A Nation of Enemies
Why I can't stop thinking about Chile
The Story
Whenever I travel, I bring along two or three books about where I’m going, so I have something to read and a little window into the place and its people. I might have a novel by a famous author or a story that takes place where I’m going, another book about arts and culture, and one about recent history, politics, and society.
In 2002, my wife and I decided to spend three weeks over the holidays in Chile, so we signed up for a self-guided “adventure tourism” trip. There were fourteen of us—all strangers from the US, Mexico, the UK, and Australia—and we met in a hotel lobby in the capital city of Santiago. Together, over the next two weeks, we made our way south, all the way to Patagonia and then Punta Arenas, on the Strait of Magellan, almost 2,000 miles from Santiago, where we saw penguins on New Year’s Eve. We traveled by bus, plane, and ferry. We spent a lot of time together, and with a lot of Chileans, on transit, in bars, cafes, and restaurants, hiking on a volcanic mountain near Puerto Montt, spent Christmas Eve dancing on a ferry that was rocking in stormy Pacific seas on Christmas Eve, and ringing in the new year in a bar in Punta Arenas (after visiting the penguins). For this trip, I brought along Chilean poet Pablo Neruda’s Memoirs and another book called A Nation of Enemies: Chile Under Pinochet. In addition to learning a little something and getting into the mood of a place, traveling with books is also a nice way to meet strangers, and that happened in Chile. But while the Neruda book generated smiles, nods, and some conversations with strangers, the Pinochet book caused different reactions.
One day on the ferry, while I was reading the Pinochet book, a man with a mustache approached me and asked, with a blank face, what my book was about and why I was reading it. It wasn’t exactly a warning, but he seemed to be suggesting that maybe it wasn’t a good idea to be reading that book in public. And that is when it dawned on me. The 1973 coup was history for me—something I saw flash by on the TV news as a kid, but Pinochet had only stepped down as president in 1990, and he continued to serve as Commander-in-Chief of the Chilean Army until 1998, only four years before my trip to Chile. Chile had been increasingly divided before the coup, and it became even more so in the years after. In 2002, it was all recent enough that many people were still alive who had lived through the coup and Pinochet’s reign, and whose memories were not so distant. While all those people on that ferry just looked like Chileans to me, in fact, there were two distinct groups—those who supported and benefited from Pinochet’s power grab, and those who suffered under the abuses of his regime and lost ground economically and socially after he replaced a social democracy with a military dictatorship.
The History
Chile’s 1925 constitution created a governance structure that included a president, a powerful congress, and a robust legislative process that “ensured political accommodation and compromise among contending parties and interests.” This strong constitution, combined with “a longstanding emphasis in Chilean politics on the expansion of the government’s socioeconomic role in providing for its citizens,” led to increased political inclusion and living standards while preserving social harmony. This system ensured political and social stability until the 1960’s, when the growing urban-rural-divide increased tension between those who wanted the state to spend more on people and those who wanted to limit spending and taxes.1
Those who wanted the state to play a larger role in equalizing the income and wealth gaps in Chile were the winners in 1970, when Salvatore Allende was elected president. Allende was a socialist—although he was called a Marxist by others—promoted a policy called “The Chilean Path to Socialism,” which included nationalizing major industries, expanding educational opportunities, improving living standards, and land reform in rural areas. But while popular with the working urban classes, these policies were deeply unpopular with the urban wealthy and rural landowners, and Allende’s brief tenure was characterized by constant social unrest and increasing tension with the opposition-controlled National Congress of Chile.2
Allende led Chile’s democratically elected socialist government for just three years, from 1970 until September 11, 1973, when he was overthrown in a coup d’état backed by many in the National Congress and led by a military Junta. The Chilean armed forces bombed the Palacio de La Moneda, the seat of the president, but Allende refused to leave and instead made a farewell speech and took his own life. Following the coup, the leader of the Chilean army, General Augusto Pinochet, seized power and led as ruler of a military dictatorship for seventeen years, until 1990. Pinochet and his regime left over 3,000 people dead or missing, tortured tens of thousands of prisoners, drove an estimated 200,000 Chileans into exile, and eliminated political parties, unions, and the free press, ending a half-century of Latin America’s most successful and stable democracy. Historian Silvia Borzutzky summarized the tensions and political and economic forces that led to the coup:
“Allende’s road was a dangerous road because its policies threatened the interests of the political and economic elite, as well as the interests of foreign capital and of the United States”3
Borzutzky’s quote points to an important side story to the Chilean coup, which was that it was also backed by the Nixon Administration and the U.S. government, through the CIA. (Will we ever stop meddling in Latin America?) After Pinochet assumed the presidency, the country’s economic future was planned by “the Chicago Boys”—a Latin-American cohort of University of Chicago economists who were acolytes of Milton Friedman and proponents of free market policies, adding a second US influence. What became known as “The Chilean Project” soon began to show results, reversing 50 years of gains for the lower and urban classes.
