Billionaire Sebastian Pinera Wins Chile Presidency

According to the January 17, 2010 Associated Press article "Billionaire Sebastian Pinera Wins Chile Presidency":

Billionaire Sebastian Pinera won Chile's election on Sunday, becoming the nation's first democratically elected conservative president in 52 years.

The ruling coalition's candidate, Eduardo Frei, conceded defeat after 60 percent of polling stations reported a 52 percent to 48 percent advantage for Pinera, ending two decades of center-left rule since the end of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship.

"Chile is much better than the country we received in 1990," Frei said. "We will be guardians of liberty and of all our social victories."

Pinera had a wide lead in every poll, and the race only tightened after Frei and outgoing President Michelle Bachelet repeatedly invoked the legacy of Pinochet, whose dictatorship was supported by the parties that make up Pinera's coalition.

But many leftists have become disenchanted after two decades with the same group of politicians in power, and Frei's effort to raise fears of a retreat on human rights failed to persuade enough of them to vote against Pinera.

Pinera, a Harvard-trained economist, focused his campaign on hopes for change, promising to create a million jobs and double Chile's per-capita income of $12,000 a year by expanding the country's growth to 6 percent a year.

Pinera voters included Tatiana Cantillana, a 57-year-old nurse's aide who hoped a Pinera victory would reduce corruption. "There has to be a change so that they stop stealing," she said.

Frei and Pinera agreed on most issues — a reflection of the remarkable economic, social and political success that has given Bachelet nearly 80 percent approval ratings as she ends her term — making human rights the wild card.

Bachelet, herself a torture victim, supported judicial efforts to resolve crimes against humanity, and more than 700 former military and security officials have been put on trial.

But dictatorship-era rights abuses remain a painful topic around Latin America, and societies remain divided over reopening old wounds. Voters in Uruguay decidedly upheld amnesty in November, even as they elected a former rebel as president. Brazil's amnesty law remains in force, and in Argentina, rights trials have become highly politicized.

Human rights came to the forefront last month when a judge concluded that Frei's father, a Pinochet critic, had been secretly poisoned to death. Bachelet raised it again by inaugurating Chile's Museum of Memory less than a week before the vote.

And Frei pressed it hard in Wednesday's televised debate, forcing Pinera to acknowledge that "part of my sector committed errors" by denying that crimes were happening even as thousands of Pinochet's opponents were tortured or killed.

The ruling coalition "may have committed errors, but not horrors," Frei countered, noting that his father's death would not have been investigated had the amnesty Pinera proposed as a senator been approved.

Pinera said no former Pinochet Cabinet members would serve in his Cabinet, but angry supporters forced him to take back the promise. "Having collaborated loyally and honestly with a government is not a sin or a crime," he later said.

Pinera, 60, put his Ph.D. in economics to use popularizing credit cards in Chile, growing a fortune that now includes a large share of Chile's main airline, a leading television channel and the country's most popular soccer team. He said the government has "run out of gas," and that he would create a million jobs and double the median income of $12,000 a year.

Frei, 67, had a rather unremarkable 1994-2000 term, and many leftists preferred the more dynamic Marco Enriquez-Ominami, who came in third last month and tepidly endorsed Frei only last week.

Only 8.3 million of Chile's nearly 17 million people are registered to vote.

Prosperous Chile's Troubling Indigenous Uprising

Members of the local Mapuche Indian community participate in a "Xrawen," or meeting, at Puerto Dominguez town 420 miles south of Santiago, Chile.

In the December 12, 2009 TIME magazine article "Prosperous Chile's Troubling Indigenous Uprising," Jonathan Franklin reports:

Compared to high-profile groups like the Quechua of Peru and the Yanomami of the Amazon rainforest, Chile's Mapuche are a relatively obscure indigenous cohort in South America. But that has changed dramatically in recent months as a growing number of armed and masked Mapuche activists, pursuing a centuries-old claim to land they say was taken from them by the Spaniards and then the Chilean government, have engaged in a wave of arson attacks. Their assaults — torching forests, hijacking forestry trucks, seizing rural ranches — have created Chile's worst security crisis in decades.

