By Carolyn Baker -- World News Trust
March 5, 2007 -- Below
the equator, it is now autumn, the end of summer and the beginning of
winter. During the month of February, the nation of Chile virtually
shuts down, and like the month of August in the United States,
government officials take a four-week vacation.
On
Feb. 3, a tragic explosion occurred in a federal government building
in Valparaiso, Chile, triggered by a gas leak. More lives might have
been lost, but the inferno occurred on a Saturday -- the very Saturday
that President Michelle Bachelet was en route to her secluded summer
cabin in the nation’s Lakes Region, intending to spend a month away
from media and La Moneda, the presidential palace, relaxing on the
beach with her mother and two daughters. No sooner had Bachelet arrived
at her Caburga cabin, than she was informed of the tragedy and
immediately boarded a helicopter bound for Valparaiso.
After
touring the disaster area, assessing the damage, and ordering a
generous aid package for families affected by the explosion, she
returned to Caburga, but the extent to which she was able to free
herself from presidential tasks for the duration of the month of
February is unclear since at the time of her departure, the capital
city of Santiago was embroiled in a mass-transit crisis as a result of
Bachelet’s implementation of a new Transantiago bus system designed to
alleviate congestion and greenhouse gasses. Throughout her vacation she
was briefed daily on the situation by her Minister of the Interior, but
as a result of the transit chaos, Bachelet returned a few days early
from her vacation, displaying an impressive tan -- the only indication
that she might have actually spent a few hours relaxing on a luscious
Caburga beach. Bachelet returned from her vacation early, not only to
quell the criticisms of her opposition, but to reassure her people that
she was in charge and that the Transantiago system would work because
she was going to make sure it would.
On
Friday, March 1, Bachelet re-visited to Valparaiso to spend time with
the 45 families impacted by the February 3 tragedy. Some of the aid
measures to those families include:
-Emergency funding to cover firefighting and rescue efforts
-800 million pesos to help businesses damaged by the explosion
-People
affected received priority attention from the Treasury, the Internal
Revenue Service and the national healthcare service (FONASA).
-37 people who lost their jobs will receive emergency jobs for three months until they can find definitive jobs.
-45 families rendered homeless received subsidies to buy homes.
-250
million pesos will be spent on restoring Serrano Street, the area most
damaged by the explosion. Public plazas and spaces will be restored as
well.
Bachelet
seems to be at her very best when she is mingling with the Chilean
people about whom she cares deeply, regularly loses sleep, and
incessantly worries will not have enough to eat, will not be gainfully
employed, adequately educated, receive sufficient health care, and have
their needs met as senior citizens. When the subject of “life” comes up
in interviews with Bachelet, she is quick to add “not just life but
quality of life”, and she holds an unrelenting commitment to her
nation’s citizens’ transcendence from poverty to a magnificent quality
of life, and the chaos resulting from the new transit system,
Bachelet's policies are engendering steady economic growth for Chile.
As I watched the video and photos
of the Chilean president’s visit to Valparaiso, my memory flashed to
Aug. 29, 2005, and the days and weeks following Katrina when the
United States president who has spent more time on vacation than any
other in the nation’s history, even after being informed of the worst
natural disaster the United States has ever experienced, functioned as
if he were the only human being on planet earth. For him, the carnage
of New Orleans and Mississippi was just so much water over the levy, or
so it seemed as he boarded Air Force One on Friday, March 1, departing
the Big Easy with a cold wave of the hand and a hollow message that
“the federal government still knows you exist.”
PRESIDENT BUSH LEAVING NEW ORLEANS, MARCH 1, 2007
Recently, I heard someone state that if you want to know what the U.S. government thinks of its citizens, look at Katrina. Listen to Newt Gingrich's recent speech
delcaring that Katrina victims perished because they were "too
uneducated and too unprepared" to get out of the way. From the moment
the Bush administration was selected by the Supreme Court as “winner”
of the 2000 election, it has made war on its own citizens, as any
democratic republic that has devolved into empire must do.
Michelle
Bachelet and her mother were taken as political prisoners by the
Augusto Pinochet regime in 1973 and were tortured in prison, later
fleeing to Eastern Europe. Her father, a Chilean air force general died
in prison of a heart attack. All of this, of course, as George Herbert
Walker Bush was National Chairman of the Republican Party and on his
way to becoming Director of Central Intelligence, the agency that
financed and facilitated the Pinochet dictatorship.
Next
month, Junior will visit a number of Latin American countries,
including Chile and Venezuela. For all the axes that President Bachelet
could have to grind with the Bush family and U.S. policies past and
present, she wishes to go down in the history of her country and the
world as the great reconciler—known not only as the physician that she
is, but a political healer who can somehow apply the socio-political
sutures and salve that will bind the wounds of her nation, her region,
and her hemisphere. Indeed, Bachelet intends to visit Cuba sometime
this year, and if she does, she will be the first Chilean president to
do so in 33 years. Because of her adamant socialist stance, she faces
powerful opposition from her nation’s right-wing Pinochet legacy and
so-called leftists who are unwilling to take the country where she is
determined to lead it.
Michelle
Bachelet has sometimes been called “Madre de Chile” or Mother of
Chile”, and some Hillary supporters may argue that she is living proof
that women govern more humanely; however, a closer look at history may
well reveal as many “good fathers” in government as “good mothers”. As
for a Hillary-Michelle comparison, the similarities between Clinton and
Bachelet begin and end with gender. She neither has been nor is a
globalist or a supporter of the Iraq War and is not a member of the
ruling elite in her country or elsewhere. Her politics and perspective,
far to the left of Hillary’s, have proven themselves devoid of
duplicity, and with a character shaped by horrific violation of own and
her nation’s human rights and a Chilean constitution that limits a
presidential term to four years only, Michelle Bachelet has a singular
agenda about which she is extraordinarily passionate: to transform the
quality of life of her beloved fellow Chilenos.
Hugo
Chavez has already appealed to Latin America to protest Bush’s upcoming
visit. Bachelet, whose style is remarkably different, is not likely to
do so openly, but at the same time, I’m betting that the reception of
the emperor in La Moneda Palace in Santiago will not be replete with
warm fuzzies. Already, mainstream media is reporting that Bush’s woes will follow him to Latin America.
As for his visit to that long, narrow country on South America’s
Pacific coast, Bush may discover that Chile is one of the “chilliest”
places on earth.
In the coming weeks, Speaking Truth To Power will be reporting on Bush’s visit to Latin America and the reactions of its leaders and citizens.