Leadership Quote by Ricardo Lagos

“Poverty is the frontier we have to be able to cross” borrows the romance of exploration to name a political obligation. A frontier isn’t just a line on a map; it’s a contested threshold, a place where rules change, risk concentrates, and the future gets negotiated. Ricardo Lagos, speaking as a center-left statesman in post-dictatorship Chile, turns poverty from an individual misfortune into a national boundary problem: something structural that blocks movement, opportunity, and citizenship itself.

The phrasing matters. “We” is a deliberate collectivizing move, refusing the market-friendly story that people simply “rise” through grit. It also binds the speaker to the promise: Lagos isn’t diagnosing from a distance; he’s drafting a mandate. “Have to be able to” is political realism in miniature. It signals that crossing isn’t automatic, and it isn’t purely moral willpower; it requires capacity - institutions, policy, and sustained investment. Think education, health access, labor protections, and an economy that distributes gains beyond headline growth.

There’s subtext, too, in choosing “frontier” over “problem.” Frontiers invite ambition, but they also imply winners and losers, insiders and outsiders. Lagos is quietly reframing poverty as a barrier that keeps part of the population on the wrong side of modernity, even as Chile’s macroeconomic success story was being marketed abroad. The line works because it sounds optimistic without being naïve: it carries the urgency of a border crossing, and the accountability of a shared journey, in a region long scarred by inequality dressed up as inevitability.