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On July 12, former President of Chile Ricardo Lagos visited the Inter-American Dialogue and discussed a variety of issues related to Chile, Latin America, and the future of the region and its place in the world. Since stepping down from the presidency in 2006, Lagos has continued his engagement with the most pressing issues of the moment. He was appointed Special Envoy on Climate Change by then UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-Moon, worked on promoting democracy through the Club de Madrid, co-chaired the Inter-American Dialogue, taught at Brown University and UC Berkeley University, and has written for several publications, including La Nación and American Quarterly. As Lagos put it during the event, “The presidency is one thing; there are many things to do beyond just being a president.” There can be no doubt that Lagos has definitely taken this mantra to heart.
As the event went on, Lagos engaged with junior and senior staff from the Dialogue on the issues that the Dialogue has focused on researching and advocating for over the past years. The former president expounded his views on China’s role in Chile and Latin America more broadly, the development and implementation of higher quality education, and ways in which democracy can be refined in Latin America, taking as an example Uruguay’s experiments with plebiscites in issues such as gay marriage and marijuana legalization. The rising climate change crisis also featured centrally in the group’s discussion about Chile and Latin America’s future.
Lagos hit upon one theme in particular that impressed many attendees. The challenges facing Latin America, the United States, and even Europe, according to the former president, are very similar; there’s overlap across the three blocks in regards to immigration, inequality, education, economic growth, wage stagnation, and the unevenness of development stemming from globalization. As Lagos sees it, these issues create common ground for these regions to work and learn from one another going into the 21st century.
