Pinochet's Santiago

The late 1970s is an important juncture in Chile's dictatorship. Having deposed the elected government in a violent coup on 11 September 1973 and waged a brutal and systematic ‘war’ against its ‘internal enemies’, the junta sought to legitimise its rule. It ended the ‘war’, lifting the state of siege in 1978, and in 1980 installed a new constitution to protect its political and economic project. The regime and its civilian advisers had fundamentally reorganised the economy from 1975: industry protections were removed, public spending slashed and financial markets deregulated, plunging Chile into crisis, which was felt hardest on the edges of the city. From 1978 the economy showed signs of macroeconomic recovery, but this ‘miracle’ did not make it to the poblaciones.Footnote ⁴

Hunger cut through households on the edge of Santiago from the end of 1973 as inflation raised the prices of basic goods, and unemployment spiked following the shock of economic reforms.Footnote ⁵ Among jefes de hogar (heads of households) in the poblaciones unemployment ran as high as 60 per cent. Desperate need was met initially, and in particular, by soup kitchens (ollas comunes) run by the Catholic Church. As it became clear towards the end of the decade that economic crisis was not a transient situation but the new reality, pobladores (inhabitants of the poblaciones), especially women, built a web of solidarity, including subsistence organisations, such as shopping collectives and ollas comunes, to feed themselves.Footnote ⁶ Overcrowding in the poblaciones reached a crisis point around the same time, giving rise to a housing movement and the re-emergence of the practice of squatting. Grassroots and collective responses to poverty and housing shortages consolidated as the regime's 1979 urban development plan formalised and accelerated the ‘eradication’ of squatter settlements (campamentos), often moving the most impoverished families from wealthier neighbourhoods to poorer, peripheral districts (comunas).Footnote ⁷ These eradications were part of Pinochet's proposed solution to the housing crisis, as well as his effort to hide signs of poverty, which undermined the image of the modern, almost-developed nation enjoying ‘miraculous’ economic growth that the dictatorship sought to project.Footnote ⁸

The economic recovery collapsed in 1981 on the back of the global oil shock and a burst local debt bubble. The poblaciones, which had not felt the recovery, were plunged further into economic crisis as well as into what social scientists at the time called a ‘crisis of the family’.Footnote ⁹ The regime's reforms had been ushered in amid rhetoric that affirmed the ideal of the patriarchal, nuclear family, with a male breadwinner and a stay-at-home wife and mother. This ‘traditional’ family was forged during industrialisation and the emergence of the modern welfare state in the early twentieth century, and as an ideal remained unchallenged despite subsequent decades of political and social upheaval.Footnote ¹⁰ During the dictatorship, the junta justified the coup and its rule as necessary to protect and provide for Chilean families. As part of this effort the regime created the Secretaría Nacional de la Mujer (Women's National Secretariat) to ‘propagate patriotic and familial values’,Footnote ¹¹ and it established an enormous ‘voluntariat’ of middle- and upper-class women who ran workshops in the poblaciones on baking, weaving and embroidering, promoting this type of work within the home as a chance to ‘work daily for the uplift of the woman, the family and the patria’.Footnote ¹²

Despite the regime's insistence on its role as the protector of the family, economic crises under Pinochet undid ‘traditional’ gender relations. Unemployed and underemployed men struggled to assume the ‘male’ role of provider. Some participated in emergency work programmes, some tried to get by on irregular and informal work, and others turned to drink to drown their shame.Footnote ¹³ Women had worked to supplement household income throughout the twentieth century, but during Pinochet's crises they often found work more easily than did their partners, challenging, intentionally or not, male authority within the household. This ‘crisis of the family’ in turn helped mobilise opposition to the dictatorship, with emerging social movements from the end of the 1970s often appealing to the same discourse of the family as did the regime.Footnote ¹⁴ Growing popular movements, persistent political organisation and economic crisis merged in a national day of protest in May 1983. Monthly street protests followed, until the regime declared a state of siege the following year. A cycle of street protest and violent crackdown characterised the lead-up to the 1988 plebiscite, Pinochet's loss at the ballot box and the country's return to democracy in 1990.

Begging in History, the Law and the Archives

Begging is not part of the histories of the Pinochet dictatorship. Studies of the poblaciones and poverty have tended to focus on the junta's policies to combat extreme poverty, survival strategies built on solidarity, political repression, or political, popular and feminist movements.Footnote ¹⁵ Where begging is tangentially mentioned, it is framed as a ‘perverse’, ‘extreme’ or ‘deviant’ behaviour that – along with black-marketeering, drug-trafficking, prostitution and theft – exists in opposition to solidarity, organisation and informal work.Footnote ¹⁶ Studies of begging in Chile are instead limited to histories of the colonial period and the nineteenth century,Footnote ¹⁷ and criminological and legal analyses of the regulation of begging in the first half of the twentieth century.Footnote ¹⁸ The history of crime and criminality in ChileFootnote ¹⁹ and Latin AmericaFootnote ²⁰ similarly focuses on the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In this context, studies on women have focused on correctional houses and ‘female’ crimes, such as prostitution,Footnote ²¹ and studies of the police are rare. Carabineros became the face of political repression under Pinochet, regularly detaining more than 100,000 annually – mostly young men – for being ‘suspicious’ (por sospecha), and carrying out massive raids in the poblaciones. Nevertheless, as Daniel Palma has noted, ‘there is no policing historiography in Chile’, and studies that do exist are dominated by institutional histories and examinations of post-dictatorial reforms.Footnote ²²

