Chile Forum

Hello there,
My chilean fiancée and I (italian, US resident) are planning to get married in Chile next march, and despite Carolina being chilean there are a few aspects on the legal side of the marriage that are escaping our understanding. The fact that we are both in the US does not help, but even when Carolina was in Santiago recently she had a very hard time finding reliable information, even from the source, i.e. Registro Civil.

Getting to the point, we are very confused about:
1. the need for us to be physically present at some office to make the appointment with the "officer" who would officiate the wedding, and also
2. the apparent need for the same physical presence, plus that of the witnesses, for the "manifestacion" or something with a name like that that is another step before the wedding itself, that can not be done right up against the wedding itself (hence requiring a separate trip to Chile!).

As I said, Carolina has done some investigation while she was recently in Chile, but she did not have a whole lot of time and dealing with government offices is not a quick process.

This claimed need for physical presence sounds like non-sense.
I mean, it is likely that that's the strict word of the law, but then I would be really really really amazed if the law did not allow for one or both the spouses to elect somebody to act on their behalf for these bureaucratic steps. Maybe not both people, maybe not both events, but there must be some option.

In Italy for instance, famously one of the worst and byzantine bureaucracies in the world, there is something that sounds like this "manifestacion".
It is an important formal document which must be done at least 4-6 weeks before the wedding date. Despite being a crucial legal step, both spouse can be substituted by somebody who was given the legal authority to act on their behalf. It's called "delega" in italian, and it is actually a very simple document, that nowadays does not even need to be notarized.

I can't believe that the Chilean system would not permit this option, allowing for the difficulty for both parties to mee.
It is particularly distressing that it seems like there is need to meet more than once, one of which with witnesses!

Does anybody know if there are in fact ways to get around this very steep requirement, and who would be so kind as to give us some guidance about how to proceed?
Thanks a lot

Giovanni & Carolina

Welcome to Chile... that's pretty much all that can be said.

When I was married in Chile just over 2 years ago we both had to make a number of trips to the registry. Luckily for me we worked them in to the visits I had already planned, so it wasn't a huge inconvenience.

Are you being married in a church??

If so it is a 2 part process.

You need to be married twice, once in the civil marriage and then in the church, and you do have to be there for the civil wedding.

Hi,
no, no church involved. Plain civil wedding.
@j.Ro: the physical presence of us, let alone of the witnesses some of whom we would like to be friends from overseas, is a serious hurdle!
First of all since we both live in the US, and really don't have much reason or time to visit Chile all that frequently, it is a significant cost!
Besides that, Carolina will probably not be able to travel outside of the US until pretty close to the Chilean wedding. This means that if there is no way to avoid the need to be physically present for the "reservation" of the office and/or for the manifestacion, we are pretty much out of luck!
We will then sadly only have a "fake ceremony"... which can be made very nice and meaningful, but it will be a different thing.
There must be a way to deal with these bureaucratic steps without walking into an office in person!

If not, then we have finally understood why marriages are not so common in Chile... compounding the renown issues with the Chilean immature men, machismo, etc.
It is plain simply too difficult to get through the paperwork!

Anyhow, we hope somebody on the forum will share some more "formal" legal comment on the matter, and/or direct us to an appropriate resource.
Thanks.

tarsi3r wrote:... the witnesses some of whom we would like to be friends from overseas, is a serious hurdle! ...

From what I understand, they must be CHILEAN RESIDENTS or CHILEAN CITIZENS holding a VALID CHILE CARNET and at least of the age of majority (18?).

Also realize that in Santiago, the waiting list could be many months (last I heard it was around 4 months). You will probably have to get married in some less densely populated muni if you cannot wait.

Why would you want to be married under Chilean law, read up on the issues involved in terminating a Chilean marriage, hell I couldn’t get divorced for 10 years because they had no laws to allow it until 6-7 years ago. They want to see if you have the stamina to handle the divorce, so they make it hard to get married.


"If not, then we have finally understood why marriages are not so common in Chile... compounding the renown issues with the Chilean immature men, machismo, etc.
It is plain simply too difficult to get through the paperwork!

