Consuela Saavedra is the anchor for the evening news for Chilean public television, and wife of Finance Minister Andres Velasco. At the time of the interview, late January, she was on her last evening of maternity leave following the birth of her second daughter.
JL: Tomorrow you return to work. How long were you away?
CS: We have very long maternity leaves in Chile—eighteen weeks. Six weeks before, and twelve after, standard, and I enjoyed it very much. Until then that I’d thought that maternity leaves were too long, a burden for the system. Having just had one I think it's a very good idea.
JL: Who funds the leaves?
CS: Generally, the public system subsidizes them, up to a certain amount, and then it's up to one’s employer to provide additional subsidies.
JL: Michelle Bachelet has been president for more than a year now. Was it surprising to people for a woman to be elected? Was the country simply ready for that?
CS: It was a very particular phenomenon. She became a massive figure, everybody loved her and everyone was talking about her; but the coalition actually had two women competing for the post. She hadn’t had any traditional political career at all. The other half of the coalition decided to put up another woman to compete to see if they could win too, and the other candidate had been in politics for longer, was more traditional. But the first election of a woman wasn't a process as much as a leap. Perhaps people were tired of traditional politicians.
JL: Remarkable… but not controversial?
CS: Everyone talked about it, but no. Interestingly, to compete with a woman candidate the right-wing parties put up a businessman who was supposedly very in touch with people; in a sense not a traditional political candidate either. That election was a different kind of political theater.
JL: How did you and Andres meet?
CS: We had friends in common but the first time we actually met was on TV during an interview.
JL: Discussing?
CS: Inflation, the price of lettuces and tomatoes. It was an interview about economics for a current events program. He was this newly-appointed Harvard professor, some kind of the golden boy, and I had to talk with him about macroeconomics and microeconomics.
JL: For the benefit of other economists, would a discussion of macroeconomics or microeconomics be a better topic in such a situation?
CS: It wasn’t a date, and we didn’t see each other again for years… but I’d say microeconomics definitely, it’s more fun. That said, Andres’s specialty is macro.
JL: Andres tells me you're more recognized here than he is.
CS: Well, I've been on TV here in Chile since '95. My first job, as anchor, was in 1995 at a new TV station for young people, called Rock and Pop. It was fun, but an economical disaster. All of the people who worked there were very close friends, and all are still in the media, now doing fine. Did Andres not tell you that when he went to the Central Market a while ago, someone did recognize him. The man insisted he’d seen him on a certain soap opera.
JL: Did you ever have a chance to interview Pinochet?
CS: Unfortunately not. I tried very hard.
JL: And you were on maternity leave when he died.
CS: The big story. All those years I covered him. I’d even traveled to London when he was arrested, and covered the extradition trial. It would have actually been illegal for me to go to work during my maternity leave to cover his funeral, so I had to sit still and watch it on TV. Of course, I go back to work tomorrow, and now we’re waiting for Fidel to die. News people, we’re all the time waiting for someone to die.
JL: Chile is doing well. Does that make things less interesting for journalists?
CS: For journalists? We can find stuff everywhere.
JL: Is it fair to say that the better job he and his colleagues in the government do, the more challenging it becomes for you journalists?
CS: Exactly right.
Interview by James Scott Linville
Showing posts with label Chile. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Chile. Show all posts
Wednesday, October 10, 2007
Friday, March 2, 2007
more from Chilean finance minister, Andres Velasco
JSL: We mentioned that you were away from your country for many years…
Andres Velasco: I was away from the country for many years, because one Friday… August 6, 1976… as I was coming out of a football game at school, someone told me my father had been kidnapped. Chile, then, was a dangerous place. My father was a prominent lawyer and academic, and head of the Social Democratic Party. After the coup, he became very active in the defense of people who’d been arrested. In June of 1976, some foreign delegations were convening in Chile, and he arranged to have a say among them. He and some other lawyers provided the visiting foreign ministers with evidence of killings and torture. This, as you can imagine, caused quite an uproar. Soon after the foreign ministers left, my father was arrested, and taken illegally to Argentina. Argentina, then, under that regime, was not a good place for someone who’d been arrested by the Pinochet government. Somehow, he was smuggled into the Venezuelan embassy, left Argentina on a Venezuelan plane, and eventually made his way to Los Angeles.
JSL: What an awful time. That feels far away.
