Sometimes these points are made explicit. Consider Guzman's thoughts. A democracy can only be stable when in popular elections . . . In the great democracies of the world, the high levels of electoral abstention do not indicate, as many erroneously interpret them, a supposed distancing of the people from the reigning system. Noninvolvement by the bulk of the population is in fact a healthy development.
Chile is held up as the greatest neoliberal success story in Latin America, perhaps even the world.
And while there has been strong overall economic growth over the past decade, Chile has also seen a widening of economic inequality such that it ranks seventh worst in a World Bank study of economic stratification in sixty-five nations. Prior to the I973 coup, Chile was legendary for the intense politicization of its population, reflected by voter turnouts as high as 95 percent of the adult population. One U.S. researcher found in I970 that Chilean teenagers were among the three least alienated, most optimistic groups of youth on earth. In the I990s Chile is a very different nation. In the most recent elections 4I percent of the population either did not vote, defaced their ballots, or left them blank.