Far-left Chilean President Gabriel Boric condemned fellow leftists during a conversation in New York on Thursday for failing to criticize the human rights abuses of leftist leaders, demanding “no double standards” for human dignity. He then proceeded to favorably quote Russian communist mass murderer Vladimir Lenin.
Boric is in New York for the United Nations General Assembly’s annual “general debate,” which invites the world’s heads of government to deliver speeches on any topic they deem important enough to share with fellow leaders. Boric used his platform at the U.N. to condemn the communist government of Nicaragua and two governments that have invested heavily in diplomatic ties to leftist authoritarians in Latin America: Russia and Iran.
Boric also admitted to the U.N. General Assembly that leftists had engaged in rampant violence during the riots that preceded his election in Chile. He narrowly won the 2021 presidential race after two years of leftists burning down subway stations and churches, initially claiming to be protesting a proposed public transit fare hike but ultimately demanding a new constitution.
Following his speech, Boric attended an event at Columbia University in which he took questions from students. One student asked what he believed Latin American leftists needed to do to better build coalitions with people who were not necessarily committed to leftist ideology but opposed corruption and sought solutions to other social problems.
“It doesn’t matter if you are from the far right, far left – those are civilizatory [sic] mandates. For example, one, respect of human rights. Respect of human rights has to have no double standard,” Boric said.
“So it really pisses me off when you are from the left, so you condemn the violation of human rights in, I don’t know, Yemen or El Salvador, but you cannot talk about Venezuela or Nicaragua,” Boric continued. “Or Chile! In Chile, we had several human rights violations in the social unrest. You don’t have to have a double standard.”
Boric noted that his stance opposing the socialist dictatorship of Venezuelan narco-tyrant Nicolás Maduro and the Sandinista communists alienated fellow leftists who scolded him for criticizing “friends.”
“I started, when I was a congressman, to ask questions about Venezuela – ask myself questions,” he explained. “I went to Venezuela in 2010, and I started asking myself questions when I started seeing the repression of the protests and the manipulation of some elections, and I said ‘This is not right. We have to be able to criticize it.'”
“People on the left in Chile said, ‘No, no, no, no, no, you don’t talk about our friends,'” Boric recalled. “And I think that’s completely wrong. In order to have a future, the left parties, we have to have just one moral standard.”
Boric followed his comments condemning human rights abuses under leftist dictators by reaffirming his commitment to the elimination of socioeconomic classes and far-left “ideology.”
“I really believe that the [re]distribution of wealthness [sic] and power is really important to build a new society, and I will believe that we have to march in a long way in order to one day might abolish social classes – that’s not going to happen from one day to another,” Boric said, “and if that happens, it’s going to happen with democracy, not by any dictatorship, and that’s one thing that we learned from the past, and I think that’s really important.”
Boric has repeatedly used some variation of the term “long march” – a communist phrase originating with Mao Zedong’s bloody takeover of China – to describe his idea of social progress.
Answering a different question – a seemingly benign request for student government campaign advice – Boric favorably quoted Bolshevik leader Vladimir Lenin.
“Lenin once said something that I think is very lucid, very brilliant. He said, ‘Being ahead of your time, it’s an elegant way of being mistaken, so go slow,'” Boric said.
Lenin, one of the ideological and political leaders of the Russian Revolution, spearheaded the “Red Terror,” which is believed to have killed tens of thousands of people disloyal to communism. Lenin’s mass murder created the Soviet Union, one of history’s most bloodthirsty states, and led to the rise of genocidal dictator Joseph Stalin.
Boric’s condemnation of leftist violence in Latin America is a nearly unprecedented departure from leftist orthodoxy in the region, which rejects criticizing leaders such as Maduro or Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua. During his address to the United Nations, Boric went as far as to condemn leftist violence in Chile, a barb directed at the voters who placed him in office.
In Chile, he told the U.N., “Discontent manifested in grave acts of violence, such as the unacceptable burning down of metro stations and vandalization of civic centers.” He stopped short of mentioning the burning down of historic sites and churches, including vandalization with Satanic graffiti.
Boric also condemned Russia for its invasion of Ukraine – an unpopular opinion on the Latin American left – and condemned Iran for its gross human rights violations against women. Iran is a close ally of Venezuela and is deeply implicated in corruption by leftists in Argentina, among other Latin American states.
Gabriel Boric, a former leftist student leader, became president of Chile in December under a coalition known as “Approve Dignity,” which included the Communist Party of Chile. He has described himself in past interviews as “to the left of the PC [Communist Party].”
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