Today, Explained - Chile’s millennial president

Episode Date: January 14, 2022

The 35-year-old president-elect in Chile loves tattoos, Taylor Swift, and progressive policies. Gabriel Boric will now try to overhaul the government as Chile rewrites its constitution. Today’s show was produced by Haleema Shah and Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Matt Collette and Noel King, engineered by Efim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. It's Today Explained. I'm Sean Ramos from for the past 50 years, Chile has sort of been stuck between two systems, socialism and capitalism. 50 years ago, Chile had a socialist president named Salvador Allende. He did, you know, socialist things, free school, free milk for the kids. For that, he was loved and he was hated. And a few years after he was elected, free school, free milk for the kids. For that, he was loved and he was hated.

And a few years after he was elected, democratically, Chile's military took over. They stormed his office. Allende took his own life rather than step down. The murderous military man who took over, Augusto Pinochet, stamped out all of the socialism and replaced it with hyper capitalism, capitalism on steroids. You can go to McDonald's in Chile and buy a Big Mac in installments as if you were,

you know, picking up a car or paying your mortgage. The hyper capitalism in present day Chile is loved by some and hated by others. And last year, the haters had their day. They went out into the streets. They protested. They won the right to rewrite their constitution, to do away with these hyper-capitalist markets that created lots of inequality. Then, a month ago, Chile elected a 35-year-old president who is going to be overseeing this new government. Bravo! A millennial president and a complete constitutional overhaul, two things we can't really even fathom here in the United States. So we wanted to find out how it might go over there. It's massive.

John Bartlett has been writing about Gabriel Boric for The Guardian. Boric himself is an interesting character. He's got an incredibly sort of magnetic personality. And obviously, as a 35-year-old, he was only just old enough to run for president in the first place. So this incredibly powerful student generation have managed to break down the door of the presidential palace, and here they are.

They've arrived with something of a bang. Horroch constantly says that he comes from social movements. That was his kind of, you know, where this generation cut their teeth was in social movements and student politics, which is also incredibly strong here in Chile. He's exploded onto the scene as part of these huge student protests in 2011, which demanded free, high-quality education for all. Many European countries have reached a national consensus to guarantee quality public education for all

in order to become more developed nations. We have to end the inequality, segregation, and injustice of our education system. The 2011 protests saw students pour out onto the streets and actually kind of take these demands to the top table for the first time in the democratic era in Chile. He then rose to become head of the University of Chile Students Union.

He actually beat Camilo Vallejo, who is now in the Communist Party. I have no doubt that Gabriel perfectly understands the challenges we have today, but some say the feminists had to be swept under the rug in the second round of the election. At the time, she was a young communist, and she was an incredibly popular kind of figure around the university,

and he managed to beat her against all odds to the presidency of the union. No more discrimination. No more education for the rich and for the poor. We are all equal, even though the government doesn't like it. So after that, he went into Congress. He's now served two terms in Congress. How in this context is a 0.3% real wage increase going to be the cause of celebration for public sector employees?

How? First time he was elected, he was one of a handful who for the first time since the return to democracy in 1990 managed to get into Congress despite not belonging to one of the two main coalitions in the country. We are protesting against problems in the whole system in general. Above all, the neoliberal system in Chile.

We reached a crisis where we noticed that the system cannot handle it anymore. Two terms later, the 2019 social movement, which was far broader across society, it galvanized support amongst so many different kinds of people with so many different demands. He managed to ride that out and not really appropriate the spirit of that movement, but he did manage to kind of represent many of those demands, which is what his generation have been talking about for such a long time.

He was only old enough to run for president by a couple of months. You have to be 35 to be president in Chile, and he was just the right side of that cutoff. Lots of people were, you know, kind of almost mocking him for this sort of brash, brazen run at the presidency. And he didn't even manage to kind of get the signatures he needed, almost. And in the first round of the election in November, he lost by two percentage points to the far right candidate, José Antonio Kast, who ran this incredibly aggressive, hardline, pro-Pinochet dictatorship and its economic legacy. Chile will never be a Marxist or communist country because we believe in freedom. But he also had a very simple message. Make Chile great again.

