Historic victory

With 99.9 percent of the votes counted, Chile elected progressive Gabriel Boric over right-wing candidate Jose Antonio Kast on Sunday December 19, 2021. Boric won 55.9 percent (4,618,480) of the total votes, leaving Kast trailing with 44.1 percent (3,648,394) as polls closed at 6 pm local time.

The 12-point victory was achieved despite massive public transit interruptions on Sunday, resulting in long lines at bus stops and polling places during an unprecedented heat wave. Left-wing party members accused right-wing current president Sebastian Pinera of electoral interference since poor and working-class neighbourhoods were mostly affected by the transit outages. Still, voters turned out en masse to break a voter participation record with 55 percent of the eligible electorate casting their votes.

Boric will be the youngest Chilean president when he assumes office in March 2022 at the age of 36. His early involvement in politics began ten years ago in 2011, during the student protests when he headed the University of Chile Student Federation (FECH). Pinera was also president of the country at the time, and forcefully opposed the protests, which stemmed from extreme inequities in higher education.

The student protests grew and created alliances with labour and other social movements. Hundreds of thousands of people participated, thousands were arrested, some killed and many injured. In 2013, Boric was elected to parliament, representing his home district of Magallanes and Chilean Antarctic. The protests continued, culminating in a mass uprising in October 2019, when high school students climbed turnstiles and waved passengers into the Santiago metro system after the government hiked fares.

The financial success story that is Chile, based on commodities like copper, does not reach most Chileans. Half of residents earn less than 400,000 Chilean pesos (USD$550) a month. A 2017 United Nations study shows that only 1 percent of Chileans earn 33 percent of the country’s gross national product. The Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) ranks Chile in 2021 as its most unequal member, with inequitable taxation, low female participation in the marketplace and weak public spending on children’s education.

At his acceptance speech on Sunday night, Boric greeted the crowd in Spanish, Aymara, Rapanui and the Mapuche national language Mapudungun. In 2014, he was a member of the government’s Commission on Human Rights and Indigenous Peoples.

Excerpted: ‘Left Wave Continues in Latin America With Historic Victory in Chile’

Courtesy: Commondreams.org