The Reason for Chile’s Downward Spiral

But in 2019, South America’s erstwhile “tiger” descended into chaos. To many outside observers, the reasons protesters gave for throwing out the country’s constitution made little sense. They cited wealth inequality, even though Chile wasn’t particularly unequal compared with its neighbors. They cited poor education and healthcare, yet Chile had among the best of both in South America. They named the lingering legacy of Pinochet, though his constitution had for decades undergirded the continent’s most stable, politically diverse democracy.

The protesters’ discontent makes more sense, however, in light of a change in Chilean leaders’ rhetoric that started about 15 years ago. That was when, after decades of celebrating Chile’s economic miracle on its own terms, leaders on both left and right began forecasting Chile’s imminent arrival among the world’s leading industrial democracies.

Andrés Velasco,

finance minister under Socialist President

Michelle Bachelet,

predicted in 2009 that by 2020 Chile would “reach the per capita income levels of a developed country.” Four years later,

Cristián Larroulet,

top adviser to Ms. Bachelet’s conservative successor,

Sebastián Piñera,

wrote that Chile “will probably become the first fully developed country in Latin America” by “the end of this decade.” Mr. Piñera himself, at the start of his second term in 2018, reiterated his goal “to transform Chile into a developed country” by 2025.

Even if these projections seem like pipe dreams now, they weren’t received as such at the time.

Marcelo Giugale,

the World Bank’s director for poverty reduction in Latin America, agreed with Mr. Velasco’s 2008 pronouncement that Chile was “well on its way to become a developed country.” In 2018 the International Monetary Fund’s Western Hemisphere director,

Alejandro Werner,

opined that Mr. Piñera’s prediction was “not exaggerated.” International organizations duly ratified Chile’s ascendancy. In 2010 Chile was the first South American country invited to join the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development—an exclusive group of the world’s leading industrial nations.

It is hardly surprising that Chile’s slide into social turmoil began only after the country entered the OECD. By 2018, when Mr. Piñera was inaugurated for his second term, Chile’s per capita income was the highest in South America but the fourth-lowest of 38 OECD countries. Measured by the Gini index, only four South American countries had less social inequality than Chile, but 34 OECD countries did. On social services, the story was similar. According to Pisa, a leading international measure of education quality, Chile had the highest-performing education system of any surveyed nation in Latin America, but one of the worst in the OECD.

The contrast between expectations and reality made the country a powder keg. “Chileans are anxious. They have been hearing for decades that they are close to becoming a First World country, and they want to have First World lives. If Mr. Piñera doesn’t deliver, he could face street protests that derail his economic plans,” wrote Miami Herald columnist

Andrés Oppenheimer

in 2018. As it turned out, they derailed far more than Mr. Piñera’s plans. By October 2019, Chile’s major cities were in flames. While this new protest movement was ostensibly triggered by a subway fare hike in Santiago, its aims were far-reaching, targeting the legitimacy of the government itself.

“This and previous regimes sold a postcard of a country that does not exist,” one protest leader told the Los Angeles Times. The government had sought “to show that we live in a just and balanced country, but that’s not real.” The protests weren’t over the 30-peso subway fare hike, she went on, but “30 years of indifference and poverty.” Now, Chile and the constitutional government that helped it leapfrog its genuinely impoverished neighbors are in shambles.

We don’t know how Chile’s saga ends, but one lesson for world leaders is already clear: Be careful what stories you tell your citizens about themselves. They may believe you.

Mr. Masko is a freelance writer based in Boston.