Socialists and Communists of the World Support Gabriel Boric As President of Chile

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This Sunday is the runoff of the presidential elections in Chile. Much is at stake. Obviously the future of Chile, but also, to a large extent, the future of the region. And the possibility of the world losing such an important symbol of capitalist success.

José Antonio Kast, a conservative, is neck to neck with Gabriel Boric, a leftist, the ticket to the Palacio de la Moneda. Kast represents the safeguard of that market economy model that made Chile the most successful, prosperous and stable country in Latin America. Almost a first-world country, with a robust and growing middle class. Boric, on the contrary, represents the breakdown of that capitalist tradition. He represents the deconstruction of the State, to submit it to the socialist delusions of those who hate Chile.

Something that allows understanding well this dichotomy between Kast’s conservatism and Gabriel Boric’s communism is to look at the endorsements. Particularly, Boric has received the backing of many artists and international personalities, yet, what is quite telling is who they are.

Michelle Bachelet

The former socialist president of Chile and current United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, Michelle Bachelet, gave her support to Gabriel Boric. Bachelet, responsible for the Chilean economic deterioration, despite the robust capitalist economy, said in a video: “This Sunday is fundamental. No one can remain indifferent. To elect a president who will ensure that our country can truly continue on a path of progress for all, a path of equality, human rights, a sustainable environment and the opportunity of a new constitution. It is important which candidate you vote for. That is why I am going to vote for Gabriel Boric.”

Bachelet was questioned for being biased despite holding a high position in an organization such as the United Nations. However, this is not new. As UN High Commissioner, Bachelet had already favored tyrannical communist regimes such as Maduro’s in Venezuela, whose dictatorship she whitewashed with rather soft reports.

Just when Venezuela was going through one of its most politically tense moments, Michelle Bachelet visited Maduro to make the UN report. In that visit, Bachelet let herself be guided by the regime and recognized the dictator as the legitimate president of Venezuela.

Piketty and Stiglitz

Both Keynesians bet on excessive public spending, financial irresponsibility and maximization of State power. Thomas Piketty and Joseph Stiglitz signed this week a letter in support of Gabriel Boric.

“We see in the program of candidate Gabriel Boric that openness to the future, that way of creating a new economy that delivers these ambitious goals. His objectives are feasible and help to sustain democratic values,” the letter reads.

Piketty, a French economist, is a theorist of inequality and proposes a model of redistribution and “circulation of goods” with the aim of “overcoming the capitalist model.” In 2018, shortly before the Colombian presidential elections, Thomas Piketty gave his support to the candidate of the Colombian far left, Gustavo Petro.

“For a new progressive cycle in Latin America and the world, I vote for Gustavo Petro!” wrote Piketty on Twitter. Petro, who was a former guerrilla of the communist and terrorist movement M-19, thanked Piketty for the endorsement and affirmed that he is “one of the best economists in the world”.

As for Stiglitz, he has also had notable moments in his career. In 2002, Joseph Stiglitz, winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, expressed his admiration for Fidel Castro and his economic and healthcare model. He confessed to admiring him, despite the fact that Castro plunged Cuba into one of the worst humanitarian crises in this hemisphere and one of the fiercest and cruelest dictatorships. Then, in 2006, Stiglitz supported Hugo Chávez and assured that criticisms against his socialist model were unfair.

Chávez only wanted to “provide education and health benefits to the poor, and to fight for economic policies that also ensure that the fruits of growth are more widely shared,” Stiglitz said then about Chavez. But that was not enough. The economist went much further and in 2007 traveled to Caracas to tell him, in person, how much he admired him.

Finally, Stiglitz’s support to dictator Evo Morales, whom he advised in his hydrocarbon nationalization policy, is also remarkable.

Residente

“It is very worrying to see how in Chile there is a presidential candidate as terrible, retrograde and dark as Kast,” said the artist Residente in a video he spread on social media. “I cannot remain silent in the face of the possibility of another Pinochet. Every dictator that exists in Latin America hurts the whole continent. We need people like Boric.”

It’s curious. Residente says that a dictatorship in Latin America is intolerable, but we all remember his sympathy for the Chavista dictatorship and for the left in the region. The artist never dared to call human rights violations in Venezuela a “dictatorship” and at the time he supported Hugo Chavez.

