Chilean Election Is a Feast of False Equivalency
The Guardian (11/21/21) called José Antonio Kast’s 28%–25.6% margin “a convincing victory,” and said he opposed “marriage equality, abortion and political correctness.”
The second round of the Chilean presidential election, to be held on December 19, will pit “far-right populist José Antonio Kast” against left-wing “former protest leader Gabriel Boric” (Guardian, 11/21/21). That candidates representing, respectively, a tendency pining for the days of dictatorship and a left-wing protest movement trounced centrist parties in the first round of voting is noteworthy on its own.
This election is a crucial one, as Chileans in May selected a progressive delegation to draft a new constitution (New York Times, 5/19/21) to undo the legacy of brutal dictator Augusto Pinochet, who came to power in a CIA-backed coup on September 11, 1973.
So we have one candidate who presents himself as the heir to Pinochet: “If he were alive, he would vote for me,” Kast has boasted (El Mostrador, 11/9/17). He promotes nostalgia for the days of mass repression of dissidents; El Siglo (11/8/21) quoted from the “state of exception” law that Kast proposes:
The president of the republic should have the power, along with restricting freedoms of movement and assembly, to intercept, open or search documents, and all kinds of communications, and to detain people in their own dwellings, or in places that are not prisons or intended for detention.
On the other side is Boric, who wants more of the country’s population to share in the nation’s wealth. For a lot of the Western corporate press, these two people are equally bad for a country lauded for its moderation.
‘World of political extremes’
The Wall Street Journal (11/21/21) describes the race as being between “two antiestablishment politicians from opposite ends of the political spectrum.”
The Wall Street Journal (11/21/21) treated Kast and Boric as one and the same, both “antiestablishment politicians,” simply on “opposite ends of the political spectrum.” It said this situation was “deepening the political instability in Latin America’s most affluent country.”
“‘No Middle Ground’: Chile Voters Face Tough Choice as Run-Off Looms” was the headline of a BBC report (12/2/21). After describing the election as “pitching two politicians representing completely opposing stances against each other,” the piece led with a voter calling it “the worst possible scenario, between Kast and Boric, with no meeting point in the middle.”
To Washington Post columnist Anthony Faiola (11/24/21), “Chile is even-keeled no more,” as it has “slipped into the world of political extremes.” Thus drowns “the illusion of Chile as an oasis in a sea of instability.”
The Post (11/27/21) also republished a piece by Bloomberg’s editors (11/26/21) declaring Chile’s “miracle” at risk. Between an “ultraconservative who seems nostalgic for the dictatorial rule of Augusto Pinochet, and a leftist who promises not merely to reform but to dismantle Chile’s economic model,” the billionaire-owned outlets insisted, it is “hard to say which of these agendas might prove more toxic.”
The piece admitted that the left candidate has a point, saying that it is “true that Chile has work to do in better balancing relatively free markets and a fairer distribution of income,” but that only the hegemony of moderate centrism can provide this: Accomplishing this is “harder and perhaps impossible without the political stability that only a viable political center can provide.” Another piece from Bloomberg (11/19/21) showed that it valued business over people, with a headline saying that the “free market model” was facing a risk from “angry voters.”
‘Theater of wokeness’
The Economist (11/20/21) explains the appeal of Kast by quoting a pollster who says “people want peace, order and security.”
But it is a lead sentence from an Economist report (11/20/21)—asking if “voters worry more about crime and immigration, or about inequality and poor public services”—that really reveals what is going on with media coverage of the Chilean political situation:
In October 2019, more than a million Chileans took to the streets to demand greater equality and better public services. At least 30 people died in protests that lasted for weeks. To restore calm, Chile’s leaders increased social spending and agreed to a process to rewrite the constitution adopted under Augusto Pinochet, a dictator who ruled from 1973 to 1990. Members of a constitutional convention elected in May this year, many of them leftists and political neophytes, have begun drafting a charter that could transform the country.
Let’s ask: How did 30 of these protesters die? Did they simply collapse from exhaustion? Or were these deaths at all related to excessive police violence against the protesters, as documented by Human Rights Watch (Deutsche Welle, 11/27/21)?
Obscuring the source of the violence, and then crediting the government with trying to “restore calm,” gives the sense that a moderate government was trying to do the right thing. In fact, it was the protesters’ organizing against both gaping inequality and state violence that unraveled the legacy of one of South America’s most notorious monsters.
The Economist piece went further in condemning anti-Pinochet reformers for allowing “political neophytes” to take part in the constitutional convention. This fits with the image of a sensible centrist government under siege from the hoi polloi, but the idea of structural reform following popular unrest isn’t unheard of; indeed, it’s the reason freedom of assembly is considered a basic civil right.
