The Development of Chilean society since the nation broke away from Spain early in the nineteenth century reflects in many ways a remarkable incongruity. On the one hand, the nation's political institutions and many of its social institutions developed much like their counterparts in the United States and Western Europe. On the other hand, the economy had a history of insufficient and erratic growth that left Chile among the less developed nations of the world. Given the first of these characteristics, Chilean society, culture, and politics have struck generations of observers from more developed nations as having what can be described, for want of a better expression, as a familiar "modernity." Yet this impression always seemed at odds with the deficiency of resources at all levels, the highly visible and considerable urban and rural poverty, and the considerable social inequalities.

Chile's location on the far southern shores of the Americas' Pacific coast made international contacts difficult until the great advance in global air travel and communications of the post-World War II time. This relative isolation of a people whose main cultural roots lay in the Iberian-Catholic variant of Western civilization likely had the paradoxical effect of making Chileans more receptive to outside determines than would otherwise have been the case. The small numbers of foreign travelers reaching the nation in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries usually found a warm welcome from people eager to hear of the latest trends in leading nations.

This combination of receptiveness to outside determines and commitment to the nation is undoubtedly related to the relative "modernity" that has been a feature of Chilean life since freedom from Spain. The University of Chile was accomplished by the national government in 1842 and soon had a large, centrally located building in Santiago. At the start of the 1990s, Chile began to recover its democratic institutions under the elected government of Patricio Aylwin Azócar. Committed to redressing the social inequalities that had developed under the military regime, the new government redirected more resources to programs and institutions in education and health in order to improve their quality and the population's access to them. In 1993 and early 1994, there was a sharp sense of optimism regarding the Chilean economy. High rates of economic growth were expected to last through the 1990s. With its newfound economic dynamism, Chile seemed poised in the early 1990s to begin resolving the long-standing incongruity of a comparatively advanced social and political system coexisting with a scarcity of means.