When Chile overwhelmingly elected Gabriel Boric on 19 December, I was elated. Left-wing Boric had been pitted against the far-Right José Antonio Kast, who had systematically denied the climate crisis, attacked the rights of immigrants, women and the LGBTQ community, and spoken admiringly of Augusto Pinochet, the murderous dictator who ruled Chile from 1973 to 1990.
Now, under 35-year-old Boric, who heads the Frente Amplio (‘Border Front’) coalition, the country has a chance for serious and meaningful change – to move away from the economic and social model forged by Pinochet. It is widely acknowledged that the neoliberal model first took hold not in Margaret Thatcher’s Britain or Ronald Reagan’s United States, but in Pinochet’s Chile. Under the dictatorship, the state was shrunk to the minimum, relinquishing to profit-driven businesses the provision of rights through the privatisation of public services.
This turned Chile into a country with housing, health, and education for the rich; a privatised pension system in which social security is at the mercy of investment profitability; a plundered natural environment; communities without access to drinking water as a result of deregulated agribusiness, and a tax system that does nothing to change the fact that the country is one of the most unequal in the world. Pinochet’s biographer, Mario Amorós, characterises the dictator’s legacy as “a model installed by blood and gunfire that benefited the elites who controlled the media and held the economic power”.