But the uprising, which has left four Mapuche dead and more than 100 arrested or convicted, has also spawned a political quandary for President Michelle Bachelet. She has resorted to a controversial anti-terrorist law — developed during the brutal, 1973-1990 dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet — to prosecute Mapuche militants. The measure, used by Pinochet to hound political opponents, allows fewer pretrial rights for defendants, who can be accused by anonymous and masked witnesses. It also imposes longer prison sentences and augments the powers of the police and judicial system — never a comfortable prospect in a country that is still shaking the iron-fisted ghosts of the Pinochet regime. "This law is an abomination," says Richard Caifal, a Chilean human rights lawyer, "and the government is using it in a discriminating way, only against Mapuches."

Bachelet had promised before taking office in 2006 that she would not use the law in Mapuche cases. She and her government, however, insist they have no choice at this point. "We've decided to invoke the anti-terror law to go after these groups of people who are set on perpetrating crimes, disorder and unrest in a region seeking peace and harmony," Chile's Deputy Interior Secretary, Patricio Rosend, said recently. (See why Chile's Atacama Desert has become a tourist destination.)

The area he's referring to is the central Araucania region, where Chile's 700,000 Mapuches (4% of the country's 17 million people) were forced to settle after the military finally "pacified" them in 1881. Until then, the Mapuche had resisted efforts by the Inca empire, Spanish colonizers and the new Chilean republic to subjugate them. Many Mapuche leaders still argue the country should return their ancestral lands in regions like south central Chile; but they're also angry about vast tracts they say were illegally taken from them in Araucania, near the city of Temuco, for forestry operations. This year militants have set fire to tree farms, leaving huge swaths of eucalyptus and pine trees scorched — and prompting local ranchers to stock up on weapons and ammunition.

Government efforts to control Mapuche protests have backfired. Recent raids by special forces of the Carabineros, the national police, have scored arrests of Mapuche leaders but also provoked charges of brutality after the shooting of children, journalists and other bystanders. Three Mapuches youths have been killed, and Caifal claims two others were shot in the eyes. What's more, whereas left-wing terrorist groups garnered little public sympathy during Pinochet's rule, opinion polls in Chile today show widespread support for Mapuche efforts to regain land.

Bachelet, a member of Chile's Socialist Party, and her center-left coalition, the Concertación, have been criticized for being soft on criminals. Many political analysts suggest that with presidential elections set for Dec. 13 — and with the Concertación well behind the conservatives in voter polls — the left may hope that employing the anti-terror law will bolster its law-and-order bona fides. Sebastian Piñera, the billionaire businessman who leads the polls, has made security and crime-fighting a centerpiece of his campaign.

The government has installed security cameras on major highways, where more and more smoldering frames of forestry trucks are being found after Mapuche hijackings. Tourists have also been warned during this southern hemisphere summer, when the forestry attacks have been escalating, not to use major roads at night. At the same time, Mapuche leaders have made it clear that the latest surge of attacks is part of a strategic push to undermine Chile's bicentennial celebration next year.

Meanwhile, dozens of Mapuche communities have joined forces to create the Mapuche Territorial Alliance, which among other demands calls for the group's political independence from the Chilean state. Whether or not that's a viable proposition, the coalition may well prod the government to a more serious dialogue over the land issues. "Otherwise," says Caifal, "we are creating a [Mapuche] generation that has grown up in a climate of violence, and that offers a bad future for the country." Especially if it means raising ghosts from the past.

Can Chile's Right Emerge from Its Dark Past?

Chile's right is haunted by the brutal legacy of Augusto Pinochet (center) who seized power on Sept. 11, 1973, in a bloody coup and ruled for 17 years.