AV: This is a country with a deeply-rooted tradition of electoral politics. When I was a little boy, on election day, my father would put me on his shoulders and take me to vote. That was part of life here. You go, and even if it's hot, or even if it's cold, you stand in line and you vote. There's been concern recently about why voting has gone down from 95 to more recently 80-something vote, which is still very high. Election day is always a Sunday. The country stops and that’s all you talk about. They’re typically in December, which is early summer here, so the weather's nice, just like today. Some people put on a barbecue, and everyone pulls out their TV, and while you grill your fish, you watch the election results as if it were a sporting event. My father died in 2001, and one of the last things we did together was, when the election came, he said, “Take me to vote.” I wheeled him out, pushed his wheelchair to the school where voting always takes place, and stood outside the booth while he cast his ballot. That's the essence of this country. And that's why it was such a painful shock, at a time when we were the only country in Latin America with a democracy, a country with a democratic tradition stretching back almost two hundred years, to have that taken away… taken away for seventeen years. If you're Chilean that's the one thing that you're allowed to get teary-eyed about.
--Sunday, 14 January 2007, Santiago, Chile
... an edited version of this entire conversation appears in the March issue of Monocle magazine, on newsstands now.
Andres Velasco: I was away from the country for many years, because one Friday… August 6, 1976… as I was coming out of a football game at school, someone told me my father had been kidnapped. Chile, then, was a dangerous place. My father was a prominent lawyer and academic, and head of the Social Democratic Party. After the coup, he became very active in the defense of people who’d been arrested. In June of 1976, some foreign delegations were convening in Chile, and he arranged to have a say among them. He and some other lawyers provided the visiting foreign ministers with evidence of killings and torture. This, as you can imagine, caused quite an uproar. Soon after the foreign ministers left, my father was arrested, and taken illegally to Argentina. Argentina, then, under that regime, was not a good place for someone who’d been arrested by the Pinochet government. Somehow, he was smuggled into the Venezuelan embassy, left Argentina on a Venezuelan plane, and eventually made his way to Los Angeles.
JSL: What an awful time. That feels far away.
AV: This is a country with a deeply-rooted tradition of electoral politics. When I was a little boy, on election day, my father would put me on his shoulders and take me to vote. That was part of life here. You go, and even if it's hot, or even if it's cold, you stand in line and you vote. There's been concern recently about why voting has gone down from 95 to more recently 80-something vote, which is still very high. Election day is always a Sunday. The country stops and that’s all you talk about. They’re typically in December, which is early summer here, so the weather's nice, just like today. Some people put on a barbecue, and everyone pulls out their TV, and while you grill your fish, you watch the election results as if it were a sporting event. My father died in 2001, and one of the last things we did together was, when the election came, he said, “Take me to vote.” I wheeled him out, pushed his wheelchair to the school where voting always takes place, and stood outside the booth while he cast his ballot. That's the essence of this country. And that's why it was such a painful shock, at a time when we were the only country in Latin America with a democracy, a country with a democratic tradition stretching back almost two hundred years, to have that taken away… taken away for seventeen years. If you're Chilean that's the one thing that you're allowed to get teary-eyed about.
--Sunday, 14 January 2007, Santiago, Chile
... an edited version of this entire conversation appears in the March issue of Monocle magazine, on newsstands now.
Saturday, January 27, 2007
Interview with Chilean finance minister Andres Velasco
On a Sunday evening two weeks ago we visited Chilean finance minister Andres Velasco and his wife at their home in Santiago. In a quiet neighborhood, their 1960s low-slung modern was furnished with Saarinen furniture, abstract paintings, and an overflow of books.
JSL: Can a country's natural resources be a curse?
AV: It’s a problem when your economy is held hostage to their price cycles. Taking account of the effects of commodity cycles has been a key to our policy. When your commodity income is high, you save. When your income is low, because the economy is low, because the price of copper is low, you spend more than you would otherwise to move against the cycle. It's known as a counter-cyclical fiscal policy.
…the entirety of this interview with Andres Velasco will run in the debut issue of Monocle magazine, available February…
JSL: Can a country's natural resources be a curse?
AV: It’s a problem when your economy is held hostage to their price cycles. Taking account of the effects of commodity cycles has been a key to our policy. When your commodity income is high, you save. When your income is low, because the economy is low, because the price of copper is low, you spend more than you would otherwise to move against the cycle. It's known as a counter-cyclical fiscal policy.
