As Goes Chile, So Goes the World
NOTE: The referendum mentioned below was REJECTED by 62% vote, so this traditionally conservative country will remain more conservative than the current administration thought it could achieve. What I admire about the democratic process seems to be in place as the leftist president said the following, ““Chileans’ decision demands our institutions and political leaders to work harder, with more dialogue, respect and care, until we reach a proposal that reflects us all,”
Today, Chile is voting on a new constitution. That constitution is said to enshrine many of the liberties we, as a nation and increasingly as a world, are fighting over. Those “inalienable” rights include legalized abortion, universal healthcare, gender parity in government, the empowerment of labor unions, more rights for indigenous people, more rights for animals and nature, and an all-important set of constitutional rights for people in general to housing, education, retirement benefits, internet access, clean air, water, sanitation and lifelong care. Phew, that’s a lot. I am writing this early on Sunday morning, so I will be anxious to see what the outcome of this referendum will be in a country that has intersected with my life quite a bit over the years. Undoubtedly, I will dutifully report back about the outcome, understanding fully that my relationship with Chile began during college since Salvador Allende the socialist (some would say communist) elected president of Chile, took office in 1970 during my senior year in high school and got overwhelmed in a coup in 1973, when I was a junior in college, causing him to take his own life and defer to the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. In other words, the result of this free election today, may or may not portend a lasting establishment of a new Chile since some may argue that we have been here before.
I often say to people that Chile is my choice for the true South American country. To begin with, I exclude Mexico because it is, depending on your take on geography, a part of Central America or North America. It is decidedly not part of South America. Yes, it shares an Iberian heritage, but some combination of location, strong Aztec cultural roots and proximity to the behemoth United States has made it its own unique self versus one of those lower, sub-equatorial brethren. As for the big boys of Brazil and Argentina, they share a common misfortune. As rich as they are in natural resources and land, they are just too damn close to their homeland in Europe and have been way too colonial in their history for their own good. I have always felt that Brazilians and Argentines are not Latin Americans. They are Portuguese, Spaniards and even Brits, who have happened to travel to a transoceanic land to extract wealth and then return to the mothership once work is done. I always quote the story that the rubber barons of the Amazon basin, living in Manaus near the headwaters of the great river, tired to rebuild their home with an opera house to rival La Scala, but succumbed to sending their shirts home to Lisbon to be laundered because they simply couldn’t find a good laundry in the jungle. True story.
But Chile was always different. Chile was a long, long way from anywhere. It is the quintessential butt of the “you can’t get there from here” joke. There was no Panama Canal and there was great peril in the turbulent waters off Cape Horn, and God knows the long way around was…a very long way from home. So, I always figured that those people who made it to Chile were like the people that finally make it to Mars. Their only choice, given the lifespan of the human species, is to consider it home and to make a go of it without support from the old country. That served Chile well because it meant that capital accumulated in Chile tended to stay in Chile, at least a lot more so than in Argentina, the purported land of the future for the last two hundred years.
Chile, being an Andean country with that spine of mountains running down its long 4,000 mile length, has its share of indigenous people, but for some, probably anthropological, geographical or meteorological set of reasons, they are not as historically dominant as in the northern Andean Pact countries like Peru , Ecuador and Bolivia. The Incan Empire did briefly extend south into northern Chile, but the Atacama Desert is considered the driest non-polar desert in the world and is not exactly a hospitable place. It is so high and dry that it is the place the world’s astronomers have chosen to put their biggest array (86 radio telescopes to be exact) of celestial antennas and telescopes. That desert provided a significant barrier to entry, as they say, for the powerful and culturally dominant Incan civilization and left Chile much more “available” to the hearty European settlers that braved the Straights of Magellan and chose not to return, but to make a life on the western pampas and in the coast-hugging mountains that frame the narrow country.
I was a student of modern revolutions in my college days, less because of the American radical 60’s I had lived through as a youth, and more because of my even younger upbringing in Latin America in the 50’s. Not only had I spent my earliest years in Peres Jimenez’s dictatorial Venezuela, but my family and I had spent one afternoon transiting through Havana in early 1959 when PanAm was still hubbing its Central American flights through there and the Castro rebels were organized enough to seize control of the airport, but not so organized as to tell PanAm to get its imperial ass the hell out of their country. I have a very vivid image of a bearded, AK-47 toting, green fatigue-clad rebel chasing my older sister Kathy across the tarmac as she had a snit over not getting a souvenir doll from the depleted tourist emporium in the makeshift tin-roofed terminal. That’s the kind of memory that sticks with you and causes you to write a praise-worthy paper on the Cuban Revolution that gets noticed by an otherwise bored professor of Government as he bemoans the waning importance of his chosen field of study as the world turns from radical to disco.
Then, in 1984, when one country after another in Latin America decided to default on its sovereign debt obligations that had been arranged, syndicated and largely held in portfolio by big American banks like the one I worked for, Chile found itself once again at the forefront of the issue parade because the Pinochet technocrats he had imported from Milton Friedman’s University of Chicago were ready with an actionable economic recovery plan while the rest of the continent was still awash in anti-IMF rhetoric. That plan allowed bankers like me to convert sovereign debt into corporate equity, so I bought the leading-edge pension and insurance companies of Chile and dove right into the heart of the social dilemma of the country and did so both at great profit to my bank and great benefit to the growing middle class of Chile.
I also spent most of the 90’s running a Global Private Bank that helped Latinos from around the continent manage their likely ill-gotten gains in offshore accounts. These were people of all backgrounds that liked making money off the back of Latin America, but wanted to keep it safe outside Latin America and the social costs of that be damned.
So you see, whether it was meeting a traditional dictator in Caracas, confronting a Castro rebel at the Havana Airport, meeting a “benign” economic dictator in the Ministry of Finance in Santiago, or trying to charm the rich and famous in Punta del Este, my awareness and personal conflict over the social struggles of the people of Latin America and their quest for the good life is somewhat profound. I am thinking that this referendum today is like what they used to say about General Motors and the U.S. Economy. To paraphrase, as goes Chile, so goes the world.