knead the dough, someone to chop onions, someone to cook, someone to distribute.

The immediate aftermath of these strikes was uneven. Some demands were met. Chile passed labor laws recognizing unions, limiting work hours, and improving conditions, on paper. The eight-hour day was gradually implemented. Workers gained visibility as a political force. But repression never disappeared. Police raids, arrests, and deportations of labor leaders were common. The army remained a looming presence.

By the mid-1920s, the political system itself cracked. Military officers, frustrated with oligarchic stagnation and social unrest, intervened directly in politics. The 1924 “military noise” (ruido de sables) forced reforms. In 1925, a new constitution was enacted, strengthening the executive and formally separating church and state. Labor rights were codified, but again, unevenly enforced.

FOCH itself would not survive intact. Internal divisions, state pressure, and the rise of new political parties weakened it by the late 1920s. But its impact endured. It created a generation of politically conscious workers who understood themselves as part of a national class, not isolated laborers. It laid the groundwork for Chilean socialism, communism, and the Popular Front movements that would follow.

Chile would continue to oscillate between reform and repression for decades. Victories would be partial. Defeats would be brutal. But after the 1910s and 1920s, the working class could no longer be erased from the national story. It had organized itself, fed itself, marched together, and shut the country down when necessary.

I’ve made a few different kinds of empanadas for this blog, but I have to say, the Chilean one with the pino filling may be my favorite, especially baked. 

Empanadas de Pino (Chilean Beef Empanadas)

Makes: 12 empanadas

Ingredients

For the dough:

• 4 cups all-purpose flour

• 1 tsp salt

• ½ cup lard (or unsalted butter), melted

• 1 cup warm water (more if needed)

For the pino filling:

• 500 g (1 lb) ground beef

• 2 large onions, finely diced

• 2 tbsp paprika

• 1 tsp ground cumin

• 1 tsp dried oregano

• ½ cup beef stock (or water)

• Salt and black pepper, to taste

• 3 hard-boiled eggs, sliced

• 12 black olives (1 per empanada)

For brushing:

• 1 egg, beaten (for egg wash)

Instructions

1. Make the dough: In a bowl, mix flour and salt. Add melted lard and incorporate. Gradually add warm water, kneading until a smooth, elastic dough forms (about 10 minutes). Cover and rest for 30 minutes.

2. Prepare the pino: Heat a little oil in a skillet. Cook onions until soft and translucent. Add beef, paprika, cumin, oregano, salt, and pepper. Cook until browned, then add stock and simmer until the mixture is moist but not watery. Cool completely.

3. Assemble: Preheat oven to 190°C (375°F). Roll out dough to about ⅛-inch thickness. Cut into 6-inch circles. Place a spoonful of pino in the center, top with a slice of hard-boiled egg and 1 olive. Fold over, crimp edges tightly with a fork or repulgo (traditional fold).

4. Bake: Brush with egg wash. Place on a baking sheet and bake for 25–30 minutes until golden brown.

5. Serve warm or at room temperature.

Caldillo de Congrio: Broth of the Battle

Caldillo de congrio, conger eel stew, comes from the coast. Congrio is a deep-sea fish, long and muscular, hauled from cold Pacific waters by fishermen whose lives were defined by risk and irregular pay. The dish itself is humble but precise: congrio cleaned and cut into thick steaks, onions and garlic softened in oil, tomatoes and paprika for color, white wine or vinegar for brightness, potatoes for heft, cilantro at the end. It is labor-intensive in preparation but simple in spirit. Traditionally eaten hot, often communally, it restores warmth and strength after long days at sea or in the market. It is working food for a different kind of worker than the nitrate miner or railwayman, but still unmistakably of the people.

By the late 1920s, Chile’s labor movement had entered a new phase. The great FOCH-led strikes of the 1910s and early 1920s had forced concessions and terrified elites, but they had also exhausted workers. The state responded with a mix of reform, cooptation, and repression. Labor laws existed, but enforcement was uneven. Union leaders were jailed or sidelined. Political parties,  Communists, Socialists, Radicals, absorbed much of the energy that had once flowed through federations like FOCH. The dream of unified labor action did not die, but it was dispersed, diluted across institutions that promised gradual change.

