In addition to the suppression of their right to strike and access trade union benefits, the workers on the coast of the Atacama Desert were accused of being both ‘communists’ (without it being the case), and ‘Indians’. In this context of racialization, ‘communist’ and ‘Indian’ were practically synonymous in the mining semantics. Accusations were thus used to stop workers’ mobilizations to improve working conditions. The derogatory labelling of ‘communist Indians’ in the context of mining colonization can be understood as a ‘phobic and obsessive figure’¹ (Mbembe, 2013, p. 37).

[…]

The imprisoned trade unionists and thermoelectric workers were sent to the coastal town of Pisagua, located 400 kilometres north of Tocopilla. Pisagua was an ‘unhappy, abandoned, narrow and dirty port. Ruinous, dead . . . ’ (Bucat, 2016, p. 221). According to González Videla himself, Pisagua, being surrounded by the ocean and the desert, ‘made it easier for the Armed Forces to control the surveillance of the relegated communists’ (González Videla, 1975, p. 1273).

The processes of brutalization reached their maximum expression through a policy of death, a barbarism applied to workers’ bodies. In Mbembe’s words, an articulation emerged between the ‘state of exception and the relationship of enmity’ (Mbembe, 2011, p. 21), resulting in the regulation of a certain right to imprison, to torture and to kill. A military prison complex was created to not affect the company’s productivity rates.