|
Chile: A Destination for the 21st Century |
By Tom Azzopardi
There is perhaps no better introduction for a visitor to modern Chile, a sliver of territory that stretches four thousand kilometres from arid deserts to southern steppes, than the drive from Santiago airport to one´s hotel uptown. Rather than the snarling jam that might welcome you in most other capital cities, perhaps even your hometown, Santiago can boast a network of four new highways that have reduced the once hour-long crawl round a clogged beltway to a fifteen minutes zip through free-flowing traffic. In fact, you may well spend more time in the airport, negotiating immigration and collecting your luggage, that you do reaching your hotel room.
Santiago´s underground railway system is similarly impressive – reliable, clean and remarkably spacious outside peak hours. A recent expansion of the metro – doubling the amount of track – has transformed the lives of thousands of commuters, slashing travel times between the centre and the city´s southern extreme from 90 minutes or more to less than half an hour. Not all is idyllic. The city´s buses, roaring yellow monsters often belching out black smoke, make for an uncomfortable ride to work but the government is rolling out a European-built of clean, quiet replacements.
Smog still blights the capital with thin white mists often blotting out otherwise spectacular views of the mountains. But air quality has improved dramatically thanks to the growing use of natural gas and strict laws banning polluting vehicles from the city centre.
Santiago´s autopistas urbanas (urban highways) and other infrastructure projects reflect much of modern Chile, a rapidly-changing country keen to make good impression to outsiders and meet its problems with practical and realistic solutions.
On South America´s western seaboard, the country is about as far as one can get from the planet´s main population centres and Chileans often refer to themselves as living on the edge of the world. It is this concern that has driven the country to open itself up to outside influences – first, ensuring stable conditions for foreign and local investors and, second, signing a series of trade agreements in the last five years unmatched anywhere in the world. Huge inflows of foreign capital permitted by the first have helped to make Chile by far the world´s largest producer of copper and a major exporter of salmon, wood pulp and fresh fruit and allowed the construction of those highways which are mostly controlled by foreign concessionaries.
Now the government hopes that second will make the country an important conduit for global trade despite its remote location. Chile is currently the only country with free trade agreements with China, the European Union and the United States. Deals with India and Japan are set to follow soon. Other countries are catching up fast but Chile will win ground by being first off the starting blocks. As China reaches out further in its search for raw materials, Chile could become a key channel for goods from Argentina and Brazil seeking access to the Pacific.
|
|
