SANTIAGO, Chile -- Last month, Chilean Foreign Minister María Soledad Alvear signed a free-trade treaty with the United States, a major step forward for a country that is seeking to overcome its small size and physical isolation through free trade. The Chilean government's handling of the treaty was emblematic of the center-left Concertación coalition's deep faith in a particular brand of pragmatic, socially inclusive neoliberalism: Though the treaty's signing may have set off euphoria here, the Concertación has declined to dine self-contentedly on the political free lunch the treaty offers. Instead, it has proposed a tax increase, government cost-cutting measures and the privatization of water utilities to finance new social and health programs and to make up for the loss of tariff revenue the treaty will bring about.
Trade is paramount, the Concertación has said, but its costs will not be borne by Chile's poor. To doubly emphasize that point, the coalition is seeking a subsidy for Chile's poorest residents to spare them from the tax increase's cost.
The Concertación has governed Chile since it brought an end to military rule in 1990; the result has been substantial economic growth, which has led to a decline in the national poverty level from 42 percent to 20 percent.
But despite this achievement, Alvear is not considered likely to beat the right-wing mayor of downtown Santiago, Joaquin Lavín, in the next presidential election, scheduled for 2005.
On the contrary, Lavín is expected to trounce her.
The charm of Joaquin Lavín, whose ever-present smile is both genial and avuncular, is that he doesn't do politics, or so he claims. The agonizing debate in Chile over the Iraq War, which Lavín skirted, was politics. Instead of politics, Lavín solves problems: He does cosas, or "things," and he claims to be neither a leftist nor a rightist but a cosista, a "thing-ist."
The "things" Lavín has done vary from implementing common-sense solutions to everyday problems (a series of underpasses replacing traffic lights on a congested roadway) to the application of standard conservative prescriptions (the privatization of middle schools) to idiosyncratic measures defying the right's sacred principles (a system of neighborhood physicians copied from Cuba).
And by doing these "things," Lavín -- the public face of the Independent Democratic Union (UDI) party -- has become so popular that he is treated almost as a president-elect. Fifty-six percent of Chileans polled in December 2002 by the Chilean Center for Public Studies said Lavín will be the next president; Alvear, who by then had already signed trade deals with the European Union and South Korea, was predicted to be president by only by 4 percent of those surveyed. Since last year, the Concertación's poll numbers have recovered, but Chileans of all political stripes continue to treat the prospect of a Lavín presidency as a fait accompli.
Many on the left have criticized Lavín's entrepreneurial solutions as short-term, superficial fixes or as populist patronage schemes. And some allege Lavín's emphasis on "things" masks his intention to remake Chile in ways that would increase authoritarianism and income inequality -- a fear that some on the right quietly share. But regardless of whether Lavín, as president, would enact his party's right-wing agenda or hew to more centrist positions, his ascent seems to represent the triumph, 13 years after its fall, of the ideals of Augusto Pinochet's dictatorship: a depoliticized politics, free of ideology and even argument, and a dedication on the part of government officials to treating citizens as clients.
The Lavín phenomenon also illustrates the strange durability of Chilean exceptionalism -- the country's historic propensity to be out of sync with the rest of Latin America.
When the Concertación took office, it resolved a debate that has long troubled Latin American countries: Should developing nations focus on International Monetary Fund-style economic reform or instead on social development? The question turned out to be misleading. Developing nations, the Concertación argued, needed to pursue each as a tool for fulfilling the other -- sticking to economic science while steering clear of economic ideology. (The Pinochet military government neglected both social development and economic science to produce a Thatcherite economic success story that had a banking crisis as its climax and a 42 percent poverty rate as its not-so-happy ending.)
Now the trail to inclusive growth blazed by the Concertación is being sought out with high hopes by Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva in Brazil, Lucio Gutiérrez in Ecuador and Nestor Kirchner in Argentina, all examples of the oft-cited wave of leftism sweeping South America. None is more committed to fitting his social programming within the constraints of macroeconomic stability than Lula, who has thus far voluntarily exceeded the IMF's primary-surplus requirement for Brazil.
Latin Americans have not rejected economic modernization after suffering the shortcomings of 1990s reform; instead, they are now clamoring that economic reform be coupled with progressive social measures, such as Lula's zero-hunger program. The contradictions in this political climate were made evident in the Latinobarometro poll results from last year, which showed a march to the right, not the left. Of the 17 countries analyzed, respondents in 11, including Chile, classified themselves as being farther to the right on the political spectrum in 2002 than they were in 1996; only two countries, Argentina and Peru, seemed to have moved leftward.
