Riding Solo in Santiago

Riding Solo in Santiago

Aqib’s Notes on Chile (Santiago, Concepción, Antofagasta, and Atacama)

Santiago

Kem is the best soda in the world. I first had this glorious artificially-flavored pineapple beverage in Chile, during my ten day trip throughout the country.

I am not sure what the median American stereotype is of Chile, but feel free to throw it in the bin. My knowledge was confined to Chilean sea bass and the Irish-Chilean liberator Bernardo O’Higgins. I was expecting a loud, bumbling, boisterous country, likely due to the stereotypes we have of Mexico and Brazilian Carnival.

But when I landed in Santiago, Chile’s capital and largest city, at the crack of dawn, I was struck by its quiet. The sound kept at a low murmur no matter where I went. The public spaces were clean and safe, the roads well maintained, the buses and subway quick and omnipresent — all the signs of good governance were present. I began to ask myself why Chile was not more prosperous or more relevant on the global stage, instead relegated as an afterthought of a developing country to most people.

Because I am a ChinaTalk writer, I traveled to Chile and saw this multi-faceted, complex country mainly through the lens of China. Although that lens of course involved reducing the country to its geopolitics, it wasn’t hard to see China everywhere I went.

Unbeknownst to me, I had arrived in Chile at a very special time. I touched ground right after September 11th, a date of great tumult for both the U.S. and Chile. On that date in 1973, General Augusto Pinochet led the Chilean Army to overthrow Salvador Allende, Chile’s democratically elected socialist president. General Pinochet then ruled the country under a military dictatorship until the transition back to democracy in 1990.

When I walked to the presidential palace, the statue of the deposed Allende stood tall, the adornments of the previous day still lying at his feet. The anniversary of the coup is memorialized every year, and this was the first year in which the country’s leader, now President José Antonio Kast, did not attend the remembrance. September 11th is always a day of high emotions and polarization for Chileans, and in witnessing the day’s remnants I began to see my own country in a new light.¹

As Americans, we consistently see our country as “the good guy” and China as “the bad guy.” After all, we are a diverse, free, and democratic society, whereas China is authoritarian and non-inclusive. But for many Chileans, America is the country that aided the overthrow of Allende in 1973. The CIA assisted the conspirators and helped kidnap officers trying to defend Chilean democracy. How, then, can we so easily ask Chileans to trust us economically and politically? Especially when China, their largest trading partner, has provided them with so many modern-day goods, including the electric buses that roam the capital?

This conflict was reinforced when I visited La Chascona, the Santiago home of Pablo Neruda, Chile’s most celebrated poet. The home was ransacked and partially destroyed in the wake of the coup, as Neruda was a communist and close advisor to Allende. The U.S. was complicit in the vandalization of the home of Chile’s most beloved author, twelve days before his death on September 23, 1973.²

I kept running into Chinese people no matter where I went. Given I don’t speak Spanish and most people there don’t speak English, I resorted to using Chinese. When I was lost or needed information, I could usually spot a Chinese person, conspicuous among the crowds, and ask them for help.

There was at least one family of Chinese tourists at every landmark. I found a boba shop run by immigrants from Zhejiang. On the subway, I chatted with delegates from Taiwan’s de facto embassy, who boasted that their nation has nine times the economic output of Chile despite having the same population and no natural resources. At the Museum of Pre-Columbian Art, the Fuzhounese I met considered the bowls and snuff trays of the indigenous people crude and rudimentary compared to the artisan crafts China was putting out at the time. They were wholly unimpressed.

When I was looking for an address, I found two Chinese workers on their smoke break to help me out. They were dispatched from their company to work on Chile’s electrical grid; Chinese state-owned enterprises (SOEs) control over half of Chile’s electricity distribution and transmission infrastructure, and China has played a major role in building out Chile’s hospitals, roads, railways, and telecommunications infrastructure. The three of us bantered about our two countries, religion, Taiwan, and AI. One said he was a devotee of the money religion (「我是money教徒」) and thought Claude was a Chinese AI model. We all agreed Santiago was pretty, though the food left much to be desired.

On my last full day in the city, I sampled one of Chile’s national dishes, the completo italiano. It was an abomination: a hot dog with tomatoes, avocado, and mayo. Although Kem is king, Chilean food was not exactly for my palate.³

When I went to bed at night in Santiago, I would crack open the windows to attract some balmy Andean breeze. But on my last night, I chuckled in bed because despite expecting another silent Santiago evening, I could hear my hotel neighbor yelling on his phone in Chinese.

