International
“The Bukele recipe is not applicable to Santiago,” says its elected mayor, Mario Desbordes
Former minister and conservative deputy Mario Desbordes (Los Andes, 1968), dealt one of the most painful blows to the government of the progressive Gabriel Boric almost a month ago when it was made by more than 20 points of difference with the Mayor’s Office of Santiago de Chile, considered the ‘jewel of the crown’.
A little more than two weeks after taking office, on December 6, Desbordes attributes his resounding triumph against the communist Irací Hassler, who was seeking reelection, to his “moderate” profile, to the “gray hair” and to the “experience”.
“Santiago is not a commune for the tougher right,” he admits in an interview with EFE in an office in the Bellas Artes neighborhood, which has been his campaign bunker in recent months.
Old acquaintance in Chilean politics, he has done almost everything: he was undersecretary of Investigations in the first term of Sebastián Piñera (2010-2014) and minister of Defense in the second (2018-2022), presidential pre-candidate and deputy.
He was also an agent of the Carabineros police force and presided over National Renewal, one of the three parties that make up the Chile Vamos coalition.
Governing the historic center of Santiago, a commune of 600,000 inhabitants, which in recent years has become very multicultural and where no mayor has been re-elected since 1996, is possibly one of the biggest challenges of his career.
The Santiago de Chile that receives Desbordes
Desbordes inherits a city that is going through one of its worst moments, with high crime rates and great deterioration of public spaces, where life on the street ends almost when the sun goes down and countless businesses have closed.
The problems come from afar, but they were aggravated with the protests of 2019 and the pandemic to the point that, regrets Desbordes, “the center of Santiago has moved emotionally to Providencia,” the adjacent neighborhood.
“The dirt, the scratches on the walls, prostitution in the Plaza de Armas in the morning, street commerce… There is a whole set of incivilities… I think Santiago looks a lot like New York in the early 90s,” he admits.
In 2023, Santiago recorded a total of 66 homicides, becoming for the fifth consecutive year the commune with the most victims in the country, and a homicide rate of 12.3 per 100,000 inhabitants, double the national average (6.3), according to the Prosecutor’s Office.
Despite the fact that more and more voices call for a heavy hand and look towards El Salvador, Desbordes assures that “the Bukele recipe is not applicable” because “Chile has another reality.”
Anyway, the elected mayor asks “to be very careful about criticizing Bukele without being in the shoes of Salvadorans who can only now go out on the street quietly.”
“I am not a friend of criminal populism that states that everyone has to go to jail and put a tank in every corner, nor of criminal goodism, which says that crime is a victim of us and in the end the bad guys are us. I think there is a middle ground,” he emphasizes.
“Clean, illuminate and paint”
That intermediate, in his opinion, is the so-called “Theory of Broken Windows”, the same that former New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani and his Chief of Police, William Bratton, applied in New York three decades ago and that says that if there is a broken window and it is not fixed, the rest end up being destroyed.
Desbordes proposes, in that sense, “to clean, illuminate, paint, put cameras, work with the community and recover the presence of the State,” in such a way that the city “is an uncomfortable place for those who infringe.”
In a conciliatory tone that contrasts with the political tension that Chile is experiencing, the elected mayor has already met with the Boric Government and is convinced that the solution also involves working in a coordinated manner with the different administrations, even if they are in “the ideological antipodes.”
“One of the complaints of the citizens is that politicians are dedicated to fighting like cat and dog and there are never agreements. When citizens lose confidence in politics and politicians, they are more likely to vote for populist and authoritarian people,” he says.
Representative of the so-called “social right”, the most moderate soul within Chile Vamos, Desbordes says that his reference is the former German Chancellor Angela Merkel or the Popular Party in Spain and that he is not in favor of radicalizing the coalition to avoid the flight of votes towards the thriving ultra-right.
“We cannot lose the center. Our main adversaries are the Broad Front (of Boric) and the Communist Party. That’s where the cultural and political struggle is.”
International
Trump: “I won’t allow the stupidity of buying venezuelan oil again”
U.S. President Donald Trump declared on Friday that he would not allow the purchase of oil from Venezuela, as his predecessor Joe Biden did when he lifted a series of sanctions.
“Biden went and bought millions of barrels of oil. I’m not going to allow something that stupid to happen again,” Trump said in remarks to the media in the Oval Office.
The president was asked about the visit of his special envoy, Richard Grenell, to meet with Nicolás Maduro at the Miraflores Palace in Caracas on Friday.
“He (Grenell) is meeting with a lot of different people,” Trump responded.
International
Trump administration holds first direct talks with Maduro regime to discuss hostage release
The Trump administration has had its first contact with Nicolás Maduro’s regime in Venezuela to advance the release of American hostages and ensure the repatriation of “criminals and gang members in a clear and unconditional manner.” The meeting took place just before U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s first trip to Latin America, marking his first international tour.
Rick Grenell, Trump’s Special Envoy for Foreign Affairs, traveled to Venezuela to meet with Maduro and discuss the release of American hostages and the deportation of Venezuelans. This marks the first face-to-face encounter between the new U.S. government and the Chavismo regime, which may begin to shape the future of bilateral relations and whether the Trump administration plans to deploy a strategy aimed at seeking regime change in the Caribbean nation.
“We want to do something with Venezuela. I’ve been a big opponent of Venezuela and Maduro. They’ve treated us badly, and they’ve treated the Venezuelan people very badly,” Trump said in a statement in the Oval Office.
“From migration to security and trade, no other region in the world affects the daily lives of Americans more than the Western Hemisphere, and that’s why, under President Trump’s golden era, he has prioritized the Americas in this administration,” said Mauricio Claver-Carone, Special Envoy for Latin America, in a call with journalists, confirming Grenell’s meeting in Caracas.
International
Florida democrats urge Trump administration to reinstate protections for venezuelans
Florida Democrats in Congress criticized the Trump administration on Friday for reversing an 18-month extension of a federal program that protects over half a million Venezuelans from deportation. They urged officials to reinstate these protections for individuals from the South American nation.
In a letter addressed to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, the group of lawmakers stated that “sending Venezuelan immigrants back to a dictatorship that engages in torture, extrajudicial killings, and systematic human rights abuses would be a death sentence for many of our friends and neighbors.”
“This decision will have a devastating impact on more than 505,400 Venezuelans who currently rely on protected status,” the lawmakers wrote. “It will also severely affect the communities where they live, work, and pay taxes.”
The letter, led by Representatives Debbie Wasserman Schultz of Broward County and Darren Soto of Osceola County, follows Noem’s decision to cancel the program’s extension from April 2025 to October 2026. The extension had been announced by former Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas just days before Biden left the White House. Noem argued that the decision should be left to the Trump administration.
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