“Make Chile a great Nation”. The Southern Highway and Patagonia Aysén during the military civic dictatorship (1973-1990)

Abstract

Traveling the Southern Highway is currently one of the main reasons to visit Chilean Patagonia. This article aims to study the construction process of the Southern Highway during the military civic dictatorship (1973-1990) from a “more than human” approach. In this sense, it is interesting to analyze the agency of the road and its territorial impact. From this base, and the review of press material, government declarations, ministerial reports, technical studies and specialized bibliography, it is proposed that the longitudinal outline of the Austral Highway implied a particular process of territorial restructuring in the Chilean Patagonia that It constituted, during the study period, an important piece of the social and political transformations of the southern space and one of the territorial keys of the authoritarian organization of the country.