The Great Depression hit Chile harder than almost any country in the world. Nitrate exports collapsed. Unemployment soared. Soup kitchens proliferated. Hunger returned as a mass experience. The memory of collective struggle remained, but survival once again took precedence. In this context, food shifted meaning. Caldillos, fish stews, bean soups, cazuelas, became staples of a population eating to survive.

The 1930s and 1940s brought new attempts to reconcile labor and state. Popular Front governments included left-wing parties and passed social legislation. Unions gained legal recognition. Industrialization expanded under state guidance. But unity remained elusive. Labor was organized, but fragmented, by ideology, sector, and region. The promise glimpsed in the general strikes lingered, unresolved.

Out of this frustration emerged the Central Única de Trabajadores (CUT), founded in April 1953. CUT was an explicit attempt to recover what FOCH had once embodied: a single national labor confederation capable of coordinating workers across industries and political affiliations. Communists, Socialists, and independents joined together, setting aside, temporarily, doctrinal disputes in favor of collective strength. CUT represented miners, dockworkers, teachers, public employees, factory workers. It spoke in the language of dignity, wages, housing, and sovereignty.

Chile in the early 1950s was restless. Inflation eroded wages. Urban populations grew faster than infrastructure. Santiago swelled with migrants living in callampas, informal settlements on the city’s edges. Public transport was overcrowded, unreliable, and increasingly expensive. The state spoke of modernization, but everyday life felt precarious. CUT organized strikes and demonstrations, pressing for wage adjustments and price controls. It had leverage, but not power.

By 1957, tensions reached a breaking point. In April, the government announced increases in bus fares in Santiago, modest on paper, devastating in practice. For workers already spending a large portion of their income on transport, the hike was unbearable. CUT called for protests. Students joined. Housewives banged pots. What began as demonstrations quickly escalated.

The “Battle of Santiago” was not a single event but several days of chaos, beginning on April 2 and peaking on April 3. Buses were overturned and burned. Shops were looted, not only for goods, but for food. Barricades went up. Police lost control. The army was deployed. Live ammunition was used. Official death tolls hovered around twenty, but many believed the number was higher. Hundreds were injured. Thousands were arrested.

This was not a disciplined general strike like those of the 1920s. It was something rawer: accumulated anger spilling into the streets. CUT did not orchestrate the violence, but it was inseparable from the conditions that produced it. Years of restraint, negotiation, and partial reform had failed to deliver stability. The broth had boiled over.

In the midst of this, food reappeared in its most elemental form. People looted bakeries and markets not for luxury, but for bread, potatoes, rice. In working-class neighborhoods, families cooked what they could with what remained. Caldillos, fish when available, otherwise bones, vegetables, water, stretched scarce resources. Soup was shareable. It could be ladled into many bowls. In times of curfew and fear, a pot on the stove meant survival.

The state responded decisively. President Carlos Ibáñez del Campo declared a state of siege. The military occupied Santiago. CUT leaders were arrested or forced underground. Public demonstrations were banned. The immediate aftermath was repression paired with concession: some fare increases were rolled back, wages adjusted, but the message was clear. Order would be restored by force if necessary.

The Battle of Santiago marked a turning point. It exposed the limits of Chile’s mid-century social pact. Labor had organization, but not control. The state could still deploy violence quickly and effectively. For many Chileans, 1957 shattered the illusion that gradual reform alone would resolve structural inequality. The memory of the streets, of smoke, gunfire, overturned buses, would linger, feeding the radicalization of the 1960s.

Caldillo de congrio, meanwhile, entered the cultural canon. Pablo Neruda’s famous Oda al Caldillo de Congrio elevated the dish from to a symbol, praising its warmth, its generosity, its ability to revive the spirit. Neruda understood what many Chileans felt instinctively: that food like this carried memory. The steam rising from the pot held stories of fishermen, markets, strikes, curfews, and long nights waiting for morning.

After the Battle of Santiago, Chile needed to pause. The country did not heal, far from it, but it absorbed the shock. CUT survived, weakened but intact. Labor would regroup. New generations would draw lessons from 1957, just as earlier ones had drawn lessons from 1907 and 1921.

Obviously, living in Central MA, its damn near impossible to find conger eel. I substituted cod instead and the end result was pretty tasty. 

