How Chile has voted and "not voted"

international | politics / elections | news report Sunday January 15, 2006 22:53 by iosaf

:-) its a Sunday, and that means "mass" things. & in Chile the mass did the voting thing, and because it is a *legal obligation* of Chilean citizenship when in residence and of suffrage age to vote...

Thus there really isn't a "not vote" count. But over 200,000 people have presented their documents in Chilean police stations today to prove they were more than 200km from their polling point. Considering Chile is a country which stretches for over 6,340 kilometres in length, its quite easy to dodge the polls.

There are two candidates, both of whom "qualified" because there's more than one round of voting.

Chile it would seem is a very democratic place.

BUT
it wasn't always that way. Oh no! Many Peruvians will tell you that Chileans have had a chip on their shoulder since their war back in the 19th century when Bolivia lost its seacoast. But other forward thinking types would point out that Bolivia still has a navy, complete with powerful admiral and we don't really need to look back at the 19th century but much _closer_ to what happened when Henry Kissinger (a popular newspaper columnist in the 50s) asked Augusto José Ramón Pinochet Ugarte (his spanish teacher) to do "Chile's September 11".

Anyway, it seems Chile has just elected a woman, agnostic, socialist, twice divorced mother of three children to the job of being its President.

Her name is not Mary Mc Aleese.
nor is Mary Robinson or Indira Ghandi,
Margaret Thatcher or Angela Merckel.

Its :- Michelle Bachelet.
At around 00h00 Irish time tonight, she will have won the counting of votes. And on the 11th of March she will become the new President of Chile.

You'll read all about her in the papers tomorrow.

She will have succeeded in defeating Miguel Juan Sebastián Piñera Echenique who is one of the richest South Americans living in South America, and though he *came out* against Pinochet, still earned the money bit of his status as "Berlusconi of Latin America" under that particular "dictatorship".

It was a special dictatorship, henry Kissinger proved very adept at spanish.

And then this week I'll tell you about the nasty man whos running for the presidency of Peru who still worries about that war back in the 19th century and wants all Chilean investment out of Peru and cough cough "bolivia" with little "b".