In the December 12, 2009 TIME article "Can Chile's Right Emerge from Its Dark Past?," Tim Padgett reports:

Chileans have had macabre reminders this month about how vicious the country's political right once was. Last week saw the reburial ceremony for Victor Jara, a popular 20th-century Chilean folk singer. His remains had been exhumed recently to help determine just how he was killed in 1973, after he'd been arrested by the brutal right-wing dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet, who ruled from 1973 to 1990. (An autopsy revealed Jara was tormented in a game of "Russian roulette" and then executed by machine gun fire.) This week, a Chilean judge ruled that former President Eduardo Frei Montalva, a Pinochet opponent who died in 1982, had actually been fatally poisoned by Pinochet agents.

It's hard to consider those grisly findings and not wonder whether the Chilean right might still be capable of such reactionary cruelty if it ever came to power again. Chile, in fact, stands at that very crossroads this weekend. On the eve of Sunday's presidential election, conservative billionaire Sebastian Piñera leads the liberal candidate, former President Eduaro Frei Ruiz — Frei Montalva's son — by at least 10 points in most polls. Chile's incumbent left hopes the Jara and Frei Montalva cases give voters pause. But the exhumations underscore how important it is that the right, after almost 20 uninterrupted years of center-left rule, gets a new chance to govern South America's most developed country. It can prove once and for all that it has purged the ghosts of Pinochet, who died in 2006. "This election," says political analyst Guillermo Holzmann, "is an opportunity to see that a center-right exists in Chile."

That message has been a centerpiece of the campaign run by Piñera and his conservative coalition, the Alliance for Chile. The Chilean right is known less for open minds than for Opus Dei, the ultra-conservative Roman Catholic society. But Piñera, 60, a Harvard-educated tycoon whose brother was a government minister under Pinochet, has deflected charges that he's a right-wing lapdog by embracing progressive causes like gay rights — a stance that has scandalized the country's Catholic church. As an economist in the 1970s and 80s, Piñera followed Chile's free-market orthodoxy; but on the stump today, he's pledged not to cut social programs. "On the contrary," he said recently, "we're going to strengthen them." Says Michael Shifter, vice president of the InterAmerican Dialogue in Washington, D.C., "Chilean voters have been eager to see that kind of pragmatic evolution from the right."

Still, concerns abound that if he's elected, Piñera faces heavy pressure from conservatives, especially in the military, to move Chile far back to the right. The recent exhumations indicate how nervous many Chileans are that the rightward shift will enervate the robust human rights apparatus established since Pinochet stepped down after a 1988 referendum rejected his continued rule. Piñera himself opposed Pinochet in that plebiscite. But last month he told a gathering of retired military and police officials who served under Pinochet that he'll work to rein in the trials — "proceedings that go on ad eternum," he remarked — that have convicted a number of their colleagues for murders and other abuses committed during the dictatorship. Some 3,000 people were killed or disappeared in that 17-year period.

Among them were leftists like Jara and, as the court has now declared, moderates like Frei Montalva, who was President from 1964 to 1970. He was succeeded by Salvador Allende, whose sharp leftward turn alarmed Chile's conservatives and prompted Pinochet's iron-fisted 1973 military coup. Along with thousands of others in the putsch's early and darkest days, Jara was rounded up and held in Chile Stadium in the capital, Santiago. After being tortured and killed, his body was tossed into the streets. Frei Montalva originally backed Pinochet's rule, but by the 1980s opposed him. According to the Chilean judge, three men tied to Pinochet, including a doctor, secretly injected Frei Montalva with toxic mustard gas and thallium while he was in the hospital for stomach surgery.

But it's doubtful that even those morbid revelations can turn enough voters back to Chile's center-left coalition, the Concertación. President Michelle Bachelet, a moderate socialist and Chile's first female head of state, remains hugely popular; but Frei Ruiz, 67, hasn't been able to exploit her cachet and has instead come to symbolize the Concertación's staleness after two decades in power, especially as the global recession slows Latin America's most envied economy. Frei Ruiz's problems have been highlighted by the remarkable rise of a third candidate, Marco Enríquez-Ominami — born, ironically, in cataclysmic year 1973 — a socialist who bolted the Concertación and is gleaning younger voters weary of the two-party order. While none of the candidates look likely to win a majority on Sunday, the question is whether Frei Ruiz or Ominami will face Piñera in a January run-off.

