Abstract

Before the 2019 social crisis 1 , Chile was perceived as the most stable country in Latin America to the light of strength institutions, politic stability and good macroeconomic indicators. Chile exhibits a good Gross domestic product per capita, roughly 15,399 U.S dollars in 2019. However the Gini index, which measures income inequality, rounds the 0.46 in 2017, a number not that good if compared with countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). According to the United Nations Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean, in Chile the richer 1% of population concentrates the 25.5% of the country’s wealth. Economists, historians and writers have tracked the path to this excessive concentration to the very first days of the country 2,3. In that time the local aristocracy (criollos) replicated the hierarchies and privileges over the land and access to economical and political power. In Chile is common to hear that a few families are the real country owners. That’s why, in Chile the family name(s) used to be a sign of hierarchy or lineage and in practice, of power. Here we propose to analyze Chilean family names by exploring two datasets trying to find differences between politicians and people persecuted by the dictatorship. We reveal contrasts between both family name groups with the aim of finding other way to analyze inequality and its origins in a recently convulsed country. For the first dataset we compiled the family names of all the ministers that hold that charge and added the family names of deputies in the charge since 1990 to 2020 4 . For the second dataset we accessed the family names compiled by the so called Valech2 Commission which was the fourth commission created in Chile to investigate the crimes occurred during the dictatorship5 . The politicians dataset (POL) includes 1333 registers while the Valech2 dataset (VAL) includes 9795 registers. Each dataset includes two family names for each person. In Chile, like in most of Latin American countries and Spain, locals are named with two family names, the first one corresponds to father’s family name, and the second one corresponds to the mother’s family name. Also, women that got marriage do not replace their family name(s) like in the United States. So, we can keep track of relationships between families.