Starting in October 2019, amid the most intense protests since the end of Pinochet’s dictatorship in Chile, a wave of urban land occupations emerged and persisted during the pandemic. The Chilean social uprising, sparked by an increase in public transportation fares, quickly evolved into broader demands against social inequality, reshaping the course of the country’s recent history. In this context of social and political crisis, Gabriel Boric, a young left-wing leader associated with the 2011 student protests and a member of a progressive coalition, was elected president in December 2021. His victory promised a significant political shift ; however, the housing crisis has persisted and even worsened in Chile.
According to a 2023 report, nearly 60,000 families participated in land occupations over four years (CES-Techo 2023, pp. 20–21). The government recently surveyed 1,432 informal settlements, known in Chile as campamentos (or camps), marking a 74.2% increase compared to 2019 (El Mercurio de Valparaíso 2024, p. 5).
Housing emergency
The housing crisis in Chile has resulted from a combination of several factors, such as the constant increase in housing prices, the lack of regulatory mechanisms for this lucrative market, the decline in real incomes for the working class, along with exceptional events like the intense social protests of 2019–2020 and lockdown measures following the health crisis. The pandemic’s health demands exposed the terrible conditions of the public housing stock. It was the residents of some poor neighborhoods who brought attention to this situation during the hunger protests in May 2020 (El Mercurio de Valparaíso 2020, p. 12).
The response of homeless families to the housing crisis can be summarized in two major organizational strategies : on one hand, mainly in the capital, several resident movements were created, gathering multiple committees of homeless families at the neighborhood level. On the other hand, in various regions such as Arica and Parinacota, Antofagasta, Tarapacá, Valparaíso, Bio Bío, La Araucanía, Los Lagos, and the Santiago Metropolitan Region, hundreds of new land occupations were organized (Pérez 2022). Among the movements’ main characteristics is that, despite its heterogeneity, it is largely made up of and led by low-income women and an increasing presence of the Latin American migrant population, primarily from Venezuela, Peru, Colombia, and Haiti. By the end of 2024, the state estimated that the foreign population in Chile had reached approximately 2 million people, representing 10% of the total population (Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas 2024).
The protests that began in 2019 succeeded in initiating an unprecedented process to replace the political constitution created by the military dictatorship in 1980 (Joignant and Somma 2024). In 2020, a Constituent Assembly was formed, clearly led by the left. Housing movements presented their own initiative, with the aim of enshrining this right with a gender perspective by guaranteeing safe housing for women victims of violence, recognizing care work and encouraging feminist participation in urban planning. However, the Constitutional Convention’s proposal was widely rejected by the public. Subsequently, a new Constituent Assembly was formed, this time led by the radical right, but its proposed new constitution was also widely rejected (Delamaza 2024).
State response
From the pandemic to the present, the state has generated three major responses to the housing crisis. First, in 2022, the National Congress declared a housing crisis through a legislative initiative that instructed the executive government to launch a Housing Emergency Plan with the aim of building 260,000 public housing units. A year later, the same parliament debated a new law on land usurpation, significantly increasing penalties by establishing effective prison sentences for those involved in land occupations and providing prosecutors and police with greater tools to expedite the eviction of occupied properties. This legislative proposal became law in 2023, sparking protests from committees and camps across the country.
The third state intervention in the housing crisis came from the Supreme Court. In 2022, the country’s highest court ruled that the residents of some land occupations in the Bio Bío and Valparaíso regions had six months to vacate the sites. Later, the Supreme Court ordered the eviction of the massive 17 de Mayo occupation camp in Cerro Navia, Santiago, and in 2024 upheld the eviction of one of the largest land occupations in Chile, located in the port town of San Antonio. The eviction of 150 families from the 17 de Mayo settlement was carried out with the intervention of special police forces, tear gas bombs and backhoes, without any dialogue from the Boric government (Cooperativa 2024).
The Port of San Antonio, Valparaíso Region
San Antonio has a population of around 100,000 and is home to one of the state’s priority investments : the Port of San Antonio. There is a consensus among authorities that this project, intended to become the most important port on the Pacific Ocean in South America, holds strategic importance. San Antonio was also one of the epicenters of the 2019 land occupation wave. In six months, 14 land occupations occurred involving nearly 4,000 families, according to state reports, adding to the five camps that already existed (Ministry of Housing and Urban Development 2020, p. 7). By 2023, over 8,000 families were living in occupations (CES-Techo 2023, p. 80).