Piñera is expected to win that round as well. And if he can truly govern as a reasonable instead of rabid conservative, it could do a lot to relieve the polarization and distrust that linger 20 years after Pinochet. "Pinochet is dead and fortunately not really an issue in this election," says Holzmann. "But if Piñera becomes the President most Chileans hope he'll be, it will amplify that gray area between liberal and conservative that countries like ours need more of."

Mapuche warrior Jacinto Lefignir Ineleu

The May 28, 1934 TIME magazine article "
CHILE: Bones to Rest" recounts the story of a 120-year old Mapuche warrior:

The armies of Peru's Incas marched again & again during the 15th Century deep down into the narrow strip of coast that was even then called Chile, to conquer the proud Araucanian Indians. Pizarro's men took the job over, passed it on to generations of Spanish soldiers who tramped in, left behind broods of half-breeds, tramped out again. When Chile broke away from Spain in 1817, she went on trying to conquer the Araucanian in his southern provinces of Malleco and Cautin. Not until 1882 when some of the Araucanians who called themselves Mapuches turned against their kinsmen was the Araucanian conquered.

One of the Mapuche warrior chiefs who led his braves against the Araucanian, again against Argentine invaders from across the lesser Andes of the south, was venerable Jacinto Lefignir Ineleu, then 68 years old. Last week, 120 years old,

Chief Ineleu felt that he was ready to die but Chilean law commands that the dead be buried in authorized municipal cemeteries. By a kinsman he sent a message to Chile's blue-eyed President Arturo Alessandri. Spoke he with grave dignity: "I am the last of the Mapuche warrior chiefs and I have served you well. It is not right that my aged bones should be laid to rest among Christians. They belong in the place called Auquell near Cunco in the province of Cautin."

Healing Chile's Malaise: Despite decades of economic growth, average citizens are dissatisfied—and want better schools and more opportunities

In the November 20, 2009 Business Week article "Healing Chile's Malaise," Geri SMith reports that "Despite decades of economic growth, average citizens are dissatisfied—and want better schools and more opportunities."

Santiago - Valeria Garcia has come a long way in the past two decades. As a high school dropout, she lived in a wooden shack with a dirt-floor kitchen and a tin roof in San Ramón, one of the Chilean capital's roughest neighborhoods. But at age 33 she went back to high school and then earned a degree in psychology from a local university. For seven years she commuted an hour each day by bus to classes, all the while taking in washing to make ends meet.

Now 52, Garcia is a psychologist at a center for battered women and is sending her children to college with no government aid. Her $1,200 monthly income disqualifies her for financial assistance, although she still lives in San Ramón, a desolate expanse of makeshift houses and vacant lots. "If I'm now considered middle-class, why do I feel so poor?" she says, looking around the four-room cinderblock house she shares with her three daughters. "The world thinks Chile is successful, but many Chileans can't do much more than work, sleep, and eat. People aren't satisfied."

Chile has come a long way since 1990, when democracy was restored after 17 years of military rule. The economy has been one of the world's fastest-growing, inflation is a distant memory, the poverty level has fallen to 13% from 45%, and per capita gross domestic product has quadrupled, to $10,100.

Yet like Garcia, many Chileans feel a certain malaise. They know their country is one of the most prosperous in Latin America due to fiscal discipline and the profound free-market reforms of the past 30 years. But Chile's explosive, Asian-style growth of the 1990s has given way to expansion averaging just 3.5% annually this decade. And despite efforts to diversify, volatile copper earnings continue to account for more than half of total exports. So Chile's leaders are seeking to reduce that dependence and nurture a knowledge-based economy via better schooling and more innovation.

