[Certain names and details have been changed to protect the on-the-ground organizers who met with the author.]
Black America has the term “Uncle Tom” for sellouts. In South America, a “vendepatria” is someone who is willing to sell their homeland to the highest bidder. Simón Bolívar, José Marti and Jan-Jak Dessalin conceived of a united, integrated Americas, or “la patria grande,” “the big fatherland;” and fought against enemies from within and without who sought to break that unity.
What can one say in 2025 of a South American president who attacks Caracas more than Washington, D.C., and Havana more than Tel Aviv? What social class and foreign forces does such a president serve when he hides behind “progressive” and “leftist” rhetoric and frequently beckons his credentials as a former “student leader”?
Gabriel Boric Font, Chilean president since 2022, is no friend of the working-class causes he has claimed to champion. With one year left in his presidential term, he has proven to be a loyal, “leftist” mouthpiece for the Chilean military and economic brass and their foreign backers.
Similar to the Democrats, Boric claims to represent an alternative. Similar to the Democrats, he presents the far right, and not the capitalist system, as the problem. After a social upheaval in 2019 that left dozens of Chileans dead and maimed, similar to the Democrats, Boric represents a safe, acceptable escape valve for the Chilean establishment and foreign capital.
The Boric lesson is that imperialism is quite willing to pivot toward a “new leftist” where it is convenient, especially given that by definition they prioritize identity politics over class politics. This offers cover for a neo-liberalism that continues to favor the ten richest families in Chile who are unsurprisingly the most connected to international finance.
Boric: The Backstabber and Betrayer
A look at the Chilean president’s relationship to the state reveals even more about his class loyalties.
The Boric administration boasts of 60 new “anti-terrorist” laws. Grassroots movements, such as Radio Plaza de la Dignidad, consider the new legislation an attack on their rights to organize and mobilize:
“The ‘improvement’ of the previous repressive law now allows the arbitrary criminalization of popular fighters, imposing a much more aggressive and arbitrary category of ‘terrorist.’ Not even the Pinochet dictatorship dared to do so much. Such laws include the trigger-happy law, the critical infrastructure law and the anti-occupation/anti-poor law. With the excuse being the fight against crime, the legal-repressive framework has been strengthened, unleashing a brutal threat against the entire Popular Movement in Struggle.”
Boric has put teeth behind this legislation, training 1,300 new carabineros (militarized police). Amnesty International has critiqued the absolute impunity for the police force after the massive clampdown on the 2019 rebellion.
Chile’s patagonia continues to function as a refuge for Zionist war criminals with areas that cater to them in modern-day Hebrew, the official language of the occupiers of historic Palestine.
The 39-year-old, 37th president of Chile brazenly claims that the leaders of Cuba, Nicaragua and Venezuela are not leftists. No different than Milei, Noboa, Trump and other reactionaries in the hemisphere, he pushes unfounded claims blaming Venezuela’s leadership for insecurity, crime and traffic of arms and drugs in the region. Why would a “leftist” promote a right-wing view of the countries most in the crosshairs of imperialism? However, Boric did not hesitate to recognize “the victory” of “president” Daniel Naboa and the Ecuadorian narco-state last weekend, on April 14.
Here in the United States, we know such leftists well. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Bernie Sanders and their ilk have long functioned as the sheepdogs of the Democratic Party to lasso in the more radical elements.
In the summer of 2024, Boric and Minister of Defense Maya Fernández Allende and Chief of the Chilean Military Joint Staff Vice Admiral Pablo Niemann hosted the U.S. Southern Command cooperation joint meetings. General Laura Richardson warned of “authoritarian, communist governments attempting to seize all they can here in the Western Hemisphere.” The neoliberal military and economic partners touted themselves as “Team Democracy” for the region.
To his credit, Boric has condemned the Zionist genocide but has attempted to find a half-way point between the Palestinians and the genocidal Zionist entity. He has also not hesitated to give full support to the U.S.-NATO proxy war on Russia and Ukraine. German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier just wrapped up a visit to Chile, condemning the legacy of the Pinochet dictatorship, as the West cheers on and funds their seven decades old, so far impregnable military base in the Middle East, known as “Israel.”
While China continues to be Chile’s top trading partner. The Boric administration has turned its back on and undermined Bolivarian and BRICS initiatives to build a more multipolar world. While Chile remains strongly in the Western imperialist sphere, the second-longest country in the world depends on strong trading partnerships with Brazil, South Africa and Russia.