Concepción

After Santiago, I took a day trip to the Southern city of Concepción, Chile’s second largest city. Santiaguinos hate Santiago, but residents of Concepción (Penquistas) love Concepción. It is quieter than the already-quiet Santiago, boasts a vibrant university scene, and has a beautiful view of the Pacific.

I went to Concepción to visit a rare earth mine by the company Aclara, and my favorite moment with them was touring the mine with young geologists. Besides garnet and regolite, we talked about the precarious state of politics in Chile. They talked of Kast’s absence from the September 11th ceremonies and ruminated on the increasing polarization of Chilean politics. Although oscillations between center-left and center-right ruling figures occur regularly in the country, the election of first Boric and then Kast were forays into more extreme ends of each spectrum. Boric, the youngest president in Chilean history, was a student protest leader and initially a Communist ally, while Kast is an unabashed admirer of Pinochet who campaigned on restricting illegal immigration.

A great deal of frustration also remains from the failed constitutional revisions attempted in 2023. Although the Social Outburst in 2019 united much of Chile, with over a million taking to the streets of Santiago to protest unemployment, rising costs, and inequality, the movement ultimately petered out. That frustration is still sitting around somewhere while Chile remains with its Pinochet-era constitution.

Chile, one of the only centralized nations on the continent, has been able to achieve relative economic prosperity and security. But now, many regions feel disenfranchised, given that all decisions of consequence are ultimately made in Santiago. The country was to be more federalized in the 2023 Constitution, which died in referendum. The country remains comprised of sixteen regions, and they lack any real financial or governmental power. As one Chilean told me, “The regions administer, but they do not govern.”

Part of my tour of the company took me to the abandoned Huachipato steel plant, which revived the interwoven threads between China and Chile. Huachipato was established in 1947 as Chile’s national steel company and funded partially by the U.S. EXIM Bank. The plant was the industrial heart of Concepción, employing thousands of workers, and the parent company underwent privatization in the Pinochet era.

Starting in the early 2000s, however, revenue began to slump. Steel was now being produced in greater quantities and at a cheaper cost in the Yangtze River Delta and Northern China. The company began to hemorrhage money every year, and the plant was eventually shut down in 2024. Its representatives explicitly cited Chinese overcapacity and production as the reason.⁴

The collapse of Huachipato was the collapse of an icon. Thousands of workers were laid off. CD Huachipato, the soccer club founded by the steel plant, is the city’s pride. They are the first and only team in Southern Chile to win the league’s national championship, most recently in 2023, the year before the collapse of the plant. The club, long since transferred to different ownership, continues to operate, though it still plays at the stadium adjacent to the abandoned factory.

I went to Huachipato because Aclara is piloting its rare earth metallization process within the abandoned Huachipato facilities. Rows and rows of offices sit empty, gigantic machinery rusts and slowly becomes defunct, and in a tiny green building sits Aclara’s project. If successful, Aclara will begin to refine and metallize rare earths in a full-scale plant in Louisiana, as an emerging player in the effort to bring the rare earths supply chain outside of China.

In the steel plant that was killed by Chinese overcapacity sits a tiny green speck of a company, now striving to become independent from the Chinese economic sphere. Some of the former Huachapito steelworkers will find new work at Aclara, back in their old company town.

The mining industry, though Chile’s largest economic sector, is new to the region, as the mines have traditionally been a Northern phenomenon. Especially after the collapse of the steel plant, Concepción’s economy has been predicated on forestry and the pulp industry. Perhaps the rare earth mine will give the city another way to reinvent itself, diversify its economy, and grow.

Antofagasta

From Concepción, my journey took me back up to the North, past Santiago, to the port city of Antofagasta. I was in proper mining country. Though a seaside city, Antofagasta is North enough to be in the desert region of Chile; the land extended barren and dry for miles on end, and what, if anything, interrupted the nothingness was the occasional mining operation or refinery. In the North lives Chile’s gargantuan copper industry — the country is responsible for nearly a quarter of the world’s copper, over half of which is exported to China. The North is dotted with innumerable mining towns where people live solely to extract copper or sell goods to the people extracting the copper. Workers usually live in company dorms and eat at the company canteen for shifts lasting seven days, before being bused back to their respective hometowns for a seven day rest.

Although copper is king in Antofagasta, I was here for another sort of resource extraction: lithium. Chile is also responsible for nearly a quarter of the world’s lithium, to be used in lithium batteries powering electric vehicles and smartphones or in medicating those with psychiatric disorders. I visited Novandino, a lithium company formed last year with the state becoming involved in the company SQM’s operations.⁵

In Antofagasta, one can see China’s presence both in what is and is not there. On the one hand, the great economic boon that China provides is visible. Novandino’s biggest market, by a large margin, is China, given all the lithium batteries used in EVs and consumer electronics. The company has a joint venture with Zhongshan Dixin Chemical in Sichuan to refine its lithium sulphate.⁶ The economic ties are deep, and without China as a major buyer, countless Chileans would be poorer and without work.

