Friendly Observer
By Arthur Keefe
Sojourn in Chile
My
son has lived in Chile for over 12 years, with his Chilean wife and three
children, and I have been fortunate to be able to visit him every other
year. I only stay for a month at a time,
so I would not call myself an expert, but I do consider I am familiar enough with the country to offer some
reflections and comparisons.
The
history of Chile has uncanny parallels to here.
It was first colonized by the Spanish, who drove one of the largest
groups, the MAPUCHE, to the South, and exterminated many of the native
population. They introduced Spanish as
the language, which is the national language today, in its clipped South
American form. They imposed Catholicism
which although still practiced is increasingly in name only in a growing
secular society.
Chile and
other S.A countries liberated themselves a century before the Philippines, and
as a result has a more independent and less colonial culture. The leaders of the liberated movement had a
mix of Spanish, English, and Indian ancestors.
After the Spanish era, settlers from England came largely to mine potash
and in the North, Copper, and German settlers developed European style farming
in the cooler South. In more recent
time, the USA has been the dominant investor, but without much significant
settlement. Chile has a small population
of only 16 people, over one third of whom, live in Metropolitan Santiago. Despite the absence of much obvious
destitution (there are only few squatter area).
Chile is a very unequal society, a large and wealthy middle class live
alongside a fairly poor, much larger, working class. People work long hours for low pay, and few
Chilean can afford to travel abroad, except by bus to neighboring Argentina,
across the high Andes Mountains - and very
spectacular are the snow topped volcanoes.
Chile is
an extremely long and narrow country, sitting between the Andes and the sea in
the North and between the plains of Patagonia (shared with Argentina), and mass
of small islands in the South meet Antarctica, with glaciers and tumultuous
seas.
It is over
4000 km in length but only 175 km wide.
This given enormous variation, and allow for rich agriculture in the
Central area, with fertile land led by raging mountain rivers. Chile exports wine and fruit all over the
world and rivals copper as the mainstay
of the economy.
