[ Gabriel Boric promises sweeping social change. In a nation of
duelling political extremes, he’ll need to sell his vision not just
to his opponents but also to his allies.]
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CAN CHILE’S YOUNG PRESIDENT REIMAGINE THE LATIN AMERICAN LEFT?  
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Jon Lee Anderson
June 6, 2022
The New Yorker
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_ Gabriel Boric promises sweeping social change. In a nation of
duelling political extremes, he’ll need to sell his vision not just
to his opponents but also to his allies. _

Gabriel Boric, who is thirty-six, campaigned on a
revolutionary-sounding slogan: “If Chile was the cradle of
neoliberalism, it will also be its grave.”, Photographs by Tomás
Munita for The New Yorker

 

February in Santiago, the capital of Chile, is like August in Paris:
the end of summer, when everyone who can afford a vacation escapes for
a last gasp of freedom. Many _santiaguinos_ go to the nearby Pacific
beaches, or to the chilly lakes in the south. After two months of
frenetic activity that followed the election of December 19th, Gabriel
Boric, the country’s President-elect, was also planning to take a
break.

At a back-yard barbecue, a few weeks before his inauguration, Boric
explained that he and his partner were heading to the Juan Fernández
archipelago, four hundred miles off the coast. Their destination was
the island where the Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk was marooned in
the eighteenth century, helping inspire Daniel Defoe’s “Robinson
Crusoe.” Boric planned to swim and fish, and also to read through a
pile of books: the Defoe classic, biographies of Chilean Presidents, a
history of Eastern Europe by Timothy Snyder. He felt that he had some
catching up to do on geopolitics, since he was already being courted
by superpowers.

After Boric’s victory, President Joe Biden had called to offer
congratulations, and to invite him to a summit of hemispheric leaders
in Los Angeles. Chile, with its four thousand miles of coastline, is a
tactical outpost in Latin America—a region where Biden has been
trying, intermittently, to increase his outreach. The trip would be
complicated for Boric; he had won office at the head of a left-wing
coalition that included Chile’s Communist Party, which tends to
regard the United States as an imperialist aggressor. But, he told me,
the summit wasn’t for several months, and “Biden said I didn’t
have to decide right away.”

The Chinese Embassy had hand-delivered a letter from Xi Jinping, in
which he courteously reminded Boric that the People’s Republic of
China was Chile’s biggest trading partner. Chile is the world’s
largest producer of copper and its second-largest of lithium;
China’s supply of batteries and cell phones depends on the trade.

Boric had also heard that Vladimir Putin was considering a visit to
Argentina, and wondered if he’d want to add Chile to his itinerary.
He grimaced as he thought about it. Some on Chile’s hard left see
Russia as an ally against American “hegemony,” but Boric didn’t
want Putin in his country.

Boric is thirty-six—a year older than the minimum age for a Chilean
President—with a stocky build, a round, bearded face, and a mop of
brown hair. He described these developments with an air of thrilled
complicity; they were among the most important moments of his life so
far. He was not yet officially President, but he had been given a car
and bodyguards, and was briefed daily by the outgoing administration.
He had declared that his government would be feminist, and that his
cabinet, in a first for Latin America, would be predominately female;
fourteen out of twenty-four ministers would be women, including the
secretaries of defense and the interior. Two ministers were openly
gay. Many of Boric’s officials were young leftists, like himself.

His partner, Irina Karamanos, also represented a break with the past.
A thirty-two-year-old of Greek and German descent, she speaks five
languages, has degrees in anthropology and education, and is regarded
as a leader in feminist politics. She had already managed to pique
some Chileans by declaring that she would “reformulate” the role
of First Lady, because she was “neither first nor a lady.”

Boric’s opponent in the election was José Antonio Kast, an
ultraconservative Catholic with nine children. An admirer of
Brazil’s far-right Jair Bolsonaro, Kast had promised a pro-business,
law-and-order government that would keep out unwanted immigrants and
oppose abortion and same-sex marriage. He was the son of an officer in
Hitler’s Wehrmacht who had immigrated to Chile after the war and
built a fortune selling Bavarian-style meats. Echoing Donald Trump,
Kast urged voters to “dare to make Chile a great country.”

In the end, Boric beat Kast by twelve percentage points, garnering the
largest number of votes ever cast for a candidate in Chile. He
represented the most left-wing government since the ill-fated
Presidency of Salvador Allende, a socialist who won power in 1970,
only to be overthrown three years later in a bloody military coup,
after which General Augusto Pinochet ruled as a right-wing dictator
for seventeen years.

To run the economy, Pinochet brought in a group that became known as
the Chicago Boys, economists who had studied at the University of
Chicago under the libertarians Milton Friedman and Arnold Harberger.
(Kast’s older brother led Chile’s central bank.) The country
became a proving ground for Latin American _neoliberalismo_, with
wholesale deregulation and the privatization of state-controlled
companies, education, health care, and pensions.

After democracy was restored, in 1990, Chile’s governments avoided
extremes. For two decades, a center-left coalition known as the
Concertación held power in a series of administrations; for another
twelve years, control of the country alternated from the center right
to the center left. Chile established itself as a stable, upwardly
mobile nation amid volatile, poorer neighbors. But the economic
policies installed under Pinochet didn’t fundamentally change.
Inequities grew more severe.

