ABSTRACT
Political geography has always had degrees of relevance to, and influence over, real-world issues (House 1973). Sometimes this has not been progressive or productive. The military dictator General Augusto Pinochet, for instance, was trained as a political geographer and used this background to remake Chile during the early 1970s. According to David Harvey, ‘Pinochet did not approve of “subversive” academic disciplines such as sociology, politics and even philosophy’; geography was his poison for instilling patriotism, regulating culture, and undertaking social engineering (Harvey 1974: 18). As President of the military Junta, Pinochet overthrew a democratic and elected government and undertook brutal reforms on, amongst other things, health and social policy. Harvey talks about the ways in which military control allowed Pinochet to smash the actors and institutions of the progressive Allende regime, which created the space for re-establishing the ‘old geography’ of a centralised and dictatorial power base.
