The great economic and social strides that Chile has made in the 18 years since the end of the military dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet Duarte, as well as the challenges posed by the law of diminishing economic returns that inevitably follow such rapid progress, was the subject of a lecture given by the Ambassador of Chile to the United States, Mariano Fernandez, at Rockefeller Hall at Vassar College on the evening of Thursday, Feb. 7.
Titled “The Promises and Challenges of Chile in the 21st Century,” the talk was part of a multidisciplinary international studies course “Political Landscapes of 21st Century Chile” that will also include a trip to that country by 43 faculty and students from Vassar over spring break.
In her remarks introducing the ambassador, Hispanic studies professor Lisa Paravisini, who, together with departmental colleague Michael Aronna and political science professor Katherine Hite are the co-teachers of the course, evoked the memory of the Chilean poet Gabriela Mistral, who taught at Vassar in the spring semester of 1931. An internationally renowned literary figure who in 1945 was the first Latin American woman to win the Nobel Prize for Literature and whose poems were later translated into English by Langston Hughes, Mistral was also a noted educator and cultural diplomat. A great deal of that spirit is evident in the nature of the course and the reciprocal visits of Fernandez and the Vassar contingent that it features.
“Two thousand and eight is the Year 18 after the restoration of democracy in Chile,” the ambassador, whose diplomatic career has included stints as his country’s envoy to the United Kingdom, Italy, Spain and the European Community, informed his listeners at the outset of his speech. “It was not easy to oust Pinochet, but soon we began to lead Chile in a way that was more successful than in the past. Now we are a legitimate democracy.”
Fernandez, whose diplomatic career began in the late 1960s and was interrupted by the U.S.-backed coup by Pinochet of Sept. 11, 1973 that overthrew the democratically elected Socialist coalition government of Prime Minister Salvador Allende Gossens, himself represents a Socialist government. And he stressed that the greatest achievement of Chile’s emergence from dictatorship has been the great reduction in the poverty rate.
“In 1990, 40 percent of Chileans were living below the poverty line,” he said. “Today the poor are only 17 percent. Yet the groups who still belong to the poor are people who it is harder to integrate. It is much harder to further reduce poverty from here than it was to bring it down, say, from 40 percent to 30 percent.” And he indicated that this problem of diminishing returns is mirrored in the economy as a whole.
“In 1990 the size of our economy was $2.5 billion. Today it is $70 billion. We have gone from an average of $ 2,500 per capita at that time to $11,000 per capita today. But to continue growing at such a rate is a big challenge, especially since our goal is not only to grow, but to introduce equity as an element in our development.”
Trade is key
Explaining that Chile was traditionally a country that relied simply on producing and exporting raw materials, Fernandez explained that greater success had come by means of economic diversification and a grand expansion of foreign trade.
“We have the widest free trade agreements of any country,” he affirmed. “We have them with 54 countries, including the EU, and are now finishing negotiations with Vietnam and India. China has become our main trading partner, replacing the U.S.”
Yet Fernandez affirmed that despite the replacement of this traditional economic relationship, U.S.-Chilean diplomatic relations are “in very good shape.”
“The U.S. is the preeminent political and economic power in the world,” he said. “We don’t want to leave such a big country out of our development strategy. We are a country of only 16.5 million people, yet we import more from the U.S. than either Russia or Pakistan. We have some differences with America – for instance, Chile voted against the war in Iraq at the U.N. Yet we have no differences that could cause serious problems in our broader agenda.”
Describing the two countries’ relations as “healthy, clear, friendly and positive,” he went on to say that, “I hope we will continue to develop positive relations, and that the trip of the 43 from Vassar will contribute to this.”
Kathleen Marroquin, a senior and international studies major who is Hite’s research assistant, explained that like the course, the trip of the Vassar contingent to Chile is intended to be multidisciplinary and expose students to different varieties of Chilean reality.
“The course focuses on what Chile looks like now, but we also look at how it got that way, particularly in terms of culture,” she said. “We will be visiting the capital Santiago, Valparaiso, Porto Mont and Isla Negra, where the poet Pablo Neruda lived, among other places. We will also be doing multiple activities that range from going to fisheries and nature reserves to a historic museum of political memory to meeting with various Chilean academics. It’s quite comprehensive.”