Chile: the good democracy?

With the government initially sacking several ministers, including the transport minister Sergio Espejo, the measures were really a face-lift as Bachelet asked Congress for $290 million to give to a private company that did not fulfil its original contract. According to one analyst recently in La Jornada, such a lack of courage to take on local businesses for their failures even led some "Christian Democrat deputies [to] have questions about the state supporting business inefficiency".

But continuing the status quo, is essentially what the Bachelet government has been about and such policies, allowing the private sector to eat out of the public coffers, are a clear example of this. Likewise, the government's reluctance to moderate in an industrial dispute between BHP Billiton mining company and employers at La Escondida mine last year, highlight that only after great public pressure is the Chilean government willing to side with workers who seek better wages.

Even with the dispute resolved, after one of the longest strikes by Chilean miners in recent history, the Bachelet government could face more crippling industrial action as large numbers of workers did not receive moderate wage increases - despite the fact that mining companies, due to the Chinese boom, are recording record-breaking profits.

In education and health, the government's credentials have also come under question. Over the last eighteen months, Chile has seen the growth of the Penguin movement by high school students: they demand that the archaic education system established under the military dictatorship should no longer favour those with high incomes. After tens of thousands of students took to the streets early last year, and were often brutally repressed by police (someone has yet to tell the police force, Carabineros de Chile, that in a democracy one has a right to protest), the Bachelet government conceded that students' grievances had a basis in reality.

Studying in classrooms with leaking roofs and inadequate chairs and desks was going to change, according to the government, yet so far, little has been done.

Similarly, in health, Bachelet's failures have angered many. Claiming to have established new hospitals all over the country, Dr Juan Luis Castro - head of the Doctors Association (Colegio Medico) - recently stated, "things have to be called by their name and of the eight hospitals announced by the President, only five correspond to that denomination." Although stating he believed the President had been misinformed, Castro added there had been "deception, an error which must be rectified" adding, "It is clearly a euphemism to speak of hospitals without beds".

Then there is the issue of Chile's indigenous peoples who are the most marginalised. While under the military dictatorship, their leaders suffered brutal repression and were pushed off their lands at the will of the General or local landowners, today the Bachelet government simply puts its head in the sand over the issue of indigenous land rights. Even worse, it has allowed repressive anti-terror laws established under the dictatorship, and strengthened by the Lagos government, to pursue Mapuche leaders whose lands are been threatened by foreign corporations in the forest industry.

As Carmen Curihuentro Llancaleo - an indigenous activist - recently explained at a conference in Sydney, Australia last year, she was under the impression that as a former victim of torture, Bachelet would surely have more sympathy towards her people's plight and the human rights violations they have endured by the state.

Currently, numerous indigenous activists languish in Chile's jails on trumped up charges as local landowners in the south take the law into their own hands against indigenous organisations. The legitimacy of such a judicial system, and the lack of will by a government to see that its citizens receive fair trials, should be seriously questioned.

Likewise, the administration's adherence to the 1980 constitution with its clause that curtails the role of the state in the market, and bans it from interfering in sectors of interest to private capital, highlight the government's commitment to neo-liberalism. Although the high price of copper, profits from the forestry industries - at great ecological cost to future generations - and moderate social spending explain much of the so called “Chilean miracle”, the fact that the country's resources are not infinite seems to escape many people's imaginations inside Bachelet's cabinet.

Hence why the regional integration today being promoted by the likes of Venezuela, Argentina, Cuba, Ecuador, Bolivia and to some extent Brazil, are so vital if Latin America is to modernise, establish political and economic unity, and (one day) negotiate with Washington on more equal terms. In this process, Chile's role has been quite embarrassing if not shameful. Since the Lagos government, Chile has been all too happy to sign bilateral free-trade deals with the United States, China, Singapore and Colombia. The latter is one of Chile's largest trading partners in the region while it can also claim the title of worst human rights violator in Latin America.

During mid-2006, when many international observers noted the huge electoral fraud that robbed centre-left candidate Andrés Manuel López Obrador of the presidency in Mexico, Bachelet, along with US President Bush, were the first in the region to recognised Felipe Calderón as the new president.