Chapter 3: Looking for Happiness, Finding Economic Growth: The Chilean Transition to Democracy

On September 5, 1988, after 15 years of military dictatorship, Chileans saw on their TVs a message full of hope: “Chile, happiness is coming.” This claim—presented as a lively jingle¹—was the core message delivered by the campaign for the “NO” option in the referendum to be held a month later. This referendum, the first election since March 1973 to have preestablished voter registration lists and international observers, asked Chilean to choose between two alternatives: “SI,” yes in Spanish, for extending the civic-military regime led by Augusto Pinochet 10 more years until 1997; or “NO” calling for free presidential and legislative elections on 1989, and thus ending the dictatorship. In spite of the confidence of the regime in a landslide victory and the unclear consequences for the people campaigning against it (Valenzuela & Constable, 1988), more than 7 million people cast their ballots on October 5th. The result was a resounding 56% of support for the “NO” option. Apparently the idea of reaching a long-overdue happiness moved Chileans to bet against all odds and oppose the dictatorship in the polls. Not long afterwards, on March 11, 1990, another historical moment was broadcasted on national TV: Pinochet himself handed the O’Higgins badge—symbol of the presidential office—over to Patricio Aylwin, the center-left candidate who won the free elections of 1989, in the newly built National Congress. This epic story, portrayed by the 2012 film No (Larraín & Larraín, 2012), appears both as the downfall of a cruel dictatorial regime and the emergence of an all-new democratic era. An era that brought stable democracy, reduced poverty from 38.6% to 11.7% (Ministerio de Desarrollo Social, 2016), increased the size of the economy by four times (from $4,407 to $22,316, as gross domestic product [GDP] per capita) (World Bank, 2016), and made the country a member of the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) in 2009. That is the story of how Chile moved from its most recent dictatorship to the current democracy; at least according to its political, economic, and technocratic elite (e.g., Boeninger, 1997).