ABSTRACT
After the coup d’état of 11 September 1973, marked by the attack on the La Moneda presidential palace and the death of the socialist President Salvador Allende, one of the first political acts of the junta led by Augusto Pinochet was to dissolve all municipal councils in the country on 19 September, before banning political parties and dissolving Congress during the days that followed (Valenzuela, 1977). The coup d’état destroyed not only national and local democracy but also the link between the state and the nation, placing the state in the hands of a military power with little legitimacy. With no democratic legitimacy to draw upon, the military government chose to rationalise its exercise of power by instituting a moral, religious and security-oriented order and by early support for market liberalisation, promoted by ‘the Chicago boys’ and the big industrial lobbies. This policy was resolutely directed towards economic growth and state retreat from functions such as social policy or redistribution. The Chilean state gradually delegated its legitimate power of intervention to market mechanisms, ‘the feeling of belonging was fractured, and the relationship between the individual and the market substituted for that between the nation and the state [ … ]’ (Castells, 2006: 118).