Anyhow, we hope somebody on the forum will share some more "formal" legal comment on the matter, and/or direct us to an appropriate resource.
Thanks."

That's nice ask for help then dump on the country and the helpers.

I think you're going to need to be here. We just registered to get married a couple of weeks ago, our date is 3-4 months' time, in a fairly small comuna. We were both there to register, it was pretty straightforward as the Registro Civil there was tiny and the ladies were lovely. They wanted to see our documents, and were concerned I didn't have my cedula yet (will do by the time of the wedding though, I hope I'm sure I read somewhere here on the forum about someone non-resident getting married in Chile, but I'd check with the proper channels. Our manifestacion is two days before the wedding, and we need to take both our witnesses then. They didn't ask for information on the witnesses, perhaps they'll ring us before the manifestacion to sort that out.

Good luck! Incidentally, we're getting married here because the bureacracy was going to be worse in Britain - even if you're a citizen, you have to be resident there for almost a month before, and we can't get back for that long. And the Consulate here were pretty unhelpful about making arrangements for British law weddings in Chile. We're still going to have a non-legal ceremony in Britain, and I'm sure it'll be as, if not more special than the legal one here.

Data point: Last I checked, Muni de San Antonio, V Región, waiting list was about two weeks.

The witness info above, I jotted down from the instruction sheet taped outside the office that does marriages at the local Registro Civil.

nwdiver wrote:Why would you want to be married under Chilean law, read up on the issues involved in terminating a Chilean marriage, hell I couldn’t get divorced for 10 years because they had no laws to allow it until 6-7 years ago. They want to see if you have the stamina to handle the divorce, so they make it hard to get married.

That's indeed a very good question...

nwdiver wrote:That's nice ask for help then dump on the country and the helpers.

Did I give you the impression that I was dumping on either?
I apologize. As I wrote in a following post, I love Chile. I have only lived there (Santiago) for a few months, but I liked every minute and everything, even more so thanks to sharing a lot with a lot of very regular chilean people (as in not living in the bubble of Vitacura or Las Condes, where really sometimes it felt like being in a replica of a US city).
I even praise (with non-chileans) many aspects of life and organization in Chile, for (some) services that one would fall into the trap of thinking they would certainly be bad (latin america!!).

My comment on the divorce was expressing a genuine curiosity rooted in the difficult history of marriage/divorce law in Chile, and the *fact* that it is true that in Chile there is still a major disparity between men and women with respect to that. We could talk about this at length, elsewhere, but it was an observation based on foot-on-the-ground experience talking with people.

I would add that I had been reading some statistics published by one of the gov. agencies about marriage and divorce since divorce became legal, and one somewhat surprising one was that even after divorce became legal the number of marriages did not increase. There are probably some societal and cultural reason for this, and it's probably going to change slowly with time and cultural change, and habits change, but it was also curiously funny to discover that getting married is not a trivial feat bureaucratically, and with Carolina we began to joke about this being a non-negligible factor in keeping the number of marriages relatively low.

About the helpers, again, no dumping. I was simply wishing that somebody could say something directly pertinent to the legal aspects of this. Comments, anecdotes and the rest are great, and are helpful but in the end what matters most is to understand what is and is not legally possible. Or to hear from somebody about a "solution", in this case it would be a crucially helpful case of personal story. Clearly negative reports can add up quickly to constitute "evidence" as well... We hope that's not the last word.

Thanks a lot.
-G

eeuunikkeiexpat wrote:Data point: Last I checked, Muni de San Antonio, V Región, waiting list was about two weeks.
The witness info above, I jotted down from the instruction sheet taped outside the office that does marriages at the local Registro Civil.

Thanks a lot for the data point, and confirming the witness info.

cafecreme wrote:I think you're going to need to be here. We just registered to get married a couple of weeks ago, our date is 3-4 months' time, in a fairly small comuna. We were both there to register, it was pretty straightforward as the Registro Civil there was tiny and the ladies were lovely. They wanted to see our documents, and were concerned I didn't have my cedula yet (will do by the time of the wedding though, I hope I'm sure I read somewhere here on the forum about someone non-resident getting married in Chile, but I'd check with the proper channels.

