CHILEAN REACTIONS TO WORLD EVENTS - Strange Analysis & Unpublished Letters

Long protected by a chain of high mountains and a difficult sea journey

away in pre-Panama Canal days, the flow of information and knowledge about

faraway places and events has not been a forte of Chilean society. Even

after air travel and telecommunications made instant exposure possible,

the threat of the “foreign” and the “different” is set with clichés and

prejudices. When the main national cable TV franchise was owned by

Argentines, you would get channels from most of South America and Mexico.

Now you can only get Argentine TV and a Mexican variety channel. Sure, you

can, as I do every morning, view the whole South American press on

internet, but how many people do, even if it is up their professional

street?

The further and more different the events and culture behind it, the

bigger the ignorance. The sin is magnified with a compulsion to expose

that ignorance, feeling safe that as the rest of the population knows even

less, nobody will know better, and they will all praise the “expertos”

because they are famous or come from one or other institution.

From the various major events that have made the news in the past

fortnight, I have selected three examples whch I shall detail below.

THE CHILDREN OF THE ASHRAM Where have those who manage Chile’s economy

and finances studied? Chicago? Wrong! Harvard? Nope! MIT? No way!

Stanford? Cold! No dears, they have all been to a secret Ashram in India

specialised in Economic thought. They probably learned the words of

Kautilya “One should crush the sands forcibly and extract oil;a thirsty

person should drink water from a mirage; wandering ceaselessly, obtain a

hare's horn; but one should never try to reason with a fool who is

characterized by stubbornness." Ministers and undersecretaries, together

with their academic fan club, recite mantras. They could of course also

have gone to a Tibetan Buddhist monastery where prayers also have Sanskrit

roots, and it is less tiring because the Buddhists have the prayer wheel,

whose spinning is equivalent to reciting the mantras aloud. I have never

seen a Chilean official with a prayer wheel (I am sure their wives’ Opus

Dei confessors would not like it), but they certainly practice the oral

mantras.

The main object of recent mantras has been the exchange rate, with the

constant reciting of two texts: “The dollar is falling abroad and there is

nothing we can do about it”, and the other is “The answer to the strong

peso is productivity”. I will suggest another one “Why did they transplant

your Lingam into your brain?”.

Strangely enough, though the dollar has fallen everywhere, other

neighbouring countries have managed to limit the fall to a fraction of the

Chilean one? Maybe they have better traders. I wonder how many public

servants managing the economy in Chile have spent even an hour on a

trading desk?

When things really get dramatic, and most of the damage is already done,

they organise an intervention. Can you imagine a military operation where

the commander announces in advance at what time and where he is going to

attack, for how long, and the maximum quantity of ammunition he plans to

use. This of course allows the enemy to take cover and wait the passing of

the small cloud. Thus, pre-announcing an intervention with a fixed daily

sum (equal to no more than 5 % of market turnover), for a limited time, is

the most ridiculous thing I have seen in financial markets over more than

40 years of career.

Interventions should be like intelligence and commando operations. They

should strike by surprise, at moments of vulnerability, with variable

means as befits the daily situation. No wonder they do not work in Chile.

Productivity. The suffering sectors are led by agriculture and tourism.

They are both labour intensive. What “productivity” are they expected to

introduce. Reduce staff and create an unemployment problem? Put up dollar

prices and price themselves out in a very competitive market? Make the

berries smaller? Use contraband fuel to counter the authorities disgusting

hydrocarbons pricing policy? Can we please get some details of the

“productivity” measures learnt in the hills of Darjeeling?

I sent a very short version of this analysis, concentrating on the lack of

expertise in intervention methods, to El Mercurio. It was not published.

LACKEY OR GENERAL? The Royal Wedding gave mental orgasms to all the

media which in any case spends its time and resources, in Chile and

elsewhere, following the antics of the famous. This was their apotheosis

and they fully lived up to it .

It could only happen in Chile, but someone decide to use the event to

score a military point, though the pages of El Mercurio. Unfortunately, he

got it wrong. A former commander in chief of the Navy, admiral Vergara,

wrote a letter saying how pleased he was to see “so many uniforms” at

Westminster Abbey, contrasting it with the fact that in Chile, “the

military appear to be like an embarassment” adding that even the

presidential AdC at ceremonies took a back seat.

Taking that last point first, presidential AdCs at ceremonies ARE supposed

to be unobtrusive unless needed, so a very bad example to complain about.

As for the uniforms at the wedding, maybe admiral Vergara did not know

that all the British royals, including female ones, and I am sure many of

the crowned heads and princes invited from abroad, hold honourary military

ranks. In the UK, various other officials also have military-looking

uniforms (as do staff at the Palace). The bridegroom being a military

officer, it would also be normal to think that his fellow officers were

invited, and as they do in Chile, came in uniform. I would be very

surprised if the whole high command of the armed forces had been invited

to the wedding . You may want to check the guest list with the British

Embassy.

