Progressive former student leader hopes to transform a country still living in the shadow of the Pinochet dictatorship
After a dizzying rise from student protest leader to head of state in just over a decade, Gabriel Boric has been sworn in as Chile’s youngest ever president.
“Know that we are going to do our best to rise to the challenges we face as a country,” he said as he received the presidential sash at a ceremony in the port city of Valparaíso.
Continue reading...Proxima d is the third planet to have been spotted circling Proxima Centauri four light years away
Astronomers have found evidence for a new planet circling Proxima Centauri, the nearest star to the sun.
The alien world is only a quarter of the mass of Earth and orbits extremely close to its parent star, at one tenth of the distance between the sun and Mercury, the solar system’s innermost planet.
Continue reading...President Gabriel Boric has brought renowned named climate scientist Maisa Rojas into government to help ensure a greener future
Hidden behind the Andes in a quiet corner of South America, a formidable generation of former student leaders are putting together one of the world’s most exciting progressive movements.
On 11 March, Gabriel Boric, 35, a tattooed leftist with a steely resolve to reform Chile from the bottom up, will become the country’s youngest ever president – and his green agenda is echoing across the world as time ticks away on an impending climate catastrophe.
Continue reading...Gabriel Boric, 35, picks youthful team including at defence the granddaughter of Salvador Allende, who was deposed in a coup
Chile’s millennial president-elect, Gabriel Boric, has named a progressive cabinet, with a ministerial team which for the first time anywhere in the Americas is dominated by women.
Boric, a 35-year-old former student leader, will replace the billionaire rightwing president Sebastián Piñera on 11 March as he becomes the youngest president in Chile’s history.
Continue reading...A large underwater volcano in Tonga has sent huge swells around the world affecting countries bordering the Pacific Ocean. The tsunami waves caused damage to boats as far away as New Zealand and large swells were seen in California and Japan but did not appear to cause any widespread damage. Two people have drowned off a beach in northern Peru, local authorities say, after unusually high waves were recorded in several coastal areas
The US once helped destroy Chilean democracy. Now, a constitutional reform movement in Chile could teach the US how to fix its own
Chile always gave the lie to the cold war claim that the United States stood for democracy. When its voters in 1970 showed the temerity (“irresponsibility”, Henry Kissinger called it) to elect socialist Salvador Allende as president, Washington helped orchestrate the coup that toppled him, and backed the resulting dictatorship.
It seems those “irresponsible” Chilean voters are at it again – on Sunday, they elected leftist Gabriel Boric as president by a 12-point margin, on the back of a campaign for a new constitution. But if Chilean democracy seems on the road to recovery from its Washington-backed disfiguration, prospects for democracy in the United States look rather bleak.
Tony Karon is a South African-born journalist and former anti-apartheid activist. He is currently the Managing Editor of AJ+
Continue reading...Boric envisions a greener, fairer and more inclusive country, reflecting the generational shift underway in Chile
Chile’s future as a greener, fairer country, depends on the success of efforts to rewrite the country’s dictatorship-era constitution, president-elect Gabriel Boric said on Tuesday.
After a meeting with the delegates elected last year to rewrite the 1980 constitution which enshrined the ideological legacy of General Augusto Pinochet, Boric called for Chileans to unite behind the project.
Continue reading...The decisive victory reflects Chileans’ revolt against a threadbare welfare system and a society systematically stacked in the favour of the rich
At the age of 14, Gabriel Boric – the great-grandson of a Croatian migrant and an avid reader of Marx and Hegel – formed a city-wide student union in the Chilean city of Punta Arenas.
At 21, and by then a law student, he led a campus sit-in for 44 days in Santiago, Chile’s capital, to oust a senior professor accused of plagiarism and corruption. Two years later, in 2011, he was elected figurehead of a massive student rebellion against profiteering private universities, and in 2013 became a congressman for his remote home region.
Continue reading...Gabriel Boric, a leftwing former student leader, will become Chile’s youngest president after storming to a resounding victory in a run-off vote against his ultra-conservative far-right opponent, José Antonio Kast.
With nearly 97% of the vote counted, the 35-year-old claimed 55.8% to take a 12 percentage point lead over Kast, who quickly accepted his defeat and called Boric to congratulate him.
Leftist former student has vowed to unite country and tackle poverty and inequality
Gabriel Boric has vowed to unite Chile, fight “the privileges of the few” and tackle poverty and inequality after winning a decisive victory over his far-right opponent to become the South American country’s youngest premier.
The 35-year-old leftist former student leader won 56% of the vote in Sunday’s second-round presidential election, cruising past his ultra-conservative opponent, José Antonio Kast, who took 44.2%.
