politicians-from-chile

"El socialismo puede llegar solo en bicicleta."

"Politics doesn't interest me, but as a good citizen I feel free to express my opinions and to censure the government. Democracy, which is so loudly proclaimed by the deluded is an absurdity in our countries, flooded as they are with vices and with their citizens lacking all sense of civic virtue, the prerequisite to establishing a real Republic. But monarchy is not the American ideal either; if we get out of one terrible government just to jump headlong into another, what will we have gained? The Republican system is the one which we must adopt, but do you know how I interpret it for our countries? A strong central government whose representatives will be men of true virtue and patriotism, and who thus can direct the citizens along the path of order and progress."

"We've been talking about climate change on Rapa Nui (Easter Island) for 20 years. Tranquility was broken in 2021 with the arrival of the Aedes aegypti mosquito."

"Starting in October 2019, hundreds of thousands of people participated in months of anti-government protests—a so-called “social explosion” — which culminated in a national vote in 2020 to rewrite the Pinochet-era constitution. If elected, Boric, who has spent the past seven years as a congressman arguing for the ideals expressed in the social explosion, promises to kill off the old model for good. A Boric - led leftwing coalition would hike taxes on major industries, ramp up public spending to overhaul services, and scrap the private pension system that has underpinned Chile’s capital markets. “If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave,” he told a rally in July after winning the primary for leftist bloc Approve Dignity."

"At last. The specter of Pinochet is removed from Chile... Congratulations to fellow Progressive International member Gabriel Boric... The hard work to redistribute wealth in Chile begins now."

"Socialist Gabriel Boric's victory in Chile's high-stakes presidential election Sunday was hailed by progressives worldwide as an inspiring example of how a democratic groundswell can overcome deeply entrenched forces of reaction and chart a path toward a more just, equal, and sustainable future. Riding a massive wave of anger at Chile's neoliberal political establishment and the economic inequities it has perpetuated... Boric, who ran on the promise to undo the lingering vestiges of Pinochet's regime, will become the youngest president in Chile's history when he takes office in March.... Boric, who has vowed to cancel student debt, impose higher taxes on the wealthy, oppose environmentally destructive mining initiatives, and scrap Chile's private pension system—another leftover from the Pinochet regime."

"The leftist leader...said that when he takes office he would develop an agenda based on the prospects for collaboration in accordance with the "tremendous challenges" facing the region and wider world. Among them, he highlighted the coronavirus pandemic,... as well as the climate crisis, migratory crises, economic cooperation and the strengthening of democracy."

"Two recent presidential elections in Latin America resulted in important milestones: Xiomara Castro is poised to become the first female president of Honduras, while Gabriel Boric, 35, will be Chile’s youngest president. Beyond those historic occasions, there’s another remarkable dimension to the two victories: They represent a huge win for the Latin American left — both in the richest and in one of the poorest countries in the region... [Boric] The president-elect has vowed to fight Chile’s growing and notorious income inequality. He wants to reform Chile’s free-market economic model and favors expanding social protections for the poor, raising taxes on the wealthy, canceling student debt, and overhauling the nation’s private pension system to replace it with one run by the state."

"in 2022, Gabriel Boric appointed Maya Alejandra Fernandez Allende head of the military that deposed her grandfather and drove her family into exile. It is one of history's most perfect about-faces. But to tell it this way is to tell it as the story of high-profile individuals, whereas it should be told as the story of movements, of public participation, of grassroots organizing, of people showing up, often in the face of threats of bodily harm or even death, to stand on principle. They stood up as did las Madres de Plaza de Mayo in Argentina when it seemed impossible to topple the regime; they stood up when the risks were huge; they stood up to sing the Ode to Joy where political prisoners could hear their voices; they stood up to orchestrate voting in the 1988 plebescite that established an open election in 1990; they stood up to get out the vote that year; they kept standing up, showing up, speaking up. These countless, anonymous heroes were the midwives who birthed a new Chile."

"On Monday the Chilean Elections Qualifying Tribunal, Tricel, officially proclaimed Gabriel Boric as president-elect of Chile, following his victory in the runoff last 19 December. The ceremony was held at the Tricel offices in Santiago but under the most strict security and sanitary measures given the surge in Covid 19 cases. One representative per media was allowed in and the rest had to follow the ceremony via streaming. President elect Boric will be taking the oath of office next March 11, at the Chilean congress in Valparaíso. Before returning to Santiago, Boric spent Christmas and New Year with his family at his hometown of Punta Arenas, where despite his refusal, the City Municipal Council decided to name him “Favorite Son” of the extreme south Magallanes Region capital."

"If Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism, it will also be its grave. Do not be afraid of the youth changing this country... We are a generation that emerged in public life demanding our rights be respected as rights and not treated like consumer goods or a business... We no longer will permit that the poor keep paying the price of Chile's inequality."

