More women and an average of 49 years: this is the new Government of Chile

The elected president of Chile, Gabriel Boric, announced this Friday to his government team that he will accompany him from next March 11, when President Sebastián Piñera hands him the presidential sash. It is a Cabinet made up of 24 professionals with whom Boric – who will take office at the age of 36 as the youngest president in the history of Chile – has surprised by the nomination of more women than men (there will be 14 female ministers), a large number of independents ( eight) and the incorporation of people linked to the center-left governments that governed Chile after the dictatorship. The Homosexual Integration and Liberation Movement (Movilh), which has been fighting for the rights of sexual diversity since the 1990s, has applauded the incorporation of Marco Antonio Ávila,“an openly gay professor who takes office as Minister of Education” and Alexandra Benado, who “becomes the first openly lesbian woman to take office as minister” in the Sports portfolio.

It is a diverse cabinet in ages, cities of origin and looks. "With joy and hope we announce the ministerial cabinet that will accompany me when I have the honor of assuming the presidency of the Republic on March 11," Boric said at a ceremony that took place at the Natural History Museum in downtown Santiago. . In his speech, Boric spoke of a "citizen government with open and close doors that is always on the side of the people". “They are a diverse group of women and men. They are people prepared with knowledge and experience, committed to the change agenda that the country needs and with the ability to add perspectives, different perspectives and new visions," said Boric, who reiterated his priorities: restoring confidence in the Government, politics and institutions, face the pandemic,recover the economy and take care of the environment.

These are the 24 ministers who will accompany Boric in his Government:

Izkia Siches

The future Minister of the Interior and Public Security, Izkia Siches, during a campaign event last December.Cristobal Olivares (Bloomberg)

A 35-year-old independent doctor born in the extreme north of the country -in Arica-, Izkia Siches becomes the first woman to reach the Ministry of the Interior in Chile, a portfolio that is in charge of political leadership and public security, a a particularly sensitive issue with the escalation of violence in the area of ​​Araucanía, in the south of the country. A doctor at a public hospital in the Chilean capital, the San Juan de Dios Hospital, she was the first woman in 2017 to lead the Medical College, the union that brings together these professionals, and became a highly popular leader within the framework of the pandemic by confronting the Piñera Administration for the measures adopted. He has no experience in Congress or in government functions, nor from the leadership of parties - he was active in the Communist Youth,but he resigned years ago – although he was a central figure in Boric's second-round campaign, which catapulted his victory at the polls. She will lead the Cabinet as the president's most important minister, with whom she has a strong friendship since the days of student leaders at the University of Chile, where they both studied. Introducing her as Minister of the Interior, the host of the ceremony added that Siches "is the mother of Khala", a girl less than a year old with whom the doctor toured the country in the campaign and who has become popular with her mother .with whom he has a strong friendship since the times of student leaders at the University of Chile, where they both studied. Introducing her as Minister of the Interior, the host of the ceremony added that Siches "is the mother of Khala", a girl less than a year old with whom the doctor toured the country in the campaign and who has become popular with her mother .with whom he has a strong friendship since the times of student leaders at the University of Chile, where they both studied. Introducing her as Minister of the Interior, the host of the ceremony added that Siches "is the mother of Khala", a girl less than a year old with whom the doctor toured the country in the campaign and who has become popular with her mother .

George Jackson

Chilean deputy Giorgio Jackson greets the president-elect, Gabriel Boric, during the cabinet presentation this Friday. Esteban Felix (AP)

The civil engineer is Boric's fellow traveler. Currently a deputy –both entered Parliament in 2014–, Jackson is 34 years old and is a member of the Democratic Revolution, one of the parties that make up the Broad Front. He was one of the most important faces along with Camila Vallejo in the 2011 university protests, the political cradle of Boric himself and of the generation that a decade after those demonstrations will soon arrive at La Moneda. Jackson and Boric are not only friends –they shared a flat at one time–, but they were a duo for eight years in Parliament. Within the framework of the presidential campaign, Jackson played a central role in politics, so starting in March he will have the key mission of weaving relations between the Government and Parliament as Minister of the General Secretariat of the Presidency,one of the five portfolios that make up the political committee of the President of the Republic. Without a majority in Congress, the next Administration will have to show significant political skill to carry out the reform agenda.

Camila Vallejo

Communist deputy Camila Vallejo, during a meeting in Nueva Imperial, Chile, in 2017. Fernando Lavoz (NurPhoto via Getty Images)

The communist deputy Camila Vallejo arrives at the age of 33 at the General Secretariat of Government ministry, which has the role of spokesperson.

A geographer by profession, she has spent years on the political front line.

