Under the murderous rule of right-wing military dictator Augusto Pinochet, Milton Friedman and his "Chicago Boys" setup shop in an attempt to implement their economic and political ideas in a country whose right-wing dictatorship liked what they had to say.
This, apparently, is one of the legacies of the "Chilean Miracle".
If you read the wikipedia entry on "Chilean Miracle" (what the 'Chicago Boys' morons called the outcome of their neoliberal bonanza) it says, totally neutrally and non-tendentiously of course, that Chile has a greater degree of "economic freedom" than other Latin American countries. I suppose that is what commodified water is for mining copanies, more 'economically free'. Meanwhile the villages people live in wither and dry up because they don't have the buying power to purchase the same kind of 'freedom' as big mining companies.
I feel like their are some good anti-capitalist metaphors here, although I'll leave it to others more eloquent than I to explicate and spin them out. There's something to the life-sustaining properties of water, and the image of business elites fighting over resources (while poluting them in the process) all while the majority of people see their lives drying up before their eyes.
Saturday, March 14, 2009
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