The General’s Slow Retreat: Chile after Pinochet

Chapter 12. Chile, Post-Pinochet

248 T W E L V E Chile, Post-Pinochet I It was the first presidential campaign since the dictator’s death, and it initially looked like a tired political rerun featuring political actors already well known to Chilean voters. By law Michelle Bachelet was prohibited from running for a consecutive presidential term, though her approval ratings had ascended to 78 percent, according to a survey by the Centro de Estudios Públicos (CEP). The same poll ranked Bachelet as the Chilean public’s best-liked political figure, with 83 percent of respondents giving her a positive evaluation. The second best-liked leader was her finance minister, Andrés Velasco (58 percent), a reflection of how her administration had managed the Chilean economy through the global financial crisis.1 Her informal style had drawn criticism at the beginning of her C h i l e , P o s t - P i n o c h e t 249 administration, but by the end of her term, Bachelet was being credited with bringing the presidency closer to the Chilean public. The election campaign to choose her successor showed a changed political culture. There had been speculation that either former president Ricardo Lagos or Organization of American States secretary general Jose Miguel Insulza might become the Concertación’s candidate, but both men opted out of the race. There had been no primary or open process of candidate selection, and the Center-Left coalition eventually selected former president Eduardo Frei. After two decades in power, the Concertación seemed not to have cultivated the next generation of leaders and at times appeared to be teetering on the verge of political exhaustion. The Center-Right Alianza coalition once again picked Sebastián Piñera, the Chilean billionaire and former senator who had lost the January 2006 runoff vote to Michelle Bachelet. Since then Piñera had maintained his high public profile, occasionally encountering legal or political problems . In 2007 Chile’s securities regulatory agency fined him $680,000 for insider trading, charging that while serving on the board of Chile’s national airline, LAN, he had purchased three million shares a few days before the company issued its earnings report for the first half of 2006. Finance Minister Velasco said the fine was based on technical considerations , while Piñera maintained that the charge was politically motivated because he was “a person with political expectations, with an important political situation.” He announced he would not appeal the fine, since it could take five years for the case to go through the courts—an oblique reference to his plans to make another run for the Chilean presidency.2 There would be other suggestions of financial wrongdoing, including an accusation from the Pinochet regime’s former justice minister Monica Madariaga about his actions during Chile’s 1982 banking crisis. According to Madariaga, she had helped Piñera avoid going to jail when authorities took administrative control of a bank he had managed and uncovered evidence that the institution had made millions in bad loans. When a judge issued an arrest warrant for Piñera, he went into hiding for twenty-four days while his lawyers tried to get the order overturned. Madariaga said Piñera’s brother, a former regime cabinet minister, sought her intervention. She contacted the judge in the case, asking that Piñera 250 C o n s o l i d a t i n g D e m o c r a c y not be arrested, and the judge in question confirmed that Madariaga had indeed called him. Chile’s Supreme Court later acquitted Piñera of the charges, after an extensive legal battle.3 Piñera rejected this version of events, accusing the Frei campaign of attempting to smear him as opinion polls showed him enjoying a considerable lead over the former president. To his critics, the billionaire was a Chilean edition of Italy’s flamboyant Silvio Berlusconi, coming to power atop a business and media empire—though unlike Berlusconi, Piñera was able to present himself as an exemplary family man and was frequently photographed with his wife and four grown children. A practicing Catholic , he described his political philosophy as Christian humanism and frequently referred to his opposition of Pinochet’s reelection in 1988. Piñera was also one of the few business leaders in the country to become involved in nature conservation. He...