Charity, Rights, And Entitlement in Popular-front Chile

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CHARITY, RIGHTS, AND ENTITLEMENT IN POPULAR-FRONT CHILE

Karin RosemblattHistory Department

Syracuse University

© 1998 Karin Rosemblatt

Prepared for delivery at the 1998 meeting of the

Latin American Studies Association

The Palmer House Hilton Hotel, Chicago, Illinois, September 24-26, 1998

Please do not cite without the author's permission



In 1939 the Caja de Seguro Obligatorio (CSO, Obligatory Insurance Fund), the Chilean

agency charged with providing social security, disability, and health care benefits to blue-collar

workers, published an advertisement in the Socialist Party magazine Rumbos. "The social security

system," read the ad, "tries to replace the denomination of 'indigent' with that of

'taxpayer'[imponente], a switch from 'charity' to 'insurance' and from 'alms' to 'rights'." The CSO thus

aligned itself with a "modern" notion of state welfare as a right and against charitable approaches,

portraying the extension of CSO-administered benefits as a way of suppressing charity.1

Beginning in 1938, the executive branch of the Chilean state was controlled by reformist

popular-front coalitions constituted by the Radical, Socialist, and Communist parties. The popular

fronts saw themselves as champions of the poor, fostered a rhetoric of citizen entitlement among

popular sectors, and explicitly sought to democratize public services. They also promoted state

intervention, believing that state control could curtail the power of the oligarchy and do away with

patronizing charitable aid. As working-class organizations mobilized to enhance and improve CSO

benefits and as members of the Socialist Party occupied key positions in health and social security

apparatuses, the discourses of state intervention and citizen entitlement became particularly prominent

within the CSO.2

Yet as this essay shows, not all Chileans benefitted equally from the popular fronts' efforts to

expand state services and democratize welfare. While (male) workers employed in the formal sector,

who were the popular fronts' core constituency, received CSO benefits that were seen as "rights,"

nonworkers continued to receive forms of state aid that were more akin to charity. Since workers

helped finance social security benefits, worker organizations consistently demanded--and obtained--

participation in the administration of social security and health programs. By contrast women--who

were for the most part housewives or nonindustrial workers--as well as unemployed and informally-



2

employed men had fewer "rights" and little, if any, say in the operation of the agencies that dispensed

aid to them as indigents. State officials would continue to determine the need of these clients who

were "dependents" and had no legal "right" to state aid.3

Respectability, Hierarchy, and the Popular-Front Pact

Formed in the wake of failed state attempts to first repress and then coopt popular

organizations, the popular fronts mobilized vast sectors of the popular classes around a program of

democratization and economic modernization. By winning presidential elections in 1938, 1942, and

1946, they ensured a more sympathetic, less repressive response to popular mobilizations on the part

of state apparatuses. They also provided popular organizations with enhanced venues of influence.

The participation of Socialists and Communists in the coalitions was crucial in this regard. As leftist

embraced electoral politics and secured positions within the bureaucracy, they provided subalterns

with access to formal and informal access to political spheres that would otherwise have remained

unavailable.4

Chileans of modest means clearly benefited from the government's less repressive approach,

and they overwhelmingly supported the popular-front governments. Yet the popular fronts favored

some Chileans over others. While industrial workers, including miners, were privileged participants

in the coalitions, rural and nonindustrial workers and women were subordinate members. This

gendered hierarchy was constructed by relating industrial and mining work to working-class

masculinity and then by associating masculinity with political entitlement and power. Because

industry and mining were seen as crucial to Chile's economic well-being, (male) industrial workers

were considered important members of national community. Conversely, because industry and mining

had long been considered critical economic activities, organized industrial workers were more



3

effectively able to demand political and economic entitlements. By contrast women, campesinos, and

informally-employed workers gained less political influence and fewer economic benefits because

popular-front governments, and the worker organizations that supported them, continued to see

"workers" as exceptionally consequential actors and to define women and nonindustrial workers as

nonworkers. As a result, women as well as laborers who performed supposedly non-productive

work, especially campesinos, remained second-rate citizens.

At least in relation to rural labor the exclusionary policies of the popular-front leadership were

undisguised. They apparently resulted from an explicit bargain between popular-front politicians and

the right: in return for passing legislation that created CORFO (Corporación de Fomento,