The Economist report, whose headline was “Chile’s Presidential Election Is a Contest Between Extremes,” was clear in its condemnation of both candidates, insisting that they betrayed the country’s image of predictable stability. It pointed to the movement to redraft the constitution, which it likened to a “theater of wokeness,” and predicted demands for “unaffordable rights and anti-capitalism.”
Growth with inequality
All of these pieces underscore a need to protect Chile’s stable and successful economy against what is presented as a hurricane of chaos, inflation and poverty swirling around the rest of the Southern Cone. For the business press, Chile’s economy is a “success story” because the GDP has steadily increased since 1990, when Pinochet left power. Today it has the highest per capita GDP of any South American country.
But that’s only part of the story, as the BBC (10/21/19) reported that according to the Gini index—”the most widely used international measure of inequality”—Chile is “one of the most unequal countr[ies] among a group of 30 of the world’s wealthiest nations.” And while Chile is slightly above average in terms of the Gini coefficient compared to other Latin American nations, it is behind such neighboring countries as Argentina, Bolivia and Uruguay. This inequality is what led to the massive protests that year, which included a coalition of unions, including those representing workers in the industries places like the Economist laud for economic growth, demanding higher pay and more pension investments (Al Jazeera, 11/12/19).
These problems haven’t melted away, as Reuters (11/18/21) noted that the left-wing factions in Chile are angry “over paltry retirement payouts blamed by critics on Chile’s highly privatized pension system,” as well as “the high costs and sometimes dubious quality of privatized education, and gaps between public and private healthcare.”
Nor is the country the Switzerland in the Andes the press makes it out to be. The US Department of Labor found that although the country has made some advances in curbing child labor, “existing prohibitions related to forced labor do not meet international standards, because forced labor is criminally prohibited only when it results from human trafficking.” The report added that “prohibitions related to the use of children for illicit activities do not meet international standards.”
‘Nobody to the right’
John Dinges: ““Kast wraps himself in the flag of General Pinochet.”
John Dinges is a former Washington Post Chile correspondent whose 2005 bookabout Pinochet, The Condor Years, was updated with new information earlier this year. Dinges told FAIR the equation of Kast and Boric fails to take into account that, regardless of what one thinks of Boric’s economic outlook, he favors preserving Chilean democracy. “There’s nothing in his policies that would question or undo democracy or popular participation, because he supports the constitutional convention, and Kast does not,” he said. “One could argue that Boric is much more supportive of Chile’s democratic process than Kast.”
Dinges, like other observers, sees Kast as invoking ideas reminiscent of Pinochet’s reign of terror. El Siglo (11/8/21), for example, reported that Kast put forward a plan of
targeting political and social sectors of the country, which could be included in the theses and plans of extraterritorial actions implemented by governments such as those of the United States and Colombia. The national territory could be opened to the action of intelligence and police agencies of other countries to persecute Chilean citizens in this “international coordination.”
The plan recalls the notorious Operation Condor, a program initiated by Pinochet and other right-wing Latin American dictators, with the backing of the US CIA, that kidnapped, tortured and killed leftist dissidents across international borders.
Dinges, a professor emeritus at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, noted that this schematic kind of coverage can often be blamed on reporters and commentators not knowing the intricacies of Chilean politics. For example, he said, in the first round of voting, Boric faced a candidate to his left, Eduardo Artés, and showed a willingness to work with the progressive and center-left delegates to the constitutional convention, indicating that he can represent a broad swath of society.
The same can’t be said of Kast. “Kast wraps himself in the flag of General Pinochet,” Dinges said. “There is nobody to the right of Kast, and Kast gives faint support to democratic institutions.”
Frightening familiarity
The false equivalency between Boric and Kast is very much about the high stakes of this contest, and gives the impression that much of the press cares more for preserving Chile’s free-market economy than its democracy. A Boric presidency would not just be an electoral victory for a left movement that has been often seen as limited to street organizing, but given the slate of delegates who will redraft the constitution, this is a chance for the left to reform Chilean society structurally.
Chile is a resource-rich nation and a model for neoliberalism in the US sphere of influence. Given how supportive corporate media have been to US efforts to destroy left-wing governments in Latin America (FAIR.org, 6/6/18, 1/10/20, 10/23/20), the hostility toward Boric seems familiar. And given what we know about the US support for the 1973 coup in Chile, that familiarity is frightening.
Research assistance: Dorothy Poucher
FAIR’s work is sustained by our generous contributors, who allow us to remain independent. Donate today to be a part of this important mission.