He would expel undocumented migrants. He would maintain Chile's unbridled free market model and lower taxes for big business. You know, he wanted to dig ditches along the northern borders of Bolivia and Peru to try and stop migrants coming into the country in the same way as, you know, the sort of Trump idea of building

a wall. The ditch would be three meters deep and six meters wide. And it's the closest thing yet to former U.S. President Donald Trump's wall along the U.S.-Mexican border. Except the cast is not proposing that Bolivia pay for it. The two of them then passed their second round just before Christmas on the 19th of December. Boric overturned this two percentage point deficit to become Chile's president-elect. Chileans, I receive this mandate with humility and... I know that in the coming years, Chile's future is at stake.

So I guarantee you that I'll be a president that looks after democracy and not risk it, that takes care of what he says, that always looks for unity, that will attend to people's needs every day, that firmly stands up against the privilege of the few and work every day for the Chilean families to have a good quality of life. I see Antonio Kast in the end turned out to be this quite convenient foil for Boric's progressive agenda because it was so starkly contrasting with what Boric wanted to do with the country and what a lot of young Chileans wanted to see happen in the country that I

think that more than anything, people united against Kass and they did in favor of Gabriel Boric. Tell us more about his agenda. Tell us more about the promises he made to Chilean voters. When he won the primary earlier this year against the Communist Party candidate, he stood on stage outside his kind of makeshift campaign headquarters and raised his fist into the sky, promising to bury neoliberalism, this sort of socioeconomic model that General Pinochet left behind. I will be a president who cares for our democracy, not one who extinguishes it, who listens more than he talks, who seeks unity, and who attends daily to the needs of the people,

who fights against the privileges of the few and works every day for the quality of life of Chilean families. And that's something that I think really does resonate with young Chileans. Everyone can see the legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship in Chile, whether it's in the pension system, in the healthcare system,

in the way that services are provided for Chileans you know that kind of formed the basis of what he wants to do how he wants to kind of unpick this model and turn Chile into something more resembling more of a kind of social democracy with a welfare state with social provisions and a social safety net kind of guaranteed for people so you know he's talked about things that were really part of his initial program when he first kind of surged into politics. So in particular, pardoning student debt, he wants to work towards kind of free, high quality education for all. The pension system, again, is an incredibly important part of this, the pension funds that were actually devised by

the current president's brother as part of the dictatorships model, which is these kind of privatized pension funds where you contribute into them. And then the allowances that people were given when they retired ended up being pitiful. So he wants to unpick that completely. He wants to encourage a green recovery from the pandemic, which I think is on the agenda of a lot of governments that are taking office over the next couple of years around the world. Another is looking at how royalties work with mining as well. The kind of the backbone of the Chilean economy is extractivism. You know, the copper industry is incredibly strong here. You've got agriculture, forestry, fisheries as well. Those are really big sectors for the country.

And he wants to address kind of all of these social ills that Chile has suffered over such a long period of time by essentially raising taxes and kind of, you know, increasing social spending. Of course, Chile's wealth as a Latin American nation comes from chiefly its mineral wealth. How is that being received? I think that this is the big question for governments that are taking the reins, not just in Latin America, which is traditionally a commodity exporter, but also around the world over the next four or five years, because there's no doubt that climate action needs to be taken quickly

and, you know, you need to make very difficult decisions. One of the things that that's centered on here in Chile in particular is lithium. Chile, I think, has just over 40% of the world's lithium. I think it's going to be a mineral which is going to define the fight against climate change. Of course, it's used for batteries. But how Boric really kind of manages the incredibly negative perception of mining. Obviously, lithium needs to be extracted. And in Chile's case, it needs to be shipped to China to be made into batteries,

then shipped back to Chile to be used. That's a very difficult conundrum for him. I think, you know, whether you're going to be able to tackle climate change without mining is another question I think he's going to have to be very careful about. He's proposed a national lithium company in the image of Codelco, which is a state copper company here. And nobody really has any problems with what Codelco are doing because they contribute a huge share of GDP in Chile.

And, you know, extractivism is always the way that Chile has gone about things. But how they diversify the economy while maintaining a green stance and hitting their 2050 carbon neutrality targets, I think is going to be very difficult. What were all the people who voted against Boric voting against? Why were they scared of his presidency? There was a lot of sensationalist rhetoric around Boric, particularly his proximity to the Communist Party. The Communist Party is incredibly powerful in Chile. They have a huge membership.