Development Corporation), the motor of state-led industrialization, right-wing politicians demanded

that rural unionization be stopped. The exclusion of women was more subterranean. Yet women

were denied full political rights--and other restrictions on suffrage such as literacy requirements

continued--because political elites on both the right and the left believed universal suffrage would

cause political dislocations. The popular fronts' position on the family wage system, which defined

men as breadwinners and women as dependent housewives, was negotiated even more quietly. Yet

on balance the popular fronts cemented male-headed nuclear families materially and ideologically,

making it difficult for women to make independent political and economic claims. Male industrial

workers made concrete gains as a result. They not only cemented their authority over women but

also affirmed their superiority over less reputable men. Furthermore, depressed rural wages benefited

urban workers materially by keeping the price of foodstuffs low, and the family wage system assured

men that women would not compete for the best jobs. 5



4

In regards to women, political elites and labor activists together circumscribed women's rights

by rejecting paid labor for women, downplaying the importance of informal forms of employment,

and defining full-time homemaking as a proper activity. Although popular-front officials recognized

the importance women's homemaking and mothering, and even granted benefits to mothers and

wives, they did not see child rearing and domestic labor as activities that entitled women to political

or social rights. Since state benefits that rewarded women's work within the home--family

allowances, widows' pensions, and maternal health care--were provided only to the wives of workers,

those benefits reaffirmed women's status as dependents.6

Moreover, popular-front leaders tacitly approved of women's exclusion from wage-work, thus

limiting women's access to the one activity that would have entitled them to citizen rights.

Throughout the popular-front period, the segregation of the labor market endured: few women

worked for wages, and only a minority of women workers did industrial work (see tables one and

two). Of those women who were employed, most did industrial work at home, engaged in artesanal

production, or participated in domestic service and laundering (see table three). Of 144,589 blue-

collar women paying social security taxes in 1945, for example, 17.3 percent were self-employed (as

opposed to 3.6 percent of men); and 58.8 percent of the non-self-employed were domestic servants. 7

These informal occupations (which official tabulations never fully documented) were neither well-

regulated nor recognized as socially useful. Even labor leader María González, herself a domestic

servant, denigrated domestic service by characterizing it as "unproductive" and "semi-feudal." José

Vizcarra, a popular-front supporter and CSO physician, asked of the limited legislation regulating

domestic service: "Have these social laws . . . made domestic servants into citizens who are

incorporated into the benefits of society?" He answered himself with a rotund no. In short, women



5

were identified with either the home or informal and intermittent work and were therefore marked

as dependent and subordinate.8

Table 1

Women's workforce participation

Men Women Total Workers % Women

1930 1,116,513 290,961 1,460,474 20

1940 1,362,275 432,903 1,795,178 241952 1,616,152 539,141 2,155,243 25

Source: Chile, Dirección General de Estadística, X Censo de la población [1930], vol. III (Santiago,

1935), xviii, 17-18; "Censo 1940," 564; XII Censo, 205-207.

Note: Economically active population has been adjusted to include the unemployed and domestic

servants and to exclude students, prisoners, hospital residents, and persons living on fixed incomes.

Table 2

Women in the manufacturing workforce

Women Factory % of WomenWorkers Workers

1930 90,756 31

1940 93,904 22

1952 131,850 24

Source: X Censo, vol. III (Santiago, 1935), xviii, xviii, 17-18; "Censo 1940," 549-558, 564; XII

Censo, 205-207, 269.



6

Table 3

Women in domestic service

Women % of Women

Domestic Servants Workers

1930 114,782 40

1940 172,975 40

1952 171,330 32

Source: X Censo, vol. III (Santiago, 1935), xvii-xviii, 17-18; "Censo 1940," 546, 564; XII Censo,

205-207, 269.

Note: For 1930 and 1940 domestic service includes, classified and unclassified domestic servants,

laundresses, and cooks. Figures for 1952 include only domestic servants classified as such.

Labor and leftist leaders also advanced the notion that male industrial workers were reputable

and deserving by differentiating them from itinerant, criminal, ignorant, and unmanly men. María9

Pardo, whose father worked at the Chuquicamata copper mine, distinguished her presumably

respectable family from the rural southerners who migrated to the mining communities in the 1930s.

"At that time," she recalled in an interview, "there was a lot of insecurity in the [mining] camps

because a lot of people from the south who were not exactly workers [obreros] would arrive, and

they would rob the workers, assault them. . . ." Using a similar notion of respectability, in 1941

workers at the El Teniente copper mine demanded the reinstatement of quintessentially respectable

labor leaders who had been laid off and prohibited from coming into the mining camp. "Are these

workers bandits, assassins, or rabble?" they asked. "No! . . . [T]hey are honorable laborers who

should be working for the company." Communist Volodia Teitelboim, like other labor and leftist

leaders, characterized nonworkers as effeminate. In Teitelboim's fictionalized account of the life of

Communist leader Elías Lafferte, Lafferte, who was still "attached to his mother's skirt," felt unmanly

as well as "useless and perverse," and "extremely incorrect" because he was unemployed.10



8

"Caja de Seguro Obrero"