Caldillo de Congrio (Conger Eel Soup)

Serves: 4

(Substitute firm white fish like cod, monkfish, or halibut if conger eel is unavailable)

Ingredients

• 1 kg (2.2 lb) conger eel or firm white fish, cut into thick steaks

• 1 large onion, sliced

• 2 ripe tomatoes, peeled and chopped

• 1 red bell pepper, sliced

• 2 medium potatoes, peeled and diced

• 2 carrots, sliced

• 3 garlic cloves, minced

• 1 bay leaf

• 4 cups fish or vegetable stock

• ½ cup dry white wine

• 2–3 tbsp olive oil

• Salt and black pepper, to taste

• Fresh parsley or cilantro, chopped (for garnish)

Instructions

1. Heat olive oil in a large pot over medium heat. Add onion, garlic, tomato, and bell pepper. Sauté until softened (about 10 minutes).

2. Add carrots, potatoes, bay leaf, stock, and white wine. Bring to a boil, then reduce to a simmer. Cook until potatoes are nearly tender (15–20 minutes).

3. Add the fish pieces. Simmer gently for 8–10 minutes until the fish is cooked through (do not overcook).

4. Season with salt and pepper. Remove bay leaf. Garnish with fresh parsley or cilantro.

5. Serve hot in bowls with bread on the side.

Completo: Fully Loaded Before the Fall

The completo’s origins stretch back earlier in the 20th century, when hot dogs, vienesas, arrived in Chile through U.S. and European influence. By the 1920s and 1930s, street vendors in Santiago were adapting them to local tastes. Avocado, abundant and beloved, replaced relish. Tomato added freshness. Mayonnaise, homemade, rich, unapologetic, became essential. Over time, the completo ceased to be an import and became unmistakably Chilean. It was urban food, sold from carts outside factories, stadiums, and bus stops. It fed workers quickly and cheaply. It was eaten at night, after shifts ended, when conversation lingered longer than daylight.

After the Battle of Santiago in 1957, Chile entered a decade defined by unresolved tension. The violence had exposed the fragility of the social pact, but it had not resolved the underlying questions of inequality, inflation, and political exclusion. The state pulled back from open confrontation while quietly reinforcing its authority. CUT survived, but under pressure. Parties absorbed anger and redirected it into elections. The streets calmed, but memory did not.

The 1960s brought reform without rupture. Eduardo Frei Montalva’s Christian Democratic government promised a “Revolution in Liberty”: agrarian reform, housing construction, expanded education, partial nationalization of copper. These reforms mattered. Land was redistributed, unions gained strength, and expectations rose. But for many workers, the pace was too slow and the compromises too obvious. Inflation persisted. Housing shortages remained acute. Urban shantytowns, poblaciones callampas, continued to spread. The sense that Chile was always on the verge of something larger never went away.

In this climate, political conversation became a daily habit. It happened in union halls, neighborhood committees, buses, and outside food carts. A completo was often part of that ritual. It was filling enough to replace dinner, cheap enough to afford on a worker’s wage, and informal enough to invite discussion. People argued over copper, wages, Cuba, the Soviet Union, China, and the United States, mayonnaise dripping onto wax paper. Politics was no longer abstract. It was immediate, edible, shared.

By the late 1960s, polarization sharpened. The left, Communists, Socialists, Radicals, and smaller parties, coalesced into the Unidad Popular coalition. Its candidate, Salvador Allende, was no newcomer. He had run for president three times before. What had changed was the country. The memory of 1957, the partial reforms of the Frei years, and the global mood of the era, Vietnam, May ’68, anti-colonial struggles, combined into something combustible. Allende promised a peaceful road to socialism: nationalization of copper, expansion of workers’ rights, deepening of agrarian reform, and redistribution without abandoning electoral democracy.

In September 1970, Allende won the presidency with a plurality of the vote. It was historic: the first Marxist elected president through competitive elections in Latin America. The victory was narrow, but the symbolism was immense. In working-class neighborhoods, celebrations spilled into the streets. Music played. Wine flowed. Food carts did brisk business. The completo, already ubiquitous, became part of the atmosphere of victory, something eaten late at night by people who felt, perhaps for the first time, that history was moving in their direction.

