PERSPECTIVES OF THE PRIMARIES IN CHILE AND THE LESSON OF PERU
21 Jul 2021 , 5:57 pm .
The election of the standard-bearer of the left in Chile attracted attention due to the expectations that are being opened in the current Chilean moment (Photo: AFP / Getty Images)
This Sunday, July 18, the primary elections were held in Chile for the presidential elections in November. This election was very relevant due to its results and because it continues to centralize interest in the region, in step with the events that continue to take place in the South American country.
Primary elections in Chile are regulated in the public electoral system so that coalitions of parties choose candidates. In the case of this year, two coalitions were measured, while other parties, including the Socialist Party (PS), will go to dialogue with other organizations to define their standard bearer or could go alone to the November appointment.
ABOUT THE RESULTS
On the left, against all odds, the deputy of the Broad Front (FA) Gabriel Boric was elected with 60.2% of the votes as the candidate of the I Approve Dignity coalition for the November 21 elections.
Boric defeated Daniel Jadue, mayor of Recoleta and outstanding standard-bearer of the Communist Party (PC).
On the right, Sebastián Sichel was elected with 48.6% of the votes as the candidate of the ruling coalition Chile Vamos, defeating Joaquín Lavín. Sichel was also elected against the forecasts of pollsters.
The election had unexpected results, which is why there is a new episode in Latin American elections where pollsters are not assertively interpreting the electorate.
In global voting terms, with 56.57% of the valid votes cast, and when the Electoral Service (Servel) scrutiny reached 99.99% of the polling stations, the Approve Dignity pact was widely imposed as the most voted block during these primary elections, compared to 43.42% of the votes cast by the ruling party Chile Vamos.
The votes cast totaled 3,094,781, of which 1,750,889 (56.57%) gave preference to one of the candidates from the left-wing bloc.
The electoral roll in Chile is more than 14 million voters inside and outside the country. Although several parties, including the PS, were not measured in the primaries and although some primaries tend to have low turnout, it is a fact that this election joined the string of elections where high abstention wins.
Read the complexity of the political picture. Even with the great turbulence and the outbreak of 2019 until the Constituent election this year, neither the right nor the left manage to mobilize voters and abstention continues to win comfortably.
ABOUT THE WINNERS
The election of Boric and Sichel, for their respective coalitions, has common features. Both were second among the favorites and were also called "moderates" within their coalitions.
Sebastián Sichel was an official in the Piñera government, he is considered a man of the institutional right and with center language. Meanwhile, Gabriel Boric, a deputy for the still new Broad Front, is part of the center-left, comes from the student struggle and has social democratic features.
Boric and Sichel were winners and both are considered "moderate" and "centrist" in their respective coalitions (Photo: El Mostrador)
In other words, it seems that caution, pragmatism, the choice of "non-radicals" or "politicians to trust" are the criteria that prevailed among the voters.
THE CHOICE FOR THE LEFT AND WITHIN
The election leaves much to be analyzed in the forces of the left that make up the I Approve Dignity coalition. In the impetus of the outbreak, the student struggle, the Mapuche struggle and the formation of the current Constituent Assembly, it was assumed that Daniel Jadue would be favored, for being the most outstanding on the left, with the polls in favor and for his political record in government functions as re-elected Mayor of the popular Commune of Recoleta.
But the result favored Gabriel Boric, leaving a bad taste among many Chilean and foreign progressives. The sensation to be analyzed among those affected by the I Approve Dignity coalition is that, already having a standard-bearer, there was no celebration in the so-called Plaza de la Dignidad. This detail reflects a state of mind to consider.
One of the uncertainties about the unexpected result lies in the possibility that sectors of the old concertation, specifically voters of the center in the PS and other formations, have voted for Boric to prevent Jadue from winning. This possibility is supported by the result that is confirmed by the comfortable and "unexpected" advantage of votes to the left compared to the right. But it remains inconclusive.
Daniel Jadue himself dismissed that possibility after the election, although without elaborating. He said that "it is not that the right wing has come out to vote in our primaries, they are our own weaknesses."
However, it is widely possible that voters, possibly from the PS, did vote for Boric, this can be deduced from the encounters he had with the standard-bearer of that party, Paula Narváez, shortly before the election, which served to reinforce his image as an open, pragmatic, moderate and convoking man, especially to historical voters who identify as the center.
Gabriel Boric's campaign was diverse both in its image and in its campaign offer. Not suitable for extreme militant leftists. (Photo: CNN Chile)
Daniel Jadue's campaign had key weaknesses that lie from its own organic composition. Being characterized by pluralism, but within the left, Jadue's campaign became entrenched in levels and themes of discourse that penetrated deeply among a small political group.
