Valeska Hesse, director of the Latin America office of the Friedrich Ebert Foundation (FES), a political think tank pointed out that much like Argentine President Mauricio Macri, Ecuador's leader, Lenin Moreno, was forced to announce austerity measures — now canceled — because of debt negotiations with the International Monetary Fund.
"For
more than 50 years, the IMF has always trumpeted the same recipe,
namely economic liberalization and cuts to public spending," she
said.
"Chile
is the most neoliberal country in the world. Every aspect of public
life there has been privatized: pensions, health care, education,"
said Hesse. Yet many Chileans have trouble making ends meet, and that
has been an important factor in protests there. "The average
middle-class citizen there earns about €700 ($778) a month, but
cost of living prices are comparable to Berlin."
Even
if Chile isn't the poorest region in the world, its inequality is the
world's most extreme. In Chile 1% of the country's population owns
26.5% of its wealth. According to the World Bank's GINI index, which
tracks global wealth inequality only two countries outside of Latin
America — South Africa and Rwanda — were ranked among the world's
10 most economically unequal. Chile was ranked seventh.
Michael
Alvarez of the Heinrich Böll Foundation, and who served as the think
tank's director in Santiago de Chile for several years told DW that
after much social progress in the early 2000s, many Latin American
countries are now tightening their belts. "Deficits are growing
in Ecuador, Argentina and other countries across the region, and
governments are not countering that with a systematic overhaul of
their tax systems and tax reforms...Compared with the last century,
people in Latin America are no longer willing to accept social
inequality."
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