Something has to explain Chilean President Sebastian Piñera’s thus-far rather rough presidency, and it couldn’t simply be that he is a confused leader of a fractious right-wing coalition who appoints fascist underlings out of touch with reality. Mayhaps he is cursed? Jinxed? Hexed? Or, as Chileans put it, yeta?
The theory has its requisite Facebook page and it recently got a more adult nod from Argentine newspaper La Nación, which sums things up pretty nicely:
- Bats appeared in presidential palace La Moneda shortly after his electoral victory in 2010.
- Shortly after that, Chile was rocked by an 8.8 earthquake on February 27, one of the worst in its history (and worse than the bats, I would posit)
- Aftershocks interrupted his inauguration.
- A mining disaster turned out well, with the 33 miners rescued, but it was still a disaster.
- And one month later, 81 prisoners died in a fire in the San Miguel prison.
The article stops there, but why? All throughout 2011, Piñera also had to deal with the largest social protests since the PInochet years, with thousands marching in protests against hydroelectric energy project HydroAysén and hundreds of thousands of students marching for education reform, occupying high schools and universities for more than six months.
And why not add the September plane crash that killed 21 people, including television star Felipe Camiroaga, more or less Chile’s Day the Music Died? And the La Polar accounting scandal, one of the largest such scandals in Chile’s history?
And now, Chile is kicking off 2012 with enormous forest fires, first accidental ones in the Torres del Paine national park in the Patagonia region, then a handful further north that killed seven firefighters and that the Piñera administration is calling terrorism.
A real four-leafed clover, this guy.
But there’s one very significant thing that has not gone wrong for Piñera: Prices of non-ferrous metals – on which Chile’s economy depends – remain shiny. So I guess we will know who to blame when commodity prices collapse.