The Paradox of Chile

Social Change In Contemporary Latin America looks at Chile, and finds some paradoxes in its story of success and stability, contrasting it with Mexico - "an empty shell that is about to collapse." Above all, the blog suggests, such success and stability are in no small measure due to "long-standing agreements among the country's elites that go all the way back to the 19th century. Such agreements explain, as an example, their ability to defeat Peru and Bolivia in the wars that they have fought against each other but also in their ability to manipulate in their favor the relation they had in the 19th century with Britain."

Now, when conflict ravages all the region, Chile stands not only as the less “democratic” of all the countries in the region (see the Electoral Democracy Index built by the United Nations Development Programme) but also as the only one that has been able to effectively reduce poverty and to develop a truly progressive tax regime.

At the core of such paradoxical success, it is possible to find political elites willing and able to reach compromises. The most important of such compromises, however, has hot been with other groups or parties, but above all with the country’s conflicting authoritarian legacy. Even the socialist President Ricardo Lagos, a political refugee during Pinochet's refine, has been willing to preserve, untouched, the market reforms carried by Pinochet.

Such ability puts the Chilean politicians well beyond their peers from other countries

.