PINOCHETISM

Heir Apparent: Meet Joaquin Lavin, Chile's likely next president, and (perhaps) the George W. Bush of Latin America. (Jonathan Goldberg, 7/16/03, The American Prospect)

The charm of Joaquin Lavin, 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 Lavin skirted, was politics. Instead of politics, Lavin 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" Lavin 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," Lavin -- 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 Lavin 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 Concertacion's poll numbers have recovered, but Chileans of all political stripes continue to treat the prospect of a Lavin presidency as a fait accompli.

Many on the left have criticized Lavin's entrepreneurial solutions as short-term, superficial fixes or as populist patronage schemes. And some allege Lavin'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 Lavin, 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 Lavin 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.

Sort of strange the way the essay notes Pinochet's remarkable achievements--restoring a healthy political system and pushing free market reforms--in passing even as it frets about Mr. Lavin following in his footsteps. Posted by Orrin Judd at July 18, 2003 8:24 PM