Michael Shifter: Rescued Relations
[Michael Shifter is president of the Washington-based Inter-American Dialogue.]
It would be hard to imagine an odder couple than Sebastián Piñera and Evo Morales. Piñera, after all, is Chile's billionaire president and unabashed free market advocate. Morales, in contrast, is one of the main champions (along with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez) of Latin America's "21st-century socialism." He is the first indigenous president of Bolivia (a country with a majority indigenous population) and remains head of the coca growers union from which he built his grassroots political base. Personalities aside, Chile and Bolivia haven't had diplomatic ties for more than a century, ever since Chile captured its neighbor's only coastline in the 1879-1883 War of the Pacific. These two presidents were not exactly set up to be friends....
Bolivian Carlos Mamani, the only non-Chilean trapped for 69 days in the San Jose Mine, deserves credit for bringing the two South American leaders even closer together Wednesday. It was Mamani's rescue that prompted Morales's jaunt to Chile, where he stood alongside Piñera at the mine. Morales, who has a knack for sensing political winners, gushed about Piñera and Chile. (Meanwhile, he is doing his best to lure Mamani from Chile back to the far less prosperous Bolivia; no luck yet.)
To be sure, the historically tense relationship between Chile and Bolivia had thawed in recent years. In January 2006, Morales invited the then-current Chilean president, Ricardo Lagos, to attend his inauguration -- a symbolically significant gesture because the two countries did not have official relations. A couple of months later, incoming Chilean President Michelle Bachelet invited Morales to her own inauguration. Before those instances, the last time the president of either country had participated in the other's inauguration was more than half a century earlier....
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It would be hard to imagine an odder couple than Sebastián Piñera and Evo Morales. Piñera, after all, is Chile's billionaire president and unabashed free market advocate. Morales, in contrast, is one of the main champions (along with Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez) of Latin America's "21st-century socialism." He is the first indigenous president of Bolivia (a country with a majority indigenous population) and remains head of the coca growers union from which he built his grassroots political base. Personalities aside, Chile and Bolivia haven't had diplomatic ties for more than a century, ever since Chile captured its neighbor's only coastline in the 1879-1883 War of the Pacific. These two presidents were not exactly set up to be friends....
Bolivian Carlos Mamani, the only non-Chilean trapped for 69 days in the San Jose Mine, deserves credit for bringing the two South American leaders even closer together Wednesday. It was Mamani's rescue that prompted Morales's jaunt to Chile, where he stood alongside Piñera at the mine. Morales, who has a knack for sensing political winners, gushed about Piñera and Chile. (Meanwhile, he is doing his best to lure Mamani from Chile back to the far less prosperous Bolivia; no luck yet.)
To be sure, the historically tense relationship between Chile and Bolivia had thawed in recent years. In January 2006, Morales invited the then-current Chilean president, Ricardo Lagos, to attend his inauguration -- a symbolically significant gesture because the two countries did not have official relations. A couple of months later, incoming Chilean President Michelle Bachelet invited Morales to her own inauguration. Before those instances, the last time the president of either country had participated in the other's inauguration was more than half a century earlier....