Independence and its Victories

 Yesterday I spoke with a financial planner whose son is learning Spanish. I noted at the end of the conversation that I had lived in Chile, and that yesterday the 18th of September was Chilean Independence Day. He said, spontaneously and rather appropriately, "Muy bien."

I believe that there is reason to celebrate the independent birth of a country like Chile in 2020, year of many popular protests and issues; I will try to explain why.

Henry Kissinger, a German-born U.S. immigrant who would return to a vanquished homeland as an American Army soldier and ended up interrogating his old countrymen at the end of World War Two in Europe, after that devastating turn of events, later became one of the most powerful men in the United States under President Nixon. In my opinion Kissinger wound up being one of the most powerful influencing Americans or human beings of all time, beyond that presidency. His adopted doctrine of the "balance of powers" and realpolitik has been the general strategy of U.S. foreign policy ever since, especially when recognizing that he as a Jewish person held Israel and the Middle East as part of the world view of peace and balance.

Thus we have arrived half a century later. We observe the balance of power theory still. Deep into the 21st century.

Kissinger, in all my readings and studies of Chile, famously said in 1973, in light of the turmoils of Chile and its fight for survival from the September 1973 coup d' etat and its aftermath, that this rather little nation was small and of little consequence. I am not sure that he totally meant that, and if he did he was wrong. Perhaps he was trying to downplay the struggle of its identity as a sovereign country and its meaning to the world. Chile, while a small country in comparison to some of its bigger and more populated neighbors of South America, mattered and matters more than the sum of its parts. All of us around the world look to clues and tells from our neighbors and how they govern. We look for allies, enemies, trading partners, associates and members of our own way of behaving and acting. We help each other and sometimes spite each other, whichever the strategy at the time dictates. Or we as nations receive signals and consciously or unconsciously take the cues and more or less accept, adopt, or eschew, whatever seems logical to those who interact with said place. This happens individually and collectively to our entities and institutions, we constantly look for heroes and pariahs, examples and exceptions, in international governance, economic policy, social maturation, any number of methods and practices to be emulated or avoided.

We are all neighbors and we all send and receive signals that affect the international neighborhood.

 

I had a UCLA professor who wrote a book called "Why Nations Get Along". Why, indeed.

Chile was key to the United States and the world in the fight against socialism and Communism. It was integral, and by the mid 1970s had become another example of tough capitalism and its rule, its monetary and labor of the fittest fight against all brands of Godless Marxism. Contrast Chile's plight with that of Cambodia, a worst case scenario of the government of the proletariat. Or simply look to Brazil, or Argentina, or Colombia.

50 years later we celebrate the freedoms enjoyed by Chileans, without the imprisonment and torture, without the deaths and disappearances of its free citizens that had occurred in its painful transition back to a liberal democracy. The victims caught up by soldiers and police and General Pinochet's draconian regime, some mistakenly, who supported a rather radical version of economic policy and control from the central government, those who were in favor of the strong handed Salvador Allende,  who was ignominiously deposed in 1973.

In 2020 we see Chile as a bastion of freedom, in its Latin American context, an economic success story. Perhaps in this Chile the average citizen does not enjoy as many advantages of income and disposable wealth as the average American or Canadian or those of the economic powers in other parts of the world, like Europe and East Asia, but Chile is held up as fiscally sound and a place for people to be what they want to be. Free, able to choose their life and work to a certain degree, to be educated. Education has come under scrutiny and a large microscope in recent years, protests during the Bachillet presidency as well as general protests under Pinera, the president more to the right. Both figures have taken turns leading the country in the time since I last lived there in 2005.

I know a young lady who served her mission there from 2017 to 2019, witnessing a time of new prosperity and perhaps the more globalized Chile. Between my mission in the early 1990s and my return with my small family in the early 21st century (2005), Chile had attracted its share of some neighbors as immigrants for economic reasons, like Bolivians and Peruvians, even some Argentines and Uruguayans.

