Poverty in Chile and its success as a problem of state: An analysis of presidential speeches of conciliation

Abstract

This article summarizes the main results of the thesis of the same name, in which we studied how the Chilean government defined poverty as a social problem and the poor as a subject of government between 1990 and 2010. The strategy used for the investigation was Critical Discourse Analysis (Fairclough 1989; van Dijk & Mendizabal 1999), which was applied to analyse a corpus consisting of messages issued by governments from the Coalition of Parties for Democracy on May, 21st. It is concluded that the discourse about the confrontation of poverty establishes a social identity of the poor as a principle of social inclusion, setting this as a basic criterion for the benefit of social policies, considering poverty as a problem that belongs mainly to the poor and the social intervention as necessary due to the inability of poor people to overcome their condition by themselves.