The first week of Gabriel Boric's leftist government 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 bath in the face of high expectations.
Four days after taking office, Boric sent Izkia Siches, the prime minister of the interior in Chile's history, to the Araucania region (south), an area under tension over arson attacks attributed to radical indigenous groups claiming land and denouncing the operation of self-defense organizations of forestry and companies montages of the police.
On the way to the community of Temucuicui, 600 km south of Santiago, where Siches was planning to meet the father of an indigenous man killed by a police shot in 2018, the entourage was ambushed.
A burning car blocked his way and gunshots were heard that forced the convoy to retreat quickly, thwarting the entry of the country's second authority into an area that imposes its own rules and does not allow access to State agents.
“The bullets interrupted or ended the installation period which was going very well (...) It was a bit abrupt,” the analyst and founder of Latinobarómetro, Marta Lagos, told AFP.
The Araucanía region is home to a large part of the Mapuche communities that claim the restitution of land that they consider theirs for ancestral rights and which are now in the hands of forestry companies.
The frustrated trip, however, helped to bring to light the seriousness of what is happening in the region, exacerbated in recent years by the State's abandonment of some areas, according to Lagos.
“There is nothing to be deceived here. No more euphemisms and stories. Now they are in the brute reality, and the brute reality is that there are places in Chile where the authority of the state cannot enter, because it has to ask permission,” said Lagos, who values the intention of the new government to go to the “crater of the volcano.”
In other missteps of his early days in office, President Boric engaged in a fight with the Spanish crown when he accused King Philip VI of delaying the change of command ceremony - denied by the royal house - and expressed his annoyance with the Catholic Church at the presence of two cardinals accused of covering up sexual abuse of minors in a official ceremony.
- Need to grow -
The situation in Araucania is one of the main conflicts that Boric will have to face, along with launching a tax reform to expand the social benefits and migration crisis that is being experienced on the country's northern border, as well as underpinning the growth of the local economy.
“Today we are moving forward with the (environmental) agreement of Escazú; 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,” said the president when he signed on Friday Chile's accession to the Escazú environmental agreement, which had been rejected by the previous administration and must still be approved by Congress.
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 he needs to finance with tax reform and economic growth.
He's already given some signs. Its cabinet is made up of more women than men, with great diversity in the origin of its members.
“A country needs to grow and so far the Frente Amplio's economic proposal (of which Boric is a part) has focused on other aspects,” political scientist Cristóbal Bellolio had warned on the day of the assumption of government on March 11.
“In countries like Chile, which are still relatively poor, it is not enough to just redistribute, you have to grow if you want to make the cake bigger in order to be able to redistribute,” he told AFP, referring to the reluctance of part of the new government's coalition about ways to grow.
Chile ended 2021 with a historic expansion of 11.7%, underpinned by the high price of copper, the increase in consumption driven by state aid by conservative Sebastián Piñera to cope with the pandemic, and the three early withdrawals of pension funds approved by Congress amid great social pressure.
The Boric government warned that it will revise downwards the growth projections for 2022 and the percentage of revenue from the tax reform that would go from 5 points of GDP to 4.
pa/pb/dga
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