For the well-to-do, it's business—and pleasure—as usual. Glittering new office towers and luxury apartment complexes abound in Santiago's wealthy neighborhoods, and on Sundays well-heeled families flock to the Club de Polo San Cristóbal for a sumptuous buffet of prime rib and king crab. They dine overlooking immaculate fields where thoroughbreds are groomed for afternoon races. But in the sprawling, dusty communities where Chile's nascent middle class lives, health clinics, parks, and public transportation are in short supply. In spite of its progress, Chile remains a class-bound society of haves and have-nots. "Chileans have advanced, but not as much as they'd like, and those who feel left behind are bitter," says Marta Lagos, an economist who heads Latinobarómetro, an opinion research firm.

MORE DYNAMIC

That's translating into trouble for the Concertación, the center-left coalition that has governed Chile since General Augusto Pinochet's military junta stepped down. The coalition of Socialists, Christian Democrats, and Radicals risks losing the Dec. 13 presidential election. Leading the polls is Sebastián Piñera, a conservative billionaire who controls LAN Airlines, the flagship carrier. The 59-year-old Piñera doesn't plan to radically change the successful mix of fiscal and monetary policies or poverty-zapping cash handouts that the Concertación has championed. But voters seem to feel he is more dynamic than the Concertación's candidate, 67-year-old former President Eduardo Frei, and more mature than Marco Enríquez-Ominami, a 36-year-old Socialist who broke ranks with the coalition when it rejected his candidacy. President Michelle Bachelet, a Socialist who can't run for reelection, is wildly popular. But her 78% approval rating hasn't rubbed off on Frei.

On Bachelet's watch, Chile enjoyed windfall profits from record-high copper prices. But instead of spending that money, as other commodity-rich countries did, the government put $20 billion into sovereign wealth funds and invested it, earning average annual returns of 7.2%. That let Bachelet unleash a $4 billion fiscal stimulus, equal to 2.8% of GDP, after the global financial crisis hit. The money was spent on loans to small businesses, subsidies for companies employing young people, financing for low-income housing, and more. "We were willing to take the heat and make an important savings effort when it was not popular to do so," says Finance Minister Andrés Velasco. While the economy is set to shrink by as much as 2% this year, economists expect growth of 3.5% to 5% in 2010 as the world economy revives and copper prices recover.

A big worry for many Chileans is education. Although 90% of students finish high school, many feel public schools are subpar. Some 40% of high school and university graduates score dismally on reading comprehension tests. And schools are plagued by frequent teacher strikes, including a walkout that kept classes idle for most of November. So low-income and middle-class parents often scrimp or take on debt to send their children to private schools. "Until Chile reforms education, nothing will change," says Manuel José Ossandón, mayor of Puente Alto, a working-class district of 700,000 on the outskirts of Santiago.

He ought to know. Even Puente Alto's top public school suffers from poorly trained teachers and classrooms crammed with as many as 45 students. "The best teachers want to work in private schools, which pay better," says Sandra Urrutia, principal of the sprawling brick complex with 2,400 students from kindergarten to high school.

TAX BREAKS FOR STARTUPS

Last year, 60,000 Chileans joined a new nonprofit group called Education 2020 that is lobbying for better schools. Among the group's goals are higher spending on education, mandatory teacher testing, and tighter accreditation standards. "How do people expect Chile's economy to grow 7% a year if nearly half of its population is functionally illiterate?" asks Mario Waissbluth, an engineering professor at the University of Chile and founder of Education 2020. "Chile has reached a glass ceiling, a limit to its future growth unless it does something quickly to improve its human capital."

A second big worry is a lack of innovation. While Chile ranks well on innovation vs. its Latin American peers, the government knows it must do more to attract higher-end foreign investment. The National Innovation Council for Competitiveness, a public-private partnership, is trying to increase ties between universities and businesses to promote biotech, green energy, and technology startups. And the government has introduced generous tax breaks and subsidies to help build such businesses.

