These make it unique in the region.
The most recent example is Chile’s firm stance towards Venezuela for the repeated violation of the human rights.
President Boric has had to firmly face events that affect his country, derived from the crisis caused by the Venezuelan regime. This has cost him reproaches and outrages from Nicolás Maduro and his officials, and has also strained relations between the two countries, governed by the left that zigzags the Latin American course.
In 2023, Boric had to deal with the migration problems of more than 500,000 Venezuelans, of whom his government deported 146 until May for various crimes. Added to this are the criminal activities of the Aragua Train criminal gang since 2021, which Chile is trying to stop without Caracas’ collaboration.
Later, in February 2024, bilateral relations were complicated by the murder of Venezuelan lieutenant Ronald Ojeda. The dissident soldier remained in Chile as a refugee and was forcibly removed from his residence in Santiago by hooded and armed men.
The Chilean prosecutor’s office said it was a political crime ordered from Venezuela, according to the results of the investigation. Months later, the prosecutor serving the Maduro regime, Tareck William Saab, stated through his networks that it was “a false flag operation” and blamed “Chilean and foreign intelligence bodies.”
The Chilean president issued an angry note of protest in June, over the accusations of the Venezuelan prosecutor. And days later, the official deputy and strong man of Chavismo, Diosdado Cabello, insulted Boric. “Bobo,” he called a second time.
Boric civilista
Boric, who has been careful to describe Maduro’s regime as a dictatorship and to break off diplomatic relations, has not yet responded to the insults, but he reiterates his position whenever he can.
Last March, he harshly questioned Maduro at the La Moneda Palace.
“I have been very critical and have denounced in international forums the violations of human rights by a regime that, without a doubt, has had an authoritarian drift, as is the case of the Venezuelan regime,” said the Chilean president.
He also requested guarantees for the elections in Venezuela in July, after indicating that “we have sought to collaborate so that there is a democratic channel.” And he made it clear that “the voice of the government, and the international policy of the government, is decided by me.” And I have publicly established a clear condemnation of the human rights violations and restrictions on freedom of expression that, from our point of view, have existed in recent years in Venezuela.”
Also at the South American Summit, held in Brasilia at the end of that month, Boric criticized President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva since the Brazilian president described the complaints that transcend the human rights situation in Venezuela as “narrative.”
“I respectfully told him that I had a disagreement with what President Lula said yesterday (…) It is not a narrative construction, it is a serious reality,” Boric said on that occasion.
Human rights in Chile
Every time the president of Chile, a 38-year-old lawyer specializing in international human rights law and institutional history, expresses this position, “he focuses on civil and democratic formulas,” inherited from the historical, political and social reality of that nation, explains the former Venezuelan ambassador to Chile, Julio César Moreno León. Boric does not incur in “nonsense,” he specifies.
“Despite the ideological identification that may exist between the Chilean and Venezuelan governments and the fact that the Communist Party of that country is an important part of the government coalition along with leftist groups, the violation of human rights is a very marked stigma in the conscience of the people, for what the Augusto Pinochet regime did against the leftist opposition that was in exile.”
The diplomat maintains that both Boric and the Chilean left feel that “there is a debt” with respect to human rights and the protection of exiles and those who were persecuted and abused by the dictator.
democratic left
Moreno León, of Christian social tendency who worked in Chile during the government of President Eduardo Frei Ruiz-Tagle, in 1994, identifies in Boric a “fully democratic” politician marked by a specific fact:
“The Chilean armed forces that Pinochet still controlled were left out of political activity when he left power. They could not be used, as in Argentina and Brazil, and when they retired to their barracks, the democratic rebirth occurred successfully,” explains Moreno León.
He believes that President Boric, who began his government in 2022 with a certain immaturity, has, as he points out, “matured because he knows that he cannot get out of the democratic institutional framework” in which successive governments of different tendencies developed, starting with the transition.
In that context, he says, the young president “is a generational phenomenon” that emerged when the formula of the concertation that led Chile to democracy was exhausted, after the defeat of Pinochet, which began with the government of Patricio Aylwin (1990-1994) and culminated with the late president Sebastián Piñera, almost three decades later, whom Boric succeeded in popular elections.
In the meantime, Christian Democratic and socialist governments succeeded.
“Between one and the other there were socialist and Christian democratic governments that fulfilled the commitment to strengthen the institutions damaged by the dictatorship, and who very wisely managed, together with Pinochet, to lead Chile to a socialist government such as that of Ricardo Lagos Escobar (2000-2006). )”.
One of the demonstrations of the democratic spirit of the Boric government, which emerged from the new Chilean left, is that it respected the citizens’ decision to reject a new constitution for the second time. The existing one, drawn up by Pinochet and substantially modified during the Lagos administration, remains in force, says Moreno León.
“That is why I believe there is a very important difference between Boric’s leftist government and the system that exists in Venezuela, which is even repudiated by people more radical than Boric, such as (Gustavo) Petro (Colombia) and Lula (Brazil).”
He added: “Considering the defense of human rights in Chile, even under left-wing governments, President Boric is absolutely right to demand that Venezuela collaborate and clarify the participation of military or paramilitary organizations in the Ojeda case.”
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Source: Interview with ambassador Julio Césár Moreno León