First as a student leader in the 2011 demonstrations – she was president of the Student Federation of the University of Chile, where she was succeeded by Boric – and then from Parliament, where she came together with the latter and Jackson in what was known as the

.

She is one of the three communist militants who reach the Government -Work and Sciences remained in the hands of that party-, but the one with the greatest political relevance.

She was a spokesperson for Boric in the presidential campaign and, although she militates in different formations of the Approve Dignity pact, she is part of the ring of political trust of the president-elect.

At the Cabinet presentation ceremony, she took the stage with her young daughter, Adela.

It is one of Vallejo's hallmarks in his public life: his feminist agenda and his interest in reconciling private life with work, for which he has pushed laws to reduce the working day from 45 to 40 hours.

She is a very popular figure both in Chile and abroad.

Mario Marcel

The then president of the Central Bank of Chile, Mario Marcel, at the Jackson Hole economic forum in 2017. David Paul Morris (Bloomberg)

Boric has turned the tables with the nomination to the Treasury of a moderate and transversally respected economist: Mario Marcel, the current president of the Chilean Central Bank, an economist who has been one of the symbols of macroeconomic discipline in that country. Marcel is a descendant of Spaniards who arrived in Chile during the civil war. At 62 years old and linked to the Socialist Party, he played fundamental roles in the center-left governments. He held top positions in the first democratic governments and in the late 1990s he worked at the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB). Then he was Director of Budgets – a key position – in the Government of the socialist Ricardo Lagos (2000-2006). In that period he was the father of the structural balance fiscal rule,a sign of security given by Lagos –the first socialist to arrive at La Moneda after Salvador Allende– to generate confidence in the economic sphere.

Marcel had done his doctoral thesis at the University of Cambridge on structural balances as a mechanism for measuring fiscal policy and implemented it between 2000 and 2006. Respected by the left and the right, he was a candidate to lead the Treasury on several occasions (when he was close to It was in 2006, in the first Administration of Michelle Bachelet). Since the social unrest of 2019, it has been the technical voice that has made a moderate counterweight to several intemperate measures of Parliament. The Treasury nomination was probably the most important in Boric's Cabinet. It is the position that has the fiscal coffers in its hands, a position that especially in this Administration is highly sensitive, given the profound changes that it seeks to make in matters such as taxes and pensions. Marcel, precisely,led a commission on pensions in the first government of Michelle Bachelet (2006-2010). Along with Siches, Jackson, Vallejo and the Minister for Women, Marcel will be part of Boric's political committee.

Antonia Orellana

Antonia Orellana greets the public after being appointed as Chile's new Minister for Women and Gender Equity, this Friday. JAVIER TORRES (AFP)

A journalist by profession, she will be the new Minister for Women and Gender Equality starting in March. At 32 years old –she will be the youngest minister in Boric's Cabinet–, Orellana is a member of the Social Convergence party, the same as the president-elect. It is one of the first innovations that Vallejo announced this Friday: this ministry will join the first ring of ministers – known as the political committee – in line with the feminist stamp that it wants to give to the Administration and to the strength of the women's movement that preceded it, even to the social revolts of 2019. She has been part of the Chilean Network against Violence against Women between 2015 and 2020 and was part of Boric's campaign team, where she was one of the main advisers on gender."It is important that in this government this agenda is not limited in the Ministry of Women," he said in a recent interview. Until now, he was not a figure known by the bulk of Chileans.

maya fernandez

The socialist deputy Maya Fernández Allende, who will assume the Defense portfolio. FELIPE TRUEBA

The socialist deputy Maya Fernández, who came to Parliament in 2014 and presided over the Chamber of Deputies between 2018 and 2019, is one of the leaders of the Socialist Party who is closest to Boric and, in fact, she distanced herself from the official position of her training to support him ahead of time in the presidential race. Her appointment in Defense – the portfolio to which Bachelet arrived in 2002 as the first female minister – has a strong symbolism: she is the granddaughter of Salvador Allende, who took his own life in La Moneda amid the military bombings. He has no memories of his grandfather: "He was not even two years old when the coup occurred," he said in an interview with EL PAIS in 2012, where he acknowledged his admiration: "For me it is a pride to be his granddaughter and also a responsibility. But I am a different person. I am Maya”, she explained.50 years old and a graduate in Sciences, she is the daughter of Beatriz

Allende, the second of the president's three daughters, and former Cuban intelligence agent Luis Fernández Oña. She was the closest to her father, a doctor like him, and the most political and with revolutionary ideas. When Allende came to government in 1970, she became his most influential collaborator. The day of the coup d'etat she was with him until the president, in the middle of the bombing, forced her to withdraw. She, seven months pregnant and the mother of an almost two-year-old girl –Mayita– reluctantly left the palace. While the rest of the family went into exile in Mexico,

She took refuge in Havana with her husband and daughter.