Allende’s presidency began with momentum. Copper was nationalized to widespread popular support. Wages rose. Milk programs expanded. Rent controls offered relief. Workers felt seen. Participation increased. But the contradictions were immediate. Economic sabotage, capital flight, and U.S. pressure strained the economy. Inflation surged. Shortages appeared. The institutional framework, Congress, courts, bureaucracy, remained largely hostile or divided. The government moved faster than the state could absorb.

It was in this context that the cordones industriales emerged. They were not planned from above. They arose from necessity. As employers shut down factories, hoarded goods, or attempted lockouts, workers organized themselves across industrial zones to keep production moving. Cordones were networks of factories linked by geography rather than trade, coordinating defense, production, and distribution. They bypassed traditional union hierarchies and, at times, even the state itself.

The cordones represented something qualitatively new. They were not simply unions demanding concessions. They were organs of workers’ power, rooted in the shop floor and extended outward into neighborhoods. Delegates were elected directly. Decisions were debated collectively. They organized transport, guarded facilities, and coordinated with neighborhood supply committees. For supporters, they were the embryo of a new socialist democracy. For critics, including some within Unidad Popular, they were dangerously autonomous.

Life inside and around the cordones was intense and improvisational. Long shifts blurred into political meetings. Guards stood watch overnight. Information traveled by word of mouth. Food mattered. Workers pooled resources, shared meals, and relied on street vendors who followed the rhythms of factory life. Completos reappeared here as well, sold outside plants during late meetings, eaten quickly between patrols or debates. Like the cordones themselves, they were improvised, excessive, and collective.

The cordones, like completos, layered functions, production, defense, politics, onto institutions never designed to carry that weight. For a time, it worked. During the October 1972 truckers’ strike, when employers attempted to paralyze the country, cordones and neighborhood committees kept goods moving. The state leaned on them, even as it hesitated to fully endorse their power.

But abundance brings instability. By 1973, Chile was stretched thin. Inflation was punishing. Lines for basic goods grew longer. Political violence escalated. The right mobilized in the streets; the left debated strategy endlessly. Allende was trapped between institutional legality and popular pressure. He needed the cordones, but he could not fully legitimize them without provoking a constitutional crisis. The workers sensed this contradiction keenly. Support remained strong, but anxiety crept in.

The immediate aftermath of this period was not resolution but suspension. The cordones had demonstrated the capacity of workers to self-organize at scale. They had kept factories running and neighborhoods supplied under siege conditions. They had also revealed the limits of a peaceful transition without control of the state’s coercive apparatus. The sense of living on borrowed time was palpable.

And still, people ate. Outside factories and meeting halls, completos were passed hand to hand. Avocado oxidized in the open air. Bread grew soggy under the weight of toppings. Conversations circled the same questions again and again: could this hold? Should it go further? Was compromise still possible? 

If you like hot dogs, this is one hot dog you have to try. 

Completo (Chilean-Style Hot Dog)

Serves: 1 (scale as needed)

Ingredients

• 1 large hot dog bun (soft, slightly sweet if possible)

• 1 frankfurter or Vienna sausage

• 2 tbsp mashed avocado (seasoned with lemon juice and salt)

• 2 tbsp finely diced fresh tomato

• 2 tbsp sauerkraut (chucrut)

• Mayonnaise (generous amount)

• Optional: ketchup, mustard, ají verde sauce

Instructions

1. Boil, grill, or steam the sausage until hot.

2. Place the sausage in the bun.

3. Layer in order: sauerkraut, diced tomato, mashed avocado, and a generous drizzle (or squirt) of mayonnaise.

4. Add optional sauces if desired.

5. Serve immediately with plenty of napkins—it’s meant to be messy!

Chorrillana: Mess Under the Table

Chorillana’s origins lie in Valparaíso, in bars that served sailors, dockworkers, and students who needed something heavy enough to soak up cheap wine and longer nights. Potatoes were plentiful, beef less so, eggs somewhere in between. The dish was improvisation elevated to ritual. Whatever was left in the kitchen went onto the plate. It was noisy food for noisy rooms, eaten with forks scraping metal trays, voices raised over music and smoke. It belonged to the margins of respectability, which is precisely why it would survive what came next.