The lack of research on everyday policing in the late twentieth century is due partly to the focus on human rights violations and partly to the difficulty of access to sources. This paper examines the existing ledgers of cases and of files sent to the Archivo Judicial de Santiago (Judicial Archive of Santiago, AJS) from Criminal Courts nos. 1–5 of Santiago, as well as case files in the AJS.Footnote ²³ Locating a file inside the AJS requires a case number and date, court and bundle (legajo) numbers, as well as the date the file was sent to the archive. This information can often be found in the ledgers, but the coverage is patchy and stretches back only to 1979. By reviewing and cross-referencing the sets of ledgers the author identified 141 locatable case files across the years 1979, 1982–8 and 1991–5, mainly in the 2nd Criminal Court. The sample is small, given the nearly 6,000 begging arrests recorded between 1977 and 1998, but it does show the same gender patterns as police statistics: women (49) outnumber men (29) between 1979 and 1985, and men (41) outnumber women (34) between 1986 and 1995.Footnote ²⁴ The case files typically contain a police report and a statement made by the detainee before a judge, in which the detainees appear to speak relatively freely about their lives and their arrests.Footnote ²⁵ In addition to these case files, this article also draws on interviews conducted by social scientists Sonia Zapata and José Antonio Moya around the end of 1990Footnote ²⁶ and interviews conducted by a government working-group on poverty in 1996 with individuals who had begun begging in the 1970s and 1980s.Footnote ²⁷ Taken together, these documents allow some insight into the phenomenon of begging as well as into its relationship with the law.

Chile's 1874 Penal Code stipulated imprisonment for vagrants – those without a fixed address or way to subsist, those who did not work despite being able to, and those who inspired ‘well-founded suspicion’ – as well as those ‘who beg in public places without the correct licence’. The articles relating to vagrancy and begging were removed in 1998.Footnote ²⁸ Between the end of the nineteenth century and the decriminalisation of begging at the end of the twentieth, descriptions of begging in Santiago reveal two main things. First, despite fluctuations in numbers, particularly in moments of economic crisis, the demographics of the city's beggars remained relatively consistent. Observers emphasised the sick, disabled, aged, unemployed men, children, women, and women who begged with children, noting, too, the presence of ‘professional’ beggars.Footnote ²⁹ Second, they suggest that the policing of begging bore little relationship to the practice of begging.

Begging was largely tolerated by police in the early twentieth century despite the ban.Footnote ³⁰ From the mid-1930s the recently restructured police force took on the floating population, including beggars, as a police problem.Footnote ³¹ Beggars were typically not detained for begging itself, but were likely to have been caught up in broad sweeps of the city as carabineros rounded up ‘suspicious’ individuals and those out late, making little practical distinction between ‘vagrants’, ‘drunks’ and ‘beggars’.Footnote ³² This shift in police practice paralleled criminological debates and positivist efforts to have vagrancy and begging framed not as crimes, but as ‘dangerous’ or ‘antisocial’ activities that would necessarily lead to crime. This idea of ‘dangerousness’ was eventually codified in the Law on Antisocial States (1954, repealed 1994),Footnote ³³ which stipulated additional security measures for a range of socially ‘dangerous’ categories including drunks, drug users, vagrants and beggars.Footnote ³⁴ These security measures were never implemented as the necessary infrastructure was not put in place, but the law consolidated the figure of the criminal beggar as the unproductive, lazy, parasitic worker, and as the potential, even inevitable, violent criminal. Importantly, this figure was implicitly male. Police actions to round up the floating population were still regular in the decades preceding the 1973 military coup,Footnote ³⁵ and arrest rates reflect the police focus on those men they considered idle and suspicious. Impoverished women on the street were not considered a criminal problem for most of the century,Footnote ³⁶ and there was little practical difference between the ‘crimes’ of vagrancy and begging, but between 1979 and 1985 a new distinction emerged, with carabineros detaining more women than men (Figure 1).

Source: Author's elaboration using statistics published in Carabineros de Chile, Anuarios estadísticos (1949–51), Carabineros de Chile, Instituto Nacional de Estadística (National Institute of Statistics, INE), Anuarios de estadísticas policiales (1967, 1977–99), and INE, Anuarios de justicia y policía (1961–82), and INE, Anuarios de justicia (1983–99). Gaps in the data are due to incomplete records or inconsistent reporting.

