This article analyzes the influence of the Chilean popular sectors during a crucial phase of the Independence War (1817-1818) when, deserting from the regiments and escaping from the recruiting parties, they generated a wave of insubordination and disrespect which heavily threatened the plans for continental liberation designed by generals San Martin and O’Higgins. Through a study of official correspondence, war reports and the testimonies of several observers, it establishes that the popular dissent –which had already flourished and shown its worst features during the Patria Vieja– emerged again with unexpected violence and insensitivity once the Ejército Libertador de los Andes had won its first honors with the victory at Chacabuco’s fields. It also makes reference to the emergence of popular guerrilla warfare, considered here as the political cradle of those plebeian and Mapuche Indians montoneras that desolated the country during the ensuing years and decades. Its central hypothesis is to remark that the complex situation created by the desertion of the lower ranks of society and its repression during this fatal year, set the context for a social confrontation that defined, in the following decades, the shape and character of the newly founded Republic. It also proposes that popular desertion was to become one of the earliest political expressions of the mob.
Keywords:
Independence, popular classes, desertion, politics, repression
León, L. (2008). The dificult problem of surviving between two homelands: the chilean underclass between Chacabuco and Maipú. Cuadernos De Historia, (29), Pág. 33–66. Retrieved from https://analesfcfm.uchile.cl/index.php/CDH/article/view/30835