That possibility and also that social democratic votes favored Boric were pointed out before the elections according to data on the digital spectrum.
Two days after the election, data was revealed from the pre-primary report of the multidisciplinary laboratory for listening to social networks, Social Listening Lab, SoL-UC . This analysis quantified and classified the data from user interactions on social networks, according to the content emanating from the Boric and Jadue campaigns.
The study sought, through a series of indicators (such as "Digital Impact" and "Diversity of Outreach"), to measure the ability of candidates to tune in with various communities of voters.
This report was right when it pointed out before the election: "the digital impact and the diversity of scope translate into mobilization of voters, so it is expected that the Pacto Approve Dignity will attract a significantly greater number of voters than the Pacto Chile Vamos," said report. Indeed it was.
Regarding Boric versus Jadue, the study indicates that the followers of the former "tend to have greater diversity both internally and in their external interaction, with respect to that of Jadue; However, the Jadue community shows a much greater internal integration."
In other words, Jadue's affections interacted a lot, but with each other, while Boric managed to convene, with other codes, beyond the stories and campaign offer of the left, managing to address and attract other sectors not identified with the left. .
According to the report, Boric's digital outreach community is more heterogeneous than Jadue's.
Jadue campaigned to win the support of the coalition by entrenching himself in the speech of the left more to the left, trying to persuade those who would already be convinced to support him, without managing to summon sectors beyond the hard wing of sympathies in Approve Dignity .
In reference to the territory, Jadue preferred to dispute with Boric the preferences on the left, mainly in the Metropolitan Axis of Santiago, instead of going for a captive and abstentionist electorate that clearly remains in Chile and that is in the breadth of the national territory.
Additionally, Jadue did not approach many codes of the common Chilean in the interior of the country and, therefore, he did not manage to convene them in this election. Indeed, it must be considered that no candidate, neither of the left nor of the right, has achieved such a thing.
The differences between the candidates played in Boric's favor, because from his meeting with Narváez he managed to impose the differentiating wedge that "it is not governed only with those who think the same as you", in response to the questions of the mayor of Recoleta, who attacked Boric on that occasion, pointing out that "they do not lose an opportunity to give a signal to the Concertación."
Consequently, Boric positioned himself as a moderate convener and Jadue was heavily attacked and branded a radical. In an election with such a small turnout, it was evident that entrenchments would work against whoever assumed them and this was the case against Jadue.
GABRIEL BORIC FACING RIGHT
Daniel Jadue has immediately granted "unconditional" support to Boric, appealing that what is in dispute is the historic project and not his candidacy. However, this does not mean that all of Jadue's followers will support Boric. Understanding traditional atomizing reactions on the left, it is highly probable that some sectors do not support Boric energetically, as Boric has given them some reasons for it.
Boric has established positions of rupture with the revolutionary governments of Venezuela, Nicaragua and recently with Cuba in the framework of its current situation, Boric declared in a very adverse way against the island. In addition to other issues of Chilean politics, this gives him the distrust of certain groups on the left.
Your challenge will be in measuring with the right in November. It must be counted on the fact that Paula Narváez for the PJ could participate in the election, or that the PS dialogue with the Christian Democratic Party and propose Yasna Provoste, current President of the Senate.
Although Provoste and Narváez have little chance of winning today, any of them could settle the floor of the "center-left" that Boric aspires as an electoral base.
Al Boric will blend in with the social democracy, it will go against the right with a compromised flow of votes if the PS raises Narváez or Provoste with force, a question that is not impossible, understanding that both worked in the government of Michelle Bachelet, who continues to be a benchmark in that country.
Boric's candidacy still does not recognize an important captive political capital, not identified with either the traditional right or the hard left of Approve Dignidad. A sector that has disdain for the Mapuche struggle, the language of gender and other flags of progressivism, but that continues to be ordinary people, formed with aspirational logics based on neoliberalism and that feel defrauded.
It is a sector with common meanings and more founded aspirations in everyday life, which are practically invisible in campaign speeches. They are a point of attention.
Right now the Senate is promoting a reform to reinstate compulsory voting in Chile, a reform that if applied in November could change everything, since the political indicators are curdling on a very large abstention basis, as has been recurrent in Chile.
Hence, with or without this mandatory voting scenario, the Boric campaign will have the challenge of recomposing its campaign codes and electoral offer to go with great emphasis towards those captive sectors that will be indispensable.