When Fidel Castro died, Residente wrote: “Beloved, hated, admired, criticized, today what separates us unites us because we are all somehow affected by his death.”

Danny Glover

We all remember how the American actor Danny Glover scammed Venezuelans by stealing 18 million dollars to make a movie that never materialized.

In the first semester of 2007, the regime of Hugo Chavez gave Glover millions of dollars to make a movie about the hero of Haitian independence, François Dominique Toussaint-Louverture. He did not make it and the money was lost.

Four years after Chavez’s death, Glover returned to Venezuela, this time to back dictator Nicolas Maduro, who had already made his debut in office by killing students in protests.

“It is a privilege to be here. We are here to commemorate the life of President Chavez, we are a network of artists in defense of humanity,” Glover said in March 2017, just days before another round of protests bloodily repressed by the Venezuelan dictatorship began.

This week, Glover again expressed his political position, this time in favor of Gabriel Boric. “I am concerned about what is happening in his country. Kast, an admirer of Pinochet, wants to be president. Fortunately, Gabriel Boric is there to stop Kast and his message of hate,” Glover said in a message released by the leftist candidate’s campaign.

Jeremy Corbyn

The so-called “Hugo Chávez of the United Kingdom,” Jeremy Corbyn, also joined the voices in favor of Gabriel Boric. He is responsible for the radicalization of the Labour Party and that, for this reason, the British have so strongly supported the Conservatives. His socialist, extreme left-wing policies turned Corbyn into an undesirable leader of the party, to the point that he ended up withdrawing.

“I am a friend of Chile. I send my solidarity and support to the Chileans. There is a choice between going back to a very bad past or moving forward, to developing a national health service, a pension system that works for all and entering into the exciting process of putting together a new constitution,” Corbyn said in a video.

“As a socialist, as an internationalist and as a friend of Chile, I strongly support Gabriel Boric,” he added.

Zapatero

Former Spanish President José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, author of one of the worst economic crises the European country has seen, close to the dictatorial regime headed by Nicolás Maduro and a key figure of the criminal São Paulo Forum, also gave Boric his backing.

Zapatero, who was recently accused by Chavez’s former security chief of having received financing from the Venezuelan regime and of owning a gold mine in Venezuela, signed a letter in which he asked Chileans to avoid the triumph of Jose Antonio Kast.

“Faced with the real danger of an involution in Chile, we cannot be, nor are we, indifferent or neutral. We say no to the normalization of ultra-right policies,” reads the letter signed by Zapatero.

Slavoj Žižek

“I ask you to vote for Boric. Not in the name of an old leftist sentimentality, but as an act of courage. Boric lives today in the era of new global pensions and ecological threats. Only Boric gives us hope,” said the famed Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek.

It is true that Žižek is one of the most complex and dense philosophers of today. Inevitable to read and study him, but his endorsement of Boric is a clear sign of the communist alignment around the Chilean leftist candidate.

Žižek, a communist and accelerationist, is one of the main promoters of the end of capitalism and the overcoming of an idyllic model of communism. Regardless of the striking argumentation of his books and lectures, the fact that Žižek accompanies Boric means that he sees in him the possibility of putting an end to that model of market economy that had made Chile so successful.

Roger Waters

Finally, Roger Waters. Lots of talent, but on the wrong side of the sidewalk. A rabid admirer of the Chavista tyranny, which he has supported on several occasions, Waters, co-founder of Pink Floyd, said that “the votes could go to Mr. Kast, so get out and vote. Please, all the mothers, fathers, uncles, aunts, grandfathers, grandmothers, grandmothers, good people of Chile, you must go out and vote on December 19. All of you, you must go out and vote,” referring to Boric’s constituents.

In December 2020, Waters also called on other Latin Americans to go out and vote. At that time, she spoke to Venezuelans and asked them to support Nicolás Maduro in a sham election that was repudiated by the international community.

A few months earlier, in February 2019, Waters released a video in which she toasted Nicolás Maduro and called for support for the “resistance” of Venezuelans in the face of “the imperialist powers that want to destroy their revolution.”

Orlando Avendano

Orlando Avendaño is the co-editor-in-chief of El American. He is a Venezuelan journalist and has studies in the History of Venezuela. He is the author of the book Days of submission // Orlando Avendaño es el co-editor en Jefe de El American. Es periodista venezolano y cuenta con estudios en Historia de Venezuela. Es autor del libro Días de sumisión.