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Gabriel Boric, president of Chile, fulfilled one of his campaign promises regarding the environment. Xinhua photo
Santiago. Gabriel Boric’s first week in the presidency of Chile was a mix between the effort to make differences in style and fulfill campaign promises, at the same time shaken by a reality check regarding the challenge of governing, especially when long-standing mistrust prevails. dates that test the will and perseverance.
It will be recorded in history that, on the second day of the new government, the Minister of the Interior, Izkia Siches, was received with bullets in the vicinity of the indigenous town of Temocuicui, which she sought to enter as proof of the presidential honesty when she says she wants to establish a direct dialogue with the Mapuche people in their territory.
The matter became more entangled when she, despite the seriousness of what happened, decided not to file a criminal complaint for an attack once morest the authority, a sign of the new times; but her subordinate, Undersecretary Manuel Monsalve, said that they were evaluating doing so. Things did not end there, but between the two there was another interlude when she said that at the place of the ambush “there were signs around the demands of Mapuche political prisoners and I think these are part of conversations that we have to have”; which the subordinate contradicted stating that “people are convicted of a crime defined in the Penal Code, from that perspective they are not political prisoners.”
Siches ended her inaugural week infected with coronavirus and therefore in quarantine, which will take her away from the streets and the media, although she continues to exercise and use her social networks.
As if the above were not enough, the week ended with the police repressing at will the demonstrators who meet every Friday in the so-called Plaza Dignidad, in Santiago, calling for the freedom of some 60 “prisoners of the revolt” who are in prisons since 2019 without charges once morest him. That police action unleashed questions to Siches and Boric from the government coalition itself, the Approve Dignity pact.
The other side of the coin, that of things that go well, managed to be present when the president fulfilled one of his commitments to the environmental world: sign the Treaty of Escazú and send it for legislative ratification, just as the first meeting of the Conference of the Parties will take place between April 20 and 22 in Santiago.
The Escazú agreement is “a regional commitment on access to information, public participation and access to justice in environmental matters in Latin America and the Caribbean.”
a ticking time bomb
For political scientist Mauricio Morales, an academic at the University of Talca, the events of the first week revealed that it will be difficult for Boric to reconcile differences within the political coalition that supports him.
“It’s a ticking time bomb because three souls coexist there: the Communist Party, the Broad Front and parties of the former Concertación. They have no consensus regarding what a political prisoner is, nor in the ways of confronting violence in the demonstrations in the streets; additionally, it gave the feeling that the minister made the decision to go to Temocuicui autonomously, without police protection and without assessing the danger,” he says.
In addition to considering that these events can damage citizen confidence in Siches -one of the best evaluated political personalities-, he warns that this should be a warning so that the government does not fall into transforming every political act into a communicational act.
“The minister must understand that an important part of her work is carried out without cameras and without lights and that the Ministry of the Interior is permanently subject to conflict and that more than communication management, what it does is political management,” he stresses.
Morales predicts that it will be “a greater challenge to lead this coalition of three souls” and that this will force Boric to officiate as leader of the government and also of the coalition.
For now, the Pulso Ciudadano survey, conducted on March 18 and 19 and released on Sunday, said that Boric has an approval of 46.5 percent in the way “his government is conducting”, compared to a disapproval of 26 .1 and a 27.4 that “does not know”; while the ministerial cabinet is approved by 37.5 percent versus 27.5 who disapprove.
According to the survey, the country’s main problems continue to be crime (39.1 percent), immigration (29.9), inflation (25.5), drug trafficking (22), pensions (20.2) , health (18.6) and salaries (16.2).
