Defender la propiedad, castigar la informalidad: gobierno de los asentamientos informales en Chile

This article examines how the parliamentary debate surrounding Law N. 21.633, known as the Anti-Usurpation Law, reconfigures the government of informal settlements in Chile. Drawing on Foucault’s (2006) perspective on governmentality, it argues that the law superimposes a securitarian rationality onto a financialized rationality historically embedded in housing policy. Methodologically, the study develops a qualitative strategy based on Critical Discourse Analysis of 13 parliamentary sessions held between 2021 and 2023. The findings show that private property is elevated to the status of a human right and that informal settlements are increasingly inscribed within the registers of crime and threat. At the same time, housing subsidies and mortgage credit are reaffirmed as legitimate pathways to housing, while mechanisms of eviction and penal sanction are expanded. The article concludes that the law reconfigures the government of informal settlements by incorporating a securitarian rationality that reinforces, through control and penalization, a housing order previously structured by financialization.