Chilean Senate Narrowly Fails to Impeach President Piñera Over Pandora Papers Leaks

The Chilean Senate voted against removing President Sebastian Piñera from office on Tuesday after the Chamber of Deputies, the legislature's lower house, voted to impeach him.

The vote on Tuesday came down with 14 of 43 senators voting against Piñera's impeachment and one abstaining, depriving the opposition of the 29-vote majority it needed to do so. His second and final term in office is due to end in March 2022.

The effort to impeach Pinera derived from documents published by the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (ICIJ) in early October that were dubbed the "Pandora Papers." The massive document dump exposed the secret offshore accounts of 35 world leaders and over 100 billionaires and celebrities.

Chile's senators gather to vote on a motion to impeach President Sebastian Pinera over allegations of irregularities in the sale of a mining firm, in Valparaiso, Chile November 16, 2021

© REUTERS / RODRIGO GARRIDO

The Chilean president was one of those implicated, claiming he sold a copper and iron mine in northern Chile called Minera Dominga to a childhood friend named Carlos Alberto Delano in 2010, with a deed signed in Chile for $14 million and another in the Virgin Islands for $138 million. The sale would have taken place during Piñera's first term as president.

Piñera pushed back, claiming he hadn't managed his own companies for 12 years and wasn't informed of the Minera Dominga sale. After the opposition in parliament moved to impeach him, Piñera called it a coup attempt.

A previous attempt to impeach Piñera for disrespecting human rights failed in December 2019 amid monthslong militant protests that sought to overturn the neoliberal regime put in place by a US-backed military coup in 1973. Led by Augusto Pinochet, the coup regime murdered its way through the Chilean left and installed a constitution in 1980 enshrining the new order under civilian leadership. Tens of thousands of people were arrested and more than 11,000 people were injured in the protests, while at least 35 people died.

The protests led to a national referendum in October 2020 in which three-quarters of voters chose to rewrite the embattled constitution.

The Senate's decision comes just five days before a general election to decide Piñera's successor. Lawyer Antonio Kast, a far-right candidate for the Chilean Republican Party he created who sees Pinochet's regime favorably, is slightly favored to win the election, although before fresh violent protests a few weeks ago he was ranked in fourth place. According to AFP, the violence helped boost the law-and-order candidate over left-wing candidate Gabriel Boric of the Social Convergence party, who until recently held the lead.