"We are going to give priority to the Pacific Alliance in the future. I have already spoken with several of the presidents, in particular with [Andrés] Manuel López Obrador of Mexico, with President [[W: Iván Duque|[Iván] Duque]] of Colombia, and we have also been in contact with the Peruvian Foreign Ministry."

"Since I was a child I've been hearing the word de-centralization, and I agree that one of the impediments for Chile's development is the excessive centralization we have, and it is the job, a new president to address firmly the issue....Let me tell you that patronage, cronyism and quotas are definitively over."

"Ten years ago, Gabriel Boric was a 25 year-old student protester... leading tens of thousands of young people through the streets of Santiago. As head of a major student union, he shook Chile’s establishment by leading rallies that brought reforms to Chile’s privatized education system. Today... Boric is within striking distance of Chile’s presidency. Chile’s Dec. 19 election, where Boric holds a narrow lead, is the most high-stakes moment yet in a tumultuous two year national debate over the market-centered economic model established by military dictator Augusto Pinochet in the 1980s. With deregulated business and privatized public services and natural resources, the system helped make Chile a haven for foreign investors and one of the richest countries in South America. But it has also generated the highest rate of inequality in the OECD group of developed nations and untenable living costs for poorer Chileans, with six in ten households earning too little to cover monthly expenses..."

"This proposal was made by the Pichileminian people. In Pichilemu, we have 15,000 inhabitants, and in summer this grows to 100,000, because we receive a lot of foreigner tourists, that love to visit beaches like Pichilemu's."

"This is made since a long time in Pichilemu, because of that, and the anxiety of our inhabitants we are proposing that these beaches become legal."

"What I got as result was my work for two periods as mayor. She came as if she owned the place, but she has to earn respect first. I just met her when she presented as candidate; before, we never saw her."

"Paulina Nin disrespected my town."

"If something have demonstrated the elections and the percentage she got (4,41%) is that nobody wanted her here."

"I always said that it was going to be beautiful that Paulina [Nin] presented me as entertainer and I sang."

"Had I been a dictator, I would still be governing."

"Tell my friends to get me out of here."

"The freedoms which had been so hard won from colonial domination were being crushed by Soviet-inspired and funded military and political forces. Their clear intention was to deprive the people of their democratic freedoms. As history shows, this is what had happened in the Soviet Union and in Cuba, and continues to be the case in other parts of the world."

"I have lived with my conscience and my own memories for over quarter of a century since the events of 1973.… These are not easy reflections for me. But I am at peace with myself, and with the Chilean people, about what happened. I am clear in my mind that the return to Chile of true democracy, and from that the true freedom to which all individual people are entitled, could not have been achieved without the removal of the Marxist government."

"I was only an aspiring dictator. I was never a real dictator."

"Is it true what Contreras testified before the courts, that the president of the junta and later the president of the Republic was the direct head of DINA? I don't remember, but it is not true. It is not true and if it was, I don't remember. Contreras liked to cajole, wrap around his boss. Contreras gave the orders. It was he who managed the institution."

"Today, near the end of my days, I want to say that I harbor no rancor against anybody, that I love my fatherland above all and that I take political responsibility for everything that was done which had no other goal than making Chile greater and avoiding its disintegration.… I assume full political responsibility for what happened."

"Power must be vested in the armed forces, since only they have the organization and the means to fight Marxism."

"I think Pinochet has been proven to be an evil dictator in the eyes of most people in the world, and most people see Allende as a dreamer and even as a visionary."

"We always think that a powerful dictator is larger than life, but he died of a cold, a very common thing. All of sudden, his authority diminished, like the Witch in the “Wizard of Oz.” It sort of trivializes his power."

"The political future of Chile is a democracy, without a doubt. Pinochet is not eternal; immortality is going to fail him at any moment."

"Although he was authoritarian and ruled dictatorially, Pinochet's support of neoliberal economic policies and his unwillingness to support national businesses distinguished him from classical fascists."

"Friedman, by contrast, hates and fears a government that prohibits use of recreational drugs in your home almost as much as he hates and fears a government that won't let you undersell your politically-powerful competitors. For Friedman, Pinochet is a bad--an aggressive, powerful military dictator--whose evil the Chicago Boys can curb by persuading him to adopt laissez-faire policies."

"I think the Pinochet trial has forced us look one another in the face … to speak to one another, to understand the past and understand that time is not going to solve the problem. In a way it has been a victory for the dead of Chile."

"Augusto Pinochet saved Chile from Communism and set it on the path to economic success. He also ran a regime that killed thousands. Pinochet replaced a threatened Communist dictatorship with a real military one, bringing material prosperity while violently suppressing freedom. He reluctantly laid the foundation for democracy and surrendered power. Thereafter, he faced incessant legal problems."

"I have certainly never contended that generally authoritarian governments are more likely to secure individual liberty than democratic ones, but rather the contrary. This does not mean, however, that in some historical circumstances personal liberty may not have been better protected under an authoritarian than democratic government. [...] More recently I have not been able to find a single person even in much maligned Chile who did not agree that personal freedom was much greater under Pinochet than it had been under Allende. Nor have I heard any sensible person claim that in the principalities of Monaco or Lichtenstein, which I am told are not precisely democratic, personal liberty is smaller than anywhere else!"

