A month after taking office in Chile, Gabriel Boric assured that his government “took off with turbulence”

Yesterday, Chilean President Gabriel Boric met with his cabinet, in Barrio Yungay, where the president resides, located 2 kilometers from the presidential palace. The meeting took stock of the Government and the guidelines on the economic recovery plan “Chile Apoya”.

In the instance, the President stated that the Government “took off with turbulence. These turbulences obviously generate uncertainty.” He also assured that “we are going to overcome them” and that they relate to the erratic communication management by the Minister of the Interior.

“I issued incorrect information”

The incoming administration has been involved in different controversies. The first was about the visit of the president's delegation in La Araucanía, a zone of Mapuche conflict, where Interior Minister Izkia Siches was received with shots in the air.

A second scandal that Siches starred was the use of the term “Wallmapu” to denominate the territory inhabited by Mapuche communities in southern Chile and Argentina, which caused discomfort in Argentine territory and forced the official to apologize publicly.

These were not the only shocks of Siches, as later in the week he accused the previous administration of the alleged return of a plane with Venezuelan immigrants expelled from Chile, but he also had to go out to recant.

Before these facts, Boric pointed out that “it is good that we ourselves tell each other and talk about it very explicitly, because that habit that is sometimes in politics of blaming the cobblestone and not recognizing our own difficulties does not have to be our line,” La Tercera confirmed.

“However, this turbulence, which obviously generates anxiety and uncertainty, I think we are going to overcome it. We have been in office for a month and it is important to take stock and deploy ourselves on the ground throughout the country,” said the President.

The Minister Spokesperson for Government, Camila Vallejo, also spoke in the instance: “It is not enough to say that we are a new government that is being installed from scratch, but it also requires recognition that we can do much better.”

He added “in this first meeting we took stock of these first four weeks of government installation in this self-critical way, but also rescuing the progress. In a self-critical way, because it has also been a difficult installation process. We've had some problems that we've been facing.”

With regard to the controversies that the Minister of the Interior has been leading, Vallejo said that “it is necessary to reinforce, obviously, its driving sun of a complete cabinet”. “She's made mistakes, she took it up publicly, and she's taken care of those mistakes,” Vallejo said.

Regarding President Boric's statement, the former spokesman for the Government of Sebastián Piñera said that the turbulence is “great and some of them self-generated”.

In the same vein, he said: “We as a past government have had many things in the last two years simultaneously, the social outbreak, the pandemic, the global economic crisis. We had a really obstructive opposition that presented nine constitutional accusations, a very bad climate of dialogue, and also criticisms that were being made about certain things that were very relevant and today are exactly the opposite,” he said on Radio Concierto.

The next meeting of the President with his cabinet will take place in the third week of April and they expect to hold monthly meetings together of all the ministers and the president.

KEEP READING