Chile Chamber of Deputies approves impeachment trial of Piñera

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Chile’s Chamber of Deputies approved on Tuesday an impeachment trial to remove the country’s president, conservative Sebastián Piñera, for alleged irregularities in the sale of a controversial mining project.

After a marathon parliamentary session of almost 24 hours, the deputies resolved by 78 votes in favor, 67 against, and three abstentions that the impeachment proceedings to the Senate, the body that will be in charge of judging the president for the scandal revealed in the investigation of Pandora’s papers.

Read also: Check out our coverage on Chile 

The opposition needed 78 of the 155 seats to approve the accusation presented last October 13. It accused the governor of failing to comply with the principle of “probity” and “seriously compromising the honor of the Nation”.

“I hope that this chamber approves the constitutional accusation, otherwise (…) Chile will judge those who are allowing this impunity in the country”, assured the deputy in charge of presenting the arguments in favor of the impeachment, the socialist Jaime Naranjo, at the end of his very long intervention.

NO TELEMATIC VOTE

Naranjo gave a speech of more than 15 hours to allow the parliamentarian Giorgio Jackson, of the leftist Frente Amplio, to finish his quarantine and come to vote.

“This was a gesture of political solidarity. It is good at all times to teach, help and support the younger generations,” said the 70-year-old veteran parliamentarian.

Jackson was confined until 00:00 local time on Tuesday because he was in close contact with presidential candidate Gabriel Boric, infected with covid-19 last week.

The telematic vote, which was in force during the most challenging months of the pandemic, was not enabled on this occasion because the state of emergency is no longer in detail, so Jackson’s presence in the hemicycle was essential.

The presence of the Christian Democrat deputy Jorge Sabag, who in the afternoon had presented some physical discomfort, which delayed his arrival from the southern city of Chillán to the Lower House in Valparaíso, was also a cause for concern.

The strategy chosen by the opposition to delay the vote, strongly criticized by the ruling party, is known as parliamentary filibustering and is used in different countries around the world, including the United States.

FINAL STRETCH OF THE CAMPAIGN

The accusation against the president will be discussed in the Senate – where a higher quorum of two-thirds is required – just a few days before Chile holds on November 21 the most uncertain elections in its recent history in which Piñera’s successor will be decided.

The Pandora Papers alleged irregularities in the sale of Minera Dominga by a company owned by Piñera’s children in the British Virgin Islands to a close friend of the presidential family, just nine months after he took office in his first non-consecutive term (2010-2014).

Piñera, one of Chile’s most enormous fortunes, defends that he disassociated himself from his businesses through blind trusts in 2009 and that what was revealed was already dismissed in 2017.

“With what we have experienced today and how the accusation was prepared, improvised to place its discussion a few days before an election, how not to understand that politics is an activity that has a bad reputation”, indicated in the hemicycle the ruler’s lawyer, Jorge Galvez, who spoke for more than six hours.

The impeachment trial, which a parliamentary committee said on Friday was inadmissible in a non-binding report, runs alongside an investigation by the Public Prosecutor’s Office for possible tax and bribery crimes in the same operation.

This is the second attempt to try Piñera politically, after the failed attempt in November 2019 for alleged human rights violations amid the social outburst, the most severe protests since the end of the dictatorship.

Since the return to democracy in 1990, all presidents in Chile have finished their term in office.