ESTADO, ELITES Y VETERANOS CHILENOS DE LA GUERRA DEL PACÍFICO

In 1918, a retired military man warned that "a heavy atmosphere seems to surround everything that implies a recognition of the services rendered by the generation that has done the most for the Homeland". At that time, and until the early thirties, initiatives aimed at financially and socially aiding the veterans of the Pacific War were rejected for formal reasons, ranging from the high implicit cost to the lack of definition about who should be categorized as such. What today seems an incomprehensible official refusal to validate the merits of these arguments responded to deeper reasons that are directly related to the consequences of the Civil War of 1891, to the lack of cohesion of the associative movement of the former recruits and, especially, with an ingrained perception the political elite had regarding the moral and civic capacities of the popular sectors.