Chile Forum

Apart from the paranoid gringo thing, in any population you are going to have certain percentage of just crazy / mental illness. Those cases above likely account for something around 50% of the murder statistics on the Island in the last 10 years.

There is a good reason that most murders are some how family related. Your family are the ones that are most likely to drive you crazy (that is joke, but sadly true). Just plain random murder of strangers are fairly rare outside really dangerous parts of the World (e.g. war zones). Even in war zones people are mostly killed for a reason ( even if it is a bad reason ) or by accident; not just random murder.

Now, all that said, I still am not sure what makes United States breed more violence than other societies overall. The death rate from murders in the States likely matches or beats a lot of civil wars around the World. I don't think It is a gun thing, before anyone goes off on that tangent. Guns are methods, not motives.

Your only real defense is less people. Chiloe does not have that many people. I don't think on a southern Chile scale Chiloe is the friendliest place I have been to in the South, but it is much more friendly than most of the World.

I am not sure extroverted would be the word, but Chileans are very social. They have very close family and friend groups, and like to socialize and have a good time.

They are perhaps a little more conservative that other countries in Latin America in terms of public displays of affection, but not that big.

I think if I would describe Chileans when they are ticked about something it would be passive-aggressive overall. They will dig in their heals and simply not budge.

For example, if you go in to a government offices and rub the secretary the wrong way, or even just overly confuse them with bad Spanish, they will drop in to a total do nothing mode telling you that something is simply impossible or create complicated steps to get just small thing done.

On the other hand if you go in and turn on even a small amount of charm with a little bit of chit chat to help kill their day, you will find all resistance to what you want to do will just go away.

In fact, I would say a lot of things that a foreigner might categorize as laziness or incompetence is more likely some sort of passive-aggressive response to the job. Workers in Chile that do not do their job for instance, I often get the impression that they know better, they just do not care or feel the company is under paying them or something related. There is a serious burn the boss attitude in stores, restaurants, and such with very little loyalty to the company. It kind of trickles up the middle management who really just come in and sit behind their desk.

Also on the other hand, companies and businesses that take their employees seriously and care about them, seem to also take care of their customers in Chile.

A great example is Easy home center in Temuco. Easy is on one side of the street and Sodimac home center is on the other side. In Sodimac I always get fast freindly and helpful services. At Easy I had to search for 40 mins to find a sales person, and finally walked in to the back office to find one. We are talking a massive home center here, not a little hardware store.

A couple of months ago all the workers went on strike at the Temuco Easy, and I believe they just fired most of them rather than negotiate. The new crew is not much better.