Chile Is Making History—Again

John Dinges

On March 11, thirty-six-year-old Gabriel Boric—the youngest Chilean president ever to have been elected—took office in an environment of enormous expectation and almost revolutionary optimism.

A half century ago, Chile blazed a path with the election of Salvador Allende, a socialist who promised that his government would elevate peasants and workers to the level of dignity and prosperity long denied them by Chile’s entrenched aristocracy and conservative business class. It was to be socialism, but with democracy and a rollicking free press—a revolution, Allende often said, with empanadas and red wine.

But the euphoria of that period, shared by progressives around the world, ended in tragedy. Allende’s coalition was riven by internal divisions, and his economic plans were no match for the international embargoes and internal obstacles delivered by the business class. In 1973, Chile’s military, encouraged by the United States, overthrew Allende in a violent coup d’etat, bringing about the seventeen-year dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, infamous for massive human rights abuses and thousands of deaths and disappearances.

The worst of the repression landed on the unionized workers and farmers who had trusted that a leftist political movement would be able to overcome the entrenched power of the conservative elite. The dictatorship finally ended and was replaced by an uneven democracy beginning in 1990.

Now, newly inaugurated President Boric wants the Chilean people to try again, to trust once more that they can succeed where past progressive movements failed. He calls for including a broader range of disadvantaged groups and identities—working people, women, seniors, Indigenous peoples, students, and “discriminated genders.”

Boric knows the history, sadness, humiliation, and anger associated with the fall of Allende. He embraced it on his first day in office.

In his inaugural speech, Boric addressed the crowd from a window in the Moneda presidential palace overlooking Constitution Square, paraphrasing Allende’s final words broadcast on radio moments before the military stormed the presidential palace.

“Today we need to speak, tomorrow, all together, we have to get to work,” he told the gathering. “And as Salvador Allende predicted almost fifty years ago, we are once again opening the grand avenues where free men—free men and free women will go forward to build a better society.”

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I, a much too idealistic American living in Chile, was there that terrible day in 1973, listening to Allende on my transistor radio and recording it on my tape recorder. He said he had faith in Chile, and that “other men will overcome this dark and bitter moment.”

Has this moment come at last?

Boric clearly sees his movement grasping the torch handed to the future by Allende. He harkens from Punta Arenas, the southernmost major city in this long and narrow country facing the Pacific Ocean and pointing at Antarctica. He comes from a family of nineteenth century immigrants from Croatia. His father and grandfather had middle management jobs in the oil industry, making him the only Chilean president to come from an authentically middle class background.

Boric earned his political chops organizing students in his high school and then at the University of Chile, where he studied law but never earned a degree. He became one of the most visible figures in a mass student movement, demanding better school funding and free university tuition. In 2019, the movement grew to a national uprising that carried out protests in cities all over the country, including filling Santiago’s main Alameda Avenue with upwards of a million people.

The movement held weekly protests in a major plaza in central Santiago, re-christening it “Dignity Plaza.” When Boric and other movement leaders organized a new political party, aiming at the presidency, they called the party Apruebo Dignidad, or “Approve Dignity.”

Dignity defines the society Boric is trying to build. “Together we will construct the change toward a country of justice and dignity,” he said in his inaugural address, adding, “Dignity, what a beautiful word.” It is not just sentiment, but a distinguishing value.

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In the recent election, Boric’s rightwing opponent, José Antonio Kast, attempted to rehabilitate the image of Pinochet and his dictatorship, saying he would impose order, end the evolution away from traditional cultural values, and double down on neoliberalism as a formula for growth.

Boric won in what passes for a landslide in Chile: 55 percent in a runoff against Kast. The traditional center-left parties, while not part of the Boric coalition, still gave their support. And Boric named leaders from those parties to major cabinet positions, including Mario Marcel, a Socialist, as Finance Minister. Marcel earned wide respect—from left, right, and center—in his former post as president of Chile’s Central Bank.

Boric is described as further to the left than those parties. Indeed, the small but well organized Communist Party is a critical ally in the Apruebo Dignidad coalition, and Boric’s spokesperson, Camila Vallejos, is a Communist.

But Boric seldom talks about socialism, even though his programs call for massive new spending on education, health, and social security. The word does not appear in his inaugural address. He has called for greater state control of copper mining—Chile’s main source of wealth, which is already partly state owned. But he does not—in contrast to Allende’s statist model—call for state ownership of industry and major financial institutions.

