Earthquakes never come at a good time, but Chile’s catastrophic earthquake of last Saturday picked a particularly bad time because a political earthquake was already going on in the country.

Chile is in an interregnum between the governing-but-rejected center-left Concertación that groups four political parties and has run the country for the last 20 years, and the center-right Coalition for Progress that will take power, under President elect Sebastián Piñera, on March 11.

The Concertación and the Coalition haven’t been able to stay out of each other’s way. When Piñera suggested that his incoming ministers collaborate with current President Michelle Bachelet’s ministers in responding to the earthquake emergency the country faces, he was told that the Concertación was going to stay in full authority till the last minute of its mandate.

When the Coalition’s leader in the decimated city of Concepción, Mayor Jacqueline van Rysselberghe, pointed out some of the tragic mistakes the Bachelet administration has made in the quake’s aftermath (see Santiago Times, March 2, 2010), the Coalition’s incoming interior minister, Rodrigo Hinzpeter, jumped to Bachelet’s defense. “It’s not the time to criticize and point out what could have been done better,” he said. “What we’ve got to do now is join with the administration, collaborate with it, and encourage the Chilean people to support it.”

In an editorial, Tuesday’s Washington Post criticized Bachelet, as van Rysselberghe did, for not having declared a state of emergency in the hardest-hit areas and immediately sent the army to prevent looting, and for suggesting that Chile didn’t need any international help in dealing with the earthquake’s aftermath.

But the truth no one likes to admit is that the Chilean government is so Santiago centered that few people in the capital, which suffered little damage compared with parts of the South, realized how serious the earthquake had been until the damage began being shown on TV. This may be the first national disaster in a country advanced enough to have one TV per family and one videocamera for every 20 (I’m guessing) families. The TVs and cameras have changed Chilean history: made the country’s leaders realize what the worst-off commoners were suffering.

Bachelet’s and Piñera’s reactions were the same: to admit on Sunday that the earthquake was much worse than it had seemed on Saturday. As Piñera said, “This calamity is much deeper, much more damaging and much more serious than we had thought.”

There may be another reason that the Concertación wanted to downplay the earthquake.

It’s recently come to light that the current, much praised finance minister, Andrés Velasco, has presided over an unpredicted 2009 fiscal deficit of 4.5 of GNP. The deficit is largely due to the government’s have spent 3 percent more than planned in the last quarter of 2009. The extra money was spent, as the business daily Estrategia put it, “in an election context—fertile ground for spending as much as possible on the greasy engine of propaganda.”

The Concertación may have hoped to escape the problems the earthquake caused on the cheap. Alas, that’s not going to be possible. The country will be paying for this tragedy for years.

Read more here.