Gabriel Boric (photo below, bio here), 35, a former leftist student leader, was elected president of Chile on Sunday, December 19, 2021, after promising the South American nation’s young voters to “remake” the country. He garnered 56% of the vote to defeat a far-right lawyer. He will take office on March 11, 2022,replacing a “conservative billionaire.”
“Boric’s ambitious goal is to introduce a European-style social democracy that would expand economic and political rights … without veering toward the authoritarianism embraced by so much of the left in Latin America,” CNBC reported here.
He “spent months traversing up and down Chile vowing to bring a youth-led form of inclusive government to attack nagging poverty and inequality that he said are the unacceptable underbelly of a free market model imposed decades ago by the dictatorship of Gen. Augusto Pinochet,” CNBC said.
Pinochet (1915 – 2006) was a brutal and widely reviled fascist dictator who seized power in a 1973 military coup and then kidnapped, tortured, and murdered dissidents (details here).
