This shadow claims to seek a broad consensus, where everyone fits in a common house. The guarantee that this can happen is the equidistance between Approve and Reject, for which it recommends a blank vote. Thus emerges, amidst the trumpets of an opera buffa, surrounded by other vociferous shadows, this character who from his throne claims to call himself Ricardo Lagos, the saviour of the homeland.
By Héctor Vega
His government was nothing more than a translation of what he is proposing today because when governing with economic powers, the first rule of conduct is to ensure that nothing will change except that which further strengthens the privileges of the groups in power. To this end, the myth of the Common House is offered, where mining companies participate in the banquet of sharing, taking natural wealth, the same wealth that finances the silence of the political class. Mr. Lagos’ millionaire presidential campaign was financed by the copper mining companies. The millionaire infrastructure concessions were nothing more than the payment for substantial contributions to his access to power, the 5 multifunds of the AFP deceit received the blessing of the Palace, it was the consecration of the Law of the Funnel, wide for the administrators of complex financial artifices, narrow for pensioners with miserable pensions.
Confusing the interests of the big corporations with the interests of Chile has been the policy of this democrat who has not hesitated to charge his share for the management carried out.
It was on November 15, 2019 when the political class sought to undermine the changes that were demanded on October 18 of that year, the day of the popular revolt. However, they were unable to defeat the Constitutional Convention that was installed on 4 July 2021. Because it was there that changes were introduced, not all the desired ones, but enough for the political class to understand that a new era had been installed in the Republic of Chile.
When the Convention proclaimed new ethical and political principles, among them the recognition of indigenous peoples as part of the one and indissoluble Nation; social security for those who until now have been Nobody; Public Goods as part of the matrix of elementary understandings in a social, democratic and lawful Republic. This was never understood by Lagos because during his presidency the power of money was installed, which from the top of the Transnationals and the local monopolies dictated the laws that favoured them. What Apruebo is seeking today is to banish money as the source of power in the Republic. Because now the debate that has always taken place in parliaments will also be public, in the municipalities, in the communal, provincial and regional assemblies, without the pettiness of the power apparatuses that discuss the priorities of the people within four walls.
Democracy is no longer the accommodation of privileges every 4 years, as new social actors emerge, which Mr. Lagos, immersed in the rigid imposture of power, viscerally rejects. That is why this militant man of the old, arrogant and authoritarian tradition, who pulled the strings of politics in the 19th century, must return to the old legal solemnities that consecrate rubbish for the poor and money for the rich.
That is why I once called him from the columns of Fortín Mapocho digital, the Janus of Chilean politics, as if on the threshold of nowhere, lying in wait for the first opportunity. With two faces, one on the right and the other on the left, an exemplary juggler of politics, nothing more and nothing less than a Gabriel González Videla, the one that our national poet, Pablo Neruda, pointed out as the traitor who left his name in our history. Lagos, this bizarre character, stamped his signature on Pinochet’s Constitution, in fact he wanted to erase it, but he became entangled in his most intimate purposes, a mixture of clown and monkey, embraced by Edwards of El Mercurio and Rockefeller of Wall Street.
The old politics is over!
Today, in the Apruebo the People raise their destiny.
