Tener Pituto

This evening my aunt's friend, Sara, gets a call at about 11.00 pm. A colleague from the elementary school where she works has been hit by a metro bus (he's a cyclist), and he's in critical condition at the nearby hospital. A chain of calls comences to alert the other school colleagues of the news: Tio Jaime is in the hospital.
The message is disseminated, and another issue arises: the medics declined to inform the man's wife of his current condition. Such information is apparently at the doctor's discretion here. So Sara calls a Policeman friend, currently a bodyguard for a minister, to see if he has contacts that could obtain the information from the doctor. He calls back quickly: his contact has been told that it's too late to call - the information office closes at 20.00 hours.

This episode was revealing to me in several ways; it concisely reveals the interdependent nature of Chilean society, uses of time, and additionally the inefficient and nonsensical bureaucracy. For one, the fact that it was appropriate to call colleagues at such an hour to give news about someone in no way related. And everyone Sara called was awake to receive the call. Secondly, the use of the word Tio - uncle - to describe the relationship to the injured colleague. It denotes a familial closeness, immediately designating a relationship between the "niece/nephew" and "uncle."
Lastly, in order to get around the (to me nonsensical) difficulties with finding out the colleagues' medical state, Sara immediately called a friend with contacts in the hospital (or with political clout) to fish for the information. In this case the bureaucracy foils the efforts: the hospital cannot give updates on patients medical state past 20:00 hours. Had the contact she had sought been of a high enough level, this too would likely have been an insignificant obstacle. Sara explains that to get things done here one must have "pituto," that is, connections.