Dealing with Income Inequality during the Bachelet Administration A Critical Analysis of the Discourse of Chilean Political Elites

The notoriety that income inequality has achieved in the Chilean political debate since the presidential election of 2006 can be explained as a response discursively produced by Chilean political elites to a sense of frustration of peoples expectations as a consequence of the unsatisfactory results reached after 21 years of the application of failed inequality-reducing policies. The discursive stratagems ranged from a recalling of the ´authoritarian enclaves´ inherited from Pinochets regime to the thesis that inequality can only be resolved by improving the quality of education. This latter stratagem became a technocratic mantra for the struggle against income inequality among Chilean political elites during the Bachelet administration and gave rise to the ideological exclusion of any political proposal that defended a more redistribution-oriented approach to the problem, an exclusion deeply rooted in the traumatic memory of those elites.