Figure 1. Arrests for Begging in Santiago (1945–99) by Gender

In the available court ledgers, there is little overlap between the populations of criminal ‘vagrants’ and criminal ‘beggars’ that can be identified by name and gender.Footnote ³⁷ Vagrancy remained a male crime and continued to follow the logic of ‘dangerousness’. Downtown ‘vagrants’ were mostly young men stopped by the Policía de Investigaciones de Chile (Investigations Police, PDI), a separate branch from the carabineros. These young men were then detained if their names appeared – usually in connection, however tenuous, to robbery – in the PDI database.Footnote ³⁸ Begging, however, became a female crime in Santiago.Footnote ³⁹ Hunger had been a feature of daily life since the end of 1973, and the limited accounts suggest downtown begging increased markedly in subsequent years.Footnote ⁴⁰ Nevertheless, such an increase cannot be quantified, and does not explain the timing of the shift in policing or necessarily account for the gender differential in arrest rates. Under military rule, too, there seems to have been little relationship between the phenomenon and the policing of begging. Both, however, were shaped by ideas of gender and family.

Female Begging: Poverty, Shame, Honour and Family

Verónica grew up as one of 12 siblings in the Santiago comuna of Recoleta. She never went to school and worked briefly as a seamstress, before marrying in order to escape her childhood home. However, her new husband soon lost his factory job, and she found herself facing ‘the same poverty’ as before. The couple did not talk to their neighbours or participate in neighbourhood organisations, and in the late 1970s they would go two or three days without eating. Verónica was in her mid-twenties and pregnant when in desperation she asked for milk in a local corner shop, offering to trade some earrings she had found. A shopkeeper gave her milk and some advice: ‘Love, this barrio is not the place to be doing this. Go to Providencia.’ Providencia was a wealthy comuna with the central district on its western border. Recoleta is separated from the northern part of Providencia by the steep Cerro San Cristóbal and although the two comunas are adjoining at the foot of the hill Verónica had never been to Providencia, nor did she know where it was. The following day she caught a bus there and sat in front of a church. She insisted in a 1990 interview with social scientists Zapata and Moya that begging was not dishonourable, but that she did find it humiliating. She kept her begging from her husband out of shame, telling him that she had work. When he found out, he wept and asked her to stop. She refused, but eventually sold things instead. She earned less, but being a street vendor was more dignified, she said.Footnote ⁴¹ Verónica's story reveals some of the shame, but also honour, that shaped poverty in the población and begging in the city centre.

The practice of begging evolved as military rule changed the face of the city. Under Pinochet more parks were built, more cars used the roads, and commercial centres popped up. Parallel to this ‘modernisation’, however, poor families struggled to cobble together livelihoods from emergency work programmes, government benefits, piece work, odd jobs and domestic service.Footnote ⁴² Subsistence was also facilitated by the sharing of information, pooling of resources and collective survival strategies in the poblaciones. Beggars, however, moved outside of this economy of solidarity. Clara Han echoes descriptions of shame in the poblaciones in the 1980s when writing of the distinction between solidarity and begging in Recoleta in the first decade of the twenty-first century. She differentiates between women ‘asking’ (pedir) and ‘begging’ (also pedir). Asking for help within the población leant on familial relationships and friendships, and implied possible – but not necessarily actual – reciprocity. However, as appeals strayed from personal relationships or failed to imply reciprocity, ‘asking’ slid towards ‘begging’, which was shameful and undignified.Footnote ⁴³ Downtown begging displaced this shame. It was often women without access to support networks, or who were suspicious or fearful of collective action, who begged, joining the increasing number of people on the street trying to secure subsistence by selling trinkets, cleaning and guarding parked cars, stealing or collecting rubbish.Footnote ⁴⁴

In their 1991 study, Zapata and Moya identified broad gendered profiles among Santiago's beggars. The men had turned to begging after losing work due to illness or age, and they lived in hostels or on the street. They found begging shameful, but also framed it in terms of freedom: from schedules, from family, from work. For the women, however, begging was a response to ‘not being able to feed their family, either because of the unemployment of the head of the household, alcoholism, pseudo-work, low salaries, etc.’. They had homes, which they were leaving to beg. They did not engage with their neighbours or participate in neighbourhood organisations. They had no interest in politics, and were unable to articulate what politics was. They did, however, have ‘a clear definition of [gender] roles, roles that have been present in society for a long time’: the woman ran the household and the man provided.Footnote ⁴⁵ During field work in the mid-1980s Andrea Rodó and Paulina Saball identified in the poblaciones the same familial identity, which they associated with ‘working-class culture’: stable family groups based in legal marriages, in which women were ‘dueñas de casa par excellence’, and men were assigned the role of ‘head of the household’, whether or not he was the sole or main provider.Footnote ⁴⁶

Rodó and Saball ascribed begging not to the poblaciones, but to the campamentos, where housing and living conditions were more precarious still.Footnote ⁴⁷ Among the poorest and most marginal, they found that family groups were unstable, and women had no real connection to public life, and no collective identity. They rarely participated in solidarity organisations, and, when they did, it was in order to gain an immediate and personal benefit. Gender roles here were not, Rodó and Saball wrote, the ‘normal’ ones. The role of provider was not exclusively masculine, as women usually worked, either intermittently or as the jefa (note that the word is feminine) del hogar.Footnote ⁴⁸ Moreover, while the city's poorest had always relied in part on Church or state handouts, cases of begging, robbery and prostitution had been extreme. Such cases were no longer ‘extreme’, especially among women and children, Rodó and Saball wrote in 1983.Footnote ⁴⁹ Police files suggest, however, that begging was a strategy that straddled the worlds delineated by Rodó and Saball.

