Who are society’s most vulnerable?
Latin America’s most vulnerable are those in the brown zones: areas where the state is absent, in terms of effective bureaucracy, public service provision and properly sanctioned legality. Depending on the country, you have a different threat, but increasingly public security is becoming a big issue in many Latin American countries – and this comes down to the state’s presence in its territories.
Why does Latin America remain the most unequal region in the world?
My research has looked at how commodity production has created inequalities at the subnational level. In Chile, for example, you find the wealthiest region’s in the north – low unemployment, low rates of poverty, low income inequality – and, yet, they have the worst healthcare. Why? Because the copper boom in 1982 brought with it the establishment of the health care system, but at the time, copper mining was almost exclusively in the hands of US companies. These companies built mining towns - with shops, healthcare, education and police – exclusively for their employees, around 40% of the population. So in these areas we see a serious underdevelopment of public infrastructure. In the Chilean case, non-state provision of these public services has actually disincentivised the state from providing them.