The global astronomical community is condemning U.S. energy behemoth AES Corporation for polluting some of the clearest skies in the world above Chile’s northern desert region.
Venezuelan Ambassador Sergio Rodríguez Gelfenstein discusses Boric’s opportunism and quotes President Allende in his final words: “Other men will overcome this gray and bitter moment in which betrayal tries to prevail.”
Chile Ablaze
Wallmapu is the Mapuche name for their historical homeland which stretches across the Andes between modern-day Chile and Argentina. Currently, there are 22 forest fires burning through Wallmapu, where two million Mapuches live on the Chilean side of the Andes. Licarayen of the local Temuco Mapuche leadership explained that Spanish colonizers used similar tactics to push her ancestors off their lands and set up their cash crops, like wheat.
A group of her colleagues showed the author the prehistoric Araucania trees that were around during the epoch of the dinosaurs and are now at risk of extinction. Boric’s Minister of the Interior, Carolina Tohá, accused the ancient, local communities of being behind the blazes. The Coordinator of Wallmapu Territories rejected the customary vilification from state power, “blaming the crisis on capitalist logging interests” and characterizing as “ridiculous the political classes’ claims.”
Chile is South America’s California. Hundreds of thousands of acres of forests are burning as Chile faces some of the worst droughts in its history due to climate change. Licarayen explained that the spiritual toll the fires are taking on the community is leading to more despair, alcoholism and suicides. She compared the dire social indices and resistance of the Mapuche to the historical struggles of native communities in the U.S. and across the hemisphere.
Boric is all bark and no bite. Currently there is a struggle to prevent a statue of Piñera from being built. Boric visited Antarctica to discourage the further exploitation of Chile’s neighbor to the south. Yet, as Wallmapu burns, it is clear how powerless the president himself is to stop the ongoing repression of the historic Mapuche community.
There are over one hundred political prisoners denied their constitutional rights because they have stood up in defense of their land and way of life.
Pinochet’s Constitution: Boric’s Great Failure
There is a basic leftist consensus on why Boric and the left failed to overturn the Constitution in 2023.
Working-class districts wanted economic and social rights, but were arguably turned off by the greater emphasis in the Constitutional Convention on feminism, environmentalism, or plurinationalism. These same woke politics with no economic teeth are one of the key reasons why the Democrats have lost twice to the MAGA movement.
Light liberal left identity politics over class politics combined with a vicious right-wing media campaign to defeat the constitutional plebiscite. There was intense red-baiting and fear-mongering of Chile becoming “Chilezuela,” complete with the right-wing media promoting sensationalist images of Venezuelans forced to eat stray dogs to survive. The true power brokers resorted to Trump and Musk-esque rhetoric exclaiming “Abortion will be allowed at whatever stage of pregnancy”; “All border controls will be lifted”; and “The law will protect criminals over victims.”
The barrage of propaganda harkened back to the 1970s’ anti-communism of the CIA-backed Pinochet regime which convinced many Chileans that the return of socialism in Chile would mean the end of all freedoms, including the right to be Christian.
The failure to pass an updated constitution transcending the 1980 Pinochet-era one is arguably the greatest setback of the “New Left.” The right wing continues to win the war of narratives. Mega and Chilevisión convinced more than 60% of voters that the new constitution would mean Mapuche supremacy over Chile’s majority European-descendent population.
Javiera Manzi, a leader of La Coordinadora Feminista 8M, denounced the Pinochet continuity, highlighting the 2011 student mobilization, Apruebo Dignidad movement and “radical tenderness” as the way forward. Valparaiso-born journalist Pablo Vivanco summed up the collective disappointment: “Boric has not delivered on his main promises. There has been no new constitution. There is no pension, education or tax reform. He told us: ‘Chile was the cradle of neoliberalism and it will be its tomb,’ but that is not the case.”
Resistencia: Another Way Forward for Chile
In contrast to Boric, political prisoner and Communist Party leader Daniel Jadue represents another vision for Chile and la patria grande. Jadue is the former mayor of Recoleta, the northern area of Santiago and home to the largest Palestinian community outside the Middle East. A spokesperson for the mass rebellion, he was the potential next president of Chile. In this interview with #AVosPatria (To You Homeland) and Radio con Aguante (Radio with a Punch), he, explains why the bourgeoisie got behind the feckless Boric.