But by the late 2010s there was found a newer class of economic refugee, now from Haiti and Venezuela. The literal neighbors of Chile have their sociological, cultural, and linguistic differences, but Venezuelans and Haitians are a new brand of different for Chile, a country that apparently had removed any African descended inhabitants back in the early 1800s, when most countries of South America were forging their respective identities from the overseas ruler of Spain.

Chile, like much of Latin America, is a racial melting pot, with fair skinned blondes and redheads with European backgrounds as strong as "white" North America, while most Chileans are considered "mixed", or mestizo. Still a smaller minority of the country are native Americans, like in the United States or Canada. First nation people with their ancient languages and customs, if you will.

The Afro-descended peoples of the Caribbean are a new world and flavor for Chile, a land long and varied geographically but quite homogeneous as a culture and a way of speaking and understanding their own identity, their own lexicon, even across the breadth of their 2700 miles from north to south.

But prosperity and economic power brings its unique challenges and virtues, and diversity is one of them. Many people would see this as positive, to have the working poor of the tropics alight on land that has enjoyed opportunity.

But don't get me wrong, Chile has plenty of poverty and economic struggle and malaise like any other part of Latin America, like Mexico or Dominican Republic, or Guatemala or Ecuador. It is not a land of milk and honey as some may think of it, nor is the United States the great land of free opportunity and wealth, for that matter. We all have our sectors of poor and wrong founded public education, we have our ghettos and decrepit living conditions, our streets and even rural back roads of unemployed, fatherless, hungry, living pay check to pay check. Jesus did say we will always have the impoverished, right? He told the truth, don't you know.

 

Chile has had hundreds of thousands of its own leave the country for political and economic reasons, like so many other countries in the world in the last century and before. But Chile, unlike so many of these other lands, has a few more advantages than most. The government is stable, the policies of prosperity are well founded and continually bear sway to the majority of those who live there.

Chile is joined in the world by those looking for freedom and power to earn and live in a decent way. No different than Australia or Indonesia, the greater continents of Asia and Africa. Every people choose to find independence as a sovereign republic or monarchy, to find within its government and armed forces and working communities the stable chances to grow and enjoy life and its better qualities.

Asian tigers have found much of this formula to success and growth; the rest of the world wishes to emulate the power and dynamic opportunism of Japan and South Korea, Taiwan and Singapore, and hark back to the original economic free powers of Western Europe. Those nations that made our world the colonized and post-colonized planet that we now understand as a Western model of living, all ascribed by the United Nations and a hundred other international organizations under the Western paradigm of "how to succeed and prosper". 

Even many Arab nations seek to follow the pattern, despite political or other cultural differences with the West.

Chile is one of the beacons to the world that sound financial policy and governance can and should work. The "pueblo de esfuerzo" (people of effort, i.e. work, a mantra on T-shirts with the Chilean flag)  do work and get ahead. Chileans do all right, compared to much of the rest of the planet. Free elections are the norm, peaceful presidencies and more peaceful protests for more economic rights and privileges are expected, even though some ugly incidents have marred the world of congregations and public demonstrations in the streets in the last year. (A public transportation increase of price resulted in severe protests in many Chilean cities, injuring and traumatizing many).

The United States understands this phenomenon a lot more in 2020, thank you.

Peaceful protests in public can be anything but, we realize here the great big US of A.

But back to Chilean Independence in the time of pandemic and social outrage post George Floyd, this perhaps less than momentous September of this uniquely destined year: we are grateful that Chile is there.

Smaller than most of its neighbors, nothing too big in the scheme of world geo-politics or culture, Chile is a light and a beacon, we are a better world for its presence, the existence of its people and present constitution and formation, and its signal to us that life and liberty can be a real result of many coming together to agree that we can survive and succeed.

 

Chile, I salute thee. Live long and prosper, continue in the path towards freedom and opportunity.

 

Happy Independence today and forever.