(The Global Americans) A month after promoting the establishment of PROSUR, Chilean President Sebastián Piñera contradicted the central principles of the new regional bloc during a trip to China.

By Gabriel C. Salvia

(The Global Americans) Knowing full well that he had an official visit to China on the horizon, it was an awkward decision for the president of Chile, Sebastián Piñera, to promote the creation of the Forum for the Progress and Development of South America (PROSUR), which stipulates a democratic system of government as a requirement for membership. Instead, the next time Piñera criticizes the ongoing human rights violations in Venezuela, Nicolás Maduro will have a ready-made response. It’s a quote supplied by Piñera during his visit to China: “Every country has a right to the political system of its choosing.”

When eight South American countries came together to establish PROSUR in March, point number five of its founding declaration stated “that the essential requisites to participate in this space will be the full validity of democracy, of the respective constitutional orders, respect for the principle of separation of the powers of state, and the promotion, protection, respect and guarantee of human rights and fundamental freedoms, as well as the sovereignty and territorial integrity of states, with respect to international law.”

PROSUR was established on March 22 in Santiago as an initiative of Piñera to replace the Union of South American Nations (UNASUR). Joining Chile as founding members were Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay and Peru.

The creation of PROSUR raised a series of questions about the complex geopolitical landscape of South America: Is a new multilateral group really necessary in the region? How does the existence of PROSUR conflict with the membership of the same countries in the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), whose democratic clause lacks legitimacy given Cuba’s membership? How does it look that certain founding members of an organization with a democratic clause have recently extolled the virtues of past military dictatorships and overseen an increasingly deadly environment for human rights activists? (Brazil, anyone?) Finally, what will be the policy of PROSUR members toward non-hemispheric countries that are not democratic, such as China? 

Piñera isn’t a stranger to ideologically sloppy statements. During his first term as president, at the ceremony marking the founding of CELAC in Caracas on December 3, 2011, Piñera, together with Hugo Chávez and Raúl Castro, proclaimed, “Long live the differences!”, relativizing the region’s varied political systems. In doing so, Piñera placed Chilean democracy on equal footing with Venezuelan autocracy and Cuban single-party dictatorship.

This sad precedent makes it unsurprising—but still unfortunate—that on April 25 in China, hardly a month after founding PROSUR, Piñera again stated that “every country has a right to the political system of its choosing,” choosing silence in the face of ongoing violations of human rights in the world’s largest dictatorship.

Here, it’s worth returning to a few of the cases included in the fifteen-page report of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights in November 2018 as part of the third cycle of the Universal Periodic Review of China in the UN Human Rights Council:

• “The Committee remained concerned over allegations of death in custody as a result of torture or resulting from lack of prompt medical care and treatment during detention.”
• “The Committee against Torture expressed concern about the failure of China to inform families of the whereabouts of their relatives who had taken part in protests and were still in detention, and of persons who had allegedly been detained for organizing activities or expressing views to memorialize the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests on the occasion of its twenty-fifth anniversary in 2014.”
• “The Committee against Torture expressed concern about reports that private and publicly run clinics offered so-called ‘gay conversion therapy’ to change the sexual orientation of lesbian and gay persons, and that such practices included the administration of electric shocks and, sometimes, involuntary confinement in psychiatric and other facilities, which could result in physical and psychological harm.”
• “The Committee against Torture stated that it had received numerous reports from credible sources that documented in detail cases of torture, deaths in custody, arbitrary detention and disappearances of Tibetans. Allegations had also been received about acts directed against Uighurs and Mongolians.”

In defense of Piñera, it has been said that his task is to defend the interests of his country, taking into account that China is Chile’s main trading partner. Risking that relationship by prioritizing the defense of human rights would be politically dangerous for Piñera.

But a leader who promotes a regional body that affirms “the promotion, protection, respect and guarantee of human rights and fundamental freedoms” cannot travel to the world’s largest dictatorship a month later and praise the right to national self-determination of its political system—irrespective of popular demands and rights—if he wants PROSUR to be taken seriously. 

With this rhetoric, Piñera stands to lose credibility as a regional and international leader in the defense of democracy and human rights.  

Gabriel Salvia is the Director General of the Center for the Opening and Development of Latin America (CADAL).

Source: The Global Americans (Estados Unidos)

Gabriel C. Salvia

General Director of CADAL

Human rights activist dedicated to international democratic solidarity. In 2024 he received the Gratias Agit Award from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the Czech Republic. He is the author of the books “Memory, human rights and international democratic solidarity” (2024) and “Bailando por un espejismo: apuntes sobre política, economía y diplomacia en los gobiernos de Cristina Fernández de Kirchner” (2017). In addition, he compiled several books, including “75 años de la Declaración Universal de Derechos Humanos: Miradas desde Cuba” (2023), “Human rights in international relations and foreign policy” (2021), “Desafíos para el fortalecimiento democrático en la Argentina” (2015), “Un balance político a 30 años del retorno a la democracia en Argentina” (2013) and “Diplomacy and Human Rights in Cuba” (2011), His opinion columns have been published in several Spanish-language media. He currently publishes in Clarín, Perfil, Infobae and La Nación, in Argentina. He has participated in international conferences in Latin America, Africa, Asia, Europe, the Balkans and the United States. Since 1992 he has served as director of Civil Society Organizations and is a founding member of CADAL. As a journalist, he worked between 1992 and 1997 in print, radio and TV specialized in parliamentary, political and economic issues, and later contributed with interviews in La Nación and Perfil.