Currently, there is a lawfare campaign against the former mayor of Recoleta. Jadue is a political prisoner because he carried out socialism on a local level, implementing programs such as the Popular Pharmacy, the Popular Optician, Open Schools, Salud en tu Barrio, Popular Real Estate, the Open University of Recoleta, the Popular bookstore “Recoletras” (a word play on the historic Palestinian neighborhood of Santiago), the “Energía Popular,” the popular dentist, the Common Pots, the Communal Public Security Plan with a focus on Human Security, among many others.
The ruling class recognizes that Jadue and the Chilean Communist Party are the real threat, whereas they are willing to work with Boric beyond the liberal-conservative divide over secondary issues. Political analyst Leonel Poblete Codutti predicts that his “alliance and agreements with the class enemy will clear the way for the extreme right to win the elections next year, similar to what happened to the Democrats in the U.S.”
Despite the attacks, the popular leader asserts there can be no change “without a people, without mobilization, without a transformative spirit that is felt.” Boric is a key part of the campaign against the true left, the inheritors of Miguel Enriquez, the Revolutionary Leftist Movement (MIR) and Victor Jara.
Inequality with a “Progressive” Mask
Labor leader Luis Mesina is the founder of the “No + AFP” (No More AFP) movement to defend pensions. He explained: “In the end, [Boric has] been subjugated to the power of financial markets.” He explains how such privatization schemes of social security and other benefits for the people have been siphoned off to foreign capital to the tune of $90 billion, characterizing Chile as “the most neoliberal country in the world.”
Hugo Fazio, Chilean economist and former vice president of the Central Bank under Salvador Allende, denounced the new pension laws as a further bamboozling of workers. Fazio argues that the pact reflects further collaboration between anti-worker sectors and the left of pacotillas (cheap sellouts) and farándula (show business). The cold reality for many retirees is that they have to continue to look for other jobs because they cannot survive. Jadue explained: “We are gifting them [foreign investors] five to seven billion more dollars every year in capital markets. That is who is most celebrating this law.”
Private mining interests that control 70% of the surplus, or profits, recently announced their largest investments in Chile’s copper and lithium resources in the past decade because their taxes have been so low. The president had promised progressive taxes on the country’s elite but has again cowered before his history’s strong demands. Iris Fontbona, of the Luksic mining dynasty, is worth $26 billion. Julio Ponce Lerou, president of the Chemical and Mining Society of Chile (SQM) and son-in-law of former dictator Augusto Pinochet, is another billionaire.
As absurd as it sounds, social spending under the “left-wing” Boric is lower even than under Chile’s last president, the reactionary billionaire Sebastian Piñera.
Boric: The Impotent Tip of the Iceberg
While there were big expectations in 2022, and Boric’s victory was heralded as a historic win, Boric is not Allende. His moderate positions were never a real threat. He is a deterrent to regional solidarity, echoing imperial policy on the Bolivarian-bloc countries. While it is easy to wail about Boric’s lack of class instincts and anti-imperialist fight, he is merely an Obama, the most convenient puppet for the moment.
The Chilean power structure with its media and banking arms is the same one that overthrew the socialist government of Salvador Allende in 1973.
Now-deceased media baron Agustín Edwards Eastman and his heirs received covert payments from the Nixon government to plot the coup against President Allende. The National Security Archive recently published declassified documents showing Edwards’ secret meetings with Henry Kissinger, Attorney General John Mitchell and CIA Director Richard Helms in Washington, D.C. To this day, the Edwards heirs are the owners of Chile’s largest newspapers El Mercurio and La Segunda, Radio Corazón and an endless array of other mouthpieces for the rich.
Álvaro Saieh—who Forbes has listed as the 729th wealthiest person in the world and 4th wealthiest in Chile—is the chairman of CorpGroup, a conglomerate with investments in finance, retail, real estate, hotel and media businesses. Saieh owns Publimetro, Diario La Hora, Revista Paula, Radio Carolina and a web of other media outlets. Saieh, a Chilean Colombian of Palestinian, Lebanese and Syrian roots, also owns the banking conglomerate Itaú CorpBanca, Banco Cóndel, Unimarc supermarkets, 60 strip malls, three power plants, Hyatt Hotels and seemingly infinite other businesses.