I have no doubt that they were very nice. As to the documents, we are trying to clarify some of this as well, but the impression (anecdotal) is that it is possible for foreigners to marry in Chile probably without having to do an awful lot of Chilean documents. But that's another piece that we are trying to confirm.

cafecreme wrote:Our manifestacion is two days before the wedding, and we need to take both our witnesses then. They didn't ask for information on the witnesses, perhaps they'll ring us before the manifestacion to sort that out.

That sounds like an excellent deal... it would mean that we may not need two special trips to Chile, one for registration and one for manifestacion.

I don't want everybody to think that we are hopelessly clueless and stupid as a post... certainly we started the process with some significant level of naivete, but the main problem so far has been that pretty much nobody in the family and circle of friends of my fiancée has gotten married. And we are not talking about teenagers... she is 29, and has lots for friends and a moderately large family. And it's not because they are freaks or weirdos... in some parts of Chilean society for a long time getting married has not been regarded as such a desirable choice.
It's hard to believe, I know, but that's how it is, and this means that things that for instance in Italy would be "common knowledge" are not so well known. On top of this, it is even more true that it is the first time they are presented with the case of somebody getting married with a foreigner, and not living in Chile. The bottom line is that we are learning the process as aliens, and getting information while being out of the country is turning out to be more challenging than we anticipated. I imagine it would not be so different if we were trying to figure out how to get married in any other country foreign for both of us (except that I really think that Chilean bureaucracy is not as bad as most. Wishful thinking?).

cafecreme wrote:Good luck! Incidentally, we're getting married here because the bureacracy was going to be worse in Britain - even if you're a citizen, you have to be resident there for almost a month before, and we can't get back for that long. And the Consulate here were pretty unhelpful about making arrangements for British law weddings in Chile. We're still going to have a non-legal ceremony in Britain, and I'm sure it'll be as, if not more special than the legal one here.

I don't even want to begin to imagine what a nightmare it would probably be in Italy!
In the US the exaggerate on the opposite side... even too easy... no residency requirement, no need to demonstrate that you are not married, etc... all pretty much on a 'honor system' basis! The craziest thing I have discovered is that in some states (for sure Colorado) a couple can solemnize their own marriage... no officials involved!

Thanks once more.
-G

If you really must marry, there is always Las Vegas.

Acceptable identification includes valid Driver's License, valid Identification Card from DMV, valid Passport if not US resident, Resident Alien card, Military ID, or Certified or original Birth Certificate.

If a foreign birth certificate, it must be translated into English and notarized. You need to know your social security number if US resident

You do not have to be a resident of Nevada.

If you were previously married, your divorce must be final. You need to know the date (month, year) of your divorce and the location (city and state) where you were divorced.

Covenant Marriage Option: No.

There is no waiting period to get married in Nevada.

You will have to pay US$35.00 - $65.00 (depends on County) to get married in Nevada - cash only. Some counties may accept a local check. Clark County (Las Vegas) charges $60 and accepts cash only.

No blood tests.

No Proxy Marriage. Both parties must be present.

cafecreme wrote:We just registered to get married a couple of weeks ago, our date is 3-4 months' time, in a fairly small comuna. We were both there to register, it was pretty straightforward as the Registro Civil there was tiny and the ladies were lovely. They wanted to see our documents, and were concerned I didn't have my cedula yet (will do by the time of the wedding though, I hope I'm sure I read somewhere here on the forum about someone non-resident getting married in Chile, but I'd check with the proper channels. Our manifestacion is two days before the wedding, and we need to take both our witnesses then. They didn't ask for information on the witnesses, perhaps they'll ring us before the manifestacion to sort that out.

Now that I think about it that sounds pretty much what we did too.

We booked the date at the registry in February, and didn't have to do anything until the first week in May for our wedding that was around the Mother's Day weekend. At the time foreigners did not need a cedula... you passport is fine, the only requirement is that you speak Spanish, if you don’t you need to get an interpreter (the person you are marrying cannot act as interpreter either).

It was also my understanding that you witnesses could be anybody (resident or not) as long as they are able to speak Spanish and understand Chilean Spanish. But I would confirm that when you make your booking.