The president of Chile, Gabriel Boric, has alerted this Saturday in Madrid against the attempts to curtail rights and freedoms that are observed both in Europe and in Latin America. “Today there are those who propose, as a solution to the problems of the present, limiting freedoms, taking away the rights of others, censoring, denying. Take away the rights of women, dissidents, migrants, the elderly or workers ”, he has listed. For the Chilean president, it is “an increasingly present threat both in Europe and in Latin America,” according to what he explained at a ceremony held at Casa América, where he received a warm welcome.
Boric has landed in Spain as the first stop before the summit that the European Union is holding next week in Brussels with the leaders of the Latin American countries. After being acclaimed with cheers of: “Boric, friend, the people are with you”, the ruler has delivered a speech in which he has advocated for more democracy as a solution to the authoritarian drift.
The Chilean president, who won the elections in December 2021, asserted that we are facing a “new world” in which countries should not repeat “the recipes of the 20th century” that ended in failure. The president expressly cited the case of Nicaragua, whose president, Daniel Ortega, has ended the country’s freedoms. “There are times, as Nicaragua reminds us, when dressing as ‘red and black’ means nothing,” he said, referring to the colors of Sandinismo.
With this example of democratic involution, Boric warned: “Regardless of the color it comes from, we must retain, recreate and reinterpret the lesson we learned in dark times.” For Boric, the repressive model of government does not work, and what must be done is respect human rights. “The values and principles that should move us is unrestricted respect for human rights always and everywhere and that no difference justifies human rights violations. And the awareness that democracy and that its problems are solved with more democracy and not with less”.
The event, organized on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the Chilean coup, was also attended by singer-songwriter Joan Manuel Serrat and former Spanish President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who remembered the victims of the dictatorships of Augusto Pinochet and Francisco Franco. Boric referred to Lumi Videla, a Chilean student and militant of the Movimiento de Izquierda Revolucionaria. “She was brutally murdered, thrown, like a rag, into the Italian embassy in Chile, a militant from a different world, and in her I want to represent those who are not here today and should have been,” she declared.
Boric referred to the historical ties that Spain and Chile share and the common experience of a dictatorship that also united them. “Our peoples share the experience of having experienced autocratic and brutal regimes. However, Chile had a fortune derived from this tragedy, which was to receive the enriching and vital current of Spanish exile. It reached our shores in decades that were crucial for our productive, artistic and intellectual development”, he stressed.
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In a speech full of emotion, the Chilean leader elaborated on the fruits of these difficulties, “of our struggles to recover democracy, and for the laborious, firm, difficult and setback effort to build a regime of freedoms and greater equality . And of an incipient welfare state ”, he valued.
Finally, Boric declared that in his country they always take into account the cooperation between both nations. “Chile will never forget the lesson of solidarity, of love, that crossed the Atlantic, that crossed from Chile to Spain, from Spain to Chile, and that will always accompany us,” he concluded.
Before speaking at Casa América, the leader gave an interview to the string BE, where he anticipated some of his ideas: “The great challenge of current politics is to speak to those who do not think like one. The best version of an opponent’s argument can give you a lot politically”, he assured when asked how to deal with the rise of the extreme right, a phenomenon that he considers “global”.
The main answer consists, in his opinion, in abounding in democratic uses. “We have decided to resolve our conflicts with more democracy, not less, which is not usual in Latin America.”
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