By Alfredo Thal

("Estrategia", December 23, 1996).

With the next presidential elections less than three years away, it seems appropriate to reflect on the equality of opportunity that must exist in a true democracy.

The [Chilean] Constitution says that citizens must elect policymakers in a secret and informed vote. The secrecy of the vote is sufficiently guaranteed in Chile. But the informed vote was not such in the last presidential election, something for which the mass media are mainly responsible.

The results that the attached charts show are surprising. Nobody would have thought that José Piñera, the independent candidate who run without the support of any political party, won some electoral precincts, much less that he won four adjacent precincts (among many others, having obtained 27.5 percent of the male vote in Vitacura). But there is another surprise, and that is the huge variance in the results in certain municipalities  (see some revealing results below).

In his campaign, José Piñera proposed to retake the modernization road in Chile, to private the remainingl state-owned enterprises, and to invest strongly in human capital, especially through educational and healthcare system reforms. Those reforms are necessary in Chile to eliminate poverty and achieve equality of opportunity.

His proposal for educational reform pointed in the direction of providing incentives to the private sector so that it would become the main provider of education, with the state subsidizing demand by giving school vouchers to those families that needed them. Those vouchers would have increased investment in education and improved its quality.

In healthcare, Piñera proposed to extend the ISAPRES system to all Chileans, with the state subsidizing demand by providing healthcare vouchers. Undoubtedly, healthcare for the poorest Chileans would have improved and we would not be lamenting the crisis in a public healthcare system that has collapsed, as we are today.

Why did the voters of Vitacura opt for that alternative, giving Piñera a first majority in many prescints, while he obtained a handful of votes in poor and far away Aysén? Aren’t the people of Aysén hit the hardest with the lack of education and healthcare? How can it be explained that a presidential candidate won the election in several urban districts, sometimes with more than 30 percent of the vote, while obtaining less than 2 percent in a rural municipality distant from the capital city of Santiago?

The answer seems obvious: Vitacura voters have access to various sources of information and became familiarized with the proposals and ideas of José Piñera, while the voters of Aysén were unable to do so. Far from the capital, their main—and, sometimes, their only-—source of information was the TV networks.

It is well known that those networks, as well as the national newspapers, decided from the get-go that the election was between two candidates, Eduardo Frei and Arturo Alessandri, granting them almost exclusive news coverage. The remaining four candidates were granted occasional coverage, always brief and never in depth.

Especially worrisome was the fact that the only nationally televised and broadcast presidential debate excluded four of the six candidates. This was especially harmful to Piñera, who, lacking a territorial base, was running on the strength of his ideas and proposals.

It is evident that the national media did not fulfil their obligation to inform the electorate about all the proposals, thus making the election fail the information test. Why did they act the way they did? Will there be equality of opportunity in future elections? Those are questions that must be asked.

However, one should not and cannot infer from the previous example that, with equality of access to the national media, the winner of the 1993 presidential election would have been someone else. What can be inferred is that the election results would have been much different, which in turn would have had a strong influence in the current situation of the country.

Among other relevant consequences, a different outcome would have forced the executive and the legislature to bring to the forefront of the national agenda true educational reform, healthcare reform, and the crisis in public safety. Perhaps the country would be moving toward the resolution of its unsolved problems rather than being in a discouraging and worrisome state of inaction.

As the saying goes, "We'd be marching to the beat of a different drummer."

Source: Chilean Ministry of Interior.