The Theory
The Gini index is a measure of income or wealth disparity, expressed as a percentage, with 0% representing perfect equality, and 100% representing the condition where a single individual earns all the income or holds all the wealth in a population. (The Gini coefficient is the same as the Gini index, only expressed as a value between 0.0 and 1.0.) The higher the number, the higher the level of inequality, and according to the World Bank, high income inequality—a Gini index greater than 40%—is often associated with countries that face increased risks of social unrest, while lower numbers correlate to countries with stronger social safety nets, progressive taxation, and more equitable wealth distribution. At 47%, Chile’s Gini index was already high in 1973, the year of the coup, but it quickly rose to 52% within five years and as high as 57% in 1990, the year Pinochet left office, when it was the highest in Latin America. Following the end of military rule, Chile returned to a democratically elected government in 1990, and economic reforms since then have pushed Chile’s Gini index back down to 43%. The transition away from military dictatorship has not been smooth, however, as Chile was rated a “flawed democracy” in The Economist’s “2024 Democracy Index.” (The United States received the same rating—flawed democracy—and occupied the spot just one place above Chile.)4 Borzuztky summarizes the impact on the country of Pinochet’s regime and the Chicago Boys’ Chilean Project:
“In brief, Chile’s large historical inequalities, briefly reversed by the Frei and Allende policies, increased dramatically during the dictatorship due to the dismantling of social policies, the drastic reduction of state regulations, and the increased power of the private sector, and specifically of a handful of economic groups. The new labor laws and the brutal repression dismembered the union movement and their representatives in congress and contributed also to increasing inequality.”5
Why should we care about Chile?
The Chicago Boys and their “Chilean Project” served as the model for Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, who both went on to implement similar neoliberal policies in the United States and the United Kingdom in the 1980s. As in Chile, free-market reforms in the US and the UK have dramatically increased income and wealth inequality, as demonstrated by changes in the Gini index for each country. In the US, the Gini index for income hovered around 35% during the 1960s and 1970s and by 1980 was at its lowest point in decades at 34.7%, the year Ronald Reagan was elected. The Reagan administration’s implementation of neoliberal policies caused the Gini index to rise, reaching 38% by the end of Reagan’s term in 1988, and a high of 42% in 2019, where it remained in 2023, after dipping briefly during COVID. Similarly, in the UK, the Gini index stood at 27% in the late 1970s, but following the election of Thatcher in 1979, it increased steadily to 36% by the time she left office in 1990 and peaked at 39% before declining slowly to a low of 32% in 2021. Economists conclude that in both the US and the UK, the shift to greater inequality was permanent and has remained stable since.6
But while income inequality has grown in the US, wealth inequality has grown even more, with Gini indexes of 83% for wealth vs. 61% for income, according to a survey by the Centre for Economic Policy.7 In the first quarter of 2024, the top 1% of households held 30.5% of the country’s wealth, while the bottom 50% held 2.5%, reflecting the country’s increasingly “K-shaped economy.” Finally, the US has a much higher Gini index than any other developed country, with yet another analysis showing that the Gini index for income in the US was 42% (or 61%, above), as compared to 32% in France and 29% in Denmark.8
The Lesson
I am one of those naive people who, before 2016, thought that while we might have our differences, most of us, 340 million Americans, saw ourselves as part of one big project, only to learn that we were massively divided. The reason I’m sharing my Chile story is that I am concerned that no matter what happens after the Trump administration and “MAGA” inevitably become history, like those Chileans I met, for years to come, we are all still going to be together, looking at each other, and wondering, “friend or foe?” Worse, even if things calm down and we do become a little more unified as a nation, it could take a generation or two for that living memory of “us and them” to pass into history. More recently, revelations in the Epstein Files continue to illuminate how a small transnational clique of billionaires, government leaders, and other elites continues to shape policy, economics, and the justice system in the US to their own advantage, while seeming to remain above the law. And having just experienced this winter’s ICE invasion in Minneapolis, it is no longer possible to talk about “social unrest,” “political violence,” and “state terror” as hypotheticals. Indeed, if Trump, MAGA, and those transnational elites continue to succeed in their efforts to dismantle democracy, we are sure to see a rapidly rising Gini index, increasing income and wealth disparities, and yes, more political violence in what has become our own “nation of enemies.”
“The past is never dead. It’s not even past.”
- Spoken by Gavin Stevens in William Faulkner’s 1951 novel Requiem for a Nun.
“What’s being set forth, I think, is that only our side deserves to be treated with dignity, and the other side is horrible, and evil, and subhuman. That’s what’s going on, which is a disgrace. Because for Jesus, there’s no us and them. There’s just us. And all of us deserve to be treated with dignity.”
- The Reverend James Martin
Borzutzky, Silvia, “Chile’s Political Democracy and Economic Inequality,” in Oxford Research Encyclopedias, published online April 30, 2020. https://doi-org.ezp2.lib.umn.edu/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.1692; Wikipedia for some basic facts.
Borzutsky, 2020; Wikipedia.
Borzutzky, Silvia (2002). Vital connections: Politics, social security and inequality in Chile. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, page 153.
Democracy Index 2024: What’s Wrong with Representative Democracy? Economist Intelligence Unit. https://www.eiu.com/n/campaigns/democracy-index-2024/
Borzutsky, 2020.
Wikipedia and various other sources.
Kuhn, Moritz and José-Víctor Ríos-Rull, “US wealth inequality in 2022: A modest reversal at the top, persistent challenges below,” in Centre for Economic Policy Research, 23 June 2025. https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/us-wealth-inequality-2022-modest-reversal-top-persistent-challenges-below
Gini Index: FRED: Federal Reserve of St. Louis. FRED: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/; Gini Index, World Bank. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SI.POV.GINI?locations=US