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__I have come back to you from thorny uncertainty. I want you as straight as the sword or the road. But you insist on keeping a nook of shadow I do not want.__

Good poets do not always write for their time, but this fragment from Pablo Neruda’s The Question repays some meditation by Chile-watchers.

Chilean history has been, of course, filled with thorny—or shaky, if you prefer a more apt but metaphor—uncertainty. From its earliest modern beginnings, Chilean politics has proceeded in lock step with the country’s motto: Por la razon o la fuerza (“by right or might�), oscillating between both modes of governance, much to the peril of the Chilean people. And, while many of the country’s modern leaders—starting with Bernardo O’Higgins all the way up to Michelle Bachelet—have spearheaded salubrious economic and social initiatives, the nook of shadow persists, and its recent manifestation, under the Bachelet regime, is cause for some concern.

The Economy

Let’s begin with the Chilean , long a of Latin American inspiration. While Chile remains the most competitive economy in Latin America, inflation continues to color economic forecasts. Recovering only recently from a five-year low in 2014, Finance Minister Alberto Arenas was in a Reuters article as saying that the economic “data confirms that the Chilean economy is going to grow around 3 percent� during 2015. Some of this success will require Bachelet to face the economic challenges head-on, from the perspective of the government. Her recent that “it is not enough with what we (the government) do…the private sector must invest and make the economy work. Because we have a budget investments,� sounds odd and somewhat misguided.

The Education System

Last month, in an with Lally Weymouth of the Washington post, Michelle Bachelet, on point of starting her second term as president, was asked how she would ensure access to quality education, one of her platform priorities. Bachelet responded by saying:

It means that from nursery school to university, people will have access � if they have the merit and capacity � to receive a quality education. Lack of money shouldn’t be an obstacle for people who want to be a professional or a technician. I don’t think that capacities and talents are distributed by social patterns. You have intelligent, bright people everywhere. We are losing many students with potential because people who live in a rural village do not have easy access to a good education, and when they try to go to a university, it is more difficult for them.

Judging by the estimated 150,000 students who have been marching through the streets of Santiago under the banner “Chile Decides its Education,� the current administration has not been operating fast enough.

Bachelet, to her credit, has made significant improvements in the scholastic realm, making good on her promise to provide free education between kindergarten and high school. It may be that like Barack Obama, president Bachelet is learning a lesson in prudential rhetoric; sweeping promises are very difficult to backtrack once uttered. A representative came from Aurora Isidora Rozas, a spokeswoman for the coordinating assembly of high school students, who said: "we need to protest against this caste of corrupt politicians and businessmen who are involved and who are not ruling for a majority, and instead they're cooking up the reforms behind four walls." This statement is instructive because it gets at the heart of what most Chileans amalgamate with all of their social and economic problems: corruption.

Corruption

Bachelet has campaigned heavily on fighting corruption, which makes the privileged access her son and daughter-in-law received for a loan used to purchase rural land (afterword developed and sold for a profit of 5 million dollars) the day after Bachelet won the presidency evoke such a visceral reaction from Chileans. Last month, the president anti-corruption measures, noting: “I am asking that the declaration includes all professional and business activities, whether they are remunerated or not, in which a person has participated during the two years previous to having assumed their post� I will be the first to use these new standards to make this known to the nation.� In a sad twist of fate, Bachelet’s anti-corruption measures are not directed solely at her ilk. High-profile members of a private company, Penta Group, and two officials in Chile’s internal revenue service all with ties to the right-wing opposition were placed on preventative on tax fraud, money laundering, and bribery charges. It has also been alleged that, as the Associated Press reported,

Bachelet's daughter-in-law, Natalia Compagnon, received a $10 million loan from Banco de Chile during the 2013 presidential campaign.

Bachelet’s approval rating currently hovers at the level it has ever been. This, alone, should not be her motivating force to set Chile “as straight as the sword or the road.� Rather, president Bachelet should make the difficult choices to set her country on the path to recovery—a path it hitherto had been proceeding very nicely upon.