La cuestión eclesial de Tacna y Arica: Religión, paradiplomacia y frontera (1900 - 1911)

Abstract

This article addresses the Chilean-Peruvian conflict over the control of religious life in Tacna and Arica. Conflict that in the beginnings of the S. XX, was included within the territorial struggle that these two countries had for the tacnoariqueno area. Thus, religion was transformed into a field of paradiplomatic relations. Chile used religion to open a series of practices of symbolic desfronterizacion that annulled and eliminated the nationalistic priests, promoters of a Peruvian resistance that questioned and impeded the exercise of the new authorities, to obtain the conditions to stimulate the Chilean sovereignty in Tacna and Arica. Peru, also used religion reality to spread a speech of territorial recovery and to encourage rejection to the process of symbolic desfronterizacion that Chile established in the provinces that were engaged in the war of the saltpeter.