THOUSANDS of miles away from the distressing theatre of war in Europe, a starkly different drama is unfolding in a southwestern strip of Latin America.
The curtain rose in Chile last Friday on what promises to be a new era with Gabriel Boric’s inauguration as president, while an elected constitutional convention is rewriting the nation’s basic law to replace the magna carta thrust upon it in 1980 by the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
That was six years before Boric was born, and he was only two when 56 per cent of his compatriots rejected Pinochet’s rule in a momentous referendum. Last December, an almost identical proportion of voters propelled him into the presidency — in a resounding rejection of the alternative represented by Sebastian Kast, the son of a card-carrying Nazi who waxed nostalgic about the Pinochet regime.
Boric, a rookie parliamentarian who had acquired a profile as a leading student activist a decade ago, was initially dismissed as an upstart during last year’s presidential campaign. But after the traditional centre-left and centre-right, the flag-bearers of Chile’s incomplete transition to democratic rule since 1990, were effectively sidelined by a populace hungry for change, he was the only meaningful challenger to Kast left standing.
Regime change in Chile sets a hopeful example.
The latter edged him out in the first round of polling in November, but Boric found it easier than his rival to appeal to the middle ground — and, crucially, succeeded in inspiring a substantially larger turnout for the second round. He emerged from the fray with the largest number of votes any Chilean candidate had ever won — and, at 35, is the country’s youngest president.
When he unveiled his cabinet in January, women occupied 14 of the 24 slots. They include Maya Fernández as defence minister; the symbolism is inescapable: she happens to be the granddaughter of Salvador Allende, the democratically elected socialist president overthrown in Pinochet’s 1973 military coup less than two years after Maya was born.
The interior minister, Izkia Siches, is a former head of the national medical union. Climate scientist Maisa Rojas is the environment minister. UNDP veteran Marcela Ríos becomes the justice minister. And at 32, the youngest cabinet minister is Antonia Orellana, in charge of women and gender equality.
The administration includes two of Boric’s key comrades from his student activism days: his campaign adviser Giorgio Jackson is now general secretary of the presidency, and the government spokesperson is none other than Camila Vallejo. The latter achieved international prominence as an activist as a secondary school student in the noughties, preceded Boric as head of the University of Chile’s student federation, and has served two terms in parliament as a member of the Communist Party.
The cabinet’s average age is 49, though a key older member is Finance Minister Mario Marcel, a Cambridge graduate and former Socialist Party politician who was hitherto head of Chile’s central bank.
Boric’s idealism is tempered with pragmatism, which may be a wise compromise. A great deal will depend, however, on whether the constituencies he has attracted through articulating his enthusiasm for feminism, environmentalism and indigenous rights continue to back him in the event of some, hopefully small, concessions to the status quo.
There are obviously many rivers to cross, and in some cases the bridges have yet to be built. But it was gratifying to find a Chilean writer reminiscing this week that when he attended the inauguration of the first post-Pinochet president in 1990, “I knew everybody in [Patricio] Aylwin’s cabinet personally”. He goes on: “I am delighted to report that I have not met even one of … Boric’s ministers, though I do know some of their parents and grandparents. This is resounding and wonderful proof of a true changing of the guard.”
Absolutely. And a great many countries could do with this kind of reinvigoration — including Pakistan and India, and not least the US, Russia, and perhaps even China. The US, in particular, has much to learn from the democratic process in Chile, which it helped to thwart half a century ago.
Kast, despite his proto-Bolsonaro image, was gracious in acknowledging his defeat. And the conservative incumbent, Sebastián Piñera — the main target of Boric and Vallejo’s ire in his first term, and of the October 2019 uprising that put a curse on his second term — passed on his presidential sash with a huge smile on his face.
In last year’s campaign, Boric appropriated a popular slogan from 2019 declaring that the birthplace of neoliberalism — a reasonably accurate description of Chile in the mid-1970s, courtesy of the Milton Friedman-spawned ‘Chicago boys’ — would also be its burial ground. That’s a tall order, but it’s not beyond reach.
The home that Boric has picked for his first presidential term, in Santiago’s Barrio Yungay, sits between streets named Freedom and Hope. Amen to both.
Published in Dawn, March 16th, 2022
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