In his first public statement of 2022, Boric said: “I want to be emphatic in this, we must take responsibility for addressing the inequalities that citizens live and that are expressed in multiple dimensions. I want us to build a country where education, health, housing, and social security are not determined by how much money your family has. They are rights and, as such, the state has the duty to guarantee them.
In contrast to what has been declared, to date these rights continue to be violated and the inequalities associated with them have not managed to be resolved at their root, and we are witnesses to the fact that, with the passage of time, they still persist and worsen under the look of a social democratic government.
A week after the public statement 2023 of Gabriel Boric’s government, and after listening to the reactions and comments of different members of the Chilean political elite, the empirical right wing of the government’s political leadership is confirmed, wrapped in a very long story of things that cannot be fulfilled, because the economic elite is not willing to accept the “tax proposal” with which to finance it.
Today we continue to observe the same type of governmental communication efforts that both the right-wing and right-wing governments have been engaged in since the return to democracy, seeking to show progress in fundamental rights through triumphalist figures and emotional speeches with allusions to specific people ( “La señora Juanita de Lagos”), These are not enough to make any real sense to a citizenry hit by the urgencies caused by long-standing social problems, and who feel confused by so many discursive changes issued by those who should guarantee their basic rights and work on public policies that contribute to a dignified life for every citizen of this country.
This story, with a new face and a “Guinness record” like extension, in its basic content is the same as the one used for decades by the Concertación (with its different epochal “badges”), namely: “we are determined to respond to the needs of the citizens, but the right-wing prevents it”.
At the same time as this latest public statement, concrete actions by groups organised around various issues reveal a reality far removed from the government’s announcements: Students, teachers (active and retired), unionised workers, retirees, people suffering from illness, defenders of human rights and of children, adolescents, women, ethnic and sexual diversity, environmentalists, have raised their voices to demand more equity and more justice in the face of the advance and worsening of an anti-human political, economic and social system, which is based on political catastrophism and the economic power of the few prevailing in our country.
Or is it the political elite and/or economic groups who, with their power, are constantly pressuring and succeeding in decoupling and diverting programmes supported at the ballot box?
All the energy deployed by different scaffolding, from the student movements, the ambits of extended coordination, the feminist uprising, the popular and youth revolt that destabilised the system, the organised and mobilised social and trade union movements, meant that in a decade (2012 to 2022) the Frente Amplio managed to bring social agendas to La Moneda, to close the gaps of inequality and national indignity. Today, however, these agendas remain in a new status quo.
The credibility and governability of governments depend on the fulfillment of the programmes presented in electoral periods and the capacity for dialogue with the relevant parts of society in order to achieve significant structural advances for a country. The immense economic deployment, especially of the large political parties, and the use of various communication strategies to attract followers and, subsequently, votes in favour of a particular government programme, seem to have the sole objective of gaining a place in the upper echelons of power and privileges, and that once achieved, the chosen party distances itself from the interests of its voters who allowed it to get there.
Thus, various government programmes, of different ideologies, have changed their original proposals in the transaction, where the interests and protection of economic groups, between the misunderstood representatives, and their political wills, and where the citizenry is excluded from any form of participation.
In the face of government actions that respond to the interests of the elite, turning their backs on the people, expectations regarding the discourse were null and void. Once again, the trap of representative democracy is confirmed, in which a public policy roadmap is committed to during the electoral period, but once elected, such commitments are disregarded, and a new governance agenda appears, that of “as far as possible”.
In detail, it supports the TPP11, validates the corrupt leaderships of the carabineros and gives them unconstitutional powers in the use of weapons; militarisation of various regions under an endless “state of emergency” that especially the communities in Mapuche territory suffer; the desired labour flexibilisation pushed by the bosses under the title of a reduction in the working day is made concrete; land seizures, which have historically been the tool of the poor to force the delivery of housing projects, are criminalised; interest rates on loans and credit cards are increased, enriching the banks and destabilising the family projects of the wage-earning strata; the voices of the territories clamouring for a basic food basket protected from usury are disregarded; the mining companies are given the green light in their extractivist expansion; and lithium is handed over to the voracity of the business community. In short, the banners of equality and social dignity are being lowered, and there is a return to targeted public policies; case by case, with bureaucratic barriers reminiscent of Piñera’s proposals.
In addition, the commitments to teachers to cancel the historical debt are ignored in practice; and something similar with the plundered debtors of the CAE (usurious financing for university students with state backing).
And politically, a clear example of this direction is the signing of the Agreement for Chile (without Chile) and its way of installing the second attempt at the Constitutional Process in our country, in which the domination of the “party of order” is reinforced, validating a constitutional process without citizen participation, where more than five million people (null, blank and abstentions) obliged to vote, turned their backs on the nefarious initiative in progress. At the same time, the direction of closing the doors of participation to new partisan initiatives is being reinforced, in an effort to control political power from the groups that currently hold it.
And in the face of all these situations described above, the president “proudly” explains in his public statement that it is just a matter of “a change of priorities” (a euphemism that at the popular level has another strong characterisation). At this point, when political efforts to overcome the chilling inequality suffered by Chileans are fading away, the doors remain open to extreme right-wing discourses, and we see them in the results of the Mori poll: … in the question about the justification of the coup d’état, which has been asked in the last 20 years by the same poll. In 2003 46% said “There is never a reason for a coup”, a figure that rose to 65% in 2006; fell to 54% in 2009; rose to 68% in 2013, at the 30-year commemoration, and fell by 17 percentage points in 2023. “It is unclear what the final verdict is if there is never a reason, or they were right,” the study says.
The evident failure of personalist leaderships, which decide not to govern with the citizenry, reinforces the future image that sucks today’s activism for the construction of a direct, participatory, sovereign democracy, which raises the collective protagonism from the territorial bases; a new power that overcomes the social ravages of this stage of individualism, crazed competition, negationism and dehumanisation.
Collaborators: M. Angélica Alvear Montecinos; Sandra Arriola Oporto; Ricardo Lisboa Henríquez; Guillermo Garcés Parada and César Anguita Sanhueza. Public Opinion Commission