Geez. It doesn't get more inane.
I read the part about the Times' praise of Chile and laughed. Well, after shaking my head and wondering at their stupidity.
Sometimes pics do better than words. Chile was and still is almost entirely dependent on commodity exports, again, in their case mostly copper. Pinochet certainly did nothing to resolve that dependence by bathing that poor country in blood.
The below compares Chile, Columbia (another RW fave), Argentina (always good for a laugh), and Brazil. Note that the real takeoff in Brazil was under Lula, you can see the massive effect he had on that country. Brazil's latest surge finally took them out of the realm of being a mere commodity exporter.
Just to set the base, this is how they compared up to 1965. Note that Argentina, still considered a major power at that time, had a larger GDP than Brazil:
Since 1965. Argentina, having never moved off its dependence on its large agricultural base, fell way behind Brazil. Chile was never a contender. Ditto Columbia. In Brazil, as I said above, note that the real surge came under Lula (no new cities like Brasilia, no freakin Charter Cities. Social justice, competently administered. That's all):
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