Posted on 06/08/2003 1:06:22 PM PDT by Luis Gonzalez
Here is something you rarely read about: While much of Latin America is lashing out against free trade and U.S.-backed economic reforms these days, Chile is going in the opposite direction, and is doing better than everybody else in reducing poverty. Chile's success story -- or its relative success compared to its neighbors -- was the talk of the day Friday at the Miami ceremony in which Chile became the first South American country to sign a free-trade agreement with the United States. The deal, once approved by the two congresses, will allow Chile to export 85 percent of its goods without paying tariffs to the world's biggest market. At the ceremony, presided over by Chile's foreign minister, Soledad Alvear, and U.S. trade representative Robert Zoellick, some of us in the audience were commenting -- only half jokingly -- that Chile is South America's most politically boring country, and at the same time the one that works best. While most of Chile's neighbors are still passionately debating -- nearly two centuries after independence -- which economic system they want to embrace, Chile has long made up its mind. Governments in Chile come and go -- from the right, the center and the left -- but they all stay the free-market course. `BASIC CONSENSUS' ''In Chile, we have been able to generate a basic consensus in society,'' Alvear told me in an interview after the ceremony. ``There are no serious questions about the wisdom of economic openness.'' So much so that the free-trade agreement was signed by the Socialist Party government of President Ricardo Lagos. Among the Chilean visitors at the signing was Diego Olivares, the vice president of Chile's United Confederation of Workers, the country's biggest labor union, Alvear noted. Chile's ability to avoid the dramatic political shifts that have ruined most of its neighbors has paid off handsomely. Since the 1988 plebiscite that defeated former dictator Gen. Augusto Pinochet, Chile has cut its poverty level -- the number of people living on less than $2 a day -- from 42 percent of the population to 20 percent. By comparison, the countries with messianic leaders who blame free market policies or the United States for their countries' ills have sparked a cycle of capital flight, greater unemployment and greater poverty. In Venezuela, President Hugo Chávez's fiery speeches against ''savage neo-liberalism'' have helped drive up the number of the country's poor by 2.5 million since he took office three years ago, according to former Inter American Bank chief economist Ricardo Haussman. While Chile's economic growth rates have dropped from 7 percent average in the mid-1990s to 2.5 percent over the past three years, Chile has shown the most consistent growth in the region. Last year, Chile's economy grew by 2.1 percent, while Argentina's dropped by 10.9 percent, Venezuela's by 8.9 percent, and Latin America as a whole fell by 1.2 percent. Chile's $9,417 a year per capita income is among the highest in Latin America, according to United Nations figures. By comparison, Cuba does not provide per capita income figures, arguing that such numbers don't take into account state subsidies, but the island's average wage is about $120 a year. AGAINST THE TIDE In many ways, Chile is swimming against Latin America's tide. It is a country where the role of the state has been shrinking over the years, young people are swinging to the right while their parents stick to the left and political life is increasingly converging to the center. ''We're becoming a U.S.-styled democracy,'' said Eugenio Tironi, a Chilean sociologist who has been an image advisor to Lagos. ``Like in the United States, we have two political coalitions, an increasingly smaller government and a society that is increasingly individualistic.'' Will Chile be an island of economic stability in South America or will it be a model that will be soon followed by its neighbors? I asked Foreign Minister Alvear. ''A model we don't like to be: It creates resentment, it makes us look presumptuous'' Alvear said. ``But we have been successful in establishing key strategic targets for the country and in maintaining them over time. You cannot reinvent the country every time a new government takes office.'' I agree. There are many things to be criticized in Chile, including a military that preserves obnoxious economic privileges dating from the Pinochet era, a gap between rich and poor that is still wider than in most developed countries and a press that -- while free -- could be much more aggressive. But there is little question that while much of the rest of Latin America has made dramatic political swings, Chile has stuck to its economic targets, and has done much more for the poor than the region's self-appointed champions of the poor.
While most of Chile's neighbors are still passionately debating -- nearly two centuries after independence -- which economic system they want to embrace, Chile has long made up its mind. Governments in Chile come and go -- from the right, the center and the left -- but they all stay the free-market course.
Would it have really killed them, to admit, in all honesty, that because of Pinochet, they are the most successfull of the south american countries and if it wasn't for him, they would be in the same boat as argentina.
Pinochet killed a lot of people. But if you want to make an omelette, you have to break some eggs, right?
Too bad the United States can't adopt smaller government and a society that is increasingly individualistic.
When I look at who Pinochet killed I see no people only totalitarian leftist hellspawn.
Well...so does the US government.
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