The above is a well-translated clip of a Chilean television report from earlier on Sunday. It’s shot in the quake-stricken city of Concepcion as a local supermarket was being looted.  I saw the rest of the report on a live stream, which does not appear here and there is a lot missing. In that part that is missing the reporter says over and over again “this is a very complex situation.”

Indeed.

So let’s get a few untidy but contextual facts out of the way right off the bat. While this sort of pillage has led to a declaration of virtual martial law in several Chilean cities, the handing over of police powers to the Army and the first impositions of nightly curfews since the Pinochet period, we are also reading one Tweet after another of how “legal” businessmen are gouging quake-stricken Chileans by jacking up prices on milk, bread, gasoline and pay-by-the minute cell phones. That is looting of the worst kind.

But back to the supermarket stuff.  I don’t think anyone wants to advocate anarchy and mob-rule especially in times of catastrophe.

A couple of these looted markets, however, were closed. Their owners clearly found it too risky to put up basic foodstuffs and  medicines for sale in an orderly way without it, in fact, turning into a mob scene. So thousands of desperate people whose houses collapsed, who had their water and cooking gas supply cut off and who were poor to begin with, broke into the markets and grabbed what they could.  Is this great social policy? No. It is, nevertheless, quite predictable and would happen anywhere.

The security forces have an obligation to intervene and impose some modicum order. The footage of people being tear-gassed and hosed down with armored water cannons as their city lay in rubble around them, is a stomach-turning vision.  Put a few cops in front of the store and fire a few shots in the air. Maybe.

I say maybe because what the Chilean government should have done was to send in those troops IMMEDIATELY after the quake, confiscate the supermarkets, hand out the supplies in a rational fashion and later compensate the owners (maybe).

By doing nothing, by not even forcing the stores to open for business, the resulting chaos was more or less guaranteed.  Indeed, starting tomorrow — a day too late– the government will be giving families free relief packages in some sort of deal worked out with market owners.

A lot was also made about how, gasp, the looters were also taking TV’s and other consumer goods. Well, of course!  Again, this is not recommended social policy but it is inevitable that it takes places once those stores were broken into and after the government failed to make sure that they were both open and protected and that some system of material relief was in place. It has and would happen anywhere. We live in a system based on and motivated by personal greed. Some folks rob you with a fountain pen (or a Wall Street hedge fund, others do it more opportunistically with a crowbar. Sometimes it’s legal and sometimes it isn’t).

That said, looting per se cannot be tolerated. But to impose curfews and militarize the most hard-hit cities is not a pretty picture and is a make-shift, repressive response that could have been pre-empted. Further, a mother and/or father have a moral obligation to secure the basic needs for their offspring in times of emergency whether or not the owners of a food store feel or don’t feel like opening for business.

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A few words now about Chile versus Haiti. Much has been written about how Chile suffered so fewer casualties because it supposedly has such a superior building code and is so experienced in anti-earthquake construction.  Only partially true. ANY PLACE in the world has better building codes than Haiti — which is marginal to the Fourth World. Further, the Haitian quake was centered much, much closer to a much larger metropolitan center. The epicenter of the Chilean quake was 22 miles below the surface. In Haiti it was only eight miles below ground.

I have lived in Chile and while, no doubt, modern, high-end residences are built with earthquakes in mind, millions of working class residences are little but wooden shacks or cracker box apartments. Please note that, in fact, the common term for a Chilean shanty town home is “media agua” — which means half-water because they are so open to the environment and so full of holes. If this quake had been centered in Santiago, or worse, in the picturesque but rickety-built port of Valparaiso, I shudder to think what the body count would have been. Tens of thousands for sure.

Further, the single biggest building to collapse in this quake is a BRAND NEW 15 story apartment complex in Concepcion which fell over on its side and in which several dozen people were still trapped as of Sunday night.  What was that about superior seismic construction (see photo)?

Also, take a look at the video below. It was shot in the working class suburb of Maipu on the outskirts of Santiago, hundreds of miles from the epicenter. These sort of ticky-tacky housing developments are as common in Chile as rashes on a baby’s bottom. Hundreds of thousands of Chileans live in these sort of structures in a working class belt that surrounds and penetrates the capital city.  Again, imagine if the epicenter had been near Santiago,

I point this out not to trash Chile. On the contrary. I am deeply moved and upset by what has happened there not to mention that I have dozens of cousins and a mother-in-law living there. But beginning with Pinochet and his ultra-nationalist clap-trap, Chile has suffered from a pronounced case of triumphalist self-delusion.  The succeeding twenty years of civilian rule have done little to abate that malady.

Official Chilean dogma is that it has left the Third World behind and is now in a small circle of prosperous, economically developed and advanced countries. This is poppycock. Millions of Chileans have been lifted out of abject poverty in the past two decades but they remain poor. Or, at best, about a half-inch above water.

Wages are miserably low. Labor law is untouched from the days of the dictatorship. The educational system is broken and terribly class-biased. The economic elites live in luxury unthinkable to the other 14 or 15 million of their countrymen. A sick consumerism –beyond the country’s real means– has further distorted the economy. Common items such as tennis shoes are sold on 12 month installment plans with an effective 30% interest rate.  And while Chile is, in many ways, much better off than its closest neighbors, its economy is NOT developed. Chile prospers primarily by selling off and exporting its NON-RENEWABLE natural resources ranging from copper to irreplaceable hardwood forests to a depleted stock of salmon (plus some replaceable fruit harvested at shameful wages).

All this might explain why the government has awkwardly danced around the issue of almost out of hand rejecting foreign assistance to deal with the earthquake. It’s a laughable notion that it doesn’t need outside support. Several million Chileans, some in my own extended family, could have used some of that help BEFORE the quake. Indeed, every month my wife and I must decide who, among the relatives, will get wired some money to pay for this month’s prescription drugs, tuition payment or whatever.

A natural disaster like this one, as painful as it might be, always offers the opportunity of reordering priorities and doing some hard re-thinking about where a society is at. Doesn’t always happen. Just ask the folks in the lower 9th Ward of Nawlins.

Anyway, here’s that video of the housing complex in the suburbs of Santiago. You can drawn your own conclusions. There is no audio.

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