On 11 March 2010 Sebastián Piñera took office as the first elected rightwing President of Chile since 1958 – albeit with fewer votes than any successful presidential candidate since 1990. His narrow victory brought to an end 20 years of government by an electoral Concertación of centre-left groupings, many of whose voters appear to have stayed at home. The Concertación itself followed 17 years of brutal military dictatorship by the late lamentable General Augusto Pinochet who, prompted by the US, overthrew the elected government of Salvador Allende and Popular Unity (an electoral grouping not entirely unlike the Concertación).
Paradoxically, Pinochet chose to retain a significant legacy from Popular Unity, in the form of the copper industry it had nationalized – the largest in the world, on which Chile still relies for much of its wealth and the Government for much of its revenue. But the Concertación, in its turn, retained largely intact a legacy from Pinochet, in the form of neoliberal free-market policies first laboratory-tested in Chile by acolytes of the US high priest of laissez-faire economics, Milton Friedman.
