Where the bullet lands: violence, motherhood and the uneven terrain of citizenship in Chile

This article examines how citizenship is made and unmade in neoliberal Chile through the ethnographic case of Linda, a mother living in La Pintana, Santiago, whose nine-month-old son, Baltazar, was killed by a stray bullet while sleeping at home. Drawing on two years of fieldwork, press and institutional materials, we show how spectacular loss triggers ‘flash’ state care: a surge of visibility, political attention and assistance that temporarily widens access to benefits while keeping belonging precarious. Baltazar’s narratively stabilized innocence enabled cross-partisan mobilization through security and victim-policy frames, yet Linda’s recognizability as a grieving mother remained morally monitored and vulnerable to suspicion. We trace how assistance is experienced as conditional and withdrawable, shaping when and how families dare to claim justice, and how the quiet closure of legal proceedings reasserts state discontinuity. We argue that stray-bullet deaths illuminate unequal geographies of protection and moral mediation of entitlement in stigmatized territories.