Going, going, gone |
FOR the first time in 35 years, Chilean voters this month decisively voted into power an admirer of their despicable former dictator, Augusto Pinochet. Despite the US president’s growing penchant for intervening in foreign elections, it wasn’t a Trump card that proved decisive for José Kast.
There were various other factors at play, not least the failure of Gabriel Boric’s left-leaning government to deliver on many of the promises behind its mandate for a progressive transformation.
Rising to power on the back of a popular revolt propelled mainly by economic woes, Boric declared in 2021 that if Chile was the birthplace of neoliberalism, it would also be its burial place. It now turns out that economic doctrine has never been laid to rest, and the Latin American graveyard instead is littered with the remains of the pink tide that roused hopes globally when it first washed across the continent earlier this century.
The Boric government delivered some relief to those who needed it most, but turned centrist after a year of struggling to shift the structures it had inherited. It sought to replace Chile’s 1980 basic law with a progressive constitution, which was rejected in a referendum; a more conservative variant suffered the same fate. So........