Santiago, the third municipality with the highest number of voters in Chile (378,363, a third of them immigrants), has taken a political turn this weekend. 51.1% of the residents of the emblematic commune that houses the historic center and that has been seriously affected by the security crisis and street commerce, have elected Mario Desbordes, standard bearer of National Renewal (RN), party of the traditional right, to govern the central territory. The triumph of the former police officer and lawyer meant the defeat of the current communist mayor Iraqi Hasslerwhich obtained 28.6% of the votes in the regional and municipal elections this Saturday, October 26 and Sunday, October 27.
Desbordes (Los Andes, 56 years old) was a right-wing student leader in a public high school in the municipality of El Bosque, south of Santiago. The son of a Carabineros advisor entered the police institution school at the age of 18 and, the following year, voted in favor of the continuity of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in the plebiscite of October 1988. He is a lawyer, a former police officer. Carabineros de Chile – he retired after being denied permission to marry – and then, as a civilian, he worked in the Gendarmerie, the prison service. At the beginning of the millennium he began to serve in the RN and, since then, he has had a political career linked to his past. The former congressional representative was a member of the defense and citizen security commissions. During the Governments of Sebastián Piñera (2010-2014 and 2018-2022) he served as Undersecretary of Research and Minister of Defense, a position he held for five months in 2020 and which he left to assume his presidential candidacy.
During the social outbreak of 2019He was open to dialogue in his role as head of RN, asking the then Piñera Government to evaluate the neutralization of the increase in Metro ticket prices that unleashed the massive protests, although he condemned the violence. The “disconnection of the elite with what happens on the street that becomes dangerous,” he raised when supporting the withdrawals of pension funds during the pandemic, which affected the country’s economy. With a moderate tone, he was a presidential candidate for the right in the primaries of the Chile Vamos coalition in 2021, but he did not obtain enough support to compete against the left.
Today he is the figure who has returned the municipality of Santiago to the traditional right, the jewel in the crown in local elections. His party, RN, was the one that obtained the most mayors, 38. Evelyn Mattheimayor of Providencia and the main presidential letter of Chile Vamos para 2025, celebrated Desbordes’ victory and, on Sunday night in the Plaza de Armas, in the center of the city and a few blocks from the Palacio de La Moneda, he said that the The results obtained were “a clear sign of hope.” One of the reasons he attributed his victory was his experience. “People have an important demand for security” and perhaps “a figure like mine, with more gray hair, with more experience, public positions” had an important weight,” he said. “It is not a commune for the hardest right, so a center-right profile was also more suitable at this moment,” he added.
Crime in the Chilean capital – the fifth commune with the highest number of homicides in the country – has hit its neighbors and merchants hard, who have closed hundreds of stores in the last five years. Desbordes promised voters to “eradicate violence and better manage resources to stop the exodus of families and businesses” from the commune. To reinforce security, it intends to install 1,000 cameras with artificial intelligence (AI), increase mixed patrols with Carabineros, recover illegally occupied properties and reinforce inspection of street commerce, according to its campaign program.
Once he became elected mayor, he was against the installation of a maximum security prison in Santiago, a plan that the Government of President Boric is pushing for organized crime and which Hassler also opposed. He Undersecretary of the Interior, Luis CorderoHe was quick to respond that if the prison system is not expanded there will be an “explosive situation and that is a security problem.” Regarding migration, Desbordes stated that “what a mayor can do is avoid the call effect, and therefore we are going to nip in the bud this idea of the immigrant being illegal,” while in relation to illegal trade, he said that he will seek “recompose the capabilities of the municipality in terms of controlling this type of incivility.”
The elected mayor, who will take office on December 6, 2024, has announced as one of his first actions that he will remove the director of the Barrios Arana National Institute (INBA), María Alejandra Benavides, after on October 23 35 students were injuredone of them in extreme seriousness and five in critical condition, when they were handling an incendiary element inside a bathroom at the educational establishment. “The student who throws a Molotov cocktail, who puts on white overalls, is no longer a problematic student, He is a criminal. There will be complaints,” he reported in a conversation with the channel. Mega.
