Great Drought of 1968

The Great Drought of 1968 (Spanish: Gran sequía de 1968) was a severe drought faced by Chile from 1967 to 1969. It was one of the largest rainfall deficits in the country during the twentieth century, comparable only to the drought of 1924. The magazine Topaze considered its effects worse than those of the 1960 Valdivia earthquake –the strongest earthquake ever recorded– and President Eduardo Frei Montalva called it "the silent earthquake" (Spanish: el terremoto silencioso).

The drought had its origin in the low amounts of precipitation that fell in 1967. The area affected by the drought spanned from Atacama Province in the north to Ñuble in the south. Albeit it had by the 1970s been suggested that droughts in Chile followed the solar cycle the Great Drought of 1968 escaped any such pattern. The drought have instead been found to overlap with the 1965–1976 period when La Niña tended to overlap with the cold phase of the Pacific decadal oscillation. In the hydrological year of 1969–1970 the area affected by the drought diminished from previously spanning the latitudes of 27–36° S to 27–32° S. The drought lasted three consecutive years, 1967, 1968 and 1969 and was part of a trend of an increasing number of three-year droughts that begun around 1930.

The government bought water tank trucks and plastic water tanks to aid in the supply of rural communities. In 30 cities the government carried out an emergency plan to assure the water supply. Politically, the drougth came in a sensitive period as the Chilean land reform was underway. Scholars like Nicolás López, Fabián Jaksic and Pablo Camus posits that the drought, in conjunction with the formation of agrarian syndicates as enabled and promoted during the land reform, radicalized politics in the countryside during the late 1960s leading to occupations and labor strikes in parts of the Chilean countryside. Ultimately, social tensions influenced by the drought contributed to the showdown in the 1970 presidential election in which Salvador Allende narrowly emerged as victor.