The women identified in the available begging case files often came from stable homes and relationships, and they lived predominantly in one of three comunas: La Granja and La Cisterna on the southern edge of the city, and Conchalí to the north.Footnote ⁵⁰ In 1978 these comunas were home to thousands of families living in campamentos, but in this respect they were not unique. Together they accounted for less than 15 per cent of squatting families. Over the following years, a significant number of families ‘eradicated’ from campamentos were settled in La Granja, but very few in Conchalí and La Cisterna.Footnote ⁵¹ The overrepresentation of these comunas in the case files may be a product of the small sample size, but in 1983 Doris Cooper also found that people charged with robbery in 1983 came overwhelmingly from five comunas, including La Granja, Conchalí and La Cisterna. Without providing details, she described these comunas as being among the city's poorest and most marginal.Footnote ⁵² Similarly, a study that considered variables including housing, health, education and municipal spending, ranked La Granja, La Cisterna and Conchalí among the five lowest-scoring comunas in 1982.Footnote ⁵³ An additional factor may have been mobility. Residential comunas La Granja and La Cisterna, while on the periphery, had fairly direct access to the centre of the city via main transport routes. Conchalí in 1983 was described by Dagmar Raczynski and Claudia Serrano as a residential neighbourhood that had grown out of government efforts to formalise squatter settlements in the 1960s. There were, they wrote, very few work opportunities for women within the comuna, and work in domestic service was complicated by difficult access to wealthier suburbs, as Conchalí, like neighbouring Recoleta, was separated from the north-eastern barrios by hills. Access to the centre, however, was relatively easy.Footnote ⁵⁴

Raczynski and Serrano's description of Conchalí appeared in a study on the impact of unemployment on families in the comuna.Footnote ⁵⁵ They cite work surveys by the Instituto Nacional de Estadística (National Institute of Statistics, INE) from 1980 to 1982 to show that around 30 per cent of women declared that they were ‘economically active’, and the vast majority of the rest said they were dedicated to ‘household tasks’.Footnote ⁵⁶ Such surveys did not readily capture the dynamic of female work in the poblaciones, whereby women tended to stop paid work when they married or had children, before sporadically returning to it when the family required additional income. In Conchalí this work – often taking in washing or sewing – was typically in the home.Footnote ⁵⁷ Around the same time, across town in La Florida, Clarisa Hardy found that around one-fifth of households that participated in ollas comunes did not include an adult male and therefore listed a woman as head of the household (jefa del hogar).Footnote ⁵⁸ Moreover, ‘the vast majority’ of women who were not the head of the family ‘dedicate[d] themselves completely to housekeeping and only in a marginal way [did] paid work outside the home’.Footnote ⁵⁹ The categories self-selected by women in work surveys and the designation of the role of jefe del hogar captured gender roles more accurately than they described employment patterns.Footnote ⁶⁰ Women worked – inside and outside the home – but they often linked this work directly to their domestic role.Footnote ⁶¹ However, women's paid work was a source of shame and conflict when women felt they were forced to abandon their home duties, when they assumed the role of provider, or by the public display of poverty associated with domestic work, street vending or seeking help from the Church or ollas comunes.Footnote ⁶² Beyond their own shame, women had to contend with men's shame at not being able to provide, which commonly expressed itself in resignation, isolation, alcoholism, feelings of impotence, and anger.Footnote ⁶³ Women's shame about their work outside the home also turned to frustration and anger inside the home as many blamed their husbands for not working and making them take on the role of provider.Footnote ⁶⁴ Female begging was also shaped by this same ‘working-class’ shame, and the same sense of crisis.

