Impeachment to remove Piñera faces a long day in the Senate

The impeachment trial that could end in the dismissal of the president of Chile, Sebastián Piñera, faces his last day in the Senate on Tuesday with an unprecedented vote that could last until early Wednesday morning.

At 9 a.m. (local time), the High camera began to analyze the accusation against the president, initiated by alleged irregularities in the sale in the British Virgin Islands of a controversial mining project at the beginning of his first term, a scandal revealed in the Pandora papers investigation.

During the morning, a shortlist of deputies representing the Low camera, a body that last week approved historically with fair votes (78 out of 155) to continue the impeachment trial, and later Piñera’s lawyer, Jorge Gálvez, will intervene.

In the afternoon the final vote will begin, in which each of the 47 senators will have 15 minutes to argue, so it is expected that the day can be extended until early Wednesday morning.

In the previous session, which took place in the Low camera, the parliamentarians were active for around 22 hours and without great pauses, in part due to the filibustering promoted by an opposition deputy who spoke for 15 hours in a row to defend the “impeachment.”

It is about the impeachment against a president who has advanced the most in the country’s history, although experts estimate that it will be difficult for him to bypass the Senate, where he needs a two-thirds quorum to prosper and the opposition only has 24 votes.

The origin of the accusation, promoted by the opposition, lies in the alleged irregularities in the sale of Minera Dominga -of which the Piñera family was the main shareholder-, in the British Virgin Islands, just nine months after the president assumed the position in his first term (2010-2014).

As revealed by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ), the project was sold to the businessman and family friend Carlos Alberto Délano for US $ 152 million, US $ 138 million of which materialized in the tax haven.

The president, one of the greatest fortunes of Chile, has maintained in public appearances to have separated from its businesses through blind trusts in 2009 and that what was revealed in Pandora’s papers was already investigated and dismissed in 2017.

The political trial takes place during the last months of the mandate of Pinera, who will leave office in March, and just a few days before the presidential elections on November 21, the most momentous and uncertain elections in the country’s recent history.

This is the second attempt to remove him, after the November 2019 attempt for alleged human rights violations amid massive protests against inequality, the most serious since the end of the dictatorship.