Popular-front leaders used the CSO, commonly called the "Caja de Seguro Obrero," to reward

purportedly reputable, industrial workers in tangible ways. The CSO was created in 1924, as elites

searched--after decades of unsuccessful attempts to repress and disband worker organizations--for

effective ways of containing popular protest. Financed by worker, employer, and state contributions,

the CSO was charged with providing health care, disability insurance, and retirement benefits to blue-

collar workers. Improved living conditions, elites believed, would mollify disgruntled workers and

stabilize the social order.13

Although the legislation that created the CSO was passed in 1924, it was not until 1935-1936

that the law was applied consistently. Initially, in the first years following the passage of the law, both

employers and workers feared that state-administered benefits would reduce their control over

welfare benefits, and state officials, anxious and inexperienced, postponed the drafting of the legal

decrees necessary to the running of the CSO. The institution was further restricted when the state

failed to disburse funds it was legally required to pay the CSO. In addition, between December of

1927 and March 1932, the provision of medical care for CSO beneficiaries was entrusted to the

Beneficencia Pública, an institution that was for the most part privately-run. Other CSO services

were also parceled out to existing state agencies during this period, effectively gutting the

institution.14

In 1932, however, the CSO regained control of medical and other services, and in 1935-1936

it began to expand its benefits. The CSO's increasingly activist stance was part of a broader process

of state expansion that, although it had originated in the mid-1920s, accelerated in the mid-1930s and



9

reached its peak after 1938. From 1930 to 1950 total state spending rose nominally from 1,131

billion to 20,637 billion pesos, and state employment grew from 30,147 to 68,225 between 1929 and

1949. Proportionally, social services absorbed the largest number of new state employees, and the

CSO spearheaded this growth: in the six years between 1934-1935 and 1940-1941, its income

increased from 94 to 292 million pesos, and between 1935 and 1939 the number of physicians in the

CSO medical services alone expanded from 396 to 926. During this same period, the number of

social workers and sanitary nurses employed by the CSO medical services rose from seventeen to

seventy-four. Within the CSO as a whole, there were twenty-five social workers in 1935 and 115 in

1945.15

By the time the popular fronts took power, the CSO, although in a precarious financial

position, had a very substantial budget. Unabashedly publicizing its own economic clout, the CSO

proclaimed in a 1942 advertisement: "The Caja de Seguro Obligatorio has a cash flow of more than

ONE BILLION PESOS a year, that is to say, more than fifty percent of the State's budget." True,

there was more than a little hyperbole involved in this advertisement: the billion peso figure included

both income and expenditures (and even then the real figure fell short of one billion). The state's

budget was closer to three billion. However, a single agency charged with investing the pension16

funds of all blue-collar workers undoubtedly had access to very significant resources.

As a result, Caja programs were far-ranging. Beginning in 1932, the institution disbursed

widows' and orphans' pensions to workers' dependents, and in 1936-1939 it began to provide prenatal

care to workers' wives and health care to their children under the age of two. As early as 1935, a

CSO publication noted with alarm that other state agencies were lagging behind it, shirking their

responsibilities: "That the evolution of the Caja's services is more rapid than that of the rest of the



10

country's social welfare organisms is unfortunate, for on more than one occasion, the CSO has

appeared as a quasi revolutionary institution." After 1938, the CSO extended its services even

further. It built housing for workers, created recreational programs, and operated a cooperative

store. In order to provide cheap foodstuffs and medicines to Chilean workers, it bought and ran a

pharmaceutical company, a milk pasteurizing plant, and several haciendas. In 1944, the CSO alone

provided health care to between one-fifth and one-third all children under the age of two.17

Although the Caja often spoke of its actions on behalf of Chile's poor, in reality, it was

charged only with attending to the welfare of workers. Wage-earners could opt to insure their family

members for a fee, but in 1945 only 2,500 CSO beneficiaries chose this alternative. Socialists pushed

for the extension of free benefits to family members, but, until 1952, were largely unsuccessful. In

October 1938, Socialist deputy Natalio Berman proposed a "social solidarity insurance" scheme,

under which all the country's inhabitants would have access to public health care. Yet this initiative

did not prosper, and when the popular fronts' first Minister of Health, Socialist Party member

Salvador Allende, introduced legislation that would have extended health insurance to workers'

families, it stalled in Congress. Even if the proposed extension of coverage had passed, many

Chileans still would not have been insured: Allende insisted that the popular fronts intended to

provide all citizens with CSO health care, and a CSO publication argued that if such legislation passed

"only a small minority of rentistas and social parasites would be excluded." But in reality the

proposed legislation covered only family members of the insured, and that "small minority" was likely

larger than Allende and CSO officials granted. If the popular fronts' failure to recognize the rights

of Chileans circumscribed their plans to enlarge the CSO, the fiscally precarious CSO was doubly

limited and could assist nonworkers only sporadically.18



11

The CSO nonetheless provided important benefits to workers, and agency officials used those

benefits to cement worker allegiance to the state. Since the mid-1930s, the CSO had been a haven

for left-leaning and progressive professionals who called for the expansion of benefits for workers

and linked CSO expansion to the democratization of services. These progressive professionals

consolidated their position within the CSO between January 1939 and January 1943, when the CSO

was under the leadership of Socialist Party members Luciano Kulczewski, Salvador Allende, and

