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COHA

The Failings of Chile’s Education System: Institutionalized Inequality and a Preference for the Affluent

While the structure of Chile’s elementary and secondary education has changed considerably since the demise of the Pinochet dictatorship, the Chilean system is currently undergoing intense scrutiny due to the recent mass student protests against President Bachelet’s proposed 2006 education policy, Ley General de Educación (LGE). This General Education bill promises to eliminate discriminatory admissions policies at Chile’s primary, secondary, and tertiary education levels, and establishes a National Education Council to further advance school autonomy away from state control. However, teachers and students continue to oppose the LGE for its failure to reform the government’s basic financial strategy in order to abet a healthier and more equitable educational system.

What President Bachelet Hoped to Accomplish
Chilean education offers inherently unequal opportunities for students from low-income families, who consistently experience sub-standard educational achievements as a result of an ongoing bias in favor of privatization measures. The government’s school voucher program has not only exacerbated the socioeconomic divide between public and private institutions, but has also ensured that wealthier students have access to quality education, which guarantees their advancement to universities and a choice of careers. Although President Bachelet’s educational reform is intended to alleviate certain discriminatory practices that prevent low-income students from entering institutions of higher learning, the continuation of Chile’s market-based strategy for school financing will almost certainly guarantee existing inequalities.

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This analysis was prepared by COHA Research Associate Andrea Arango.

An Embattled Cristina Fernandez de Kirchner: Can She Restore Her Popularity and Aid in Argentina’s Recovery?

To the outrage of President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner, Vice President Julio Cobos cast the decisive vote on July 17 against her plan to increase the export tax on grains being shipped abroad, effectively putting a full stop to a very tense domestic situation. As a result, Argentina today is considerably more tranquil now that the hostile demonstrations and strikes by Argentine farmers, which led to chaos in the domestic and overseas food markets, have ended. The crisis averted, average Argentines can now breathe a sigh of relief knowing that the nation’s most unsettling issue, a crushing annual inflation rate of almost 30 percent, can be addressed.

During last year’s electoral campaign, Cristina was consistently 20 to 30 percentage points ahead of the other presidential candidates in the polls. Her victory was expected as her husband, Nestor Kirchner, had just ended his own presidential term with high popularity ratings, and the country looked forward to the continuity of his economic success paired with Cristina’s less heavy-handed style of governance. But President Fernández’s unwillingness to reduce the agricultural export tax and her obdurate approach to the dispute – perceived by many to be haughty and authoritarian – severely damaged her popularity. Even some of her most fervent supporters became disappointed by her uncompromising attitude. In addition, many complain that Nestor holds too much sway over Cristina and has had a negative influence on her dealings with the rural sector.

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This analysis was prepared by COHA Research Associate Emily Dunn.

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COHA

Still on the Drawing Board: the Banco del Sur a Half Year Later

COHA and the history of the Argentine human rights situation

COHA Director Larry Birns was recently mentioned in Hugo Alconada Mon’s article, “Piden desclasificar los archivos sobre los desaparecidos,” in La Nación. The article may be accessed by clicking on the following link:

http://www.lanacion.com/ar/politica/nota.asp?nota_id=1013271

• In the wake of the third summit of heads of state for the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR), the newest development is the creation of a South American Defense Council. One question still in the air, however, is what happened to the Banco del Sur, the South American development bank that was so heavily hyped a half year ago?
• The Banco del Sur may become an important actor throughout the continent, but for this to happen its members first need to agree on the subscribed capital upon which it will be levied.
• Once the bank’s capital subscription is decided, future challenges await: How to allocate the voting shares distribution and how to achieve high quality portfolios and credit ratings.

In December 2007, presidents from seven of the thirteen South American countries met in Argentina to create the Banco del Sur, a development bank originally advocated by Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez as a substitute for international financial institutions like the International Monetary Fund (IMF )and the World Bank. However, as the Banco del Sur is still on the drawing board and its purpose still debated, the only relatively fixed points are the countries which have agreed to be members: the leftists Bolivia, Ecuador and Venezuela, and the moderate left-leaning Mercosur countries, Argentina, Brazil, Paraguay and Uruguay. The question at hand is whether the newborn Banco del Sur will be able to live up to the challenges of running a successful sub-regional development bank while still making a coherent and strong ideological statement.

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COHA

COHA’s Women’s Studies Series: SERNAM and the Underrepresentation of Women in Chile

COHA on Cuba

The latest ill-fated salvo in President Bush’s poorly-focused rhetorical war against Cuba, which was just issued, once again fell far short of the target. In minimizing the importance of the reforms now being witnessed in Havana, Bush continues his record of trivializing U.S.-Latin America policy and undermining its lack of coherence and relevance regarding the important reforms now occurring almost daily on the island.


It is not an exaggeration to say that, under Bush, U.S. influence in Latin America is at its lowest point since the end of World War II. Much of the low esteem in which Washington is now held is due to the dead weight of its unremitting sterile policy toward Cuba that has pulled the State Department down to where its regional initiatives are scorned by almost any other country inside or outside of the region.


Ironically, Bush’s wasted words occurred some time after the E.U.’s senior development commissioner, Louis Michel, visited Cuba and urged all E.U. sanctions against the country be scrapped. Whatever shortcomings Cuba now exhibits in terms of the lack of civic guarantees it offers to its citizens—and there are many— President Bush would be well advised to inspect any number of important U.S. institutions that have been gored and disgraced by his own dysfunctional and constitutionally challenged administration and an all but illiterate diplomacy, that has produced neither tangible results nor appreciable leverage, over Cuba. In spite of the unrelenting hostility, the island today has a stronger economy and a brighter history of diplomatic success which consistently has out-trumped Washington on an almost daily basis.


President Bush’s verbiage may make the Florida delegation of exile representatives Lincoln Diaz-Balart, Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, and Connie Mack, full of admiration, but it has no standing with most Americans who look upon U.S.-Cuba policy with a sense of embarrassment and despair.

While the successful turnover of the Pinochet regime in 1989 presidential elections marked the formal beginning of civilian rule in Chile, it also brought on an important turning point in the relationship between civil organizations and the state. In focusing on the female sector, this transition has been shown to affect their movement in a number of ways. Though the women’s movement had presented a strong and often autonomous voice during the years of the Pinochet dictatorship, Chile’s transition to democracy began the institutionalization of women’s issues within society, changing the way that their demands were processed as well as affecting the types of issues that came before public agencies.

SERNAM’s Role

El Servicio Nacional de la Mujer (SERNAM) is an important state-sanctioned institution that was created after the transition to democracy had begun, in order to address issues of gender equality in the social, economic, political, cultural, and familial spheres of everyday life (Richards, 2003, 42). However, while some might suggest that SERNAM actually provides important resources and a set of objectives around which the women’s movement has re-mobilized (Franceschet 2003), others suggest that SERNAM is limited in its scope, and therefore, does not adequately represent the concerns of the popular sector when pushing the government for certain policies and programs high on its agenda. In addressing this second claim, we hope to show that SERNAM functions as a conservative organization for the concerns of a limited portion of the popular sector, by discussing the non-inclusive nature of SERNAM’s policy proposals, its low level of autonomy from the state government, and the general channeling of the popular women’s movement through state-sanctioned intermediaries. The conclusion reached is that the transition has pushed civil society organizations and their mobilization capacity to operate within a state-directed and institutionalized political arena.

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