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Economic Stagnation and the Emergence of the Political Ideology of Chilean Underdevelopment
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 July 2011
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The recent presidential election in Chile and the subsequent installation of Salvador Allende as “The first popularly elected Marxist president in the Western Hemisphere” have once again brought that isolated republic to the attention of the academic community, journalistic commentators, and the public at large. This is not the first time that Chile has experienced such world-wide interest in its domestic political affairs: the emergence of the so-called “Socialist Republic” in 1932, the Popular Front experience of 1938–41, and the 1964 election of the Christian Democrat Eduardo Frei marked other occasions when interest in Latin American politics has shifted to Chile. But perhaps never before has so much interest been lavished on tlie country as following the events of September, 1970.
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References
1 U.S. Agency for International Development (AID), Economic Data Book: Latin America, 1968 (Washington, D.C. 1968), 8.Google Scholar
2 All growth data come from Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA), Economic Survey of Latin America, 1969, Part One, mimeo version (Santiago 1970), 7.Google Scholar
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11 Ibid., 154.
12 Ibid., 39.
13 Ibid., 115.
14 Ibid., 154.
15 Ibid., 150 (urban areas), 139 (rural areas).
16 Such urban-rural differences have been interpreted by means of a coherent political ideology. Herein may reside the principal difference between Chile and many other Latin American countries, where urban-rural differences along the dimensions we have presented are of course also notorious.
17 It is important to note that the Chileans have responded more to the absolute as opposed to the comparative or relative nature of their economic and social condition. What appears increasingly salient is Chilean awareness of the untenable nature of the country's economic and social development in absolute terms, regardless, for example, of the fact that Chile might rate higher man Bolivia, Ecuador, Paraguay, or Peru on almost all measures of such development.
18 It is manifestly impossible to summarize here all the salient relationships in Chilean “structuralist” theorizing or to cite all the important references. For a discussion of structuralism as it has been applied to the effort to resolve the problem of inflation in Chile, see Hirschman, Albert O., Journeys Toward Progress (New York 1963), 212ff.Google Scholar Also see the papers by Campos, Roberto Oliveira, Felix, David, and Grunwald, Joseph in Hirschman, ed., Latin American Issues (New York 1961).Google Scholar Prominently associated with the structuralist viewpoint are the Chilean economists Aníbal Pinto and Osvaldo Sunkel. See Pinto (fn. 9), 125ff., and Sunkel, , “La inflación chilena; un enfoque heterodoxo,” El Trimestre Económico, XXV (October-December 1958), 570–99.Google Scholar
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35 Although not stated there precisely in “dependency” terms or in the form of testable hypotheses, many of these suggestions stem from Douglas A. Chalmers, “Developing on the Periphery: External Factors in Latin American Politics,” in Rosenau (fn. 33), 67–93.
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47 Hart (fn. 34).
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50 Again we exclude the peasantry from this generalization.
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