The Economist October 30th 2021 57
The AmericasChileFuelling the flames
“W
e want tosee the end of capital
ism and neoliberalism,” says Cata
lina (not her real name), a 37yearold prot
ester surrounded by a group of hooded
men wielding sticks. She is one of many
hundreds who, since Chile eased its covid
related curfew in October, have gone out
on the streets to rail against the govern
ment. Some protesters have looted super
markets and pharmacies. Others, wearing
black balaclavas, have thrown Molotov
cocktails at “pacos”, or the police. For a
week the main thoroughfare of the capital
was full of piles of rubbish that had been
set on fire. The downtown area is covered
with graffiti. “Death to the government,
long live anarchy,” reads one scrawl.
Chile used to be one of Latin America’s
success stories. gdpper person almost tri
pled between 1990 and 2015; it is now the
highest in Latin America. The number of
university students quintupled over the
same period. Income inequality fell and is
now below the regional average (though far
above that of the oecd, a club mostly of
rich countries). Yet ever since huge prot
ests took place in October 2019, in which atleast 30 people died and metro stations and
churches were razed, violence has become
far more common. In the past few weeks
three people have died during the protests
and hundreds have been arrested.
After the protests in 2019 the govern
ment agreed to create a constitutional con
vention—the idea being that, by electing a
body broadly representative of Chile’s citi
zens in order to rewrite the constitution
from the era of the dictator Augusto Pino
chet, discontent could be channelled into
better responses than populism and anar
chy. But two years on, as that democratic
experiment gets under way (with just 43%
of citizens voting for the 155 members of
the convention in May), Chile looks in
worse shape than at any point since the re
turn of democracy three decades ago.
For a start, extremist politicians are
gaining ground. In November, a generalelection will take place in which the cen
treright president, Sebastián Piñera, can
not stand again because of term limits
(separately, he is also dealing with poten
tial impeachment proceedings). The two
politicians leading the polls to replace him
are Gabriel Boric, a 35yearold allied with
the Communist Party, and José Antonio
Kast, a hardright candidate who once
claimed that if Pinochet were alive, “he
would vote for me.” Mr Kast wants to build
“a ditch” on the country’s northern border
to keep out immigrants who arrive illegal
ly. Mr Boric’s team argue that their policies
are no more extreme than, say, those of
Bernie Sanders, a former presidential can
didate in the United States. Even so, they
seem beholden to radical leftists.
Another problem is that many of the
underlying issues which brought people
out onto the streets two years ago have not
gone away. In the early 2000s, during a
commodities boom, a new middle class
emerged but inequality remained severe.
According to a study published in 2019 in
theLancet, a medical journal, life expec
tancy at birth for a woman born in the
poorest neighbourhood of Santiago is
nearly 18 years lower than for a woman
born in the richest neighbourhood, a much
larger gap than in the other five Latin
American cities surveyed, including Mexi
co City and Buenos Aires. (Although overall
life expectancy remains high.)
University tuition fees are high, but the
quality of degrees is often shoddy. More
than 80% of pensioners receive pensionsS ANTIAGO
A country once likened to Finland is in trouble→Alsointhissection
58 Red,whiteandbluetapeinCuba
59 Bello: Peronist economics