Election Watch: Chileno Style

This is our neighbor Boni on the evening of the election. He and Sandra invited us to their house to watch CNN as we don't have a TV. He taped the sign to his forehead, and it was still there when we left two hours later. Chileans were ecstatic over the election; at school the next day I was given many hugs and kisses. Everyone was smiling, and many of the teachers had stayed up for most of the night to watch Obama's speech.

This newspaper is a left-wing periodical. The headline says Defiance to Racism.



Chile's presidential election is in approximately a year and a half. Michelle Bachelet, Chile's current president, is a moderate socialist who believes in free market policies. Her father, a general, served under Allende in a food distribution program. Her parents and she were tortured under Pinochet, her father died from cardiac arrest while he was held prisoner. Bachelet's popularity is very low at this time. There have been scandals in missing funds in both education and a government sponsored sports program. People I've met, both wealthy and the not-so-wealthy, feel the government is too lax in handing out stiffer sentences for criminals. I've heard nostalgia for the "good old days of Pinochet," and that Pinochet "saved Chile" has been told to me more than once . . . even by a young woman whose grandfather was killed by his thugs. Our mouths drop open when we hear this type of thing. People are very careful in saying much about this era, as family members were killed and injustice done to both sides. The distrust is still here.

We've talked to people whose family farms that had been in the family for generations were taken away under Allende and "destroyed because no one knew how to take care of them." We've been told that people here were beginning to starve and that Chile was on the brink of civil war when Pinochet's coup occurred. We say in response that stability isn't worth tyranny, that both sides of the government, the left and the right, should work together to make Chile a better place instead of spending energy blocking each other's attempts to improve situations. (Of course that can be said of a certain country to the north).

Hopes are so impossibly high on Obama, but perhaps with his election, and because problems are so serious, the United States could be a real leader in having each side of the government thinking first about the country and partisanship last. Perhaps the joy expressed about Obama's election here, and in other nations, will create an opening for acceptance by the rich and powerful to allow for justice and for equality to become more pervasive. Maybe there's a young Obama in Chile, a Mapuche boy, or a girl from the slums of Santiago, who will one day help the nation step out of its past wounds and begin a new era for the nation.