Jacobin Radio

Suzi talks to Pablo Abufom in Chile about Gabriel Boric’s impressive landslide victory in the second round of Chile’s Presidential election held December 19. Boric, a 35 year old former student leader from the Apruebo Dignidad (I Approve Dignity) coalition, decisively defeated the first round winner, Jose Antonio Kast, the ultra-right admirer of Pinochet’s dictatorship whose campaign stoked fear and demonized migrants as narco-trafficking terrorists, opposed women’s rights, same sex marriage and promised repression. Pablo Abufom Silva discusses Boric’s politics and the immense challenges he faces in making the changes his campaign has promised in a divided country and a divided parliament, reeling from an economic downturn exacerbated by the pandemic. Boric is a moderate leftist representative of the anti-neoliberal popular movement that exploded on the streets in October 2019 and won the right to scrap Pinochet’s constitution and elect constituents to draft a new one. The structural reforms Boric championed