How can such attitudes be squared with the election of so many left-of-center leaders? The answer, in part, is that South Americans are installing leftist politicians to implement orthodox economic priorities -- but in a socially inclusive way.
Except, apparently, in Chile -- the country that pioneered this left-right combination. If Lavín wins the presidency in 2005, as a majority of Chileans expect, it will be only the second presidential victory for the right since the Great Depression, a fact that the respected Christian Democrat Ignacio Walker, a political scientist and a former leader in the Chamber of Deputies (similar to the U.S. House of Representatives), pointed out to me during an interview.
Lavín began his career working for Pinochet for two years as an economics bureaucrat -- one of the "Chicago boys" who became free-market zealots at the University of Chicago and returned to Chile to serve in the dictatorship. Lavín's political career began in earnest when he ran for a Chamber of Deputies seat at the regime's end. At the time, he was fiercely confrontational -- his slogan was "gallo de pelea," or "fighting cock." He lost, beginning his transformation from combative rooster to cheerful solver of local problems.
But even today, Lavín defends the UDI's authoritarian past. The UDI was created to collaborate with the dictatorship, and since democracy resumed in 1990, it has steadily fought off attempts by the more moderate party of the right, Renovación Nacional, to reform the anti-democratic institutions left by the military government. Besides being Chicago boys, many UDI members belong to Opus Dei, a Catholic lay movement with a wealthy, male membership that professes strict, conservative social views seemingly at odds with the UDI's economic libertarianism.
Moreover, the UDI's statement of principles has, since the end of the Cold War, gone from maniacally anti-communist to simply maniacal. Take this warning from the section, "The New Face of Marxism," which makes reference to the Marxist intellectual Antonio Gramsci: "The weakening of marriage, the legalization of abortion and permissiveness toward pornography and drugs are symptoms that -- though of different origins -- are fostered and taken advantage of by this new Gramscian version of Marxism, which today threatens even the most developed countries of the West."
But whatever its peculiarities, the clarity -- or single-mindedness -- of the UDI vision has created a certain kind of mystique that is considered key to winning grass-roots support in Chile. Moreover, the UDI mayors -- many elected to the same seats they held during the dictatorship -- have successfully turned issues they've worked on at the municipal level, such as crime and education, into the most important national issues.
Lavín has executed that formula successfully. He was twice elected mayor of Las Condes, perhaps Chile's richest municipality, and after narrowly losing the 1999 presidential race, he was elected Santiago's mayor.
One reason Lavín is so successful is that his campaigns have the same political effect as Richard Nixon going to China -- again and again and again. During the last presidential campaign, Lavín spent nights in a sleeping bag in shantytowns, even meeting with relatives of people who had "disappeared" under the same military government in which Lavín had served as a technocrat. Meeting the families of victims, Lavín came away deeply troubled that they still lived in shantytown conditions -- a curious, materialistic way to make peace with the past, but at least a genuine expression of compassion from a part of the political spectrum that has traditionally ignored the dictatorship's victims.
Lavín's success is also a testament to the "things" he has achieved. Meeting with Lavín's chief of staff in the local government's neoclassical castle on Santiago's Plaza Mayor, I asked which of Lavín's accomplishments she was most enthusiastic about; she named dozens of projects. During site visits that I arranged on my own, I confirmed that many of these initiatives had indeed been successful.
In addition to the neighborhood doctors system -- which Lavín copied from Cuba after traveling to meet with Fidel Castro -- Lavín has created another medical team dedicated to making house calls in Santiago. In Las Condes, he decentralized the public primary-care clinics and created a phone-ahead appointment system, eliminating long lines in the early mornings.
Lavín also established an English-Spanish bilingual public school in Santiago and a charter school for former juvenile delinquents in Las Condes that was based on the Wildcat Academy (an American charter school sponsored by the Manhattan Institute in New York). And to allow a broader audience to benefit from Santiago's cultural offerings, he staged a well-attended free concert called "Chile's Three Tenors."
But some observers worry that Lavín's "things" are purely propaganda. They point to "Lavín's beach," a stretch of the muddy Mapocho River where thousands of Santiago residents who cannot afford vacations tanned this summer on sand Lavín ordered trucked in. The beach may have been popular, these critics say, but it did not solve its visitors' real problems. Such skepticism, however, has not deterred the mayor: This past weekend, he opened a children's ski center -- it is currently winter in Chile -- on the site of his former summertime beach. He even smiled gamely for the cameras as the kids pelted him with snowballs.
"I think the term 'special effects,' from movies, describes what Lavín is doing. He is basically inventing realities like the beach," says Marta Lagos, a prominent academic here who organizes the Latinobarometro poll. "You can't bring people to the beach, so you bring the beach to the people. It's an entrepreneurial way of looking at satisfaction, and he's a satisfaction-oriented guy."
