blog 8

Chile 2010: bicentennial year

In this year, 2010, our country Chile, celebrates 200 year of independence. This celebration was commemorated the past September 18°, in honor to the first cabinet meeting. This is a good moment to reflect about these two hundred years of history.
What have we done in these two hundred years? Has had Chile a big progress as a country? Everybody feels the same about it?

I have to say that our country has progressed a lot in these last years. Chile has become in one of the most influential countries of Latin America. Our economic development has increased; we have a lot of trade agreements with important countries from other continents, which help us to expand our economic horizon. Chile has a lot of income in different areas, like mining industry (cooper), export fruits and wine, and so on. The per capita income this year is around US$14.299, which means that every Chilean person should earn about $6.892.118. But is that real? Are we at least near of this figure? It sounds almost like a bad joke, how can be possible that with this per capita income we have a minimum salary of $172.000 that is equivalent to $2.064.000 a year?

This is the point where our country hadn’t work enough or efficiently. Here are a lot of differences of social classes, I know that it would be an utopia that everybody earns the same salary, but I think is necessary to distribute the resources in an equitable way.
Chile has so bad distributed the resources that we can compare us with Africa in this point. Our county has developed a lot in the last time, but people don’t feel it in their everyday. The most of the money is concentrated in a little group of people, powerful people; while the majority of our population belongs to the middle class and has to satisfy with a salary of 300.000 as average, because in many cases it is lower.

As you can see, Chile has progressed a lot in these years, but it has to be not only for a few people. The big task of the current and future presidents is to help people that really need it, because until the moment only the powerful people have filled their pockets of money.