Boric government in Chile gets a quick reality check

The first week of the leftist government of Gabriel Boric had some setbacks in Chile, particularly the attempt at dialogue made by the chief of staff in a Mapuche area where she was shot at, a reality check given the high expectations.

Four days after taking office, Boric sent Izkia Siches, the first Interior Minister in Chile’s history, to the Araucanía region (south), an area in tension due to arson attacks attributed to radical indigenous groups that claim land and that They denounce the operation of self-defense organizations of forestry companies and police assemblies.

On the way to the community of Temucuicui, 600 km south of Santiago, where Siches planned to meet with the father of an indigenous man killed by a police shot in 2018, the delegation was ambushed.

A burning car blocked his path and shots were heard that forced the convoy to quickly back down, frustrating the entry of the country’s second authority into an area that imposes its own regulations and does not allow access to state agents.

“The bullets interrupted or ended the installation period that was going very well. It was a bit abrupt”, said the analyst and founder of Latinobarómetro, Marta Lagos.

A large part of the Mapuche communities settle in the Araucanía region, claiming the restitution of lands that they consider theirs by ancestral rights and that today are in the hands of forestry companies.

The frustrated trip, however, helped to reveal the seriousness of what is happening in the region, exacerbated in recent years by the abandonment of some areas by the State, according to Lagos.

“There is nothing to cheat here. No more euphemisms and stories. Now they are in the brutal reality, and the brutal reality is that there are places in Chile where the State authority cannot enter, because it has to ask for permission.”, indicated Lagos, who appreciates the intention of the new government to go to the “crater of the volcano”.

In other missteps of his first days in government, President Boric got into a fight with the Spanish crown by accusing King Felipe VI of delaying the change of command ceremony – denied by the royal house – and expressed his annoyance with the Church Catholic for the presence of two cardinals accused of covering up sexual abuse of minors in an official ceremony.

need to grow

The situation in Araucanía is one of the main conflicts that Boric will have to face, along with implementing a tax reform to expand social benefits and the migration crisis that exists on the northern border of the country, in addition to supporting the growth of the local economy.

“Today we are moving forward with the Escazú (environmental) agreement; tomorrow we will do it for the reunion between those who inhabit our territories, for decent pensions, quality health, for the eradication of gender violence”, affirmed the president when signing on Friday Chile’s adherence to the Escazú environmental agreement, which had been rejected by the previous administration and must still be approved by Congress.

The young president Boric weighs the hope of thousands of Chileans to build a more egalitarian country based on a more robust social system, a promise that needs to be financed with a tax reform and economic growth.

It has already given some signs. Her cabinet is made up of more women than men, with a great diversity in the origin of its members.

“A country needs to grow and so far the economic proposal of the Broad Front (of which Boric is a part) has been focused on other aspects”, the political scientist Cristóbal Bellolio had warned on the day of the inauguration of the government on March 11.

“In countries like Chile, still relatively poor, it is not enough just to redistribute, you have to grow if you want to enlarge the cake to be able to redistribute”, he indicated when referring to the reticence about the ways of growing from a part of the coalition of the new Government.

Chile closed 2021 with a historic expansion of 11.7%, underpinned by the high price of copper, the increase in consumption driven by state aid from the conservative Sebastián Piñera to deal with the pandemic and the three early withdrawals from pension funds approved by the Congress in the midst of great social pressure.

Boric’s government warned that it will revise downwards the growth projections for 2022 and the percentage of collection of the tax reform that would go from five points of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to four.