Democracy in Latin America: Between Hope and Despair

Chapter 7: The New Social Question

CHAPTER 7 THE NEW SOCIAL QUESTION As a senator, I represent a district of twenty-six municipalities and five provinces that stretches from Valparaíso to Aconcagua, with a predominantly poor, rural zone and another predominantly urban one. In both areas, a new middle sector is breaking through in the midst of the profound transformations that have taken place during the process of democratization carried out since the late 1980s. When attempting to summarize this in a single image, one could say that the grandchildren of the beneficiaries of the agrarian reform endorsed by President Eduardo Frei Montalva during the Revolution in Liberty (1964–1970) are now enrolled in college and university—today, seven of every ten students enrolled in higher education in Chile are the first in their families to reach that level of education. Having said this, we must not lose sight of the great diversity and heterogeneity in Latin America, which will help us avoid simplifications and generalizations. The contrast between this new reality and the old social reality that existed only a few decades ago is significant. I remember what the twentysix communities of the region I represent in parliament were like when I was elected as a deputy to the National Congress in 1993. The changes 191 have been profound and obvious. This is the shift from the old to the new social question.1 In 1993, these communities were too close to the image of Third World or underdeveloped countries, with deficiencies in all types of basic needs, especially things like nutrition, literacy, education, health, and infrastructure . Chile is a different country now when compared to what I knew in my youth, and Latin America is a different region. This reality varies so significantly from one country to another that we must avoid the temptation of looking only at the averages in terms of poverty, inequality , and per capita income. In the constituency I represent one can still find pockets of poverty and extreme poverty, along with the social inequality that continues to be Latin America’s great scandal. There are common patterns, however, that I try to unravel in this chapter. At the core of this new reality one could point to the fact that, at the beginning of the twenty-first century, Latin America seems to be more like middleincome countries—varying, of course, from one country to another— with new forms of social mobility related to the significant rise in education and profound changes in social structures. Latin America’s “social question” was at the center of the crisis of oligarchic rule and the national and popular model that aimed to substitute a new democratic order for the old oligarchic one. It was linked to the emergence of a new proletariat in the incipient process of industrialization that opened the way for the last stage of outward-looking growth, the accompanying migrations from the countryside to the city, and the urbanization associated with the modernization process. The anticlerical struggles of the “religious question” typical of the nineteenth century 192 DEMOCRACY IN LATIN AMERICA 1. This chapter is fundamentally based on investigations and studies carried out by CIEPLAN and the Fernando H. Cardoso Institute between 2006 and 2009. The results of these studies can be found in Cardoso and Foxley (2009) and in three volumes on “social cohesion” published under the coordination of Eugenio Tironi: Tironi (2008), Valenzuela et al (2008), and Gasparini et al (2008). The conversations, conferences, seminars , and monographs inside and outside of Chile that inspired the ideas in this chapter are innumerable. They include a seminar, Social Cohesion in Latin America (Assembling the Pieces), at the Kellogg Institute for International Studies at the University of Notre Dame on April 16, 2009. In the lines that follow, I try to bring together the essence of these reflections as they relate to what has been called Latin America’s new social question. gave rise to new social and political movements and organizations. These new organizations sought to represent the interests of the popular sector and middle sectors of society through the new, state-led import substitution industrialization development model. Sometimes this process took place under a democratic political form, while in other cases it took place under authoritarianism. I analyzed the characteristics, consequences, and economic, social, and political implications of this development model in chapters 2 and 3. Latin America is not like it once was...