I have been living and working here in Chile for the last 11 years. From my perspective, the biggest obstacle is the shaky, scrabbling middle class (to which I belong). The class separation here is rather pronounced. There's the rich class, which consists of a small share of the society which concentrates obscene wealth (compared to the rest) and is attainable almost exclusively through birth or marriage. Then there's the poor class, which is full of people with scarce resources; they excel at poverty because there's little or no "credit culture" (or whatever it's properly called) here, so they live in debt.

The rest of us belong to the middle class and are being kept on our toes, lest we suddenly join the poor. Any bill that gets passed usually favors either the poor or the rich. If you default on your debt or anything like that, your name and info will end up in Dicom (the local Equifax), which is often enough to bury your prospects of employment indefinitely, even after you've paid off your debt and normalized your situation.

So you see, that's where the fear of failure comes from: if you have a stable, well-paid job, there's not much incentive to risk it for a startup.