By Joe Hinchliffe
Santiago Times
October 31, 2011
http://www.santiagotimes.cl/chile/politics/22797-confidence-in-chiles-institutions-and-progress-plummets
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| La Moneda, Chile’s presidential palace. |
Following months of student protests, church scandals and record lows in government approval.
Chile is at the forefront of a wave of discontent sweeping across Latin America after a continent-wide poll found that satisfaction with the operation of democracy in the country fell 24 percent in 2011 to only 32 percent of the population.
Over the last year the belief that Chile is developing fell 26 percent, while confidence in both the Catholic Church and the national government fell 24 percent.
The findings were published in this year's Latinobarómetro, an annual public opinion survey that interviewed 19,000 people across 18 Latin American countries.
Marta Lagos, the poll's director, attributed much of the decline in public confidence in Chile to the student movement that for the last five and a half months has been waging an intense campaign to reform the country's highly privatized, class-education system. Their aim is to improve public education and to make it free.
"The Chilean case has surprised everyone," Lagos wrote in an analysis of the poll. "No one saw the student movement coming. What's more, as the days go by, the perception is slowly beginning to emerge that we are dealing with something that is much bigger than what many want to reduce it to."
The students' push to reform the country's tax system in order to pay for education and other services -- endorsed by a World Bank report and some members of the opposition -- also seems to have struck a chord with the public.
The belief that Chile's distribution of wealth is unjust polled at 94 percent, 6 percent higher than last year and 14 percent higher than the Latin American average.
Acceptance of the market economy as the only system to develop the country fell 13 percent to 43 percent overall, while belief that privatization has been beneficial to the country fell 14 percent to only 20 percent overall.
Perhaps the figure that distinguished Chile most from its neighbors was the belief that education is the best public service in the country. The Latin American average was 33 percent. In Chile only 1 percent agreed.
Delinquency is still seen as more of a problem in Chile than in the other countries in the region, even though concern about delinquency dropped 1 percent since 2010. Of those polled, 21 percent of the population in Chile saw delinquency as the number one national problem, while the continental average was 28.
Meanwhile, the Karadima case -- where a high profile priest who ministered to Chile's wealthy was found guilty of pedophilia by the Vatican -- appears to have shattered the public confidence in the country's most important religious institution.
Confidence in the Catholic Church in Chile plummeted to just 38 percent, down from 62 percent in 2010. The Latin American average was 64 percent.
The Economist attributed the decline in confidence in governments, the market economy and the current economic model across Latin America to an emerging middle class that is discontent with the state of public services and inequality of wealth."There's a feeling among those who have left poverty that it's much more difficult to continue rising," Marta Lagos, Latinobarómetro's director told The Economist. "They want to compete on equal terms with the rich."
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