Continue reading...The campaign has resurfaced deep divisions and revived bitter memories of the country’s recent past
Chilean voters headed to the polls on Sunday to chose between two presidential candidates offering starkly contrasting visions for the future, in the country’s most divisive elections since it returned to democracy in 1990.
Leftwing candidate Gabriel Boric, a tattooed former student protest leader, has pledged to empower women and Indigenous people and raise taxes and spending in order to create a fairer Chile.
Continue reading...For opponents of the dictatorship Lucía Hiriart was a reviled symbol of the violent authoritarian regime and its bitter legacy
Lucía Hiriart, the widow of the Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet, has died at her home at the age of 99.
Hiriart – an intensely divisive figure in Chile – had rarely been seen in public in recent years and her health has been kept a closely guarded secret.
Continue reading...As election run-off looms, José Antonio Kast’s opponents sound the alarm
María Irene Campos was a woman on a mission.
“I want to send the message that Chile will never again be communist,” the 74-year-old retiree proclaimed as she hit the streets last Friday to catch a glimpse of the man she believes can save her South American homeland from such a fate.
Continue reading...Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, London
Pablo Manzi’s political scenes, which span several decades and are powerfully performed, could perhaps lead to a future epic
Thirty years ago, the Royal Court introduced a Chilean playwright, Ariel Dorfman, with Death and the Maiden, a much-revived, twistily structured thriller about South American human rights abuses.
While theatre can have a one-hit-and-run attitude to distant politics, the Court has commendably kept an eye on Santiago. Its international programme mentors new writers in an initiative spawning several Court stagings, including Guillermo Calderón’s B in 2017 and now, in sparky English by the same translator, William Gregory, Una Lucha Contra … by Pablo Manzi.
A Fight Against … (Una Lucha Contra … ) is at the Royal Court theatre, London, until 22 January
Continue reading...Far-right José Antonio Kast and left-wing Gabriel Boric in tight race amid divided political landscape
Chile’s presidential race is hurtling towards its conclusion with the two remaining candidates battling to secure moderate votes in a deeply divided political landscape.
Far-right candidate José Antonio Kast secured a two-point victory in November’s first round, but polls show that Gabriel Boric – the leftwing former student leader he will face in the 19 December runoff – now holds a narrow lead.
Continue reading...Revelations appear at odds with José Antonio Kast’s own statements about his father’s military service
The German-born father of Chilean presidential candidate José Antonio Kast was a member of the Nazi party, according to a recently unearthed document – revelations that appear at odds with the far-right candidate’s own statements about his father’s military service during the second world war.
German officials have confirmed that an ID card in the country’s federal archive shows that an 18-year-old named Michael Kast joined the National Socialist German Workers’ party, or NSDAP, in September 1942, at the height of Hitler’s war on the Soviet Union.
Continue reading...Vote seen as a blow to conservative presidential candidate José Antonio Kast, who won majority of votes in November’s first round
A historic vote granting equal marriage rights to same-sex couples in Chile has been heralded by activists as a triumph and a blow to the conservative agenda of presidential candidate José Antonio Kast.
Kast won the majority of votes in November’s first-round vote, instilling a wave of fear among the country’s LGBTQ+ community. A tight runoff between Kast and his progressive opponent, former student protest leader Gabriel Boric, is scheduled on 19 December.
Continue reading...Javiera Rojas remembered as ‘an emblematic activist who was dedicated to the process of resistance’
Environmental activists in Chile have called for justice after a 42-year-old land defender was found dead with her hands and feet bound.
The body of Javiera Rojas was found buried under a pile of clothes in an abandoned house on Sunday in Calama in the northern region of Antofagasta.
Continue reading...José Antonio Kast will face progressive former student leader Gabriel Boric in runoff election next month
Chile’s right wing have claimed a jubilant victory after José Antonio Kast, a former congressman with a history of defending the Pinochet dictatorship, secured a surprise win in the first round of the country’s presidential election.
Kast, who campaigned on a platform of public order, migration controls and conservative social values, confounded expectations to take 28% of the vote and beat the progressive former student leader Gabriel Boric by two percentage points.
Continue reading...Republican party’s José Antonio Kast set to win first round with 28% of the vote
The far-right populist José Antonio Kast is on course for a convincing victory over former protest leader Gabriel Boric in the first round of Chile’s presidential election.
With more than 90% of the votes counted, Kast led Boric by 28% to 25.6%. The two will meet in a runoff next month. Chileans also voted for a new congress in the general election.
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