The Chilean Chamber of Deputies approves the impeachment of Piñera

The Chilean Chamber of Deputies approved this Tuesday to carry out a political trial to dismiss the country’s president, the conservative Sebastián Piñera, for alleged irregularities in the sale of a controversial mining project.

After a marathon parliamentary session of almost 24 hours, the deputies decided by 78 votes in favor, 67 against and 3 abstentions that the constitutional accusation advance to the Senate, the body that will be in charge of judging the president for the scandal revealed in the investigation. Pandora papers.

The opposition needed 78 of the 155 seats to approve the accusation that it presented on October 13 and in which it accused the president of having lacked the principle of “probity” and “seriously compromising the honor of the Nation.”

“I hope that this chamber will approve the constitutional accusation, otherwise (…) Chile will judge those who are allowing this impunity in the country”, Assured the deputy in charge of presenting the arguments in favor of the impeachment, the socialist Jaime Naranjo, at the end of his very long speech.

No telematic vote

Naranjo gave a speech lasting more than 15 hours to allow MP Giorgio Jackson, of the leftist Frente Amplio, to end his quarantine and be able to go to vote.

“This was a gesture of political solidarity. It is good at all times to teach, help and support the younger generations ”, said the veteran parliamentarian, 70 years old.

Jackson was confined until 00:00 local time on Tuesday for being close contact with presidential candidate Gabriel Boric, infected with covid-19 last week.

The telematic vote, which was in force during the toughest months of the pandemic, was not enabled on this occasion because the state of exception no longer governs, so Jackson’s presence in the hemicycle was essential.

The presence of the Christian Democrat deputy Jorge Sabag, who in the afternoon had presented some physical discomfort, delayed his arrival from the southern city of Chillán to the Lower House in Valparaíso.

The strategy chosen by the opposition to delay the vote, strongly criticized by the ruling party, is known as parliamentary filibustering and is used in different countries around the world, including the United States.

Final stretch of the campaign

The impeachment against the president will be discussed in the Senate – where a higher two-thirds quorum is required – just days before he Chile celebrate on November 21 the most momentous and uncertain elections in its recent history in which precisely the successor of Pinera.

The Pandora Papers revealed alleged irregularities in the sale of Minera Dominga by a company owned by the children of Pinera in the British Virgin Islands to a close friend of the presidential family, just nine months after he took office for his first non-consecutive term (2010-2014).

Pinera, one of the largest fortunes in Chile, defends that it disengaged from its businesses through blind trusts in 2009 and that what was disclosed was already dismissed in 2017.

“With what we have experienced today and the way in which the accusation was prepared, improvised for the purpose of placing its discussion a few days before an election, how can we not understand that politics is an activity that has a bad reputation?”said the president’s lawyer, Jorge Gálvez, who spoke for more than six hours in the hemicycle.

The impeachment trial, which a parliamentary commission said on Friday was inadmissible in a non-binding report, runs alongside an investigation in the Public Ministry for possible tax and bribery crimes in the same operation.

This is the second attempt to prosecute Piñera politically, after the failed attempt in November 2019 for alleged human rights violations in the midst of the social outbreak, the most serious protests since the end of the dictatorship.

Since the return to democracy in 1990, in Chile all the presidents have finished their term.