Chile Forum

A bridge on the main highway connecting central and southern Chile was cut in the 7th region (think I got that right) by floods. There is over 14 km line of cars and trucks waiting to cross.


Not even regular mail and shipping is getting through. Last week we had to get an urgent package to an office in Santiago. Chile Express, tur bus, where all out of businesses. We finally had to send it by plane on Lan courier, but from the airport. No pickups. We sent our driver to the airport in Temuco, and then had our driver in Santiago pick it up from the airport and deliver it. expensive mess.

DECENTRALIZE CHILE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

yea, the kids down in Palena likely never even noticed anything was wrong.


They are suppose to have it up and running again Monday. It was a major bridge, on a major river, on a major highway.

The president was just talking in the state of the union address about direct elections of regional governors and such.

Let us call it the central corridor problem. It is a little bit more than just Santiago, and stretches to include most national infrastructure between the ocean such as Vina and Valpo, East to Santiago.

Government offices
About 90% of the documents we send to Santiago are because there are no regional offices. How often (for those in the U.S.), do people in the U.S. need to send government documents to Washington D.C. and can only send them to an office in Washington? In fact, I do not believe in my entire life I have ever had to send a document to Washington.

Even when there are regional offices, they have to send the documents to Santiago to be approved and have no authority or capacity to approve them.

Communications
That is just government documents. Imagine one of those volcanoes outside of Santiago pulled a Chaiten? Almost all telephone and internet communication for Chile goes through Santiago (likely better than 99.9%). When I traceroute my internet connections, to the outside world I am seen as being in Santiago. All the telecommunication trunks are there. Add all mail and shipping, in spite of places like Puerto Montt, go through the central region and Santiago first.

If you send a container to Puerto Montt, it gets taken off a ship in the central region, put on a truck, and driven across that bridge that is down. It may not even go through customs until it reaches Puerto Montt, even though it has been off the ship for over a week. Almost everything produced in Chile, gets sent to the central region for final processing and packaging. Even if it was say grown or raised in Southern Chile.

Corporate head quarters
Company head quarters are all in Santiago. A lot of the bad customer service in southern Chile can be traced to the fact that no more than figured head management exist in southern Chile. In most companies (Ripley, telefonica, vtr, and so on) the local managers are almost never authorized to anything as simple as correcting a mistake on a bill. They send it to Santiago for approval, even if they are telling you no problem. Like two years ago VTR's computer system went down, and no one had internet in Southern Chile or could even pay a bill by walking in to the main office. The office here could not call Santiago, because they use the same phone and internet system that was down and requires the computer system to function. VTR could not call VTR.

Everywhere we go in terms of government spending we hear complaints about how the government in Santiago, in order to get their money in the first place, requires them to hire certain consulting firms and only those firms to tell them how to spend the money. When done the little town such as Futa and a million others can end up with as little as 25% of the money allocated to their local infrastructure projects. Even at that, they end up being forced to hire contractors out of Santiago to do the work such as paving roads, rather than hiring local people or companies. Short of the rocks in the concrete being from a local river bed, not much else in the streets and sidewalks are from Southern Chile. The government allocation system is structured to allow a very narrow subsections of national companies to qualify for the contracts. Chile compras system is designed to add transparency, but really it just excludes all but biggest companies from competing or at least the preselected. The contracts get drafted in such a way that only one or two companies could ever qualify.

Well, I am sure I could crash the chile forum server ranting about this, but you get the picture. Decentralization would make for a stronger country, less vulnerable to disasters, more diversity in participation, help even the social and economic playing field. There are a lot of laws in the hopper to do this right now. The government has recognized that it has to be done just because having all their eggs in one basket is not getting the practical jobs on the ground done. I am all for it.

I would qualify that it still needs some centralized control, or we end up with super rich and super poor towns and regions. I am in no way advocating that Chile turn to a State like federal system as in the U.S. Just a little more say from local people about local issues. A little more independence, just not so much that they hang themselves with it.