Chile's Social Earthquake

Chile is
experiencing a social earthquake in the aftermath of the 8.8 magnitude
quake that struck the country on February 27. "The fault lines of the
Chilean Economic Miracle have been exposed," says Elias Padilla, an
anthropology professor at the Academic University of Christian Humanism
in Santiago. "The free market, neo-liberal economic model that Chile
has followed since the Pinochet dictatorship has feet of mud."

Chile
is one of the most inequitable societies in the world. Today, 14
percent of the population lives in abject poverty. The top 20 percent
captures 50 percent of the national income, while the bottom 20 percent
earns only 5 percent. In a 2005 World Bank survey of 124 countries, Chile ranked twelfth in the list of countries with the worst distribution of income.

The rampant
ideology of the free market has produced a deep sense of alienation
among much of the population. Although a coalition of center left
parties replaced the Pinochet regime twenty years ago, it opted to
depoliticize the country, to rule from the top down, allowing
controlled elections every few years, shunting aside the popular
organizations and social movements that had brought down the
dictatorship.

This explains the
scenes of looting and social chaos in the southern part of the country
that were transmitted round the world on the third day after the
earthquake. In Concepcion, Chile's second largest city, which was
virtually leveled by the earthquake, the population received absolutely
no assistance from the central government for two days. The chain
supermarkets and malls that had come to replace the local stores and
shops over the years remained firmly shuttered.

Settling Accounts

Popular frustration
exploded as mobs descended on the commercial center, carting off
everything, not just food from the supermarkets but also shoes,
clothing, plasma TVs, and cell phones. This wasn't simple looting, but
the settling accounts with an economic system that dictates that only
possessions and commodities matter. The "gente decente" the decent
people and the big media began referring to them as lumpen, vandals and
delinquents. "The greater the social inequities, the greater the
delinquency," explains Hugo Fruhling of the Center for the Study of
Citizen Security at the University of Chile.

In the two days
leading up to the riots, the government of Michele Bachelet revealed
its incapacity to understand and deal with the human tragedy wrecked on
the country. Many of the ministers were gone on summer vacation or
licking their wounds as they prepared to turn over their offices to the
incoming right wing government of billionaire Sebastian Pinera, who
will be sworn in this Thursday. Bachelet declared that the country's
needs had to be studied and surveyed before any assistance could be
sent. On Saturday morning the day of the quake, she ordered the
military to place a helicopter at her disposal to fly over Concepcion
to assess the damage. As of Sunday morning, no helicopter had appeared
and the trip was abandoned.

As an anonymous
Carlos L. wrote in an email widely circulated in Chile: "It would be
very difficult in the history of the country to find a government with
so many powerful resources-technological, economic, political,
organizational-that has been unable to provide any response to the
urgent social demands of entire regions gripped by fear, needs of
shelter, water, food and hope."

What arrived in
Concepcion on Monday was not relief or assistance, but several thousand
soldiers and police transported in trucks and planes, as people were
ordered to stay in their homes. Pitched battles were fought in the
streets of Concepcion as buildings were set afire. Other citizens took
up arms to protect their homes and barrios as the city appeared to be
on the brink of an urban war. On Tuesday relief assistance finally
began to arrive in quantity, along with more troops and the
militarization of the southern region.

US Secretary of
State Hillary Clinton, on part of a Latin American tour that was
scheduled before the quake, flew into Santiago on Tuesday to meet with
Bachelet and Pinera. She brought 20 satellite phones and a technician
on her plane, saying one of the "biggest problems has been
communications as we found in Haiti in those days after the quake." It
went unsaid that just as inChile, the US sent in the military to take control of Porte au Prince before any significant relief assistance was distributed.

Milton Friedman's Legacy

The Wall Street
Journal joined in the fray to uphold the neoliberal model, running an
article by Bret Stephens, "How Milton Friedman Saved Chile." He
asserted that Friedman's "spirit was surely hovering protectively over
Chile in the early morning hours of Saturday. Thanks largely to him,
the country has endured a tragedy that elsewhere would have been an
apocalypse." He went on to declare, "it's not by chance that Chilean's
were living in houses of brick-and Haitians in houses of straw-when the
wolf arrived to try to blow them down." Chile had adopted "some of the
world strictest building codes," as the economy boomed due to
Pinochet's appointment of Friedman-trained economists to cabinet
ministries and the subsequent civilian government's commitment to
neoliberalism.

There are two
problems with this view. First, as Naomi Klein points out in "Chile's
Socialist Rebar" on the Huffington Post, it was the socialist
government of Salvador Allende in 1972 that established the first
earthquake building codes. They were later strengthened, not by
Pinochet, but by the restored civilian government in the 1990's.

Secondly as CIPER,
the Center of Journalistic Investigation and Information reported on
March 6, greater Santiago has twenty-three residential complexes and
high rises built over the last fifteen years that suffered severe quake
damage. Building codes had been skirted, and "the responsibility of the
construction and real estate enterprises is now the subject of public
debate." In the country at large, two million people out of a
population of seventeen million are homeless. Most of the houses
destroyed by the earthquake were built of adobe or other improvised
materials, many in the shanty towns that have sprung up to provide a
cheap, informal work force for the country's big businesses and
industries.

There is little
hope that the incoming government of Sebastian Pinera will rectify the
social inequities that the quake exposed. The richest person in Chile,
he and several of his advisers and ministers are implicated as major
shareholders in construction projects that were severely damaged by the
quake because building codes were ignored. Having campaigned on a
platform of bringing security to the cities and moving against
vandalism and crime, he criticized Bachelet's for not deploying the
military sooner in the aftermath of the earthquake.

Signs of Resistance

There are signs
that the historic Chile of popular organizations and grass roots
mobilizing may be reawakening. A coalition of over sixty social and
nongovernmental organizations released a letter stating: "In these
dramatic circumstances, organized citizens have proven capable of
providing urgent, rapid and creative responses to the social crisis
that millions of families are experiencing. The most diverse
organizations--neighborhood associations, housing and homeless
committees, trade unions, university federations and student centers,
cultural organizations, environmental groups-are mobilizing,
demonstrating the imaginative potential and solidarity of communities."
The declaration concluded by demanding of the Pinera government the
right to "monitor the plans and models of reconstruction so that they
include the full participation of the communities."*

*See Asociacion
Chilena de ONGs Accion, La Ciudadania, Protagonista de la
Reconstruccion del Pais. March 7, 2010, Published in Clarin, https://www.elclarin.cl/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=20384&Itemid=48