In 2011, the eruption of the Chilean student movement broke open a nation-wide questioning of Chile’s current democracy centering on the ongoing influence of General Pinochet’s seventeen-year dictatorship. My dissertation illuminates central elements of Pinochet’s legacy and points toward possible changes necessary for a more democratic Chile in the present. Many studies examine the continuity and change between the dictatorship and the restored democracy and argue that the democratic potential of Chile’s present is bound by the political-economic inheritances from the authoritarian regime. This explanation, while accurate, stops short; the political-economic model of the dictatorship not only was installed by force, it was installed by force to eradicate a more participatory politics. As such, my research focuses on the contentious relationship between the Chilean path to Socialism and the military coup and subsequent dictatorship to elucidate the contents of this participatory politics and specify the tools of its eradication.

Liberating Forestry is an historical ethnography of a territory of forestry estates in the Southern Andes that Pinochet came to call his government’s most conflictive zone. In the years between the election of Allende in 1970 and the coup in September of 1973, this territory experienced tremendous socio-ecological transformation; through political alliances, marginalized forestry workers pushed the boundaries of Allende’s Basic Program for an institutional path to Socialism and demanded the conversion of the large private estates of the area into a single, state-owned, worker-operated Forestry Complex. In this Complex, forestry workers, forestry engineering students, and governmental experts negotiated a new form of forestry production that integrated the knowledge of uneducated rural workers with the expertise of foresters, and sought to enable the long-term wellbeing of the forestry communities.

Following the coup, the military regime represented the Forestry Complex as a vast guerrilla training camp, the product of outsider extremists’ manipulation of a simple, hard-working rural community. Combining this misrepresentation with the violent repression of workers thought to be leaders within the Complex, the dictatorship sought to erase this experience of worker empowerment and innovative forestry. Although the military kept the Complex as state property, it stripped the workers of any participation in the organization of forestry, and replaced the advances of the previous years with the precarious work forms of temporary contracts, minimum employment programs, subcontracting, and frequent relocations. Across violent repression and the mundane production of alienated labor, these forestry estates became an important site for the dictatorship’s policing of national belonging.

Through archival research and oral histories across fifteen months of fieldwork, I recuperate the lived practices of these rural working class activists and their allies as their political participation pushed through the formation of the Complex, and then, as it was deliberately dismantled following the coup. Using ethnographic methods, I examine not only how these large political changes were experienced at the level of the everyday, but also more importantly, how the everyday practices of these forestry workers had wider significance for political participation and national belonging. My findings suggest that deepening Chile’s democracy will require moving beyond the technical expertise so valued by neoliberal ideology to incorporate more voices into decision-making over the use of Chile’s natural resources.