Miguel Etchebarne. (During those years Allende and Etchebarne also took turns as Minister of

Health.) Workers' productive contributions, progressives argued, were an essential part of national19

well-being, and in recompense the state should collaborate with workers in order to ensure their

health and well-being. CSO medical care was, a 1942 agency publication stated, "a right, which gives

the contributor motive to demand efficiency from an organism created with his own contributions."20

After 1938, CSO officials also courted worker support by fostering working-class organizing

and developing ties with union leaders. The Centro de Reposo Valparaíso (Valparaíso Nocturnal

Rest Center), a CSO boarding house for men deemed to be at medical risk, explicitly saw its role as

"stimulating men's associative tendencies, in the interest of social solidarity and brotherhood

[compañerismo]." The Center's social worker corresponded with a union representative, and

although boarders were not generally permitted to leave the house during the evenings, an exception

was made for union meetings. In fact, residents of the Centro were actually encouraged to participate

in union events, and the Center's social worker happily reported that after leaving the Center many

ex-participants were elected to leadership positions within their unions.21

Within the CSO health services, professionals attempted to create more horizontal relations

between workers and medical staff. The head of the CSO's social service division saw social workers'



12

medical interventions as "essentially pedagogical." Similarly, the CSO health publication Vida Sana

saw its role as "purely educational" and declared itself open to collaboration with and consultation

by its audience. Acknowledging that subalterns might mistrust counsel dispensed by more educated

and wealthy professionals, the magazine tried to reduce the social distance between state officials and

clients. It often presented its advice as conversations among workers. A typical "Workers' Dialogue"

published in one issue of Vida Sana, and most likely written by a physician, concluded by saying "Let

my experience be of use to you, my friend Pedro."22

In addition, CSO physicians likened their analyses of illness to those of labor and leftist

organizations by adopting a "social" approach to medicine. Practitioners of "social" medicine

championed preventive health care and recognized environmental conditions, including poverty, as

important causes of illness. One CSO physician who analyzed the causes of tuberculosis went so far

as to claim that they escaped the domain of medicine and might be better understood from a

sociological or socioeconomic perspective. Likewise, in 1939 Allende approvingly quoted a 193523

article that saw the eradication of poverty as the best cure for tuberculosis:

Tuberculosis, a social disease, requires a corresponding social hygiene, a hygiene of the

masses, the application of which cannot be assured either by the individual or by the family;

a hygiene that, having as its point of view the economic inequality of individuals, from the

moment that there are rich and poor, compensates for class differences.24

After 1938, Allende and other progressive physicians affirmed that a social medicine could

not prosper if the dominant classes' control over medical establishments, and the paternalism that

went along with that control, continued. Private and charitable initiatives, they argued, simply

individualized and pathologized the poor. Allende criticized the Beneficencia Pública, an institution

that provided hospital care for both the poor and CSO beneficiaries, because it did not exercise a



13

"social function." According to Allende and other progressive professionals, the Beneficencia--

although it received state funds and was overseen by state agents--was tainted by its palliative medical

approach and its roots in private charity. Medical establishments that were truly controlled by the

state would, by contrast, provide health care that took into account the social determinants of health

and disease, well-being and misery. Thus in 1942, the Socialist La Crítica paraphrased the 1935

article quoted by Allende saying, "Tuberculosis, a social disease, needs a corresponding social

hygiene, a hygiene of the masses, the application of which cannot be handed over to the individual,

nor his family, nor 'public charity.' The state must take charge."25

CSO officials, in short, promoted cooperation between workers and the state and portrayed

state control as the sine qua non of effective solutions to working-class problems. Their efforts to

expand and reform state services provoked the ire of employers and the political right. It was not

simply the Socialist Militia's purchase of lowcost shirts at a CSO cooperative store that outraged

right-wingers. They also opposed the Caja's contracting of agents to "study" unionization in six

provinces. And they were surely irritated by projects such as the Centro Valparaíso. Early in the first

popular-front presidency, right-wing politicians allied with certain members of the Radical Party to

launch a virulent campaign against alleged Socialist misuse and mismanagement of CSO funds, a

campaign that led to the removal of CSO administrator Luciano Kulczewski. On a local level,

employers also boycotted the CSO. When the Caja contracted out the provision of medical services

for blue-collar employees to the Tarapacá and Antofagasta Nitrate Company, for instance, medical

doctors hired by the company refused to cooperate with a Caja physician carrying out a campaign

against venereal disease.26



15

An incident that occurred in the men's wing of the Beneficencia-run San José Sanatorium,

where CSO-insured workers received treatment for tuberculosis, revealed workers' distrust of

"public" charities such as the Beneficencia. It also exposed the efficacy of worker pressure on public

officials who understood health care as a worker right. According to Sergio Llantén, a patient

interned at San José, the hospital did not provide the sort of medical to which patients were entitled.

