>On September 11, 2023, Chile marked the fiftieth anniversary of the bloody military coup that toppled Socialist president Salvador Allende and installed General Augusto Pinochet, who presided over nearly two decades marked by human rights abuses and radical economic reforms, making the country a laboratory for neoliberal policies later embraced across much of the world. Not long ago, it looked as if the anniversary would mark a definitive break with this history. In 2019, a massive wave of protests over inequality led to the convocation of a new constitutional convention that aimed to replace the constitution imposed by Pinochet in 1980. After three decades in which mostly center-left governments had maintained and expanded upon the suite of free market policies introduced during the dictatorship—a model that had helped generate impressively steady economic growth—the electorate swung hard to the left. Radical candidates won most seats in the constitutional assembly, and in 2021, the thirty-five-year-old former student-activist Gabriel Boric easily won the presidential contest.
>But even this forceful leftward momentum rapidly veered off course in the months after Boric took office in early 2022. The new draft constitution, written by the Left-dominated assembly, became deeply unpopular when its details—among them, a proliferation of new rights and a declaration of a “plurinational” state that accorded significant autonomy to Chile’s indigenous communities—were made public. When the vote occurred in September, the proposed constitution lost by a devastating margin of 38–62, forcing the election of a new constitutional convention. Matters only got worse for the Left in the subsequent months, as Boric’s popularity plummeted and his new administration flailed. By May 2023, when a vote was held to elect the new convention, voters had pivoted decisively to the Right and gave a plurality of votes to the party of ultraconservative former congressman José Antonio Kast, who had been defeated by Boric in the 2021 presidential contest.
>Kast’s rise is as remarkable a development as the election of Boric was two years ago. For two decades after Chile returned to democratic rule in 1990, the Concertación—a center-left coalition dominated by the Christian Democrat and Socialist parties—held a firm grip on the presidency. In 2009, center-right candidate Sebastián Piñera finally ended this streak with a narrow victory. A Harvard-educated former economics professor and CEO, Piñera took pains to distance himself from the Pinochet dictatorship and loudly condemned its human rights violations. Throughout the decades after Pinochet stepped down, it was understood that a right-wing candidate could only win national office by making such declarations. Piñera was reelected to a second term in 2017, which put him in the presidential palace when the 2019 protests kicked off. This helped discredit him and the moderate conservative faction to which he belongs.
>Kast, an unapologetic supporter of Pinochet, has defied the long-standing assumption that right-wing candidates must disavow the dictator and his abuses in order to win elections. The resulting irony is that the fate of the new constitution is now in the hands of a man who defended the old one. Moreover, he and his conservative allies will likely attempt to strengthen the very aspects of the older document that enraged the 2019 protesters: its safeguards against any radical transformation of the sort attempted by Allende. That said, early polling suggests the second attempt at a new constitution will also fail to win majority support when voted on. Indeed, the far-right version currently looks set to fail by a margin comparable to the far-left one. Boric has stated that if the new draft is voted down, “the conditions would not be there to carry out a new constitutional process.” In that case, Pinochet’s 1980 constitution would remain in place.
>Far from moving beyond its twentieth-century history, then, Chile now seems mired in it more than ever. If anything, it was the 1990s and 2000s, during which a consensus prevailed around a hybrid regime of pro-market and social democratic policies, that represented a break from the conflict-ridden prior era. Now, as in the early 1970s, energy has dissipated from the political center, and a hard Right and hard Left face off, calling upon the symbols of the past, of Pinochet and Allende, to assert their legitimacy. In the years leading up to the 1973 coup, these implacable enemies each seemed to command just-below majority support, leaving politics deadlocked. The likely failure of the second constitutional convention portends a similar predicament. In 1973, what broke the deadlock was the military—which had maintained a commitment to political neutrality up to then—throwing its force behind one side. This is unlikely to recur, but how the impasse will be resolved is unclear.
vaguelydad on
The Chile Project is a really interesting book. A couple surprising things stuck out for me:
– Allende really destroyed Chile. The success of Chile is striking relative to the damage wrought by textbook socialist populism.
– Much of the economic question had nothing to do with the kind of wonky reforms we think of in the States, but rather with how to peg the currency to achieve price stability. A lot of the Chicago Boys success and failure with inflation and economic growth came down to this question. I have an econ degree, but I knew little about the macroeconomics of a floating exchange rate, a soft peg, a hard peg, or dollarization. However currency pegs are very important to small counties with large exports, often moreso than budget reforms. I think of this a lot when we discuss Milei.
– A lot of the growth of Chile happened after the transfer to democracy and there was a lot of continuity in economic policies between dictatorship and democracy.
Chile is a fascinating country and Edwards’s book is definitely worth a read.
HeavyVariation8263 on
>“Chile was the indisputable economic leader of Latin America.” How is it, then, that the country with “the highest income per capita, the lowest incidence of poverty, and the best overall social indicators” in the region witnessed a massive revolt on material grounds, the leaders of which demanded a total overhaul of the economic system?
