‘Today There are Prisoners in Cuba for Thinking Differently,’ Laments Chilean President Gabriel Boric

Chilean President Gabriel Boric, right, during his interview with the US network Telemundo, this Thursday. (Capture/Telemundo)

14ymedio bigger14ymedio, Madrid, 9 June 2022 — The president of Chile, Gabriel Boric, has once again, this Thursday, marked the terrain where his political ideas dwell, and it continues to seem far from Cuba. “I come from a left that is profoundly democratic, that values ​​and respects human rights unrestrictedly, regardless of who is in power,” he declared in an interview with Telemundo in the framework of the IX Summit of the Americas, held in Los Angeles.

In the interview, he asserted that “today there are prisoners in Cuba for thinking differently and that for us is unacceptable,” referring to those arrested for the protests of July last year. Similarly, he was critical of the United States, which he says “was wrong” for not inviting Havana, Caracas and Managua to the meeting.

“I prefer to discuss with Cuba, tell Mr. Ortega to free Nicaragua’s political prisoners to his face, and I prefer to tell him at a summit of equals. How can we guarantee that the elections in Venezuela are fully democratic next year,” he said.

Boric also believed that the US applies a “double standard” by arguing not to invite these three countries saying that “dictators should not be invited to the conversation,” because “they have no problem having relations with Saudi Arabia” or “in continuing to support the occupation of Palestine by the State of Israel.”

When asked if the president of Mexico, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, who like the Chilean criticized the absences, had made a mistake in not attending the Summit, Boric replied that he is not “the one to judge” and that he prefers to talk and use all the multilateral spaces, since the Chile cannot afford “the luxury” of missing it.

It is not the first time that the Chilean has made clear his distance, at least in public statements, with the so-called Bolivarian left, the direct daughter of Castroism. Months ago, in an interview with the BBC, he stated: “I come from the Chilean Americanist libertarian socialist tradition. That is my ideological space of reference. I am a democrat.”

Boric’s statements have earned him, for example, the criticism of Nicolás Maduro, who alluded to the Chilean, without naming him – and that of other new leaders such as the Colombian Gustavo Petro and the Peruvian Pedro Castillo – putting him in the bag of “a cowardly left.”

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