Page 4 - MONTT LATIN AMERICAN MAGAZINE, SEPTEMBER 2021 (English)

dissipated, and it has not been replaced by anything. Nor are there any patriotic ideals, the great men of our Independence (O’Higgins, Carrera and others of that value) are just street names or the odd statue that can be defaced in popular demonstrations. The only references are characters raised by advertising, that is, prominent footballers, occasionally very successful athlete, and people of that kind.Their mind is impregnated with the ideological conflict between the capitalists and the communists and the strong publicity campaigns that each of them makes explicitly or implicitly, without having any affection for or against either of these two positions. They are not communists, but they are not anti-communists either, they just want more, more for themselves and their social group; they have felt and seen that they have to fight hard to maintain the position of consumption and enjoyment of some goods on the social scale that they have achieved, especially in the last 30 years, which seams unstable and susceptible of being lost with some ease. Most of them are children of public officials or employees of private sector companies, or small merchants or mini-entrepreneurs or independent workers, who have labour very hard, getting up very early to get to their jobs from distant places where they live, easily allocating three hours a day on roundtrip transfers but they don’t want that for themselves. They do not know how this is achieved, they do not know what needs to be done so that this newly born middle class continues to progress and remains in a “safe” position in its new social location.
The extreme left bombards them that they must take refuge in the State; that the State will protect them; that their point of security is to be public officials and that the companies must all be state-owned, so as to “end private profit which is the cause of inequality, since that profit is taken by a few thanks to the efforts of all ”.
On the other hand, the capitalists show them that what those on the extreme left speak are dreams, they are abstract speculations,
and that the reality of the attempts made in Latin America to build that paradise is called Cuba or Venezuela, where the level of poverty is enormous, in addition to being totally authoritarian regimes, dictatorships, in which we live at the pace of what the State orders. Faced with this, our millennials feel and do what is healthy, they do not believe anyone, they already know that everyone lies, that everyone has a self-interest to defend and that no one is willing to tell or feel the truth. From that position, they think, how can we continue?
They are a dominant force in society today. There is the proof with Chile, of a young man in his thirties who is the candidate who has the highest probability of being the next President, which is not a rare case as many believe, since in several countries of the world people of that age are taking positions of power. So where are we going to go? The answer is not clear, because the transformation of the society of our small Latin American countries, especially those of the Andean area, requires moving to the next stage of development, ceasing to be just an extractive economy, but without losing successful extractive activity, but rather move towards its industrialization. This supposes broader domestic markets, more powerful financial structures, human conglomerates not only of consumption but also of transformation, which implies a level of socialization between our different countries of the subcontinent, their peoples and their governments that until now in history has not been possible to summon. “Perhaps this generation of millennials, who only listens to their cell phone, can accomplish what was not achieved in the famous interview between San Martín and Bolívar, which should have been to keep Hispanic America together. Perhaps now that interview will be done by cell phone in a chat of hundreds of thousands that break the misconception that has existed in our Latin America of not understanding that we are the same nation.