In 1965, Chile launched a bold new policy which became infamous for officials’ use of white chalk to mark out plots of land for Santiago’s poorest families. Half a century on, did it really help those in need – or simply deepen social divisions?

Castor Castro was 14 years old when his family moved to La Faena, a residential project in east Santiago, in 1967. “There was nothing here, just bare earth,” Castro recalls, sitting in the house his parents built back then. “Each family was given a plot, and they had to get on with it and build. There was no electricity supply and no plumbing – just land.”

Despite this rudimentary introduction to La Faena, Castor and his family were, in many ways, lucky. They were beneficiaries of “Operación Sitio” (Operation Site), a bold housing policy rolled out by the Chilean state in the late 1960s.

Up until then, Chilean governments had tackled the country’s housing shortfall through conventional methods; they built low-rise, concrete residential blocks for scores of families. But this wasn’t enough to meet the demand, and Chile’s poorest simply could not afford them.

So the government switched tack. Instead of building houses, it would sell land. With Operation Site, it offered small plots on the outskirts of Santiago at knockdown prices to poor families, who paid for them in monthly instalments – after which the families, for the most part, had to fend for themselves. This marked a turning point in the urban development of the Chilean capital.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Chile’s president Eduardo Frei Montalva meets Santiago construction workers in the mid-1960s. Photograph: Museo Eduardo Frei Montalva

The plan did not prove popular with everyone, however. According to its champions, Operation Site was the only realistic way to tackle the country’s growing housing crisis. For its critics, it was hasty and ill-conceived.

The scheme was dubbed “Operation Chalk” because, in some cases, officials from the housing ministry would turn up on a stone-strewn stretch of land, divide it into rectangles using white chalk, then simply assign each rectangle to a family, who were given very little else. To many people, the initiative appeared demeaning – an insult to the poor.

The barest bones

Chile’s housing crisis of the 1960s had been brewing for some time. For decades, people had been moving from the countryside to Santiago in search of a better life – a process exacerbated by the collapse of the nitrate mining industry in the north, which forced miners and their families south in search of work.

Between 1940 and 1960, the population of Santiago doubled to nearly two million. Poor families, desperate for a place to live, started to occupy land illegally.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Locations of Operación Sitio around Santiago. Courtesy: University of Chile archive

Successive governments tried to stem the crisis by building more houses, but demand constantly outstripped supply. According to the state’s housing corporation, Chile faced a housing deficit of 170,000 units in 1953; by 1962, it topped 300,000. Something had to be done.

In 1964, a Christian Democrat government came to power, inspired in part by the second Vatican council, which had opened in Rome two years earlier with the pledge to bring the Church closer to the people. In a bid to help the poorest in society, Eduardo Frei Montalva, Chile’s new president, vowed to build 360,000 new homes by the end of the decade.

The following year, the government established Chile’s first Ministry of Housing and launched Operation Site. To start with, the state endeavoured not only to provide people with land but also a modest wooden house with electricity and running water. But as time went on and demand grew, it offered only land. The residents would have to build their own houses.

Still, the benefits of the system were clear: instead of building a few decent homes for a handful of fortunate families, the government could, relatively quickly and cheaply, provide thousands of families with a patch of land and the barest bones of a home.

The implementation of Operation Site was patchy: “In the worst cases, the authorities supplied little more than a plot of land, a gravel path and a link to the electricity grid,” says Francisco Quintana, an architect at Santiago’s Pontifical Catholic University. “In some cases they went further, building a kitchen and bathroom with plumbing. The residents then had to build the rest of the house around it. And in the best cases, the authorities provided not only the land but also a 30 metres squared wooden house.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Celso Oviedo and his father Haroldo, outside the house the 86-year-old built and still lives in. Photograph: Gideon Long/The Guardian

Celso Oviedo, another early resident of La Faena, was eight when his family moved to the area in late 1966. His 86-year-old father, Haroldo, still lives in the modest but sturdy house they built on their plot: “Some families didn’t even have a house, especially in the early months,” Celso recalls. “They lived under plastic sheeting or in makeshift tents.”

And yet, at its best, “Operation Chalk” was transformative. Instead of occupying land illegally with no access to even the most basic of services, poor families could, for a relatively small fee, obtain tenure of their land. They could build without fear of eviction. They had a genuine chance of owning a home.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Newly constructed houses, built as a result of Operation Site, in 1965. Courtesy: National Museum of Fine Arts, Santiago

The project also encouraged self-help: faced with the challenge of building a house, residents learnt carpentry and plumbing skills which they passed on to their neighbours. Some set up cornershops selling window frames, sewage pipes and wood panels. “Everyone helped each other,” Castro recalls. “So-and-so would help with the roof, someone else would be good at plumbing.”

Frei was not the first Chilean president to encourage poor people to buy land and build their own houses; his predecessors Carlos Ibáñez del Campo and Jorge Alessandri Rodríguez had done something similar. The difference under Frei was that the policy went mainstream. During his six years in power, the state quadrupled the rate of land allocation, providing 380,000 of Chile’s poorest people with 71,000 plots of land.

But in the years that followed, Operation Site was abandoned. As the 60s became the 70s, the mood changed: “These were years of real social ferment in Chile,” says Emanuel Giannotti, professor of architecture at the University of Chile. “People staged big, illegal land occupations and demanded more from the state. Operation Site started to unravel.”

With revolution in the air, the socialist government of Salvador Allende won the election of 1970, and his administration viewed Operation Site – the poor being asked to build their own houses – as yet another example of class exploitation.

Then came 1973 and the military coup that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power. Chile lurched to the right and the state was suddenly in no mood to sell land cheaply to the poor. Pinochet’s soldiers evicted squatters from valuable land in central Santiago and moved them out to the peripheries. Private construction firms moved in, bought up the land and developed it commercially.

A disputed legacy

Half a century after its inception, the ramifications of Operation Site are still forcefully debated. Critics say it fostered social segregation by lumping poor families together, far away from Santiago’s wealthier areas and the commercial heart of the city. Most of the areas allocated to Operation Site are close to the ring road, towards the city’s outskirts. To this day, the Chilean capital remains a city of deep social divisions.

“Operation Site had plenty of critics,” says Giannotti. “The construction industry, which was very powerful in Chile, never liked it because it didn’t offer them much of a role. The socialists didn’t like it because they saw it as divisive and demeaning.”

Back in La Faena, however, the legacy of Operation Site appears to be largely positive. Many people still live on plots that they or their relatives bought in the 1960s. Some have expanded their homes, building extra storeys and extensions. There are plenty of trees in the streets, planted by local residents, and green spaces that are well maintained. The houses are modest and arranged in orderly fashion, with access to a street, running water and electricity.

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Castro is clearly proud of the area. He and his neighbours are planning a celebration later this year to mark the 50th anniversary of the arrival of La Faena’s first residents. And in Quintana’s view, Operation Site helped Santiago avoid the worst of Latin America’s often horrendous housing problems.

“If you look at any capital city in Latin America, they have slums – the barriadas in Lima, the favelas in São Paulo and the villas miserias in Buenos Aires,” Quintana says. “That’s what happens when people occupy land illegally and are forced to build completely informally, without any state help.

“That didn’t happen so much in Chile, though. Yes, it’s true that Operation Site created pockets of poor people in Santiago – but at least those poor people had some initial help from the state, and a plot of land they could call their own. And that’s better than having no help at all.”

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