“…The nineteenth century Chilean historian, Diego Barros Arana (1879-1881/1979) notes that Chile, shortly after Independence, began a development process that distinguished it from the other South American nations that became independent after Chile, like Peru. The notion that permeates a whole series of explanations about the Chilean victory and the corresponding Peruvian and Bolivian defeat are based on racist arguments found in many historiografic sources of the last century (McEvoy, 2012;Cid, 2012), which butresss moral and ideological justification set forward by Chilean political and social elites in order to develop and reproduce a nation-state project in accordance to their own class interests (Salazar, 2005;Cancino, 2006;Valencia-Moya, 2018). This expansionist posture was summarized in the 1940´s by the Chilean liberal intellectual Ricardo Donoso in the following way: "Chile closed in by natural barriers, the sea and the mountains, there was no other direction for expansion except for the Atacama Desert," in addition it was distinctive for having "a uniform, strong, rough, armed population of an ardent and exalted patriotism pressing down on the influences of aboriginal roots" (Donoso, 1940, cited in Sansoni, 2012.…”