Monday, October 5, 2009

Elections

This year my country will hold presidential elections. There are four candidates, one of them I cannot even believe that decided to run for president. He was already president for 6 years between 1994 and 2000 and his government was not that bad but he made terrible mistakes of which we still pay the consequences.
To begin with, he granted presidential pardon to one of the biggest narcos in Chile's history. He has never explained why he did that or what he was trying to achieve.
The second mistake was to force Chile to adopt natural gas. When I say "To force", it was literally that. From one week to another he signed a contract with Argentina for buying gas and using government money he subsidized the building of a gas pipeline. Not only that, the pipeline was imposed all over Chile and after that was given to the gas companies for them to use and connect everybody to it. Since Argentina never invested in improving their gas producing facilities they ran out of gas to export and now we had to build a special port to import gas to be able to use gas, which before this brilliant idea was produced from garbage.
The third mistake was denying Intel's application to establish in Chile. Before setting in Costa Rica, Intel wanted to establish some factories in Chile. But this genius didn't want to deal with a "evil company" so he sent some underlings to deal with Intel. As soon as Intel noticed the government was not interested, they moved to Costa Rica. At that point, 10 years ago, Costa Rica was a very poor nation, nowadays they have a flourishing services industry and Intel is expanding there.
I'm not going to enumerate all of his mistakes because this post will grow too long, but I'm going to say this: I don't care who is elected, as long as it is not him. Please fellow Chileans, don't elect the same stupid again because we cannot keep wasting our options.

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