There were no toilet facilities in the sanatorium, and the food was lousy. Perhaps more important,

the institution's social workers had no interest in helping patients and treated them "really badly"

[remal]. Social workers refused to run errands for patients who needed rest and made patients wait

endlessly for appointments. If anyone dared complain, the visitadoras insulted and ridiculed him.29

The patients had soon had enough and organized a committee to protest. When their leader

was discharged from the sanatorium, thirty-five other San José residents staged a "patients' strike"

and left the facility. The patients returned to the hospital only when the Minister of Health, who the

patients sought out, offered them improvements. "We believed the Minister," Llantén told a reporter.

"We know he is not tricking us." The hospital's director was, unfortunately, less reliable. Once the

patients had returned, he not only refused to meet their demands but also prohibited them from

leaving San José during a period of two weeks and refused to give them permission to visit the

women's wing. Horrified at this retribution, the striking patients attempted to phone the Minister of

Health and the press. Hospital staff denied them access to the phone. Llantén was then forced to

travel to the Santiago offices of the Communist Frente Popular to tell his story.30

In reporting this dispute, Frente Popular demanded further intervention on the part of state

officials, calling on the Caja--which paid for the care of insured workers in Beneficencia hospitals--to

intervene in the matter. Emphasizing the worthiness of the patients, Frente Popular also noted that



16

they were "insured workers." The Minister of Health, like Frente Popular, recognized the deserving

nature of the San José patients. And if CSO officials intervened, they would presumably enforce

workers' "rights" as well. Unlike company welfare departments or "public" charities such as the31

Beneficencia, these popular-front authorities would heed worker demands for efficient and dignified

treatment. Experiences such as these likely persuaded workers that although state services did not

always fulfill their needs or expectations, problems could be corrected with the help of sympathetic

state officials who viewed them as entitled.

Workers generally felt that CSO-controlled services would be particularly sensitive to their

demands and open to popular pressure. The presence of worker representatives on the CSO

governing board assured that worker demands would be heard by government authorities. On a

national level, representatives of the CTCh (Confederción de Trabajadores de Chile, Confederation

of Chilean Workers), which grouped together the majority of the country's labor unions, sat on the

CSO board. "The Government of the Left, "the Socialist newspaper La Crítica noted, "has partially

supplied workers with the ability for their representatives to intervene in everything that is related to

giving the insured every guarantee. . . ." The provincial branch of the CTCh in Antofagasta agreed,

asserting that "It is appropriate to say, when we speak of the Caja de Seguro Obrero, that Mr.

Luciano Kulczewski, currently its Administrator, has given its services the social character it had lost

in last years of the previous government." Hence when "comrade Gardguilla" was appointed as the

CTCh representative on the CSO regional board of directors in Antofagasta, the leaders of the

regional CTCh believed that they would "properly control this service" and "proceed to the aid of

insured workers whenever necessary."32



17

Thus, CSO officials' efforts to inspire confidence in workers apparently succeeded to a degree.

The Antofagasta CTCh noted that the CSO medical professionals fulfilled a vital worker need and

that physicians--and the medical corps more generally--were aware of "the mission of their generous

and appreciated profession, in this aspect, the worker has [found] in them a teacher, a comrade, who

is in the end his or her best friend." It further sustained in relation to the CSO:

[A]s a way of collaborating with the Popular Front, we have the obligation of elevating its

[the CSO's] prestige, development and performance, without this meaning that we fail to

criticize the bad procedures that we discover, [procedures that] mortify the blue-collar

imponente, on the part of the medical corps and the administration. We will scout out the bad

functionaries, which hopefully are few in number. . . .33

Workers thus argued that doctors were friends, that the CSO needed gentle prodding, that

paternalistic professionals were few.

Unfortunately, workers' organizations too rarely suggested that nonworkers--a group that

included the "dependent" family members of the insured--merited the same dignified treatment as

workers themselves. While the CTCh strongly supported the extension of CSO benefits to the family

members of the insured, Caja beneficiaries who demanded improved, CSO-controlled services also

differentiated themselves from mere indigents. CSO beneficiaries complained, for instance, that both

indigents and the insured received inadequate hospital care at Beneficencia hospitals. But instead of

insisting that the Beneficencia improve services for all, La Crítica suggested that the labor's

representatives on the Caja's Consejo should "struggle in particular so that the insured receive care

in their own hospitals, and not, as is now the case, in public hospital rooms where workers are cared

for as if this care constituted charity and not an acquired right." Workers had a right to proper

medical treatment, La Crítica put forth, because they made "Chile great through their work." For

the "unproductive" indigent, "charitable" care by the Beneficencia would apparently suffice.34



18

Tomé's Socialist newspaper contributed to this divisive and exclusionary approach. There--

and throughout the region between Concepción and Chillán affected by the 1939 earthquake--the

Beneficencia, the CSO, and the Dirección General de Sanidad joined forces, providing care for both

the indigent and the insured. This led a Socialist journalist to wonder whether abuses were taking

place: posing as indigents, anyone--including white-collar workers who had a separate system of

health care subsidies--could have access to medical care financed by the CSO. Eschewing solidarity

with those who were not CSO-insured, these leftist and labor leaders insisted instead on the right of

insured workers to separate, CSO medical care.35

The Socialist Youth of Chillán took a more generous and inclusive--but less frequent-- stance.

