The Current Conditions of Street Life in Chile

Essay written in October, 2001

In recent years, the IMF and other international financial institutions have used Chile as a success story. Because of this policy of free trade, privatisation and its focus on profitability, parts of Chile can no longer be considered as being in the third world as witnessed by the many skyscrapers in the big cities.

However, despite this evident prosperity, there has been a rapid increase in the number of street children in Santiago and in surrounding communities. Generally, street children tend to congregate near shopping centres where they beg, sell or offer sexual services. Others work cleaning windshields or selling flowers. Some children beg along with their mothers and take what they earn home, illustrating the fact that the majority maintain strong connections with their families. NGO workers believe that this increase in the number of street children is a result of the economic crisis which is being faced by the poor who are now excluded from the formal economy and are forced to depend on their children working in order to survive.

As in many countries in the South, it is easy to predict the path of a child on to the streets. Probably the child lives in a poor neighbourhood located next to a rich community in which there is a shopping centre. At the beginning, the child goes with his mother on to the street to sell sweets or to beg (children often show a can with the words “Community Fund” printed on it). After gaining more experience on the streets, he goes on the streets by himself and returns home with his money, out of which his parents demand 5 or 10 dollars a day. Later on, an intelligent child discovers that if he stays on the streets rather than going home that he can keep all the money for himself and so he ends up as a street child. He continues to attend school, however, but is expelled because it is forbidden for children to work. This illustrates the intolerance of the public school system in Chile.

Juvenile prostitution is also largely caused by the country’s puritanical sexual mores. In poor neighbourhoods every night, one can see many men driving expensive cars looking for boys and girls for sex. Prostitution is generally not controlled by pimps, however, and young girls take responsibility for their own sexual activities. The NGO Raices is conducting a campaign to stop juvenile prostitution.

The present government is nominally socialist and gives funding to NGOs through the Servicio Nacional del Menor (Sename). Although Sename´s focus is on social welfare, some Chilean NGOs have praised its flexibility. Furthermore, because Chile has not endorsed the concept of children´s rights, children are considered to be non-citizens and not responsible actors in their own right.

During the military dictatorship (1973-1990), the government neglected its own citizens, so networks of NGOs became responsible for the social welfare of the poor. Hogar de Cristo, a Catholic NGO which has thousands of contributors is an example of this phenomenon. In the same way, several universities have social welfare programmes aimed at assisting poor communities.

The majority of Chilean academics and directors of NGOs believe that there will be an increase in the number of street children living on the streets of Santiago, Valparaiso and other Chilean cities. This seems to be inevitable in light of Chile´s pursuit of monetarist economic policies, the focus on mere charity on the part of the government and the lack of national will to combat the problem.