Mario Abdo Benítez will travel to Chile to attend the investiture ceremony of that country’s president-elect, Gabriel Boric, Foreign Minister Euclides Acevedo announced.
Speaking to journalists from the Palacio de López, Acevedo assured that they are “negotiating” the time for a meeting between Abdo Benítez and Boric, which is expected to take place tomorrow.
Without specifying details, the head of diplomacy indicated that the president would travel one day before the presidential investiture, which will take place on Friday, for the official farewell of the current Chilean president, Sebastián Piñera.
“And that same day, there will be a bilateral interview with President Boric,” Acevedo added.
He anticipated that among the issues that both leaders will address will be the submarine cable promoted by Chile to connect South America with Asia-Pacific, known as the Humboldt Project.
According to the foreign minister, this initiative, together with the bi-oceanic corridor -a regional highway that will link the Atlantic and Pacific oceans-, “make an essential parallel” for the Paraguayan vision of the Asia-Pacific as “export horizon” of its products.
Abdo Benítez met on February 18 with Piñera during a brief visit of just over 24 hours to Santiago.
About Boric
Convinced feminist, “millennial”, student leader turned deputy, champion of mental health, allergic to ties, environmentalist and homeless: Gabriel Boric, the next president of Chile, is a “rare bird” of international politics that arouses interest around the world.
At just 36 years and one month old (he was born on February 11, 1986), Boric will become the youngest president in Chilean history on Friday and will join the small and select world club of “millennial” presidents, in which he also there is the Finnish Sanna Marin or the New Zealander Jacinda Ardern.
“There are other young people who have become presidents, like Bukele in El Salvador or Zelensky himself in Ukraine, but without his experience,” Sebastián Salazar, from the University of O’Higgins (UOH), told Efe.
Despite his youth, he added, “he has had a front-line political career for a decade, both in the student leadership and in Parliament,” which he entered in 2014 and where he was a deputy for eight years for his native region, the southern Magallanes. .
Before, when he was studying Law, he was at the head of the powerful Federation of Students of the University of Chile (FECH), an organization that led the 2006 and 2011 marches in favor of gratuity.
There he met part of his hard core: his faithful squire Giorgio Jackson, who will be in charge of government relations with Parliament, and the communist Camila Vallejo, who will be the spokesperson.
It was also there that he finished forging his political convictions and convincing himself of the need to put an end to the neoliberal model installed during the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet (1973-1990) and build a welfare state similar to the European one.
For Guillermo Pérez, from the Institute of Studies of Society (IES), “there is a very fast jump from the student leadership to the Presidency.”
“On a global level, his youth and his career have aroused enormous interest. It is still striking that someone at such a young age reaches the Presidency of a very traditional country like Chile,” he assured Efe.
MAJORITY OF WOMEN
Julieta Suárez-Cao, from the Catholic University, believes, however, that, beyond Boric as a person, what generates so much expectation is “his collective idea of government.”
«He has not named the same as always. There is a strong mandate to bring new airs, which is what the people who came out to protest in the social outbreak »at the end of 2019, asked for, he pointed out.
Boric will head the first cabinet with more women than men in the Americas (14 to 10), with some of them in the most important positions, something that made headlines abroad when it was announced in early January.
In the powerful portfolio of the Interior, he appointed the independent doctor Izkia Siches, the first woman to hold the position.
Also surprising was the announcement that Irina Karamanos, the social scientist with whom she has been sharing life for a few years, will reformulate the traditional position of first lady to give her a feminist vision.
“Boric understands the need to include new identities, subjectivities and citizen groups in decision-making and the demand for greater horizontality in power relations that has been requested in Chile for years,” Claudio Elórtegui, from the University of Chile, told Efe. Valparaiso.