Praising the fusion of CSO and non-CSO medical services in the region between Concepción and

Chillán, they refuted the notion that the CSO-insured were making a disproportionate financial

contribution and receiving inferior services. State agencies other than the CSO were contributing

financially to medical services in the region, they pointed out. And they countered insured workers

who complained that the quality of service had declined after the unification of medical services by

undertaking a study of the matter. Complaints, they found, had actually declined. Quality medical

services, according to this view, could be provided by institutions other than the CSO and to Chileans

who were not insured workers. These young activists thus rejected distinctions between worthy

workers and undeserving "others" and between rights-based and charity-like services. Implicitly, they

undermined the link between entitlement and work.36



19

Conclusion

By the time the popular fronts took power, the gendered contours of the welfare state had

already been established. The popular fronts transformed that legacy by democratizing services, at

least to a degree, and by expanding them greatly. Abetted by popular and left organizations that

encouraged democratic participation and entitlements principally for workers, the popular-front

governments deepened the gendered cleavages within the state. Physicians promoting a social

approach to medicine made friends with workers, and the increased state resources they controlled

made this alliance possible and attractive. Those resources also convinced workers that it was

necessary and useful to struggle over how services would be provided.

Organized workers had effective tools for dealing with state authorities and state agencies.

It was the political mobilization of these workers, both before and during the popular-front era, and

their alliance with progressive professionals that prompted the democratization of CSO services. At

the same time, worker politics propped up a charity/rights dichotomy that sustained differences

between respectable workers and "others" and reinforced, at least to a degree, a view of the CSO as

a special agency serving privileged citizens. Within this widely accepted worker discourse, there was

little room for recognizing the rights of those who were not reputable, productive, manly workers.

Ironically, but perhaps understandably, state services for the indigent were finally expanded

precisely as the popular fronts disbanded and worker and leftist influenced dwindled. In the postwar

era, the United States conditioned loans to Chile on the repression of striking workers, the

Communist Party, and working-class activists more generally. The Chilean Congress and popular-

front President González Videla, himself a left-wing Radical, complied. Beginning in 1947-1948, they

repressed worker mobilizations and outlawed the Communist Party.



20

It was during this period of repression that Congress overhauled the social security and health

care systems and disbanded the CSO. To avoid political haggling over how to invest worker

pensions, a new institution, the Servicio de Seguridad Social (SSS, Social Security Service), was

created. Instead of investing pension savings, the SSS would pay retirement benefits out of a rolling

fund. At the same time, CSO health services were handed over to a separate agency, the newly-

created Servicio Nacional de Salud (National Health Service). Henceforth, women, men and children,

workers, indigents and housewives, would receive equivalent medical care in the same clinics and

hospitals.



21

1. Rumbos (September 1939): 89.

2. On Socialists in the CSO see below. For a left rejection of alms-giving approaches

(especially among charities that received state funds) see La Crítica, 1 December 1939, 16;

Barricada, second fortnight December 1938, 6.

3. On the gendered nature of welfare state see Carole Pateman, The Disorder of Women:

Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989); and the

articles in Linda Gordon, ed., Women, the State, and Welfare (Madison: University of Wisconsin

Press, 1990).

4. On Chile in the popular-front era see Paul Drake, Socialism and Populism in Chile, 1932-

1952 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978); María Angélica Illanes, "En el nombre del pueblo,

del estado y de la ciencia (. . .)": Historia social de la salud pública, Chile 1880-1973 (Santiago:

Colectivo de Atención Primaria, 1993); John Reese Stevenson, The Chilean Popular Front

(Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1942); Tomás Moulian, "Violencia, gradualismo y reformas en

el desarrollo político chileno," Estudios sobre el sistema de partidos en Chile, ed. Adolfo Aldunate,

Angel Flisfisch and Tomás Moulian (Santiago: FLACSO, 1985).

5. On the bargaining that accompanied the passage of the law authorizing CORFO see Oscar

Muñoz Gomá, Chile y su industrialización: Pasado, crisis y opciones (Santiago: CIEPLAN, 1986),

92. On the interest of urban laborers in keeping rural wages low see Brian Loveman, "Political

Participation and Rural Labor in Chile," in Political Participation in Latin America, vol. 2 of Politics

and the Poor, ed. Mitchell Seligson and John Boothe (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979), esp.