The social unrest and the pandemic created a political opportunity for the consolidation of these occupations. Since April 2020, most of the leadership of these land occupations supported communal kitchens in the camps to alleviate the crisis and hunger, which generated solidarity and gave strong recognition to their leaders. The real-estate company Bellavista, which owns a large portion of land in the city, filed a lawsuit against the occupations in 2021 and received a favorable ruling two years later. The judiciary ordered the eviction of all camps in the Bellavista, Placilla, and Centinela hills, where from 6,000 to 7,000 families live across more than 200 hectares (Noticias del Poder Judicial 2023).
The lawsuit spurred collective mobilization in the camps in 2021 : in September, they organized a caravan against the land usurpation law, and in October, they held a day of protest that included barricading the main access roads to the port city (El Líder de San Antonio 2021, pp. 2–3). In 2022, the situation eased somewhat. The municipality, led by its new mayor, openly opposed the evictions, and the new ministry of housing provided support through the Housing Emergency Plan.
However, the urgency returned to San Antonio in 2023, with 100 days left before the eviction order, which had to be carried out between October and November, causing uncertainty among the affected families, who responded by intensifying their protests. In August 2023, during a march of over a thousand people against the evictions, a leader stated, “We are protesting the eviction because more than 7,000 families will be left on the streets, and what is the state going to do, watch from the sidewalk ?" (El Líder de San Antonio 2023, p. 5). The protests have been repeated ever since, just as the eviction orders have been repeatedly postponed, but the deadline for their execution is approaching.
Evicting a grassroots solution
The housing crisis in Chile is worsening. In the midst of severe forest fires, a dozen camps in Viña del Mar burned in February 2024, killing about 150 people and destroying nearly 3,000 homes. Further south, in San Antonio, the Supreme Court’s decision to reverse the eviction in March added fuel to the fire : camp residents have carried out numerous protests that have repeatedly paralyzed Chile’s main export port throughout the year.
More than 100,000 families are currently living in camps in Chile. The vast majority, led by grassroots women, have transformed deserts, hills, garbage dumps, and abandoned sites into homes and neighborhoods. Land occupations are a solution proposed by popular sectors to the housing crisis and have demonstrated consistent capabilities to build cities and create grassroots organizations as an alternative to housing shortages, a social force that has entered into a growing contradiction with the interests of Chile’s dominant class. For this reason, the escalation of forced evictions being promoted by the Chilean state, far from becoming a solution, is worsening the largest housing crisis in Chile in decades.
Although it may still be too early to draw conclusions, we invite you to pay attention to the protagonism, agency, and strategies that, from the ground up, are being built by low-income Chilean and migrant families to secure a place to live in a country that is an example of neoliberal development in Latin America.
Bibliography
- CES-Techo. 2023. Catastro Nacional de Campamentos 2022–2023, pp. 20–21. Available online at the following URL : https://cl.techo.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/9/2023/03/CNC22-23.pdf.
- Cooperativa. 2024. “Gran operativo : Carabineros desalojó toma 17 de Mayo en Cerro Navia”, 16 May. Available online at the following URL : https://cooperativa.cl/noticias/pais/vivienda/tomas-de-terrenos/gran-operativo-carabineros-desalojo-toma-17-de-mayo-en-cerro-navia/2024-05-16/095246.html.
- Delamaza, G. 2024. Por un Chile diferente. Participación popular en el proceso constituyente, Santiago : LOM Ediciones.
- El Líder de San Antonio. 2023. “Con una masiva marcha habitantes de las tomas rechazan eventuales desalojos”, 11 August, p. 5.
- El Mercurio de Valparaíso. 2020. “El gobierno detalla plan de alimentos y registran protestas por hambre”, 19 May, p. 12.
- El Mercurio de Valparaíso. 2024. “Catastro MINVU detecta alza significativa de campamentos”, 16 March, p. 5.
- Instituto Nacional de Estadísticas. 2023. Estimación de personas extranjeras residentes habituales en Chile.
- Joignant, A. and Somma, N. 2024. Social Protest and Conflict in Radical Neoliberalism : Chile, 2008–2020. London : Palgrave Macmillan.
- Ministerio de Vivienda y Urbanismo. 2020. Informe tomas de terrenos, 2 December, p. 7.
- Noticias del Poder Judicial. 2023. “Corte de Valparaíso acoge recurso de protección y ordena desalojo de terrenos tomados en San Antonio y Cartagena”, 7 July.
- Pérez, M. 2022. The Right to Dignity : Housing Struggles, City Making, and Citizenship in Urban Chile, Stanford : Stanford University Press.