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Did you miss this early in the article? Or did you just not find it convincing?

> Chile is so long because of the Andes. Here's a map of elevation in South America.

> You can't easily pass these mountains, and the tiny sliver of land to their west is Chile.

Basically, going east<->west is nearly impossible at scale, so moving an army is not going to happen if there is any resistance.

And going north<->south is so easy, that anyone doing it could likely cover the whole country pretty quick. So odds are, if there were two countries in that area, there would be just one pretty quickly.

Definitely one of those ‘geography defines the culture and the borders’ situations.

Ok but why a single country ? Why hasn't it split?

TFA also covers that - desert in the north and rainforest in the south.

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