Instead, he promises to represent “all Chileans,” work with the opposition, listen to their criticisms, and guarantee their freedom and right to dissent. That will soon be tested, as the first item on his legislative agenda is to raise taxes, in a country with some of the lowest tax rates and least amount of tax enforcement for the wealthy in all of Latin America.

Dignity bespeaks guaranteeing a rightful place in society for LGBTQ+ people, for Indigenous peoples who comprise about 10 percent of the population, and for women. His cabinet has a majority of women, the first time that has happened in Latin America.

A major challenge for Boric will be how to intervene in the process of drawing up a new constitution. The same social movement that brought Boric to the presidency voted even more overwhelmingly last year to replace the Pinochet-era constitution, but the process has not been going well. Approval of all provisions requires a two-thirds vote of all 155 elected members. Last week, for example, a set of fifty provisions dealing with private property, expropriations, and residual rights to Indigenous lands were all rejected, some not even gaining a simple majority.

The new president has no official role in the process, except to ensure its funding. But there is growing consensus that Boric’s leadership is urgently needed to right the ship before it founders.

The newspaper El Mercurio, a powerful voice for the business elites and conservative cultural values, did not express opposition in its editorial on the inauguration, but it did challenge Boric to use his influence in the Constitutional Convention to “make it possible for the varying political and cultural sensibilities to feel welcomed by [what is written]. If that does not occur, the constitutional process will have been a failure and the image of the new coalition that has arrived in power will be weakened.”

Boric indicates that he welcomes this kind of “constructive criticism.”

I met with Senator Isabel Allende, late-president Allende’s daughter, who still lives in the home on Guardia Vieja Street where her father raised her. She says Boric had made a very visible demonstration of his respect and admiration for Allende and his legacy. As he approached the presidential palace his first day, before giving his address, Boric stopped in front of a statue of Allende just outside the building. He paused with his hand over his heart and bowed his head slightly in a show of respect, before going into the building to address the crowd some hours later from the window that Allende had used so many times.

“Of course the tears flowed,” she says, “It was tremendously emotional to see him make that gesture, so full of symbolism, to raise up the figure [of Allende].”

She adds, “I am allowing myself the pleasure of feeling great excitement and hope, again.”

(John Dinges is a former managing editor of NPR News and professor of journalism at Columbia University. Courtesy: The Progressive Magazine. The Progressive Magazine is an American magazine and website of politics, culture and progressivism with a left-leaning perspective.)

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Boric’s Challenge: Laying Chile’s Ghosts to Rest

Ariel Dorfman

When 36-year-old Gabriel Boric was sworn in on Friday as the youngest president in Chilean history he immediately faced the need to resolve what is paradoxically the oldest problem this Andean nation has been enduring since before its independence in 1810.

Back in 1796, José Cos de Iriberri, a Chilean merchant, praised “the opulence and richness” of the land, going on to lament: “Who would think that in the midst of such abundance there would be such a scant population groaning under the heavy yoke of poverty, misery and vice.”

Of course, the ghost of Iriberri (who inhabited a Spanish province of less than a million souls), would not recognize contemporary Chile, a nation of 20 million people, groaning, rather, under the yoke of typical 21st-century troubles. And yet he might observe that inequality, injustice and corruption continue to haunt his native land. Now, though, there is a chance that this could change.

Boric was elected because he embodied a vast movement of citizens who took to the streets in October 2019 demanding a new political system, a different set of economic priorities and, above all, dignity for the underprivileged: a series of drastic measures that, if enacted, could soon make Iriberri’s melancholy statement obsolete.

The success of Boric’s radical agenda will depend on several factors.

Foremost, in a country racked by the pandemic and social unrest, he will need to increase taxes on the super-rich and major corporations – especially in the mining sector – to finance indispensable reforms in health, education and pension plans, a higher minimum wage and aggressive ecological policies, as well as the empowerment of women and regional governance.

To receive this revenue Boric’s administration will have to negotiate with a Congress where his coalition is in a minority. Moderating some of the more ambitious goals might lead to some agreements but could also disappoint – and vocally mobilize – many of his agitated followers: they voted for a leader who vowed to bury neoliberalism and its discontents. At any rate, whatever solution is reached will take many months of legislation and compromises, always under pressure from potential protestors.

