Más de Chile

Ramiro me manda la columna "The Americas" del WSJ de hoy. El tema es Chile, relacionado con lo que comentaba hace un par de posts. Honestamente me preocupa mucho:

Will Chile's President Flunk the Test?
By MARY ANASTASIA O'GRADY

When Chilean President Michelle Bachelet met with George W. Bush yesterday in Washington, she appeared the picture of self-possession.

Back home, the nation is not nearly so composed. For the past three weeks a nationwide "strike" to protest inferior public schools by more than 600,000 students shut down the country's government-run secondary education system. Students laid siege to hundreds of schools and marched in the streets, throwing rocks and committing vandalism. Yesterday they returned to class but the issue is not yet resolved.

The tear gas and water cannons in the Chilean capital were not covered much in the U.S. media but Latin America watched closely the worst upheaval in Chile in more than three decades. The Socialist Ms. Bachelet, who took office in March, is facing her first test, with implications that go well beyond free school lunches and daily bus passes.

On the domestic front, Chile is coming to terms with the myth of the Socialists' "third way," the idea that a liberalized open economy can function perfectly well alongside the atavistic structures of status-quo statism, embodied here in the public schools. At some point the two were bound to clash.

On the international front, despite the weak role it has so far played in the global war on terror and in the Organization of American States, Chile is the regional model for democracy and could be a key actor in the multilateral effort to contain the ambitious Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez. Ms. Bachelet's handling of the crisis will not only affect her ability to govern Chile. It also could pull Chilean foreign policy further to the left.

Last week Ms. Bachelet tried to diffuse the strike with a nationally televised address proposing $200 million more in school funding through next year. Student leaders rejected that offer. On Monday, the violence worsened when a former communist guerrilla group, the Manuel Rodriguez Patriotic Front (FPMR), mobilized labor militants, members of the education bureaucracy and university students to join the fun. The demonstrators ransacked neighborhoods and tried to barricade a central boulevard with burning tires. On Tuesday, the students occupied a United Nations office in Santiago.

It is critical to separate the students' fundamental gripe from the radicalism of Chile's ultra left, which seeks to destabilize democracy itself. The students' central complaint -- that public schools are shoddy -- has a certain validity in the eyes of many law-abiding Chileans and even the conservative Catholic Church. Unfortunately, Ms. Bachelet's proposal to throw money at the problem doesn't inspire confidence in a solution.

In 1982, Chile introduced a voucher system that allows children to use government funds to attend either public or private schools. The voucher system seeks to improve the quality of education by creating competition for students. Among private-school students, it has worked; test scores are up. But public schools remain disappointing.

The problem is that rather than a full-fledged voucher system, Chile has a quasi-voucher program that distorts the choice and competition effects of vouchers by subsidizing public schools directly. The rationale for the subsidy is fine: Since the cost of educating a poor child is higher than a middle-class child, extra funding is needed to support poor children. But unfortunately, that extra funding does not go into the hands of the student as a tool for choice. Instead, it goes directly to the public schools that the poor children attend. If a poor student wants to go to a private school, he cannot take the subsidy with him.

Claudio Sapelli, a Chicago-trained economist at the Catholic University in Santiago, has studied the distortions of the quasi-voucher system and written a chapter in the book "What America Can Learn From School Choice In Other Countries," (Cato Institute, 2005). On the subject of the "non-portable" funding, he wrote, "schools receive it in the form of supply subsidies, which merely accentuates the dependence of poor students on public schools." In other words, in the absence of making the subsidy portable, neither choice nor competition have had a chance to emerge.

The trouble for Chilean politicians is that the government bureaucracy and teachers' unions are powerful special interests. So although a more competitive system is needed, the incentive to feed the monster bureaucracy may be greater.

Meanwhile, the dust-up could have other repercussions. To counter the charge that she caved in to violence, Ms. Bachelet has pledged that there will be no further financial concessions. But there are other ways to compensate her left flank.

That's where the international worry comes in. In October, Latin American countries will decide whether it will be Venezuela or Guatemala that wins the next opening for a non-permanent Latin America seat on the U.N. Security Council. The leftist government of Argentina, which has repeatedly used anti-Americanism to strengthen its hand at home, has already said it will vote for Venezuela. Given Hugo's close alliance with the mullahs, this is a vote for Iran.

How did Argentina, once an upstanding member of the international community, morph into a sympathizer for the axis of evil? Partly it has been influenced by the terrorist background of key members and advisers of the current government, who were involved with the Argentine equivalent of the FPMR in the 1970s. But Argentine foreign policy has also been shaped by orchestrated street violence. President Nestor Kirchner has found that to placate thugs and shore up his base at home, nothing is as gratifying as carrying water for Hugo.

No one expects Chile to sink to Argentine lows. But remember that the most terrifying violence in this "strike" occurred when union members of the education bureaucracy took to the streets with the FPMR; their modus operandi is clear.

On the U.N. vote Ms. Bachelet will feel pressure from these Chilean extremists, along with neighboring Argentina and friends like Fidel Castro and Mr. Chávez who know something about exporting organized violence. Let's hope that fear or political expediency do not drive her decision. That would be a tragedy for regional stability and for Chile's global prestige.