The women in begging case files were on average 30 years old, one-fifth were married, and they typically identified as dueñas de casa in their statements.Footnote ⁶⁵ The women interviewed in 1990 by Zapata and Moya had worked previously, but were not working at the moment they started to beg.Footnote ⁶⁶ They also showed resentment, anger and fear at becoming the jefa de hogar. Zapata and Moya wrote of their female interviewees that ‘when they have to assume roles that were not theirs, culturally speaking, like being the provider for their family group, it produces feeling of rejection and anguish, and for this reason they severely criticise what caused their husbands or partners to abandon their role, whether voluntarily or not, for example: alcoholism, unemployment, etc.’Footnote ⁶⁷ One woman said she resented her husband for not providing and because she had to resort to begging. As he sat silently on the patio, she told him: ‘If you're upset, go and find work […]. That's the way it should be.’Footnote ⁶⁸ This ‘anguish’ paralleled an anxiety related to the abandonment of their motherly role. Most of the women Zapata and Moya spoke to had more than two children, and they were ‘always struggling, on the one hand with the need and urgency to gather together some money to feed their children, and [on the other with the] annoyance and anxiety that comes with abandoning the home, their children, which means not fulfilling their role of mother’.Footnote ⁶⁹ This tension between earning money and abandoning their domestic maternal role was particularly acute among women who begged with their children. These women had their children with them for a variety of reasons: to guard against partners’ suspicion that they were having an affair, or because there was no one to leave them with, for example.Footnote ⁷⁰ Women recognised that begging with their children risked them falling in with sex workers, drug users or thieves because of being on the downtown streets, but they also saw these same threats on the streets of their poblaciones: ‘the people in the población are not good people’, said one woman when explaining the dangers in her neighbourhood.Footnote ⁷¹

Once downtown, women who begged often found a sense of calm and respite from their troubled home lives.Footnote ⁷² Some also found a sense of honour in holding their family together or feeding their children. In her 1990 interview, Verónica conceded the humiliation of begging, while maintaining that it was not dishonourable,Footnote ⁷³ and Victoria from La Cisterna insisted on her honour before a judge in the mid-1980s. Twenty-nine-year-old Victoria was repeatedly detained on the same downtown corner and admitted in court to begging.Footnote ⁷⁴ In July 1985 she told the judge: ‘I do it periodically in order to subsist because I am a single mother and looking after my children does not allow me to work.’Footnote ⁷⁵ In an earlier police report from April she was more defiant: ‘It's true that I was begging in order to feed my children, because I have four and no way to feed them, and it would be worse if I went around stealing or committing some other type of crime. I am not ashamed of what I do, because I am honourable [honrada].’Footnote ⁷⁶ Victoria's testimonies anticipated Javier Martínez and Margarita Palacios’ 1996 study of the ‘culture of decency’ in the poblaciones. ‘Decency’, they argued, was based in the belief that it was possible to overcome the degrading effects of poverty. It was underpinned by a moral code of honour (honradez) that valued ‘caring for the property you had acquired by virtue of your own effort or by gracious concession, […] and, by consequence, the rejection of criminal appropriation of goods’.Footnote ⁷⁷ For some on the street, therefore, it seems begging was not a ‘perverse’ or ‘deviant’ activity, but a response – at once humiliating and honourable – to hunger and deprivation. While social scientists at the time did not consider begging as work, lumping it in with prostitution and theft, Victoria, for example, contrasted her begging with such ‘crimes’.Footnote ⁷⁸ Moreover, the practice of female begging was often shaped by the same fears and sense of shame as informal work. In fact, begging proved in many cases a gateway to informal work as women stayed on the street, switching to street commerce. While these women framed their begging as a struggle on behalf of their families and their children, they were confronted with the carabineros’ effort to protect the regime's vision of the family.

Policing Begging: Family, the Nation and Moral Decay

In 1984 retired carabinero Héctor Jacob Sánchez wrote a ‘frank’ analysis of the institution he cherished, taking issue, in particular, with the practice of detaining people for sospecha. ‘In recent times’, he wrote,

Under military rule, sospecha became the tool the carabineros used to arbitrarily detain hundreds of thousands of poor Chileans, usually young men. These arrests occupied more than half of police time, Sánchez wrote. Detainees were held overnight and these ‘“dangerous subjects” […], these poor citizens, wretched even, whose only sin, if you can call it that, was to be poor’, were removed from the cells in the morning. When writing about raids in the poblaciones, Sánchez made brief reference to the political repression of the time, but his interpretation of the general dynamic was more detailed and more prosaic: ‘It all […] has an absurd explanation. Carabineros have to show that they did “effective police work” during their shift, so that the respective chief does not run the risk of receiving negative evaluations of his work.’Footnote ⁷⁹ It may be that, like sospecha, the policing of begging was also impacted by unofficial bureaucratic quotas. It seems likely, too, that the policing of begging was ‘revived’ as part of the junta's efforts to eradicate common crime and hide signs of extreme poverty:Footnote ⁸⁰ people caught up in sweeps were processed as beggars, members of the Romani population were routinely detained for begging, and some detainees described arrests that resembled sospecha or identification checks.Footnote ⁸¹ However, in Santiago from the late 1970s the begging laws were applied mostly to poor women.