186-187. Cf. Jean Carrière, "Landowners and the Rural Unionization Question in Chile: 1920-

1948," Boletín de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe 22 (July 1977), who claims that the left

earnestly tried to mobilize rural workers but was outmaneuvered by the right. On the family wage

system in popular-front Chile see Karin Rosemblatt, "Gendered Compromises: Political Cultures,

Socialist Politics, and the State in Chile, 1920-1950" (Ph.D. dissertation, University of Wisconsin-

Madison, 1996), chapter two.

6. Rosemblatt, chapters two and six.

7. Figures cited in Raquel Weitzman Fliman, "La Caja de Seguro Obligatorio" (Memoria,

Facultad de Ciencias Jurídicas y Sociales, Universidad de Chile, 1947), table five, n.p.

8. Vanguardia Hotelera, 6 January 1934, 2. Boletín Médico-Social de la Caja de Seguro

Obligatorio, nos. 98-99 (August-September 1942), 446-455. The quotation is on p. 450. Cf. El

Obrero Gastronómico (Valparaíso), 15 April 1939, 4. I am grateful to Rosita Bravo, Thelma Gálvez,

Lorena Godoy, and Elizabeth Hutchison for help deciphering census data.

9. For scholarly works which, in two very different national contexts, postulate the existence

of two male genders, a respectable married male worker who earned privileges and other less

ENDNOTES



22

privileged workers, see Luise White, "Separating the Men from the Boys: Constructions of Gender,

Sexuality, and Terrorism in Central Kenya, 1939-1950," International Journal of African Historical

Studies 23, no. 1 (1990), 1-25; and Sonya Rose, "Respectable Men, Disorderly Others: The

Language of Gender and the Lancashire Weavers' Strike of 1878 in Britain," Gender and History 5,no. 3 (autumn 1993), 382-397. See also Robert Connell, Gender and Power (Stanford: Stanford

University Press, 1987), esp. 183-88.

10. Interview with María Pardo (pseudonym), 21 Abril 1993. El Despertar Minero (Sewell),

11 May 1939, 2. Volodia Teitelboim, Hijo del Salitre (Santiago: Editora Austral, n.d.), 106.

11. Margarita Urquieta Tognarelli, "Problemas psico-sociales del obrero siderúrgico chileno"

(Memoria, Escuela de Servicio Social, Ministerio de Educación Pública, Santiago, 1946), 3-4, 33.

Servicio Social 12, no. 4 (October 1938): 164-65.

12. Carrière; Rosemblatt. For state publications that advocated increased economic and

political benefits for rural workers or domestic servants see, for example, Boletín Médico-Social de

la Caja de Seguro Obligatorio, nos. 98-99 (August-September 1942): 446-455; Acción Social 9, no.

78 (May 1939): 10-11; ibid., no. 79 (June 1939): 1-3. For leftist publications, El Grito del Obrero

Agrícola, August 1940, 2; Mujeres Chilenas, December 1947, 9; CTCh, 11 November 1943, 7.

13. On elite motivations see James Morris, Elites, Intellectuals, and Consensus: A Study of

the Social Question and the Industrial Relations System in Chile (Ithaca: Cornell University Press,

1966).

14. Acción Social, no. 113 (June 1942): 5-7; Revista de Asistencia Social 13 (1944): 435,

438; Boletín Médico-Social de la Caja de Seguro Obligatorio, nos. 117-119 (July-September 1944):

205-213.

15. Ibid. On state expenditures see Anuario estadístico, año 1935: Finanzas, bancos y cajas

sociales (Santiago, [1937?]), 2-5; Estadística Chilena 23, no. 12 (1950): 703. On state employment,

Germán Urzúa Valenzuela and Anamaría García Barzelatto, Diagnóstico de la burocracia chilena

(1818-1969) (Santiago: Editorial Jurídica de Chile, 1971), 74. On CSO expenditures Acción Social

12, no. 113 (June 1942): 17. On social workers and physicians in the CSO see Salvador Allende, La

realidad médico-social chilena (síntesis) (Santiago, 1939), 144. On CSO social workers, Servicio

Social 20, no. 1 (January-April 1940): 44; ibid. 16, nos., 1-2 (January-June 1942): 73, 76; Isabel

Norambuena Lagarde, "El servicio social en la CSO" (Memoria, Escuela de Servicio Social, Junta

de Beneficencia, Santiago, 1943), 2, 11-12; Boletín Médico-Social de la Caja de Seguro Obligatorio

12, nos. 125-127 (March-May 1945): 178.

16. The quotation is from El Siglo, 4 July 1942, 9. For budget figures see Estadística

Chilena 18, no. 12 (December 1945): 678, 683.

