“This is a country with a deeply-rooted tradition of electoral politics. When I was a little boy, on election day, my father would put me on his shoulders and take me to vote. That was part of life here. You go, and even if it’s hot, or even if it’s cold, you stand in line and you vote. There’s been concern recently about why voting has gone down from 95 to more recently 80-something vote, which is still very high. Election day is always a Sunday. The country stops and that’s all you talk about. They’re typically in December, which is early summer here, so the weather’s nice, just like today. Some people put on a barbecue, and everyone pulls out their TV, and while you grill your fish, you watch the election results as if it were a sporting event. My father died in 2001, and one of the last things we did together was, when the election came, he said, “Take me to vote.” I wheeled him out, pushed his wheelchair to the school where voting always takes place, and stood outside the booth while he cast his ballot. That’s the essence of this country. And that’s why it was such a painful shock, at a time when we were the only country in Latin America with a democracy, a country with a democratic tradition stretching back almost two hundred years, to have that taken away… taken away for seventeen years. If you’re Chilean that’s the one thing that you’re allowed to get teary-eyed about.”

Andres Velasco Interview by James Scott Linville, January 2007. [Link]

Last fall Chilean Finance Minister Andres Velasco garnered attention for actions that sound paradoxical: he purposely slowed the economic growth of his country. It was a fiscal maneuver that embodied the long-term strategic vision that has been his hallmark, both as a professor at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and at the Finance Ministry, where he’s served on and off since 1990.

Velasco was born in 1960, and left with his family in the mid-1970s, for Los Angeles. He later studied at Yale, and at Columbia for his PhD. Since then, he’s consulted for the IMF, the World Bank, and was Chile’s negotiator for the 1995 NAFTA treaty. In his spare time, he wrote a pair of best-selling novels that featured much football and some heartbreak. On a Sunday evening two weeks ago, Velasco and his wife, Consuela Saavedra, the young anchor for Chilean TV’s evening news, invited Monocle to their home. In a quiet neighborhood, the 1960s low-slung modern, built around a greeny courtyard, was furnished with Saarinen pieces, abstract painting, and an undue number of books for such a minimalist environment. Consuela bustled about, preparing for her first workday since maternity leave. For a moment the minister, wearing shorts and a t-shirt, was left holding the baby. With Bachelet away for the inauguration of the Ecuadorian president, Velasco was for that weekend the acting president of the republic.