Around the time of Sánchez’ observations, 27-year-old Morelia, a married ‘dueña de casa’ from La Pintana, was detained three times for begging. Her son was removed from her in 1984 while she was held in the COF.Footnote ⁸² In 1985, she acknowledged that on previous occasions she had ‘had to beg to feed her children’. The police report does not mention the children, but Morelia told the judge that she did not know what had become of them since her arrest: ‘they've been alone since yesterday, and today I was meant to take one of them to the doctor […] but because I was detained I was not able to fulfil my obligations’.Footnote ⁸³ Later that year, she was arrested again and spent a night in the COF. She denied being a beggar, insisting that she had been arrested as an illegal street vendor.Footnote ⁸⁴ Morelia's experience is representative: women were usually held in the COF for between one and three nights to await an appearance before a judge, and if they were arrested with children, the children were typically sent to the CNN for the duration of their mother's detention. Neither the formal legal criteria for criminal begging, nor the now anachronistic references to begging licences that appeared in police files, seem to have driven these arrests. Instead, they are the product of a shift in police practice from tending to ‘irregular children’ to criminalising their ‘irresponsible’ mothers.

Morelia's 1984 case file cited Law 16,618 when justifying sending her child to the CNN. This 1967 Minors’ Law created police units with specialised personnel dedicated to ‘collecting minors in irregular situations in need of assistance and protection’, and ‘surveillance of sites known to be centres of corruption of minors’.Footnote ⁸⁵ The same law also created the Consejo Nacional de Menores (National Minors’ Council), which was charged with preventing child ‘irregularity’ and the elimination of ‘vagrancy and begging among minors’, and defined parents who ‘allow their children to devote themselves to vagrancy or begging […], whether in an honest manner or as a professional pretext’, as morally incompetent. The passage of the Minors’ Law paralleled a reform process within the carabineros that gave rise to the Women's Brigade, the Department of Minors and the ‘Child and Fatherland’ Foundation (Fundación Niño y Patria), which tended to vagrant children.Footnote ⁸⁶ Attempts in the previous decades to eradicate child vagrancy had had little success, leading to a shift in police policy in the early 1960s from repression to prevention:Footnote ⁸⁷carabineros continued to round up children but no longer treated them as criminals.Footnote ⁸⁸

The 1960s ‘decriminalisation’ of ‘irregularity’ featured heavily in the first edition of the police magazine Niño y Patria published by the Department of Minors in 1975. The editors cited at length comments made by Captain Santiago Silva of the 2nd Minors’ Commissary in 1967 about vagrant children begging downtown, encouraged by their parents. Once they outgrew begging, Silva said, echoing the thinking at the time on ‘dangerousness’, girls turned to prostitution and boys ‘almost inevitably to crime’.Footnote ⁸⁹ In the same magazine, the head of the Women's Commissary, Captain Carmen Ferreira, described how some of the training courses for female officers were delivered by the Department of Minors because female officers would have the important mission of protecting the city's ‘irregular’ children.Footnote ⁹⁰ This maternal role was an extension of the officers’ ‘sacred obligations’ as women, as noted in Colonel Pedro L. Reveco Gutiérrez’ speech at the inauguration ceremony for female officers that was reproduced in the same issue. ‘From humanity's first steps across the face of the earth’, Reveco told newly-minted officers,

From the late 1970s, therefore, it was the city's Minors’ and Women's Commissaries that assumed responsibility for children on the streets.

The same history of carabinero engagement with poor children recounted in Niño y Patria in early 1975 had also been expressed in April 1974, when the military junta heard a submission from retired police officer and former member of the National Minors’ Council, ‘Coronel señor Vicuña’. Vicuña made the case for greater funding to address the issue of ‘minors in irregular situations’, understood as minors without secure access to ‘culture, education, health services, and even adequate food’.Footnote ⁹² In subsequent years, the regime implemented programmes directed at helping ‘limited’, ‘crippled’, malnourished children, including the carabineros’ Corporación de Ayuda al Menor (Corporation for the Care of Minors), created in 1976 to ‘protect’ children in ‘irregular situations’.Footnote ⁹³ By 1978, however, the regime recognised that these policies had not worked, and with the Justice Ministry's National Plan for Minors 1978–82 it sought to overhaul legislation relating to minors in irregular situations. The plan attributed ‘irregularity’ to a combination of economic, environmental, genetic and psychological factors, and it proposed measures, including economic subsidies, day care for working parents, adoption, foster families and the institutionalisation of children removed from their families. It also envisaged a preventive role for the carabineros via youth clubs run by the Department of Minors.Footnote ⁹⁴

