In January, Chile elected Sebastián Piñera, the country’s first democratically elected conservative president in more than a half-century. The Concertación, the country’s once ruling center-left coalition, came to the electoral contest already defeated—a worn-out political project destroyed by internecine disputes and personal ambitions. Now Chile will join a bloc of U.S. allies in the region, including Colombia and Peru, together with Costa Rica, Honduras, and Panama in Central America, that is clearly meant to counter the region’s “left turn” and, more specifically, the Bolivarian Alliance of the Peoples of Our America (ALBA).
That’s why the victory of Piñera—whose populist program follows the path of the Concertación, but guarantees the iron fist against social movements—was received with jubilation by the most reactionary sectors on the continent. Indeed, the election caused a great deal of anticipation in other countries, comparatively more than in Chile, given the geopolitical significance of a new right-wing government in South America.
Yet international issues hardly came up at all during the presidential campaign. The Honduran coup wasn’t even mentioned; neither were the U.S. military bases in Colombia and Panama, nor the failure at the Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen, nor the global financial crisis, nor . . . the list of issues having to do with the world, humanity, and our Latin America that the candidates ignored during the campaign is never-ending. To go over it would only confirm how politically insular the world is that we Chileans live in.
This factor—which has produced ignorance, ideological erosion, and depoliticization—has allowed both the right and the Concertación to manipulate voters with marketing techniques and deceitful tactics. For average Chileans, caught in a spiderweb of 29 million credit cards’ worth of debt, politics is a galaxy far away from their daily concerns. The country’s representative democracy obligates them only to vote, without recognizing their right to truly participate in the political process. The issues that concern Chileans as citizens belong to the realm of the incidental and the superfluous, offering no solution to their concrete problems. And so these issues are delegated to political professionals who, at the same time, are considered abhorrent drones.
It’s no wonder: Between the 14 million pesos that senators earn each month and the 257,000 monthly pesos that more than half of Chileans earn lies an abyss of inequality. The poorest 20% of Chileans spend more than 60% of their salaries paying off loans that go well beyond mere usury. The parties that make up the Concertación did not try to close this gap, much as Piñera’s exultant “new right” hardly will.
Chile’s workers are weighed down with long work hours, living in the constant fear of joining the army of 800,000 unemployed or of falling ill, given the country’s high health care costs and the never-ending waiting lists in the hospitals. They live with the lost hopes of obtaining quality education for their children, their families living packed into small apartments, plagued by drugs and crime, burying family memories of the atrocities of the Pinochet dictatorship. With what enthusiasm or with what time would they worry about the political dimensions of Piñera’s triumph?
That’s why it shouldn’t seem strange that more than 3.5 million Chileans voted for the “new right,” naively expecting this government to relieve their miserable condition. Their passive and indifferent attitude to the country’s political deterioration—which means legitimizing the heirs to the dictatorship and enabling the threats to the sovereignty of Chile’s neighboring countries—is a result of the Concertación’s thundering failure.
But it is also a result of the unjustifiable tardiness of the Chilean left to overcome its fragmentation and bring a popular and independent alternative to the table. Now we are at the point of starting over; the story has not ended. It is upon us to cut short the time that the right attempts to stay in power.
Manuel Cabieses Donoso is a journalist and editor of Punto Final (puntofinal.cl). This is an edited, translated version of an article that appeared in the January 22, 2010, edition of Punto Final. Reprinted with permission.
