One day, however, I did happen to look at the coins scattered across my desk, where they get dumped if they don’t make it to the relative safety of my change purse. Searching for some readings, also piled on the desk, I noticed a strange 10-peso coin that looked different from the coin I was accustomed to seeing. The 10-peso coin is not worth much, even here. In comparison to the U.S. dollar, they are worth about the same as two pennies. The majority of these penny-sized, gold coins have Bernando O’Higgins’ head in profile stamped on one side, similar to U.S. coins. As one of Chile’s founding fathers, he also appears on the 50-, the 5-, and the 1-peso coin.
This new coin, however, didn’t have Bernando O’Higgins face on it. I first thought it that it was a foreign coin that I had gotten by mistake. One side shows a winged woman with her hands raised overhead, breaking the chain that held her manacled wrists together. Underneath this inspiring scene is the word “Libertad” or liberty. Printed on her left side in tiny numbers is a date “11-IX” and 1973 is printed on the other. As an International Studies major with a focus on Latin America, I knew that September 11, 1973, was the day when the military bombed La Moneda, the Chilean presidential palace, and the socialist president, Salvador Allende, committed suicide. The military junta headed by General Augusto Pinochet took power on that day, and Chile remained a dictatorship until 1990.
This scene struck me rather forcefully at the time, but it wasn’t until later when I noticed the year on the other side. I originally thought that the government had stamped all the coins in 1973, right when the failing socialist government fell. Chile was in an economic crisis in the early 1970s. Tearing myself from my musings about the 1970s, so that I could focus on homework, having finally found the readings buried among the papers on my desk, I failed to notice that the year of fabrication was actually stamped on the other side of the coin. Once I noticed the year, I found that the four coins I have got at the moment were stamped in 1988, 1986, and two in 1989, just before Chile voted for a new government. The late 1980s marked the final years of the brutal military dictatorship that had tortured and killed hundreds of people. Yet the government still had the gall to print these coins that blatantly proclaim “Libertad” and “Republica de Chile” in bold letters. Liberty proclaimed the “republic” controlled by the army that stripped people of their civil liberties. I know a coin is nothing compared to what happened under Pinochet, but it is one thing to study history and another thing altogether to find physical evidence of what happened nearly twenty years later.
The irony doesn’t end there either. The 100-peso coin, a slightly more important coin especially in terms of bus fare, also has two versions. The older version is a bronze-colored coin about the size of a quarter, maybe slightly larger, that has the Chilean seal on one side. The seal is a shield with a star topped with what looks like feathers and flanked by a huemul, a Chilean deer, and a condor. The other side says 100 pesos and is surrounded by two sprigs of laurel or some similar plant. It’s the uglier, but sometimes more useful, of the two coins as many vending machines only take the older coins.
The newer coin, stamped in the past few years, is more aesthetically pleasing. It is slightly smaller and has the seal with the laurel and the “100 pesos” on one side. A ring of gold surrounds the silver colored center, making two concentric circles. The other side, the more interesting of the two, has the portrait of a Mapuche woman in traditional dress with the word “Mapuche” printed in small letters to the left side. Around this, in the golden border, it says “Republica de Chile” and “Pueblos Originarios” or Original Peoples more or less. The Mapuche are one of the indigenous groups of Chile and make up the largest minority in the country.
I found this coin interesting because while in Chile, I gathered research material on the Mapuche and started to form ideas for the thesis that I would write upon my return to the United States. I eventually decided to write about the Mapuche’s territorial conflict with the Chilean state. They have a long history of resistance, first fighting off the advancing Incas in the 1500s, then fighting against the Spanish conquistadores for years in a war that decimated the Mapuche population. After the war with the Spanish, the Mapuche managed to preserve a reduced territory for another few hundred years. This changed, however, some years after Chile declared independence from Spain in 1810. In the middle of the 19th century the Chilean state decided that the Mapuche, who held some of the most fertile land, hindered the advancement of the country. Chile needed to be united as one state with one people. During the Occupation of the Araucanía, the Chilean armed forces slowly advanced south into the Araucanía, the region where the Mapuche lived, building forts. By the close of the 19th century there was no longer a frontier that separated the two groups, and the Mapuche would lose their autonomy.
Needless to say, the Mapuche have been trying to get their land and their rights back since the early 1900s. Various groups and communities have organized to protest and some even attempt to retake their ancestral lands by force. Since the end of the military dictatorship in 1990, there has been some progress in terms of securing indigenous rights, especially with the Indigenous Law proclaimed in 1993 guaranteeing indigenous rights. Many Mapuche groups still fight today to regain their territory. Some organizations work with the state, but some more radical ones burn equipment and buildings now owned by wood harvesting companies or landowners in southern Chile.
Almost as if the state wants to throw a symbolic bone to the Mapuche, it issues this coin proudly representing the Pueblos Originarios. It is not as if the state has not made an effort to resolve the conflict, but, to me, these coins seem like an artificial attempt to engender good feeling. The state makes a coin to “honor” the original peoples of Chile, but as my research into my thesis progresses, I find that the state has not done enough to resolve the current territorial conflict.
The final irony lies in the fact that in the handful of change you can find a symbol of Pinochet’s version of “Libertad” and a symbol of the more recent government’s attempt to placate the Mapuche. Interestingly enough the opinions of the Chilean governments can be found in such small objects, like coins. In a handful of coins you can see a glimpse of Chilean history and of ideas that are worth far more than a few pesos.
June 2, 2009
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