A catalyst for the renewed focus on ‘irregularity’ was the lead up to UNESCO's 1979 International Year of the Child. The National Plan for Minors acknowledged the importance of the upcoming celebration,Footnote ⁹⁵ the magazine Niño y Patria celebrated the International Year of the Child as an opportunity to refocus on the issue of irregularityFootnote ⁹⁶ and the anniversary also led to increased press coverage of poor, marginalised and abandoned children.Footnote ⁹⁷ Adult begging was not covered in the press under military rule, but newspapers regularly addressed childhood vagrancy and begging, presenting children as beings to be protected: if families were not going to protect children, the state – via the carabineros – should assume responsibility and remove them from the ‘bad life’.Footnote ⁹⁸ This type of coverage increased from around 1979, and that year, for example, the newspaper La Tercera de La Hora wrote that ‘in general [child vagrants and beggars] are children that have lost the notion of home’. ‘There is no respect’, it continued, ‘because the father goes out to drink and the mother, who has lost her vision of family, is happy to have the children leave the home’.Footnote ⁹⁹ The same year, the military regime replaced the National Minors’ Council with the Servicio Nacional de Menores (National Minors’ Service, SENAME).Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The creation of SENAME was based on the idea that the family was the ‘fundamental nucleus of society’ and that it was the responsibility of the state to defend and strengthen it, particularly in cases where parents or guardians were unable to provide opportunities for the normal development of minors.Footnote ¹⁰¹ The policy, press and police focus on childhood irregularity was part of the regime's broader ‘defence of the Chilean family’ as a way to protect the nation.

In addition to the ‘traditional’ police concern about idleness and crime, the military regime began to link together irregularity, criminality and Marxism. In his 1974 meeting with the junta, Vicuña recounted the de-criminalisation of childhood vagrancy, echoing Captain Silva's 1967 comments on the link between irregularity and criminality. Vicuña, however, also added that ‘the irregular child is a breeding ground for Marxism’.Footnote ¹⁰² Under military rule, the antisocial causality of positivist criminology was augmented by the junta's Cold War paradigm. The family was the ‘basic nucleus’ of society and its health was linked directly to that of the nation.Footnote ¹⁰³ In this context, expressions of poverty were seen not only as pathways to criminality but also as threats to national security and symptoms of moral decay and family breakdown. The junta described this connection in its 1978 Population Policy, part of its National Development Plan (1978–83).Footnote ¹⁰⁴ The policy linked family planning, opposition to abortion, population growth and ‘responsible’ parenting to national security, and it insisted on the ‘moral strength’ of the nation, that is, a shared set of family values:

Cracks in this ‘moral foundation’ represented ‘fertile ground’ for ‘[f]oreign and aggressive social systems’ to ‘penetrate’ Chile. It was the task of ‘responsible parents’ to transmit not only life, but also ‘moral, cultural and spiritual values’. The policy went on to insist that ‘[t]he incentives for any kind of child degradation, such as begging, vagrancy, improper child labor, and corruption, must be removed’.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

The Population Policy reflected the increasing effort in the late 1970s to protect the Chilean family not just from Marxism, but also from ‘drug addiction, graft, pornography, and alcoholism’.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ The regime declared the ‘war’ against the Communist internal enemy to be over at the end of the decade, identifying a range of new threats. Protecting families from these threats became, according to Gwynn Thomas, ‘a kind of spiritual calling that justified all means employed by the government’.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ It was a ‘spiritual calling’ in which ‘deviant’ mothers, in particular, were held responsible for the moral failing of the family. The military regime celebrated women who conformed to heteronormative gender roles, maintained ‘moral’ homes and raised children in agreement with its conservative ideology; the inverse of this celebration, however, was the condemnation of women who did not conform to these roles. The dictatorship blamed poor people for their poverty, and framed crime and expressions of that poverty as the direct result of the breakdown of the family unit inside the poblaciones. In this context, women who failed to maintain a proper home, failed to discipline their husbands and could not control their children were held responsible for producing cracks in the moral foundation of the nation.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Whereas blame for female destitution had once been laid at the feet of their unemployed husbands, women were now at once culpable for their families’ poverty and for threats to national security.

Police publications in the late 1970s reinforced the idea of the family as ‘the basic nucleus’ of society and that family disintegration was at the root of sociocultural ‘maladjustment’ and ‘helplessness’, which in turn led to child vagrancy, and subsequently, criminality.Footnote ¹¹⁰ It was at this moment, as the defence of the family consolidated and political attention turned to children on the street, that the police units responsible for addressing childhood vagrancy began arresting women for begging. While the Minors’ Commissaries stopped detaining child beggars,Footnote ¹¹¹ they were responsible for the spike in arrests of women for begging. Arrest statistics show that they policed begging more rigorously than did other prefectures, and that, in the early and mid-1980s, and in contrast to other prefectures, they policed begging more rigorously than vagrancy.Footnote ¹¹² In available case files from this time, more than half of female cases were the responsibility of Women's or Minors’ Commissaries, involved women detained with children, or involved women previously detained with children and known to police. From mid-1987, however, personnel from Women's and Minors’ Commissaries no longer appear in the available police files as arresting officers. Instead, the responsible units are predominantly the 1st and 4th Commissaries: the same units as those responsible for the majority of arrests of male ‘beggars’ throughout the entire period.Footnote ¹¹³ The profiles of the male and female criminal ‘beggar’, and the police units targeting them, suggest that from 1979 the commissaries charged with protecting the city's ‘irregular’ children turned their attention to rounding up ‘irresponsible mothers’. Holding women in the COF and removal of children appears, too, to have been, at least in part, punitive and intended as a deterrent.