THE PERUVIAN LESSON
To conclude, let's put another perspective on the matter. Why did Pedro Castillo in Peru manage to surprise and Jadue not, if both countries come from a long neoliberal period with their respective populations outraged and fed up with their elites?
As we have suggested, there is a Chile that has not been seen in the demonstrations since 2019 and that seems to have no representation on either the left or the right.
We are talking about a sector that Castillo has led to mobilize on the electoral plane, but on the political level he had already been leading a high-level union operator for a few years.
The fact that Chilean candidates only project a cosmopolitan vision does not allow a wide spectrum of the country to feel identified politically and frequently attend electoral appointments.
That same mass has been the one that led Castillo to be elected president of a traditional and historically conservative country. It could be said that the new Peruvian president has given a lesson in how politics should be understood and where a discourse has to be traced that can be assimilated by sectors of society that have been excluded for a long time from the political and electoral circuits.
It is a lesson that has emerged in South America for decades, where the impoverished majorities, in the city and in the countryside, have been protagonists of key moments in their recent history: Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cuba, Bolivia, and now Peru, are examples of it.
Although Jadue was free to dispute the spaces outside the cities, not taken by the political inertia of the Chilean establishment, he decided to run for Boric in Santiago and was defeated in a key primary for the cosmopolitan left of the southern country.
It is time to take note of this and other experiences in the region that shed light on how to interpret the political moment in Latin America and the Caribbean. Otherwise, those who claim to represent a legitimate change in their respective countries will continue to repeat the same formulas that serve only those who are interested in not changing anything.
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Chile: The Candidate of the ‘Left’ Gabriel Boric and his Constant Criticisms of Venezuela and Cuba
July 22, 2021
By Carlos Aznárez – Jul 19, 2021
Now that all the hegemonic media on the right, as well as a significant number from progressivism, are telling us who Gabriel Boric is—winner for the ”left” in the presidential primaries in Chile, defeating Daniel Jadue, it is worth taking into account some information that complement the profile of the person who will be the presidential candidate in the elections of November this year. All biographies of Boric show us a ”politician of the moderate left” ”respectful of human rights,” factotum of the ”peace agreement” with Piñera, etc, etc.
Hence, it is worth remembering that during the entire popular revolt that Chile has lived since October 2019, Boric could not approach any of the large demonstrations and even less the Plaza Dignidad because young people rejected him not only for having joined the bourgeois political caste that offered Piñera ”a way out” when the extreme-right neoliberal president was most besieged by the popular revolt, but also for having voted with the right wing in support of the fascist ”anti-barricade law” that the government brought in against the people who went out into the streets again and again to repudiate State repression.
For such political positions, Boric was denounced publicly by a group of young people in the center of Santiago, accusing him of having ”sold himself.”
However, there is more to the candidate’s resume. If there has been something constant about Boric in recent years, it is his attacks against the Bolivarian Revolution and the Cuban Revolution, including even this week, after the opposition demonstrations in Cuba. This needs to be mentioned because, beyond the fact that very few people voted in these primary elections, demonstrating the little credibility given to the political class, the results also finalized the candidates of the ”left” and the right. Boric won with a huge and unexpected margin over Daniel Jadue; hence, it will not be entirely wrong to assume, as some Chilean analysts have already pointed out, that his victory was more due to a strategic move by the right, that might have sent its activists and supporters to vote for Boric instead of Joaquín Lavín, the right-wing candidate who had been leading all the pre-election polls but lost, rather unexpectedly, to Sebastián Sichel in the primaries. Why would the right do that? Simply so that communist Jadue, a steadfast activist in solidarity with Cuba and Venezuela, and one of the champions of the Palestinian cause on the international level, does not become a candidate for the presidency of Chile.
In other words, when the deceptive platforms of Chilean social democracy want to sell us the idea that Boric is LEFT, let us not continue to get fooled by those lies. The leaders of the Chilean Socialist Party are also said to be ”left” who, to the greater shame of those who once aligned themselves with the martyr President Salvador Allende, have just condemned Cuba, joining the chorus of destabilizers against the Revolution, promoted by the United States. They, Boric and some others who use the label of ”left” are nothing more than mere collaborators of the empire. It is better to take this into account now so as not to regret later.
https://orinocotribune.com/chile-the-ca ... -and-cuba/
Tweets supporting post(in Spanish) at link.
Social Democrat sabotage again... How long?
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THE NEOLIBERAL MODEL IS CONSOLIDATED IN ECUADOR AT THE HANDS OF LASSO
20 Jul 2021 , 5:05 pm .
Two months after the inauguration, Guillermo Lasso's surrender agenda continues (Photo: Reuters)
The new government of Ecuador has been showing signs of a reversal of the surrender policies that had been abolished with the arrival of the Citizen Revolution, and that survived the neoliberalization process of the Moreno administration.