17. The quotation is from Boletín Médico-Social de la Caja de Seguro Obligatorio 2, no.

19 (December 1935): 4. On CSO might see also Norambuena Lagarde, 2. On CSO programs see

Acción Social 12, no. 113 (June 1942): 9-14; ibid., no. 12 (January 1933): 7; ibid., no. 4 (November



23

1930): 46-47. On CSO health care for infants see Helga Peralta, "La atención materno-infantil en la

Caja de Seguro Obligatorio" (Memoria, Escuela de Servicio Social, Universidad de Chile, Santiago,

1951), 32 and passim; Revista Chilena de Higiene y Medicina Preventiva 8, no. 3 (September 1946):

149 and passim; ibid. 5, no. 1 (June 1942): 103, which claimed that , the CSO cared for 46 percentof children under the age of two in Valparaíso and Viña.

18. On family insurance see Estadística Chilena 18, no. 12 (December 1945): 688. On

Berman's plan Boletín de la Confederación Regional de Aspirantes a Colonos de la Zona Devastada

(Concepción), October 1939, 2. For other plans to reform the CSO, "Reforma de la ley número

4054," Mensaje, Cámara de Diputados, 10 June 1941, cited in Boletín Médico-Social de la CSO;

Noticiario Sindical, August 1951, 6-9; Cámara de Diputados, 23 November 1950, 8a. sesión

extraordinaria (sesiones extraordinarias, 1950-1951, I, 515-530 and passim). See also CTCh, 22

August 1945, 7. The quotation is from Vida Sana (Temuco), second period 1, no. 5 (May 1941):

5.

19. On Socialists in the CSO see the biographical catalogue on congressional representatives

in the Biblioteca del Congreso; and the second through the tenth editions of the Diccionario

biográfico de Chile (Santiago: Empresa Periodística Chile, 1939-1958). For an indication of other

Socialists who held high ranking positions in the CSO see Tribuna, 6 March 1941, 2.

20. Acción Social 12, no. 113 (June 1942): 4.

21. Vida Sana (Valparaíso) 1, no. 2 (June 1942): 6. Servicio Social 16, nos. 3-4 (August-

December 1942): 195-202.

22. Boletín Médico-Social de la Caja de Seguro Obligatorio, nos. 117-119 (July-September

1944): 347. Vida Sana (Temuco) 1, no. 1 (November 1938): 1, 7.

23. Vida Sana (Temuco), second period, 1, no. 5 (May 1941): 4. For similar views in an

earlier period, see Boletín Médico-Social de la Caja de Seguro Obligatorio 1, no. 11 (April 1935):

1-2; ibid. 2, no. 17 (October 1935): 3-4. For a comparative look at sanitarista ideology see Dain

Borges, "'Puffy, Ugly, Slothful and Inert': Degeneration in Brazilian Social Thought, 1880-1940,"

Journal of Latin American Studies 25, no. 2 (May 1993): 235-256; Eduardo Zimmerman, "Racial

Ideas and Social Reform: Argentina, 1804-1916," Hispanic American Historical Review 72, no. 1

(February 1992): 23-45; Donna Guy, Sex and Danger in Buenos Aires: Prostitution, Family and

Nation in Argentina (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 1991); Nancy Stepan, The Hour

of Eugenics: Race, Gender and Nation in Latin America (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991).

24. Cited in Allende, La realidad, 87.

25. Allende, La realidad, 135. La Crítica, 5 September 1942, 3.

26. La Voz de la Provincia (Valdivia), 1944; Rumbo (December 1939): 85; Cámara de

Diputados, 14 November 1939, 4a. sesión extraordinaria (sesiones extraordinaria, 1939, I, 292-307).

Boletín Médico-Social de la Caja de Seguro Obligatorio 6, nos. 60-61 (May-June 1939): 71.



24

27. Acción Social, no. 113 (June 1942): 5-7; Revista de Asistencia Social 13 (1944): 435,

438, 440; Boletín Médico-Social de la Caja de Seguro Obligatorio, nos. 117-119 (July-September

1944): 205-213; Morris, 206, 243-247; Illanes, 187-191, 224-229.

28. El Despertar Minero (Sewell), 5 June 1941, 1-2. Partido Socialista, "I Congreso

Regional del Partido Socialista en la provincia de Tarapacá: Resoluciones adoptadas" (Santiago,

1939), 12, 49. See also Servicio Social 11, no. 4 (October 1937), 229.

29. Frente Popular, 5 May 1940, 2.

30. Ibid.

31. Ibid.

32. La Crítica, 13 May 1942, 1; ibid., 17 May 1942, 4, 5; ibid., 18 May 1942, 4; Ceteche

(Antofagasta), second fortnight July 1938, 3; ibid., 7 December 1939, 1. On increasing workerinfluence within the CSO see the proposal in CTCh, 24 March 1943, 4.

33. Ceteche (Antofagasta), first fortnight December [1939?], 2.

34. La Crítica, 17 May 1942, 5. See also CTCh, cited in Illanes, 352.

35. Liberación (Tomé), 20 May 1939, 2.

36. La Crítica, 12 May 1941, 8.

Charity, Rights, And Entitlement in Popular-front Chile

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