By 2019, the World Inequality Report placed Chile near the bottom of
its rankings, among such states as the Central African Republic and
Mozambique; one per cent of the country’s population held
twenty-seven per cent of its income. That October, everything burst.
High-school students took to the streets, protesting a
government-mandated subway-fare hike, but this was only a symbol of
deeper frustrations. As one slogan put it, “It’s not the thirty
pesos, it’s the thirty years of indifference.” The protests grew
into mass demonstrations, in which as many as a million Chileans
marched, demanding change of every kind—it was a sometimes
cathartic, sometimes bloody episode known as the _estallido social_,
or social explosion.

In November, 2019, after weeks of growing violence, Chile’s
political parties negotiated a historic pact. Grandiloquently named
the Agreement for Social Peace and a New Constitution, it called for a
new constitutional process, in which everyone’s voice would be
heard. On the left, the most notable signatory was Gabriel Boric.

Boric’s efforts to defuse the unrest helped make him a viable
candidate for President. During his campaign, he promised Chileans
“a better life.” He would create a national health-care system,
implement government-subsidized pensions, and eliminate student debt.
He would alleviate poverty by creating half a million new jobs,
funding his proposals by raising taxes on mining corporations. He
adopted a revolutionary-sounding slogan: “If Chile was the cradle of
neoliberalism, it will also be its grave.”

The day before I arrived in Chile, Boric had celebrated his birthday
with Karamanos and a few close friends. They carried on the next
night, and I joined them as they bantered over wine and _piscola_, a
head-spinning concoction of pisco, a grape-based liquor, and
Coca-Cola. Every few minutes, Boric got up to tend the fire beneath
an _asado patagón_—lamb cooking on an upright iron cross.

The conversation was mostly lighthearted, but it grew serious when it
turned to the vagaries of the Chilean left. Even though Boric had
emerged as the leading figure, he was vilified by some as _amarillo_,
or yellow, for his willingness to engage in dialogue with adversaries.
On the far left, to be _amarillo_ is tantamount to being a traitor.

During the _estallido_, leftist extremists had engaged in daily
street confrontations with police, and had torched churches and public
buildings. The conservative government of the billionaire Sebastián
Piñera had deployed riot police, who attacked protesters, resulting
in some thirty deaths; tear-gas cannisters and rubber bullets caused
more than three hundred eye injuries, and a rumor spread that
Piñera’s men were aiming for the eyes. The police were also accused
of rape and other kinds of sexual abuse. A feminist group
choreographed a dance protest, called “A Rapist in Your Path,”
which has been performed by sympathizers around the world.

Protesters adopted as their emblem a fearsome black dog called Negro
Matapacos, or Black Cop Killer, and soon there were stencils of him on
buildings everywhere, along with graffiti like “A dead cop doesn’t
rape.” By the time the protests died down, in March, 2020, the
resulting damage had cost the country at least three billion dollars,
and the economy had slowed. Piñera was forced to apologize for his
policies and to fire several cabinet ministers. But many Chileans
still felt contempt for law enforcement and for government
institutions. Activists heckled officials in restaurants and on the
street. In December, 2020, I visited the symbolic heart of
the _estallido_, an intersection that protesters had renamed the
Plaza de la Dignidad. It remained a free-fire zone, where activists in
gas masks waited for riot police to show up and fight. The pavement
was scorched from flaming barricades and littered with projectiles,
including spent fire extinguishers, that had been hurled at passing
cars.

In office, Boric faces huge challenges. His party and its coalition
partners are the minority in parliament, and to pass any laws he will
have to negotiate agreements with his political rivals. His own
coalition—Apruebo Dignidad, or I Choose Dignity—is riven by
internal disputes, especially between his closest political allies and
the Communist Party. Andrés Scherman, a Chilean political commentator
and journalist, told me, “One of the risks of leading such a
fragmented and heterogeneous coalition is that Boric ends up as a
general without any troops.”

Boric has four tattoos, all of which commemorate his birthplace, in
Patagonia—Chile’s most remote region, known by the romantic name
Magallanes and the Chilean Antarctic. During one of our first
meetings, he rolled up his sleeves to show them to me. One, on his
forearm, depicted a lighthouse above a roiling sea. Another was an
intricate map that included the Beagle Channel, where his
great-grandfather, an émigré from Croatia, had come in 1887 to
search for gold. Boric unbuttoned his shirt to reveal his right
shoulder, which was inked with a native lenga tree, a symbol of
Patagonia. He smiled and said, “I’m going to be the first
President from Magallanes in two hundred years of autonomous Chile.”

Magallanes is Chile’s Alaska, with some hundred and seventy thousand
residents amid a vast wilderness. Three-quarters of them live, as
Boric’s family does, in Punta Arenas, a windblown town with a
frontier spirit. Patagonians are independent-minded, accustomed to
wind and rain and cold; they are also accustomed to relatively
comfortable livelihoods, often from sheep ranching, tourism, or the
oil industry.