That two months after the inauguration, Guillermo Lasso has rejoined the mechanisms for the resolution of disputes between investors and the State (ISDS) and that the ambassador of Ecuador in Washington sign the re-entry of the country to the International Center for Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID) of the World Bank is a sample of this.
The ISDS settlement mechanism had been previously denounced and ICSID Ecuador had withdrawn in 2009. However, the most striking thing about the return to the old model is the unconstitutional path that Lasso is taking to carry it out. It so happens that Ecuador's withdrawal from ICSID was part of a larger process that resulted in the termination of all of Ecuador's Bilateral Investment Treaties (BITs).
LASSO'S SURRENDER AGENDA
Getting out of these frameworks took years, but Lasso wants to return to them through a stroke of the pen. An article by Guillaume Long and Andrés Arauz (the latter recent presidential candidate) published in the Institute for New Economic Thought last week maintains that "the Constitutional Court of Ecuador decided that Ecuador's reentry to ICSID did not require legislative ratification. Now, the government is promoting a reinterpretation of the Constitution that allows Ecuador to sign BITs. "
Contrary to the fast and unconstitutional way of the new president, the experts maintain that "Article 422 of the new Ecuadorian Constitution, approved by popular referendum in 2008, stipulates: 'The Ecuadorian State shall not enter into international treaties or instruments in which the Ecuadorian State cede its sovereign jurisdiction to international arbitration entities in contractual or commercial disputes between the State and natural or legal persons' ".
This is how the government of Rafael Correa in ten years put an end to a first batch of BITs in 2008 and a few months later he left ICSID, says the article by Ecuadorians entitled "The new Ecuadorian government aligns itself with powerful international lobbies to rejoin investment treaties prohibited by the Constitution ".
"In 2013, the Ecuadorian government commissioned a group of experts to audit its arbitration cases and all its BITs, including the legality of their ratification, and their repercussions in the country. The Commission for the Audit of Investment Protection Treaties (CAITISA), made up of academics, lawyers, public officials and civil society groups, concluded that many of Ecuador's BITs had not been properly ratified. It also found that the treaties did not attract foreign investment to Ecuador, "they say.
These audits confirmed that said treaties were unfavorable for Ecuador and highlighted the importance of the State to defend the interests of the nation. The report details that the hiring of lawyers with close ties to transnational corporations was usually a problem for investor-state dispute resolution mechanisms.
Contrary to the myth that the loss of sovereignty is a way to attract investment, the CAITISA report confirmed that foreign investment is directed to countries that experience constant economic growth; that they have strong institutions, including a strong judiciary; and that they are stable, even politically and socially.
UNFAVORABLE TREATIES FOR COUNTRIES
What is clear is that it was shown that Bilateral Investment Treaties create a shield of impunity for environmental damage and tax evasion by transnational companies. It is easy for these companies to evade responsibility in the event of disasters because they generally leave the country where they occur.
Everything points to the fact that the government of Guillermo Lasso is returning to these mechanisms that have wreaked havoc in Ecuador as a way of allying itself with the influence of US imperial politics, a logic from which Rafael Correa escaped "taking advantage of the growing world consensus on the negative effects of ISDS, which many countries subscribed to from the late 1980s to the early 2000s, during the height of deregulation and 'downside' approaches to attracting investment. Some of the largest emerging economies had led the way : South Africa ended its investment treaties in 2012; Indonesia in 2014; India in 2017. Among Latin American states, Brazil never ratified any treaty that included ISDS, and Bolivia ended its BITs in 2008. "
The clauses of the ISDS were revised because not even the countries of the European Union were exempt from sanctions by arbitration tribunals simply for upholding European law. This led the President of the European Commission, Jean-Claude Juncker, to write: "Nor will I accept that the jurisdiction of the courts of the EU Member States is limited by special regimes for investor disputes", Long and Arauz collect .
It was finally in May 2017 that after a new authorization from Parliament, and with previous decisions of the Constitutional Court, Ecuador ended its 16 remaining BITs, including those signed with the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, Spain, China. and the Netherlands.
It is worth noting that the turn to these policies did not begin with the current president, since Lenín Moreno from the beginning of his government did not share this criticism of the mechanisms that companies use to extort money from the States and thus avoid effective regulatory systems, either in the area of taxes, environmental safeguards or labor rights.