By mid–1973, Chile had entered a deadlock that no one could pretend was temporary. The cordones industriales had shown that workers could organize production and distribution outside traditional institutions, but they had also exposed the limits of power without arms. Employers escalated lockouts. The right openly called for military intervention. Congress paralyzed the government. Inflation and shortages fed anger on all sides. Allende remained committed to legality, even as legality was being hollowed out around him. The armed forces, long presented as constitutionalist and apolitical, were quietly choosing sides.

On September 11, 1973, that choice became irrevocable. Tanks rolled through Santiago. Fighter jets bombed La Moneda. Allende died inside the palace, refusing exile. The coup did not simply remove a government; it annihilated a political horizon. The cordones were dismantled overnight. Factories were occupied by soldiers. Union leaders were arrested, disappeared, or executed. Stadiums became detention centers. The language of participation gave way to the language of order.

Food habits changed immediately. Curfews emptied the streets. Night eating vanished. The informal economy that had fed workers through long meetings and patrols collapsed under surveillance. Street carts disappeared. Kitchens shrank. Meals became quieter, faster, more cautious. The abundance of the completo felt obscene now, a memory from another life.

The junta, led by General Augusto Pinochet, justified its seizure of power as salvation. Chile, they claimed, had been rescued from chaos, Marxism, and civil war. What followed was not restoration but transformation. Political parties were banned. Congress was dissolved. Censorship became total. Thousands were detained, tortured, and killed. Fear was not an unintended consequence; it was a governing strategy.

Economically, the dictatorship pursued a radical break. Under the guidance of U.S.-trained economists, the “Chicago Boys”, the state retreated from production, unions were crushed, and public assets were privatized. Wages fell. Inequality exploded. The social safety nets that had been built over decades were dismantled with surgical precision. Stability returned, but only in the narrow sense that protest had been rendered suicidal.

And yet, beneath that surface calm, resistance reorganized itself. Not in factories or mass strikes, those were impossible, but in fragments. In churches, which offered relative sanctuary. In neighborhood soup kitchens, ollas comunes, where women organized food distribution under the guise of charity. In cultural workshops, music groups, theater collectives, and poetry readings that encoded dissent in metaphor. In universities, where students learned to speak carefully and organize anyway.

This is where chorrillana reenters the story.

Bars reopened slowly, cautiously, often presenting themselves as apolitical spaces. Music played again, but softer. Conversations happened at tables, not in the streets. Chorrillana returned as bar food. Just fries, meat, eggs. A shared plate ordered late, meant to be eaten together.

But sharing is never neutral.

Chorrillana required proximity. Plates were placed in the center of the table. Forks crossed. Hands reached in. It encouraged lingering. You didn’t order it to eat quickly and leave. You ordered it when the night was stretching on, when the bottle was half empty, when the conversation mattered more than the hour. In those spaces, whispers replaced slogans. News traveled in fragments: who had been released, who had vanished, who was organizing where. The resistance survived not through spectacle but through continuity, and continuity needs places to sit.

The dictatorship understood this instinctively. Surveillance extended into nightlife. Informants listened. Raids happened. Bars closed suddenly. People learned to read the room. To speak in half-sentences. To pause when someone unfamiliar approached the table. Chorrillana sat between them, steam rising, yolk breaking, absorbing tension. 

The resistance itself fractured and adapted. Armed groups like the MIR and later the Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez pursued sabotage and assassination attempts, most famously the failed 1986 attack on Pinochet. Others rejected armed struggle, focusing instead on rebuilding social networks, labor organizing, and international pressure. Exiles broadcast from abroad. Inside Chile, cassette tapes circulated hand to hand. Songs were memorized, not written down.

Food anchored these fragile worlds. Ollas comunes fed families when wages collapsed. Church kitchens became organizing hubs. Bars offered anonymity within crowds. Chorrillana, cheap and filling, made its way into these spaces naturally. It was the opposite of official Chile, which prized discipline, order, and individual success. This was communal mess, eaten off shared plates, in defiance of isolation.

