Page 3 - MONTT LATIN AMERICAN MAGAZINE, OCTUBRE 2021 (English)

-Editorial-
The Moderns and the Laggards
In these last two years we have experienced with great force and drama the two faces of Latin America. At one extreme are the modern, vigorous, educated and increasingly professionally skilled social groups, many of them multilingual, capable of successfully organizing and carrying out ventures, which today, unlike in the past, is made up of an important social diversity and without necessarily coinciding with the established economic elites, generating jobs and important economic and social value. This represents a variable percentage in the different countries of the subcontinent, but as a social group means about 15/20 percent of the total on average. At the other extreme there is a mass of socially laggards close to 30/40 percent, according to the different countries, who have only a basic education, whom are not at all in modernity and who do not have greater access to progress, since they lacks meaningful opportunities, and that as the intermediate social groups that make up the difference of about 40 per cent move into progress, the laggards are becoming increasingly destitute and unmotivated.
These two extreme groups, with an intermediate layer of about 40 percent, are the two faces of Latin America, both exist and are fully real, and are coexisting more and more worse way. The modern group tends more and more to ignore the lagging group in its actions, and sees them as simple labour (as if they were immigrants); likewise, the newly incorporated modern groups rather want
“The cleavage is no longer in the political ideas of the right or the left, but between the modern and the laggards, the latter empowered by social networks and their capacity for mobilization, and reinforced by the political leadership of the undemocratic left.”
Santiago Montt, president of Montt Group
to get rid of them, often because with great effort they were able to distance themselves from them. Thus, the lagging groups have already lost, or are clearly on the way of losing any real contact with the moderns other than distant labour relations. It is this dichotomy that is coming to the surface and generating at its core the social conflict that is being experienced in our subcontinent. In each of these countries, in an increasingly less friendly coexistence, there are these two social strata with a non-existent internal mobility between them. Where this has remained pristine is in Chile, in the formation of the Constituent Commission that was democratically chosen by general elections after the social outbreak of October 2019, to draft a Constitution “from a blank page”, in which the group of stragglers showed their power in the representativeness of their people by choosing the 16,66 percent of the representatives, who added to 18,74 percent of the group Apruebo Dignidad made up of the Communist Party, alone reach 35,34 percent, who in an important part show a speech and a revenge attitude towards the modern, what they feel like the causing their dispossession. It is truly surprising to hear some of the opinions with rejection of the civilization incorporated since European colonization, which they accuse of provoking the plundering of the original inhabitants, who have the best right. What can be done? What has happened? How to democratically merge all these population strata in a nation with the necessary harmony
Montt Latin American Magazine p3