Boric’s father, Luis Javier Boric Scarpa, from the Croatian side of
the family, is a chemical engineer who has spent his entire career
with the state petroleum company. Boric’s mother, María Soledad
Font, of Catalan descent, is a former librarian and a member of a
Catholic sect, the Movimiento Apostólico de Schoenstatt. The family
home, a sprawling two-story house beside the Strait of Magellan, is
decorated with pictures, altars, and votive candles dedicated to the
Virgin Mary.

Boric, the oldest of three boys, studied at Punta Arenas’s British
School before moving to Santiago to attend law school at the
University of Chile. He finished classes in 2009, but he never
practiced law. Politics, instead, became his abiding interest.

He emerged as a leader during the Chilean Winter, a period of student
protests that began in 2011, during the first Presidency of Sebastián
Piñera. (For the sixteen years before Boric’s election, Piñera
traded four-year terms with the Socialist politician Michelle
Bachelet, because Chile’s Presidents are forbidden to serve two
terms in a row.) A previous round of demonstrations, in 2006, had been
known as the Penguin Revolution, because it was led by high-school
students who often marched in their black-and-white uniforms. The
Chilean Winter protests were led by university students, who took up
some of the same demands, including greater state support for
education and an end to subsidies for private schools—a legacy of
the Pinochet years, which had hollowed out public education. Among
them were Boric and a handful of other activists who have become
prominent: Giorgio Jackson, Camila Vallejo, and Karol Cariola.

In 2009, Boric was elected president of the student union at the law
school. Two years later, he became president of the University of
Chile’s student union, narrowly defeating Vallejo, a geography major
whom the _Times Magazine_ had dubbed “the world’s most glamorous
revolutionary.” Ambitious, bright, and outspoken, the four activists
were friends with differences: Vallejo and Cariola were Communists,
Jackson and Boric closer to democratic socialists. In the 2013
elections, all four won parliamentary seats.

[A group of people stand in a line at a protest wearing masks and
holding up shields and posters.]

In Chile’s estallido social, or social explosion, protests demanding
change turned into violent conflicts with police.

In 2018, Boric stepped away from his parliamentary duties to seek
treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder. He announced the news on
Instagram, where he had 1.5 million followers, posting a picture of
himself with a deep frown. “Hi everyone!” he wrote. “I wanted to
tell you that I am taking a break for a couple of weeks. As I have
said before, I have had O.C.D., obsessive-compulsive disorder, ever
since I was a boy, and based on medical recommendation, I’ve now
agreed to be responsible and to seek treatment.”

Boric’s O.C.D. first appeared when he was eight, and he often
struggled at school. He recalled being unable to finish Anne Frank’s
“The Diary of a Young Girl” in the assigned time, because his
O.C.D. made him go back two lines every time he accidentally skipped a
word. There were other tics: he had to blink four times before leaving
his bedroom, and when he walked he always started with his left foot.

Discussing his O.C.D. was politically risky; in one debate, Kast used
it to insinuate that he wasn’t fit for office. But Boric’s candor
attracted public sympathy. In his Presidential acceptance speech,
Boric said that more needed to be done for mental illness in Chile,
and the audience responded with a huge round of applause.

Gabriel García Márquez once quipped that Chile was the only place in
Latin America where newsboys hawked copies of the country’s laws on
the street. Democracy and stability are the norm. After winning
independence from Spain, in the nineteenth century, Chile had six
decades of relative political quietude—far longer than most of its
neighbors. Later, it developed a multiparty system, and experienced
another half century of peaceful democracy before Pinochet seized
power.

But alongside Chile’s institutional habits runs a current of
anarchism and bohemianism. In the years before the coup, the country
was shaken by duelling political extremes. When Allende was elected,
in 1970, it was the height of the Cold War, and both the U.S. and the
Soviet Union saw Chile as a strategic battleground. Although Allende
gained power legitimately, he won the popular vote by a razor-thin
margin, at the head of a left-wing coalition.

In office, Allende instituted a program that he called the “Chilean
path to socialism,” nationalizing copper mines and banks,
confiscating large landholdings, and increasing social protections for
the poor. Radicals and revolutionaries poured in from around the
region. Chile’s most militant leftists agitated for a sweeping
transformation of society. The right launched terror attacks. Fidel
Castro came and stayed for three weeks, appearing at rallies and
telling Chileans they should prepare to fight to defend their
“revolution.”

Allende’s reforms were nonviolent, in contrast with Castro’s
advocacy of armed rebellion. He embodied the possibility of a
different kind of Latin American socialism, closer to Scandinavia than
to the U.S.S.R. Still, his government alarmed Chile’s conservative
establishment: politicians, the armed forces, the private sector.
Corporate interests in the United States were also dismayed, and they
urged the White House to do something. The Nixon Administration
devised covert plans to unseat Allende, with help from the C.I.A.

In the end, Pinochet and his allies in the military did it for them.
The Air Force bombarded the Presidential palace, and on September 11,
1973, Allende killed himself, using an AK-47 that Castro had given
him. In the aftermath came an onslaught of repression, in which more
than three thousand people were murdered and many more were tortured
and imprisoned. Half a century later, Chile has not entirely
recovered.

But, as despotic as Pinochet was, even he embodied some of Chile’s
institutionalist tendencies. After seven years in power, he sought to
legitimatize his tenure by drafting a new constitution. In Santiago,
Pinochet once explained to me that the old constitution had been a
drag on his power. “You have to be able to set the goalposts to be
able to act!” he said. “So I set the goalposts.”

