Impeachment trial to remove Piñera from office faces long day in the Senate

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The impeachment trial that could end in the removal of the president of Chile, Sebastián Piñera, faces this Tuesday, its last day in the Senate with an unprecedented vote that could extend until early Wednesday morning.

At 9.00 AM (local time), the Upper House began to analyze the accusation against the ruler, initiated for alleged irregularities in the sale in the British Virgin Islands of a controversial mining project at the beginning of his first term, a scandal revealed in Pandora’s papers investigation.

Read also: Check out our coverage on Chile

During the morning, a slate of deputies representing the Lower House, the body that last week approved historically with the slim majority of votes (78 out of 155) that the impeachment proceedings, will present their arguments, and then Piñera’s lawyer, Jorge Gálvez, will speak.

In the afternoon, the final vote will begin, in which each one of the 47 senators will have 15 minutes to argue, so it is foreseen that the day may extend until the early hours of Wednesday morning.

In the previous session, which took place in the Lower House, the parliamentarians were active for about 22 hours without long breaks, partly due to the filibustering promoted by an opposition deputy who spoke for 15 hours straight to defend the impeachment.

It is the most advanced impeachment trial against a president in the country’s history. However, experts estimate that it will be complicated to pass the Senate, where it needs a quorum of two-thirds to prosper, and the opposition only has 24 votes.

The origin of the accusation, promoted by the opposition, is located in the alleged irregularities in the purchase and sale of Minera Dominga -of which the Piñera family was the main shareholder-, in the British Virgin Islands, just nine months after the president took office in his first term (2010-2014).

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) revealed that the project was sold to businessman and family friend Carlos Alberto Délano for 152 million dollars, 138 million of which were paid in the tax haven.

One of the most enormous fortunes in Chile, the president has maintained in two public appearances to have disassociated himself from his businesses through blind trusts in 2009. What was revealed in the Pandora papers was already investigated and dismissed in 2017.

The impeachment trial is during the last months of Piñera’s term, who will leave office in March, and just days before the November 21 presidential election, the most consequential and uncertain election in the country’s recent history.

This is the second attempt to impeach him, following the November 2019 attempt for alleged human rights violations amid massive anti-inequality protests, the most serious since the end of the dictatorship.