Weekly Report - 20 September 2012 (WR-12-37)

The government of President Sebastián Piñera is locked in a damaging institutional clash with the supreme court. The conflict is the result of outspoken remarks by a cabinet minister criticising a supreme court ruling against the construction of a major thermoelectric plant in northern Chile. The institutional friction is overshadowing the real issue at stake: Chile’s future development. Unless Chile increases its energy supply, and reduces its dependence on unreliable sources of energy, its rate of growth in the medium-term will be stunted and Piñera’s ambition of reaching developed nation status by 2020 will remain unfulfilled.