Madrid, October 1999
Chilean Yawns
Anyone like me, who has been following closely the elections in Chile, where Michelle Bachelet, the centre-left candidate, defeated the centre-right candidate, must have felt both envy and considerable surprise. Was Chile a Latin American country? For the truth is that this election campaign seemed like one of those boring civic contests, where, say, the Swiss or the Swedes change or re-elect their government after a certain number of years, rather than a Third World election where countries going to the ballot box are staking their political model, their social organisation and often even their very survival.
In a typical Third World election, everything seems to be in question and goes back to square one, from the very nature of the institutions to the political economy and the relations between government and society. The election result can turn everything around, which means that countries can suddenly go backwards, losing overnight what they have gained over the years, or else carry on indefinitely along the wrong path. That’s why it is normal in underdeveloped countries to be continually jumping, usually jumping backwards rather than forwards, or simply jumping on the spot.
Although it is not a First World country — it is still some way from being so — Chile is not an underdeveloped country. In the last quarter of a century it has progressed systematically, consolidating democracy, opening up its economy and strengthening its civil society in a way that has no equal in Latin America. It has reduced the level of those living in poverty to 18 % (the average in Latin America is 45 %), a rate of progress comparable to Ireland or Spain, and its middle class has grown consistently, so that now it is, in comparative terms, the largest in Latin America. One million Chileans have escaped poverty in the last ten years. This is due to the extraordinary stability of Chilean society, which can attract all the foreign investment it wants, and can equally sign free-trade agreements with half the world (with the United States, the European Union and South Korea, and now it is negotiating agreements with India, China and Japan).
All this has come out very clearly in these elections. In the debate between Michelle Bachelet and Sebastián Piñera, which took place a few days before the end of the second round, you would have had to have been psychic or a diviner to discover on which points the candidates from the left and the right disagreed openly. Despite their respective attempts to distance themselves from each other, the truth is that their differences are not important. Piñera, for example, wants to put more police on the street than Bachelet.
When an open society reaches these levels of consensus, it is a long way down the road of civilisation. This is a word that finds little favour with intellectuals who are infatuated with barbarism — and it is true that, seen from a distance and from somewhere safe, barbarism seems much more amusing and exciting than civilisation, that smacks of tedium and routine — but it is the most effective framework for defeating hunger, unemployment, ignorance, human rights abuses and corruption. And it is the only environment that guarantees its citizens freedom of expression.
President Lagos left power with a 75 % approval rate, a really extraordinary figure in a democracy: only dictators, who can massage the figures, would seem to have that level of popularity. In the case of Ricardo Lagos it is absolutely deserved. He has been a socialist who, like Felipe González or Tony Blair, knew how to take advantage of the lessons of history and promote, without any sense of inferiority, a modern political economy which was liberal, open to the world, supported private initiatives and, during his government, led to significant growth.
He is also an intelligent politician, a man of ideas, a careful speaker, not charismatic, a leader who deserves the highest praise of alclass="underline" that he left his country much better off than when he found it. During his administration, the anti-democratic traces of the Pinochet dictatorship were confronted and dealt with. And the ex-dictator himself, during these years, thanks to the tenacious and patient work of several judges, has appeared before the world stripped of the mask of the honest autocrat that his supporters had fashioned for him. Nobody would now dare to say that Pinochet was ‘the only dictator who did not steal’. He did steal, large amounts, which is why he and his family and his close associates are now being tried or investigated for suspect transactions to the value of more than thirty-five million dollars.
In these elections the Chilean right, thanks to Sebastián Piñera, has managed to purge a great deal if not all of its original sin: its links with the dictator. Piñera campaigned against the dictator in the referendum, and no one that knows him could doubt his democratic convictions. Many people thought that his major economic holdings would get in the way of his political leadership. But that was not the case, and the energy and intelligence with which he conducted his campaign would seem to have guaranteed him a solid future as the leader of the Chilean right.
The victory of Michelle Bachelet, among other things, showed the Chilean people willing to make moral redress to all those people who were abused, tortured, exiled or silenced during the years of the dictatorship. And it is a giant step forward towards equality between men and women in a country where machismo seemed unmovable. (It was the last country in Latin America to allow divorce.) But it is not just the rights of women that will be boosted by this new president. Secularisation, that fundamental prerequisite for democratic progress, will also be encouraged. The Catholic Church has had a much stronger influence in Chile than in the rest of Latin America. Despite all these promising signs, Chile cannot rest on its laurels if it wants to continue to progress. One of its greatest problems is that it does not have energy resources to meet the increasing demands of its expanding industry and industrial infrastructure. For this reason it is essential that Chile looks to repair relations with its neighbours, especially with Bolivia. The dispute with Bolivia goes back to the War of the Pacific in 1879, when Bolivia lost its access to the sea. One of the great challenges facing Michelle Bachelet’s government is to solve once and for all this dispute with Bolivia and also its maritime disagreements with Peru, so that active collaboration between these three countries can bring tangible benefits to alclass="underline" the energy that Chile needs and that Bolivia has in abundance, the opening up of the prosperous Chilean market to Bolivian and Peruvian goods, and the investment and technology that Chile could bring to its neighbours, which they need for their own development. Such collaboration would also mean that they could put a stop to, and begin to reduce, the arms build-up in the region, which has had such disastrous consequences in the past and which currently creates suspicion and mistrust, a fertile breeding ground for xenophobic nationalism. Chile spends more on arms than any other country in South America, and under Lagos alone it spent two-and-a-half billion dollars on military equipment.