ABSTRACT
This essay analyses populism in a specific context, that of Chilean neoliberal society, which has developed since 1975, emphasising in particular its post-1990 stage. Populism uses mechanisms and devices for the regulation of feelings, centred in fear as an emotion, as a way of living the experience of unsafety; so, it is thought as the projection of diverse dependencies, contexts and elites, undermining democracy in different ways. These dependencies are accentuated because the main neoliberal fear is terror and constitutes its basic emotional context. Socio-politically, this study shows how this emotion gets stronger with these dependencies, due to practices such as municipal patronage and certain leaderships, which are systematically used, extending in time social links such as caudillismo, aristocracy and paternalism, reigning over the local and immediate interest, and depoliticising society.
