Vulnerable individuals and institutions: the double territorial burden of COVID-19 in Chile

In fragile territories, the COVID-19 pandemic has often worsened pre-existing formsof vulnerability, especially socio-economic and institutional ones. Chile, a structurallyvulnerable country in many respects, is unfortunately a good example: its communities are exposed to natural disasters and the effects of climate change, as well asto social imbalances. The latter is a result of high economic inequality emergingfrom the country’s market-driven policies implemented under Pinochet’s dictatorship,which remains mostly unaltered since the return of democracy in 1990.In an environmentally and socially fragile context that has given way to the strongprotests that have paralysed Chile’s public life since October 2019, Chilean institutionsshow additional elements of vulnerability. The centralist tradition of the Chilean stategives a central role to national institutions, which nonetheless citizens do not trust,while municipalities are closer to local communities. However, municipalities have tomanage a contradictory situation: past administrative reforms put municipalities incharge of providing basic public services such as schools and healthcare, necessaryfor citizens who cannot access private services, but local bodies are fiscally autonomous and receive a minor contribution from a national Municipal Common Fund(Navarrete-Hernandez and Toro, 2019).