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Dolores de parto de ciudadania en Chile

Chile­Birth Pangs of Citizenship
February 6, 2008
Alvaro Vargas Llosa

THE INDEPENDENT INSTITUTE (WASHINGTON)

SANTIAGO, Chile­It might be argued that a country ceases to be
underdeveloped when its citizens shift their anger from other people's
wealth to the quality of the services their own wealth is paying for.

Chile is perhaps the world's best example. For the past two years,
President Michelle Bachelet has faced a national malaise that has
manifested itself in violent student protests, strikes affecting copper
mining and the forestry industry, and the gradual unraveling of the
coalition that has governed since 1990.

I recently asked Bachelet and former President Ricardo Lagos what was
happening. Their answers were instructive. Lagos told me that "Chileans
feel they have became a nation of consumers but not quite a nation of
citizens; in other words, our economic prosperity, which has reduced
poverty to 14 percent of the population, is not reflected in the kind of
basic services people are obtaining. Our coalition bears some
responsibility because our political platform is stuck in the early 1990s
and today's problems are those of a more prosperous nation."

I asked Bachelet if she agreed. "Yes," she said, "but I would add that in
today's world, because of improved communications, it is easier for
Chileans to realize that the countries we now compare ourselves with, like
Spain, provide better services than the ones we have. Also, communications
make it easier for Chileans to realize that in order to be competitive,
our education system needs to take a big leap forward."

Of course, there is no real difference between being a consumer and being
a citizen. A person who obtains a first-rate education that makes him or
her a proud citizen has to "consume" an education that someone produces.
Chile's governing coalition has not quite understood that link­a reason
why the economy is heavily reliant on private enterprise while the basic
services are stifled by government bureaucracy.

Two-thirds of the families whose children attend public schools are
extremely dissatisfied with the quality of education, whereas two-thirds
of the families whose children attend private schools, including many who
benefit from a voucher program that helps them meet tuition, are very
satisfied. Not surprisingly, the students who plagued Bachelet's first
year in office were mostly those in the public system.

Another example of the disconnect between Chile's free economy and a
service sector riddled with government intervention­between what Lagos
calls "consumers" and "citizens"­is transportation. The government tried
to overhaul the capital's transit system, replacing a privately run bus
system with a centrally planned operation that covered fewer routes,
lengthening the time it took to go from one place to the other and
overcrowding the subway, which used to be highly regarded. The result was
a political earthquake that left the government badly wounded.

At first sight, Chileans should be content. Their economy is the envy of
Latin America. Their average per capita income, which will soon reach
$10,000, continues to rise. And the prospects for copper, the country's
main export, are rosy: Despite a decline in demand in the United States,
China's insatiable appetite for the metal means that global demand will
continue to grow for quite some time.

One of the most significant developments that took place in Chile in the
last decade and a half was the center-left coalition's buying into the
economic reforms it inherited from Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship. That
political consensus translated into stability and predictability,
generating a steady flow of investment and an increase in economic
production. But now that people are weary of the governing coalition,
Chile faces a challenge similar to what Spain faced some years ago: the
need for the right­the child of the military dictatorship­to demonstrate
that it is ready to govern under the rule of law. The effect will be not
only to bid farewell to the Pinochet syndrome once and for all, but, more
importantly in today's modern and democratic Chile, to engage in a new
wave of reforms that begins to narrow the gap between an economic
environment that is first class and a service environment that for many
Chileans is third rate.

It is by no means assured that the right will opt for such costly reforms
or that most Chileans will understand that the way to satisfy their
demands is to reduce the bureaucratic dead weight attached to the basic
services. Still, it is heartening to know that Chileans are becoming real
citizens­worrying more about the quality of that which their money can buy
and less about who stole the nation's mythical treasure. If they act
decisively upon that growing sentiment, they should catch up with Spain in
the not-too-distant future.

