In a Jan. 17 election, Chileans selected billionaire Sebastian Piñera as the country’s next president. Having narrowly beaten the liberal candidate Eduardo Frei, 52 percent to 48 percent, Piñera will take office on March 11 as the country’s first right-wing leader since dictator Augusto Pinochet left power in 1990.At age 60, Piñera amassed a large portion of his $1.2 billion fortune by setting up Chile’s first credit card network. He now owns one of Chile’s four television stations, a popular football club, and a big stake in Latin America’s biggest airline, LAN.
Piñera spent over $13.6 million on the campaign, Business Week reported. According to the Wall Street Journal, he plans to apply his entrepreneurial skills to Chile’s already-stable economy. He has already declared that Chile will experience an average annual growth rate of 6 percent during his term. Many experts, including Harvard University economist Ricardo Hausmann are doubtful as to the plausibility of this goal.
While Piñera has garnered much support with his talk of economic prosperity in Chile, many people still express ambivalence regarding his election. Current Chilean president Michelle Bachelet has questioned the probable conflict of interests of Piñera’s many investments.
Other concerns have arisen regarding Piñera’s treatment of human rights. Piñera found the majority of his support coming from the same parties that stood behind dictator Augusto Pinochet, whose regime tortured over 28,000 people and murdered over 3,000.
Bachelet’s term and the term before hers saw much improvement on human rights, and Piñera seeks to assure voters that there will be no departure from this progress.
“I have condemned human rights violations all my life, with no hesitation,” Piñera said in a Business Week article. “Human rights are sacred. Our government will be a government of the future.”
During his campaign, he assured that he would hire no former Pinochet cabinet members, but he later retracted the statement due to backlash from angry supporters.
“Having collaborated loyally and honestly with a government is not a sin or a crime,” he said, according to USA Today.
According to Business Week, two of Piñera’s top campaign advisers held posts during Pinochet’s dictatorship, while a third was a former minister to Pinochet.
“The fact that the candidate who represents the parties that supported Pinochet has won shows how much Chile has changed,” said Patricio Navia, a Chilean political scientist at New York University in Manhattan.
Some are saying that this shift of power in Chile could reflect a more general shift of power in Latin America away from the left.
In an e-mail interview, Assistant Professor of Sociology and Anthropology Maria Amado pointed out that Panama also recently elected conservative Ricardo Martinelli, while in Honduras the democratically elected leader was deposed in a military coup by a group representing right-wing agendas.
“While these events, along with the election of Piñera in Chile, may not be sufficient evidence to predict a significant shift to the right, they are certainly indicators of a possible change in that direction,” said Amado.
Assistant Professor of History Alvis Dunn speculates that the election was more a result of the specific conditions of Chile’s current political system.
“I think Piñera’s victory was more a function of the fraying forces that have held the left-wing parties together in the past,” he said. “The coalition on the left seems to have lost cohesion and this permitted a more unified non-left.”
According to Dunn, Piñera has a difficult task ahead of him. In the midst of keeping promises of economic growth, Piñera will also need to focus on coalition-building and maintaining popularity among his own constituency.
“Bachelet’s economic policies were really quite successful,” Dunn points out. “I don’t think Piñera will really change the economic policy all that much. I don’t think he can afford to. There will probably be a lot of talk that sounds different to please his constituency, but I think if he changes the economy too much, it will suffer.