Detention in the COF suggests a punitive motive because the carabineros’ 1982 Basic Manual of Police Procedures actually prescribed provisional release in begging cases.Footnote ¹¹⁴ In the available case files, women were provisionally released more often than men, but never in cases where arresting officers are identified as being from a Women's or a Minors’ Commissary. Women in cases where children were not mentioned averaged less than one night in the COF, whereas women in cases where children were involved were typically held for one, two or three nights. In June 1987, for example, Erna (34) was held for three nights while her children – a three- and a four-year-old – were sent to the 34th Minors’ Commissary as a ‘protective measure’.Footnote ¹¹⁵ The COF had a maternity section to house women who gave birth in prison with their babies, and a day care facility, where the infants of prisoners and prison employees played together.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Moreover, in 1983, the Good Shepherd Congregation, which ran the COF, had entered into an agreement with SENAME to house ‘minors in irregular situations’ in the COF.Footnote ¹¹⁷ However, the carabineros sent children of female ‘beggars’ to the CNN, a protocol that suggests they were ‘protecting’ these minors from what they considered to be ‘incompetent’ and ‘irresponsible’ mothers.

Beyond being a ‘protective measure’, child removal resonated among women as a strong disincentive to beg. In a 1996 interview, for example, Georgina recounts how in the years following the coup, her husband lost his job and they had nothing to eat. One day her neighbour suggested they beg:

The attention she and her children received did not drive them from the street, but it did prompt a shift away from begging. Georgina began to look after parked cars at a cinema two blocks away for tips. It was work she and her children were still doing in 1996.Footnote ¹¹⁹ In July 1979 Jovina also cited the removal of her son as the catalyst for her transition to street vending.Footnote ¹²⁰ Over the subsequent years she testified to selling towels, crispbreads and coin purses.Footnote ¹²¹ A 1985 statement also confirms she was on the street with her seven-year-old son, presumably the same child as the one removed from her in 1979.Footnote ¹²² Jovina's wariness of the police was linked to begging and the risk of her son being taken from her. It was a specific and contextual fear.

Fear, like Jovina's, was common under military rule but fear had different causes. To explain their interviewees’ lack of interest in politics, Zapata and Moya noted not only their low level of education but also how political repression had sown fear and made political engagement taboo and dangerous. These women feared police, but ‘above all soldiers’, and they tended to link this fear to ‘being political’, which for them meant the violence of the coup, disappearances and raids in the poblaciones.Footnote ¹²³ However, fear of the policing of ‘apolitical’ activities in the city centre was different. Street vendors in the 1980s, for example, came from the poblaciones and also feared arrest, but they did not fear the types of abuses associated with political repression. Amid a police crackdown on street commerce, vendors spoke of suffering physical abuse, others insisted they were treated well, and many harboured no ill-will, insisting officers were just doing their jobs. What they feared was spending a night in the commissary, the confiscation of their wares and the associated loss of income, and the fine they would have to pay.Footnote ¹²⁴ Similarly, women like Jovina and Georgina did not fear the type of political repression or physical abuses that occurred in the poblaciónes; they feared the police as they might take their children from them.Footnote ¹²⁵ It is clear, too, that they assumed their begging or history of begging was related to their arrests, as they switched to street commerce in large part to reduce the risk of detention.

Interviews and judicial files suggest female beggars transitioned to street commerce not only because it was a more dignified option, but also to escape the police harassment associated with begging. At the time of Jovina's transition, police targeted illegal street commerce, and, as permits were not granted, essentially all commerce was illegal.Footnote ¹²⁶ This repression was not new, but became more rigorous from the mid-1980s as the city's municipalities used the police force to clear the streets and pavements.Footnote ¹²⁷ As part of this crackdown carabineros focussed on men. In the early 1990s vendor Isabel, who had started selling in the 1980s, told her interviewer that:

Isabel's observation aligns with the ‘traditional’ concern with male ‘idleness’, and it is also reflected in the statistics. A 1988 study of street vendors – the majority of whom started after 1981 – found that women represented approximately one-third of the city's vendors.Footnote ¹²⁹ Without quantifying the motivations of these women, the authors cite above all the need of dueñas de casa to leave the house to work.Footnote ¹³⁰ ‘Illegal street commerce’ appears as a category in published police statistics from 1989, and from that year until 1998 men were consistently detained more often than women, at a rate of about six to one.Footnote ¹³¹ The shift from begging towards street commerce evident in the case files also aligns with the explanation given by carabinero General Alfredo Núñez for the drop in arrests for begging in the late 1980s. In 1991, Núñez described to a Chamber of Deputies commission the steep reduction in arrests of adults for begging between 1988 and 1989, and explained that the ‘very complex phenomenon’ of street vending had obscured the practice of begging or had incorporated beggars.Footnote ¹³² This lack of visibility seems to have brought to an end the new policing of begging, and in terms of gender differentiation and police unit participation, criminal begging arrests began to again resemble arrests for ‘criminal’ vagrancy.