The culture of boom-and-bust and the duty-free zone: The struggle to find Iquique's place in the Chilean nation-state (Augusto Pinochet Ugarte)

Iquique is the former stronghold of the nitrate industry that financed Chile's drive to modernization in the early 20th century as well as the birthplace of Chile's labor movement. After the nitrate industry died out, Iquique and the region of Tarapaca have been subject to continuous boom-and-bust cycles. As a historical ethnography, this dissertation explores the socio-cultural effects of repetitive boom-and-bust cycles in a marginal region, from the period the nitrate industry died out in the late 1950s to the year 2000, when the Duty-free Zone in Iquique was facing its own decline. As the nitrate industry died out, the citizens of Iquique pressured the Chilean state to install a Duty-free Zone in Iquique to revive their ailing economy. The movement gathered momentum as the state refused to consider this proposition, and the citizens of Iquique, represented by a civil association called the Center for Progress, declared secession from the Chilean state and staged a region-wide boycott of one of Chile's most important civic holidays on May 21st, 1957. The Duty-free Zone was implemented by Augusto Pinochet in 1975, and a large segment of the Iquiquefio population have since become supporters of the notorious dictator.; This dissertation explores how the bastion of Chile's labor movement became Pinochet's pet city, and suggests that answers may lie in the “specters of boom-and-bust. Drawing from Freud's definition of the uncanny, I argue that the specters of former boom-and-bust cycles fomented a culture of anxiety in the region, thereby propelling regional actors to seek recognition and development projects from the state. When the state ignored those requests, the struggle to end boom-and-bust cycles turned into a struggle against the state. As Pinochet made Iquique a Duty-free Zone, he was received as the messiah that had bestowed the ultimate gift to a city that constantly struggled against the idea of decline. All in all, the struggle to end boom-and-bust cycles in Iquique, was as much a struggle to gain recognition from the state. In this vein, I call attention to the category of the regional, and especially regional movements, that have received little attention in the scholarship on Chile.