In 1988, Pinochet held a referendum, hoping to secure eight more years
in power. This time, he lost, but he didn’t entirely withdraw. He
kept command of the armed forces, and had arranged for himself to be
named a senator for life, along with nine handpicked associates. He
had parliamentary immunity and, through an alliance with right-wing
political parties, effective control of the legislature.

Pinochet’s grip on Chile was loosened in 1998, by a surprise arrest.
As he visited the United Kingdom, the Spanish judge Baltasar Garzón
had him apprehended on charges of genocide, torture, and terrorism.
Pinochet was ultimately allowed to return home, but he was diminished,
and spent the rest of his life fighting prosecution. In 2005, he was
discovered to have stashed millions of dollars of pilfered government
funds in more than a hundred and twenty concealed bank accounts, with
help from the U.S.-based Riggs Bank. When Pinochet died, the following
year, few Chileans mourned his passing.

After his widow, Lucía Hiriart, died, last December, at the age of
ninety-eight, the streets of Santiago filled with crowds drinking
champagne and shouting in celebration. One placard read “_Chau vieja
CTM_ ”—a slogan, abbreviating the local epithet _concha tu
madre_, that translates roughly as “Bye-bye, you old bitch.”

The evening before Boric left for his island vacation, we met at the
home of the writer Patricio (Pato) Fernández, in the suburb of
Providencia. Fifty-two, with a Teddy-bear build and an easy sense of
humor, Fernández is a political commentator and the founder of _The
Clinic_, a satirical newspaper that he started in order to poke fun at
Pinochet. (The name refers to the British medical facility where
Pinochet was recovering from back surgery when he was arrested.)
Fernández’s paper is generally progressive, but it does not spare
the left: one memorable cover depicted Nicolás Maduro, the
obstreperous leader of Venezuela, with donkey ears, under the headline
“_nicolás maburro_.”

At Fernández’s house, Boric wore his habitual outfit of jeans,
beat-up boots, and a checked flannel shirt. He had brought along pisco
and Coca-Cola, and periodically refilled a red plastic cup. He sent
his Presidential bodyguards out to buy beef, and then bustled around a
grill in the garden.

I had spent an evening with Fernández and Boric in 2015, at a bar
near the Punta Arenas waterfront called the Shackleton, for the
Anglo-Irish explorer who limped into Chile after his ordeal in
Antarctica. It was winter in Patagonia, and a cold wind whipped
outside as Boric and Fernández talked intently about Michelle
Bachelet’s latest travails. Bachelet had staked her Presidency on
the promise of education reform, but she had become embroiled in a
scandal involving her son and a questionable bank loan.

Boric, in his early days as a parliamentarian, was bright, intense,
and ambitious, but new to politics and looking for guidance. Born in
1986, he hardly remembered the Pinochet years and, like others of his
generation, he felt impatient with moderate reforms. Fernández had
come of age under the dictatorship and had learned to value the
freedoms brought about by the Concertación governments. He had his
ear to the ground, and could tell Boric things that he wouldn’t hear
elsewhere.

Since then, the two had built a close friendship, with Boric coming
often to Fernández’s home for dinner or to play chess with his
teen-age son, León. When their conversations ran late, Boric slept on
the couch. These days, Fernández likes to tell visitors, “The
President has slept where you are sitting.”

During the _estallido social_, the two men were drawn into the
national debate over how to end the upheaval. In “Sobre la
Marcha,” a book Fernández wrote about the demonstrations, he argued
in favor of the Agreement for Social Peace and a New Constitution,
saying that the process could help calm Chile’s civil strife and
address its endemic social inequities, “so that after leaving behind
the time for throwing stones, as Ecclesiastes once said, we can enter
the time of gathering them together.”

Boric’s party, Social Convergence, opposed the agreement, which it
saw as an impediment to more foundational reforms. But, Fernández
recalled, “I argued strongly in favor. Even though it wasn’t a
demand of the groups on the street, it seemed like most of their
demands could find common cause in a new constitution.” In the end,
Boric signed—in his own name, rather than as a representative of
Social Convergence. The Party suspended him, but the deal
went through. As Boric saw it, he’d gambled his political capital
in order to get rid of “Pinochet’s constitution once and for
all.”

Social Convergence eventually took Boric back, but he retained some
enemies on the street. Soon after signing the agreement, he was
sitting in a park when a group of leftists began cursing at him,
accusing him of having “sold out the people.” As they soaked him
with beer and spat on him, Boric stayed seated and quietly stared them
down. His calm response was widely praised.

When the proposal for a new constitution was put to a referendum, it
was approved overwhelmingly, by seventy-eight per cent of voters. A
constitutional congress was elected: a hundred and fifty-five
representatives, of whom three-quarters were leftists or independents.
They included Fernández, who had run at the urging of friends.