I am the first one to think that the military in Chile have been badly

treated, having had to do the élite’s dirty work by protecting their

privileges threatened by Allende’s regime. They then were the only ones to

be tried and imprisoned for human rights abuses, whilst their civilian

puppet masters enriched themseves on privatisations, became senators and

deputies, sometimes ambassadors, without a single one of them spending a

night in jail.

The final coup de grace on the horizon is the plan to repeal the Copper

Law, completely handing over major procurement decisions to venal

bureaucrats and politicians, helped by “advisers” of very dubious quality

and hidden allegiances.

The problem with admiral Vergara’s complaint (as I explained in another

letter to El Mercurio which similarly went unpublished) is basically

incorrect. I studied for three years in France and worked for 20 years in

London. I have been interested in military affairs since I was 8 years old

, but in all these 23 yearsin Europe, I did not once meet or even see a

military officer at a social event, inauguration, conference or seminar

(except when they specifically dealt with military affairs). It is true

that the presence of uniformed representatives at diplomatic receptions in

Chile has fallen since I first arrived, though I am not sure which part is

due to their not being invited, or not going. In fact, spouses are

generally not invited either these days (not even to the Royal Wedding, as

we heard). Can you imagine my wife writing to El Mercurio complaining as

to why she was not invited to the national day of Uzbekistan, though David

Beckham’s wife was at Buckingham Palace?

AFTER LENIN DIED Though Marx was the theorist, Lenin was the practioner

of Communism. He died in January 1924. The Soviet Union went on for

another 66 years without him, even surviving the demise of Stalin for 37

years. The USSR and the Communist system in general were very centralised,

with orders coming from the top and having to be obeyed. Al Qaeda is a

loose franchise, so why is it going to fall apart because Usama bin Laden

is dead? Not a chance.

I have mentioned in my two previous notes on the Egyptian and Libyan

upheavals, about the poor state of knowledge and analysis of the Middle

East in Chile. Despite the presence of a large community of Palestinian

origin, even culture and language among them are a minority activity,

whereas the rest of the population knows nothing about it. The only Middle

Eastern studies centre at the Univeristy of Chile is non-descript. One has

to say that Arab embassies have done little to counter this situation,

even letting the government palace host annual Jewish celebrations as if

it was a Chilean holiday (how many Chilean ministers have been to the

Santiago Mosque?).

Ah, but we have the “expertos”. They surpassed their performance on the

Arab crisis by commenting on the killing of Bin Laden. Among the three

comments I picked up, the best one was the analyst who placed Pakistan in

North Africa on a TV debate, but the others were also notably off the

mark.

“A Great Victory for the USA”, a columnist wrote. Really? What is great

about it? The fact that it took you 10 years to locate a guy sitting with

a large part of his family in a house 40 km from your embassy in

Islamabad? And that with a U$ 40 bn annual security and intelligence

budget and airport procedures which transformed air travel into a hellish

experience? Was it the great performance of the Navy Seals (parasail down

from helicopters onto a house full of women and children where nobody shot

back, and the main target, unarmed, was killed in cold blood)? This is

back to the times of the Far West posses and lynching of Blacks in the

Deep South. The law West of the Pecos river. It is now politically

incorrect to lynch Blacks, particularly if your president is one, so there

are the Arabs, neigh, Muslims in general (never mind that your president

holds the second name of Imam Husain, the most venered Shia martyr).

Can you imagine the scandal if during Pinochet’s detention in London,

Spain had sent a commando unit to shoot him at the London Clinic? Remember

the complaints high in the sky about the Bulgarian secret service killing

a dissident in London with a poisoned umbrella- high marks for

originality- or the more technically sophisticated disposal by slow

radiation poisoning of a Russian dissident, also in London. Let us not

even mention the breach to Pakistani sovereignty, however well or badly

exercised by its government. The US of A, like its devilish offspring the

State of Israel, has never bothered about legal niceties in international

relations. Full marks to Ricardo Lagos as the only Chilean politician who

did not deem it necessary to lick arse in his reaction.

Another academic declared that the killing of Bin Laden was good for the

prospects of the US economy. Wow! So the budget deficit and the bankrupt

Social Security system were all due to the wicked Osama, huh? Like with a

magic wand, the deficit is going to disappear and the unemployed will all

find jobs.

Though it has nothing to do with the subject, except to signal the level

of competence of the security services in Anglo-Saxon countries, a

headless corpse was fished out of an English river recently. The press

gathered and asked the senior police officer about more details. Sorry, he

replied, he could not confirm the person was dead until he had been

examined by a doctor. Just shows that you do not nned a brain after all.

FREEDOM OF EXPRESSION Though it was unplanned, I am proud that the day

of my birthday was chosen as the yearly celebration of International Press

Freedom Day. I shall continue to live up to the honour whenever I feel

like it, and that despite of the fact that me and my family have been

under undescribable pressure to make our lives hell. It takes more than

that to stop Armenians, but if something happens to me, do suspect foul

play.