Detectives Salvajes censurado!

http://www.slate.com/id/2183917

hot document: Primary sources exposed and explained.
Jailhouse Lit Bust!
Bonnie Goldstein

Posted Thursday, Feb. 7, 2008, at 5:49 PM ET

When an English translation of The Savage
Detectives, by the late Chilean novelist Roberto
Bolaño, was published last year in the United
States, New York Times critic Richard Eder judged
the work "complex, numbingly chaotic and
sinuously memorable." In the Sunday Times Book
Review, James Wood, a famously exacting literary
critic, compared Bolaño's novel favorably to the
work of Stendhal and Gide. The literary
thriller's content, however, falls outside the
Texas Department of Criminal Justice's
publication-review guidelines as spelled out in
its Offender Orientation Handbook (see excerpts
on Pages 2 and 3). The disqualifying passage,
which appears on Page 39, describes an oral-sex
contest in a nightclub that ends when the
champion vomits after nearly choking to death on
the penis of a particularly sadistic and well-endowed customer.

Inmate No. 1385412, in Huntsville, Texas (below),
ordered a copy of the book, but on its arrival,
the prison mailroom intercepted it and sent it,
at the inmate's expense, to a relative of the
inmate's in Austin. The prison determined that
the material could "encourage homosexual or
deviant criminal sexual behavior" and was
"detrimental to the offender's rehabilitation."
(For what it's worth, the sexual and violent acts
described in the offending passage are in fact between a man and a woman.)

Inmate No. 1385412 is seeking to appeal the
decision. Failing that, he'll have to find
something else to read until his projected release date of August 2009.

El primer cumpleanos del Transantiago en The Economist

Chile
The slow lane
Feb 7th 2008 | SANTIAGO
 From The Economist print edition

Fallout from a botched transport reform


A FREE hand to redesign a city's bus services
from scratch may be a transport planner's dream.
But the overhaul of Santiago's public-transport
system, launched in February 2007, has turned
into a nightmare for commuters in Chile's
capital. A year on, the multitude of flaws and
glitches in the new scheme, called Transantiago,
are gradually being fixed. The political damage
to Michelle Bachelet, the country's president,
and her predecessor, Ricardo Lagos, looks harder to repair.

The new scheme was the most ambitious transport
reform ever tried by a developing country, says
Darío Hidalgo of the World Resources Institute, a
think-tank in Washington, DC. It involved some
200km (125 miles) of dedicated bus lanes, and the
wholesale reorganisation of bus routes to
integrate them with the city's metro. But
Transantiago has become a model of how not to
reform public transport. It brought misery for
commuters: more changes to complete typical
journeys, long queues for full buses and gross overcrowding of the metro.

A new transport minister, René Cortázar, has
gradually ordered the chaos. He negotiated
contract changes with private bus firms; there
are now more buses, more flexible bus routes and
less congestion on the metro. The pre-paid smart
card works, though not yet the satellite
technology to control bus movements. Officials
now recognise that Transantiago, which was
designed to be self-financing, will need a
long-term subsidy of up to $40m a month.

The chaos was all the more shocking to Chileans
because they like to think of their country as
the best-organised in Latin America. Officials
admit that planners and politicians made big
mistakes. These included President Bachelet's
decision to launch the system when almost none of
the bus lanes and the technology was ready. Other
cities, such as Bogotá, Colombia's capital, have
adopted similar rapid-transit systems based on
bus lanes, but have done so piecemeal, allowing
glitches to be fixed quickly. And in Santiago,
the planners imposed arbitrary routes that took
little account of passengers' habits.

Ms Bachelet's approval rating has fallen from 50%
to 39% over the past year, according to the
Centro de Estudios Públicos, a pollster. Her
disapproval rating in Santiago stands at 48%,
compared with 38% elsewhere. The reputation of Mr
Lagos, whose government designed Transantiago,
has also suffered. Hugely popular on leaving
office in 2006, any ambition he might have to win
the presidency again in 2009 looks stalled, for
now at least. Like a broken-down bus.