Flag of Chile

How to read it

Decree 1534 of the Ministry of the Interior, of 18 October 1967, gathers Chile’s rules on its national emblems. It describes the flag as two horizontal stripes of equal width, the lower red, the upper deep blue (“azul turquí”) for the third of its length next to the pole and white for the rest, with a white five-pointed star in the middle of the blue square; the star’s diameter is half the side of the square, and the flag is two thirds as high as it is long. The present flag was created by a decree of the Ministry of War of 18 October 1817, under the Supreme Director Bernardo O’Higgins, with Colonel José Ignacio Zenteno as minister; Law 2.597 of 11 January 1912 dealt again with its colours and proportions. The decree lets anyone fly the flag without prior permission, and requires it to be flown on 21 May and on 18 and 19 September. The President’s standard is the same flag with the national arms embroidered in the centre.

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What the colours mean, and who says so

No law gives Chile’s colours a meaning. The Clinic, checking the decree in the Library of Congress’s database in 2023, found that it says only how the colours are arranged and in what proportions. A Chilean Army text quoted by The Clinic gives blue for the Pacific, white for the mountains and red for the blood shed to win independence, and says the star has several readings, from the Mapuche guñelve to a light guiding the country.

On 9 July 2023, the day of the oath to the flag, the government’s official account posted a different set: blue for justice, white for the authority of the people, red for the blood of the patriots and the star for the unity of the nation. Users objected. The government’s communications office said the reading came from Friar Camilo Henríquez, and The Clinic pointed out that Henríquez had been describing the earlier flag of the Patria Vieja, first raised on 4 July 1812. An article on the government’s own website gives a third version: blue for sovereignty, white for the law and red for the blood of the patriots in the war of independence, with the star for the unity of the nation and the legacy of the Mapuche people.

Telling it from the Texas flag

The Texas flag has the same three colours and a single white star. The writer Óscar Barrientos, in a 2022 column for CIPER, notes that people point out the likeness, and that no clear link between the two has been found. The blue tells them apart. On Chile’s flag the blue is a square in the upper half only, and the red stripe runs the whole length of the flag beneath it. On the Texas flag, under Texas law, the blue is a vertical stripe at the pole a third of the flag’s length wide, with the white and red stripes beside it, and the star sits in the middle of the blue stripe.