By EFE
The Chilean Chamber of Deputies approved this Tuesday to carry out a political trial to dismiss the country's president, the 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 decided by 78 votes in favor, 67 against and 3 abstentions that the constitutional accusation advance to the Senate, the body that will be in charge of judging the president for the scandal revealed in the investigation. Pandora papers.
The opposition needed 78 of the 155 seats to approve the accusation that it presented on October 13 and in which it accused the president of having lacked the principle of "probity" and "seriously compromising the honor of the Nation."
Chilean President Sebastián Piñera arrives at the La Moneda presidential palace in Santiago, Chile, on Monday, November 8, 2021. Esteban Felix / AP
"I hope this chamber approves the constitutional accusation, but (...) Chile will judge those who are allowing this impunity in the country," said the deputy in charge of presenting the arguments in favor of impeachment, the socialist Jaime Naranjo, at the end of his very long speech.
["We are at war," says the president of Chile. There are serious disturbances in the country. There are at least eight dead]
Naranjo gave a speech lasting more than 15 hours to allow MP Giorgio Jackson, of the leftist Frente Amplio, to end his quarantine and be able to go 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 veteran parliamentarian, 70 years old.
Jackson was confined until midnight (local time) Tuesday for being close contact with presidential candidate Gabriel Boric, infected with COVID-19 last week.
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The telematic vote, which was in force during the toughest months of the pandemic, was not enabled on this occasion because the state of exception no longer governs, so Jackson's presence in the hemicycle was essential.
The presence of the Christian Democrat deputy Jorge Sabag also generated concern, 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.
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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.
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 momentous and uncertain elections in its recent history in which it will be decided precisely to Piñera's successor.
The Pandora Papers revealed 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 assumed office for his first term. not consecutive (2010-2014).
Piñera, one of the largest fortunes in Chile, defends that he dissociated 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 the way in which the accusation was prepared, improvised for the purpose of locating its discussion a few days before an election, how can we not understand that politics is an activity that has a bad reputation," he said in the Hemicycle the lawyer for the president, Jorge Gálvez, who spoke for more than six hours.
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The impeachment trial, which a parliamentary commission said on Friday was inadmissible in a non-binding report, runs alongside an investigation in the Public Ministry for possible tax and bribery crimes in the same operation.
This is the second time that Piñera has been politically prosecuted during his current term.
The first was at the end of 2019, when he was held responsible for human rights violations during the repression of a violent social outbreak.
Piñera argued that the accusation did not meet the relevant constitutional requirements, which was accepted by the majority of the deputies.
Since the return to democracy in 1990, in Chile all the presidents have finished their mandate
