This sounds like a character the world can do without:

Paul Schaefer, a former Nazi corporal and founder of a cult-like community in Chile, has died in prison aged 88. He was in jail serving a 20-year sentence for sexually abusing children at the Colonia Dignidad, some during Chile’s military dictatorship. The former Baptist preacher established the colony in southern Chile in 1961, after fleeing Germany to escape separate child abuse charges.

He had close ties to Chile’s elite during Gen Augusto Pinochet’s rule. Schaefer denied allowing Chile’s secret police to use the enclave as a centre for torturing left-wing dissidents in the 1970s and 1980s.

It seems like you’re always learning something new and discreditable about Pinochet’s regime.

Jonathan Franklin and Jeffrey Smith report from Santiago:

While the death toll rose steadily to more than 700, according to a midday estimate, it remained a small fraction of the tally from a far less powerful earthquake last month in Haiti that claimed at least 220,000 lives. That temblor was more shallow and much closer to a large population center, the Haitian capital, Port-au-Prince. But the deaths there were mostly because of widespread building collapses, which Chilean cities did not experience.

Earthquake scientists, building engineers and political scientists in Chile and the United States agreed that even though half a million homes were heavily damaged during more than 120 seconds of shaking, the fact that so many Chileans survived was a testament to the nation’s enactment and enforcement of stringent building codes.

You often see people from the political right promoting the view that even when the case for public sector intervention is sound in the abstract, it nonetheless shouldn’t be done because it’s impossible to make public institutions work well (see Hirschman’s The Rhetoric of Reaction: Perversity, Futility, Jeopardy) but the fact of the matter is that quality of performance varies a great deal and the variation is extremely important. Effective and well-enforced building codes in an earthquake zone can save many lives, and the same is true across an extremely wide swathe of public activities.

Santiago, Chile (cc photo by radzfoto)

As I’ve had occasion to briefly note in the past, the renaissance of Chile over the past 20 years (1990 is both a conveniently round number and also marks the end of the Pinochet dictatorship) is one of recent history’s great success stories. Right now, the country is embarking on an important new step in its journey forward as for the first time since the end of dictatorship, the center-right coalition has won a presidential election. Optimistically, this sets the stage for Chile to become a genuinely “normal” democracy in which the center-left peacefully hands power to the center-right which governs for a time and then peacefully hands power back to its opponents.

On the other hand, as this excellent Monkey Cage post by Chile experts observes there are also significant risks:

If Piñera, while governing, is able to build a centrist front, further renovation (i.e. democratization) of the center-right is possible. This is not easy, however, given the congressional strength of the UDI, and its weight within the Alianza. At the same time, the Concertación’s survival, out of presidential office, is endangered and all four parties, which moved away from civil society while been in charge of running the state, are in a vulnerable situation. If the centrist and more pragmatic parties in that coalition (i.e. PRSD and/or the PDC) concede to Piñera and support his policy proposals in congress, the pacts, as we knew them, will be in disarray. That would nonetheless open room for a more radical renovation of center-left parties in the future.

The way Chilean politics works is that it’s organized around two main pacts, each of which contains multiple political parties. The right-wing Alianza contains the genuinely democratic National Renewal party to which the new president belongs. But it’s partner, the Independent Democratic Union, is very much a Pinochet-descended party and controls the largest bloc of seats in congress. The left-of-center Concertación, meanwhile, is very much a big tent of former opposition movements and not necessarily viable over the long-haul as an alliance.

All I really know about contemporary Chile is that President Michele Bachelet has an amazing life story and is very popular. So for all I know, The Washington Post’s article on Chile’s emergence as a developed country is riddled with errors. But like everyone else, I enjoy hearing my prejudices confirmed so I liked this:

Today, Pinochet-era reforms such as a policy of privatizations and low import tariffs remain in place.

Chile’s openness to trade is combined with generous social spending. In recent years, Chile has accelerated spending on education and day care. Forty percent of youths now go on to universities or other institutions beyond high school, authorities say, and 70 percent of those are the first in their families to do so.

I don’t in any sense endorse going through a period of brutal military dictatorship. That said, this description of Chile’s post-Pinochet trajectory reflects my preferred version of left politics—an emphasis on bringing justice and tolerability to a free market regime through taxes on social welfare spending, rather than an effort to directly push market outcomes in a more congenial direction through regulation. Places like Denmark, with high taxes and open economies, are probably the best model of this. In the United States, politicians will go to almost any length to minimize the volume of formal taxes, and consequently we rely much more heavily on regulation (see, e.g., the idea of “mandates” on either individuals, employers, or both in health care) and I think we do so to our detriment.