Bold Tone wrote:
You, being from Chile, can correct me if i am wrong in guessing that this has led to these countries developing better institutions than they could, given their natural resources?
Fine, I'll bite.
Not quite. Chile has generally had much better institutions than neighbouring countries before Pinochet, during, and after. We would have probably been better off without Pinochet and the initial influx of U.S. aid, too.
Pinochet had some initial success with U.S. backing, but the U.S. withdrew a lot of their support after the dictatorship orchestrated terrorist attacks on U.S. soil.
Either way they were doomed. The economic reforms from the 70s that Friedman and the likes had informed were poorly thought out and led to record levels of poverty and unemployment in the 80s, as well as a giant slump in GDP.
The economy only recovered after a further series of reforms and government intervention of the banking system. Most of Chile's economic growth is from the democratic era, where we got no support from the U.S. or anyone else. Fanatical neoliberals credit the economic reforms of Pinochet for this growth because technically there wasn't a major revolution between the two periods, but I do not subscribe to this view.
What I give the Chilean Junta credit for is that they left behind a series of institutions (in healthcare, pensions, etc.) which could theoretically be reformed into highly functional agencies if there was political will to do so. Case-in-point is a deranged electoral system which was reformed a few years ago into a lovely proportional representation system with very few adjustments.
This is similar to Spain under Franquismo. Repugnant regime, but some of the institutions (public housing, for example) were sound once administered by democrats.
Now, I think it would have been better yet if they (Pinochet, etc.) had done nothing at all (chilean institutions were fine), but at least they did not do what Maduro has just done to Venezuela, or what Stroessner did to Paraguay, etc.
As for Israel, I genuinely doubt it's the military aid that has allowed them to build a decent welfare state, become a hub for innovation, agriculture, technology, etc.
I do not see why we cannot separate a country's objective functionality with the crimes perpetrated by its armed forces, etc. I always maintained that Libya was a pretty functional state, for example, given its extremely fragile context, and that reform, not revolution, was how it could have been improved. You can say the same thing about Jordan and others, too, but certainly Israel is up there among the most promising nations in the region by almost any metric.