Those incentives helped lure U.S. tech firm Synopsys (SNPS) to Chile. The company, which designs software for chipmakers such as Intel (INTC), opened a research center in Santiago three years ago. Chile's economic development agency, Corfo, pays up to $25,000 for training each new employee, money Synopsys uses to send hires to its Mountain View (Calif.) headquarters for orientation. The newcomers seem to like the culture. Synopsys' 28 engineers, who earn about half what their U.S. counterparts do, come to the office in T-shirts and shorts. "We wanted to create an atmosphere of creativity and innovation," says General Manager Victor Grimblatt. Last year, Synopsys Chile exported $1.2 million in services, and three of its engineers applied for a U.S. patent.

Drive 75 miles west toward the port city of Valparaiso, and you'll find another leg of Chile's efforts to build a knowledge economy. There, Evalueserve, a New Delhi outsourcing firm, employs 160 Chileans who provide business analysis for companies worldwide. "I feel like I'm exposed to the heart of the international financial system," says Santiago Tapia, a 32-year-old who analyzes beverage and food companies for a global investment bank. Tapia says he's "living the American Dream," with a modern apartment two blocks from the ocean, a late-model Hyundai, and his fast-paced job with co-workers from India, Japan, China, and a half-dozen other countries.

Thanks to government-subsidized training and free rent for five years, Evalueserve says its costs in Chile are half what they would be in the U.S. and just 50% more than in India. The company plans to triple its workforce in Chile in four years. Corfo, the economic development agency, says outsourcers in Chile will export some $950 million in services in 2009. Within five years the agency aims to boost that to nearly $3 billion.

If successful, the effort will bring jobs needed to sustain growth as the country moves away from its dependence on copper exports. Until investments in education and innovation pay off, though, many Chileans plan to send their political leaders a message this election: There's no time to waste making sure average citizens enjoy real opportunities. Marta Cecilia Carvacho, a 42-year-old single mother who earns $585 a month as a maid, sells ice cream on weekends at a street market so she can send her 13-year-old son to a private school. "I know we're all better off now than we were 20 years ago," she says. "I can more or less feed and clothe my son and give him shelter. But there is more to life than simply surviving. I want my son to develop as a human being, to participate fully in Chile's promise, and I don't see that happening now."

Economic Growth in Chile

Chile GDP Growth Rate

Chile GDP Growth Rate chart, historical data, forecast and news. Chile is the sixth largest national economy in Latin America. In 2007, Chile’s Gross Domestic Product (GDP) measured on purchasing power parity basis was estimated at $231 billion, according to the International Monetary Fund. The country is currently classified as an Upper-Middle Income economy by the World Bank, with one of the highest ($9,884) GDP per capita in the region.

Michelle Bachelet

In the April 28, 2008 TIME magazine profile of Michelle Bachelet as one of the world's 100 most influential people of 2008, Hillary Clinton writes:

When I heard that Michelle Bachelet — a doctor who devoted her life to helping the people of Chile, a daughter who lost her father to the violent regime of Augusto Pinochet and a leader who experienced personally the brutality of dictatorship but never lost hope in the people of her nation or the promise of democracy — was running for the presidency of Chile, I was enthralled.

This was a woman who had overcome so much herself, rising to become Health Minister and then Defense Minister — the first woman in Latin America to ever hold such a post. And I remember thinking how wonderful it would be for a woman to break through yet another barrier — and to help her country break through barriers too.

When we met in January 2005 during her campaign, she spoke with deep passion and even deeper expertise on the challenges facing her nation, from modernizing the military to modernizing the health-care system. I had been very eager to finally speak with her in person. Being a woman in politics can be tough business, and Bachelet made it look effortless. In our meeting, I learned why: because Bachelet, 56, speaks and leads from her heart. She won, of course.

In Chile, Argentina, Liberia, Germany and around the world, women are not only blazing new trails but bringing others along as well. In every country, on every continent — in places where women are soaring to new heights, and in places where too many women remain second-class citizens — women and men can draw inspiration from leaders like Bachelet, leaders with grace and courage, leaders who never give up and never give in.

Count me among the inspired.