14 of the 24 members of Gabriel Boric’s Cabinet will be women

The leftist Gabriel Boric will lead from this Friday the first government with more women than men in the entire American continent. The new Administration will be made up of fourteen women and ten men in charge of state portfolios.

The person who will have the most power within the future Cabinet will be the independent doctor Izkia Siches35, the first woman to hold the position of Minister of the Interior in Chile.

Siches is credited with the strategic success of the second round of elections, which led Boric to La Moneda after beating far-right José Antonio Kast.

She met Boric in the midst of the student movement at the university and until November she served as president of the Medical College; she resigned to become a campaign manager and tour the country, despite having a newborn daughter.

Camila Vallejo, 33, is another of the women who will accompany Boric in the Cabinet. The deputy for the Communist Party (PC) for more than seven years will be the new government spokesperson minister.

Vallejo led the 2011 student protests of the Federation of Students of the University of Chile (FECh), of which Boric was also president. He is currently one of the most dialoguing and transversal faces in Chilean politics.

The Defense portfolio will be held by Maya Fernández, 50, recognized militant of the Socialist Party (PS), biologist and veterinary doctor who has been a deputy for two periods; she presided over the Lower House in 2018.

She is the granddaughter of former President Salvador Allende and the niece of Senator Isabel Allende.. He lived in exile with his family in Cuba between 1973 and 1990.

He entered the ranks of the PS at the same time as the University of Chile, combining his academic work with political militancy; He held positions during the administration of former President Ricardo Lagos and today represents the wing that defended the PS’s turn to the left to approach the Broad Front.

Heading the Foreign Ministry will be Antonia Urrejola, 53, who has a long career in international organizations and will be responsible for spreading Boric’s change project in a region that seems to be turning to the left.

Urrejola is an independent lawyer. When she was in charge of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) in 2021, she was very critical of the regime of Daniel Ortega, of Nicaragua, and her opposition to the regime of Nicolás Maduro, of Venezuela, is well known.

Antonia Orellana will be in charge of the Ministry of Women. At only 32 years old, she will be the youngest minister of Boric. She is a feminist activist and one of the founders of Social Convergence (CS), the party of the elected president, and was an active part of the Chilean Network against Violence against Women.

The doctor Jeanette Vega, 64, will be the Minister of Social Development and Family. For many years It was linked to the Party for Democracy (PPD) and the ex-Concertación. She has an outstanding career in the world of health: she was undersecretary of Public Health, director of the National Health Fund, the Institute of Public Health and external advisor to the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Pan American Health Organization ( PAHO).

It will be responsible for challenges such as poverty, childhood and the indigenous policy of the new Administration; although, due to his profile, it was thought that he would be in charge of health.

Marcela Ríos will lead the Justice and Human Rights portfolio. A 55-year-old sociologist, she has a recognized career spanning more than fourteen years at the United Nations Development Program (UNDP). She is a militant of Social Convergence.

Heading the Ministry of Sports will be Alexandra Benado, a 45-year-old LGTBI activist born in Sweden. She has a career as a former professional soccer player: she was selected for the national women’s team and technical director. She has worked in spaces dedicated to human rights and lived in exile in Cuba after the dictatorship assassinated her mother in 1983, a militant of the Revolutionary Left Movement (MIR).

Javiera Toro will be Minister of National Assets. The 34-year-old lawyer has practiced in different private law firms. She chaired the Partido Comunes and was part of Boric’s strategic team during the campaign. She signed, as a leftist leader, the Peace Agreement of November 2019, which laid the foundations for the Constitutional Convention.

The Ministry of the Environment will be in charge of the Chilean climatologist Maisa Rojas. At 49 years old, she is not politically active, and is recognized for being one of the authors of the report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a document that explains the reasons for the global climate crisis.

María Begoa Yarza, 57, will be Minister of Health. He has a long history within the public health system and does not belong to any political movement. His main challenges will be to continue to face the COVID-19 pandemic with its omicron variant spikes, but with high vaccination, and other structural problems.

The portfolio of Culture, Arts and Heritage will be in charge of Julieta Brodsky, 38 years old, social and cultural anthropologist specializing in urban anthropology. She is a militant in Boric’s party and has experience in the area of ​​cultural policies, both locally and nationally as well as internationally, and was Director of Research at the Observatory of Cultural Policies between 2011 and 2022.

This March 11, Boric will become the youngest president in Chilean history, at just 36 years old. The presence of women in the Cabinet has been interpreted as an attempt to mainstream the fight for gender equity and a powerful signal to the feminist collectives, crucial in their victory.

However, in addition to having the first Cabinet in Chilean history with a female majority, the Boric Administration has thrown up other interesting edges for political analysis, such as including members of other leftist and independent political spaces, despite not accompanied in the elections last December.

Seven of the 24 ministers are under 40, but have chosen to place experienced professionals in important portfolios, such as the Ministries of Finance, Education, Foreign Affairs and Housing. The average age of the Cabinet will be 42 years, collects France 24.

Two key men in Boric’s tenure will be Mario Marcel and Giorgio Jackson.

Marcel is current president of the Central Bank and will be Minister of Finance. He has a long history and has been in macroeconomic positions in almost all governments since the return of democracy.

For its part, Jackson, his right-hand man and personal friend, like Vallejo, will be in charge of the General Secretariat of the Presidency, which has a key role in dealing with the Legislativevery fragmented and where the Executive will be one of the minorities, according to experts.

The 24 ministers of the new Chilean government must help Boric achieve the structural changes he promises to move towards a welfare state model in the midst of high inflation and a society that has not fully recovered from the social outbreak and protests of 2019the most severe since the end of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. (I)