Chile does not have a presidential residence. The elected president ruled out living in the Palace and the apartment he rents in the center was declined.
Where will be the residence of the elected president of Chile, Gabriel Boric, has become a matter of state and national discussion in the country. The 35-year-old leftist leader will assume power on March 11 and until that date it must be defined where he will live with his partner, Irina Karamanos, 32. It is the first time since the return to democracy that a head of state does not have his own house.
Chile is one of the few countries in the region that does not have an official residence, such as the Quinta de Olivos in Argentina, the Palacio de la Alvorada in Brazil and the Palacio de Carondelet in Ecuador and Until now, all the presidents from Salvador Allende (1970-1973) to Sebastián Piñera (2018-2022) have lived in their personal residences. in the communes with greater resources in Santiago.
Boric, who with more than 4.6 million votes is the youngest and most voted president-elect in Chilean history, has been renting since he was 17, when he left his parents’ house in Punta Arenas, in the extreme south of Chile. .
The apartment where he lives in the center of Santiago and the Palacio de La Moneda, seat of government, were ruled out.
The first, located in the bohemian and tourist neighborhood of Bellas Artes, was immediately discarded because it does not meet the minimum security parameters such as having more than one access. And the second, it was Boric himself who ruled it out a few days ago: “The conditions are not there and it is important to separate the workplace from the place where you sleep,” he said.
Palace ceased to be a residence in 1958
La Moneda has been uninhabited as an official residence for more than 70 years. The last president who lived there was Carlos Ibáñez del Campo in 1958. His successor, Jorge Alessandri (1958-1964), had an apartment in the center and established the tradition of presidents living in their own residences.
“When the Palace was bombed on September 11, 1973, not only was the constitutional order broken through the military coup, but also the symbol of democracy in Chile, which is La Moneda, was eroded and since then it became in the government residence and not in the president’s residence,” says international analyst Juan Velasco.
Eduardo Arriagada, professor of Communications and co-director of the social network research and analysis laboratory at the Catholic University of Chile, says that in the country, “every time a president takes office, a report is made to see if his home meets the conditions of security” and adds that there have been cases in which they came to rent neighboring houses to those of the leaders to install other dependencies and guarantee security.
Arriagada says that Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) had a presidential house built during the dictatorship, “a rather peculiar house that he was never able to use and that when he returned to democracy it was handed over to the army.”
He also mentions another case, when Michelle Bachelet (2006-2010/2014-2018) was president, her house did not meet the conditions either and they rented her a more convenient home. “The only presidential home in the country is a house in Viña del Mar, that is used in the summers as a resting place at the beginning of each year for certain specific government meetings”, says Arriagada.
Inflation complicates real estate purchase
However, for Velasco, the fact that Boric does not have his own home is a situation that is common in many Chileans of the same generation as the incoming president and He says that it is a product of the high costs of real estate and the high interest rates of credits.
“Boric lives like most Chileans, who do not have their own house and have to rent and that is a novelty and evidences a different reality, Chile lived until 2021 a period of low interest rates that allowed the real estate market to grow a lot. … but the crisis of the 2019 protests and now the health crisis caused inflation to increase and interest rates to skyrocket in Chile,” says Velasco.
For the analyst there will be a problem to buy your own house in the next fifteen years, stresses that the inflation that the country registers will be something that Boric will have to deal with and that the issue of housing will have to be defined in the rights that are sought to be ensured in the Constitutional Convention through the new Magna Carta.
Arriagada agrees with the current difficulty in buying homes in the country and says that this problem is related to the three deliveries of pension funds that have been made in recent years due to the crisis caused by COVID-19.
However, in Boric’s case, differs that he has been affected by this situation and states that he has a family residence in Punta Arenas and that he rents in Santiago because he did not live there permanently.
“Their problem is not access to the house, it is rather the issue of whether it is justified for the State to have a house for the presidents, but in principle, if that decision is made, it would be for later… this is going to be solve when he finds a house that meets the conditions, that he himself will have to pay for it” he mentions.
Arriagada says that “because of Boric’s age and the salaries he has, he could perfectly have a home in Santiago, but he has decided not to have it, he is from Punta Arenas and his work until two months ago I was in Valparaíso as a deputy, I didn’t need to have a home in the capital”, he points out.
Meanwhile, for now everything points to Boric choose a middle-class neighborhood close to the Palace to live in, being the first time that a president lives in a commune of this type, which would end up being something symbolic of the wave of changes that he promises to bring with his mandate to build a welfare state similar to the European one and put an end to the socioeconomic inequality that unleashed the serious riots of 2019.
Controversy over housing in Punta Arenas
About the house in Punta Arenas, the president and his family were involved in a controversy about whether they pay their taxes, which was later clarified.
Several publications with thousands of interactions shared since December 31 on Twitter, Facebook and TikTok denounce that Boric’s family registered their house in Punta Arenas as a parking lot to defraud taxes.
As proof, they attach a photograph that shows the family’s residence along with a fiscal appraisal certificate from the Chilean Internal Revenue Service (SII), the entity in charge of collecting taxes in the country.
In the SII document it can be read that the property is registered as a parking lot valued at 73.3 million Chilean pesos (about 87,000 dollars).
“How is it possible that Boric’s family’s house is used as a parking lot???? (sic) unpresentable and a mockery for all Chileans. I hope they solve this at the touch ”, denounced a user on Twitter.
However, the house adjoins another piece of land they own that is used as a car park, for which they also pay contributions.
The Boric family does pay taxes on the house and also on the land. The ROL number -a real estate identification number- linked to the address of the home, indicates that the Boric property is classified as residential and valued at 132,709,689 Chilean pesos (about 158,580 dollars at current exchange rates).
On the same page of the SII, the payment of contributions for the two plots of land can be consulted in “Assessments and Real Estate Contributions”, where it is observed that the taxes have been paid correctly.
The last transactions were made on January 3, 2022. For the house that day, 498,570 Chilean pesos (about 590 dollars) were paid and for the parking lot a total of 425,519 pesos (about 508 dollars). (I)
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