Chile: 1000 Still Missing — Relief Slow — Frustration Supreme
There were still scattered reports of looting Tuesday evening in Chile and social tension remains inflamed and volatile as mounting criticism of relief efforts focus on its tardiness. Thousands more troops were deployed throughout the country today to begin distributing basic food items. But tens of thousands remain without shelter, foodstuffs and medicines. And 18 hour a day curfew had been clamped down on the city of Concepcion, the hardest hit by the quake and home to 600.000.
Most reliable reports estimate that with the death toll hovering for the moment at around 800, somewhere around 1000 people are still missing.
Foreign aid began trickling in today, in part because of an unwisely prideful decision by the Chilean government to not make an urgent relief plea. Only reluctantly and slowly did the government of President Bachelet make such a call.
Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made an extremely brief foray into Chile today. And in a surreal scene, personally delivered the first batch of American aid in the form of 25 satellite cell phones. Thirty-five more have been promised along with other quite modest relief supplies.
Can someone please explain this from either end of the equation?
March 2nd, 2010 at 10:51 pm
Bret Stephens of the WSJ can. I guess Chile got all the US aid it needed in 1973:
Milton Friedman has been dead for more than three years. But his spirit was surely hovering protectively over Chile in the early morning hours of Saturday. Thanks largely to him, the country has endured a tragedy that elsewhere would have been an apocalypse…
Also I can’t help notice the “Salvamos tu verano con esta promocion” juxtaposed against a file of tanks. Friedman would approve.
March 3rd, 2010 at 10:20 am
Just caught a report on Dichato–a coastal village wiped out by a series of waves.
Stories in the coastal communities are hair raising with some people knowing to run after the quake; those that heeded the authorities (where the waves didn’t arrive for an hour!) and died. The wave heights varying between 7 and maybe 25 feet depending on the location and time after quake before they hit 20 minutes to an hour.
I Googled Tehuan???? its got a big inlet on one side and the ocean on the other. Couldn’t figure out where anyone ran to!
I was interested to see in one of the photos (forget which town) there was a Tsunami warning sign pointing the direction people should run in the aftermath of a quake!
March 3rd, 2010 at 3:26 pm
re: that WSJ pile of crap: The Chicago Boys destroyed Chile’s economy. Why do you think the economy crashed twice during the 17 year dictatorship? Some economic miracle huh?
And I can go even further and say that Allende actually inadvertently saved Chile’s economy by nationalizing copper in the 1970s. Because the (still nationalized) copper industry has saved Chile’s ass so many times (both during the dictatorship and during the recent financial crisis). Even Pinochet himself toward the end of his tenure as dictator finally kicked the Chicago Boys out because they were doing such a terrible job at managing the economy (and coincidentally, when the Chicago Boys left, the economy started to pick up).
March 3rd, 2010 at 4:10 pm
The Naomi Klein piece from the Guardian:
Milton Friedman did not save Chile
To say the late economist deserves credit for the country’s building codes shows a lack of knowledge of pre-coup Chile
* Naomi Klein
*
o Naomi Klein
o guardian.co.uk, Wednesday 3 March 2010 22.15 GMT
o Article history
Ever since deregulation caused a worldwide economic meltdown in September ’08 and everyone became a Keynesian again, it hasn’t been easy to be a fanatical follower of the late economist Milton Friedman. So widely discredited is his brand of free-market fundamentalism that his admirers have become increasingly desperate to claim ideological victories, however far fetched.
A particularly distasteful case in point. Just two days after Chile was struck by a devastating earthquake, Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens informed his readers that Milton Friedman’s “spirit was surely hovering protectively over Chile” because, “thanks largely to him, the country has endured a tragedy that elsewhere would have been an apocalypse … It’s not by chance that Chileans were living in houses of brick – and Haitians in houses of straw –when the wolf arrived to try to blow them down.”
According to Stephens, the radical free-market policies prescribed to Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet by Milton Friedman and his infamous “Chicago Boys” are the reason Chile is a prosperous nation with “some of the world’s strictest building codes.”
There is one rather large problem with this theory: Chile’s modern seismic building code, drafted to resist earthquakes, was adopted in 1972. That year is enormously significant because it was one year before Pinochet seized power in a bloody US-backed coup. That means that if one person deserves credit for the law, it is not Friedman, or Pinochet, but Salvador Allende, Chile’s democratically elected socialist president. (In truth many Chileans deserve credit, since the laws were a response to a history of quakes, and the first law was adopted in the 1930s).
It does seem significant, however, that the law was enacted even in the midst of a crippling economic embargo (“make the economy scream” Richard Nixon famously growled after Allende won the 1970 elections). The code was later updated in the 90s, well after Pinochet and the Chicago Boys were finally out of power and democracy was restored.
