What can we Expect from Boric? (Interview)

Orinoco Tribune | December 23, 2021

We spoke to Bruno Sommer, founder of El Ciudadano, one of Chile’s leading progressive media outlets. We discussed what Chile and the world can expect from Gabriel Boric and the broad movement that delivered Sunday’s landslide electoral victory.

I imagine there is still a sense of elation on the streets of Chile now! 

Of course, the victory of Boric and his Frente Amplio group is not only a victory for their sector, but for all the social movements that came out to back him. This election was unique, it had the highest rate of participation since the ‘return to democracy’. Boric is the youngest President in history, 35 years old, and received more votes than any other president since the return of democracy. His 55.9% of the vote was 12 points higher than Kast, which gives the program of transformation a better chance at governability. There’s a sense of deep joy among the left, and serious anger among the right. Kast came out to concede defeat, but his supporters are, as we say in here; ‘con un aji en el trasero’ (with a chili pepper up their behind), that is to say, they are furious. This presents a number of opportunities for the future of our country.

Salvador Allende’s Grandson Responds to Boric: The Human Rights Double Standard and ‘Chic’ Leftism

Orinoco Tribune | December 22, 2022

Editorial note: Orinoco Tribune does not publish articles that are over two weeks old, but sometimes we make exceptions. The following note was originally published almost three years ago; however, with the victory of Gabriel Boric in the Chilean presidential race on Sunday, we consider it important to take another look at it. In the midst of the joyous celebrations in Chile for Boric’s win against pinochetista Kast, and perhaps as a response of memory to some who are exaggerating too much about the president-elect to compare him with Salvador Allende, with Pablo Neruda or with other icons of the international left, a text by doctor Pablo Sepúlveda Allende, grandson of Chile’s former President Salvador Allende who was overthrown and assassinated in 1973, has been circulating on social media as well as on some online publications. Said text was an “open letter” in response to statements made by the Frente Amplio deputy—now president-elect—Gabriel Boric, who has repeatedly called on the Chilean left to “condemn the human rights situation” in Cuba, Venezuela, and Nicaragua, all of them Latin American countries with socialist projects. It is worth rereading it, in order to have all the information at hand and not just those which are being amplified by the logical enthusiasm generated by Kast’s defeat.

Doctor Sepúlveda Allende’s open letter to Boric is translated and reproduced below:

Deputy, I dare to respond to you because I see the danger that it represents for important leaders like you, young referents of the “new left” that has emerged in the Frente Amplio, to make simplistic, absurd and misinformed comparisons on issues as delicate as that of human rights.

It is very biased and rude that you equate—without the slightest argument—the supposed “weakening of the basic democratic conditions in Venezuela,” the “permanent restriction of freedoms in Cuba” and “the repression of the Ortega government in Nicaragua” with the proven atrocities of the military dictatorship in Chile, the evident criminal interventionism of the United States around the world, and the State of Israel’s terrorism against the people of Palestine.

World Leaders Celebrate Gabriel Boric’s Victory in Chile

teleSUR | December 20, 2021

President-elect Gabriel Boric, Santiago, Chile, Dec. 19, 2021. | Photo: Twitter/ @ArsenalFlaf

Read more: https://www.telesurenglish.net/news/World-Leaders-Celebrate-Gabriel-Borics-Victory-in-Chile-20211220-0001.html

Chilean High School Students Occupy the Ministry of Education

CHILEAN STUDENTS PROTEST

teleSUR | January 04, 2021

The organized high school students’ union protested the country new neoliberal university entrance exam by protesting and occupying the Ministry of Education. | Photo: Twitter/@PaoladrateleSUR

Carabineros (Chilean police force) arrested nine people, including a cameraman from Chilevisión and CNN.

Student union leaders of the Coordinating Assembly of Secondary Students (ACES) took over the Ministry of Education (Mineduc) in protest of the country’s University Transition Test (PTU).

The incident was recorded on Monday morning when the protesters arrived at the Mineduc headquarters and chained themselves to the front of the building.

Chile: Approval for A New Constitution Wins Massive Mandate

VICTORY OF CHILE’S PEOPLE

teleSUR | October 25, 2020

Chileans go to the National Stadium, where voting tables were set up, to cast their vote in the plebiscite in Santiago, Chile, Oct. 25, 2020 | Photo: EFE/ Alberto Valdes

Chileans today overwhelmingly approved, at the polls, the doing away of the Constitution drafted and approved under the military regime of Augusto Pinochet and gave the green light to the creation of a Constitutional Assembly.