By the early 1980s, the dictatorship’s promise of economic miracle faltered. The debt crisis hit hard. Unemployment soared. The veneer of technocratic competence cracked. Protests erupted again, cautiously at first, then more openly. National days of protest brought cacerolazos, pots and pans beaten in the night. Barricades appeared briefly, vanished quickly. The streets remembered what they had once been for.

Chorrillana followed the protests. Nights grew louder. Bars filled again. Students and workers mixed. Fear remained, but it was no longer absolute. You could taste the shift in how people ate: slower, louder, together. Plates returned to the center of tables. Forks clinked. Someone always ordered another.

Pinochet’s regime, for all its violence, had built its legitimacy on permanence. The 1980 constitution was designed to keep him in power indefinitely. But permanence erodes when people stop believing in it. By the late 1980s, international pressure mounted, and internal opposition coalesced into a broad coalition. The 1988 plebiscite, meant to ratify Pinochet’s continued rule, became a referendum on fear itself.

The “No” campaign did not promise revolution. It promised normalcy. Joy. The end of night raids. The ability to speak openly again. When the results came in and Pinochet lost, the dictatorship did not collapse overnight. The transition was negotiated, constrained, incomplete. The military retained power. The constitution remained. Justice would be partial at best.

But something irreversible had happened. The spell had broken.

As far as greasy diner food goes, chorillana is king. It kind of reminds me of Latin poutine. Try it out!

Chorrillana (Chilean Loaded Fries)

Serves: 4 (as a shared dish)

Ingredients

• 4 medium potatoes, cut into thick fries

• 400 g (14 oz) beef (sirloin, flank, or thin strips), seasoned with salt and pepper

• 1 large onion, sliced into rings

• 4 eggs

• Vegetable oil (for frying)

• Salt and black pepper, to taste

• Optional: pebre (Chilean salsa) or ketchup for serving

Instructions

1. Fry the potato fries in hot oil until golden and crispy. Drain on paper towels and season with salt. Spread on a large platter.

2. In a skillet, heat a little oil and sauté onion rings until soft and caramelized. Remove and set aside.

3. In the same skillet, quickly sear the beef strips until browned and cooked. Season well.

4. Fry the eggs sunny-side up.

5. Assemble: Pile beef over the fries, then scatter caramelized onions, and top with the fried eggs so the yolks can run into the dish.

6. Serve immediately on the platter for sharing, with forks.

Chacarero: Fresh Cut Rebellion

Thinly sliced beef, fresh green beans, ripe tomatoes, all nestled in a soft roll, the chacarero began as a farmer’s fare. Its name comes from the chacra, the small family farm, where it was originally the portable fuel of the campesino, or peasant farmers. For generations, it was an assembly of what was on hand: the last of the summer's green beans, the heaviest tomatoes, and thin cuts of beef from the previous day’s roast.

However, it was in the 1940s that the chacarero truly claimed its place in the national soul. As Chile’s cities swelled with a new urban workforce, the sandwich migrated from the farmhouse to the fuente de soda. In these neon-lit Santiago lunch counters, the chacarero became a standardized, affordable staple, a bridge between the rural past and a modernizing future. By the mid-20th century, it was no longer just a farmer’s meal; it was the fuel of the city’s laborers, students, and clerks. It is a sandwich built for movement, for streets and plazas, for conversation that carries through open air. It is, in other words, protest food.

Chile in the years after Pinochet’s fall was a country of cautious optimism. The transition to democracy in 1990 under Patricio Aylwin opened space for discussion, for reform, for the rebuilding of institutions. Yet the shadow of the dictatorship never fully lifted. The constitution of 1980 remained, technocratic and constraining. Privatization of water, pensions, education, and healthcare left much of the population dependent on markets rather than the state. Economic growth was real, but so was inequality; Santiago gleamed in glass towers while working-class neighborhoods in the periphery struggled with soaring rents, underfunded schools, and limited access to healthcare.

Street food, once silenced under curfew and surveillance, returned with renewed vibrancy. Fast-food chains proliferated. Bakeries offered complete sandwiches and empanadas. But these decades of apparent calm were deceptive. Beneath the orderly façades of democracy, resentment accumulated. Students marched for education reform. Pensioners demanded fair treatment. Indigenous communities and activists called attention to the lingering inequalities embedded in law and custom. The echoes of Pinochet’s reforms, deregulated markets, weakened unions, and centralized political authority, remained stubbornly present.

