aTypical Joe: a gay New Yorker living in the rural South

Thursday, November 30, 2006

Change in Chile

The WaPo reports on those eager shed Chile’s questionable label as the most culturally conservative country in Latin America:

Groups that have historically determined Chile’s cultural norms—including the Supreme Court, the Catholic Church and a traditional class of political elites—are now being tested on multiple fronts.

A new national policy, for example, offers free morning-after pills to anyone 14 or older. Congress is debating proposals to explicitly protect the legal rights of gays and other minorities. Another proposal that would allow “merciful deaths” to terminally ill patients has ignited a debate about euthanasia. And a government-funded AIDS prevention campaign launched this month shows school-age girls and a gay couple, among others, promoting condom use. The campaign has riled Catholic Church leaders.

For a country that legalized divorce just two years ago, the pace of the changes is remarkable.

They have a woman president:

As president, Michelle Bachelet—an agnostic, separated mother of three—stands at the center of many of the cultural disputes. She was inaugurated in March after running a campaign that emphasized social tolerance. Though she is part of the same governing coalition that has held the presidency since Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s military dictatorship was ousted 16 years ago, her style of governance at times has been markedly different from those of her predecessors.

For example, Bachelet, a former health minister and pediatrician, pushed for the distribution of free morning-after pills without extensive consultation with more conservative members of the ruling coalition—lawmakers who for years have successfully put the brakes on culturally divisive proposals. [...]

Though it was a bitter fight in political circles, the morning-after pill issue didn’t affect Bachelet’s approval rating, which increased slightly after the controversy. One poll conducted about three weeks ago placed her approval rating at 59 percent, higher than the 53 percent of the total vote she was elected by in January.