The president of Chile, Gabriel Boric, has asserted that the demonstrations that took place in the country during 2019, known as a social outbreak, and which celebrate their third anniversary this Tuesday, were neither “an anti-capitalist revolution”, nor “a pure wave delinquency”.
“The outbreak was not an anti-capitalist revolution and neither, as they have wanted to install in recent days, a pure crime wave. It was an expression of pain and fractures in our society that politics, of which we are a part, has not been able to interpret nor give an answer”, Boric pointed out.
The Chilean president has pointed out during a speech from the Palacio de la Moneda that the social outbreak consisted of a series of demonstrations in which the population expressed the “discomfort accumulated for a long time” in relation to questions of justice or equality.
“They demonstrated so that neither the size of the wallet nor the place of birth were a condition to access a safe life, decent health, quality education and the need to have pensions that guarantee decent retirement after a life of effort,” said Boric.
Likewise, the president has asserted that, after three years of those protests, “it is time to leave the comfort zone” to thoroughly analyze what happened in 2019 and attend to the “lessons that must be learned from this process “, picks up the Channel 13 television network.
On the other hand, the president has reproached that during the marches of the social outbreak “there were deaths, there were sexual abuses, there were eye mutilations.” “We must assume that the police control of those months exceeded the limits of what is acceptable,” he lamented.
In this sense, the Government of Chile confirmed on Monday a security device of some 25,000 agents, some 5,000 only in the capital, Santiago, ahead of the third anniversary of the social outbreak.
This Tuesday’s date is marked by the recent attacks suffered by several police officers, including that of Sergeant Carlos Retamal Jaque, who died last week during an operation, as well as the latest warnings from various members of the Government, including Boric, of who will relentlessly pursue violent behavior and crime.
This third anniversary is the first since Boric has been in La Moneda and the opposition has already taken it upon itself to remember the past of some of the new authorities, whom it has accused of not having condemned at the time those protests that led to riots and clashes with the police.
The mobilizations for the anniversary of last year resulted in at least two deaths and some 450 detainees, in addition to looting and various violent acts after the march had been largely peaceful.
On October 18, 2019, the people of Chile took to the streets en masse to protest the rise in the price of public transport, initiating mobilizations that remained constant for several months and that channeled the discontent of society due to the overwhelming inequality. The demands escalated rapidly and one of the main ones was the drafting of a new Constitution, since the one in force at that time dated from the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet.
The then president, Sebastian Pinera, declared a state of emergency and a curfew to quell the mobilizations. While the demands of the citizens were not heeded at first, the role of the security forces, especially the Carabineros, was widely criticized and the subject of investigation by Chilean and international organizations, which pointed to numerous and flagrant cases of violations of the Human rights.
