DRIVING on a bright and warm July day through the fertile plains of Rinconada de los Andes, some 80 km north of the Chilean capital Santiago, one could feel in paradise. The snow-capped peaks of the Andes glistened in the mid-winter sun on our right while all around were fields where rich crops of fruits will ripen later in the year.
However, for the group of local men and women I met in a simple wooden but just off the main road, it is far from paradise. From October to April these people work up to 16 hours a day, seven days a week, picking this fruit for export; for the rest of the year they have no work.
Carlos told me that since he tried to set up a trade union he can get no work at all. The employers' threat to fire all workers who joined the union was very effective, others told me. Without unions, conditions of work and pay are gradually getting worse as employers respond to greater competition abroad by cutting costs at home.
These people have known better times. Under the agrarian reforms of the Salvador Allende government (1970-73), they received their own land as the large estates or haciendas were broken up. After the military coup of 1973, they lost it all again as large companies, including such US companies as Dole and United Fruit, bought up the land turning it into huge plantations of grapes, pears, kiwis, and now raspberries, for export to the US and Europe.
Here I saw what economist Fernando Leiva has called the two faces of the Chilean economic model. For Chile's remarkable growth rates of more than 6 per cent a year for more than a decade are based on the export of natural resources - fruits, fish, wood products and copper - much of it in a relatively unprocessed state.
This booming economy has reduced unemployment from 10.9 per cent in 1987 to 6.8 per cent in 1994 and poverty from 45 per cent of the population to 28.5 per cent during the same period, - though the rate of poverty is still higher than it was in 1970. It is now held up as Latin America's economic "tiger" and the World Bank promotes it as a model for the region.
Yet, even as poverty falls, inequality is growing. The percentage of income per household of the richest 20 per cent grew from 55 to 57 per cent from 1990 to 1994 while that of the poorest 20 per cent grew from 4.2 to 4.5 per cent. Though there is plenty of work, I heard complaints again and again that salaries are dropping and conditions are worsening. The Ministry of Labour admits that more and more workers are employed on short-term contracts or through sub-contractors which allows employers avoid paying social security payments. As one local trade union leader told me in the huge fishing port of
Talcahuano, "this system functions on low salaries and casualisation but we workers have learnt to be silent, to be humble."
For some economists, this is a sign that Chile has not begun to break out of a traditional pattern of underdevelopment. Rafael Agacino, an economist who has studied the restructuring of Chilean industry in the 1980s, said that instead of investing in new technology, employers extended production through driving down wage costs. He pointed out also that concentrating on exporting raw materials is failing to build up the high-tech industry that a country needs if it is to develop. Alvaro Diaz, an economist with the economy ministry, disagrees. He identified countries such as Finland, Norway and New Zealand as examples Chile could follow but said that it would take a far more directive state to "pick winners" and help build up high-tech skills in the economy.
The environmental impact of Chile's economic boom is another area of growing concern. The Santiago-based Institute of Political Ecology argues that the country's economic growth "is sustained upon the indiscriminate and deregulated exploitation of the country's natural resources and cautions that the present export model is simply unsustainable. More mainstream economists agree that a clean up of the environment is urgent and estimate it would cost 1 to 2 per cent of GDP and would be likely to slow growth rates.
But growth rates of 6 to 7 per cent a year remain central to the government's plans to try to make Chile a developed country. Andres Aylwin, a Christian Democrat congressman and brother of Patricio Aylwin who was president of Chile from 1990-94, told me he fears an outbreak of social unrest if growth were to slump. He thinks "the political class" is too subservient to both the military and foreign capital and lacks "the necessary passion to confront problems of poverty and growing inequality". A result of the "permanent consensus politics" is that the people feel marginalised and there is a widespread apathy about politics, he said.
A poll in the daily La Epoca in July showed an increase in the numbers not interested in politics from 49 per cent to 58 per cent over a seven-month period. Where Gen Pinochet failed to eradicate political activism during his 17-year dictatorship, it seems that the consensus politics of the Christian Democrats and the Socialists who have government in a coalition arrangement since 1990, have succeeded. Socialist party congressman, Pedro Munoz, said that most of the government ministers from his party are "technocrats" who will not listen when told of growing social problems and disillusion throughout the country. He too predicted a "social explosion" in the future.
Gabriel Salazar, a leading historian of Chile's social movement, makes a distinction between material poverty and what he calls "poverty of citizenship. For the poorest 40 per cent of the population life has got worse, he said. These are the people who face growing insecurity as their conditions of work worsen and who bear the brunt of the growing levels of delinquency, drug taking and social breakdown. "Though they feel robbed by the survey-takers, devalued by the politicians and ignored by the consultants and the universities, they cling to life and they resist what is being done to them."
