The morning Chile opened marriage
Two fathers, two children, one "I do": on 10 March 2022, Chile's first same-sex couple married in Santiago.
Early on the morning of 10 March 2022, Javier Silva and Jaime Nazar stood in the civil registry office of Providencia, a district of the Chilean capital Santiago. Their two small children watched as the two men said "I do". It was the first same-sex marriage in Chile's history. The new marriage law had come into force that same day.
Barely half an hour later, Consuelo Morales and Pabla Heuser married at the same office. The two women had been a couple for seventeen years and had a little daughter. Until then, only one parent in a same-sex couple had had full rights. The new law changed exactly that: it brought not only marriage but also the right to adopt and full parenthood for both.
The road there was long. Since 2015, couples in Chile had been able to enter a civil union, but children were left out. The organisation Movilh had already filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights in 2012. President Michelle Bachelet later introduced a bill that lay in parliament for years. The breakthrough came, of all people, from her conservative successor Sebastián Piñera, who surprisingly backed marriage equality in June 2021. Congress approved it in December, and ninety days later the law took effect.
After the wedding, Piñera received the newly married male couple at the presidential palace. The next day he handed over office to Gabriel Boric, who had already congratulated the two publicly.
"We did it," Silva said after the ceremony. He had not expected it. For a country where sex between men had been a crime until 1999, that Thursday morning marked a turning point.