Little wonder: as Paul Krugman points out, Friedman was ambivalent about building codes, seeing them as yet another infringement on capitalist freedom.
As for the argument that Friedmanite policies are the reason Chileans live in “houses of brick” instead of “straw”, it’s clear that Stephens knows nothing of pre-coup Chile. The Chile of the 1960s had the best health and education systems on the continent, as well as a vibrant industrial sector and a rapidly expanding middle class. Chileans believed in their state, which is why they elected Allende to take the project even further.
After the coup and the death of Allende, Pinochet and his Chicago Boys did their best to dismantle Chile’s public sphere, auctioning off state enterprises and slashing financial and trade regulations. Enormous wealth was created in this period but at a terrible cost: by the early 80s, Pinochet’s Friedman-prescribed policies had caused rapid de-industrialisation, a tenfold increase in unemployment and an explosion of distinctly unstable shantytowns. They also led to a crisis of corruption and debt so severe that, in 1982, Pinochet was forced to fire his key Chicago Boy advisers and nationalise several of the large deregulated financial institutions. (Sound familiar?)
Fortunately, the Chicago Boys did not manage to undo everything Allende accomplished. The national copper company, Codelco, remained in state hands, pumping wealth into public coffers and preventing the Chicago Boys from tanking Chile’s economy completely. They also never got around to trashing Allende’s tough building code, an ideological oversight for which we should all be grateful.
Thanks to CEPR for tracking down the origins of Chile’s building code.
March 3rd, 2010 at 6:22 pm
Correction on nationalization of Chile’s copper: it began legally under Ibanez in 1955, continued big time with Frei in the 60s, (Anaconda copper, etc) — and was finished by Allende in 1971, when all the parties in the Congress agreed to the Constitutional amendment on nationalization, without compensation (except to some minor mines.) The vote was unanimous.
March 3rd, 2010 at 7:08 pm
A little perspective on CODELCO: 10% of its earnings are earmarked for the military.
Lagos wanted to privatize it and then levy taxes against it. Probably would have been better in the long run as it would have diminished the $$$ spent on the military and the taxes generated could have gone to social programs.
March 4th, 2010 at 6:27 am
how come Chile (and other countries ) have “villages” while the US has “towns”?
March 4th, 2010 at 6:35 am
Not true. Lots of small communities in the NE US have are called villages.
March 4th, 2010 at 8:27 am
Randy, should know. He spends time in Greenwich Village as the Village Idiot.
March 4th, 2010 at 8:28 am
Sergio, did it ever occur to you that ‘town’ has a more pejorative ring to it? Whilst ‘village’ has a sense of charm, a sense of community and a place where people actually might want to visit?
Town is just a generic word for an aggregation of population that is smaller than a city. In America we would use town after some denigrating adjective like what a shitty town… no one would ever say ‘its a shitty little village’
Town is even used to describe Manhattan.
You are an idiot and now sound like Woody.
March 4th, 2010 at 9:08 am
I’ve tried a limerick now I’ll go with a haiku:
Serial wanker
Tries to be humorous yet,
Fails one more time.
March 4th, 2010 at 11:50 am
I cannot believe village and town have become a source of argument.
This is why the world laughs at America we are the world’s village of idiots.
March 4th, 2010 at 12:11 pm
Saved the bell. Literally!
http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/world/2010/03/04/mcedwards.chile.12.year.old.hero.cnn?hpt=C2
March 4th, 2010 at 12:50 pm
“I cannot believe village and town have become a source of argument.
Not the first time – there’s the famous intro to Sonny Boy Williamson’s “Little Village” where he gets in an argument with producer Leonard Chess, transcribed as follows:
Sonny Boy The little village is too small to be a village
Williamson Not large enough to be a town
Too small to be a -
Leonard
Chess: Go ahead we’re rolling, Take 1
What’s the name-a this?
Sonny Boy: Little Village
A Little Village, Muther Fucker! A Little Village!
Leonard There’s isn’t a mother fuckin’ thing there about – a village
You son-of-a-bitch!
Leonard: Nothin’ in the song has got anything to do with – a village
Sonny: Well, a small town
Leonard I know what a village is!
Sonny: Well alright, goddamn it!
You know, you don’t need no title
You name it up, you, I got-get through with it, – son-of-a-bitch
You name it what you wanna
You name it your mammy, if ya wanna
Leonard: Ha-ha
Leonard: Take 1 roll it!
1, 2, 1-2-3-4
March 4th, 2010 at 1:28 pm
perfect. Then Gene Pitney’s Town Without Pity. Somehow Sergio thinks the fact that outside the US small communities are called ‘villages’ instead of the charmless “town’ that us colonial pigs are denigrating the indigenous cultures who predominately create and inhabit small communities called villages.
I am going to slap myself upside the head now…
hey, still waiting to see if civil unrest will at last erupt in America.
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