When Lavín has been forced into true political discussions, according to Lagos, he turns on the special effects again, telling each side what it wants to hear with the same sentence.
"He said he was against divorce," Lagos explains, "but that he was in favor of everybody having a legal solution to their personal situation. Perfect. Because he wasn't saying 'no' to the Catholic Church, and he wasn't saying 'no' to those who want to have their legal solution."
But tax policy and other issues Lavín would deal with as president cannot be semantically sliced the same way, which leaves many wondering whether or not he would follow the hard-line UDI platform.
Patricio Navia, a Chilean political scientist at New York University, worries that a Lavín presidency would worsen inequality in Chile. "He might want to do what [President] Bush is doing, which is to adopt a centrist view in some areas and to adopt very radical, extremely conservative views in others, and try to play those things against each other, to say, 'I'm a compassionate conservative' and then put in a tax break that will only help the wealthy," Navia says. "I think Lavín will follow that pattern -- in fact, he has been following that pattern."
Like Bush, Lavín has been accused of being fiscally irresponsible. For example, he sold monopoly rights to provide water in Santiago for 40 years to a Spanish utility company. The proceeds are funding a set of "things" chosen by plebiscite that vary from the construction of dental clinics to paying the unemployed $20 to paint the exteriors of their homes. The bill for it all -- literally, the water bill -- will be paid later by others, say critics.
"Future mayors are going to be left without money to spend on the people, to invest in the people," complains city councilman Ricardo Zúñiga Contreras.
Even leaders of the right express doubts about Lavín. Rodrigo Hinzpeter, vice president of the moderate Renovacion Nacional, says, "We feel we can support a Lavín government, with some conditions, with some ifs. What we fear is that there are some issues where we think we have to go ahead as a country -- like divorce, like freedoms in terms of culture and cinema censorship and other aspects like taxes -- that we feel like we can make a contribution from our perspective." An administration dominated by the UDI, Hinzpeter said, would leave him worried about "the rights of the people."
Renato Sepulveda Nebel, Renovación's secretary-general and a close ally of Lavín, complains that Lavín treats Renovación dismissively and as secondary to the UDI. "I don't think Joaquín does it on purpose, but the UDI is taking advantage of it," says Sepulveda. "There are notorious examples of this unequal treatment. In the last congressional elections, Lavín was coming to take pictures for campaign posters. We put everything here in the [ballroom of the party headquarters] to the side, we had the set all prepared, and all of our candidates assembled. Joaquín, because of internal problems with the UDI, decided not to come."
A former senior official of the UDI-Renovación coalition confirmed for me that a meeting -- which the Chilean media has speculated about -- between Lavín and allies on the right took place in mid-2002. Prior to this meeting, Lavín had angered the right by visiting Cuba and by receiving a customary kiss on the cheek from a thankful transvestite. (One of the "things" Lavín accomplished in Santiago was to teach area transvestite prostitutes to be hair stylists so that they could open a business together.)
To pacify the right, Lavín called a secret gathering on the campus of an elite business school overlooking Santiago from high in the Andes. "People be calm," Lavín said, according to the official. "Now I'm a candidate, but it'll be different if I'm president. I have three basic elements of my life: I am UDI; I am Opus Dei and I am a Chicago boy. And if I become president, I would not forget my roots."
But the meeting is no proof that Lavín is cynically misleading the Chilean public; he may instead have been misleading his business-school audience. The point is, nobody knows who Lavín really is.
In a profile of Lavín in the Chilean magazine Qué Pasa, Fernando Villegas wrote, "The mirror that Lavín holds up to us reflects our profound anxiety to be modern, to seem modern, to not be Indian, to have light-colored skin, so they don't look at us askance. We've always wanted to be Yanquis -- isn't it true? -- and that everything here would work like in Yankee-land, that we wouldn't have to go to Miami to enjoy that feeling of order, rationality and plastic happiness that we associate with a modern market society. And who better than Lavín, the man of the plebiscites and the portable traffic lights, to provide us all that."
Lavín himself has said his goal is for Chile "not to be like the rest of Latin American countries."
But if Lavín thinks the difference between Chile and the United States is a bunch of "things" -- that democracy consists merely of asking residents to chose between a free eyeglass giveaway and repaved sidewalks, that politics should be about competing to serve clients rather than publicly debating issues -- he insults not only American democracy but the sophistication of Chilean voters. Even Bush, often referred to as America's first MBA president, seems to recognize that a political leader is more than the CEO of a body politic. Joaquin Lavín may not.
Jonathan Goldberg will be a graduate student at the London School of Economics in September.
