CHILE

Chile's radical neoliberal experiment — imposed under Pinochet and maintained by democratic governments — created a society where competition is the organizing principle of existence. Chilean men compete for university slots, jobs, and status in a system designed to produce winners and losers with no safety net. The 2019 estallido social (social explosion) was partly a masculine crisis erupting: young men who were told the system would reward merit discovered that merit without connections is worthless in Chile's stratified society.

The Pinochet years left a specific male wound: families where the father was disappeared, tortured, or exiled carry a silence that's been maintained for 50 years. Men whose fathers were taken by the DINA (secret police) grew up with an absence they couldn't mourn publicly during the dictatorship and couldn't process afterward because the democratic transition prioritized national reconciliation over individual healing. The mining economy in the north creates another dimension — men in Calama, Antofagasta, and Atacama work in some of the world's largest copper mines under grueling conditions, returning to families as strangers after weeks underground. Chile's high altitude, extreme geography, and long, narrow isolation mirror the internal landscape of its men: stretched thin, compressed, and always on a fault line.