Tim Padgett has an item at Time titled “Chile and Haiti: A Tale of Two Earthquakes” that notes:

The 8.8-magnitude earthquake that hit Chile early on Feb. 27 was 500 times stronger than the 7.0 quake that killed an estimated 200,000 Haitians last month. And yet the number of casualties in Chile appears to be exponentially smaller, with the official death toll still in the hundreds. Far fewer people were rendered homeless than in Haiti, and much of the telephone service in Santiago and parts of central Chile had been restored within five hours.
…
Both Chile and Haiti sit atop large, volatile fault lines. In recent decades, Chile has mandated earthquake-proofing for new structures, requiring that materials like rubber and features like counterweights be built into the architectural designs to allow buildings to bend and sway rather than break during temblors. Haiti, by contrast, lets its buildings rise with little if any input from engineers and plenty of bribes to so-called government inspectors. Structures have scant reinforcement and are often set on weak foundations.

Padgett is right to stress the importance of the rule of law to Chile’s earthquake surviving prowess, and he even note’s Chile’s relative high rank on the global corruption index.

But having the lowlevels of corruption necessary to enforce building codes is just one reason why Chile has fared relatuvely better. A country also needs high living standards and the resources to meet those building codes.

And that is where Chile’s commitment to free market principles like free trade, property rights, and labor freedom have helped Chile become one of the biggest economic success stories in Latin America. In fact, Chile’sommitment to free market policies earned it a #10 overall ranking the 2010 Index of Economic Freedom, the highest degree of economic freedom in the South and Central American/Caribbean.