The center-left opposition of Chile he failed in his attempt to obtain the official votes he needed to approve by 2/3 in the Senate a political trial to remove the president Sebastián Piñera.
The opposition needed 29 of the 43 votes of the Senate to remove the president, but since it only has 24, it was essential that it obtain five votes from the center-right ruling party, which it could not achieve.
The failure of the impeachment against Piñera was expected because it was highly unlikely that five government officials would approve action against the president, whom the opposition accuses of favoring the sale of a family property during his first term.
The crucial session comes just five days after Chileans go to the polls to elect a president for the 2022-2026 term. At the end of his term on March 11, 2022, Piñera will deliver the symbols of power to the winner of the presidential elections.
The president remains in office after the admission of impeachment by the Chamber of Deputies a week ago, and is only prohibited from leaving Chile. When the rejection of the impeachment is formalized, its roots will be lifted.
The charges against him are “openly violating the constitution and laws” and “seriously compromising the honor of the nation” and will be voted on separately.
The vote that sealed the fall of the impeachment against Piñera, which prevented the opposition from obtaining the five official votes, was from the conservative senator Luz Ebensperger, who rejected the two accusations. The legislator said that it is not enough to make an accusation, “there is to try it ”.
Senator Isabel Allende, daughter of former socialist president Salvador Allende, who was overthrown by the military in 1973, was the eighth to speak before the plenary session and supported both positions, after stating that “presidents must finish their terms, but this is a different case. ”.
Some senators did not use their time, while the official Juan José Ossandón was the only one who has abstained so far. He stated that in the accusation against Piñera “I found myself only with presumptions.”
He added that “I am not to measure intentions, but to analyze facts. In my opinion, the prosecution has no probative support ”. Ossandón has maintained multiple differences with the president, in public and private.
The Senate will sit until the impeachment is voted by all the legislators.
The session started early Tuesday with the intervention of three accusing deputies on the grounds that led the Chamber of Deputies to admit the trial a week ago by 78 votes in favor, 68 against and three abstentions, and continued with the presentation of the Piñera’s discharges through his lawyer.
The deputies said that Piñera favored the sale of a family mining and port project, agreed in a tax haven to avoid taxes, affecting the principle of probity and that the prestige of Chile was seriously damaged.
Defense attorney Jorge Gálvez alleged that Piñera “enjoys judicially established innocence” after a 2017 judicial inquiry that included a review of 1,800 emails, which dismissed him after concluding that he did not intervene or use privileged information in the 2010 transaction.
He added that the sale of the family business was made by a company in which the ruler’s children had a “non-controlling” stake, that the facts are prescribed and that Piñera learned of the transaction after the end of his term in 2014. The constitution establishes that a ruler can be politically prosecuted during his term and up to six months after the end of his term.
The accusation was presented in October by 16 opposition deputies after becoming acquainted with the Pandora Papers, an international journalistic investigation about negotiated in tax havens that included a December 2010 contract on the sale of a mining and port business of their children that conditioned one of the payments to which the zone in which the company would be installed was not declared of exclusion, park or national reserve. Four months earlier Piñera relocated a thermoelectric plant that would be built in the same place.
For the same facts, the National Prosecutor’s Office opened a criminal investigation to investigate whether the revelations of the Pandora Papers “could reverse crime characters” related to bribery, bribery or tax offenses.
This is the second trial that Piñera faces during his second term (2018-2022). The first was at the end of 2019 and was not processed because it did not meet the necessary requirements, according to the majority of the deputies.
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