The _convencionales_, as they are known, were given until this July
to draft a constitution, which they will submit to a referendum in the
fall. In a column after the Presidential election, Fernández wrote,
“Gabriel Boric knows perfectly well that the destiny of his
Presidency is inextricably linked to that of this constitutional
process.” But, as the _convencionales_ began drafting proposals,
the pragmatic spirit that Boric embodied often seemed absent. A
veteran Marxist named María Magdalena Rivera solemnly proposed a
Soviet-style system in which all state institutions would be replaced
by a “Multinational Assembly of Workers and Peoples” that would
exclude such “parasitic figures” as senior clergy, the military,
and owners of corporations. An environmental commission proposed
special protections for fungi. One _convencional_, a tattooed man
with a shaved head known as Baldy Vade, was ejected; he had run for
office on an inspiring story of surviving cancer, which it turned out
he’d never had.

Many of the impractical proposals were rejected. But the media,
particularly on the right, have presented a steady drip of news about
the more bizarre ideas. If the constitutional congress fails, it would
be disastrous for Boric’s government, potentially reviving his
opponents on both the right and the hard left. Fernández wrote,
“Success will require the building of new forms of trust, of a
cohesion gained through new civilizing challenges, and the complicity
of diverse sectors of Chilean society.” He meant that Boric needed
to bring together a divided country before it fell apart.

Chile is known as one of Latin America’s “poetic countries,” the
birthplace of Pablo Neruda, Gabriela Mistral, and Nicanor Parra.
Another poetic country is Nicaragua, the home of Rubén Darío and
also of Gioconda Belli—a poet and writer who has been exiled for
fiercely criticizing her country’s despotic ruler, Daniel Ortega.
Boric invited Belli to represent Nicaragua at his swearing-in. The day
after the ceremony, a lunch in her honor was held in the elegant
apartment of the writer Carla Guelfenbein.

Among the guests was Chile’s de-facto poet laureate, Raúl Zurita, a
bearded man of seventy-two. During the Presidential campaign, he had
presented Boric with a manifesto of support, signed by more than five
hundred Chilean writers, which expressed fear that a Kast government
risked “taking us back to the darkest moments in our history.” In
a less restrained mood, Zurita had told an interviewer that he was
“ready to commit suicide rather than vote” for Kast.

At lunch, Zurita was feeling celebratory, as were most of the guests;
speeches were interrupted frequently by champagne toasts. Things
quieted when Belli spoke about her new life in Madrid, and recalled
the death of an old friend who had been jailed on Ortega’s orders.
Belli’s presence at the swearing-in was a coded rebuke: Ortega and
his wife and co-leader, Rosario Murillo, were not invited.

For Boric, this kind of intrigue was just a small indicator of the
geopolitical problems that he might face. During one of our
conversations, he confessed that he wished he’d seen more of the
world before becoming President. He had taken his first trip outside
the region when he was thirteen, going with his family to Disney
World. He threw up his hands and laughed with embarrassment. At
seventeen, he’d lived for four months in a village near Nancy,
France, but he’d seen little of the country. It was soon after the
U.S. invaded Iraq, and his host family was too worried about
retaliatory terror attacks to allow him to visit Paris. Instead, Boric
stayed close to the village, and the father, a veteran of the Algerian
war, regaled him with stories about throwing prisoners from
helicopters. A few years later, Boric joined his parents on a
Mediterranean tour, but he caught no more than a glimpse of Europe.
“Rome, Prague, Cairo, Athens—a day in each place,” he said,
shrugging.

Later, Boric took a trip to Israel and Palestine. “It was the most
brutal thing I’ve ever experienced,” he recalled. He spoke
heatedly about the wall dividing the West Bank from Israel, and about
what he felt was a policy of “humiliation” of the Palestinians.
After the election, Boric’s nominee for agriculture minister wrote
to say that the Israeli Ambassador had invited them to a presentation
about water use. Chile was in the midst of a sustained drought, and
the Israelis are renowned for their advances in drip irrigation. The
minister assured Boric that the Ambassador was a progressive, raised
on a kibbutz. Boric was unconvinced. “We have to have some sort of
political discussion first,” he told me. “I mean, we cannot
normalize this degree of brutalization.”

During the Presidential campaign, Boric called Israel a “genocidal,
murderous state.” In a subsequent interview, he affirmed that
statement but noted that he would say the same about Turkey’s
treatment of Kurds, and China’s of Uyghurs. Chile has a significant
population of ethnic Palestinians—as many as five hundred thousand,
in a country of nineteen million people—and Boric’s sentiments
caused little controversy. But the Jewish population, about eighteen
thousand people, was unsettled. Following the election, Gerardo
Gorodischer, who leads a prominent organization called the Jewish
Community of Chile, told me that he looked forward to presenting Boric
with “additional viewpoints from the Jewish community, in the hope
that some of his past expressions can be toned down.”

After the first round of elections, in which Kast took the lead, Boric
moved closer to the center. His Communist Party coalition partners
continued to support the leftist autocracies in Cuba, Nicaragua, and
Venezuela. Boric had taken a contrary position, tweeting, “No matter
who it bothers, our government will have total commitment to democracy
and human rights, without support for any kind of dictatorship or
autocracy.” He had already criticized Daniel Ortega’s regime for
repressing political opponents, and had sharply chastised the Cuban
government for cracking down after protests last year. He
characterized Nicolás Maduro’s tenure in Venezuela as a “failed
experiment.” In retaliation, Maduro suggested that Boric was a
member of a new “cowardly left.”

