The president of Chile, Gabriel Boric, made this Tuesday a profound reform to his cabinet that affected relevant figures. Among them the Ministers of the Interior, Izkia Siches; of the presidency, Giorgio Jackson, and the political committee, the nucleus in which the relevant decisions are made in the Palacio de La Moneda.
The restructuring of the cabinet, which turns to the center left, is the first in his almost six months in office. It comes two days following the overwhelming triumph of rejection in the plebiscite to change the Constitution and takes place amid pressure from the opposition and tensions within the left-wing coalition on which Boric relies.
The president appointed Carolina Tohá, daughter of Jose Tohá, first interior minister in the government of the ousted president Salvador Allende, as the new interior minister. She is also one of the men retaliated once morest and imprisoned by the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet and also a member of the centrist Party for Democracy.
As Minister of the Presidency, the President chose Ana Lya Uriarte, a woman from the Socialist Party with a broad career and political experience.
Jackson, one of the men closest to the president, a partner in the student protests, remained as Minister of Social Development and Family. While she joins the epidemiologist Ximena Aguilera as the new Minister of Health.
Diego Pardow, a member of Social Convergence, the same party as the president, also came to the Executive as Minister of Energy. And Silvia Díaz, an independent close to the Party for Democracy, who becomes the first Minister of Science in the history of Chile.
Controversy in the Undersecretariat
The announcement of the changes and the ceremony of assumption of the same was delayed more than an hour due to, Apparently, because of the controversy that sparked the appointment as Undersecretary of the Interior of former student leader and member of the Communist Party, Nicolás Cataldo, who became the shortest Undersecretary in Chilean history.
???? NOW | The new Undersecretary of the Interior, Nicolás Cataldo (PC), deletes tweets once morest Carabineros.
???? Join the live signal: https://t.co/zjY348QeGO #NoticiasExpressCNN pic.twitter.com/Rv6rJ1mwUv
— CNN Chile (@CNNChile) September 6, 2022
Shortly following the news broke, members of the opposition and the local newspaper Third rescued from social networks, mainly Twitter, Cataldo’s messages in 2011 in which he harshly criticized the military and accused them of infiltrate the protests, torture and exceed their powers.
One of the most critical of the appointment was the former Minister of Education, Marcela Cubillos, who assured that “If that is true, the government has decided to laugh in the face of the victims of violence and of the southern macrozone”in relation to the conflict in Araucanía.
The dismissal of Nicolás Cataldo was confirmed
Manuel Monsalve, Undersecretary of the Interior, who in all the pools sounded like the new Minister of the Presidency, acted as a notary, with which the dismissal of Cataldo and the permanence of Monsalve were confirmed at the Undersecretary of the Interior.
Cataldo, professor of History and Social Sciences at the University of Valparaíso, He was Undersecretary of Education. He was a student leader, joining the Federation of Students of the University of Valparaíso, a member of the Communist Party since 1998, specializing in the design of public policies and legislative processing, working in public administration, both at the central and local levels.
In the midst of a security crisis in our country, President Boric appoints Nicolás Cataldo, a member of the Communist Party, as Undersecretary of the Interior????????♀️ pic.twitter.com/xiZT9X7ofJ
– Francisca Ilabaca ???????? (@fran_ilabaca) September 6, 2022
Between 2015 and 2018, he worked in the legislative team of the Ministry of Education, getting involved in the processing of bills related to the creation of the Teacher Professional Development System, New Public Education, Higher Education, teacher retirement incentive laws and the statute of the Educational Assistants, initiatives that were part of the Educational Reform, explained the statement.
“Ascend to greater responsibility”
According to the statement released by the Palacio de La Moneda minutes before the president announced his profound change of cabinet, Cataldo thus leaves the Undersecretary of Education, where he was, to “ascend to greater responsibility.”
The restructuring of the cabinet, which had been planned for weeks, accelerated this Sunday following the overwhelming victory of the rejection in the mandatory plebiscite on the new text of the Constitution proposed by the criticized constituent commission.
