Chile’s feminist lawyers decry appointment of women’s minister
Chile’s association of feminist lawyers (ABOFEM) is among the groups that have criticised President Sebastián Piñera’s appointment of Macarena Santelices as the country’s new minister for women and gender equality, citing the fact that she is the great niece of former dictator Augusto Pinochet and has made comments in support of his 1973-90 regime.
Santelices (pictured) is a former mayor of Olmué, a city in Chile’s Valparaíso region, and is a former vice president of the right-wing Independent Democratic Union (UDI) party. She was appointed women’s minister by Piñera on May 6.
ABOFEM’s executive director Bárbara Sepúlveda criticised Santelices’ lack of a background in gender themes or public policy regarding women, and which she considers to be “crucial” to performing the role of women’s minister.
“We cannot allow the women’s minister to be improvising in these matters, not only when we have thousands of cases of violations of women’s rights, but when we are in a global pandemic in which we know that domestic violence continues to increase,” Sepúlveda said.
“Considering the overwhelming violation of human rights that this government and this state has committed against women, we see it as practically a provocation that the government has appointed Santelices as a minister, knowing that she is not only the great niece of Pinochet but that she has also been a defender of the dictatorship.”
In 2016, during her tenure as Olmué’s mayor, Santelices said in an interview with El Mercurio de Valparaíso newspaper that “the good things” about Pinochet’s dictatorship should be acknowledged.
Among the other groups that have criticised Santelices’ appointment is the so-called observatory against harassment of women in the streets (OCAC), whose president María José Guerrero told Radio Universidad de Chile that the designation of Santelices as women’s minister demonstrates “a lack of respect towards all the women of this country”.
Santelices has also been criticised for allegedly ignoring allegations against the director of an educational institution for sexual harassment during her tenure as mayor of Olmué.
