Boric echoes the praise of one of the Republican leaders to Pinochet: "He was corrupt and a thief. Statesman never"

Chilean President Gabriel Boric after a meeting with other South American leaders at the Itamaraty palace in Brasilia.EVARISTO SA (AFP)

The most voted constitutional adviser in Chile, Republican Luis Silva, acknowledged on Wednesday his "admiration" for the facet of "statesman" of dictator Augusto Pinochet. The numerary, representative of the extreme right, called in an interview at the Chilean Institute of Rational Business Administration (ICARE) to make "a slightly more weighted reading of his Government" on the 50th anniversary of the coup d'état against the socialist Salvador Allende. President Gabriel Boric has responded to the controversial statements by saying that Pinochet was a "corrupt and thief" dictator. "Statist never," he added on his Twitter.

Silva, a constitutional lawyer, is the face of the triumph of the Republican Party in the elections that defined the 50 members who will draft a proposal to bury the Constitution inherited from the dictatorship. Asked what he thinks of Pinochet, he said: "There is a hint of admiration for the fact that he was a statesman. Definitely a man who knew how to lead the State, who knew how to rearm a State that was torn to shreds. Unfortunately, during his time in charge of the Government of Chile, things happened that he could not not know, that he would have justified and are atrocious. That taints what he did for Chile," he said in relation to human rights violations.

Augusto Pinochet was a "dictator, essentially anti-democratic, whose government killed, tortured, exiled and made disappear those who thought differently. He was also corrupt and a thief. Cowardly to the end he did everything in his power to evade justice," the Chilean president wrote on his social networks. The number of victims of political imprisonment and torture during the Pinochet dictatorship is around 30,000, according to the Valech report. Deaths and disappearances stand at 3,065, according to the Rettig report. There are still 1,162 people missing.

"With all the gravity of those 17 years of human rights violations," Silva said, he invited "not to simplify or reduce" the reading of the dictatorship to those facts. "I think we deprive ourselves as Chileans of a balanced understanding of our history," added the counselor, who said he was not a Pinochet supporter. The Republican Party, led by José Antonio Kast, defines itself as a right wing similar to Spain's Vox. Last December they participated in the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) alongside leaders such as Jair Bolsonaro, from Brazil, and Javier Milei, from Argentina. His speech advocates reducing the role of the state, appeals to authority and traditions, and defends conservative positions such as the rejection of abortion and same-sex marriage.

Government spokeswoman Camila Vallejo avoided commenting in particular on Silva's interview, but remarked that in the Republican Party "several representatives who have recognized themselves as Pinochetists." "We are concerned that there is denialism, that it is still intended to justify or validate a coup d'état, a dictatorship that violated human rights, that massacred a large part of our people, that persecuted politically, that tortured and that generated wounds to this day," he said.

A group of 10 pro-government parliamentarians, led by the communist deputy Carmen Hertz, presented this afternoon in Congress a bill that seeks to sanction with imprisonment and economic fine those who approve or deny the violations of human rights committed by agents of the State during the military dictatorship. "The pseudo conflict or collision that would eventually occur with the right to freedom of expression was settled by international human rights law," Hertz said.

Silva's statements come a day after the results of the CERC-MORI poll, in which 36% of Chileans said they believed that the military "were right" in carrying out the coup, while 41% said they "are never right" and 19% did not answer. Regarding the opinion of the Pinochet regime, 47% said that it was "partly good, partly bad"; 25% were "only bad" and 11% were "only good". As for who was responsible for the coup d'état, in an open question, 22% answered that Pinochet, 13% that it was Allende, 4% pointed to the United States and 35% did not know or did not answer.

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