They're very active in much of the country, particularly in the traditional sort of industrial belts in the country. You know, anti-communism, as a historian here once said to me, is one of the few things that Pinochet managed to get to unite Chileans. And it still is the country. You know, anti-communism, as a historian here once said to me, is one of the few things that Pinochet managed to get to unite Chileans. And it still is the case. You know, when you talk about the popularity of certain politicians from the Communist Party, you talk of their popularity in spite of their membership of the Communist Party. And Boric's campaign was very close to the Communist Party. It was the largest party that was part of his

campaign. And there are going to be several Communist Party ministers, I think, in this government. So I think that that was something that inspired people to vote against Boric. People are very scared. And, you know, there's obviously a sort of certain trauma around communism in Chile after Salvador Allende's presidency, which was brought to an abrupt end by General Pinochet's

coup d'etat on the 11th of September 1973. So it sounds like he sort of wants nothing short of overhauling how Chile works. Definitely. I think that it's such a profound set of reforms that he's suggesting. And, you know, certainly rhetorically, since he surged onto the scene and this whole generation have kind of taken politics by storm in Chile, these are things that they've been talking about for such a long time. Obviously, what happens now when they have to turn those promises into practice and how they prioritise these reforms is going to be the most interesting part of this. The other thing that certainly isn't in his favour is that he has a divided Congress. The right made gains in the general election, which was part of the first round of the presidential votes as well. So Congress is now divided, it's quite evenly split. It's going to be very hard for him

to push through the reforms that he actually wants. You know, over the next four years, I don't think he's going to be able to change Chile and kind of turn it on its head. But if it resembles something more of a more of a social democracy in four years time, then I think you could say that his administration has been a success. And a large part of that is going to be down to the constitutional process, which is rumbling on in the background. Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter.

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to speak to an advisor free of charge betmgm operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario okay so john we've got a new president in Chile. He's the youngest president in the history of the country. He has a lot of ideas of how to completely overhaul the government. And while he will try to impose those ideas, the government itself is being completely overhauled by this constitutional reform. Is that all right? Yeah, that's absolutely correct. The political system, I think, is going to change markedly. One of the things that we're really going to see is this sort of disconnection between the political and economic elite, the people that effectively run the country and the rest of the population. I think that's a bridge that needs to be rebuilt. And that's certainly as possible

through the constitutional process. I think that what we might see is a transition to a single chamber Congress, for example. We might end up seeing that kind of certain parts of the presidential powers at the moment, like the presidential veto over legislation that Congress passes, I think that that may go as well. That, you know, the president's ability to direct the legislative agenda, that might go as well. So there are lots of things that I think are going to change. I think that politics as well as society is going to become more equitable. That said, with a whole new political system being implemented, I think that that makes this, it's a headache for any sitting president and sitting government. So Boric has a lot on his

plate, I think. He has to be very careful what he does now and what he does in the future as part of the political transition. And he wants to make these big changes while there will be big changes to Chile's constitution. Will that work in his favor or could it work against him? Can he sort of marry his changes into the new constitution? Or could the fact that the constitution's being changed, you know, make his governmental reforms feel less legitimate? I think that this is a true transition government. I think that whoever had won this presidential election was always going to have to be the one that oversaw this transition from one political system or sort ofeconomic system as

well to another. So there's no doubt there really that I think that's going to be the top priority. And I think that's how this government's going to be remembered, whatever it manages to achieve in terms of legislation. In Boric's case, he's obviously very much in favour of the constitutional process. He's backed as well by a lot of the convention itself. The convention that was elected is broadly left wing. There are lots of independents. There are lots of voices from outside the capital, Santiago, which has this incredible sort of gravitational pull in terms of economic resources, in terms of kind of the political power in the country. Everything is very much concentrated in Santiago. So that's something else that Boric has really talked about a lot. He really wants to

kind of include the regions in the political process. He wants to decentralize. He wants to move towards something more resembling a sort of federal model, I suppose, of kind of governance, because the regions really don't have a say in their own decision making. No Chilean politician casts a longer shadow than Augusto Pinochet. And despite being a murderer, he's still beloved by many in the country. Is there a chance that Gabriel Borch is, you know, a fresh start for Chile, and that the country might finally be shaking off the legacy of Pinochet? Without a doubt. And this is something that rhetorically he's repeated over and over again this idea that he wants to kind of bury uh general pinacher's legacy i think that the constitution is

