Chile: Far-Left President Boric Faces Backlash After Pardoning Violent Rioters

Chile’s far-left President Gabriel Boric is facing a lawsuit by lawmakers this week in response to his decision in December to pardon a former Marxist guerrilla member and several others imprisoned for participating in leftist riots between 2019 and 2021.

The presidential pardons sparked a new crisis for the largely unpopular president and his cabinet. Chilean opposition lawmakers filed a lawsuit before the nation’s courts on Wednesday against Marcela Ríos, who recently resigned from her position as minister of justice to contest the pardons.

Boric pardoned a group of 13 Chilean men on December 30. Twelve of them, aged between 21 to 38, had been involved in the movement of violent leftist assaults that initially claimed to have begun as protests against public transit fare hikes in 2019. The protests resulted in multiple incidents of leftist rioters burning churches and historical sites, destroying train stations, and attacking police. The riots left more than 30 dead.

The thirteenth man pardoned by Boric was 48-year-old Jorge Mauricio Mateluna Rojas, a former member of the Marxist-Leninist Manuel Rodríguez Patriotic Front (FPMR) terrorist organization. Mateluna had been sentenced to 16 years in prison for his participation in a bank robbery in 2013.

“It is a difficult decision, but I do it thinking about the good of the country, I believe that we have to heal these wounds, here we lived a process that was tremendously complex where these are young people who are not delinquents,” Boric said, asserting that the pardons were a “personal” commitment. “They are complex decisions, but I assume them responsibly.”

Boric followed up his pardon with a stern condemnation this week of a riot in Brasilia, Brazil, by unarmed supporters of former conservative President Jair Bolsonaro that destroyed historical artifacts in the country’s congressional, presidential, and Supreme Court headquarters, but reportedly did not involve any armed persons and resulted in no deaths.

The Chilean leftist attackers took advantage of nationwide outrage in response to a proposed public transit fare hike to ultimately demand a complete replacement of the nation’s constitution. Boric, elected after the protests, followed through on the process of drafting a new constitution via a Constitutional Convention process. The proposed new constitution was overwhelmingly rejected through a referendum held in September 2022.

Throughout 2022, the Chilean Senate worked on a project to grant amnesty to qualifying people arrested during the violent wave of leftist riots. The project had been originally scheduled for a vote on August 17, but one day before it was put up to vote, Chilean senators expressed that the project faced an “uncertain future” due to a lack of required support to continue materializing it.

Boric’s decision to grant pardons to people involved in the leftist riots contradicts his own statements during his presidential campaign.

In November 2021 — right after he had won the first round of the presidential election and one month before his presidential runoff election victory — Boric had explicitly stated, “I believe that a person who burned down a church, a small and medium-sized enterprises, or looted a supermarket cannot be pardoned.”

“People convicted of arson, looting, serious crimes, from my point of view, it is not acceptable to think of a pardon for everyone,” he added.

One of the 12 men pardoned was Felipe Santana, a 22-year-old Chilean man who had been sentenced to seven years in prison for attempting to burn the cathedral located in the city of Puerto Montt.

Another of those pardoned by Boric was 34-year-old Luis Castillo who, prior to his participation in the leftist riots and looting in 2019, had been convicted of crimes on five different occasions between 2005 and 2017.

Camila Vallejo, communist politician and Chile’s current minister general secretariat of government, acknowledged in a press conference held on Sunday that the Chilean government did not comply with the criteria of excluding those with “complex records” from pardons, while assuring that, “if the president had had all the elements in view, the situation would have been different.”

The controversial pardons sent out a ripple of reactions and backlash against the far-left president — made worse by Vallejo’s statements — and have so far caused the resignation of two of Boric’s cabinet members in the first days of January: Matías Meza-Lopehandía, Boric’s chief of cabinet, and Marcela Ríos, who served as justice minister.

Isidro Solís Palma – who served as Chile’s minister of justice during the socialist governments of Ricardo Lagos (2000-2006) and Michelle Bachelet (2014-2018) – heavily criticized Boric’s decision to pardon the leftist rioters on Tuesday. Solís demanded that the pardons either be invalidated — which, according to him, is achievable through possible legal defects present in the pardon decree — or outright revoked.

“The president is morally responsible for everything that those pardoned do from now on,” Solís said while adding that if Castillo “kills a person in six more months, blood will flow through the hands of the President of the Republic.”

Members of the conservative National Renewal (RN) party publicly demanded that Boric rescind the pardons he issued in December. RN Sen. Paulina Núñez stated in an interview with Chilean television news channel Teletrece on Wednesday that some of the nation’s lawmakers had raised the possibility of a constitutional accusation against Boric.

“This is a tool that the National Congress has, where it is the congressmen who have to weigh the arguments to consider whether to file an accusation against the President,” Núñez said. “I don’t want to comment too much on that, but without ruling it out because it is a tool that you have and that will have to be evaluated if it is appropriate or not.”

The backlash from the pardons also impacted socialist Interior Minister Carolina Tohá, who had to suspend her role as spokeswoman in negotiations with the nation’s lawmakers towards reaching a consensus to promote her “Transversal Security Agreement,” which includes matters pertaining to gun control laws among other security-related pieces of legislation. 

Jorge Alessandri, Chilean lawmaker of the right-wing Independent Democratic Union (UDI) party and president of the Chilean Congress’ Security Commission, said on Monday that his party would step out of the negotiating table. Alessandri said that if Tohá knew about the pardons, it represents a serious trust issue with the opposition, as the minister did not communicate to them about the pardons during the agreement’s meetings before Boric approved them.

“There is an important question that has not been answered. And that is if the minister [Tohá] knew about the pardons several days ago and omitted to tell us at the security table, which is tremendously serious for the trust with the opposition,” Alessandri said, “or if the minister did not know about the pardons, and then it means that she is not in the small circle of decision-making at La Moneda [Chile’s Presidential Palace].”

“This is also worrying, because it means that the most extreme sectors of Approve Dignity [the far-left government coalition] are the ones that make the important decisions of the government and that Democratic Socialism only holds the positions, but not the decisions,” the lawmaker added.

Boric, who has consistently held low approval ratings throughout his presidency, saw his disapproval rating rise by nine percent after issuing the pardons, reaching a peak of 70 percent disapproval rating as of the start of January according to a poll carried by Chilean polling agency Cadem.

Cadem’s poll result showed that 64 percent disagreed with Boric’s decision to pardon 12 men involved in the violent leftist riots, while 74 percent did not agree with the decision to also pardon Marxist terrorist Jorge Mateluna.

Christian K. Caruzo is a Venezuelan writer and documents life under socialism. You can follow him on Twitter here.