¡Fuera Piñera!

I.

Chile was out of step with Latin American leftward-bending trends in the closing days of the last century and the opening salvos of the present one. Partly, this had to do with the fact that the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet from 1973 to 1990 so unambiguously terrorized and uprooted the organized Left and its supporting social layers, and partly it was because the spectre of that terror’s return continued to haunt the first generation of Chileans after liberal democracy’s restoration. The audacity of social experimentation and political bravado from below characteristic of the democratic-socialist era of Salvador Allende (1970-1973) – as often in spite of government attempts at containment as due to Allende’s intended or unintended stimulus and encouragement – was replaced over the 1990s and early 2000s by a defeated torpor of post-political technocracy. Alongside a commitment to neoliberal continuity, authoritarian enclaves underpinned the new order, with legacies from the dictatorship enmeshed in the nodes of an ostensibly democratic state structure.

The Chilean elite, in other words, faced little opposition in their managed transition to ortho-liberalism, maintaining the sanctity of market-imperatives aggressively introduced by Pinochet with the help of the Chicago Boys in the mid-1970s. From 1990 to 2010, a centre-left coalition called Concertación formed every government. Concertación’s reign was ended by the formation of the government of Sebastián Piñera of Chile Vamos, a coalition of centre-right and right-wing parties, in 2010. Concertación’s successor coalition, New Majority, then came back to office with the second presidency of the Socialist Party’s Michelle Bachelet (2014-2018), followed by Piñera’s return to the presidency for a second term in March 2019.

Lauded as the model student of free-market growth and institutionalized moderation, post-dictatorship Chile was widely understood by the know-all social engineers of international financial institutions and their cousins in esteemed departments of politics and economics to have overcome the destabilizing polarization of the past. For these true believers, Chile had vanquished the twin demons of the Cold War: the authoritarian state and the revolutionary Left.

Irrespective of amendments here and there, the core of the constitution inaugurated under the dictatorship in 1980 remains in place. The dominant ideology, shared by centre-left and centre-right alike, has been premised on the technocratic isolation of state managers and depoliticization of society – the impersonal tyranny of the market projected as the ultimate arbiter of social conflict.

II.

Busy playing handmaiden to capital, centrist governments of different tints ignored obscene levels of inequality. Today, ten Chilean billionaires boast combined assets worth 16 percent of Gross Domestic Product. The Bello columnist for the British liberal magazine The Economist offered a telling observation late in 2019: “Some years ago your columnist attended a drinks party of about 60 people in Santiago. A friend whispered in his ear: ‘You realise that half of Chile’s GDP is in this room’.”

Set apart from those in attendance at the cocktail festivities, the working and middle classes live off credit, indebting themselves to pay for the enormous cost of living associated with privatized education, health, pensions, highway, and water services. Hidden taxes on the poor, the burdens they bring reach into every orifice of quotidian life; a particular source of discontent, as we will see, are the high fares on transit. Household debt in Chile is the highest in Latin America at 45.4 percent of GDP; and we know, personal indebtedness of the working classes is an enormous disciplinary whip in the hands of capital, one which keeps workers treading ever harder with the aim of staying above water. One of the bitter ironies of the present scenario is that Piñera made much of his estimated wealth of $2.8 billion by introducing credit card debt to the plebeian substratum.

In an interview that would come to haunt him, published in the Financial Times on October 17, 2019, Piñera captured the ethos of the Chilean model as seen from the perspective of the ruling class: “Look at Latin America,” Piñera said. “Argentina and Paraguay are in recession, Mexico and Brazil in stagnation, Peru and Ecuador in deep political crisis and in this context Chile looks like an oasis because we have stable democracy, the economy is growing, we are creating jobs, we are improving salaries and we are keeping macroeconomic balance . . . Is it easy? No, it’s not. But it’s worth fighting for.”