VALPARAISO, March 11—Today’s inauguration of another liberal misleader, Chilean president Gabriel Boric, represents a major blow to class consciousness and the struggle for working-class power in the region. The victory of communism will never come through the ballot box, only by the seizure of state power through violent revolution under leadership of the mass and international Progressive Labor Party (PLP).
The 36-year-old former student leader, the first “leftist” millennial elected as President, Boric secured office by riding a recent wave of mass fightback against cost of living hikes, wage inequality, and anti-indigenous racism. But like so many liberal capitalist politicians, Boric is already primed to deceive the working class. Boric joins the stock of played out pink-tide democratic socialists in Latin America who pacify workers with shiny promises of change, but trap workers in the hamster wheel of capitalist reforms. The greatest danger liberals like Boric pose is fascism. A country battered by crisis, Boric will need to exert fascist control of the economy in order to discipline workers, while courting rival imperialists U.S. and China, and enriching the local capitalists.
All politicians under this system—from Boric to Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, from Joe Biden to Vladimir Putin—serve the interests of preserving one faction of capitalist rule or another. Our task as communists and anti-capitalist fighters is to cut through the hype and false promises of the bosses everywhere, and win millions of others to the winning alternative of building PLP and international revolution.
Identity politics, the kiss of death
It’s easy to see how a case could be made for Boric, considering he’s taking the helm from former billionaire president Sebastian Piñera, and beat out another candidate during the election whose father was a card-carrying Nazi and Pinochet sympathizer (Guardian, 12/8/21). Boric  is making history by stacking his cabinet with a record number of women politicians as well as members of Chile’s sellout “Communist” Party (Americas Quarterly, 1/21).
But all that glitters is not gold. Within the same cabinet, Boric was quick to appease international capitalist interests by appointing Mario Marcel as finance minister (Reuters, 1/21). Marcel was head of Chile's central bank during the administration of Piñera in 2019, the year of mass protests in response to rising transit costs and stagnant wages. During this period, Chile was “one of the most unequal countries in Latin America” (Al Jazeera, 10/30/19).
The development of a new national constitution, the compromise made with the Chilean ruling class in response to the protests of 2019, now will take shape under Boric’s watch. The new constitution is already being hailed as a major advance from the previous one written under the rule of fascist military dictator Augusto Pinochet.
But the reform promises of a greater social safety net and gender parity are already on shaky ground. Two years of pandemic capitalism exacerbated a profit crunch and Boric will compromise with bosses of all stripes (Deccan Herald, 12/21/21).
Chile caught in U.S.-China rivalry
To try and pull Chilean capitalism out of its crisis, Boric and company look to exploit the country’s vast mineral wealth. Chile is the world’s largest copper producer and is home to some of the largest lithium deposits on the planet (S&P Global, 12/21/21). The scramble to mine these metals, valuable for commodities from computers to electric vehicles, is attracting more attention from the world’s top imperialist powers.
Already, Boric’s compromise with imperialist fracking, hiking mining taxes and ramping up resource extraction show his willingness to sell workers out to capital. Expect more super-exploitation of miners and dispossession of indigenous workers who are living in the crosshairs of the resource-rich Atacama Desert
(Washington Post, 6/21/19).
Still considering Chile much in the U.S. sphere of influence, the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden was quick to congratulate Boric on his election victory while even sending a delegation to attend the inauguration. U.S.-based company Albemarle is already running one of the largest lithium extraction operations in the country while still seeking to expand (CSIS, 8/17/21). Meanwhile, Chinese imperialist influence on the South American continent has grown at least tenfold over the last decade and a Chinese mining firm just outbid Albemarle for a new lithium contract in Chile (Asia Financial, 1/22).
Certain to play the greatest cost for this growing imperialist showdown is the environment and workers that Boric claims to be eager to defend. Mining is easily one of the most deadly industries for the working class, claiming thousands of workers’ lives every year to ensure the bosses’ profits. No doubt still fresh in the memory of many workers in Chile is the Copiapó mining accident in 2010 in which 33 miners were trapped underground for 69 days.
Boric’s claims to want to nationalize mining in the country are nothing more than a ploy to throw some crumbs at the working class while the bosses are primed to make a boon in profits, a la Hugo Chavez/Nicolas Maduro with oil in Venezuela. Any social contract with our exploiters is murder for our class!
Only one path to workers’ power
There are no doubt workers still alive in Chile who saw the rise and fall of the socialist president Salvador Allende. Voted into power, Allende and his government made the fatal error of a “peaceful” path of opposing capitalism, only to pay the price when the U.S. imperialists backed Pinochet to overthrow him and establish a fascist regime that murdered thousands of workers across decades.
Let’s not repeat the same mistakes. Let the militant fightback from workers in Chile in 2019 be reignited and become one of the many battles for communist revolution!