My reading of this was that voters didn’t have their priorities straight (just an ill defined malaise against the establishment) and took the bandwagon of the students protesting about paying the subway fare
Then they got more than they could chew and when they saw the constituents for writing the new constitution they got terrible cold feet
TL:DR : it was a Latam moment but they got their senses back at the end
4 Comments
[deleted]
>On September 11, 2023, Chile marked the fiftieth anniversary of the bloody military coup that toppled Socialist president Salvador Allende and installed General Augusto Pinochet, who presided over nearly two decades marked by human rights abuses and radical economic reforms, making the country a laboratory for neoliberal policies later embraced across much of the world. Not long ago, it looked as if the anniversary would mark a definitive break with this history. In 2019, a massive wave of protests over inequality led to the convocation of a new constitutional convention that aimed to replace the constitution imposed by Pinochet in 1980. After three decades in which mostly center-left governments had maintained and expanded upon the suite of free market policies introduced during the dictatorship—a model that had helped generate impressively steady economic growth—the electorate swung hard to the left. Radical candidates won most seats in the constitutional assembly, and in 2021, the thirty-five-year-old former student-activist Gabriel Boric easily won the presidential contest.
>But even this forceful leftward momentum rapidly veered off course in the months after Boric took office in early 2022. The new draft constitution, written by the Left-dominated assembly, became deeply unpopular when its details—among them, a proliferation of new rights and a declaration of a “plurinational” state that accorded significant autonomy to Chile’s indigenous communities—were made public. When the vote occurred in September, the proposed constitution lost by a devastating margin of 38–62, forcing the election of a new constitutional convention. Matters only got worse for the Left in the subsequent months, as Boric’s popularity plummeted and his new administration flailed. By May 2023, when a vote was held to elect the new convention, voters had pivoted decisively to the Right and gave a plurality of votes to the party of ultraconservative former congressman José Antonio Kast, who had been defeated by Boric in the 2021 presidential contest.
>Kast’s rise is as remarkable a development as the election of Boric was two years ago. For two decades after Chile returned to democratic rule in 1990, the Concertación—a center-left coalition dominated by the Christian Democrat and Socialist parties—held a firm grip on the presidency. In 2009, center-right candidate Sebastián Piñera finally ended this streak with a narrow victory. A Harvard-educated former economics professor and CEO, Piñera took pains to distance himself from the Pinochet dictatorship and loudly condemned its human rights violations. Throughout the decades after Pinochet stepped down, it was understood that a right-wing candidate could only win national office by making such declarations. Piñera was reelected to a second term in 2017, which put him in the presidential palace when the 2019 protests kicked off. This helped discredit him and the moderate conservative faction to which he belongs.
>Kast, an unapologetic supporter of Pinochet, has defied the long-standing assumption that right-wing candidates must disavow the dictator and his abuses in order to win elections. The resulting irony is that the fate of the new constitution is now in the hands of a man who defended the old one. Moreover, he and his conservative allies will likely attempt to strengthen the very aspects of the older document that enraged the 2019 protesters: its safeguards against any radical transformation of the sort attempted by Allende. That said, early polling suggests the second attempt at a new constitution will also fail to win majority support when voted on. Indeed, the far-right version currently looks set to fail by a margin comparable to the far-left one. Boric has stated that if the new draft is voted down, “the conditions would not be there to carry out a new constitutional process.” In that case, Pinochet’s 1980 constitution would remain in place.
>Far from moving beyond its twentieth-century history, then, Chile now seems mired in it more than ever. If anything, it was the 1990s and 2000s, during which a consensus prevailed around a hybrid regime of pro-market and social democratic policies, that represented a break from the conflict-ridden prior era. Now, as in the early 1970s, energy has dissipated from the political center, and a hard Right and hard Left face off, calling upon the symbols of the past, of Pinochet and Allende, to assert their legitimacy. In the years leading up to the 1973 coup, these implacable enemies each seemed to command just-below majority support, leaving politics deadlocked. The likely failure of the second constitutional convention portends a similar predicament. In 1973, what broke the deadlock was the military—which had maintained a commitment to political neutrality up to then—throwing its force behind one side. This is unlikely to recur, but how the impasse will be resolved is unclear.
The Chile Project is a really interesting book. A couple surprising things stuck out for me:
– Allende really destroyed Chile. The success of Chile is striking relative to the damage wrought by textbook socialist populism.
– Much of the economic question had nothing to do with the kind of wonky reforms we think of in the States, but rather with how to peg the currency to achieve price stability. A lot of the Chicago Boys success and failure with inflation and economic growth came down to this question. I have an econ degree, but I knew little about the macroeconomics of a floating exchange rate, a soft peg, a hard peg, or dollarization. However currency pegs are very important to small counties with large exports, often moreso than budget reforms. I think of this a lot when we discuss Milei.
– A lot of the growth of Chile happened after the transfer to democracy and there was a lot of continuity in economic policies between dictatorship and democracy.
Chile is a fascinating country and Edwards’s book is definitely worth a read.
>“Chile was the indisputable economic leader of Latin America.” How is it, then, that the country with “the highest income per capita, the lowest incidence of poverty, and the best overall social indicators” in the region witnessed a massive revolt on material grounds, the leaders of which demanded a total overhaul of the economic system?
My reading of this was that voters didn’t have their priorities straight (just an ill defined malaise against the establishment) and took the bandwagon of the students protesting about paying the subway fare
Then they got more than they could chew and when they saw the constituents for writing the new constitution they got terrible cold feet
TL:DR : it was a Latam moment but they got their senses back at the end
!ping LATAM