I took office as Minister of Mining in December 1980 with one overriding mission: to open Chile’s most strategic economic sector to private initiative and investment.

 

The sector had been effectively sealed off – first by Salvador Allende’s 1971 constitutional amendment and then, to almost universal astonishment, by the retention of that same statist wording in the new Constitution approved in September 1980.

 

This special edition of “Economía y Sociedad” recounts how we resolved what had appeared an insoluble problem.

 

The solution to the “mining drama” arrived on 1 December 1981 with the enactment of the Organic Constitutional Law on Mining Concessions (Law 18.097), universally known ever since simply as the Mining Law. At its heart, the Mining Law is a statute about property rights – the bedrock of freedom – and it was forged in the urgent necessity of restoring those rights in the single most vital domain of the Chilean economy.

 

No sooner had the law taken effect than, exploiting the severe 1982–83 recession, Christian Democrat politicians unleashed a ferocious campaign against it. The demagoguery knew no bounds: “The Mining Law is a crime that history will never forgive. It is worse than handing Patagonia over to the Argentines” (Enrique Krauss, “La Tercera”, 8 September 1983); “It is the greatest crime against Chile since O’Higgins” (Radomiro Tomic, “Hoy”, 6 September 1983).

 

In the 1990s Margaret Thatcher liked to say that the duty of her Conservative Party was to remain in office “until the opposition comes to its senses and becomes fit to govern.” Imagine a premature return to democracy in Chile in 1983 with that cohort in charge. The entire project of a prosperous and free Chile would have been stillborn. The democratic timetable embedded in the 1980 Constitution averted that disaster and bought the time required for the reforms to take root (see my book “A House of Freedoms: How We Built a Madisonian Democracy in Chile”, 2025).

 

From the moment the 1981 Mining Law entered into force, Chile ignited a rocket of private mining investment and production that accounts for a substantial share of the country’s growth and development over the past 45 years.

 

The epic story of the Mining Law teaches a simple yet profound lesson: the reforms that have made Chile great had to be carried through, come hell or high water.