The spark was small. On October 7, 2019, the Santiago Metro announced a fare increase of thirty pesos. For many Chileans, the rise was trivial, a few cents on a subway ticket. But it became a symbol of everything wrong with the country: a system designed to extract, rather than support, ordinary people. Students began jumping turnstiles in protest, actions met by police repression. Within days, what started as fare evasion escalated into a national conflagration. Millions poured into the streets. Protests erupted in Santiago, Valparaíso, Concepción, Temuco, cities large and small. The movement was youthful, improvisational, and chaotic, organized not by unions or political parties, but through WhatsApp groups, social media, and neighborhood networks.

Here, the chacarero found its place. Street vendors sold sandwiches from carts. Neighborhoods shared homemade meals. In the crowded plazas of Santiago, where young people faced riot police, the same green beans and tomatoes that decorated the chacarero mirrored the bright banners and flags of protest. Sharing food became an act of solidarity. A single chacarero, offered to someone crouched behind a barricade of burning tires, became a moment of humanity in the midst of confrontation. 

The protests were not just urban spectacle. They were demands for structural change. Demonstrators condemned the privatization of social services, inequality in pensions, overpriced healthcare, and the slow pace of constitutional reform. They called for a new social contract, one written not in technocratic terms but in the lived experience of millions who felt left behind. It was, in some ways, a revival of the spirit of the cordones industriales: ordinary citizens asserting their collective power outside formal institutions, improvising governance in occupied spaces. The plazas, barricades, and spontaneous marches were a temporary parliament of the streets.

Violence and repression were inevitable. Police deployed water cannons, tear gas, and rubber bullets. Fires consumed stations, buses, and banks. Yet the protests were largely nonpartisan. There was no central leadership, no single ideology dominating. The energy was generational and horizontal. Social media amplified both the messages and the documentation of brutality. International observers watched in disbelief at the scale of mobilization. 

By the end of October 2019, the government had responded with concessions: the fare increase was reversed, and President Sebastián Piñera announced reforms and the drafting of a new constitution. Yet these gestures only partially addressed the root causes of unrest. Citizens demanded systemic change, not temporary reprieves. The government declared a state of emergency, but the protests refused to dissipate. Instead, they evolved. Neighborhood assemblies, coordinated marches, and cultural expressions, from murals to music performances, transformed public space. The plazas became hubs of community, feeding both body and spirit with chacareros and comradeliness. 

The aftermath of the Estallido Social reshaped Chilean politics. The overwhelming demand for a new constitution culminated in a plebiscite in 2020, where citizens voted to replace Pinochet’s 1980 charter. The drafting process, characterized by broad representation and deliberative assemblies, reflected the energy of 2019. Politicians like Gabriel Boric emerged from the student movements that had helped drive the protests, promising to translate the lessons of the streets into governance. Yet the country remained divided: questions of economic policy, indigenous rights, and social equity continued to provoke debate, and of course, the election of José Antonio Kast in 2025 leads to a troubling return to Pinochet-era politics. But, chacareros remain, ready to help fight another battle.

I can’t emphasize this enough. You NEED to try this sandwich. It is unlike any sandwich I have ever had.

Chacarero (Chilean Steak Sandwich)

Makes: 2 sandwiches

Ingredients

• 2 thin beef steaks (sirloin, flank, or churrasco cut, about 150–200 g each)

• 2 crusty round rolls (such as marraqueta or kaiser)

• 1 cup green beans, trimmed and boiled until tender-crisp

• 1–2 ripe tomatoes, thinly sliced

• 1–2 fresh green chilies (ají verde or jalapeños), thinly sliced

• Mayonnaise, to taste

• Olive oil, salt, and black pepper

Instructions

1. Season steaks with salt, pepper, and a drizzle of olive oil. Grill or pan-fry over high heat to medium (2–3 minutes per side). Rest briefly, then slice thinly against the grain.

2. Slice rolls in half and lightly toast if desired. Spread mayonnaise generously on both sides.

3. Layer on the bottom half: sliced steak, tomato slices, green chilies, and a handful of cooked green beans.

4. Close the sandwich and serve warm.