This is the Kato Daily Podcast for Friday, January 7th, 2022.

I'm Caleb Brown.

The incoming leftist president of Chile is another

Kato's Ian Vasquez describes how Chile got here

and offers some hope for reversing the trend.

The election of Gabriel Boric is part of a wave of leftism that has come

back to Latin America in the last several years, but it is especially worrisome in the case of

Chile. After all, Chile was without any successful

country in the region and it's really one of the great

development success stories of all times by any measure and yet Chile decided after several decades of

success to elect not just a leftist president but a far leftist president, somebody who has been allied with the Communist

party, which will now be part of the government that he forms, somebody who has for many years praised the far left

regimes in Latin America from Venezuela to Cuba and when he gave his acceptance speech he vowed as he did throughout his campaign

and throughout his entire political career to bury the neoliberal model of Chile, that is the free market policies that have led

to that success.

And when you look at Chile, you see that by virtually any measure it far surpasses most developing countries.

After all, since the 1970s, when these far-reaching reforms began, Chile has quadrupled its income per capita.

Its measures of human development or indicators of well-being far surpass almost any other

Latin American countries usually listed at the top. It's at the top of the human development

index by the United Nations. It is the country with the greatest personal freedoms in

Latin America. It's one of the freest countries in the world and just looking at infant mortality rates and so on access to

to safe water virtually any indicator it far surpasses Latin America. It became during this period of time a

...