Chile: a success story turns sour
“Around the world, 2019 has been a year of public protest,” said Ian Bremmer in Time magazine, “and in some countries, it’s not hard to understand why.” In Hong Kong, people are furious about Chinese interference; in Algeria and Sudan, they’re venting their frustration with decades of dictatorship; in Iraq and Lebanon, the issue is endemic corruption. But what have the Chileans got to be so angry about? They live in one of the “most peaceful and prosperous countries” in South America, yet student-led protests last month against a rise in subway fares in the capital, Santiago, have escalated into weeks of demonstrations, riots and vandalism. One protest drew more than a million people onto the streets. “Startled Chileans have seen nothing like this since the end of the Pinochet dictatorship nearly three decades ago.”
This explosion of anger has been brewing for some time, said Amanda Taub in The New York Times. For years, Chile’s political leaders have championed the free market as the answer to everything, but the people have now woken to the fact that the system is failing them. Economic growth has not been fairly shared (the UN estimates that the richest 1% of Chileans earn one-third of national wealth). Middle- and working-class Chileans are “struggling with high prices, low wages, and a privatised retirement system that leaves many older people in bitter poverty”. The inequality in Chile is appalling, agreed Boris van der Spek in the Toronto Sun. Half of its people live on a monthly income of $550 or less. The exorbitant cost of higher education (annual tuition fees are around $10,000) means that “entire families are forced into debt for the rest of their lives, just so a single child can attend university”. Add in rising healthcare and housing costs and “it’s easy to understand how an increase in metro fares was simply the last straw”.
Chile’s leaders could doubtless do more to make their country a fairer place, said Noah Smith on Bloomberg, but let’s not lose sight of the progress that has been made. The nation is “substantially less unequal than it was in 1990”, and its poverty rate has fallen. Life expectancy in the nation now exceeds that in the US, and Chile also scores higher than the US on measures of political and press freedom. The angry protests in Chile today are not a damning verdict on the entire economic system. Rather, they’re a violent reaction by a “generation raised on expectations of steadily rising living standards” to a recent slowing in the growth rate. In this respect, Chile could be said to be “a victim of its own success”.