After Boric returned from vacation, his close friend Emiliano Salvo
threw another _asado_. Boric arrived wearing a loud Hawaiian shirt
and a baseball cap with the name of the Spanish punk band Siniestro
Total. The island had been idyllic, he said—raw nature, hardly any
other tourists.

Salvo’s apartment was in a sixties-era building that looked out
toward the Andean foothills. He said that it reminded him of East
Berlin, where he lived as a child. His father was a socialist who had
been jailed and tortured by Pinochet’s regime. In exile, he met
Salvo’s mother, a German Communist, and they settled in an apartment
near Alexanderplatz. Salvo said fondly that his mother was a little
nostalgic for the old East Germany, like the mother in the movie
“Good Bye Lenin!”: “She refuses to see that the world has
changed.”

[Gabriel Boric hugs a member of a crowd.]

Boric is often mobbed by supporters taking selfies and plying him with
letters and gifts.

Boric and Salvo spoke wistfully about their youthful admiration for
the early years of Venezuela’s Bolivarian revolution. When Hugo
Chávez died, in 2013, Boric tweeted, “Much strength to the
Venezuelan people. There are many Chileans who are with you. To the
deepening of the Bolivarian revolution!” Salvo brought out a gift
he’d received in 2017: a windbreaker in the colors of the Venezuelan
flag, like the one that Chávez had made iconic. Lamenting the way
that things had turned out in Venezuela, Salvo muttered something
about the loss of innocence and then put his windbreaker away.

On the balcony, Boric searched on his phone for a poem: “Shocked,
Angry,” the Uruguayan poet Mario Benedetti’s response to Che
Guevara’s killing, in 1967. Standing amid friends and aides, he read
in a theatrical voice, with a finger held aloft for emphasis: “One
finger is / enough to show us the way / to accuse the monster and
its firebrands / to pull the triggers again.”

Despite Boric’s feeling for resonant language, he is wary of the
rhetoric of the hard left. He felt that the zero-sum discourse of the
past several decades had “served more as a poison than as a
fertilizer.” Since before Boric was born, Fidel Castro had exercised
an outsized influence on the Latin American left, promoting an
absolutist approach to power and politics. The leaders who sought to
follow Fidel Castro’s example most closely had miserable results:
Hugo Chávez and Nicolás Maduro, in Venezuela, and Daniel Ortega, in
Nicaragua. There are other leftist leaders in the hemisphere,
including Andrés Manuel López Obrador, in Mexico, and Alberto
Fernández, in Argentina. But, despite their revolutionary
pretensions, their political systems often seem most concerned with
preserving their hold on power. Of the surviving lions of the left,
just two have retained their status: José (Pepe) Mujica, the former
guerrilla who was the President of Uruguay a decade ago and has since
retired to his farm, and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, of Brazil, who
may return to power in elections in October.

Boric told me, “We have the opportunity to reimagine the left.”
But he knows that the crucial dichotomy in the region is less between
left and right than between democracy and populist authoritarianism.
Boric—young and unburdened by the past—seems likely to be the
politician who can best articulate the benefits of a greater freedom
from ideology. After the election, he named a much admired
establishment economist in his sixties as his finance chief, which
helped calm Chile’s jittery markets and business community. As
Fernández said, “The appointment sent an important signal that
Gabriel isn’t some crazy revolutionary.” Kast, despite the
inflammatory rhetoric of his campaign, made clear his willingness to
work with the new administration. Soon after the polls closed, he
tweeted, “Boric is our President now, and he deserves all of our
respect and constructive collaboration. Chile always comes first.”

Many of Boric’s people, in the U.S. context, would be Bernie Sanders
supporters. As his longtime political comrade Giorgio Jackson put it
to me, “We’re more Allendista than Fidelista. It’s like we’ve
been germinated with that democracy seed.” Boric himself is closer
to the center. When I asked if he had a role model, he said, a little
hesitantly, that he had always admired Allende, but that he didn’t
have “static role models.” It wasn’t because he was a chameleon,
he clarified—it was because he was “continually evolving.”

International Women’s Day is a huge event in Santiago, and this year
some three hundred thousand women marched along one of the main
avenues, heading to a rally in the city center. I joined a crowd of
women and girls with painted faces and clothes in the feminist colors
of purple and green. There were almost no other men in sight, but no
one asked me to leave.

Hundreds of women gathered to chant and sing and wave banners at the
Plaza de la Dignidad. Situated at a spot where police and protesters
had regularly done battle, the plaza contained a stone plinth
supporting a bronze statue of a historic Chilean figure, General
Baquedano, on horseback. During the _estallido_, authorities had
removed the statue, leaving only the plinth, which was now covered in
graffiti, as were many nearby buildings, some of which had also been
torched.

Women held placards with outraged slogans: “It’s a dress, not a
yes,” “What you call love is just unpaid work,” “_Muerte al
macho_.” One sign read “We’re the granddaughters of the witches
you weren’t able to burn.” A nearly naked woman walked past,
holding burning torches aloft. With a rope around her waist, she
pulled a wagon carrying another woman, dressed in queenly garb.
Elsewhere, two women collaborated on a performance: one methodically
washed pink panties and pinned them to a clothesline, while another,
kneeling, repeatedly dunked her head in the washtub. Not far away,
Irina Karamanos marched with several of Boric’s female cabinet
ministers, holding a banner that read “Democracy in the nation, at
home, and in bed.”