There she gave birth to Alejandro, who was renamed Salvador Alejandro Allende Fernández, with the surnames reversed, at the suggestion of Fidel Castro.

Four years later, in 1977, Tati took her own life in the Cuban capital, plunged into a deep depression.

He was 34 years old and the children were six and three.

Maya spent much of her life in Cuba and only returned to Chile in 1992, so she still has a strong island accent.

Antonia Urrejola

Antonia Urrejola, during the first report of the IACHR in Managua.

Charles Herrera

In charge of leading the Foreign Ministry is the lawyer Antonia Urrejola, 53, who joined the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights between 2018 and 2021 and presided over it in 2021, with an especially relevant role in democratic crises in the region, such as in Nicaragua. Without political militancy, although close to the Socialist Party, through social networks he thanked the "trust placed" by the president-elect. "It is an honor. We are going for more multilateralism, cooperation and dialogue, with an emphasis on foreign policy based on democracy, human rights and feminism”, wrote Urrejola, who will be the face of a government with different sensitivities in foreign policy matters. In the midst of the presidential campaign, the Communist Party defended the recent elections in Nicaragua,which generated the rejection of Boric and the need to clarify that it will be the president who will define Chilean international relations.

Carlos Montes

The new Minister of Housing and Urbanism, Carlos Eduardo Montes, upon his arrival at the presentation of Boric's new cabinet. Alberto Valdés (EFE)

This 75-year-old economist who will lead the Housing Ministry is the veteran of the Cabinet. A key figure in the center-left coalition that has ruled Chile since 1990 after the Pinochet dictatorship, Carlos Montes is a historic leader of the Socialist Party with an extensive track record in Congress. Between 1990 and 2014 he was a deputy for a popular district in the southern area of ​​Santiago and, since then, a senator. Influential in economic matters and in his own party, in 1999-2000 he played a central role in the second round campaign of Ricardo Lagos, where the socialist prevailed over the right-wing candidate, Joaquín Lavín. Despite his extensive career – he had decided not to reapply for Congress – Montes comes to the Government for the first time and will do so in a portfolio with great challenges: the housing deficit affects 500.000 families in the country, where precarious camps have proliferated.

the other wallets

In the Ministry of Economy, Boric has nominated

, who will do a pair with Marcel.

The 38-year-old doctor in Economics belongs to the party of the elected president, Social Convergence, has a close political and friendly relationship and has been one of the main advisers on economic matters throughout the campaign.

In Social Development and Family, the ministry that is in charge of coordinating the social policies of the vulnerable population, the doctor

(64 years old), independent, who served as a WHO official on issues of equity and poverty , will arrive.

.

In a gesture rarely seen in recent governments, in addition, a teacher will arrive at the Ministry of Education:

, 44, a member of the Broad Front. Justice, meanwhile, will be in charge of the sociologist

, from March, a member of the same formation as Boric, a recognized official of the United Nations Development Program (UNDP) based in Santiago de Chile. At 55 years old, he was in charge of the agency's governance area.

A communist militant,

, a 47-year-old lawyer who served as undersecretary of Social Welfare in the second Bachelet government (2014-2018), will arrive at the Ministry of Labor. The 51-year-old architect

, meanwhile, will be the new Minister of Public Works, representing the Liberal Party, which was not originally in Boric's Approve Dignity alliance.

A close person from Izkia Siches arrives at Salud, the independent doctor

, 57, director of an important public hospital between 2009 and 2018. The 57-year-old political scientist

, a member of the Regionalist Front of Boric's coalition, will assume Agriculture, while Mining will remain in the hands of a militant member of the Radical Party, center-left, doctor

, originally from Antofagasta, in northern Chile.

In the rest of the technical portfolios, the doctor in civil and industrial engineering

, 51 years old and without militancy, will be in charge of Transport;

the lawyer

, a member of the Comunes del Frente Amplio party, will lead Bienes Nacionales at the age of 34;

the engineer

(55 years old), from the same party as Boric, will arrive at Energy;

the independent Physics graduate

, 49, will be in charge of Environment;

the independent teacher and athlete

(45 years old) will arrive at the Ministry of Sports;

38-year-old anthropologist

, from Boric's Social Convergence party, will assume the portfolios of Cultures, Arts and Heritage in March;

meanwhile, the biologist

, 56, a communist militant, will arrive at the Ministry of Sciences.

He was vice-rector for Research and Heritage at the University of Chile.

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