When the left takes over the government, thanks to an electoral and democratic process, its rulers hasten to achieve their reforms before the forces of reaction manage to destabilise it and return to power. This has happened several times in our troubled regional history and the best-remembered case is that of the assassination of Salvador Allende.
Progressive leaders obviously will be willing to satisfy social demands such as, for example, improving workers’ wages, resolving the high housing and health deficits, strengthening public education, and as promised, improving pensions for retirees.
To do this, states need resources, which is why pension reforms, the expropriation of large companies in foreign and monopolistic hands, and above all, those that have been shown to commit abuses against consumers, are almost always imposed.
We fear that Gabriel Boric’s government is running out of time and that at this stage of his administration, it will be almost impossible for him to fulfill his programme. The right-wing opposition is increasingly defiant and controls a large part of the National Congress, where major transformations have to be agreed.
To keep their purposes in force, the rulers must be exemplary in their conduct. No corruption, embezzlement, nepotism, and other vices because, when these happen, the people quickly turn their backs on them and are tempted by the populism and deceit of the right wing which, despite its divisions, always demonstrates unity and seditious will. Especially if the country falls into the hands of organised crime, which steals, kills, and consolidates shadowy mafias that overwhelm the population without the authorities proving efficient in combating them.
A little less than two years into the new Chilean government, we can see that there has been no progress on a tax reform that would allow the Executive to gather the resources it needs for its distributive task. By all accounts, we now have a stagnant economy that is not growing enough to provide better wages and jobs for Chileans. Unemployment remains unabated, as does precarious work where thousands and thousands of immigrants land. Inflation is also eating away at workers’ pockets, and very few now dare to buy their own homes because the interest rates on loans are too high for the hundreds of thousands of families who are victims of usurious bank loans and those of the big construction companies.
Composed of yesterday’s university leaders, today the government is mostly talking about gradually and partially forgiving the high student debts. A situation that is seen as shameful by the youth and the thousands of families who support their children’s education. To make matters worse, the profound material deterioration in primary and secondary infrastructure is recognised, with hundreds of schools out of operation and teachers’ strikes that last for months, as in Atacama, and the fact that thousands of students no longer attend their schools. A situation that goes a long way to explaining the results of the latest PISA test, in which language and mathematics levels fell by four and five points.
Likewise, health and welfare continue to be in a critical condition. Although the State and the Supreme Court have managed to determine the abuses committed by the isapres, the fines they must pay to compensate the thousands of users abused by their excessive tariffs augur their bankruptcy and the threat that many patients will be left out in the cold in their private clinics. But this, which should encourage a left-wing government to bring down a speculative system, leads parliamentarians and other avant-garde politicians to come to the rescue of these abusive companies on the pretext of giving continuity to health care. For them, long years of deadlines and write-offs with resources that, via expropriation and intervention, should be transferred to the public system, satisfying the demands of private medical services that they no longer want to serve because their business does not seem so lucrative to them now.
Surely some legislators are raising the last desperate pesos for their electoral commitments, in a country where the high contribution of business to the financing of politics is well known. Or to democracy, as some say. It is curious, in this sense, to observe the turnaround of some self-described left-wing legislators who, from being rabid enemies of the isapres, have become promoters of their continuation in order “not to harm Chileans’ access to health care”, as they cynically point out.
The pension reform and the promise to change a system in which pension fund administrators have achieved one of the most lucrative businesses in the world thanks to the miserable pensions they pay to those who retire and by obtaining millionaire dividends for these resources deposited in foreign banks. In this sense, no one is arguing that state intervention should be decisive and resolute, when the few companies in the sector are, to top it all, foreign. In other words, they profit from the monthly contributions of the millions of workers affiliated to their private system. The one that offers nothing compared to the pensions received by those who remained in the old tax system.
Of course. To implement these and other reforms, a left-wing government should not be too accommodating to national and transnational business. It would have to “squeeze the issue” and risk the disdain of the Empire and its allies. However, as a foreign policy, the current left government favours diplomatic and trade relations with the United States and capitalist countries (including big China). Curiously, President Boric has decided to become a champion of democracy and human rights, but he omits to speak out against the absurdities committed by so many regimes, emphasising his criticism only of Nicaragua, Venezuela and Cuba.
Likewise, in the face of our reality, little or nothing has been done by La Moneda to promote democratic diversity, one of the foundations of any democracy worth the name. One only has to look at open television and the daily newspapers to see its ideological bias, as well as its reliance on the police to find a repressive rather than preventive solution in the fight against the rampant crime we are suffering today.
Without realising that violence and crime are largely based on social inequality. Forgetting that wise sentence of Don Quixote to Sancho: “To change the world is neither madness nor utopia, but justice”.