When I mentioned the Women’s Day march to Ricardo Lagos, the
President from 2000 to 2006, he seemed delighted. “This used to be a
country of gray suits,” he said. “But in the past thirty years
there has been a huge cultural opening!” A grandfatherly man of
eighty-four, he received me in his book-filled office at his
foundation, Democracy and Development.

As a young man, Lagos had been nominated as Allende’s Ambassador to
the Soviet Union, and had fled into exile when Pinochet seized power.
Returning home a few years later, he became the first prominent
Chilean to speak out against Pinochet on live TV. As President, he
represented the center-left Concertación coalition. “We opened this
country up,” Lagos said. “Chile was a different Chile then. There
wasn’t even a divorce law in this country! In 1993, when I first ran
for President, I said that I would pass one, and they didn’t elect
me. We finally managed it ten years later.” He noted that it
wasn’t until the Presidency of Michelle Bachelet, his
fellow-Socialist, that abortion in cases of rape was legalized.

Many leftists insist that Chile’s current problems are an
inheritance of past governments’ failure to create a fairer society.
To them, Lagos was a neoliberal. Lagos suggested that the insistence
on ideological purity was part of the problem. He and his allies had
provided educational opportunities and public housing for the poor.
“It wasn’t enough,” he conceded. But they didn’t have the
votes to do more, he said; Chile’s right-wing legislators had
wielded veto power to block reforms. “Our problem has been both
figuring how to deal with the ensemble that we inherited from Pinochet
and how to create a new ensemble,” he said.

In the hope of fostering greater unity, Pato Fernández had introduced
Boric to Lagos during the Presidential campaign. Lagos told me, “I
can’t say we’re friends—the generational difference is too
great. But I look favorably on him.” He added that he had liked
Boric’s Presidential acceptance speech, saying, “He understands he
has to be a statesman.” He had especially appreciated Boric’s
stance on the Russian invasion of Ukraine. On the first day of the
war, while Boric and Karamanos were still in the Juan Fernández
Islands, Boric had tweeted, “From Chile we condemn the invasion of
Ukraine, the violation of its sovereignty and the illegitimate use of
force. Our solidarity will be with the victims, and our humble efforts
will be on behalf of peace.” Lagos concluded, “I like his use of
the word ‘humble.’ It shows that he understands his place in the
world.”

La Moneda, the Presidential palace, was restored after Pinochet’s
bombing, but Chile’s modern Presidents have lived in their own
homes. A few days before Boric’s inauguration, he and Karamanos
moved into a new house: a rambling former clinic in an old section of
downtown. Boric said excitedly that it had thirteen rooms, a big step
up from the small apartment they’d shared before; he would finally
have space for his books.

The neighborhood, Yungay, consisted of two- and three-story homes from
around the turn of the twentieth century. I found Boric on the second
floor of a low Art Deco building, alone with a huge pile of unpacked
boxes. From the window, we could see _carabineros_ at a barricade at
the end of the block, where a group of curious people were being kept
at bay. The area was run-down, known for drug deals and persistent
crime, but Boric and Karamanos didn’t want to live in one of
the _barrios altos_—the posh neighborhoods of Santiago. Boric said
that he hoped their presence in Yungay would help make things better.

In one room, Boric had his only piece of furniture, an old-fashioned
rolltop desk. He had bought it from a secondhand store, he said,
stroking it with pride. His laptop was open, and he explained that he
was working on his speech for the inauguration. He was feeling “a
bit nervous, finally,” he confessed. He’d been distracting himself
by dipping into books—one about the twentieth-century Chilean
dictator Carlos Ibáñez del Campo, another about libertarian thought.

Boric wanted to greet the people at the barricade, so we walked
together, his plainclothes bodyguards fanning out. He stopped at a
doorway, where a young man handed him a flag of a Magallanes soccer
club. They embraced, and Boric stood for a selfie.

[Gabriel Boric stands on a balcony during his inaugural speech.]

In his inaugural speech, Boric summoned the memory of the coup that
brought Augusto Pinochet to power, in which the Air Force attacked the
Presidential palace. “Never again,” he said.

At the barricade, about fifty people had assembled, waving cell phones
and calling out to Boric. For ten minutes, he moved along the line,
posing for selfies, shaking hands, kissing elderly women, and
listening to his new constituents. A woman complained about the state
of her mother in a hospital; a man said he was having labor problems
at a mine.

Back in the apartment, Boric gestured toward a neglected exercise
machine, mentioning that he was feeling out of shape. He said that as
President he hoped to take some time for himself every day, but it
seemed unlikely that his duties would allow it. He showed me a gift
from a woman in the crowd below: a bearded doll woven to look like
him. “That’s nothing,” he said. Walking over to a stack of
boxes, he pulled out a huge plastic bag of gifts that people had
pressed upon him: more effigies, and hundreds of notes.

Through the window, I saw a woman waving excitedly from her apartment,
across the narrow street. Boric smiled and waved back, but he looked
overwhelmed. He murmured, “It’s all a bit ‘Truman Show,’
isn’t it?”

