A March 1 Wall Street Journal article compared the low earthquake death toll in Chile to Haiti, and cited conservative economist Milton Friedman as the saviour of the Chilean people.
Haiti's death toll from the January 12 quake has been estimated to be more than 200,000, while Chile's official toll from the quake that struck it on February 27 was put at more than 528 by the United Nations Office for Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, VOAnews.com said on March 6.
The article attributed Chile's capacity to experience an earthquake 500 times stronger than that of Haiti with a fraction of the losses in life to the introduction of neoliberal policies by Augusto Pinochet's regime in the 1970s.
After seizing power in a bloody US backed coup in 1973 that overthrew the left-wing government of Salvador Allende, the Pinochet dictatorship went on a campaign of privatisation and deregulation under advice from right-wing US economist Milton Friedman and his cronies, known as the Chicago Boys.
Author Naomi Klein responded in a March 4 Alternet.org article: "Enormous wealth was created in this period but at a terrible cost: by the early eighties, Pinochet's Friedman-prescribed policies had caused rapid de-industrialisation, a ten-fold increase in unemployment and an explosion of distinctly unstable shantytowns.
"They also led to a crisis of corruption and debt so severe that, in 1982, Pinochet was forced to fire his key ... advisors and nationalise several of the large deregulated financial institutions."
The earthquake has uncovered one legacy of the Pinochet regime — Chile's deep social divide.
One factor in the differing death tolls is that the Chilean earthquake's epicentre was located further off-shore and further from the surface than Haiti's.
As Chile is located in an area of high seismic activity, people are more experienced in what to do in the event of an earthquake.
Differing quality of buildings was also a factor. Chile's current building code, cited by the WSJ as a product of the Pinochet era, was actually introduced by Allende's socialist government in 1972.
An estimated 1.5 million homes have been damaged by Chile's quake, at least half a million of which were totally destroyed, leaving 2 million people homeless.
The enforcement of building codes has not extended to the homes of the working class and the poor. A 2008 United Nations Economic and Social report found 2.5% of the urban population lives in slums.
Makeshift homes around the country have collapsed and, in coastal towns affected by the tsunami that followed the quake, been pulled out to sea.
The neoliberal model introduced by Pinochet, and continued by social democratic governments after the formal return to democracy in 1990, has left its mark.
Roger Burbach, director of the Center for the Studies of the Americas in California, wrote in New America Media on March 9: "Today 14 percent of the population lives in abject poverty. The top 20 percent captures 50 percent of the national income, while the bottom 20 percent earns only 5 percent.
"In a 2005 World Bank survey of 124 countries, Chile ranked twelfth in the list of countries with the worst distribution of income."
An April 2009 OECD report said Chile has high inequality levels, even in comparison with other Latin American countries — a region that has the highest levels of inequality in the world.
The 2008 UN report said 4% of Chile's population go hungry every day. This figure climbed in the first days after the earthquake.
Desperate, hungry people, tired of waiting for help that wasn't arriving, took food and other essentials from supermarkets — in some cases while local police stood and watched.
Twenty-four hours after the earthquake, interior minister Perez Yoma condemned the "looting" of supermarkets. By March 2, 14,000 soldiers were stationed across the country, guarding supermarkets and only allowing in people who looked like they had money, the Timesonline.co.uk said the following day.
Yoma admitted food relief had only just started to reach some victims 80 hours after the earthquake struck.
Desperate people taking food and other essential items from big supermarkets have been demonised in Chilean and international media as being the same opportunistic looters. They have attacked by the military, in some instances with tear gas and water cannons.
A March 3 article on Solidarity-us.org said the deployment of soldiers and the introduction of martial law were triggered by a meeting of President Michelle Bachelet and Yoma with supermarket magnates on March 1. "These industry heads demanded and got a meeting ... when they saw that people were taking matters into their own hands ...
"Another outcome of the meeting was a curfew that was first imposed in Concepcion from 9pm to 6am, and later extended to other towns and longer hours…
"What the episode makes clear is who calls the shots in Chile. Attention to this issue did not emerge until business forcefully raised its concerns.
"The state will now take minor steps to distribute some goods to the affected poor. But the main message of its actions was that it immediately stepped up to make sure that the private property of the huge retailers, and their fundamental power to shape the distribution of commodities, would not be threatened even when the goods will probably go bad or be thrown away."
Burbach said there are signs of an awakening of Chile's popular movements in response to this disaster. He said a coalition of over 60 organisations had released a letter stating: "In these dramatic circumstances, organised citizens have proven capable of providing urgent, rapid and creative responses to the social crisis that millions of families are experiencing.
"The most diverse organisations ... are mobilising, demonstrating the imaginative potential and solidarity of communities."
The letter demanded of incoming right-wing President Sebastian Pinera the right to "monitor the plans and models of reconstruction so that they include the full participation of the communities".