A second series of circumstances will require immediate attention. A migration crisis in the far north of the country, overrun with undocumented workers from all over Latin America, has created a backlash of anti-migrant sentiment that has led to blockages by truckers. If repeated, these could paralyse significant areas of the economy, and Boric’s own stance of welcoming his Latin American brothers and sisters might soon be put to the test.

In the south of the country, the exigencies of long-neglected and despised indigenous groups have generated a fertile terrain for violence. The new president is determined to reject his right-wing predecessor’s embrace of militarization and open a peaceful dialogue with all parties, but events on the ground may not give him much breathing space.

A similar dilemma awaits him as his government copes with rising crime and narcotrafficking, while simultaneously trying to retrain a recalcitrant police force that has systematically brutalized the young and the poor.

The major concern of the incoming administration, however, is that it will take over the reins of government at the very moment when a constitutional convention – created to channel the demands of militant activists – is writing a new ‘Magna Carta’ to replace the fraudulent one pushed through by dictator Augusto Pinochet in 1980, which blocked the very reforms that Boric now wants to institute.

Most of the 154 delegates to the convention share Boric’s convictions – ecological, feminist, egalitarian, profoundly participatory, with great respect for indigenous beliefs; only 37 are conservatives. However, there are signs of tension between a government that has to deal with the everyday complications of everyday people and reach agreements with adversaries, and a convention that is dreaming of a land entirely free of exploitation, where nature reigns supreme and multiculturalism is triumphant.

The one thing that Boric cannot afford is that voters refuse to approve the new constitution in the referendum that will vote on it in September. That’s an unlikely possibility for now, but with powerful reactionary forces rampaging against the convention, it could leave the new government tied to old laws that have obstructed significant challenges to the status quo in the past.

Despite all these traps and dilemmas, I am optimistic about the future.

I am delighted to report that I have not met even one of the members of Boric’s ministers

Thirty-two years ago, on 11 March 1990, I was an official guest at the inauguration of President Patricio Aylwin, who was taking over from Augusto Pinochet after 17 years of terror. At that ceremony, I knew everybody in Aylwin’s cabinet personally, as well the heads of the senate and the chamber of deputies.

I am delighted to report that I have not met even one of the members of Boric’s ministers, more than half of whom are female – though I do know some of their parents and grandparents. This is resounding and wonderful proof of a true changing of the guard. The time seems ripe for this cohort of talented millennials – starting with the charismatic, tattooed, tieless Boric himself – to finally attack the long-standing predicament of our unfortunate homeland.

It is not merely that they come to power with the backing of a fired-up citizenry that is ready to rebel again if its mandates are not answered: these young politicians form part of the resurgence of a new Left across Latin America, with possible victories in Brazil and Colombia later this year that would confirm this tendency. Despite the global crisis created by the invasion of Ukraine, Boric faces a favorable international panorama, without the kind of hostility – not to mention blatant interventionism – from the US that has doomed previous efforts at radical makeovers.

Boric represents, moreover, a welcome libertarian streak on the Left, opposing authoritarianism in whatever guise: he has criticized Cuba’s repression of dissidents and denounced pseudo-Sandinista Daniel Ortega as a dictator. In this he breaks with a number of Latin America’s more orthodox revolutionaries, including some of his own Communist allies in Chile. It matters to understand that the foundational experience of Boric’s generation was forged, not in the struggle against a dictatorship, but in opposition to democratic governments, demanding that they live up to the promise of democracy and serve the needs of the majority of its citizens rather than a small, powerful, privileged elite.

A lot rides on Boric’s ability to advance towards radical changes and environmental justice through peaceful means. The world – especially the young – needs an inspiring, foundational model that offers hope in democracy at a time when we are being bombarded by a relentless cascade of despairing news.

Many, here and abroad, will be watching as Gabriel Boric opens a new era in Chile’s history.

I like to imagine that, wishing him well, along with so many among the living, are also generations of the dead who came before and were unable to solve the perennial misdevelopment that still haunts us. Perhaps the ghost of José Cos de Iriberri, wherever he may be, is smiling as he muses that, maybe this time, after more than 200 years, his compatriots will get it right; maybe he will finally be able to rest in peace because his country has the government it deserves.

(Ariel Dorfman is a Chilean-American novelist, playwright, essayist, academic, and human rights activist; and a distinguished professor emeritus of literature at Duke University, USA. Courtesy: OpenDemocracy. OpenDemocracy is an independent global media organisation that seeks to educate citizens to challenge power and encourage democratic debate across the world.)