What is not in Chile, however, is an economy moving up the value chain, though not for lack of trying. In lithium, for example, Chile has attempted to move up from just producing lithium chloride and lithium carbonate into the actual lithium batteries. Plants were planned in Antofagasta as a joint venture with BYD and Tsingshan, yet neither plant broke earth after the collapse in lithium prices rendered both untenable.

This is the invisible market presence of China in Chile. On one hand, China provides economic value in buying raw resources. On the other, developing countries cannot do much to move beyond sole resource extraction, as China has broken the flying geese paradigm. Normally, countries move beyond lower value markets, kicking them to developing countries, and secures a position in a higher value market (ex. AI models, smartphones, services). China has both begun to rise in the higher value market while never relinquishing control over the lower value market.

I think this is what is most different about the anti-China narrative between the U.S. and other countries. For the U.S., China is much more tangible; we can see that we once had factories and industrial capacity, and it left for China. For developing countries like Chile, they do not have such a visible footprint: they were never able to build the factories in the first place or move up the value chain because China already occupies the space. Many of the Chilean businessmen that I’ve talked to were frustrated with this dynamic. They want their country to be wealthy, and move from copper to copper wires or lithium to lithium batteries and beyond, but they cannot.

Now, Chile’s economy is stagnating. The GDP has fallen from last year to this year. And the country, wanting to diversify beyond mining, is left with few opportunities to do so. The general hope I’ve gathered was to leverage resource wealth to catapult Chile into a service economy. Instead of going from copper to copper wires, they want to take copper money and turn into AI and financial services; I heard the goal stated more than once as becoming “the Singapore of Latin America.”

San Pedro de Atacama

After Antofagasta, I took a four hour drive deeper into the desert to San Pedro de Atacama. Along the drive, I witnessed the majesty of the Cerro Dominador solar plant. This beautiful behemoth is a 210 MW solar power and photovoltaic plant, which combines solar panels with hundreds of mirrors channeling the Sun’s beams into a tower of Mordor. Over 97% of Chilean solar panels are imported from China.

After my visit to the lithium salt flats in San Pedro, I was able to relax in the tourist town of San Pedro and keep contemplation of geopolitics to a minimum. I don’t know whether my timing in San Pedro was auspicious or inauspicious, but it was definitely something. The Atacaman desert is the driest desert in the world; it is fifty times drier than Death Valley. The region receives an average rainfall of 0.6 inches per year. But when I was there, it rained heavily and reached 0.6 inches within two days.

I don’t know whether my timing in San Pedro was auspicious or inauspicious, but it was definitely something. The Atacaman desert is the driest desert in the world; it is fifty times drier than Death Valley.⁷ The region receives an average rainfall of 0.6 inches per year. But when I was there, it rained heavily and reached 0.6 inches within two days.

The rain coincided with Fiestas Patrias, the celebration of Chilean independence. It is the country’s biggest holiday: one friend told me that Fiestas Patrias was the only time of the year he could leave home on a Friday, come back on a Sunday, and his wife would not ask any questions. It is a time to don the Chilean flag, eat barbecue, get drunk, and dance. When I walked along the main street after the rain, locals were dancing to celebrate the holiday; the old and young danced together, the boys strapped in their boots and spurs. It was lovely.

Besides that, I went stargazing, swam in salt ponds 8,000 feet above sea level, witnessed geysers erupt, found a Chilean recluse spider in my room, saw wild flamingos, and ate guanaco. Such is the life of a ChinaTalk analyst.

I don’t pretend to be an expert on Chile after my trip, but I think I have returned with a better understanding than my superficial stereotype from the beginning. I hope for readers that I can perhaps present a better (though still incomplete) understanding of Chile and its inhabitants, so permit the blind to lead the blind if you are intending to travel to Chile:

You must know, Chilean Spanish is littered with the words po and weon; you will never know what they mean. If you ask for a Coke, you are likely to get a Coke Zero. Chileans are a bit shy or stiff, especially after twelve hour work shifts, but a few terremottos can change that. Oh yes, on their Independence Day, they drink terremottos, a concoction of white wine and pineapple ice cream that is named after the country’s most hazardous natural disasters.⁸ If you ask for milk with your tea, they will look at you as if you are crazy. Everyone is at most two degrees of separation from a person working in a copper mine. And when you go to Chile, you must remember: drink a Kem.⁹

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© 2026 Jordan Schneider
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