…the entirety of this interview with Andres Velasco will run in the debut issue of Monocle magazine, available February…
Monday, January 22, 2007
more from interview with Andres Velasco
Among the people behind the [1988] opposition campaign were a team of ad people, journalists, economists, and data analysts who came together to brainstorm. I was a small part of that. The symbol of our campaign was a rainbow. The slogan of the campaign, which to this day sounds a bit “much,” was simply “Happiness is coming.” And the campaign emphasized young people, walking down the street together, running on beaches, something like the old Coca-Cola ads but it was important, and it worked. There was another ad that was remarkably subtle but powerful. It just shows faces of boys singing in a school choir. The camera pans across the choir: all the boys are blonde and blue-eyed and singing in a foreign language, until the camera comes on one boy with brown eyes and brown hair and it stops, and you see that the boy is struggling and doesn’t know the words to the song. The camera pulls back and the voice-over says simply: “Exiled. Never again.” You didn't need to say more. Everyone in Chile knew people who were exiled in far off lands, and knew that they wanted to return. Many would return… but many would not.
Sunday, January 21, 2007
... more from interview with Chilean Finance Minister, Andres Velasco
You were away from Chile for many years in the 1970s and the 1980s. But you returned to work on the campaign for the 1988 plebiscite that ended the Pinochet dictatorship.
AV: It was an important time to be here. If there’s one day in my life where I thought the things one did could make a difference, the one day in my life which I will never forget, it was that day, especially the evening, when the dictatorship conceded that they had lost the plebiscite, and would have to hold elections and leave power. Leading up to it, I was working on my dissertation at Columbia in New York, but I had spent all of 1987, and much of 1988 in Chile. I came back again about a month before the plebiscite to work on the campaign. I helped with some of the ads, mostly conducting background research. On the day of the vote, I was assigned to be in charge of the team of poll-watchers for downtown Santiago. In that capacity I turned up at 7 AM, just as the polls opened, at Instituto Nationale, the best and most respected public school smack in the middle of downtown. We knew that’s where Pinochet would be voting. He swept in with a group of guards. We stood outside, our credentials as members of the opposition team in hand, and we were apprehensive. I’d been wondering what the army officers guarding the polling site would do when this team in our twenties appeared to say, “We've come here to check on the vote.”
AV: It was an important time to be here. If there’s one day in my life where I thought the things one did could make a difference, the one day in my life which I will never forget, it was that day, especially the evening, when the dictatorship conceded that they had lost the plebiscite, and would have to hold elections and leave power. Leading up to it, I was working on my dissertation at Columbia in New York, but I had spent all of 1987, and much of 1988 in Chile. I came back again about a month before the plebiscite to work on the campaign. I helped with some of the ads, mostly conducting background research. On the day of the vote, I was assigned to be in charge of the team of poll-watchers for downtown Santiago. In that capacity I turned up at 7 AM, just as the polls opened, at Instituto Nationale, the best and most respected public school smack in the middle of downtown. We knew that’s where Pinochet would be voting. He swept in with a group of guards. We stood outside, our credentials as members of the opposition team in hand, and we were apprehensive. I’d been wondering what the army officers guarding the polling site would do when this team in our twenties appeared to say, “We've come here to check on the vote.”
Thursday, January 18, 2007
... from interview with Chilean finance minister Andres Velasco
James Linville: I’ve been staying around the corner from the old US Embassy. I heard that long ago, when he was a university student, your father stormed the embassy. What was the occasion?
Andres Velasco: Not precisely “stormed,” I think. Those were of course different times, in the 1940s, after the end of the war, and once upon a time the anti-American demonstrations in Chile were not so few or far between. There was, however, an occasion when he was part of a group out front. The American ambassador came out and he invited the leaders of the demonstrators in for a chat. Yes, my father did enter, and then, well, it all ended perfectly amicably, until the next issue arose.
from MONOCLE magazine, March 2007
Andres Velasco: Not precisely “stormed,” I think. Those were of course different times, in the 1940s, after the end of the war, and once upon a time the anti-American demonstrations in Chile were not so few or far between. There was, however, an occasion when he was part of a group out front. The American ambassador came out and he invited the leaders of the demonstrators in for a chat. Yes, my father did enter, and then, well, it all ended perfectly amicably, until the next issue arose.
from MONOCLE magazine, March 2007
Sunday, January 14, 2007
Saturday, January 13, 2007
to Santiago... Chile... then
... arrived yesterday in Santiago, Chile, to interview the Finance Minister Andres Velasco for Monocle magazine.
After the overnight, I rocked up at NH hotel... to find no reservation.
The wonderful Andrea at the front desk searched and searched, only to discover a reservation for me at their hotel in Santiago... de Campostella, Spain.
Still a few bugs in the system. Let us speak of this no more.
--Linville
After the overnight, I rocked up at NH hotel... to find no reservation.
The wonderful Andrea at the front desk searched and searched, only to discover a reservation for me at their hotel in Santiago... de Campostella, Spain.
Still a few bugs in the system. Let us speak of this no more.
--Linville
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