Isabel Cocker/The Santiago Times Staff
SANTIAGO – During Thursday’s Presidential Debate at the Moneda Palace, Beatriz Sánchez shocked the audience when she gave up part of her introductory time in order to include video footage from candidates who had not been invited to participate.
The event, part of ENADE 2017 (the National Forum for Business), had invited five of the eight candidates to speak to an audience of prominent business owners about their plans for the Chilean economy. This quota excluded Alejandro Navarro, Marco Enríquez-Ominami and Eduardo Artés. According to Icare, the group which organized the event, only those candidates who had been succeeding in the polls were invited to participate.
In response, Sánchez, the candidate for FrenteAmplio, offered all those omitted some of the time allotted to her for her introductory speech. Of these, only Enríquez-Ominami decided to contribute and a three-minute video speech was played to the audience.
Sánchez commented just before showing the video that “this doesn’t seem right to me, it isn’t democratic, and because of this I offered my time to those who were left out, because I believe in true democracy, and so I offered time in my exposition to others.”
However, the video by Enríquez-Ominami was received with jeers by the audience, as it accused those present of not doing enough for the majority of Chileans. He stated that “Some of you colluded to raise the price of toilet paper. And also, the price of chickens. If that wasn’t enough, also to increase the prices of medicines for those of us who are ill. This needs to stop.”
In the rest of her speech, Sánchez unveiled a new slogan for her political campaign: “Del poder de pocos al poder de muchos” (From the power of the few to the power of the many). She also accused those present of not doing enough to combat corruption, stating that “there is a central problem of trust”.