Eager to return to the neoliberal policies of the 1990s, and under intense pressure from transnational corporations, the Moreno government asked the Constitutional Court to reinterpret Article 422, arguing that it only applied to trade disputes. This maneuver was notable for its audacity: Article 422, which mentions the generic term 'contract', is clearly intended to prohibit arbitration of investment disputes. The minutes of the Constituent Assembly that drafted the Constitution, and the multiple previous decisions of the Court Constitutionally, they also support the interpretation that article 422 refers to investments. For this reason, the court has received dozens of amicus curiae (third parties unrelated to a litigation) from reputed national and foreign academic experts,as well as civil society organizations, who ask him to reject the offer, "the article details.
Although the deadline for the interpretation of article 422 by the Constitutional Court has passed, the government of Guillermo Lasso is pressuring the court to allow a quick return to ISDS mechanisms.
They suggest that the process is flawed while the person in charge of the Court to analyze the reentry to ICSID, Teresa Nuques, has been the director of the arbitration center of the Guayaquil Chamber of Commerce and a vocal defender of the ISDS. There were magistrates who appealed to the Constitution, which requires the legislative approval of any treaty that implies the renunciation of national legal powers in favor of a supranational body, but they were outnumbered and on June 30 the court announced its decision that the Legislative approval of accession to ICSID was not mandatory.
The surprising thing - they refer - is that the moment of the reincorporation of Ecuador to ICSID occurs three weeks after this organization declared a ruling in favor of the French-British oil company Perenco in its arbitration case against Ecuador.
"The company received from Ecuador 412 million dollars (a fine of 372 million dollars, plus interest) for violating the clause of the France-Ecuador BIT on 'indirect expropriation'. In 2006, the Congress of Ecuador had unanimously approved a law that forced to distribute the income derived from the increases in the prices of raw materials. In 2007, the government further modified a rule to maximize income for the State. Most of the oil companies established in Ecuador accepted the new conditions, but not Perenco, which never paid the amount owed. When the tax authority claimed the amount owed by seizing an equivalent amount of oil, Perenco left the country, without paying for the damage that its operations caused to the environment ", details the Article.
There is no apparent explanation for reincorporation to a mechanism that threatens the sovereignty of a country. What is clear is that it is ruled in favor of a French billionaire family to the detriment of a country of about 20 million inhabitants. "Companies established in tax havens often resort to the corrupt practice of 'buying' investment treaties signed by other countries to enjoy the best of both worlds: protection and impunity," affirm the Ecuadorian authors.
Finally, the Ecuadorian government would pay the fine to Perenco , announced the Ministry of Communication of the South American country, although Ecuador could resort to several measures to avoid or delay this payment, especially in a context of economic crisis and pandemic, whose mortality rate per capita by covid-19 is one of the highest in the world. With all the resources to reverse the measure, Lasso has already made clear, upon rejoining ICSID, that his government has no intention of challenging the payment to the company.
DISMANTLING CONTINUES
It is evident that the new government of Ecuador follows the surrender line initiated by Lenín Moreno. But Lasso's pro-imperialist policy was already in sight from the beginning of his business ties and his political career.
*From a very young age he was linked to the Guayaquil stock market.
*His first company was Constructora Alfa y Omega, founded with his older brother Enrique Lasso in 1978, at the age of 23.
*This businessman from birth in 1994 was appointed executive president of Banco Guayaquil. That same year he passed through the national subsidiary of Coca-Cola.
*In 2017 a report revealed that Guillermo Lasso was associated with 49 offshore companies in tax havens and accumulated between 1999 and 2000 a wealth of 30 million dollars.
*In 1998 he began his political career when he was appointed as Governor of the Province of Guayas.
*During the presidency of Lucio Gutiérrez he was appointed itinerant ambassador.
*It rejects any type of regional integration that is not akin to the neoliberal corporate model.
With this brief review, the political decisions complacent with Washington's agenda are not surprising, nor that the pro-imperial agenda is above national interests.
In any case, Moreno handed over that of the dismantling of the Ecuadorian State to Lasso, who had already met with the former president in a curious call for dialogue where only right-wing political actors participated.
"Crony companies that want to participate in bargain-priced privatizations, for example, are eager to anchor the new trade and investment treaties with ISDS chapters. And the Lasso government is eager to sell as many state assets as possible. It is no coincidence that, a week after the Constitutional Court gave the green light to Ecuador's return to ICSID, Lasso issued an executive decree ordering the gradual privatization of the state oil industry and highlighting international arbitration as the cornerstone of its policy. " , Long and Arauz stand out.
For this reason, the pressure and lobbying to avoid parliamentary authorization and the despair of lobbyists for a return to the pro-ISDS agenda is evident.
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