going a long way towards doing that uh which is uh you know i think it's a positive thing for chile because a lot of these things were kind of taboo subjects before particularly before the social movement in 2019 uh people really didn't talk about these things you had these divided dinner tables which i think you know is the the kind of the sort of classic image that you have of these kind of post dictatorship societies where they're just kind of irreparably scarred by what's gone before. Whether Boric can kind of heal those divisions, I'm not sure. I think that's something that's going to have to come from society itself. And I think it already is actually changing. People are actually talking here for the first time in generations. But, you know, interestingly, now this generation has come

to power. These were the ones that didn't live under the dictatorship. They never really experienced what it was like, but they have seen the legacy and they have lived under the privatized education model. They have seen the inadequate public services, which are inherited from the Pinochet years. You see these incredibly evocative slogans come up from time to time, you know, when the Chileans were asked yes or no, would they like a new constitution? Around 80% of people voted yes to draft a new one. And at that time, there was this banner unveiled in the main square here in Santiago, which said that we are the sons and daughters of the ones that you weren't able to kill. And that idea, I think, is incredibly

powerful. These are the people that weren't around at the time, but they have suffered the effect. John Bartlett is a freelance journalist based in Santiago de Chile. You can find a lot of his writing about Gabriel Boric at theguardian.com. Our show today was produced by Hadi Mawagdi and Halima Shah, engineered by Afim Shapiro, fact-checked by Laura Bullard, and edited by Matthew Collette and Noel King. And we used music by Victor Jara.

He's a Chilean musician and activist who was tortured and killed under Augusto Pinochet's military dictatorship. I wanted to say a quick little something before we call it for the week. Over the holidays, the world lost a legend. A few, actually. You heard about Betty White, but you might not have heard about the ecologist Dr. Thomas Lovejoy. A lot of people know Dr. Lovejoy as the godfather of biodiversity.

He practically coined the term. He spent much of his life studying the most biologically diverse place on the planet, the Amazon, and he eventually became one of its foremost preservationists. We all sort of take for granted that we got to protect the Amazon, we got to save the Amazon, the cure for cancer might be in the Amazon, the trees in the Amazon are going to save the planet from climate change. Whatever it might be, it was not always a given. Dr. Lovejoy was one of the first people to really make the case that we got to save the Amazon back in the 70s. In 2019, when we were covering a story about a push to increase mining in the Amazon, we reached out to Dr. Lovejoy to ask him to explain what was worth saving.

I still remember when he came into Vox's office in Washington, D.C. in a full suit, wearing a bow tie, and I interviewed him in jeans and a t-shirt and thought, this guy probably thinks I'm just some punk. But he didn't. He invited me to come to his camp in the Amazon over the holidays that year. I went. It was one of the most incredible experiences of my life. And we became friends. He always asked me to call him Tom. And I always said,

sure thing, Dr. Lovejoy. Tom died on Christmas Day at his home in McLean, Virginia. You can read all about his incredible life and his work in the Washington Post or the New York Times or at the Amazon Biodiversity Center's website. That's the organization he founded. I thought it'd be nice to play some of the episode we made with him before we go today. He'd want you to go see and save the Amazon too. So when I first walked into the forest 54 years ago, my first reaction was, hey, what's the big deal? I mean, you go there thinking that things are going to be leaping out at you from all different places and corners. And in fact, all you see is a lot of green. And then after a while, you realize you've never seen so many shades of green in your life.

That you're literally looking at hundreds and hundreds of different kinds of trees. And then you begin to hear things. Then you realize there are always all kinds of things making noises in the background. You just can't see them. It's sort of like an enormous symphony of organisms calling all day long and all day night. Some might be birds, some might be insects, others might be frogs, others might be monkeys. You'll have a bird which gives an enormous, loud wolf whistle of a call. And it's called the screaming peahot.

All the males hang out and basically have a competition as to who sings more effectively. And it's ear splitting. You'll have toucans, all kinds of birds called ant birds, macaws, parrots, and then my favorite one is called a motmot. It's a gorgeous bird and it only will call at dawn and at dusk. You can almost set your watch by it. So if you hear the mot-mot in the morning go, udu, you know it's 5.30. And then after a while your eye gets accustomed. You see that this is an environment where life is built on life over long periods of time. So it's not surprising that, you know,

it is the single greatest repository of biological diversity on the entire planet. Thank you.