Here we have but two of the managers and molders of Chilean public opinion.
Chile—no different from any other capitalist country, whether shrouded in social-democratic or hard-right camouflage—is run by a tiny clique of families connected to international finance. Similar to us here in the U.S., arguing over who is worse, Republicans or Democrats, the Chilean bourgeoisie presents a fake contest between two contenders, confident under their Neoliberal “democracy” paradigm their interests are untouchable. Chile continues to be the society of the cuicos and flaites (local slang for rich and poor). Boric knows who his masters are and dares to question them only so much.
Boric and Obama: Two Pseudo-Progressive Peas in a Pod
Malcolm X presciently explained how the ruling class swings the political pendulum in front of us:
“The white conservatives aren’t friends of the Negro either, but they at least don’t try to hide it. They are like wolves; they show their teeth in a snarl that keeps the Negro always aware of where he stands with them. But the white liberals are foxes, who also show their teeth to the Negro but pretend that they are smiling. The white liberals are more dangerous than the conservatives; they lure the Negro, and as the Negro runs from the growling wolf, he flees into the open jaws of the ‘smiling’ fox.”
In an interview with the author, Chilean journalist Pablo Jofré Leal clarifies: “In reality, Boric was never a standout ‘student leader.’ It was the Chilean media that artificially created him and inflated his leftist credentials. It is not the first time they have done this. He went from being a ‘student leader,’ to Congressman to President in no time. He never had any real base in the labor movement or the left.” The right wing catapulted his career forward because he was the counterweight to the communist student movement. A decade later, while the stakes are higher, the dynamics of the fake vs. fighting left remains the same.
The right wing recognizes that Boric represents a break from Bolivarian politics and true class struggle. Libertad y Desarrollo (LYD), a conservative think tank charts Boric’s meteoric rise through politics precisely because he condemned the historic left focused on class struggle. His pivot toward the “new left” and identity politics ensured that he was not a threat to the entrenched political and economic establishment.
The Chilean elite’s “Boric strategy” is reminiscent of the “Obama phenomenon.” Both faux “progressives” were touted as representing “change” and were elevated to the summits of bourgeois power almost overnight. Both are phonies. High finance uses such lapdogs at times as mouthpieces, or at other times as distractions, and at all times as faux “resistance.”
For Chile, it was the 2019 social explosion (el estallido social). For the United States, it was the deep-held anger against the unpopular, Bush-era wars on Iraqi and Afghani sovereignty. The aging Piñera and Bush were seen as the personification of “the old way.”
A significant wing of capitalist power succeeded in presenting the youthful Boric and Obama as proof that the system can be changed from within.
The memories of the militant social rebellion in Chile and U.S. anti-war, left-liberal protest movement in the U.S. 2001-2008 were buried in what has long been the institutional graveyard of social movements—capitalist elections.
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About the Author
Danny Shaw teaches Latin American and Caribbean Studies and Race, Ethnicity, Class and Gender at the City University of New York.
He holds a Masters in International Affairs from the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University. He is fluent in Spanish, Haitian Kreyol, Portuguese, Cape Verdean Kreolu and has a fair command of French, and works as an International Affairs Analyst for TeleSUR, RT and other international news networks.
He has worked and organized in seventy different countries, opening his spirit to countless testimonies about the inhumanity of the international economic system. He is a Golden Gloves boxer, fighting twice in Madison Square Garden for the NYC heavyweight championship. He teaches boxing, yoga and nutrition and works as a Sober Coach. A Senior Research Fellow at the Council on Hemispheric Affairs, he works to keep young people out of the military and prison industrial complex.
He is a mentor to many guiding them through the nutritional, ideological, social and emotional landmines that surround us. He is the father of two young Life Warriors, Ernesto Rafael and Caũa Amaru. He is the author of six books: 365 Days of Resistance, Shedding that which is Not Us: A Working-Class Guide to Life Foods Training and Healing, The Saints of Santo Domingo: Dominican Resistance in the Age of Neocolonialism, My Son Blazes within Me: So Many Contradictions, So Little Time, Paisajes de Amor y Combate and Los Santos de Santo Domingo. He has also authored blogs and articles on Latin American history, boxing and nutrition, among other topics.
He can be reached at: DRS33@columbia.edu.
