Command and Control: The Santiago Metro, Authoritarian Nationalism, and Urban Development in Chile, 1973–80

How does political continuity or rupture affect large-scale state projects? To what degree does ideology influence urban development? These questions have been explored at multiple scales during Latin America’s Cold War, from neighborhoods (e.g., Nueva La Habana in Chile) to cities (e.g., Brasília), and from national planning to global circulation networks. However, there are few studies of large-scale state projects that survived political rupture, even though these projects, which lasted through different regimes and ideologies, can offer new perspectives on the region’s transitions from democracy to dictatorship, and from state-led development to free-market capitalism.

My paper contributes to this literature on the politics of urban development by tracing the history of the Santiago metro system during the early years of Chile’s military regime. I ask why the project survived the 1973 coup and how it was appropriated for new political goals in local, national, and international arenas. Using government archives and oral histories, I argue that the metro became a battleground for Pinochet’s neoliberal economists, who sought to enforce fiscal discipline by curbing metro development. Labor discipline was also imposed in the metro, as workers’ rights were curtailed by the military regime and cutting-edge technologies provided for greater control over the system’s operation. Yet even while factions within the military regime attacked the project as an unnecessary luxury, the metro also became a tool for constructing the regime’s legitimacy on the local and international stage at a moment when its human rights abuses were coming to light. By tracing the metro’s construction, inauguration in 1975, and early years of operation, I argue that the transition from democratic, state-led development to Pinochet’s neoliberal dictatorship was more contested and contradictory than often acknowledged.