A view of the Andes mountains in Santiago. Photo by Samuel Silva
“In Brazil, Turkey and Chile, Protests Follow Economic Success,” is the title of an op ed piece by Moises Naim in Bloomberg Businessweek. Asking why thousands of citizens in three countries which have enjoyed strong economic growth in recent years are taking to the streets in mass protests, Naim suggests the answer may be found in a 1968 book by the Harvard political scientist Samuel Huntington, Political Order in Changing Societies.
He writes that “in societies experiencing rapid change, the public’s demand for public services grows at a faster clip than the government’s ability to satisfy it. His more general point is that institutions cannot develop at the pace required by the fast-growing expectations of a population recently empowered by prosperity, literacy, more information, and a newfound expectation—indeed hunger—to shape its own better future. In Huntington’s words, “The primary problem of politics is the lag in the development of political institutions behind social economic change.” http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-06-27/in-brazil-turkey-and-chile-protests-follow-economic-success
The New York Times travel section has a piece on Valparaiso, a port city once the main trading harbour for the Pacific but which declined after the opening of the Panama Canal and is now a UNESCO World Heritage site undergoing a renaissance of sorts: http://travel.nytimes.com/2013/06/30/travel/a-comeback-on-chiles-coast.html?ref=travel
The Washington Post has a blog piece on Chile’s primary elections, in which former president Michelle Bachelet had an easy win in the Nueva Mayoria coalition, a group that now includes Chile’s Communist Party: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/she-the-people/wp/2013/06/28/in-chiles-sunday-elections-the-question-is-who-will-finish-second/
Notes on the Americas 