On March 11th, Boric was inaugurated, in Valparaíso, an hour’s
drive from Santiago. The ceremony took place in Chile’s
congressional building—a concrete behemoth that Pinochet erected
near the location of his childhood home. As Boric took his position
onstage, he stepped behind Piñera, his predecessor, and executed a
curious maneuver involving a complete pirouette; his O.C.D. was
flaring up. But the ceremony went smoothly, and at the end Congress
rose to applaud. Evidently unsure which gesture best represented him,
Boric acknowledged them by placing a hand over his heart, pumping a
fist in the air, and clasping his palms together: namaste.

Afterward, Boric was driven through the streets in a 1966 black Ford
Galaxie convertible—a gift from Queen Elizabeth II that has been
used by Chile’s Presidents since Allende. By the time he arrived at
the grounds of La Moneda, it was almost sundown. Boric would address
the nation from a balcony outside the office where Allende had
recorded his final speech, in 1973. Even though the inauguration
ceremony was an obligatory ritual, he had told me, he was really
looking forward to the address.

Among Boric’s obligations was a reception at which he greeted
foreign dignitaries. A few days earlier, he had told me that the King
of Spain was coming. With a vexed look, he said, “What the fuck do I
have to say to a king?”

Most Latin American leftists hold Spain’s monarchy in disdain,
because of its associations with colonial rule. In 2019, Andrés
Manuel López Obrador, the Mexican President, wrote to King Felipe
demanding an apology for Spain’s “abuses” in his country. The
King did not reply.

In Chile, the indigenous Mapuche people had resisted Spain’s
conquistadores, sometimes defeating them in battle. But the
Mapuche—afflicted by political marginalization, endemic poverty, and
land grabs by outsiders—have remained a restive social force. An
unresolved conflict has simmered in their central-Chilean homeland of
Araucanía, south of Santiago. The violence has escalated lately, with
land takeovers, arson, and occasional killings. Piñera sent in troops
on “pacification” missions, which were both brutal and
ineffective. Boric had criticized this strategy and vaguely promised a
new approach. The Mapuche conflict is one of the more delicate issues
facing him as President. (Later, when his interior minister visited
Araucanía, shots were fired near her convoy, in an apparent act of
intimidation.) Another pressing issue is rising discontent over
migrants; as many as 1.5 million of them have flooded into Chile from
poorer countries, especially Venezuela, Colombia, and Haiti.

When Boric finally met King Felipe, there was evidently not much to
say—just a polite handshake before moving down the line of
international guests. Aside from the King, there were few
conservatives. Bolsonaro had made a point of boycotting, though he
wouldn’t have been welcome anyway. The leftist contingent was much
stronger, including members of Spain’s Podemos movement. The
left-leaning Presidents of Argentina, Peru, and Bolivia also came, as
did the Colombian Presidential candidate Gustavo Petro, a former
guerrilla. After the inauguration, Petro and Boric tweeted a selfie of
themselves smiling and making heart shapes with their hands.

Before walking the red carpet into La Moneda, Boric veered off to take
selfies with well-wishers, hundreds of whom were straining at a police
line. Then a military band struck up, and Boric, whose handlers had
instructed him to walk in time with the music, headed toward the
palace in an awkward half march. Midway there, he stopped for a long
moment in front of a bronze statue of Allende, his head reverently
bowed.

When Boric appeared on the balcony, he spoke of how rockets had once
pierced the building where he stood. Never again, he suggested, would
the Chilean state repress its own people. He spoke about the
country’s burdens: peasants without access to water, students
saddled with debt, retirees without adequate pensions, relatives of
the disappeared, still waiting for their loved ones. Several times, he
said, “Never again,” repeating it in his reedy tenor like an
incantation.

As a half-moon rose, a rhyming chant broke out in the crowd: “Boric,
friend, the people are with you.” He called for unity. “We have to
embrace one another as a society, to love one another again, to smile
again,” he said. He referred to “violence in the world, and now a
war as well”—an allusion to Ukraine—and said, “Chile will
always take the side of human rights, no matter where, no matter what
the color of government involved.” When he said, “We must heal the
wounds of the _estallido social_,” the crowd roared its approval.
After Boric’s speech, Karamanos crossed the balcony, and they
kissed. As the audience chanted his name, Boric gripped the railing,
gazing out. He seemed aware that there would be no more free applause.

When it was all over, people began to move away from La Moneda,
heading home or out to celebrate more. Venders sold beer, along with
Boric flags and mugs and T-shirts. The city had a festive, ragged
atmosphere, as if a concert had just let out. As I approached the
Plaza de la Dignidad, though, the crowds grew sparse, and it was soon
clear why. A few blocks ahead, protesters had built barricades across
the avenue and set them ablaze. They had strung up a banner across one
with a message for Boric: “We won’t forget that you made a pact
with the enemy, and we won’t leave the streets until liberation is
complete.” 

_Jon Lee Anderson
[[link removed]], a staff
writer, began contributing to The New Yorker in 1998. He is the
author of several books, including “Che Guevara: A Revolutionary
Life [[link removed]].”_

* Chile's Election; Gabriel Boric;
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* Latin American Left
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* Radical Social Change
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