"Fortunately, there have been those whose conscience and consciousness enabled them to see things differently. They correctly perceived Pinochet and DINA officials to be the terrorists—state terrorists. They correctly recognized the right of people to peacefully resist a military regime, especially an anti-democratic regime that has gained power through the violent ouster of a democratically elected regime. Nothing—not even “free-enterprise, Chicago-boys” economic policies—can excuse that sort of state-sponsored thuggery. That’s why people in the libertarian section of the political spectrum, unlike those in the conservative section, have long supported the criminal indictment of Pinochet and his DINA minions—because terror in the name of fighting terror is a grave criminal offense against humanity no matter what economic philosophy the state terrorist happens to hold."

"How is Obama's killing of Abdulrahman any different from Pinochet's murder of Orlando Letelier and Ronni Moffitt? In the one case, a 16-year-old boy has had his life snuffed out because he had the wrong father. In the other case, a man had his life snuffed out because he had the wrong philosophical beliefs. Given that the Letelier and Moffitt killings were treated as murders, why shouldn't the Abdulraham killing be treated as murder too?"

"The armed forces have acted today solely from the patriotic inspiration of saving the country from the tremendous chaos into which it was being plunged by the Marxist government of Salvador Allende.… The Junta will maintain judicial power and consultantship of the Comptroller. The Chambers will remain in recess until further orders. That is all."

"Twenty-nine years ago, in Chile, on the 11th of September 1973, General Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of Salvador Allende in a CIA-backed coup. “Chile should not be allowed to go Marxist just because its people are irresponsible,” said Henry Kissinger, Nobel Peace Laureate, then the U.S. Secretary of State... Guatemala, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Brazil, Peru, the Dominican Republic, Bolivia, Nicaragua, Honduras, Panama, El Salvador, Mexico and Colombia – they’ve all been the playground for covert – and overt – operations by the CIA. Hundreds of thousands of Latin Americans have been killed, tortured or have simply disappeared under the despotic regimes that were propped up in their countries."

"The exercise of justice is only possible within the framework of established institutions which command respect. To command respect it is not sufficient to make just pronouncements: it is necessary also to have the power to put them into practice... A general acquiescence towards the established order is required for the exercise of this power, and hence for the just dealings which the citizen expects from it. In return for this expectation of justice, the state expects the allegiance of its citizens; they are constrained in conscience to sanction the most violent and even "unnatural" methods in the suppression of rebellion, provided the aim is as rapid a return as possible to the condition where just dealings become the norm. This is surely what should be said in defence of those, like Chile's General Pinochet, who have had to make the choice between violently establishing an order in which natural justice has a chance, and acquiescing in the ongoing violence and degradation of a society devoted to "social justice". Only those who have no experience of communism will be without sympathy for the General in this dilemma – which is not to say that he ever experienced it as one."

"The great majority of Chileans, even the political opponents of Senator Pinochet, feel wounded at the way we and the Spanish have treated them. They are right to do so. Until the Senator's arrest last October, Chile had achieved three remarkable successes, all of them in large measure due to former President Pinochet. First, it had seen the total defeat of communism at a time when that ideology was advancing throughout the hemisphere. As Eduardo Frei, the former Christian Democrat president of Chile put it: "The military saved Chile". Secondly, Chile has seen the establishment of a thriving, free-enterprise economy which has transformed living standards and made Chile into a model for Latin America. Thirdly, Chile is also remarkable because President Pinochet established a constitution for a return to democracy, held a plebiscite to decide whether or not he should remain in power, lost the vote (though gaining 44 per cent support), respected the result and handed over power to a democratically-elected successor. Chile thus enjoyed prosperity, democracy and reconciliation."

"At last. The specter of Pinochet is removed from Chile... Congratulations to fellow Progressive International member Gabriel Boric... The hard work to redistribute wealth in Chile begins now."

"The United States... supported authoritarian regimes throughout Central and South America during and after the Cold War in defense of its economic and political interests. In tiny Guatemala, the Central Intelligence Agency mounted a coup overthrowing the democratically elected government in 1954, and it backed subsequent rightwing governments against small leftist rebel groups for four decades. Roughly 200,000 civilians died. In Chile, a CIA-supported coup helped put Gen. Augusto Pinochet in power from 1973 to 1990."

"The country is safe, because we have a good intelligence service."

"I am going to die. The person who succeeds me also would die. But elections, you won't have."

"If Senator Kennedy is elected President of the United States, the government of Chile will take the necessary measures."

"Not a single leaf moves in this country if I'm not the one moving it. I want that to be clear!"

"I devalued the peso solely looking after the poor."

"This is not a dictadura [dictatorship/hard rule] but a dictablanda [soft rule]."